Late stages and losses in grammatical change
What are preconditions, motivations, and consequences of the loss of linguistic constructions and whole categories (e.g. loss of gender in English). The project Late stages of grammaticalization and losses in grammatical change is conducted in cooperation with Dr. Tine Breban (University of Manchester).
Grammaticalization research has been interested in stages of grammatical change from its beginnings, as e.g. the well-known cline introduced by Givón (1979) shows (i.e. from discourse > syntax > morphology > morphophonemics > zero). Later, Hopper and Traugott (2003) made a distinction between primary (evolution from lexical to grammatical) and secondary grammaticalization (from grammatical to more grammatical). However, relatively few scholars interested in grammaticalization have worked on the latter type of phenomena, nor have different stages informed much of the quest for general processes in grammaticalization. A special issue based on a workshop we organized at the ICHL 21 in Oslo in 2013 was a first step to close this research gap, focusing on the question “What happens after grammaticalization?” (Breban & Kranich 2015).
Moving on from this interest in the late stages of grammatical change, we focused next on the question: what happens in the very last stages – i.e. rather than looking at the much investigated question in diachronic linguistics as to how new grammatical constructions and categories come into being and explaining why they emerge, we wanted to find out more about the comparatively little researched question as to how they decline and eventually die out. In a workhop at the 40th DGfS in Stuttgart in 2018 we brought together renowned scholars from different countries, different research disciplines and interested in different languages (with a strong focus on English and German, however), who looked at different stories of loss in language change.
Some of the specific questions the workshop shed light on:
- Motivations/causes: Under which conditions do constructions or categories get lost? Are there particular language-internal or external contexts favoring loss (e.g. competition, language contact, other changes in a grammatical system)?
- Steps in the process: Are cross-linguistic generalizations possible of these steps (e.g. drop in frequency, context restrictions)? Is loss always gradual?
- Consequences: How does the language system cope after loss of especially a whole category (e.g. new means of coding vs. loss of coded distinction altogether)?
- Theoretical modeling: Which theoretical models (e.g. competition model, optimality theory, grammaticalization) can account best for the reasons and paths of loss?
The outcome of this workshop is a highly promising volume entitled Lost in change: Causes and processes in the loss of grammatical constructions and categories, which has been accepted for publication by Benjamins in the series Studies in Language Companion, and which is scheduled to see the light by the end of 2019.
Works cited in the project description
Breban, T., & Kranich, S. (Eds.). (2015). What happens after grammaticalization? Secondary grammaticalization and other late stage processes in grammaticalization. Special Issue. Language Sciences, 47(B), 129–228.
Givón, T. (1979). On understanding grammar. New York: Academic Press.
Hopper, P. J., & Traugott, E. C. (2003). Grammaticalization (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Project members
Publications
The project has brought forth a number of publications.
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