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Encyclopedia > Grammaticalization

Grammaticalisation, also referred to as Grammaticalization, Grammatisation or Grammatization is a theory describing the change of a content word (lexical morpheme) into a function word or grammatical affix. Function words are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning, but instead serve to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. ... Function words are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning, but instead serve to express grammatical relationships with other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. ... An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a base morpheme such as a root or to a stem, to form a word. ...


Mechanisms

There are four related mechanisms that are involved in Grammaticalisation:

  • Desemanticisation - The loss of meaning or content
  • Extension - Use in new contexts
  • Decategorialisation - Loss of morphosyntactic properties
  • Erosion - Loss of phonetic substance

Phonetic (pho-NET-ic) is a nationwide voicemail-to-text messaging service available for most digital mobile phones in which a subscriber is provided a custom voice mailbox for the purpose of receiving all incoming voice messages as actual transcribed text for reading via short messaging (also known as SMS...

Examples

In English, the word "go" became a change-of-state marker, e.g. "He went home" and "He went mad". The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...


In French, "ici" ("here") became a demonstrative marker, e.g. "Il est ici" ("He is here") and "Cet homme-ci" ("This man-PROXIM")


See also

Robert Lawrence Larry Trask (November 10, 1944 - March 27, 2004) was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex and an authority on Basque language and historical linguistics. ... Historical linguistics (also diachronic linguistics or comparative linguistics) is primarily the study of the ways in which languages change over time, by means of examining languages which are recognizably related through similarities such as vocabulary, word formation, and syntax, as well as the surviving records of ancient languages. ...

References

  • Heine, B. and Kuteva, T. (2002) World Lexicon of Grammaticalization, Cambridge University Press

  Results from FactBites:
 
LINGUIST List 7.1208: Grammaticalization (1574 words)
I also share some of David Pesetsky's puzzlement as to why the unidirectionality and unity of grammaticalization processes are believed by Fritz and by Oesten to be such a serious problem for generative grammar (by Fritz indirectly, in that his critique of grammaticalization is part of a critique of functional-typological linguistics in general).
So while grammaticalization theorists may not use evidence from reconstructions where the justification of the reconstruction is that A > B in other languages, it is not illegitimate to use evidence from reconstructions when the reconstruction is established on the basis of independent, language-family-particular evidence.
In grammaticalization, as elsewhere, an innovating form typically exists side-by-side with an older one for quite some time, often over generations; it may be confined at first to occurring in very narrow circumstances, and be extended only piecemeal to other circumstances.
Grammaticalization and evolution of language (384 words)
Grammaticalization is part of a physical theory of language - and so it is part of our theory as well - as it describes the evolution and emergences of several features in language.
Grammaticalization is the study of emergent features - changes in construction to be understood as structural or organizational - that we categorize as grammatical relative to non-grammatical forms[
The description of grammaticalization phenomena may be extended to include the dynamics that describe the emergence of linguistic forms from pre-linguistic forms.
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