31.67, Review: Historical Linguistics; Morphology; Syntax; Typology: Narrog, Heine (2018)

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Subject: 31.67, Review: Historical Linguistics; Morphology; Syntax; Typology: Narrog, Heine (2018)

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Date: Mon, 06 Jan 2020 17:22:41
From: Pierre-Yves Modicom [pymodicom.ling at yahoo.fr]
Subject: Grammaticalization from a Typological Perspective

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-65.html

EDITOR: Heiko  Narrog
EDITOR: Bernd  Heine
TITLE: Grammaticalization from a Typological Perspective
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Pierre-Yves Modicom, Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux 3

SUMMARY

The first chapter is actually the introduction (“Introduction: typology and
grammaticalization”, by Heiko Narrog and Bernd Heine, p. 1-15). The editors
present the main question addressed by the volume: is there a definition of
grammaticalization that could hold for all languages, independently of their
language type? 

Chapter 2 (“Grammaticalization in Africa: two contrasting hypotheses”, by
Bernd Heine) follows two aims: on the one hand, it is a presentation of
recurring grammaticalization paths in African languages; on the other hand, it
is a plea for Heine’s “meaning-first hypothesis” about grammaticalization.
Heine distinguishes between four stages of grammaticalization, and discusses
several grammaticalization phenomena in African languages where items can
reach stage 2 or 3 without any formal change: the rise of approximatives
(aspectual markers meaning ‘nearly doing something’) out of verbs of volition;
the grammaticalization of body-part nouns into reflexive markers; the rise of
comparative markers from action verbs such as ‘to pass’, and the
grammaticalization of an andative verb (‘go’) into a future marker. 

Chapter 3 (by Mohssen Esseesy) is devoted to “typological features of
grammaticalization in Semitic”. The author focuses on a few recurring
grammaticalization phenomena. Esseesy shows that formal change does not
parallel semantic change, using the example of body-part nouns that are
grammaticalized into adpositions. He also depicts the grammaticalization of
nouns meaning ‘property’ into analytic markers of possession. The third and
last case study is the grammaticalization of independent pronouns into markers
of verbal agreement, a better-known phenomenon involving strong formal
reduction. 

In Chapter 4, Geoffrey Haig examines “Grammaticalization and
inflectionnalization in Iranian”. The first main part of the chapter is
devoted to the fate of oblique personal clitics after the reorganization of
the TAM system in Iranian languages: after the loss of older past tenses, new
tenses emerged out of resultative participles taking these oblique clitics as
subject markers. Non-past tenses retained accusative argument marking, and
oblique pronouns basically remained pronominal object clitics. In past tenses,
those former oblique clitics are now the obligatory grammatical markers for
transitive subjects. The second part of the chapter presents the
grammaticalization of a nominal postposition of cause into an object suffix,
and the emergence of auxiliaries and aspectual markers. 

In Chapter 5 (“Grammaticalization in Europe”), Östen Dahl addresses a central
question of the volume: are the grammaticalization processes exhibited by
Standard Average European (SAE) languages, which were instrumental for the
first definitions of grammaticalization, actually different from what can be
found in other regions? Dahl presents the characteristic features of
grammaticalization in SAE languages. He then turns to ‘have’-perfects and
draws a comparison between stative, possessive and “iamitive” source
constructions for perfects in the languages of the world. This comparison
makes the case for the notion of ‘persistence’ coined by Hopper. Finally, the
author discusses claims by Ansaldo et al. (see below CIfhapter 11) about
particulization and inflectionalization.

Chapter 6 (“Revisiting the anasynthetic spiral”, by Martin Haspelmath) is a
discussion of a classical double hypothesis in diachronic typology: (i) that
there is a path in language evolution leading from an isolating stage to a
flective or fusional stage via an agglutinative stage, and that this path
involves grammaticalization; (ii) that synthetic patterns are progressively
replaced by analytic patterns (so that flective languages should finally
become isolating). Haspelmath proposes a concept of analyticization that is
located at the level of individual constructions. He sketches a four-stage
model for the “anasynthetic spiral”. He also makes the case against the
hypothesis that flectional features arise from reduction and fusion of
agglutinated elements. In a further step, the author presents and discusses
some plausible cases of “holistic anasynthesis”, i.e. consistent anasynthetic
evolutions at a large level. The final part is devoted to possible
explanations for the rise of analytic marking. 

Chapter 7 is an overview of “Grammaticalization in North Caucasian languages”
by Peter Arkadiev and Timur Maisak. The first part is devoted to its Western
branch (Circassian languages). Peter Arkadiev presents and discusses several
salient phenomena in this family, such as the grammaticalization of body-part
nouns into applicative prefixes. Some verbs of motion also grammaticalized
into directional affixes. The descriptive part is closed by a fine-grained
analysis of auxiliaries in Circassian languages. One important claim of the
author is that the grammaticalization of verbs in Circassian does not involve
only a simple lexical item but a more complex morphosyntactic construction.
The second half of the paper (by Timur Maisak) is devoted to Lezgic languages.
Here also, auxiliation is used as a major example. But the author is also
concerned with the polygrammaticalization of ‘say’ verbs, not only into
markers of reported speech or in hearsay evidentials, but also into dependency
markers expressing relations of causality or finality or even into
derivational markers for ordinal numbers. The last section is centered on
verificatives (verbal suffixes expressing the idea of ‘checking, finding
out’). The author takes this example to cast doubt on whether grammaticalized
suffixes of that kind arise from clause union (“a variety of clause reduction
where the main predicate and the complement predicates share one set of
grammatical relations”, Noonan 2007:83).

The following two chapters are both devoted to the “Transeurasian” group of
languages, with Lars Johanson and Éva Csató presenting data on
“Grammaticalization in Turkic” (ch.8) and Heiko Narrog, Seongha Rhee and John
Whitman discussing “Grammaticalization in Japanese and Korean” (ch.9).
Johanson and Csató mostly deal with the grammaticalization of converbs,
defined as “non-finite verb forms typically functioning as predicates in
non-main clauses having a modifying or non-modifying function in the matrix
clause” (p.150). They show that converbs have grammaticalized into
postpositions. They also gave birth to “postverbal constructions” by which the
converb is combined with a grammaticalized finite verbs functioning as an
auxiliary. This construction can mark phase specification, spatial
orientations, beneficiency and modality. Converb constructions also play an
eminent role in the paper on Japanese and Korean. Another important
construction there involves the grammaticalization of nouns, optionally
followed by a copula, as post-verbal markers expressing modal, spatial or
causal meanings. Japanese and Korean have both developed deverbal
postpositions as well as grammaticalized classifiers. Those two phenomena
might be an original case of grammaticalization triggered or at least favored
by written usage, crucially involving ritual translation from Chinese texts.
Finally, honorifics and intersubjective sentence-final particles are taken as
an argument for Dasher & Traugott’s (2001) claims on the link between
intersubjectification and grammaticalization. 

Contact-induced grammaticalization is at the heart of Alexander R. Coupe’s
chapter on “grammaticalization in South Asia” (ch.10). The author presents a
survey of recurring grammaticalization patterns in the area. Those patterns
are: the grammaticalization of body-part nouns into postpositions, and
eventually into markers for thematic roles; the rise of converb suffixes out
of prepositions; verbs meaning ‘send, give’ that gave rise to morphological
causatives; verbs meaning ‘eat’ that became passive or middle markers; ‘see’
or ‘look’ as sources for the grammatical expression of conativity; the
emergence of the relative-correlative construction in Tibeto-Burman. Each
time, the question of contact-induced grammaticalization is raised. While this
hypothesis is convincingly ruled out in some cases (e.g. ‘eat’ as a
passive/middle marker), the author shows that language contact is an
indisputable factor for the adoption of the relative-correlative construction
in South Asian Tibeto-Burman languages, or for the adoption of the
‘send’-causative in Khasi, an Austro-Asiatic island in Northeast India.

Compared with most other contributions to the volume, which are devoted to
families or areas, Chapter 11 (“Grammaticalization in isolating languages”, by
Umberto Ansaldo, Walter Bisang and Pui Yiu Szeto) takes a different
perspective: although it is concerned with Eastern and Mainland South East
Asian (EMSEA) languages, it is much rather a general reflection of the
applicability of the notion of grammaticalization to isolating languages, and
thus to the language- or type-specific dimension of grammaticalization. Four
typological features of EMSEA languages play a key role in the paper: tone,
syntactic structure and the role of particles, polyfunctionality, and the
frequent optionality of grammatical marking. Using Lehmann’s (1982) parameters
to measure the weight of items, the authors show that most grammaticalized
items in EMSEA languages do not undergo any significant change of weight. This
leads them to a further discussion of Dahl’s (2004) notion of “maturation”.

The following chapter (ch.12, by Marian Klamer) is concerned with “typology
and grammaticalization in the Papuan languages of Timor, Alor, and Pantar”
(235-262). The first part of the study is devoted to the grammaticalization of
verbs the Timor-Alor-Pantar (TAP) family, with three case studies. The first
is *mi ‘bei in, at’, which gave birth to a pervasive applicative prefix
throughout the family. The second is *ma ‘come’, which has evolved into a
postposition for oblique objects in three languages. It can also express
future and/or hortativity in three languages. Finally, *med ‘take’ has
grammaticalized into a light verb or a postposition, and in one language it
became part of a univerbated ‘give’ form. The author contrasts these patterns
of grammaticalization with what happened in neighboring Austronesian
languages: grammaticalization in TAP is heavily determined by the original
typological features of the family. The second part is devoted to sortal
classifiers. No such classifiers can be reconstructed for the protolanguage,
and the classifier inventory in TAP is quite diverse, suggesting that this
pattern is an innovation. The rise of classifiers in TAP has been determined
by two sorts of factors: first, there are some relevant language-internal
features such as the fact that these nouns are number-neutral and that mere
reanalysis was sufficient to trigger an interpretation as classifiers; second,
neighboring Austronesian languages massively use sortal classifiers.

The next chapter, by Ilana Mushin, is devoted to “grammaticalization and
typology in Australian Aboriginal languages” (ch. 13, p.263-281). The first
part explains that given the lack of diachronic evidence and the fact that
Australian Aboriginal languages have a long history of extensive language
contact, the historical work that is necessary to identify language-specific
grammaticalization phenomena appears to be quite difficult. The second part is
mostly devoted to second-position clitics in North Central Australian
languages. Pronominal clitics appear to have free cognates. However, it seems
that the free form has not preceded the bound form in all of these languages.
Using the case of the Jingulu language, the author subsequently shows that TAM
markers in second position clitics may have been originally associated with
the main verb, and that the current systems are clitic clusters determined by
information-packaging, and originate from inflected verbs. Finally, the author
discusses the role that pragmatic factors may have played in this
grammaticalization process.

The last chapter devoted to the Pacific region is “Grammaticalization in
Oceanic languages”, by Claire Moyse-Faurie (ch. 14, p. 282-308). This chapter
is a survey of grammaticalization phenomena attested in various Oceanic
languages. The first part deals with the grammaticalization of nouns as
markers of aspect, benefactive, comparison, reflexivity or negation, as
applicatives or reciprocals, as markers of discourse relations. Postural
verbs, verbs of (deictic) movement,  verbs meaning ‘give’, ‘take’, ‘return’,
‘follow’, ‘say’ or ‘(not) exist’ appear to be an important source for
grammaticalization phenomena. As for nouns, the author mentions Tahitian mea
‘thing’ used to mark stative aspect. Other topics dealt with in the paper are
possessive markers evolving into benefactive markers and the
grammaticalization of former verbs into “verbal classifiers” whose combination
produces compound verbs (p.303-304). The final part is devoted to
degrammaticalization.

The same questions of reconstruction and language-contact that were central to
Mushin’s paper on Australian Aboriginal languages are also at the heart of
Chapter 15, ‘Shaping typology through grammaticalization: North America’, by
Marianne Mithun (309-336). The author distinguishes three great sort of
factors that can shape grammaticalization paths : (i) social, communicative
and pragmatic factors; (ii) the relative order of the various aspects of
grammaticalization; (iii) language-contact and “the point on a
grammaticalization pathway at which contact enters in”. Factor (ii) determines
the plan of the chapter. The first part is devoted to grammaticalization via
auxiliation, i.e. grammaticalization processes where univerbation occurs at a
late stage. Examples are provided from the Wintuan and Pomoan families as well
as from Yuki and Wappo, all languages from Northern California. For the
author, the pervasiveness of changes in the area must be due to language
contact and the extensive copying of constructions, motivated by the need to
‘constantly […] renew the pragmatic force of negation’ (p.320). The second
part of the paper is concerned with cases where univerbation occurs first,
such as noun-verb and verb-verb compounds. Body-part nouns appear to be often
incorporated. The author shows that in some languages, desemanticization has
taken place, with the incorporated noun being used as a verbal classifier.
Compound verbs similar to those described above for Oceanic also exist in
Tonkawa (Texas). 

The following two chapters are both concerned with the Amazonian area. Chapter
16 (p. 337-349), ‘Areal diffusion and the limits of grammaticalization: An
Amazonian perspective’  by Alexandra Aikhenvald, is a snapshot on
contact-induced grammaticalization Tariana language, an Arawak isolate
surrounded by Tucano, in the Vaupés river basin area, which is characterized
by both multilingualism and the refusal of language mixing. Aikhenvald shows
that Tariana has developed bound morphology parallel to Tucano and different
from what can be observed in related Arawak languages. Once again, patterns of
verb compounding also seem to have given rise to aspect enclitics (such as
-wasa, ‘jump’ > enclitic expressing sudden movement,) following a pattern
existing in Tucano.

In Chapter 17 (‘Diachronic stories of body-part nouns in some language
families of South America’ p. 350-371), Robert Zariquey focuses on one source
domain in 17 languages from 9 families of Amazonian languages: body-part
nouns. The chapter is organized into two main parts. First, Zariquey presents
the target constructions of grammaticalized body-part nouns: (i) locative
adpositions; (ii) classifiers; (iii) body-part prefixes. The second half of
the paper is devoted to the source constructions. The author names:
incorporation of body-part nouns; nominal compounds; generic genitives and
locative compounds.

The final two chapters are both devoted to the specific questions raised by
creole languages. In “Addressing questions of grammaticalization in creoles:
It’s all about methodology” (ch. 18, p. 372-393), Hiram L. Smith takes notice
of the difficulties raised by creoles for grammaticalization research and
proposes a case study in form of a plea for quantitative variationist methods
in creole language research. Focusing on the alleged habitual morpheme asé in
Palenquero, Smith resorts to a series of tests: polarity sensitivity (newly
grammaticalized morphemes are expected to be more frequent in affirmative
contexts), marker deletion in negative contexts, habitual vs frequentative
uses, repartition of roles with the concurring progressive-habitual marker ta,
co-occurrence with main verb asé ‘do’, and frequency. Each time, the different
hypotheses at stake concerning the emergence of asé lead to falsifiable
predictions. The conclusion is that asé is only an incipient aspectual
morpheme. Finally, John Mc Whorter asks the question “Is grammaticalization in
Creoles different?” (ch. 19, p. 394-408). Grammaticalization has sometimes
been regarded as less interesting in creole languages, because it is allegedly
overdetermined by the substrate and/or because it is supposedly a reparative
strategy. Mc Whorter argues against both claims. The focus of the chapter is
on Saramaccan: while there are indices of substrate-induced
grammaticalization, the grammaticalization of TAM markers, copulas,
information markers and negation appears to be essentially a language-internal
phenomenon. In the final part of the chapter, McWhorter claims that
grammaticalization in creoles is more pervasive than in older languages, which
supports the theory that creoles emerge from pidginization.

EVALUATION

The merits of this collection are of two sorts: first, it delivers a broad
panorama of grammaticalization phenomena across linguistic families and areas.
As such, it is a very useful companion volume for scholars interested in
cross-linguistic perspectives on the emergence of grammatical forms. We can
expect this collection of papers to stay a reference work for many typologists
and grammaticalization scholars for the years to come. 

The other great merit of the book pertains to the theoretical debates that are
dealt with in various papers. One major issue is the influence of great
morphosyntactic types on the patterns of grammaticalization observed in
different languages. This question is predominantly dealt with in the first
half of the volume. Most crucially, the paper by Ansaldo, Bisang & Szeto
(Chapter 11) is directly discussed and criticized in two other papers (Heine
and Dahl), whereas the three authors also comment on other works by Dahl and
Heine. It might have been interesting to open the volume with the paper on
EMSEA and isolating languages and to go on directly with the chapters by Heine
and Dahl in order to border the volume with a more detailed presentation of
its theoretical relevance. Esseesy’s descriptive paper on Semitic should also
be named as a part of this subgroup of chapters, since the question of the
obligatoriness of formal reduction is central to his presentation. What is at
stake is the definition of grammaticalization itself, as both Heine and
Ansaldo, Bisang & Szeto point out. In their discussion of Dahl’s notion of
“maturation”, the latters also insist on the impact of this debate for the
definition of grammar. They also address the theoretical background of
Lehmann’s (1982) parameters to underline the link between grammaticalization
theory and the definition of the linguistic sign. Indeed, the classical
Saussurean reflections on the arbitrariness of the sign are not so remote from
the debate between “meaning first, form second” and “form and meaning”
parallelism (to use Heine’s categories). Yet, one of the main advances made
clear by this volume is precisely the fact that these two basic hypotheses
presented by Heine don’t exhaust the debate. Ansaldo, Bisang & Szeto propose a
third variant, in which formal change might even be absent, but where formal
characteristics of the language do determine the paths of grammaticalization
which are possible in that language.

The very general questions raised by the study of grammaticalization in
isolating EMSEA languages is not the only way to address the problem of how
typological features may help determine the modalities of grammaticalization
in various languages. It is also possible to ask this question at a
micro-level, focusing on a specific typological feature and tracking down its
role in the grammaticalization profile of a set of languages. For instance,
the pervasiveness of converbs in “Transeurasian” languages is a major
parameter in the description of grammaticalization in those languages in the
papers by Johanson & Csató as well as Narrog, Rhee & Whitman. Quite
unsurprisingly, noun-verb incorporation and polysynthesis are very salient
features in the grammaticalization profiles presented by Mithun (on North
American languages) and Mushin (on Australian Aboriginal languages). Other
examples of typologically salient features relevant for grammaticalization
research are compound verbs, serial verb constructions, classifiers, word
order phenomena and the availability of adpositions (see the papers by
Moyse-Faurie, Klamer, Mithun and Zariquey). The thorough discussion of the
relevance of “clause union” as a parameter in the rise of some markers in
Lezgic in the paper by Arkadiev & Maisak should not be left unmentioned,
either. All in all, the detailed discussion of the link between the
grammaticalization profile of a language and its main typological features
rather seems to lead to a question that is symmetrical to the one raised by
Ansaldo, Bisang & Szeto: shouldn’t we assume that the grammaticalization
profile of a language helps shape its typological characteristics at least as
much as its typological characteristics helps shape its grammaticalization
profile? This question is addressed by Marianne Mithun, and it is  also a
logical follow-up of Haig’s analysis of the fate of personal clitics in
Iranian and how their grammaticalization in association with participles
helped shape the characteristic alignment of Iranian languages. But this issue
is also at the heart of the Martin Haspelmath’s very broad, encompassing
reflection on the “anasynthetic spiral” in a paper that is likely to be very
discussed in the years to come.

Another important question has to do with the role of language contact in the
rise of grammatical categories. This is a central issue in the remarkable
papers by Coupe, Klamer, Aikhenvald, as well as in the two general
contributions on creole languages. Even though it is not at the heart of the
chapter by Mithun and Mushin, the phenomena at stake in those two papers also
include language contact and areal diffusion. Whereas the chapters concerned
with linguistic areas tend to confirm the major role that language contact can
play in shaping the grammaticalization profile of languages, the two studies
on creole seem to indicate that the role of language contact should not be
overestimated in the case of creoles once the stage of pidginization is
passed.

As a conclusion, there is little doubt that this volume is as a pivotal
contribution to its field. As a companion to the study of grammaticalization
across language families, it is here to stay. As a contribution to the debates
on the nature and definition of grammaticalization, it delivers a considerable
amount of new insights, puzzling questions and interesting hypotheses. It is
too soon to know how influential these advances will be, but as for now,
everyone interested in grammaticalization theory should benefit from reading
this collection of papers.

REFERENCES

Dahl, Östen. 2004. The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity.
Amsterdam : John Benjamins.

Dasher, Richard & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2001. Regularity in semantic
change.  Cambridge (UK) : Cambridge University Press.

Lehmann, Christian. 1982/2015. Thoughts on Grammaticalization. Berlin:
Language Science Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Pierre-Yves Modicom teaches Germanic Linguistics at Université
Bordeaux-Montaigne (France). He holds a PhD in linguistics from U.
Paris-Sorbonne. His works is devoted to the syntax-semantics interface in
Germanic and to discourse particles in German.





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