Synopsis of Hopper & Traugott

Grammaticalization,

Chapter 2

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1. This chapter deals with the history of Grammaticalization going back to von Humboldt, Meillet, and other pioneers and places it in a historical and theoretical context.

   In work of Humboldt (1822), e.g., there was a concern for the evolutionary nature of language, from isolating to agglutinative to synthetic, which was supposedly the highest stage. This was part of the ideas about typology at the time. Later concern for historical linguistics took over and notions about the "evolution" of grammar became swept up in the Neogrammarian tradition, where everything had to be "exceptionless" so no concern any more for the evolution.

   Gabelentz also concerned with grammaticalization (1891); he talked about how forms begin vigorously (like burocrats) then fade, grow pale, become bleached out, need new paint; some become mummified. He suggested there were 2 competing tendencies:

   • tendency toward ease of articulation: "wears down" words and morphemes, they get blurred, weakened.
   • tendency toward distinctness: need to reinvent stuff to make more clear; new forms must step in and replace old. (Later Meillet called this "renewal".

   Gabelentz also noted that the process is not linear, but cyclical with constant reiteration of the process; the conditions are always present in the language, i.e. it doesn't reach a final, ideal stage. Or, it's not so much cylical (bec. things would come back to the same place) but a spiral.

   Meillet then took up the notion, used the term grammaticalization, and recognized it as a central area in the theory of language change (esp. morphological change.) But anchored in a positivistic idea of "being able to know" something for sure:

   • regularity in ling change,
   • systematicity in synchronic description.

   Meillet emphasized not the origins of grammatical change, but the transformations: the ongoing changes, not a kind of corruption or movement toward perfection, but just the way it is.

   Meillet said there were two ways that new grammatical forms emerge:

   • analogy;

   • autonomous words taking on role of a grammatical element (true grammaticalization ).

   Meillet said these were the only ways by which new grammatical forms are arrived at, and that analogy was not the primary way: analogy was more a process of replacement of allomorphs by more general ones, e.g. the way English plural -s has expanded and generalized to be the default marker, when it was originally just one possibility. So if analogy is secondary, autonomous words (lexical items and phrases) taking on grammatical roles is the primary way that grammaticalization takes place.

   "Whereas analogy may renew forms in detail, usually leaving the overall plan of the system untouched, the `grammaticalization' of certain words creates new forms and introduces categories which had no linguistic expression. It changes the system as a whole." (p. 133, Meillet).

   Thus the example of be-going-to ---> gonna where all morpheme boundaries are erased, and phonological reduction occurs. The phrasal collocation may take over from a reduced form that has become "commonplace" and as sort of "lost its zip" (become banal.) Later Meillet also talks about the possibility of grammaticalization being extended to syntax, since syntactic patterns also have meaning and gives example from Latin, where various kinds of word order became SVO, and it is clear only from the order which is the subject and which the object. (dog bites man/man bites dog etc.)

   This word-order business shows two of the hallmarks of grammaticalization :

   1. what was 'expressive' becomes grammatical in meaning

   2. it creates new grammatical tools for the lg. rather than just modifying or replacing existent ones.

   The expressivity for Meillet means perhaps pragmatic word order in Latin may be pragmatic, a way to indicate focus but then the expressivity is lost by its grammaticalization. Thus loss of expressivity becomes a cause of grammaticalization i.e. the frequent or overuse of an expressive device leads to a need for its replacement. This may be so, but is it enough of a cause for all grammaticalization? H&T feel there is a need for a "different way of talking about meaning change" which will be dealt with in Chap. 4.

2. Weakening is a term used by Gabelentz ( Verbleichung ) and by Meillet (affaiblissement ) as one of the causes of grammaticalization, too. This applies to both phonology and grammar, both are "weakened". Gives example from modern Greek, development of future tense tha from the phrase

   thelô ina --> thelô na --> thena --> tha "I wish that"

   Semantic development is from 'wish, desire' to 'future.' The phonolog. weakening is there, is the semantic change a "weakening"? Meillet tends to stress 'deficits' i.e. things getting worse (loss, weakening, attrition). Is this part of the classical attitude that lg. change is deterioration? (esp. w. classical lgs.)

3. Other approaches since Meillet.
   • Kurylowicz (1964, 1965)
   • Calvert Watkins (1964)
   • Benveniste, a student of Meillet, apparently felt the need to reinvent grammaticalization ; he focussed on what he called auxiliation i.e. the creation of auxiliary verbs etc. and didn't mention Meillet's prev. work.

   • Grammaticalization and Structuralism: grammaticalization is a challenge to structuralism, which is always looking for discrete categories, regularity, and fixed stable systems. So Grammaticalization reappears in the 70's as part of the questioning of autonomous syntactic theory while the growth of interest in pragmatics and typology focussed interest on the old line of investigation.

   • Givon 1971 sparked this revival ("Today's morphology is yesterday's syntax") showing evidence from various African lgs. (what are now affixes were once colloctions of pronouns and independent verbs).
     • Focus on Arbitrariness in Am. structuralism emphasized how there could be no connection between sounds of a word (e.g.) and its meaning; aside from some onomatopoeic items there was little reason why the word dog has the sounds [d - o - g] while some other language has [na:y] or [perro] etc.

       But there are limits to arbitrariness, i.e. numerical systems could theoretically consist of a different 'word' for every number in the lg., but in fact they don't: they use a small, finite no. of morphemes and recombine them into an infinite number of combinations. (The morphs for 1-9, 10, 'teens', multiples of 10 (20-90), hundred, thousand, etc. are all that is needed.) Other examples of derivation, reusing similar affixes etc., or case-systems, tense-systems which theoretically could use a different morpheme for every word, but don't.

     • Principle that governs Non-arbitrariness is iconicity i.e. the similarity between an item and its sign. Pierce dist'd between

       • imagic iconicity: systematic resemblance between item and its referent by some ( visual? pictorial? audial?) characteristic. and

       • diagrammatic iconicity, which have to do with arrangements of signs. Signs don't need to resemble anything, but the relationship reflects the icon's referents. Example: word order often represents order of occurrence of events e.g. veni, vidi, vici "I came, and then I saw, and then I conquered." instead of *vici, vidi, veni which can't mean the same thing.

       • This is the kind of iconicity that linguists are interested in: suggests insights into the organization of language. Another example: politeness is usu. more complicated than non-polite speech.

       • In work on Typology and search for typological universals, Li and Thompson (e.g.) working on serial verb constr. in Chinese etc. showed how verbs could be reanalyzed as prepositions and case markers (cf. Tamil on this, too.) Cite example p. 27; similar to the situation with Tamil

         kuruDan avane paattu siriccaan	original meaning:	'having seen him, the blind man laughed'
         blind-man him hvg.seen laughed-he	reanalyze as:	blind-man him - AT - laughed-he
         'The blind man looked at him and laughed'	New meaning:	'The blind man laughed at him'

         In other words, the past-participle of the verb paar "see" can be reanalyzed as meaning "direct the attention at" or just 'at' since with a subject like 'blind-man' there can be no interpretation of 'seeing.' This can be seen with many other postpositions in Dravidian which have started out as verbs. (See more examples from Tamil here, esp. postpositions taking the accusative case.

     • Focus on Focus Another area where study of grammaticalization broke some ground was on the subjects of "subject" and "focus" because of how this differed from language to language; in some what is a subject would be in another a matter of focus, depending on NP-VP agreement, or non-agr, or "loose relationship" with the verb. Perhaps difference between "subject" and "focus" is one of degree of grammaticalization .

     • Word Order and language universals (Greenberg et al.) also brought in studies of grammaticalization of various sorts in the lgs. Greenberg studied, which were primarily in Africa. Cf. Cologne project, Eurotyp, etc.)

     • Givon's 1979 book On Understanding Grammar : focused on shifting polarities between

       • child-adult

       • creole/standard
       • unplanned/planned
       • pragmatic/syntactic,

       where in each of these polarities, the first is 'labile/loose' and the second is 'tight/fixed.' Movement, or change, is in the direction of the tight pole. But there needs to be a combination of work on

       • sociolinguistic variation

       • developmental research (child lg. acquisition.)
       • grammaticalization

   • Importance of Heine and Reh's book Grammaticalization and Reanalysis in African Languages bec. gives not only exhaustive examples but also exhaustive index of typical pathways of grammaticalization found by authors.

   • Traugott and Heine's Approaches to Grammaticalization raises the following issues:

     1. Can diachronic and synchronic approaches to grammaticalization be reconciled, or is a new approach necessary?

     2. Is grammaticalization continuous or discontinuous process?

     3. To what extent is grammaticalization result of discourse pragmatic forces?

     4. what constraints are there on the input? (What can or can not be used as input?)

     5. how do we know incipient grammaticalization when we see it?

     6. When do we know when we don't have grammaticalization, i.e. what phenomena are not examples of it?