Ramat Anna Giacalone, Hopper Paul J. (Eds.). The Limits of Grammaticalization

John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1998. — 309 p. — (Typological Studies in Language 37).The earliest use of the term “grammaticalization” was to refer to the process whereby lexical words of a language (such as English keep in “he keeps bees”) become grammatical forms (such as the auxiliary in “he keeps looking at me”). Changes of this kind, which involve semantic fading and a downshift from a major to a minor category, have generally been agreed to come under the heading of grammaticalization. But other changes that equally contribute to new grammatical forms do not involve this kind of fading. In recent years, a debate has arisen over how to constrain the term theoretically. Is grammaticalization to be distinguished from “lexicalization”, the creation and fixing of new words out of older patterns of compounding? If so, how is the line to be drawn between a form that is grammatical and one that is lexical? Should the term “grammaticalization” be extended to the study of the origins of grammatical constructions in general? If so, it will have to include broader issues such as word order change and the reanalysis of phrases. What principles govern these processes? Is grammaticalization a unidirectional event, or can change occur in the reverse direction? The authors of the papers in this volume approach these important questions from a variety of data types, including historical texts, creoles, and a typologically broad sample of modern and ancient languages.Grammaticalization and Language Contact, Constructions and Positions - Walter Bisang
Grammaticalization and clause linkage strategies: a typological approach with particular reference to Ancient Greek - Sonia Cristofaro
Some Remarks on Analogy, Reanalysis and Grammaticalization - Livio Gaeta
Testing the Boundaries of Grammaticalization - Anna Giacalone Ramat
Discourse and Pragmatic Conditions of Grammaticalization. Spatial deixis and locative configurations in the personal pronoun system of some Italian dialectal areas - Stefania Giannini
The Paradigm at the End of the Universe - Paul J. Hopper
At the Boundaries of Grammaticalization: What Interrogatives Are Doing in Concessive Conditionals - Torsten Leuschner
The Grammaticalization of the Left Sentence Boundary in Hittite - Silvia Luraghi
On the relationship Between Grammaticalization and Lexicalization - Juan C. Moreno Cabrera
Structural Scope Expansion and Grammaticalization - Whitney Tabor and Elizabeth Closs Traugott
On the Application of the Notion of Grammaticalization to West African Pigin English - Barbara Turchetta