Linguistics Grammaticalization
by
D. Gary Miller, Elly van Gelderen
  • LAST REVIEWED: 19 May 2017
  • LAST MODIFIED: 21 January 2016
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199772810-0019

Introduction

The essence of grammaticalization is the evolution of a lexical category to a grammatical one or of a hybrid/functional category to another grammatical category. The first involves changes such as that of the verb have from “possess” to the marker of the perfect tense. The second involves changes such as that of to from a preposition (a hybrid category in English) to an infinitive marker or such as that of a demonstrative (e.g., the Latin ille ‘that’) to a definite article (the Italian il, the Spanish el, and so on). These changes have attracted attention for hundreds of years and are very well known. More recently, additional conditions and stipulations have been placed on this leading idea, but the essence remains the same.

Introductory Works

The fundamental insight of grammaticalization (also called grammaticization) is grammation, a change from lexical to grammatical content via reanalysis of a lexical item to be merged in a functional category, as emphasized in Andersen 2008. Meillet 1912 and Kuryłowicz 1965 argue that grammaticalization is a change from lexical to grammatical content or from hybrid/grammatical to other grammatical content. Joseph 2005 shows that there are many definitions of grammaticalization, but Traugott 2003 gives the most common one: “the process whereby lexical material in highly constrained pragmatic and morphosyntactic contexts is assigned grammatical function, and once grammatical, is assigned increasingly grammatical, operator-like function” (p. 645). Functionalists have focused on the goal of grammaticalization theory, which Kuteva and Heine 2008 depicts as “to describe the way grammatical forms arise and develop through space and time, and to explain why they are structured the way they are” (p. 215). Grammaticalization theory, as endorsed by most functionalists, is criticized in Lightfoot 2003 and other generativists. It involves a chain of concomitants of grammaticalization that are themselves in need of explanation. See The Universal Cline Hypothesis and other sections in this bibliography.

  • Andersen, Henning. 2008. Grammaticalization in a speaker-oriented theory of change. In Grammatical change and linguistic theory. Edited by Thórhallur Eythórsson, 11–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    DOI: 10.1075/la.113Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Offers numerous analyses of grammaticalization, with detailed discussion of the individual changes involved, and separates out reduction processes.

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  • Joseph, Brian D. 2005. How accommodating of change is grammaticalization? The case of “lateral shifts.” Logos and Language 6:1–7.

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    Discusses some possible additional types of grammaticalization.

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  • Kuryłowicz, Jerzy. 1965. L’évolution des catégories grammaticales. Diogenes 51:54–71.

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    Follows Meillet 1912 in treating grammaticalization as a change in content from lexical to grammatical or from grammatical to other grammatical.

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  • Kuteva, Tania, and Bernd Heine. 2008. On the explanatory value of grammaticalization. In Linguistic universals and language change. Edited by Jeff Good, 215–230. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

    DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199298495.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    A strictly diachronic approach to change; the only putative constraint is unidirectionality.

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  • Lightfoot, David. 2003. Grammaticalization: Cause or effect? In Motives for language change. Edited by Raymond Hickey, 99–123. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.

    DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511486937.008Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Discusses grammaticalization and its effects.

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  • Meillet, Antoine. 1912. L’évolution des formes grammaticales. Scientia (Rivista di scienza) 12.26: 384–400.

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    The seminal work that spawned a hundred years of work on grammaticalization. Reprinted in Meillet, Linguistique historique et linguistique générale (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1965), pp. 130–148.

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  • Traugott, Elizabeth C. 2003. Constructions in grammaticalization. In The handbook of historical linguistics. Edited by Brian D. Joseph and Richard D. Janda, 624–647. Oxford: Blackwell.

    DOI: 10.1002/9780470756393Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Argues for a tightly constrained context in which grammaticalization must occur.

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Textbooks

There are few introductory textbooks on grammaticalization. The most general one that assumes little prior knowledge is Hopper and Traugott 2003. The more recent Heine and Kuteva 2007 is more conservative in many respects. Two books that technically cover more than grammaticalization but that treat many of the best examples of grammaticalization are Bybee, et al. 1994 and Fischer 2007. Brinton and Traugott 2005 emphasizes the difficulty of distinguishing grammaticalization from other types of change. The more theoretically oriented works require considerably more linguistic knowledge. The most difficult of these is Roberts and Roussou 2003. A more recent theoretical work, van Gelderen 2011, explains the basic premises of the theory of minimalism before proceeding to analyses.

  • Brinton, Laurel J., and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2005. Lexicalization and language change. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.

    DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511615962Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Technically about lexicalization, which here includes conversion (e.g., preposition up → verb), but is also concerned with such traditional grammaticalization issues as emancipation.

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  • Bybee, Joan L., Revere D. Perkins, and William Pagliuca. 1994. The evolution of grammar: Tense, aspect, and modality in the languages of the world. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

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    Grammaticalization figures in most of the documented histories of pathways of change.

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  • Fischer, Olga C. M. 2007. Morphosyntactic change: Functional and formal perspectives. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

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    The internal and external factors (especially pragmatics, discourse, and semantics) that motivate morphological and syntactic change. Many changes involve grammaticalization.

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  • Heine, Bernd, and Tania Kuteva. 2007. The genesis of grammar: A reconstruction. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

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    A functionalist account of the origin of affixes from lexical words.

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  • Hopper, Paul, and Elizabeth C. Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization. 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

    DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139165525Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    The classic work that popularized grammaticalization in the modern era. Originally published in 1993.

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  • van Gelderen, Elly. 2011. The linguistic cycle: Language change and the language faculty. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

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    A highly original minimalist account of grammaticalization. Series of changes are motivated by efficient computation preference principles and feature changes. Many valuable case studies.

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  • Roberts, Ian Gareth, and Anna Roussou. 2003. Syntactic change: A minimalist approach to grammaticalization. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.

    DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511486326Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    A highly original minimalist account of grammaticalization, complete with eighteen case studies, including the Romance future.

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Edited Collections

Perhaps the most useful overviews of the issues of grammaticalization are the two volumes López-Couso and Seoane 2008 and Seoane and López-Couso 2008. Many of the same issues are treated, but with less breadth, in Wischer and Diewald 2002; Fischer, et al. 2004; Stathi, et al. 2010; Davidse, et al. 2012; and Hancil and König 2014. The most complete collection, in the sense of including generative along with traditional perspectives, is Traugott and Trousdale 2010. A handbook that presents a state of the art is Narrog and Heine 2011 in which different theoretical perspectives are represented as well as a host of different angles. Robbeets and Cuyckens 2013 looks at contact-induced grammaticalization.

History

Originally published in 1912, Meillet 1965 coined the term grammaticalisation and posited two mutually exclusive operations that yield new grammatical forms: analogy and grammaticalization. The latter is defined as “le passage d’un mot autonome au rôle d’élément grammatical” (the movement of an independent word into the role of a grammatical element; p. 131). Meillet illustrates with the French suis ‘am’, as in je suis ici ‘I am here’, and its grammaticalized use as a formative of the past tense, as in je suis parti ‘I have (lit. am) left’. Grammaticalization was known long before Meillet gave it a name. Tiedemann 2005 shows that the standard doctrine since the 17th and 18th centuries was that all affixes evolve from lexical words.

  • Meillet, Antoine. 1965. L’évolution des formes grammaticales. In Linguistique historique et linguistique générale. By Antoine Meillet, 130–148. Collection linguistique (Société de linguistique de Paris) 8. Paris: Honoré Champion.

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    Meillet collected a number of examples and gave a name to the process that was well known. By giving it a name, his original paper, published in 1912 as L’évolution des formes grammaticales [Scientia (Rivista di scienza) 12.26: 384–400], defined the issue that continues to occupy scholars.

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  • Tiedemann, Therese Lindström. 2005. Grammaticalization—past and present. Logos and Language 6:19–35.

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    The most concise overview of the history of the concept.

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The Universal Cline Hypothesis

Changes such as the Western Romance future (Latin facere habeō ‘I have to do’ > French [je] ferai ‘I will do’) spawned an extravagant notion of grammaticalization. A standard tenet of the functionalists (see Textbooks) is the cline: lexical word > functional (grammatical) word > clitic > inflectional affix (> zero) (where the symbol > denotes a historical change). One problem with this formulation is that the endgame is not invariably an inflectional affix. Andersen 2008 and Willis 2010, among other works, have corrected it to simply an affix. A second problem is the assumption of unidirectionality—that is, the idea that a reverse trajectory is impossible (see The Unidirectionality Hypothesis). Third, in the words of Andersen 2008, the cline “confuses content, morphosyntax, and expression.” Fourth, Schiering 2006 demonstrates that phonological reductions do not occur in mora- or syllable-timed languages, are generally irrelevant in (poly)synthetic languages, and in stress languages frequently but not necessarily accompany grammation because of the increased frequency of the construction. Willis 2007 and Willis 2010 solve these problems by splitting the change of lexical to grammatical content from the formal hierarchy of word > clitic > affix, and Andersen 2008 decomposes the various steps into individual changes of well-attested types in both directions on the cline.

Reduction as a Concomitant

As noted in The Universal Cline Hypothesis, reduction processes occur in certain language types. They are generally assumed to be phonological, but most are combined phonological and morphological processes. Miller 2010 discusses a complex interaction in Medieval Icelandic in which the reflexive anaphor was reduced and initially attached to the verb, for example, fela sik ‘to hide oneself’ > felask ‘to hide oneself’ (> ‘to hide’). Originally, other person forms occurred, for example, hræðumk ‘I should be terrified’, with –mk, from mik ‘myself’. Subsequently, -sk was generalized through the paradigm, yielding an invariant mediopassive formative, modern -st. Andersen 2008 shows that in Old Serbian, ‘I want to read’ is hoć–u pisa-ti. When hoć–u ‘I want’ was grammaticalized as a future marker, it became phonologically reduced in the construct with the infinitive: pisati-hću ‘‘I will write’. Next, the vacuous infinitive pisa-ti was replaced morphologically by the verbal base pisa-, and the future marker -hć- was phonologically reduced further, yielding písa-ću ‘I will write’.

  • Andersen, Henning. 2008. Grammaticalization in a speaker-oriented theory of change. In Grammatical change and linguistic theory. Edited by Thórhallur Eythórsson, 11–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    DOI: 10.1075/la.113Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Especially useful for the many examples from the history of the Slavic languages.

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  • Miller, D. Gary. 2010. Language change and linguistic theory. Vol. 1, Approaches, methodology, and sound change. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

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    An up-to-date account of change, with many examples of grammaticalization (see pp. 199ff.).

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The Unidirectionality Hypothesis

In addition to the empirical question of whether unidirectionality (left to right on the cline discussed in The Universal Cline Hypothesis) is just definitional (Janda 2001), there are two separate issues: (1) Can the process, once begun, be interrupted or reversed? And (2) can the resulting grammatical element revert to the same lexical item in its original construction? By that strong formulation, as argued in Luraghi 2005, reversion is indeed impossible. But as discussed in Fischer 2003, Willis 2007, Norde 2010, and other works (see the Universal Cline Hypothesis and Reduction as a Concomitant), the cline consists of well-attested individual changes in both directions, reversals of particular stages are frequent, and a total reversal is not expected. Many languages exhibit changes from free or clitic to bound, or from bound (affix) to clitic or free, as in the pronouns of several Australian languages documented in Mushin and Simpson 2008. Because it was the only person/number inflection in some paradigms, the Irish first-person plural -m(u)id was reanalyzed as a pronoun, muid. This well-known change is discussed in Willis 2007 and Kiparsky 2011. These changes have no bearing on grammation because both are functional. Kiparsky 2011 shows that some suffixes become clitics by analogy to other clitics. There is no contradiction among the different approaches if analogy can play a role in grammaticalization, as argued in Fischer 2007 and Fischer 2010.

  • Fischer, Olga C. M. 2003. Principles of grammaticalization and linguistic reality. In Determinants of grammatical variation in English. Edited by Günter Rohdenburg and Britta Mondorf, 445–478. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

    DOI: 10.1515/9783110900019Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Challenges unidirectionality and insists that pragmatic inferencing and semantic change are important ingredients of any grammaticalization process.

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  • Fischer, Olga C. M. 2007. Morphosyntactic change: Functional and formal perspectives. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

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    Although broader than grammaticalization, morphosyntactic change figures in many of Fischer’s discussions. In contrast to Meillet, who separated analogy from grammaticalization, Fischer employs both.

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  • Fischer, Olga C. M. 2010. An analogical approach to grammaticalization. In Grammaticalization: Current views and issues. Edited by Katerina Stathi, Elke Gehweiler, and Ekkehard König, 181–220. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    DOI: 10.1075/slcs.119Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Argues that form and meaning are equally important and that analogy, as a general cognitive principle, should be seen as the main mechanism operating in change.

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  • Janda, Richard D. 2001. Beyond “pathways” and “unidirectionality”: On the discontinuity of language transmission and the reversability of grammaticalization. Language Sciences 23:265–340.

    DOI: 10.1016/S0388-0001(00)00023-1Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    This entire issue of Language Sciences is devoted to problems with grammaticalization, and Janda’s paper is one of the more critical.

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  • Kiparsky, Paul. 2011. Grammaticalization as optimization. In Origins, nature, outcomes. Edited by Dianne Jonas, John Whitman, and Andrew Garrett. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

    DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582624.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Insists that grammaticalization and analogy interact, as in the change of the Hungarian illative suffix -be from postpositional noun to suffix, and opposes exemplar-based analogy to non-exemplar-based analogy (grammaticalization), thus reducing grammaticalization to analogy.

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  • Luraghi, Silvia. 2005. Does a theory of language change need unidirectionality? Logos and Language 6:9–17.

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    Attempts to clarify when unidirectionality is relevant or irrelevant.

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  • Mushin, Ilana, and Jane Simpson. 2008. Free to bound to free? Interactions between pragmatics and syntax in the development of Australian pronominal systems. Language 84:566–596.

    DOI: 10.1353/lan.0.0048Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Counterexamples to the weaker formulation of the cline, that is, right-to-left changes.

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  • Norde, Muriel. 2010. Degrammaticalization: Three common controversies. In Grammaticalization: Current views and issues. Edited by Katerina Stathi, Elke Gehweiler, and Ekkehard König, 123–150. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    DOI: 10.1075/slcs.119Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Discusses the different understandings of what degrammaticalization entails and proposes to restrict the potential examples to three subtypes.

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  • Willis, David W. E. 2007. Syntactic lexicalization as a new type of degrammaticalization. Linguistics 45:271–310.

    DOI: 10.1515/LING.2007.009Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Discusses the change of functional items to lexical, the opposite of grammaticalization.

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Degrammaticalization and Asymmetries

Haspelmath 2004 introduces antigrammaticalization to “cover any type of change that goes against the general direction of grammaticalization (i.e., discourse > syntax > morphology).” This requires caution because discourse particles evolve by grammaticalization, as discussed in Traugott 2003. D’Arcy 2005 documents the more complex interaction of syntactic markers and discourse particles in the history of like. The reanalysis of a suffix as a lexical item (e.g., ism) for Haspelmath involves degrammaticalization, but not antigrammaticalization, because it is “not the reverse of a potential grammaticalization change.” Willis 2007 admits Janda’s degrammaticalization of the German zu ‘to’ reanalyzed as an adjective ‘open’ (Janda 2001), and proposes other examples, such as the change of the Bulgarian nešto from indefinite pronoun to ‘thing’ and of the Welsh eiddo from ‘his’ to ‘property’. The fundamental difference between Heine’s reversion (Heine 2003) and Willis’s specially motivated counterdirectional changes reinforces the difficulty with the notion of degrammaticalization, as discussed in Norde 2010. Despite the attacks on unidirectionality, it is necessary to recognize genuine asymmetries in grammaticalization. For instance, Miller 2010 argues that reflexive anaphors are often reanalyzed as mediopassive markers, but not vice versa, and that participles can be reanalyzed as adpositions, but adpositions never become participles.

  • D’Arcy, Alexandra. 2005. Like: Syntax and development. PhD diss., Univ. of Toronto.

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    Documents the spread of like from a preposition to a complementizer to a CP-adjoined discourse marker to a discourse particle adjoined to TP, DP, νP/VP, DegP, and NP, in that order.

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  • Haspelmath, Martin. 2004. On directionality in language change with particular reference to grammaticalization. In Up and down the cline: The nature of grammaticalization. Edited by Olga Fischer, Muriel Norde, and Harry Perridon, 17–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    DOI: 10.1075/tsl.59Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    A useful overview, with some new terminology introduced.

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  • Heine, Bernd. 2003. On degrammaticalization. In Historical linguistics 2001: Selected papers from the 15th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Melbourne, 13–17 August 2001. Edited by Barry J. Blake, Kate Burridge, and Jo Taylor, 163–179. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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    Argues that the only true degrammaticalization would be reversion to the original lexical item.

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  • Janda, Richard D. 2001. Beyond “pathways” and “unidirectionality”: On the discontinuity of language transmission and the reversability of grammaticalization. Language Sciences 23:265–340.

    DOI: 10.1016/S0388-0001(00)00023-1Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    A critical look at the standard assumptions of functionalist grammaticalization.

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  • Miller, D. Gary. 2010. Language change and linguistic theory. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

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    Case studies include English like.

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  • Norde, Muriel. 2010. Degrammaticalization: Three common controversies. In Grammaticalization: Current views and issues. Edited by Katerina Stathi, Elke Gehweiler, and Ekkehard König, 123–150. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    DOI: 10.1075/slcs.119Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Discusses the different understandings of what degrammaticalization entails; proposes to restrict the potential examples to three subtypes.

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  • Traugott, Elizabeth C. 2003. Constructions in grammaticalization. In The handbook of historical linguistics. Edited by Brian D. Joseph and Richard D. Janda, 624–647. Oxford: Blackwell.

    DOI: 10.1002/9780470756393Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Discusses the evolution of discourse markers by grammaticalization.

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  • Willis, David W. E. 2007. Syntactic lexicalization as a new type of degrammaticalization. Linguistics 45:271–310.

    DOI: 10.1515/LING.2007.009Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Argues for degrammaticalization (a change from functional to lexical content) based on the same reanalysis processes that yield standard grammaticalizations.

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Mechanism

Changes from lexical to grammatical content typically begin with contextual pragmatic inferencing (the pivot context of Garrett 2011) and yield variations, or splits, between the original and the grammatical use of the items in question, such that both can coexist indefinitely. In the case of the Spanish periphrastic future with ir ‘go’, Aaron 2006 comments that “half a millennium after a construction begins to grammaticize, quantitative analyses can still show evidence of a construction’s original (lexical) meaning” (p. 214). Gaeta 2008 shows that this is a typical source of synchronic mismatches, especially as grammaticalization expands, leaving unchanged residues. Nesselhauf 2012 provides a very precise account of the changes in the various future markers (shall, will, ‘ll, be going to, be to, and the progressive) and identifies three crucial features—intention, prediction, and arrangement—and argues that as the sense of intention is lost and is replaced by the sense of prediction, new markers of intention will appear. When grammation involves a change in category, as it generally does, that change is naturally expressed as (contextual) reanalysis because the grammatized item is merged in a different syntactic position from the original lexical or functional item. That reanalysis plays a role in grammaticalization has sometimes been denied by functionalists but is generally assumed; see Campbell 2001. The issue is in part terminological and in part a rejection of syntax, as for Heine (e.g., Heine 2003). On formal accounts, such as that of Roberts and Roussou 2003 or van Gelderen 2011, all grammaticalization is reanalysis.

  • Aaron, Jessi Elana. 2006. Variation and change in Spanish future temporal expression. PhD diss., Univ. of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

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    A detailed variationist account of the grammaticalization of the Spanish ir ‘go’ as a future and modal marker.

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  • Campbell, Lyle. 2001. What’s wrong with grammaticalization? Language Sciences 23:113–161.

    DOI: 10.1016/S0388-0001(00)00019-XSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Although this whole issue of Language Sciences assesses grammaticalization, Campbell’s paper offers a unique perspective.

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  • Gaeta, Livio. 2008. Mismatch: Grammar distortion and grammaticalization. In Rethinking grammaticalization: New perspectives. Edited by María José López-Couso and Elena Seoane, 103–127. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    DOI: 10.1075/tsl.76Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Discusses various kinds of mismatches (e.g., abnormal structures, constructions incompatible with the general patterns of the language), including mirror-principle violations and unchanged residues of grammaticalization.

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  • Garrett, Andrew. 2011. The historical syntax problem: Reanalysis and directionality. In Origins, nature, outcomes. Edited by Dianne Jonas, John Whitman, and Andrew Garrett. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

    DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582624.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Discusses a more rigorous approach that motivates reanalysis and grammaticalization.

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  • Heine, Bernd. 2003. Grammaticalization. In The handbook of historical linguistics. Edited by Brian D. Joseph and Richard D. Janda, 575–601. Oxford: Blackwell.

    DOI: 10.1002/9780470756393Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    A traditional functionalist account that rejects syntax.

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  • Nesselhauf, Nadja. 2012. Mechanisms of language change in a functional system: The recent semantic evolution of English future time expressions. Journal of Historical Linguistics 2.1: 83–132.

    DOI: 10.1075/jhl.2.1.06nesSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    A careful study of the mechanisms of change in the marking of future time in Late Modern English.

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  • Roberts, Ian Gareth, and Anna Roussou. 2003. Syntactic change: A minimalist approach to grammaticalization. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.

    DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511486326Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Among the eighteen case studies is a detailed discussion of the Romance future.

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  • van Gelderen, Elly. 2011. The linguistic cycle: Language change and the language faculty. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

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    A highly original minimalist account of grammaticalization. Series of changes are motivated by preference and computation principles and feature changes. Numerous valuable case studies.

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Conditions

A natural question is why grammaticalization sometimes occurs and sometimes does not. It is too facile to reply that language never has to change. A related question is why, for instance, have grammaticalizes but the semantically equivalent possess does not. Miller 2010 argues that creoles draw on the same tense, mood, and aspect elements that universally figure in grammaticalization, even though the source languages are different; cf. go / va; bin / te; done / fin(i) / kaba. Because Garrett 2011 and other works have attempted to constrain grammaticalization, it is reasonable to look at the reverse—cases in which grammaticalization might have occurred but did not. Coupé and van Kemenade 2009 discusses why modals grammaticalized differently in Dutch and English; both languages developed infinitives on the modal verbs and double modals, which Dutch retains but which English lost, partly because the infinitival forms were more robust in Middle Dutch (and later allowed stacking) than in Middle English. Eckardt 2006 addresses the issue of why go grammaticalized as a future marker in English but the German gehen ‘go’ did not; at some point, “be going to had become a phrasal way to express one’s plans for the near or immediate future” (p. 102) (cf. ‘preparing to do’ in Garrett 2011). English thus differed from German, which has no such imminent action use of gehen ‘to go’. More generally, one can ask why go should grammaticalize to a tense marker. Because go expresses movement from proximal to distal in space, Sweetser 1988 suggests that it can easily shift to indicate “movement away from the present time” (p. 392). Moreover, movement from the present can motivate grammaticalization as a past tense marker, as shown in Bourdin 2008, rendering Garrett’s pivot context all the more important. Sweetser 1988 was among the first to argue that “semantic bleaching” is a misnomer because meaning transfers show preservation of image-schematic structure, which permits inferences projected through the semantic shifts. Abraham 2001 and Eckardt 2006 also maintain that inferencing argues against the traditional idea of semantic bleaching.

  • Abraham, Werner. 2001. How far does semantic bleaching go? About grammaticalization that does not terminate in functional categories. In Grammatical relations in change. Edited by Jan Terje Faarlund, 15–63. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    DOI: 10.1075/slcs.56Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Treats, among other things, intermediate stages in the development of modal particles from adverbials and conjunctions in German and Dutch, before they became functional categories. There is some contradiction between bleaching and preservation of lexical semantics.

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  • Bourdin, Philippe. 2008. On the grammaticalization of ‘come’ and ‘go’ into markers of textual connectivity. In Rethinking grammaticalization: New perspectives. Edited by María José López-Couso and Elena Seoane, 37–59. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    DOI: 10.1075/tsl.76Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Motion verbs can grammaticalize as future (or sometimes past) tense markers or as connectives, and the latter are subject to reanalysis as past tense formatives.

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  • Coupé, Griet, and Ans van Kemenade. 2009. Grammaticalization of modals in Dutch: Uncontingent change. In Historical syntax and linguistic theory. Edited by Paola Crisma and Giuseppe Longobardi, 250–270. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

    DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199560547.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Motivates the difference between Dutch, which kept double modals, and (standard) English, which lost them.

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  • Eckardt, Regine. 2006. Meaning change in grammaticalization: An enquiry into semantic analysis. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

    DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199262601.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Discusses semantic motivations of grammaticalization and disputes bleaching. Case studies include negation in the history of French (chapter 6) and the English going to / gonna (chapter 4).

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  • Garrett, Andrew. 2011. The historical syntax problem: Reanalysis and directionality. In Origins, nature, outcomes. Edited by Dianne Jonas, John Whitman, and Andrew Garrett. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

    DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582624.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Discusses constraints on grammaticalization, including a motivating pivot context.

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  • Miller, D. Gary. 2010. Language change and linguistic theory. Vol 2, Morphological, syntactic, and typological change. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

    DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199583430.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Case studies include the Romance future and English going to / gonna (see chapter 10).

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  • Sweetser, Eve E. 1988. Grammaticalization and semantic bleaching. Berkeley Linguistics Society 14:389–405.

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    In grammaticalization the image-schema is projected onto a more abstract domain.

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Early Minimalist Accounts

Formal generative accounts of grammaticalization are based on reanalysis and involve merger in a functional position (e.g., from head to higher head) by loss of movement to that position. Roberts and Roussou 2003 proposes that relatively marked parameter values require overt, robust cues. Otherwise, a less marked, or default, option is realized. The structural reanalysis is always a simplification. On this account, semantic bleaching issues from the development of new functional material. Wu 2004 proposes vertical grammaticalization, a process of reanalysis from head to higher head. To minimize the role of universal grammar and predict changes, van Gelderen 2004a and van Gelderen 2004b formulate efficient computation preference principles, for instance, with evidence compatible with a specifier or a head, project as a head; head > higher head; and so on.

Recent Minimalist Accounts

Roberts 2010 argues that grammaticalization is upward and leftward in the syntactic structure, for example, can instantiates ModAbility/Permission, ModPossibility, ModEpistemic, and MoodEvidential. This multiple exponence gives the impression of gradience but in reality exemplifies upward movement, a process of reanalysis to successively higher categories. Additional arguments against gradience and for variation as driven by feature variation are offered in van Gelderen 2010a. In a series of papers culminating in a major monograph, van Gelderen 2010b, van Gelderen theorizes that grammaticalization reanalysis is triggered by a change in features, mostly from semantic to interpretable to uninterpretable, or acquisition of another feature. This, she argues, correlates with her earlier analysis of adjunct / argument > specifier > head. In the negative (Jespersen) cycle, for instance, negative argument (semantic Neg) > negative adverb (iNeg in SpecNegP) > negative particle (uNeg in head Neg). Another of van Gelderen’s cycles involves agreement: emphatic subjects are reanalyzed as subject pronouns and then to agreement markers. Although not in the minimalist framework, Muysken 2008 documents a similar variety of chains, such as the author’s noun chain: noun > classifier > strong pronoun > clitic pronoun > agreement marker. Van Gelderen 2015 is an attempt to understand linguistic change as a resolution of labeling paradoxes. Labeling is a requirement of the interface and certain changes occur to avoid paradoxes.

  • Muysken, Pieter Cornelis. 2008. Functional categories. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.

    DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511755026Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Discusses series of changes (“chains”) similar to van Gelderen’s cycles.

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  • Roberts, Ian Gareth. 2010. Grammaticalization, the clausal hierarchy and semantic bleaching. In Gradience, gradualness, and grammaticalization. Edited by Elizabeth C. Traugott and Graeme Trousdale, 45–73. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    DOI: 10.1075/tsl.90Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Argues against gradience for multiple exponence, owing to upward and leftward movement in the syntactic structure.

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  • van Gelderen, Elly. 2010a. Features in reanalysis and grammaticalization. In Gradience, gradualness, and grammaticalization. Edited by Elizabeth C. Traugott and Graeme Trousdale, 129–147. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    DOI: 10.1075/tsl.90Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    An account of gradual change using her feature economy principles. Argues against gradience and for variation as driven by feature variation.

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  • van Gelderen, Elly. 2010b. The linguistic cycle: Language change and the language faculty. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

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    Many important case studies of grammaticalization, in a novel approach in which series of changes are feature driven (semantic > interpretable > uninterpretable).

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  • van Gelderen, Elly. 2015. Problems of projection: The role of language change in labeling paradoxes. Studia Linguistica.

    DOI: 10.1111/stul.12041Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Uses the most recent theoretical framework (Chomsky’s “Problems of Projection”) to account for syntactic change.

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Reanalysis of Specifiers as Heads

To some extent, head preference and feature economy make different predictions, and the two may be independent. In any event, a major consequence of van Gelderen’s preference for heads (see Early Minimalist Accounts) is that specifiers are prone to be reanalyzed as heads. Roberts and Roussou 2003 and van Gelderen 2010 argue that demonstratives in SpecDP with interpretable features are cross-linguistically reanalyzed as definite article heads, probes in D with uninterpretable features that value the phi-features of the noun. According to van Gelderen 2010, demonstratives can also change their deictic location features to tense, a change from D to C [i-T(ense)]. Thus, the demonstrative pronoun that became a complementizer in Germanic. In each case, a null head is eliminated by instantiating it, here through reanalysis of a Spec as a head accompanying a change in its lexical features. Willis 2007 presents an in-depth study finding that in Welsh, initial pronouns were reanalyzed first as expletives inserted in SpecCP, then as affirmative main-clause complementizers merged in C. Van Gelderen 2009 discusses more generally the reanalysis of pronouns to complementizers and the origin of complementizers from prepositions and other category types.

  • Roberts, Ian Gareth, and Anna Roussou. 2003. Syntactic change: A minimalist approach to grammaticalization. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.

    DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511486326Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Many examples of reanalysis of head to specifier beside the prevalent head to higher head.

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  • van Gelderen, Elly. 2009. Renewal in the left periphery: Economy and the complementiser layer. Transactions of the Philological Society 107:131–195.

    DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-968X.2009.01216.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    A review of changes that renew specifiers after their reanalysis as heads.

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  • van Gelderen, Elly. 2010. The linguistic cycle: Language change and the language faculty. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

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    A highly original minimalist account of grammaticalization. Series of changes are motivated by preference, computation principles, and feature changes. Numerous valuable case studies.

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  • Willis, David W. E. 2007. Specifier-to-head reanalyses in the complementizer domain: Evidence from Welsh. Transactions of the Philological Society 105:432–480.

    DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-968X.2007.00194.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    An important case study of Welsh initial pronouns reanalyzed as expletives, then as complementizers agreeing with a pronominal subject, with agreement subsequently lost.

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Extensions

Although hypercharacterization (e.g., bestest, more better) is not usually thought of as a form of grammaticalization, it is in effect a double functional marker of the category in question, the norm in Molizean Croatian veče bolij ‘more better’ > ‘better’, as shown in Kuteva 2008. Meillet 1965 mentioned the grammatical function of word order in a language such as French or English versus its expressive role in Latin. This expansion of grammaticalization is pursued in Schøsler 2008 and accepted in Frajzyngier 2008.

  • Frajzyngier, Zygmunt. 2008. Grammaticalization, typology and semantics: Expanding the agenda. In Rethinking grammaticalization: New perspectives. Edited by María José López-Couso and Elena Seoane, 61–102. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    DOI: 10.1075/tsl.76Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Applies grammaticalization to word order, phonological expressions of grammatical function, lexical or phrasal repetition, and other nonconventional means of coding grammatical function.

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  • Kuteva, Tania. 2008. On the frills of grammaticalization. In Rethinking grammaticalization: New perspectives. Edited by María José López-Couso and Elena Seoane, 189–217. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    DOI: 10.1075/tsl.76Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Contact-induced grammaticalization is frequently accompanied by accretion (i.e., diachronic overlaps and synchronic buffer zones) rather than by attrition.

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  • Meillet, Antoine. 1965. L’évolution des formes grammaticales. In Linguistique historique et linguistique générale. By Antoine Meillet, 130–148. Collection linguistique (Société de linguistique de Paris) 8. Paris: Honoré Champion.

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    Cites many examples of grammaticalization, some not so canonical, such as the grammatical (as opposed to stylistic) use of word order. Originally published in 1912 as L’évolution des formes grammaticales [Scientia (Rivista di scienza) 12.26: 384–400].

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  • Schøsler, Lene. 2008. Argument marking from Latin to modern Romance languages: An illustration of “combined grammaticalisation processes.” In Grammatical change and linguistic theory. Edited by Thórhallur Eythórsson, 411–438. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

    DOI: 10.1075/la.113Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

    Picks up Meillet’s idea of the fixing of word order as grammaticalization.

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