13.2166, Review: General Ling: Heine & Kuteva (2002)

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-13-2166. Sat Aug 24 2002. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 13.2166, Review: General Ling: Heine & Kuteva (2002)

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1)
Date:  Fri, 23 Aug 2002 18:55:38 +0400 (MSD)
From:  Timur Maisak <timik at isabase.philol.msu.ru>
Subject:  Heine & Kuteva (2002) World Lexicon of Grammaticalization

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Fri, 23 Aug 2002 18:55:38 +0400 (MSD)
From:  Timur Maisak <timik at isabase.philol.msu.ru>
Subject:  Heine & Kuteva (2002) World Lexicon of Grammaticalization

Heine, Bernd, and Tania Kuteva (2002) World Lexicon of Grammaticalization.
Cambridge University Press, 387pp, Hardback ISBN 052180339-X, $70.00

Announced in http://linguistlist.org/issues/12/12-1983.html

Timur A. Maisak, Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences

OVERVIEW & SYNOPSIS

"World Lexicon of Grammaticalization" (henceforth simply the Lexicon,
or WLG) summarizes the most salient generalizations that have been
made on the unidirectional change of grammatical forms and
constructions. It is a product of ten years of research carried out at
the University of Cologne and the Center for Advanced Study in the
Behavioral Sciences (Stanford, California), and its main purpose is to
make accessible to a wider readership a wealth of data on the origin
and development of grammatical forms that has been published over the
course of the last three decades.  This is a reference work in A-Z
format; in total the Lexicon covers about 400 processes relating to
the evolution of grammatical categories, using data from roughly 500
different languages.

The findings delineated in the book are relevant to students of
language across theoretical boundaries. They may be of help for
diachronic reconstruction, "especially in areas where other tools
available to the historical linguist, such as the comparative method
and internal reconstruction, do not yield appropriate results"
(p.1). Descriptive linguists will find in this book information "on
how and why different grammatical meanings can be related to one
another in a principled way, (...) on why there are some regular
correspondences between grammatical forms and the meanings expressed
by them, or on why certain linguistic forms have simultaneously
lexical and grammatical functions" (p.1).  Although potential
readership of the book includes first of all linguists, the authors
note that the Lexicon may be of some interest also to anthropologists,
sociologists, and psychologists, who "may discover that the kind of
human behavior held responsible for the evolution of grammatical forms
is not all that different from the kind of behavior they observe in
their own fields of study" (p.1).

In the INTRODUCTION (pp. 1-14) the authors provide a brief
characteristics of their work, its theoretical background (which is
modern grammaticalization theory) and problems they encountered while
compiling the Lexicon. Grammaticalization is conceived in WLG as
"above all a semantic process" (p.3), so in this book only meaning of
linguistic forms is concerned, and their morphosyntactic properties
are normally not discussed. It is also acknowledged that
grammaticalization is a unidirectional process (with rare exceptions),
so all the paths are listed in a strict "X > Y" format with definite
directionality. At the same time, some possible cases exhibiting
alternative directionality are also mentioned (for example from
Chinese and Russian), although not all of the alleged counterexamples
seem convincing to me (see point 5 of the Discussion below).

There was obviously a wide range of problems the authors had to take
care of, and they discuss the most serious difficulties in the second
part of the Introduction: for example, the findings are based on data
only from "hardly more than one-tenth of the world's languages" (p.5);
the continuous (chainlike) nature of grammaticalization processes has
to be presented in a discrete "source > target" format, which is
certainly a simplification; the quality of the data wholly depends on
the information contained in available published sources, and this
information may often be unsatisfactory; the very question of when one
can definitely say that grammaticalization has been concluded is far
from being an easy one, and so on. Of course, the presence of all
these problems does not make the whole endeavour impossible, and I can
say that the decisions the authors of WLG make in difficult cases seem
to be in general deliberate and convincing. All the controversial
points are commented upon in the Lexicon entries; some interpretations
which I do not find very felicitous will be treated in more detail
below.

The second introductory chapter (pp. 15-26) presents a classification
of GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS (functions) used in the book. The terms used
are mainly the same that are found in modern literature on grammatical
typology; some terminological variants are also provided. Additional
labels in parentheses refer to superordinate categories: cf. ABLATIVE
(spatial, case), BENEFACTIVE (case), HABITUAL (aspect), EPISTEMIC
(modality), etc. The presence of such concepts as ALREADY, ALSO, EVEN,
EXCLAMATION, NEXT, ONLY, ONE, TWO, OTHER, SAME, SOME, SUCCEED,
TOGETHER may seem surprising at a first glance, but the authors state
explicitly that they made no attempt to trace a strict bound between
'grammatical' and 'non-grammatical or 'lexical' concepts and the
reason for including such concepts as ONE or TOGETHER in the Lexicon
is simply because these items often "exhibit more grammatical
properties, or fewer lexical properties, than the concepts from which
they are historically derived" (p.15). The list of concept labels,
with approximate glosses and some descriptive notes, includes in total
about 170 items.

The main part of the book is the SOURCE-TARGET LEXICON (pp. 27-316),
where about 400 processes of grammatical change are discussed (below I
will also use the term "grammaticalization paths", although the
authors seem to avoid it for some reason). The Lexicon includes
numerous cases of changes from lexical source to grammatical concept
(e.g. BELLY > IN, CHILD > DIMINUTIVE, COME TO > FUTURE, EAT > PASSIVE,
GIVE > BENEFACTIVE, SAY > EVIDENTIAL, SIT > CONTINUOUS, THING >
COMPLEMENTIZER, YESTERDAY > PAST, and so on), as well as from one
grammatical concept to another (like ABLATIVE > AGENT, ALLATIVE >
DATIVE, COMITATIVE > INSTRUMENT, CONDITIONAL > CONCESSIVE, FUTURE >
EPISTEMIC MODALITY, LOCATIVE > A-POSSESSIVE ('of', attributive
possession), PERFECT > PAST, H-POSSESSIVE ('have', predicative
possession) > OBLIGATION, REFLEXIVE > PASSIVE, etc.). In each case,
suitable examples from a variety of languages are given, and
references to the relevant research literature are provided. Many
entries also contain a brief discussion of cognitive motivation
underlying the path of development, with reference to similar types of
paths.

The book is supplemented by three APPENDIXES:
 *      the "Source-Target List" summarizes the Lexicon, listing
        alphabetically all paths in a "Source > Target" format;
 *      the "Target-Source List" is organized in a similar manner, and is
        especially useful, as it allows to find all known historical sources
        for a given grammatical marker; for example, one can find out that
        grammatical marker for AGENT may arise from ABLATIVE, COMITATIVE,
        HAND (lexical source) or LOCATIVE, and the marker of CAUSATIVE may
        have one of lexical verbs DO, GIVE or TAKE as its source;
 *      the alphabetical "List of Languages" enumerates more than 500
        language names with information about their genetic affiliation.

An extensive list of References (on 36 pages) concludes the book.

DISCUSSION

In my opinion, WLG is certainly one of the most important books
concerning grammaticalization, although it mainly does not contain new
data about the world's languages but rather systematizes and
summarizes what is already known from other sources. The necessity of
such kind of work has always been felt, because such a great number of
facts about grammatical changes in individual languages is dispersed
and scattered in grammatical descriptions or is discussed on pages of
numerous articles and theoretical monographs.

Although there are quite a few monographs on grammaticalization theory
published in last 20 years (beginning with Lehmann (1982)), WLG seems
to be the first comprehensive reference work listing hundreds of
grammaticalization paths with examples from half a thousand
languages. In fact, it was Bernd Heine who promoted the compilation of
a lexicon of grammaticalization already at the beginning of the
"grammaticalization renaissance" in early 1980s. The first attempt to
enumerate grammaticalization paths (found in African languages) from
source to target and from target to source is present in the Appendix
to Heine & Reh (1984). Nine years later a "Lexicon of
grammaticalization processes in African languages" (Heine et
al. (1993)) appeared, which included also data from languages outside
Africa and which is a direct predecessor of WLG. However, WLG which is
published nine more years later includes data on a still wider range
of languages and provides useful comments about individual paths of
change, which were absent in the earlier version. (At the same time,
it seems that not all the data from Heine et al. (1993) was carried to
WLG, so these two books are to a much extent independent one from
another.)

As WLG was conceived just as a reference work, with the main purpose
to collect the information available from other sources, it does not
contain a general discussion of results -- like relative frequency of
different paths (or groups of paths), or preferences of these or those
types of changes in particular languages, etc. (although such
information can normally be found in the authors' notes to individual
entries). However, on the basis of data available from WLG, the reader
can make his or her own conclusions about such matters.

To give an idea about relative frequency of different sources and
targets I would like to present here some results of my counts based
on the summarizing lists of processes in the Appendixes. As it was
mentioned before (and as it is stated by the authors themselves on
p.1), total number of "unidirectional grammatical processes" described
in the book approximates 400. According to the Appendixes, these
processes involve 182 possible source items and 144 targets -- this
correlation alone seems to well confirm the observation that "usually
a language has several options to choose from in order to introduce a
new category, or to replace an existing one" (Heine & Reh 1984: 113).

The "Top 12" that follows shows which source items are the most
frequent, according to WLG. Below I list those items that can give
rise to more than 5 target concepts (the number of possible paths is
given in brackets):
 * LOCATIVE (11),
 * COMITATIVE (10),
 * GET (9), ONE (9),
 * DEMONSTRATIVE (8), SAY (8),
 * ABLATIVE (7), ALLATIVE (7), GO (7, with also 3 paths for GO TO), TAKE
   (7),
 * COPULA (6, with also 5 paths for COPULA, LOCATIVE), LEAVE (6).

The verb COME is also worth mentioning, as it may be a source for 4
concepts, and there are also 5 paths for COME TO and 2 paths for COME
FROM listed separately. So, if we speak about most widely used
primary, i.e.  lexical, sources, verbs -- or, more correctly, verbal
meanings -- COPULA (and LOCATIVE COPULA), GO (and GO TO), COME (also
COME TO, COME FROM), GET, SAY, TAKE and LEAVE have the highest ranks.

Another list which I made up comprises top 15 targets, i.e. grammatical
concepts which can arise from several -- at least more than 5 (this is a
number I chose arbitrarily) -- different sources:
 * CONTINUOUS (13),
 * FUTURE (12),
 * CAUSE (9), PASSIVE (9),
 * COMPARATIVE (8), COMPLEMENTIZER (8), HABITUAL (8), PURPOSE (8),
 * CLASSIFIER (7), OBLIGATION (7), A-POSSESSIVE (7), H-POSSESSIVE (7),
   TEMPORAL (7),
 * AFTER (6), DOWN (6), FRONT (6).

The total number of 400 grammaticalization paths looks considerable
enough, the impression being strengthened by the fact that among the
paths listed in WLG very rare or peculiar ones can be found (like
ALONE > ONLY, BEAT > PRO-VERB, BOWELS > IN (spatial), BRANCH >
CLASSIFIER, EAR > LOCATIVE, FIELD > OUT, FOOTPRINT > BEHIND, MAN >
EXCLAMATION, SEE > PASSIVE, etc.). However, that does not mean that
the list presented in WLG is by any means exhaustive. It is very hard,
of course, to conjecture what part of all the possible -- or at least
the most frequent -- paths is covered in the book (90 percent, or 50,
or 30?). But it is obvious that this number can, and should be,
increased. Paths of change which have occurred to me while reading WLG
and which, to my opinion, are worthy of being added to the Lexicon
(although they are not mentioned there now), include, for example:

 * LOOK AT [+ Verb] > CONATIVE ('try to'), at least in Turkic and
   Dravidian;
 * SAY [+ Num] > ORDINAL (ordinal number marker), at least in Northeast
   Caucasian;
 * RETURN [+ Verb] > REFLEXIVE (see Lichtenberk (1991) for discussion of
   this and other developments from RETURN, GO and COME in Oceanic
   languages);
 * GO [+ Verb, past participle] > PASSIVE, at least in Indo-Iranian and
   Italian;
 * COME [+ Verb, past participle] > PASSIVE, at least in Indo-Iranian,
   Italian and Maltese;
 * COME [+ Verb] > DESIDERATIVE ('want to'), at least in Turkic;
 * COME [+ Verb] > CAUSATIVE, at least in Icelandic and Swedish;
 * ENTER [+ Verb] > INGRESSIVE;
 * GO UP [+ Verb] > INGRESSIVE.

Much more grammaticalization paths for motion verbs can be listed;
many of them are described in Maisak (2002), a study based on data
from more than 200 languages. A brief discussion of possible changes
of EAT to grammatical marker -- on p.122 of WLG only "EAT > PASSIVE"
is mentioned -- can be found in Naess (2001).

Absence of mention of the development of negative particles from nouns
(like in case of French "pas" or "point" in "ne ... pas" construction)
is also somewhat unexpected.

The authors of the Lexicon are certainly aware of the fact that "what
is covered in the book might represent merely the tip of the iceberg
of what future generations of researches might discover"
(p.13). Already in the Introduction, they admit that the data
presented in WLG "constitute but a fraction of all instances of
presumed or actual grammaticalization that we were confronted with"
(p.12), and that they normally did not include paths of development
where only examples from one language family were available, or those
where the reconstruction of the processes was not reliable enough.

The present work of Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva cannot be
overestimated, because (as it was already stated above) it is a unique
and comprehensive lexicon of grammaticalization phenomena (with
numerous examples and comments) compiled so far. My most strong wish
is that this Lexicon should be developed further, as a great number of
grammatical changes is still to be revealed and described. I think the
best way to continue this project would be to make it open to
additions and corrections from specialists on particular
languages. (It becomes especially obvious when one sees that a
considerable number of examples appear in the book with reference to
"personal communication" of many people and to comments of "anonymous
reviewers" of Cambridge University Press.) I do not know whether the
authors plan to realize their Lexicon in a computer database format
and to make it accessible on the Web, but that seems to be the best
way for a wide circle of linguists interested in grammaticalization
phenomena to make their contributions to WLG in an interactive
manner. (An example of a similar project which occurs to me is the
Universals Archive at Konstanz University, see
http://ling.uni-konstanz.de:591/Universals/introduction.html)

I will conclude with a number of minor critical comments, which treat
some points that seem controversial to me or some interpretations of
data which I do not agree with. There are quite a few of such
comments, but they by no means detract from the merits of this book. I
also hope that the notes which follow might be of some use in a new
edition.

1.

The authors certainly adopt the view that processes of grammatical
change usually concern not just lexemes as such, but "more complex
conceptual entities, such as phrases, whole propositions or even
larger constructions" (p.6). Thus, English "be going to" as a future
marker does not have just GO as a source, but rather a construction
"GO (progressive aspect) + to + Verb (infinitive form of the verb with
purposive meaning)", and similar constructions in other languages also
tend to contain auxiliary in imperfective form (usually present tense)
and main verb with purposive or allative marking. Reference to
"construction" is in a few cases present in WLG already in the entry's
heading (like GO TO > ..., COME TO > ..., COME FROM > ...), or it may
be commented upon in the text.  Nevertheless, there are many cases
where this has not been done.

I agree that it is certainly easier for referential purposes to cite
lexeme (e.g. BE, GO, SAY, ONE, etc.) as a name for an entry. However,
I think that if a grammatical marker develops from this primary
source, at least the following kinds of information should be
indicated:
      (a) what class of words does it modify;
      (b) what other elements, if any, are involved in the construction;
      (c) what form does the modified (meaningful) word take -- if it is a
          part of a verbal periphrastic form, for example, then is it a
          participle (with some aspectual value: perfective, imperfective,
          etc.), or a converb
          (again with characterization of its meaning), or an infinitive, etc.;
      (d) are there restrictions on the grammatical form of the auxiliary
          word -- if we take verbal periphrastic forms as an example again,
          the development of periphrastic forms with future meaning always
          implies that the auxiliary (like GO, COME, WANT, etc.) is
          in the present tense.

Information of (a)-(b) type is always present in WLG, although (c) --
sometimes, and (d) -- almost always -- are absent. Of course, the
authors of the book should not be blamed for such cases, as it is
obvious that the available sources of information may lack the
necessary data or contain vague formulations or inaccuracies; but I
think that in general all four parameters (a)-(d) should be included
in the format of description (maybe even in the format of the entry's
heading).

2.

There are some grammaticalization paths which look similar, though
this similarity is not commented upon in the text, and sometimes the
criteria for differentiating the paths are not quite clear. Thus,
there are several paths leading to CONTINUOUS (like IN (spatial) >
CONTINUOUS (p.178), LOCATIVE > CONTINUOUS (p.202), COPULA, LOCATIVE >
CONTINUOUS (p.97) and EXIST > CONTINUOUS (p.127)), but the
corresponding sections do not contain cross-references. Because of
this, the similarity of all these paths is obscured, though in fact
all the sources listed above are rather realizations of the single
Location Schema (mentioned on p.203).

The paths ABLATIVE > NEAR PAST (p.33-34) and COME FROM > NEAR PAST
(p.72-73) are also very close, which is not pointed at in the text. It
is also not quite clear why, e.g., French construction "venir de" is
treated on p.33 as an example of ABLATIVE -- it rather involves a
lexical verb COME that serves as a "marker introducing a spatial
participant" (however, on p.73 it is mentioned again under COME FROM >
NEAR PAST heading).

I also wonder if there is really a separate path H-POSSESSIVE ('have')
> FUTURE (p.242-243, with famous Romance examples): it is commonly
assumed that there is an intermediate meaning of obligation (or, more
accurately, "predestination of the object to follow a certain course
of events", according to Benveniste (1968: 90)), so there are rather
always two successive developments H-POSSESSIVE > OBLIGATION
(p.243-245) and OBLIGATION > FUTURE (p.218).

Although RESULTATIVE ('having reached a new state') is mentioned in
the Index of grammatical concepts on p.25, some relevant paths leading
from this meaning are not included, like RESULTATIVE > PERFECT or
RESULTATIVE > INFERENTIAL (discussed in Bybee et al. (1994), among
others). The very source construction common to resultative grams --
"BE/COPULA or HAVE + past participle/converb" -- is also worthy
mentioning as a separate entry.  I think that in general all (or
almost all) developments having COPULA as a source (see pp. 94ff)
should be represented as constructions already in the heading.

3.

The relationship between an abstract meaning label for a source lexeme
and its real meaning in particular language in not always clear. For
example, there are cases where several translational equivalents are
given for a language-specific lexeme, but one of the meaning seems to
be chosen as the "basic" one. Thus, Turkish "dur-" 'stand; wait;
remain; endure' is described as a case of REMAIN development (>
DURATIVE, p.255), and not as a case of STAND (> CONTINUOUS, p.280),
like the Tatar "tor-", for example.  The verb "kala" 'to be; exist;
remain' from Kongo is treated as an example of EXIST (p.127), and not,
say, COPULA or REMAIN.

I suggest that all meanings of polysemous source items should be added
to the Lexicon as separate entries, with a reference to some section
where this (language-specific) lexeme is discussed with its "basic"
meaning (like 'remain' above for Turkish "dur-").

By the way, I was also surprised to find Spanish construction with
"estar" as durative auxiliary under the entry "STAND > CONTINUOUS"
(p.281): I think it is rather a case of development of verb meaning
'to be' from a posture verb (STAND > COPULA) with later evolution of
"BE + Verb (imperfective converb)" to continuous aspect marker. The
very reason for avoiding the verb BE as a source (in WLG only COPULA
and EXIST are found among source labels) is not explained.

4.

I was a bit confused with so many paths of development leading to
PROXIMATIVE ('be about to'), INTENTION ('intend to'), FUTURE and NEAR
FUTURE -- I cannot get rid of the feeling that some of these targets
(if not all) may be in fact varieties of one and the same target
concept. I also wonder why the authors consistently avoid using the
term "prospective", and do not even mention it. This term, introduced
by Bernard Comrie (1976: 64-65) as referring to "a present state
relative to some future event" (and already containing "seeds of some
future situation"), seems to be close, if not identical, to
"proximative", described in Heine (1994: 36) as describing "a temporal
phase located close to the initial boundary of the situation described
by the main verb". Term 'prospective' is used by Suzanne Fleischman,
Simon Dik, Oesten Dahl, Michele Emanatian, among others. Bybee et
al. (1994) do not mention it either, and the corresponding label they
use is 'immediate future'.  Anyway, 'prospective' / 'proximative' /
'near future' / 'immediate future', as well as just 'future' (and to
some extent also 'intention') are rather different shades of one thing
-  or, to put it in grammaticalization terms, may be viewed as
successive steps on one grammaticalization path, which may look as
INTENTION ['the participant intends to do P after the reference
point'] > PROSPECTIVE/PROXIMATIVE ['the state of affairs holding at
reference point is such that in normal circumstances it will lead to
the situation P' -- like in "It's gonna rain"] > (PREDICTIVE) FUTURE
['the speaker predicts that P will happen'].  Even if this line of
development is not true of all cases, it certainly deserves to be
commented upon in WLG. (Note also that the development from referring
to the situation (P) connected in some way to the moment of speech
(having "present relevance") to referring to the situation without
such a connection is parallel to the evolution RESULTATIVE > PERFECT >
PAST in the "retrospective" domain.)

AVERTIVE does not seem to be far from this "family" of meanings, as it
is often indistinguishable from 'past prospective/proximative'. Both
Comrie and Heine agree that prospective resp. proximative is an
aspectual meaning, and if its combination with present tense develops
into future, its combination with past is normally interpreted as 'was
on the verge of doing' or 'almost did'.

5.

The translation of a Russian example on p.94 (from Kuteva (1998)) is
not correct: "mashina bylo poexala" does not mean that the car 'nearly
started' or 'was just about to start' (which can be expressed as
"mashina chut' bylo ne poexala"); it means that the car did start, but
-  most likely -- almost immediately stopped. That is, we deal here
not with the AVERTIVE meaning in Kuteva's sense ('almost; nearly'),
but rather with something like "cancelled result" or "interrupted
attempt", other meanings from the "antiresultative" family as defined
by Plungian (2001) -- 'the result of the action was reached, but it
was later cancelled'. By the way, the position of particle "bylo"
before the verb seems rather unusual -- although it is quite possible,
its postposition (like in "poexala bylo") is much more neutral and
frequent.

6.

I can't agree with anonymous reader of the book, who notes that there
is a reversed direction of the path "HEART (body part) > IN (spatial)"
in case of Russian word "serdtse" ('heart') which is derived from a
root "sered-" ('middle', like in "sered-ina" 'middle part'; see p.171,
footnote). First of all, Russian root "serd-" goes back to the
Indo-European level (and corresponds to Latin "cor, cord-", Welsh
"cairdd" or English "heart"), so the development, if any, must have
taken place in PIE, and not in Russian (see other examples of this
root at, e.g.,
http://indoeuro.bizland.com/project/phonetics/word55.html ). More than
that, even if 'heart' and 'middle' have the same root diachronically,
what we have here may be a standard derivation of one lexical item
from another lexical item (i.e. from a noun or an adverb meaning
'middle' or 'in the middle'), and not a development of a grammatical
"marker introducing locative participant" (and that is meant by "IN"
label according to p.21) into a noun meaning 'heart'. So, there may be
no reversal of grammaticalization process (IN > HEART), but only
reversed semantic development ('middle' > 'heart' and 'heart' >
'middle'). Of course, semantic derivation as such can occur without
grammaticalization, cf.  manifestation of 'heart' > 'middle' in such
examples as "in the heart of England" or "heart of oak". In Russian,
by the way, there is also a word "serdtsevina" 'core, middle part',
which is a derivative from "serdtse" ('heart').

Amusingly, there is another commentary concerning Russian example,
where other directionality is suspected, which also seems strange to
me. On p.223 it is suggested that the derivation of an adjective
"odinakovyj" ('same') from numeral "odin" ('one') involves
"alternative directionality" to the proposed path ONE (numeral) >
SAME. I may be missing something, but I think the Russian example
provides pure confirmation to this type of change rather that runs
contra it.

7.

A terminological note: the label "venitive" ('motion hither, 'motion
toward'), probably adopted from Bybee et al. (1994), doesn't seem to
be correct from the derivational point of view. As far as I
understand, terms in "-ive" are derived from Latin supinum/passive
participle stems plus suffix "-ive", and not from praesens/infinitive
stems plus "-tive": in such cases like "imperative" (Part. imperat-us,
Inf. impera-re) it is not so obvious, but cf. permiss-ive < permiss-us
(Inf. permitte-re), concess-ive < concess-us (Inf. concede-re),
prohibit-ive < prohibit-us (Inf. prohibe-re), ingress-ive < ingress-us
(Inf. ingredi) and other cases. "Venitive", conversely, seems to be
derived from the infinitive stem "veni-re" ('come') plus "-tive",
though the correct variant should be, I guess, "ventive" from supinum
stem "vent-um". (I thank Vladimir Plungian for this observation.)

8.

On p.78 affix "-kiR-" in Tamil example should be labelled "PRES"
instead of "PAST", which is also obvious from the translation. (I
thank Anna Smirnitskaya for this observation.)

9.

Although the information on language classification given in Appendix
3 is certainly simplified and serves a referential purpose only, it
should be better to mention the source of this information (which is
probably Ruhlen (1987) mentioned in the list of references; Grimes
(2000) and Dalby (2000) are more up-to-date, however). Some notes on
subgrouping are not quite consistent (or correct), and I list here
those variants that seem to be more felicitous:
      Ainu = Isolate (not Altaic);
      Ket = Yenisei Ostyak (not isolate);
      Tamil = South, Dravidian (like Kannada);
      Telugu = Telugu-Kui, Dravidian (like Kui);
      Avar (the same with Lezgian) = Northeast, North, Caucasian (cf.
      Abaza, Abkhaz, Ubykh, which are labelled "Northwest, North, Caucasian",
      not just "North, Caucasian");
      Surselvan = Romance, Indo-European (or, if necessary,
      Rhaeto-Romance, Romance, Indo-European).

10.

Finally, I think it is desirable to have a language index with page
numbers in the book (and maybe also a subject index with page
numbers), as readers may be often interested in looking at all the
examples of grammaticalization processes listed for their "favourite"
language (or at all mentions of a certain term).

REFERENCES

Benveniste, Emile (1968) Mutations of linguistic categories //
Lehmann, W.  P., and Yakov Malkiel, eds. Directions for historical
linguistics. Austin & London: University of Texas Press.

Bybee, Joan L., Revere Perkins, and William Pagliuca (1994) The
evolution of grammar: Tense, aspect and modality in the languages of
the world.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Comrie, Bernard (1976) Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dalby, David (2000) The Linguasphere Register of the World's Languages
and Speech Communities. 2 vols. Hebron: Linguasphere Press.

Grimes, Barbara, ed. (2000) Ethnologue: Languages of the World. 14th
edition. S.I.L. [See also http://www.sil.org , http://www.ethnologue.com]

Heine, Bernd (1994) On the genesis of aspect in African languages: The
Proximative // Proceedings of the 20th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley
Linguistics Society: Special Session on historical issues in African
linguistics. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistic Society.

Heine, Bernd, Tom Gueldemann, Christa Kilian-Hatz, Donald A. Lessau,
Heinz Roberg, Mathias Schladt, and Thomas Stolz (1993) Conceptual
Shift: A Lexicon of Grammaticalization Processes in African Languages.
(=Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere 34-35.) Koeln: Institut fur
Afrikanistik.

Heine, Bernd, and Mechtild Reh (1984) Grammaticalization and
reanalysis in African languages. Hamburg: Helmut Buske.

Kuteva, Tania (1998) On identifying an evasive gram: Action narrowly
averted // Studies in Language 22-1: 113-160.

Lehmann, Christian (1982) Thoughts on Grammaticalization: A
Programmatic Sketch. (Arbeiten des Koelner Universalien-Projekts
48). Cologne: Universitaet zu Koeln, Institut fur Sprachwissenschaft.

Lichtenberk, Frantisek (1991) Semantic change and heterosemy in
grammaticalization // Language 67-3: 475-509.

Maisak, Timur A. (2002) Tipologija grammatikalizacii konstrukcij s
glagolami dvizhenija i glagolami pozicii. {= Grammaticalization paths
of motion and posture verbs.} Ph.D Dissertation, Moscow State
University.  [See dissertation abstract in the LINGUIST database.]

Naess, Ashild (2001) "Eat" as auxiliary // LINGUIST List 12.1631, Wed
Jun 20 2001 [See http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/12/12-1631.html].

Plungian, Vladimir (2001) Antirezul'tativ: do i posle rezul'tata {=
Anti-resultative: before and after result} // Plungian, Vladimir, ed.
Issledovanija po teorii grammatiki. 1. Glagol'nye kategorii. Moskva.

Ruhlen, Merritt (1987) A guide to the world's languages, Vol. 1:
Classification. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Timur A. Maisak is a researcher at the Caucasian Languages Dept. of
the Institute of Linguistics (Russian Academy of Sciences),
Moscow. His main research interests are typology of TMA categories,
grammaticalization theory (in particular lexical sources and their
possible grammaticalization paths), tense and aspect systems of
Nakh-Daghestanian languages, as well as lexical typology of motion
verbs. His main publications include chapters describing verbal
categories in some minor languages of Daghestan (in part. Bagwalal,
Tsakhur, Agul) and papers concerning grammaticalization of verbs
denoting motion and posture in the languages of the world. The
dissertation "Grammaticalization paths of constructions with motion
and posture verbs" was defended at Moscow State University in May,
2002.


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