[Lingtyp] grammaticalized v grammaticized

Sun Jun 9 14:27:13 UTC 2019

In the Preface to the first edition of our book Grammaticalization (Cambridge UP 1993) we discussed our choice of the longer form as follows:

"A word about the choice of the term “grammaticalization”. As we note in more detail in Chapter 2, the word seems to have been first used by Meillet (1912). In recent linguistics there is some variation between this word and the newer form “grammaticization”. In adhering to the older form of the word, we do not intend any theoretical point other than to maintain a continuity of terminology. We believe that a terminology can and should survive quite radical changes in the ways the terms that comprise it are understood by successive generations of scholars. Some linguists have told us that they avoid the longer term because “grammaticalization” could be understood as “entering the grammar of a language,” i.e., becoming “grammatical”. “Grammaticization”, by contrast, suggests a process whereby a form may become fixed and constrained without committing the linguist to a view of “grammar” as a fixed, bounded entity. A similar point is sometimes made in a different way: it is said that “grammaticalization” stresses the historical perspective on grammatical forms, while “grammaticization” focuses on the implications of continually changing categories and meanings for a synchronic view of language, thus placing the entire notion of synchrony into question. It is far from obvious that any such distinctions in usage exist between the two words, and our own choice does not reflect any particular theoretical position. We note that the titles of several recent major works contain the longer form “grammaticalization” (e.g., C. Lehmann 1985; Heine and Reh 1984; Traugott and Heine 1991; Heine, Claudi and Hünnemeyer 1991)."

      I think by the time of the second edition (2003) we had concluded that the debate was no longer current, the form with -al having clearly prevailed. Surely we can agree that the two terms will exist amicably side by side, according to preference and with no valid claim of theoretical superiority on either side.

- Paul

__________
Paul J. Hopper
Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Humanities
Department of English
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh PA 15213, USA
________________________________
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Nigel Vincent <nigel.vincent at manchester.ac.uk>
Sent: Sunday, June 9, 2019 8:58:07 AM
To: Bernhard Wälchli; John Du Bois; Bill Palmer
Cc: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] grammaticalized v grammaticized

I think usage here is probably often based on individual choice. I have always avoided the term 'grammaticization' and have preferred 'grammaticalization' in the diachronic sense and I would avoid both in the synchronic sense. By contrast, Joan Bybee  generally uses 'grammaticization' in the diachronic sense (except in her chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization!), and even refers to it as the 'more elegant' term in her book with Perkins and Pagliuca 'The Evolution of Grammar' - see p.4, footnote 2, an aesthetic judgement with which I would personally disagree!
And with apologies for self-promotion, I briefly discuss the interesting and important issue that Bernhard raises about semantic change affecting technical metalanguage in §6 of my article 'Conative' in 'Linguistic Typology 17 (2013) 269-289.
Best
Nigel

Professor Nigel Vincent, FBA MAE
Professor Emeritus of General & Romance Linguistics
The University of Manchester

Linguistics & English Language
School of Arts, Languages and Cultures
The University of Manchester

https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/researchers/nigel-vincent(f973a991-8ece-453e-abc5-3ca198c869dc).html
________________________________
From: Lingtyp [lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] on behalf of Bernhard Wälchli [bernhard at ling.su.se]
Sent: Sunday, June 09, 2019 12:55 PM
To: John Du Bois; Bill Palmer
Cc: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] grammaticalized v grammaticized

As suggested by Dan, this discussion seems to be a very nice case of Michel Bréal’s Loi de répartition (based on earlier work by Gilliéron): synonyms do not last for a long time, either they acquire different meanings or one of the terms disappears. Similar points have been made in psycholinguistics and first language acquisition, among other things by Eve Clark.

Can we conclude from this that metalanguage for describing language change is subject to language change in the very same way as everything else in language?

Bréal, Michel. 1897. Essai de sémantique. Science des significations. Paris: Hachette.
Clark, Eve V. 1988. On the logic of contrast. Journal of Child Language 15.317–335.
Gilliéron, Jules. 1880. Patois de la commune de Vionnaz (Bas-Valais). Paris: F. Vieweg. (= Bibliothèque de l’école des hautes études. Sciences philologique et historiques; Fasc. 40).

Best,
Bernhard Wälchli

________________________________
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of John Du Bois <dubois at ucsb.edu>
Sent: Sunday, June 9, 2019 1:15:37 PM
To: Bill Palmer
Cc: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] grammaticalized v grammaticized

This distinction accords well with how many people use the two terms, I think.

The study of grammaticization focuses on  functionally motivated patterns that arise in synchronic language use (discourse profiles), defining the environment to which grammars adapt via emergence.

Grammaticalization focuses on the historical processes that create new grammar, driven by the discourse profiles plus additional principles intrinsic to cultural evolution and historical change.

The two are closely intertwined, of course. A key task for functional linguistics is to clarify how they interact to provide an explanation for why grammars are as they are.

Best,
John

==============================
John W. Du Bois
Professor of Linguistics
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, California 93106
USA
dubois at ucsb.edu<mailto:dubois at ucsb.edu>

On Sat, Jun 8, 2019, 9:11 PM Bill Palmer <bill.palmer at newcastle.edu.au<mailto:bill.palmer at newcastle.edu.au>> wrote:
Dear all

Juergen's email prompts me to ask a question I'd be interested to get people's thoughts on.

What is the relationship between the terms grammaticalized and grammaticized? I use them to refer to different things, but I don’t know to what extent my usage corresponds to others' understandings.

I use grammaticized to refer to a synchronic situation, and grammaticalized to refer to a diachronic process. For example, I would say that the category of auditory evidentiality ("I heard [X happen]") is grammaticized in language X, meaning that the category is expressed in the language by a grammatical form; and I would say that the verb 'hear' has grammaticalized as an evidential marker in language X, meaning that a form with a lexical meaning has developed into a grammatical marker of some kind.

Does this accord with anyone else's understanding of these terms? Apologies if there's some obvious literature on this I have missed.

Best
Bill Palmer

-----Original Message-----
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>> On Behalf Of Bohnemeyer, Juergen
Sent: Saturday, 8 June 2019 12:26 AM
To: David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de<mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>>
Cc: Stephanie Evers <saevers at buffalo.edu<mailto:saevers at buffalo.edu>>; lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Glossed corpora of languages w/o grammaticalized definiteness marking

Dear David — Good point! We use ‘definiteness’ to denote a variety of similar language-specific semantic categories that characterize the discourse status of a nominal in terms of its referent being discourse-old, previously mentioned (etc.), and/or otherwise uniquely identifiable to the interlocutors. Since unique identifiability may be conferred by the speech situation, we require that candidate devices not be restricted to exophoric (spatial) reference in their regular uses.

What we mean by ‘grammaticalized’ is that the language has a particle, function word, or inflection that is routinely used by the speakers of the language to express the semantic category in question. For illustration, I would assume (perhaps wrongly so) that it is possible in any language to use demonstratives to indicate ‘definiteness’, including in Russian - but Russian speakers, so far as I know (and so far as Stephanie Evers, the student working on this project, was able to show in her Qualifying Paper), do not regularly use demonstratives for this purpose, at least not unless they wish to place contrastive narrow focus on the nominal in question.

Why the restriction to particles, function words, and inflections? Well, it is hard for me to see how expressions that are for all intents and purposes regular content words could be used to indicate the ‘definiteness’ of another expression. But, the ultimate goal of the project is to test hypotheses about the conditions under which dedicated definiteness marking emerges vs. does not emerge in a language (family) or area. So if such borderline cases exist, I suppose they would in fact be of great interest to the project, even if they do not meet the criteria laid out above.

Best — Juergen

> On Jun 7, 2019, at 1:32 AM, David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de<mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>> wrote:
>
> Dear Juergen,
>
> Ian Joo mentioned our Indonesian corpus; a better way of accessing a more complete version is described at https://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-2007.html.
>
> However, I am puzzled by your criteria, specifically by the notion of "grammaticalized definiteness (marking)", and a bit surprised nobody so far in this thread has picked up on it.
>
> Both terms are problematic, as can be exemplified via Indonesian.  "Definiteness": well, Indonesian has a couple of nominal markers, =nya and itu, that are sometimes described as marking definiteness, though I believe that they are more appropriately analyzed otherwise, namely as marking possession/association and deixis respectively.  So does Indonesian fail to meet criterion 1, or does it in fact offer a nice example of "alternative strategies" for marking definiteness?  Depends on your analysis.
>
> Then there's the notion of "grammaticalized":  what does it mean to say that  =nya and itu are grammaticalized?  The former marker, =nya, exhibits some properties that suggest that it might be a clitic, but otherwise, these markers would seem to exhibit grammatical behaviour similar to most other content words in the language.  So are they "grammaticalized"?  Well it depends on what you mean by "grammaticalized".
>
> I use Indonesian here merely as an illustration; similar issues arise in very many other languages.
>
> Best,
>
> David
>
>
> On 06/06/2019 22:02, Bohnemeyer, Juergen wrote:
>> Dear colleagues — An advisee of mine is looking for glossed texts to investigate the use of strategies alternative to grammaticalized definiteness marking. Basically, she’s trying to identify about half a dozen genealogically and areally unrelated languages each of which meets all of the following criteria:
>>
>> 1. The language lacks grammaticalized definiteness marking.
>>
>> 2. A text or corpus of texts is available for the language that has Leipzig-standard interlinear glosses and translations in English or Spanish.
>>
>> 3. The text (corpus) comprises at least about 1000 clauses, but ideally twice that or more.
>>
>> 4. The individual texts should be long-ish and their referring expressions shouldn’t be predominately proper names.
>>
>> If you’re aware of a language so resourced, please let me know!
>>
>> Many thanks! — Juergen
>>
>>
>> Juergen Bohnemeyer, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
>> Department of Linguistics and Center for Cognitive Science University
>> at Buffalo
>>
>> Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus * Mailing address: 609 Baldy
>> Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
>> Phone: (716) 645 0127
>> Fax: (716) 645 3825 * Email:
>> jb77 at buffalo.edu<mailto:jb77 at buffalo.edu> * Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/
>>
>>
>> Office hours M 12:30 – 1:30pm / W 1:00 – 1:50 / F 12:30 – 1:50pm
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>>
>> There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets In (Leonard
>> Cohen)
>>
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> --
> David Gil
>
> Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution Max Planck Institute
> for the Science of Human History Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena,
> Germany
>
> Email:
> gil at shh.mpg.de<mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>
>
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> +62-81281162816
>
>
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Juergen Bohnemeyer, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies Department of Linguistics and Center for Cognitive Science University at Buffalo

Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus * Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
Phone: (716) 645 0127
Fax: (716) 645 3825 * Email: jb77 at buffalo.edu<mailto:jb77 at buffalo.edu> * Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/

Office hours M 12:30 – 1:30pm / W 1:00 – 1:50 / F 12:30 – 1:50pm

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