Conversion

3 Key excerpts on "Conversion"

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  eBook - ePub

  The New Psychology of Language

  Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure, Volume II

  • Michael Tomasello, Michael Tomasello(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Once underway, the course of grammaticalization is unidirectional and thus, in principle, predictable. Nouns and verbs lose their categorical status and become prepositions, auxiliaries, and other grammatical forms. Free elements become more restricted and fuse with other elements. Loosely conjoined main clauses fuse to become a main plus subordinate clause. The reverse directions are rarely attested.

  Both the general trends in grammaticalization and many of the very specific developments are not restricted to individual languages, but are common across genetically and geographically unrelated languages. This widespread distribution, which is illustrated later, provides a new view of language universals. Because patterns of change cannot in themselves exist in speakers’ minds, the more basic universals must be the mechanisms that create the changes that are so similar across languages.

  Many of the very basic mechanisms that constitute the process of grammaticalization are cognitive processes that are not necessarily restricted to language. By better understanding these cognitive processes and how they function in communicative situations, we will eventually learn the answers to the most fundamental questions that linguists ask.

  GRAMMATICALIZATION

  Grammaticalization is usually defined as the process by which a lexical item or a sequence of items becomes a grammatical morpheme, changing its distribution and function in the process (Heine, Claudi, & Hünnemeyer, 1991a, 1991b; Heine & Reh, 1984; Hopper & Traugott, 1993; Lehmann, 1982; Meillet, 1912). Thus English going to (with a finite form of be) becomes the intention/future marker gonna. However, more recently it has been observed that it is important to add that grammaticalization of lexical items takes place within particular constructions and further that grammaticalization is the creation of new constructions (Bybee, in press; Traugott, in press). Thus going to does not grammaticalize in the construction exemplified by I’m going to the store but only in the construction in which a verb follows to, as in I’m going to help you

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  eBook - ePub

  The History of English

  A Student's Guide

  • Ishtia Singh(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  (like functions as both discourse marker and quotative complementizer). Nevertheless, such work is complementary to more structure-based accounts of grammaticalization; together, they should achieve no less than increasing our understanding of such processes.

  The explanations of the preceding sections have necessarily portrayed language change as an ordered and neat phenomenon. This is in fact not the case: change is, for want of a better phrase, quite ‘messy’ indeed. The processes we have considered may or may not occur, and if they do, do not affect the usage of all speakers, and certainly not at the same time. This means that change contributes to synchronic variation in a language system – old and new, and new and new, variants may co-exist at any one time in a speech community. It also has a diachronic effect – as some variants become dominant and are retained and as others are lost, the ‘linguistic character’ of the language (at least, of the language preserved in the textual record) also changes, as we will see in our narrative of English from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day (Chapters 3 –6 ). But processes of change not only ‘move’ a language from one stage to another; they can also, given enough time and appropriate conditions, eventually result in the gradual emergence of a new language. Such lines of linguistic descent also constitute an integral part of a language's diachronic narrative, and it is to a discussion of research in this area that we turn in Chapter 2 .

  1.7 Study Questions

  1. The following data illustrates a current vowel shift in American English – the Northern Cities Shift, which is taking place in the industrial inland North and is most strongly advanced in the largest cities including Syracuse, Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Chicago and Rockford:

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  eBook - ePub

  Variation in Linguistic Systems

  • James A. Walker(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  grammaticalization (Bybee et al. 1994), a type of language change in which forms from one part of the linguistic system take on functions in other parts of the system. The origin of this term is normally attributed to Meillet (1912: 131), who referred to it as “le passage d’un mot autonome au role d’élément grammatical . . . l’attribution du caractère grammatical à un mot jadis autonome” [“the passage of an autonomous word to the role of a grammatical element . . . the attribution of grammatical characteristics to a formerly autonomous word”, my translation]. In the classic case of grammaticalization, a lexical form takes on grammatical functions, a process most clearly exemplified in the cross-linguistically common development of future markers from the verb go. As we have seen, this happened in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, as well as in other languages.

  Subsequent studies have widened the definition of grammaticalization to include not only the movement of lexical forms into grammatical functions but also the movement of already-grammatical forms into other areas of grammar, such as syntactic forms into morphology or discourse markers. For example, the synthetic future in French developed from a periphrastic construction, in which an auxiliary verb (from Latin habere “to have (to)”) gradually fused to the main verb (7.10 ). In English, erstwhile main clauses occurring without complementizer that, such as I think and you know, have developed into discourse markers that can occur not only in main-clause position but also at various positions in the sentence (7.11 ).

  (7.10)Grammaticalization: syntax → morphology

  Latin cantare habeo “to-sing I-have” > French je chanterai “I will sing”

  (7.11)Grammaticalization: syntax → discourse marker

  a. You know , I do believe in things happen for a reason.

  (TO5: 247)

  b. They would have to, you know , be happy for me.

  (TO5: 130)

  c. As long as they’d be careful with it, you know .

  (TO5: 175)

  Studies of grammaticalization (Bybee et al. 1994, Hopper 1991) have uncovered a number of operative principles, several of which make predictions that can be translated into a variationist approach to language change. Variation between linguistic forms is recognized by the principle of layering, which states that multiple forms may undergo grammaticalization in the same functional domain. Under this principle, we expect forms to co-vary within functional domains, though their patterns of distribution within that domain may be shaped by other principles. For example, the domain of future reference in English is occupied not only by a go-future but also by a modal future will

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