16.923, Review: Historical Ling/Typology: Fischer et al. (2004)

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Subject: 16.923, Review: Historical Ling/Typology: Fischer et al. (2004)

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1)
Date: 25-Mar-2005
From: Claus Pusch < pusch at uni-freiburg.de >
Subject: Up and down the Cline - The Nature of Grammaticalization 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sat, 26 Mar 2005 14:46:25
From: Claus Pusch < pusch at uni-freiburg.de >
Subject: Up and down the Cline - The Nature of Grammaticalization 
 

EDITORS: Fischer, Olga; Norde, Muriel; Perridon, Harry
TITLE: Up and down the Cline
SUBTITLE: The Nature of Grammaticalization
SERIES: Typological Studies in Language
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-1897.html


Claus D. Pusch, Department of Romance Languages, Albert-Ludwig 
University at Freiburg im Breisgau

DESCRIPTION OF THE BOOK

This book contains a selection of papers originally presented at the New 
Reflections on Grammaticalization II Conference organized by the volume's 
editors in 2002 at Amsterdam University (Netherlands). The NRG-II 
conference was a follow-up meeting to a first New Reflections on 
Grammaticalization conference held at the University of Potsdam (Germany) 
in 1999 (the proceedings of which are found in Wischer & Diewald eds. 
2002). The third conference of this series is going to be hosted by the 
University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) in July 2005, for which, 
according to one of the organizers, a tremendous number of abstracts has 
been sent in, testifying the ever increasing interest in the concept of 
grammaticalization and related processes in the linguistic research 
community. An equally impressive indication of this interest in 
grammaticalization and of the broad range of languages and subjects 
studied under this perspective, is the present book which, in addition to an 
introductory chapter by the editors, contains 17 contributions, four of 
which focus on English, two on Romance languages, three on Finnish and 
Baltic languages, one on Greek, whereas four papers discuss language facts 
found in Eastern and South-Eastern Asian languages and the remaining 
papers either deal with other languages or do not have a focus on a specific 
language or language group.

Following the editors' introductory chapter, the volume opens with Martin 
Haspelmath's paper "On directionality in language change with particular 
reference to grammaticalization" in which the author maintains that the 
unidirectionality hypothesis as formulated in classic work on 
grammaticalization such as Lehmann (1995 [1982]) and Hopper & Traugott 
(1993) continues to be valid and important in order to understand 
language change in large samples of the world's languages. Haspelmath 
acknowledges that there are examples contradicting an absolute reading of 
the unidirectionality hypothesis but believes that unidirectionality as 
a 'statistical' universal is not affected by these isolated counter-examples, 
which are by far outnumbered by the cases of language change where 
unidirectionality holds true. Moreover, Haspelmath considers the 
phenomena described as degrammaticalization as too heterogeneous to be 
covered by a unified term. He suggests a differentiated view and 
terminology, considering as valid counterexample to unidirectionality only a 
process "that leads from the endpoint to the starting point of a potential 
grammaticalization and also shows the same intermediate stages" (p.27s). 
Such cases of "antigrammaticalization", as he coins them, are extremely 
rare. Other cases such as "retractions" (another term suggested by 
Haspelmath), where an advanced stage of a grammaticalization chain 
becomes obsolete but a still existing previous ("layered") stage survives, are 
rejected by the author as counterevidence to unidirectionality.

In his paper "Rescuing traditional (historical) linguistics from 
grammaticalization theory", Brian D. Joseph takes a critical stand concerning 
the usefulness and methodological soundness of research on language 
change carried out within the grammaticalization framework. Comparing 
this research with traditional diachronic linguistics, Joseph criticizes the - as 
he puts it - sometimes superficial analyses of historical stages and facts by 
adepts of the grammaticalization approach, who tend to privilege cross-
linguistic, typologically-oriented generalization over the careful study of 
individual cases and let themselves lead to easily to posit historical and 
functional links on the mere basis of the similarity of form. For the author 
this qualifies as "an ahistorical approach that often bypasses crucial 
considerations needed to make historical accounts work." (p. 54)

Anette Rosenbach analyzes "The English s-genitive" and asks if it really 
constitutes - as frequently claimed - "A case of degrammaticalization?". Her 
answer to this question is negative insofar as the possessive 's is not 
stepping back on the clitic to inflectional affix cline and therefore - 
according to Rosenbach - is not an instance of antigrammaticalization as 
defined in Haspelmath's contribution. Cautious examination of textual data 
from Middle, early Modern and Modern English leads the author to 
conclude that the development of possessive 's is connected to other 
changes that have affected the English noun phrase and that the (former) 
inflectional affix has acquired a new status as a definite determiner, a 
process "which made POSS 's change track and leave the grammaticality 
cline and become part of the newly emerging article system" (p. 87). 
Therefore, what looks like degrammaticalization (or 
antigrammaticalization) on the token level is, in reality, an embarking on a 
new cline of change, i.e. a continuing grammaticalization on the type level. 
Like Rosenbach, Martine Taeymans takes "A corpus-based approach" in 
her "Investigation into the marginal modals DARE and NEED in British 
present-day English", but uses frequency counts to elucidate the oscillation 
of these verbs between main verb and modal status. As far as 'need' is 
concerned, she arrives at the conclusion that "while NEED structurally 
violates the unidirectionality hypothesis, it does not seem to show a reverse 
semantic shift" (p. 111), i.e. unidirectionality is preserved on a semantic if 
not on a structural level.

The idea of defining unidirectionality in grammaticalization primarily on the 
semantic level instead of the levels of structure and function, is also 
suggested in Debra Ziegeler's paper "Redefining unidirectionality. Is there 
life after modality", where the author describes the trajectory of the 
Mandarin Chinese verb 'dé' which developed from main verb to (epistemic) 
modal status and lexicalized back to a main verb use. According to Ziegeler, 
this development cannot count as counterevidence to semantically defined 
unidirectionality: in the process, a "secondary 'split' from the continuing 
main path of grammaticalisation" (p. 126) occurred but this split is in 
accordance with the overall developmental cline if this cline and its 
lexicalization branch are integrated into a larger 'family resemblances' 
conceptual network. Although this is in discordance with a notion of 
unidirectionality as a functional-categorial universal (postulating that 
lexical material develops into grammatical material but not the other way 
round), such a lexicalization step "does not threaten the prospect of a 
unidirectional hypothesis as long as it can be maintained that semantic 
change is prior to all other changes" (p. 131). This same idea of 
unidirectionality being a characteristic feature of semantic change 
(although not necessarily of functional change) underlies the study of 
Foong Ha Yap, Stephen Matthews and Kaoru Horie, "From pronominalizer 
to pragmatic marker. Implications for unidirectionality from a crosslinguistic 
perspective", where the historical developmental sequences of markers in 
Japanese, Chinese and Malay are found to lead uniformly from inflectional 
(genitive marking) to pragmatic (stance-marking) functions but where the 
diachronic ordering of the developmental steps involved turns out to be 
different in each language.

The categorial change of language elements accompanied by an increasing 
pragmatic (subjective) value, i.e. the conception of grammaticalization as 
developed in the work of Elizabeth C. Traugott (e.g. 1995; cf. also Traugott 
& Dasher 2002), constitutes the theoretical basis of Jacqueline Visconti's 
contribution "Conditionals and subjectification. Implications for a theory of 
semantic change". The author documents the semantic-pragmatic 
motivation of the pathway of change of English 'suppose / supposing' and 
some of its Romance cognates from propositional to textual to subjective 
meaning, stressing that this (unproblematic) example of unidirectional 
semantic change should not be understood as a 'mechanical' 
or "deterministic process" (p. 187) but that the reason for the process is to 
be sought in the speakers/writers' "recruitement of 'supposing' for 
argumentative uses" (p. 186), which means that the driving force behind the 
change is discourse-pragmatic in essence. This point of view corresponds 
exactly to what Ulrich Detges, in "How cognitive is grammaticalization? The 
history of the Catalan 'perfet perifràstic'", argues to be the basis for the 
unexpected grammaticalization of a 'go' + infinitive periphrasis towards the 
expression of an aoristic past tense in this Ibero-Romance language. 
Detges interprets this instance of language change as a result of rhetorical 
strategies put to use by speakers/writers who realized that this and 
comparable constructions can bear a 'hot news' character which may be 
exploited for the purpose of textual foregrounding. "Thus, it is not the 
value of the source constructions as such which makes them eligible for 
grammaticalization, but the fact that these constructions prove to be useful 
for very basic communicative strategies." (p. 224) In this approach to 
grammaticalization, communicative need seems more prominent than 
cognition-based source determination or functional necessity; this reduced 
importance accorded to functional need is also one of the conclusions of 
Anastasios Tsangalidis' chapter on "Unidirectionality in the 
grammaticalization of modality in Greek".

Jim Miller, in his article "Perfect and resultative constructions in spoken and 
non-standard English", emphasizes that in evaluating grammaticalization 
processes, diasystematic variation must be taken into account in order to 
arrive at a complete and correct picture of language change. On the basis of 
Scottish English data he shows that the Perfect as an aspectual-temporal 
form that seems well established in the standard language is still in 
competition with other past-denoting forms in non-standard data and co-
exists there with the possessive-resultative construction out of which it is 
supposed to have evolved. In the same vein, Lea Laitinen, under the 
heading "Grammaticalization and standardization", demonstrates how 
(language-external) standardization may, on the one hand, obscure on-
going (language-internal) grammaticalization processes and, on the other, 
interfere with these processes and ultimately manifest a certain impact on 
the structural make-up of the language having undergone standardization. 
Her examples come from Finnish, the same language that is studied by 
Ilona Herlin and Lari Kotilainen who, in "External factors behind cross-
linguistic similarities", question the cognitive character of language change 
phenomena which, at first sight, seem to be textbook-examples of 
universal tendencies in grammaticalization-based change and advocate - 
as Laitinen does - a closer look at such aspects as areal factors and 
language contact.

In her contribution "What constitutes a case of grammaticalization? Evidence 
from the development of copulas from demonstratives in Passamaquoddy", 
Eve Ng addresses the question how in languages with a very limited written 
record the fact of grammaticalization having taken place can be assessed. 
At the same time, she questions to a certain extent the operability of the 
criterion of categorical change, considered as a defining feature in many 
approaches to grammaticalization, by showing how intricate this question 
turns out to be in this Algonquian language when certain forms in verbless 
clauses and their status between 'demonstrative-hood' and 'copula-hood' 
have to be evaluated. Marian Klamer, in "Multi-categorial items as 
underspecified lexical entries. The case of Kambera 'wàngu'", treats a 
similarly problematic case in this Indonesian language and maintains that 
linguistic elements involved in grammaticalization chains are necessarily 
ambiguous as far as grammatical categorization is concerned, as the 
different steps of this developmental chain are located within a conceptual 
network organized through family resemblances (as described earlier by 
Ziegeler). Structural "underspecification" of these elements within an on-
going grammaticalization process is considered by the author as a natural 
result of semantic bleaching, one of the most basic characteristics of such 
processes.

The problem of ambiguous functional status and multifunctionality is also 
addressed in Kwok-shing Wong's paper "The acquisition of polysemous 
forms. The case of 'bei2' ("give") in Cantonese". The author uses Chinese 
corpus data from the CHILDES data base to explore if diachronic changes as 
posited by grammaticalization research are paralleled by or reconstructable 
through L1 acquisitional processes, a venture that in the case of 'bei2', 
which has a main verb function but also additional, more grammatical 
functions such as dative or passive marking, turns out to be feasible. 
Cantonese and other isolating languages represent a certain challenge to 
grammaticalization research in that concurrent processes affecting the 
formal constitution of the linguistic elements which are being 
grammaticalized (and which could provide for additional evidence 
concerning the position on the grammaticalization chain that these 
elements have attained), e.g. phonetic attrition, are less readily observable 
in these languages. 

However, Umberto Ansaldo and Lisa Lim, in "Phonetic absence as syntactic 
prominence. Grammaticalization in isolating tonal languages", show on the 
basis of examples from Cantonese and Hokkien and the results of their 
phonetic analysis that phenomena of phonetic erosion are well detectable 
in such languages, whereby "the erosion is primarily in terms of duration 
and vowel quality." (p. 360) In the view of the authors, these findings cast 
doubt on "the old adage of yesterday's syntax becoming today's 
morphology as universally valid" (ibid.) but do confirm the validity of the 
grammaticalization approach in the case of languages which lack 
inflectional morphology, which, in the classic accounts, is considered as the 
target for grammaticalizing items. These classic accounts therefore seem 
too narrow; this is also one of the conclusions that Sergey Say, in the 
concluding chapter of the book, "Grammaticalization of word order. 
Evidence from Lithuanian", arrives at. Say analyzes the positional options of 
the genitive in this Baltic language reputed to allow free word order. He 
finds that a positional differentiation between referential (possession-
expressing) and non-referential (qualifying or classifying) genitives, which 
was still available in Old Lithuanian, has been leveled in the modern 
language, leading to a fixation of the genitive construction in preposition to 
the nominal head. Again, as in Herlin and Kotilainen's paper, a possible 
influence of language contact is taken into consideration, but more than 
this, system-internal aspects of functional overlap with (equally preposed) 
adjectives are advocated.

EVALUATION

This book is a highly recommendable read for both supporters and critics 
of the grammaticalization approach to language change. The impressive 
range of languages and phenomena on all levels of linguistic structure 
described and included in the volume is a reflection of the stimulating effect 
and the descriptive power that grammaticalization - be it as an 
elaborated 'theory' or as a heuristic principle - seems to have for current 
functional linguistics. However, as will have become evident from the 
synthesis of the book's contents, it is not intended as a panegyric: instead of 
highlighting what grammaticalization studies have achieved up to now, the 
volume's editors have preferred to take a rather critical stand to many key 
notions of this theoretical approach resp. have invited the contributors to 
critically examine these "seemingly unchallengeable principles" (p. 1) that 
have been put forward as strong hypotheses in some of the foundational 
work on grammaticalization. The editors expressly refer to the 2001 special 
issue of 'Language Sciences' (Campbell (ed.) 2001), that contained a 
number of critical evaluations of the validity and explanatory value of the 
concept of grammaticalization. Although in the present volume, Brian D. 
Joseph is the only representative of these critics to have contributed a 
paper, it becomes obvious throughout the books that the contributors have 
these detractors' positions in mind and that they are aiming at a debate with 
them, taking up and integrating into their analyses some of their arguments 
and refuting others.

As should have become obvious, the most controversial key concept and 
the one that is most broadly discussed in this volume, is unidirectionality. 
Although almost all the authors who mention this principle try to 'rescue' it 
and conclude that it continues to be a valuable notion for describing the 
specificities of grammaticalization-driven language change, the 
modifications suggested for the possible domains of its application and for 
the very character of the principle - as compared to early formulations such 
as the one by Lehmann (1995 [1982]:19, quoted by the editors on p. 2) - 
are far-reaching. In this respect, the terminological differentiation 
suggested by Haspelmath between antigrammaticalization and retraction 
(which obviously is not only terminological in scope but points out 
important differences in the way that language change phenomena evolve 
and pathways of grammatical change are followed) appears useful and 
conclusive.

Apart from this vivid discussion of the unidirectionality hypothesis, the 
book "Up and down the Cline" clearly illustrates the existence of different 
currents among the practitioners of the grammaticalization approach. 
These have been in existence for quite a while, with the main trends being, 
on the one hand side, a more form-oriented vision of grammaticalization 
which is mainly interested in the 'lexicon > grammar' resp. the 'syntax > 
morphology' cline typically associated with the work of Christian Lehmann, 
and, on the other, a more function-oriented approach that focuses on 
the 'propositional > textual > subjective' cline as developed in the work of 
Elizabeth C. Traugott. Although these perspectives on grammaticalization 
are generally looked upon as complementary rather than conflictive, is goes 
without saying that they imply very different approaches to the data that is 
taken into account, and that they yield rather different conclusions, e.g. 
concerning the importance accorded to universal cognition-based factors 
in comparison with maybe equally universal, but generally more case-
specific and context-dependent discourse-pragmatic factors. This becomes 
obvious in the contributions by Detges (in this volume, but also in his earlier 
work) or by Visconti and points out the still inconclusive debate on the 
precise relation between intersecting concepts such as grammaticalization, 
lexicalization and pragmaticalization (cf., for instance, some of the 
contributions in Wischer & Diewald (eds.) 2001 and in Bisang, Himmelmann 
& Wiemer (eds.) 2004).

In addition to this, in the book under review there are a couple of original 
proposals concerning aspects that might play a significant role in the study 
of grammaticalization processes but which so far have not received the 
attention they deserve. Among these aspects one should range the 
importance of extra-linguistic factors such as language planning and 
standardization as described in the contributions by Laitinen and Herlin / 
Kotilainen, or (albeit a little less original) the consideration of areal factors 
and effects of language contact and interference (cf. Heine & Kuteva 2005 
with further references on this subject). Another promising direction for 
further research might be the systematic analysis of suprasegmental 
features of elements supposed to have undergone or to be currently 
undergoing grammaticalization, as demonstrated in the contribution by 
Ansaldo / Lim for tonal languages but applicable - and probably highly 
significant - also in other, less phonization-dependent languages.

>>From a formal / technical point of view, one has to acknowledge both the 
editors' and the publisher's solid work and high level of accuracy. Although 
the volume is not free of misspellings or minor layout errors (let me just 
mention a few of them: on p. 79, paragraph beneath examples (6) and 
(7): "the possessor head 'king(-es)'" should most probably read "the 
possessor head 'devil(-es)'"; p. 85, paragraph preceding table 2: "in German 
and Dutch prenominal possessives have turned into determiners but are 
phrase markers" should be "but are _not_ phrase markers"; p. 330, 1st 
paragraph, reference to Comrie (1989): this title is missing in the 
bibliography; p. 348, paragraph preceding example (7): "the 
morpheme 'gwo33' can be found suffixed to a verb as a comparative 
marker" should read "suffixed to an adjective"; p. 368, example (13b.) "la 
casa di pietro" should be "la case di pietra"), the number of typos and 
shortcomings of this kind is remarkably low for a 400-page book. The 
inclusion of a language index (listing also the grammaticalized items and 
constructions discussed in the respective articles), a name index and a 
rather detailed subject index (including again the languages treated) make 
this book very reader-friendly.

REFERENCES

Bisang, Walter, Himmelmann, Nikolaus & Wiemer, Björn (eds.) 2004: What 
makes Grammaticalization? A Look from its Fringes and its Components. 
Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Campbell, Lyle (ed.) 2001: Grammaticalization. A Critical Assessment (= 
Language Sciences 23 [special issue]).

Heine, Bernd & Kuteva, Tania 2005: Language Contact and Grammatical 
Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hopper, Paul & Traugott, Elizabeth C. 1993: Grammaticalization. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lehmann, Christian 1995 [1982]: Thoughts on Grammaticalization. Munich: 
Lincom.

Traugott, Elizabeth C. 1995: "Subjectification in grammaticalization", in: 
Stein, Dieter & Wright, Susan (eds.): Subjectivity and Subjectivisation. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 31-54.

Traugott, Elizabeth C. & Dasher, Richard B. 2002: Regularity in Semantic 
Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wischer, Ilse & Diewald, Gabriele (eds.) 2002: New Reflections on 
Grammaticalization. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Claus D. Pusch is assistant professor of Romance linguistics at Albert-
Ludwigs University in Freiburg (Germany). His current research interests 
include corpus linguistics and spoken language, the evolution and 
distribution of Romance imperatives and prohibitives in a 
grammaticalization perspective, the development of phrasal discourse 
markers, and the interplay of orality and standardization in Romance 
minority and regional languages. He is the co-founder and convenor of the 
triennial "Freiburg Workshop on Romance Corpus Linguistics" (3rd edition 
in September 2006).





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