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<p>Dear Jürgen,</p>
<p>the development of the definite article in Ancient Greek, which
you mention, is probably a case in point.</p>
<p>The development of a conditional form in the conjugation of
Romance languages may be another.</p>
<p>Numeral classifiers are apparently an innovation of the Viceitic
and Naso branches of Chibcha, although this is not historically
documented.</p>
<p>Most of the aspectual auxiliaries found in the Mayan languages
are produced in post-Proto-Mayan times in one or another of the
branches. There was certainly contact among them both with respect
to the idea of an aspectual auxiliary and with respect to one or
another of the specific aspect features coded. Nevertheless, the
latter do not coincide among the Mayan languages. For instance,
the Yucatec predictive future seems to be an independent
innovation (although I may be mistaken about this).<br>
</p>
<p>Just a short comment on your generalization:</p>
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap=""> The grammaticalization of such largely redundant expressions apparently serves to reduce the hearer’s inference load. </pre>
<p>To the extent that the contribution made by such expressions to
the sentence meaning is indeed redundant, it would mean that the
respective information is already contained in the context, and to
this extent there would be no need for the hearer to employ
inferencing.</p>
<p>A more general (and rather defeatist) version of your hypothesis
would be: Grammatical formatives and constructions contribute to
structuring the message, thus enhancing expectability in it. This
supports communication in general (Talmy Givón has been preaching
this for decades); and to this extent, it is of secondary
importance just which semantic features are coded by grammatical
formatives, or which grammatical categories a language possesses.<br>
</p>
<p>Best,</p>
<p>Christian<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
<p style="font-size:90%">Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann<br>
Rudolfstr. 4<br>
99092 Erfurt<br>
<span style="font-variant:small-caps">Deutschland</span></p>
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