The Limits of Grammaticalization

309 Pages·1998·27.092 MB·Typological Studies in Language 37

by  Anna Giacalone Ramat (Ed.), Paul J. Hopper (Ed.)

THE LIMITS OF GRAMMATICALIZATION
TYPOLOGICAL STUDIES IN LANGUAGE (TSL)
A companion series to the journal "STUDIES IN LANGUAGE"
Honorary Editor: Joseph H. Greenberg
General Editor: Michael Noonan
Assistant Editors: Spike Gildea, Suzanne Kemmer
Editorial Board:
Wallace Chafe (Santa Barbara) Ronald Langacker (San Diego)
Bernard Comrie (Los Angeles) Charles Li (Santa Barbara)
R.M.W. Dixon (Canberra) Andrew Pawley (Canberra)
Matthew Dryer (Buffalo) Doris Payne (Oregon)
John Haiman (St Paul) Frans Plank (Konstanz)
Kenneth Hale (Cambridge, Mass.) Jerrold Sadock (Chicago)
Bernd Heine (Köln) Dan Slobin (Berkeley)
Paul Hopper (Pittsburgh) Sandra Thompson (Santa Barbara)
Andrej Kibrik (Moscow)
Volumes in this series will be functionally and typologically oriented, covering specific
topics in language by collecting together data from a wide variety of languages and language
typologies. The orientation of the volumes will be substantive rather than formal, with the
aim of investigating universals of human language via as broadly defined a data base as
possible, leaning toward cross-linguistic, diachronic, developmental and live-discourse data.
The series is, in spirit as well as in fact, a continuation of the tradition initiated by C. Li {Word
Order and Word Order Change, Subject and Topic, Mechanisms for Syntactic Change) and
continued by T. Givón {Discourse and Syntax) and P. Hopper {Tense-Aspect: Between
Semantics and Pragmatics).
Volume 37
Anna Giacalone Ramat and Paul J. Hopper (eds)
The Limits of Grammaticalization
THE LIMITS OF
GRAMMATICALIZATION
Edited by
ANNA GIACALONE RAMAT
University of Pavia
PAUL J. HOPPER
University of Pittsburgh
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The limits of grammaticalization / edited by Anna Giacalone Ramat, Paul J. Hopper,
p. cm. — (Typological studies in language, ISSN 0167-7373; v. 37)
Chiefly papers presented at a symposium held during the 28th annual meeting of the
Societas Linguistica Europaea which was held Aug. 1995, Leiden, Netherlands.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Grammar, Comparative and general—Grammaticalization-Congresses. I. Giacalone
Ramat, Anna. 1937- . II. Hopper, Paul J. III. Series.
P299.G73L56 1998
415~dc21 98-21202
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ISBN 1 55619 649 0 (hb.) / 1 55619 650 4 (pb.) (U.S.; alk. paper)
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Table of contents
Introduction 1
Anna Giacalone Ramat and Paul Hopper
Grammaticalization and Language Contact, Constructions and Positions 13
Walter Bisang
Grammaticalization and clause linkage strategies: a typological
approach with particular reference to Ancient Greek 59
Sonia Cristofaro
Some Remarks on Analogy, Reanalysis and Grammaticalization 89
Livio Gaeta
Testing the Boundaries of Grammaticalization 107
Anna Giacalone Ramat
Discourse and Pragmatic Conditions of Grammaticalization. Spatial
deixis and locative configurations in the personal pronoun system
of some Italian dialectal areas 129
Stefania Giannini
The Paradigm at the End of the Universe 147
Paul Hopper
At the Boundaries of Grammaticalization: What Interrogatives Are
Doing in Concessive Conditionals 159
Torsten Leuschner
The Grammaticalization of the Left Sentence Boundary in Hittite 189
Silvia Luraghi
On the Relationships Between Grammaticalization and Lexicalization 211
Juan C. Moreno Cabrera
Structural Scope Expansion and Grammaticalization 229
Whitney Tabor and Elizabeth Closs Traugott
vi Table of Contents
On the Application of the Notion of Grammaticalization to West
African Pidgin English 273
Barbara Turchetta
Language Index 289
Name Index 291
Subject Index 297
Introduction
Anna Giacalone Ramat and Paul Hopper
University of Pavia and University of Pittsburgh
The study of grammaticalization appears to be entering a new and significant
stage. The pioneers in the field, starting with Meillet, developed the idea of
grammaticalization as a tool of historical linguistics in order to give an
account of the origins and typical changes in grammatical morphemes that
would complement the rich field of etymology and word history. For Meillet,
grammaticalization was a concept that was needed because analogy alone
was inadequate to explain the sources of grammatical morphemes. A search
for the ultimate origins of grammatical morphemes led to the insight that their
source was in the lexicon, through a process of weakening and generalization
of meaning.
With the renewal of interest in grammaticalization that began in the
1980s, interest was naturally focused on expanding the encyclopedic knowl­
edge of grammaticalization by studying its manifestations in a wide variety of
individual languages and typologically by reference to larger groups of
languages. In the course of this work, more and more examples were un­
earthed of borderline phenomena, which as historical processes seemed to
share much in common with the classical type of grammaticalization and yet
lacked some perceived crucial component. Researchers reacted differently to
these phenomena, sometimes, implicitly or explicitly, broadening the notion
of grammaticalization so as to include them, sometimes closing off inquiry at
the point where the term grammaticalization no longer seemed applicable to
the enterprise.
In the third stage that we perceive, there is a growing reflexive interest in
integrating grammaticalization with theoretical work in descriptive and his­
torical linguistics. This interest has naturally focused in part on the question of
the appropriate use of the term grammaticalization itself. Which phenomena
2 Anna Giacalone Ramat and Paul Hopper
are appropriately dealt with under the rubric of grammaticalization? Which
are to be excluded, and on what grounds? As the amount of research in
grammaticalization accumulated, the question of the limits of grammatical­
ization became increasingly urgent. Reviews of current work increasingly
referred to the problem, and one of the most repetitive criticisms of published
work involved the question of whether this or that feature could properly be
referred to as grammaticalization, or should not instead be called something
else, such as morphologization or lexicalization.
A typical problem, and one that was widely noted, was that of lexicaliza­
tion. The source of grammatical morphemes was in the lexicon. Yet the
lexicon itself was susceptible of explanation along lines very similar to those
of grammatical morphemes. One class of examples concerns the fusion of the
parts of a compound noun into stem+suffix, as in English childhood, kingdom.
Former nouns "hood" and "dom" with independent lexical meanings {hood <
"kind, quality", dom < "condition, state, domain") were compounded with
more specific nouns with combined meanings "state of', "condition of',
"domain of'. Here the change of function from noun to derivational suffix
was accompanied by a generalization of meaning and loss of lexical au­
tonomy that was no different from that undergone during the change from
lexical item to grammatical morpheme. An example of a slightly different
type is discussed by Moreno Cabrera in his paper. Certain Spanish adjectives
in -nte, themselves derived from Latin present participles, come to be used as
nouns, and sometimes the source adjective is no longer used, even though the
verb of the original participle is still current. An example is calmante "seda­
tive", from calmar "to soothe". Since the immediate origin in an adjective is
no longer evident, such forms are completely autonomous nouns. We appear
then to have examples of lexical items which are the outcome of a process
(the formation of a present participle from a verb stem and a grammatical
suffix) which is unambiguously grammatical. Evidently the line between
strictly grammatical and strictly lexical processes is a blurred one.
Another area of uncertainty in the placement of conceptual boundaries to
grammaticalization lies in collocations. In Italian the verbs venire and andaré
have come to be used as auxiliaries with gerundal verbs, as in andar dicendo
"to keep on saying", venir dicendo "idem." In the 14th century and for some
time after that, a larger number of verbs could be collocated with andaré and
venire (Brianti 1992). However, in modern Italian the combination andar el
venire + verb is restricted to a handful of verbs: dire "to say", ripetere "to
Introduction 3
repeat", aumentare "to grow", peggiorare "to get worse", consolidare "to
become solid", an the like (Giacalone Ramat 1995). Changes of this kind
represent an apparent countertendency to the general direction of grammati-
calization, for in grammaticalization one expects rather to find an expansion
and loss of constraint in the environments of a form (Lehmann 1985); for
example, modal auxiliaries typically go from requiring human subjects (the
king will..., etc.) to permitting all kinds of subjects (the weather will...), and
many other examples. In the Italian example, however, it seems that the
choice of contexts for the auxiliaries andare and venire has narrowed to the
point where they form a small, closed class of fixed lexical patterns. How are
such cases of emergent "collocation" to be handled within the general theory
of grammaticalization?
The phonological end of the linguistic continuum is also involved in the
question of boundaries to grammaticalization. Often the visible outcome of
linguistic change is one or more meaningless phonological segments whose
function is no longer a grammatical or semantic one, but operates purely on
the phonological level. Thus Dixon (1977) showed how Olgolo syllable
structure, which had been reduced through the loss of word-initial conso­
nants, was being "repaired" by new word initial consonants supplied by
degrammaticalized word class prefixes. Grammaticalization in this instance
presumably went through the sequence identified by Greenberg (1991) for
demonstratives in general, starting from demonstratives, passing through
prefixed articles, and eventually becoming word class markers. In the final
stage of this process described by Dixon, these word class markers, drained of
their original function, serve primarily to restore the natural phonotactics that
had been eroded by the loss of word initial consonants. A remnant of the
original situation is left only in some tendencies for certain consonants to be
associated with very broad lexico-semantic classes. Many words can be
shown to owe part of their phonological substance to earlier morphemes that
have lost their functions. In the German past participle gegessen "eaten", for
example, the middle -g- is historically the ge- of the past participle (MHG
gessen) whose presence idiosyncratically facilitates the prefixing of a new ge.
An extreme formulation to which all borderline cases might lead is that
ultimately grammaticalization is not separately definable from the concept of
change in general. Such a position has in fact been claimed by Hopper (1991),
who has noted that in cases like English miss, Mrs., mistress the semantic and
phonological changes involved are identical with those characteristic of