Morphosyntactic Change and Grammaticalization
How a language's grammar changes over time, including the rise of new grammatical markers from ordinary words through grammaticalization, and changes in word order and morphology.
Definition
Morphosyntactic change is change in a language's grammatical structure, including its morphology and syntax, while grammaticalization is the process by which lexical items or constructions develop grammatical functions and grammatical items develop still more grammatical ones.
Scope
This topic treats change in morphology and syntax: shifts in word order, the rise and loss of inflection, reanalysis and extension of constructions, and especially grammaticalization, the process by which lexical items and constructions become grammatical markers. It addresses the recurrent, often unidirectional pathways such developments follow.
Core questions
- How do new grammatical markers arise from lexical words?
- What are the typical pathways and stages of grammaticalization?
- Is grammaticalization unidirectional, and what would count as a counterexample?
- How do reanalysis and analogical extension drive syntactic change?
- How do word-order and inflectional systems change over time?
Key theories
- Grammaticalization theory
- Hopper and Traugott describe how lexical items move along clines toward grammatical status, accompanied by semantic bleaching, phonetic reduction, and increasing structural fixedness, often following cross-linguistically recurrent pathways.
- Reanalysis and extension in syntactic change
- Harris and Campbell argue that syntactic change proceeds principally through reanalysis (changing the underlying structure of a construction without altering its surface), extension (generalizing a pattern to new contexts), and borrowing.
History
The term grammaticalization was coined by Antoine Meillet in 1912, building on earlier observations about the lexical origins of grammatical forms. The field expanded greatly from the 1980s, with Hopper and Traugott's synthesis establishing it as a central explanatory framework. Parallel work on historical syntax, notably by Harris and Campbell, systematized the mechanisms of syntactic change.
Debates
- Unidirectionality of grammaticalization
- Grammaticalization is widely held to be largely unidirectional (lexical to grammatical), but the existence and significance of degrammaticalization counterexamples is debated.
Key figures
- Paul J. Hopper
- Elizabeth Closs Traugott
- Alice C. Harris
- Antoine Meillet
Related topics
Seminal works
- hopperTraugott2003
- harrisCampbell1995
Frequently asked questions
- What is a classic example of grammaticalization?
- The English future marker 'going to' (gonna) developed from a verb of motion expressing literal movement into a grammatical marker of futurity, with accompanying meaning loss and phonetic reduction.
- What is reanalysis?
- Reanalysis is a change in the underlying grammatical structure assigned to a construction by speakers, without an immediate change in its surface form, often setting the stage for further syntactic change.