Areal diffusion and the limits of grammaticalization

Intensive contact brings about diffusion of grammatical categories. Grammaticalization of lexical items is one of the mechanisms at play as languages converge and new categories develop. In a situation of intensive contact-induced change, the forms to be grammaticalized, and semantic changes involved, may turn out to be somewhat unexpected, forcing us to reconsider potential constraints on grammaticalization. We focus on a number of instances of hitherto undescribed grammaticalization paths in the languages of the Vaupés River Basin linguistic area in northwest Amazonia (especially Tariana, the only extant Arawak language), and then discuss further examples of typologically unusual instances of grammaticalization in Amazonian languages.

Typological features of grammaticalization in Semitic

This study highlights some notable typological features of ancient and modern Semitic languages. It sheds light on a number of shared intragenetic similarities and parallels within Semitic in the processes and outcomes of grammaticalization. Specifically, it examines the emergence and evolution of prepositionals from certain body-part terms; the shift from synthetic towards more analytic possessive strategies; and independent personal pronouns becoming inherently bound agreement markers as prefixes and suffixes on the imperfective and perfective verb stems, respectively. Moreover, with supporting evidence from corpus data, this study argues for the primacy of third-person pronouns, which assume expanded grammatical functions as copulas, expletives, and discourse-related functions. Finally, this study draws attention to the sociolinguistic factors, such as native speakers’ attitudinal stance, which directly impinge on language change within the diglossic nature of Arabic, and calls for consideration of sociolinguistic factors in the study of language evolution by grammaticalization.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the goal of this volume: to identify aspects of grammaticalization that correlate with typological features of languages. It sets out the question of what ultimately drives or motivates grammaticalization and the role that typological features play—mainly phonological and morphological features but also, to a lesser extent, in syntax and semantics. The chapter then outlines the structure of the volume, the content of the chapters, and the relationship between them.

Grammaticalization in Oceanic languages

This chapter investigates the main grammaticalization processes found in Oceanic languages. In connection with verbs of posture and localization (‘sit’, ‘be at a place’), of motion (‘go up/down’, ‘come’, ‘return’, ‘follow’) and with verbs such as ‘take’, ‘make’, ‘do’ as sources, different paths of development will be described that give rise to various grammatical morphemes, often preserving the original function and meaning of the verb. A few cases of grammaticalization involving nouns, as well as cases of relexification and unusual developments such as ‘degrammation’, will be discussed as well. The perspective of my analysis will be both a typological and a semantic one, underlining the importance of spatial representation, the contribution of serial verb constructions, and the role of metonymy and reanalysis in the grammaticalization processes found in Oceanic languages.

Grammaticalization and typology in Australian Aboriginal languages

While grammatical change has been a key area of interest for Australian historical linguistics, only a few studies have sought to explain the development of grammar in terms of processes of grammaticalization. This chapter explores the key reasons for the relative absence of grammaticalization studies in the Australianist tradition. It then shows how the development of a particular areal feature—second-position clitic constructions—may be explained in term of both grammaticalization and constructionalization. The chapter also discusses the development of dual-pronoun systems in Australian languages, and shows that it can be reasonably assumed that erstwhile bound pronouns have developed into free pronouns, in contrast to previous research claiming the emergence of bound pronouns from free pronouns.

Grammaticalization in Japanese and Korean

In this chapter, we try to present typical processes of grammaticalization in Japanese and Korean, and investigate which processes may particularly contribute to the discussion of theoretical aspects of grammaticalization. The processes introduced in some detail are the grammaticalization of converbs, of deverbal postpositions, and of nouns marking categories in the verb phrase as typical processes. We then discuss the morphological properties of grammaticalization in the two languages, and the high frequency of grammaticalization into interpersonal domains. Both features support extant ideas about grammaticalization rather than contradicting them. In contrast, a third point—that grammaticalizations may enter the language through writing rather than conversation—may be a challenge for ideas about grammaticalization that seek the source of grammaticalizations solely in speaker–hearer interaction.

Grammaticalization and inflectionalization in Iranian

The oldest attested Iranian languages underwent erosion and loss (or at least simplification) of much of their inherited inflectional morphology. These processes, echoing similar developments elsewhere in Indo-European, affected the categories of gender, case, aspect, person, and modality. The modern languages have since restored the old categories to varying degrees, providing a rich source for observing the mechanisms of grammaticalization. This chapter focuses on the innovation of inflectional person marking, based on erstwhile clitic pronouns. While person indexing for subjects may adhere to the predicted pathway for the grammaticalization of agreement, yielding obligatory verb-bound agreement markers in some languages, the grammaticalization of object indexing does not progress beyond the stage of clitic pronouns, despite the same etymological origin as the subject pronouns, and an even longer time-depth. The chapter also discusses the grammaticalization of a new accusative case marker in Persian, and of an innovated progressive aspect.

Diachronic stories of body-part nouns in some language families of South America

The present chapter deals with some well-attested diachronic developments of body-part nouns in languages belonging to a sample of language families of South America. Body-part nouns in these languages are often implicated in the development of locative adpositions, classifiers of different sorts, and body-part prefixes (as described for Panoan languages). This chapter argues that it is possible to postulate at least four different source constructions for these developments, including incorporated nouns, derivative compounds, generic genitives, and locative compounds. As shown in this chapter, there is an intrinsic relation between these constructions and body-part nouns, and this fact, in addition to the special cognitive nature of body-part expressions, may explain why these nouns undergo the grammaticalization processes described here. Due to its widespread distribution, the recruitment of body-part nouns for the development of grammatical elements such as adpositions, classifiers, and prefixes might be considered an areal feature of South American languages.

Grammaticalization in isolating languages and the notion of complexity

This chapter consists of four related arguments. We first review the claims about the nature of grammaticalization in isolating languages, specifically those of East and Mainland Southeast Asia (EMSEA); based on this, we present a view that suggests that grammaticalization is indeed a type-specific, or areal, phenomenon. Following on that, we propose that morphological elaboration is likewise type- or area-specific; and to conclude we discuss the significance of this in terms of language evolution. Our arguments lead us to posit that elaboration of morphological structure only happens in a certain type of languages, and cannot be taken as an overall diagnostic of age across the world?s languages. In other words, ‘mature’ linguistic phenomena are not necessarily morphologically complex, nor are all morphologically free languages ‘young’.

Grammaticalization in Turkic

The chapter represents the whole Northern Eurasian area, where Turkic languages are spoken in close contact with the Transeurasian languages Mongolic and Tungusic. These three families share significant grammaticalization strategies and typological characteristics with each other as well as with Koreanic and Japonic. First, the distribution, classification, and some basic typological features of Turkic languages are briefly presented in comparison with other Transeurasian languages. The main focus lies on typically non-European grammaticalization processes that are representative of the whole family and recur throughout the known history of Turkic. A detailed account of different grammaticalization strategies of so-called postverbial constructions—a combination of a converb and an auxilary verb—complements the treatment of similar processes in other Transeurasian languages in the volume.