Download or read book Grammaticalization Theory and Data written by Sylvie Hancil and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1980s theories and studies of grammaticalization have provided a major source of inspiration for the description and explanation of language change, giving rise to many publications and conferences. This collection presents original, empirical studies that explore various facets of grammaticalization research of both formal and functional orientation. The papers of this selection deal with general issues and specific empirical domains, such as personal pronouns; indefinite pronouns; final particles; tense and aspect markers; comitative markers and coordinating conjunctions. The languages covered include English, German, dialects of Italian, Japanese, Polish, and Walman (Papuan). The book will be of great interest to linguists working on language change in a wide variety of languages.

Download or read book Theory and Data in Cognitive Linguistics written by Nikolas Gisborne and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2014-09-24 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cognitive linguistics has an honourable tradition of paying respect to naturally occurring language data and there have been fruitful interactions between corpus data and aspects of linguistic structure and meaning. More recently, dialect data and sociolinguistic data collection methods/theoretical concepts have started to generate interest. There has also been an increase in several kinds of experimental work. However, not all linguistic data is simply naturally occurring or derived from experiments with statistically robust samples of speakers. Other traditions, especially the generative tradition, have fruitfully used introspection and questions about the grammaticality of different strings to uncover patterns which might otherwise have gone unnoticed. The divide between generative and cognitive approaches to language is intimately connected to the kinds of data drawn on, and the way in which generalisations are derived from these data. The papers in this volume explore these issues through the lens of synchronic linguistic analysis, the study of language change, typological investigation and experimental study. Originally published in Studies in Language Vol. 36:3 (2012).

Download or read book Measurements of Grammaticalization written by David Correia Saavedra and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-10-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grammaticalization has often been described as a gradual phenomenon. While many studies have discussed the quantitative aspects of grammaticalization, there has been little to no work that has tried to propose a way of measuring degrees of grammaticalization. This book addresses this gap by proposing a corpus-based approach to the measurement of grammaticalization, using binary logistic regression modelling. Such an approach has theoretical benefits as it can provide empirical evidence for the gradience and gradualness of grammaticalization. It can help substantiate observations that have been done on the basis of case studies so far, such as the hypothesized unidirectionality of grammaticalization. In addition, as the methods proposed in this book rely on corpus-based data only, it offers a way of comparing grammaticalization across multiple languages, which is currently a challenging endeavour. What this book hopes to achieve is to start a discussion on the measurement of grammaticalization. To draw a parallel, the field of morphological productivity has greatly benefited from the discussions (and disputes) regarding how its object of study should be measured, and I believe that so will the field of grammaticalization.

Download or read book Approaches to Grammaticalization written by Elizabeth Closs Traugott and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of grammaticalization raises a number of fundamental theoretical issues pertaining to the relation of langue and parole, creativity and automatic coding, synchrony and diachrony, categoriality and continua, typological characteristics and language-specific forms, etc., and therefore challenges some of the basic tenets of twentieth century linguistics.This two-volume work presents a number of diverse theoretical viewpoints on grammaticalization and gives insights into the genesis, development, and organization of grammatical categories in a number of language world-wide, with particular attention to morphosyntactic and semantic-pragmatic issues. The papers in Volume I are divided into two sections, the first concerned with general method, and the second with issues of directionality. Those in Volume II are divided into five sections: verbal structure, argument structure, subordination, modality, and multiple paths of grammaticalization.

Download or read book World Lexicon of Grammaticalization written by Tania Kouteva and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 647 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on analysis of more than 1,000 languages, this volume reconstructs more than 500 processes of grammatical change in the languages of the world.

Download or read book Grammaticalization and Variation written by Nicole Hober and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-11-08 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grammaticalization research looks back on a rich history, but recent empirical findings, as well as new insights from cognitive science and psycholinguistics, entice researchers to reassess and review what we know about the process. This book presents a detailed study of the grammaticalization of motion verbs in the Mayan languages. The focus lies on variation in the parallel grammaticalization of motion verbs into auxiliaries and directionals. It is demonstrated that the genetically related and areally close languages do not always grammaticalize source items in the same way - both from a formal and meaning perspective. The empirical findings suggest that traditional theories on grammaticalization do not capture the complex nature of the phenomenon entirely. Therefore, a Network Approach to grammaticalization is introduced which emphasizes a 'meaning-first' account. The approach seeks to combine the conceptual with the discourse-pragmatic while being firmly grounded in cognitive and psychological facts. New insights into the grammaticalization behavior of the world's languages are offered, while well-established notions and assumptions within the grammaticalization research paradigm are reviewed and challenged.

Download or read book Corpus Approaches to Grammaticalization in English written by Hans Lindquist and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2004-06-22 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grammaticalization is an important concept in general and typological linguistics and a prominent type of explanation in historical linguistics. For historical corpus linguists, grammaticalization theory provides a frame of orientation in their effort to analyze and systematize a fast-accumulating mass of data. Students of grammaticalization have become increasingly aware of the potential of existing corpora and established corpus-linguistic methodology for their work. This book continues and develops the dialogue between the two fields. All the contributions are based on extensive use of various electronic corpora. Relating corpus practices to recent theoretical concerns of grammaticalization studies they deal with grammaticalization and historical sociolinguistics, lexicalization and grammaticalization, layering, frequency, grammaticalization and dialects, degrammaticalization and grammaticalization in a contrastive perspective. The papers show that a synthesis of corpus methodology and grammaticalization studies leads to new and interesting insights about the mechanisms of language change and the communicative functions of language.

Download or read book Grammatical Change and Linguistic Theory written by Þórhallur Eyþórsson and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains 15 revised papers originally presented at a symposium at Rosendal, Norway, under the aegis of The Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. The overall theme of the volume is 'internal factors in grammatical change.' The papers focus on fundamental questions in theoretically-based historical linguistics from a broad perspective. Several of the papers relate to grammaticalization in different ways, but are generally critical of 'Grammaticalization Theory'. Further papers focus on the causes of syntactic change, pinpointing both extra-syntactic (exogenous) causes and – more controversially – internally driven (endogenous) causes. The volume is rounded up by contributions on morphological change 'by itself.' A wide range of languages is covered, including Tsova-Tush (Nakh-Dagestan), Zoque, and Athapaskan languages, in addition to Indo-European languages, both the more familiar ones and some less well-studied varieties.

Download or read book Grammaticalization written by Ekaterini Stathi and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010-09-16 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains a selection of papers on grammaticalization from a broad perspective. Some of the papers focus on basic concepts in grammaticalization research such as the concept of 'grammar' as the endpoint of grammaticalization processes, erosion, (uni)directionality, the relation between grammaticalization and constructions, subjectification, and the relation between grammaticalization and analogy. Other papers shed a critical light on grammaticalization as an explanatory parameter in language change. New case studies of micro-processes of grammaticalization complete the selection. The empirical evidence for (and against) grammaticalization comes from diverse domains: subject control, clitics, reciprocal markers, pronouns and agreement markers, gender markers, auxiliaries, aspectual categories, intensifying adjectives and determiners, and pragmatic markers. The languages covered include English and its varieties, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, French, Slavonic languages, and Turkish. The book will be valuable to scholars working on grammaticalization and language change as well as to those interested in individual languages.

Download or read book Thoughts on grammaticalization written by Christian Lehmann and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2024-05-23 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Thoughts on grammaticalization" was first published in a working-paper version in 1982 and became very influential immediately, even though it was properly published only in 1995. Despite its modest title, the book can be read as an advanced introduction to grammaticalization, though its conception is very original. The present edition contains a number of corrections of the 1995 edition. After a short review of the history of research, the work introduces and delimits the concepts related to grammaticalization. It then provides extensive exemplification of grammaticalization phenomena in diverse languages, ordered by grammatical domains such as the verbal, pronominal and nominal sphere and clause level relations. The final chapter presents a theory of grammaticalization which is based on the autonomy of the linguistic sign with respect to the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes. This is the basis of the structural parameters that constitute grammaticalization. They are operationalized to the point of rendering degrees of grammaticalization measurable.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization written by Heiko Narrog and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-13 with total page 948 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a critical assessment of research on grammaticalization, a central element in the process by which grammars are created. Leading scholars discuss its core theoretical and methodological bases, report on work in the field, and point to directions for new research. They represent every relevant theoretical perspective and approach.

Download or read book New Reflections on Grammaticalization written by Ilse Wischer and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributions in this volume cover a wide range of theoretical and methodological issues and raise a number of new questions that indicate the future direction of grammaticalization studies. The volume focuses on issues such as grammaticalization and lexicalization; the unidirectionality hypothesis; the issue of the relevance of contexts for grammaticalization; the description of grammaticalization paths. Much of the current work concentrates on such categories, as discourse markers, honorifics or classifiers, which have not previously been central to works on grammaticalization. Other studies take a new perspective on known grammaticalization paths by applying concepts adopted from other linguistic fields, such as prototype theory, morphocentricity, or by discussing their findings from a comparative or typological angle, presenting data from a large number of languages, often based on extensive empirical investigations of written and spoken text corpora.

Download or read book Gradience Gradualness and Grammaticalization written by Elizabeth Closs Traugott and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, which emerged from a workshop at the "New Reflections on Grammaticalization 4" conference held at KU Leuven in July 2008, contains a collection of papers which investigate the relationship between synchronic gradience and the apparent gradualness of linguistic change, largely from the perspective of grammaticalization. In addition to versions of the papers presented at the workshop, the volume contains specially commissioned contributions, some of which offer commentaries on a subset of the other articles. The articles address a number of themes central to grammaticalization studies, such as the role of reanalysis and analogy in grammaticalization, the formal modelling of grammaticalization, and the relationship between formal and functional change, using data from a range of languages, and (in some cases) from particular electronic corpora. The volume will be of specific interest to historical linguists working on grammaticalization, and general linguists working on the interface between synchrony and diachrony.

Download or read book The Limits of Grammaticalization written by Anna Giacalone Ramat and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The earliest use of the term “grammaticalization” was to refer to the process whereby lexical words of a language (such as English keep in “he keeps bees”) become grammatical forms (such as the auxiliary in “he keeps looking at me”). Changes of this kind, which involve semantic fading and a downshift from a major to a minor category, have generally been agreed to come under the heading of grammaticalization. But other changes that equally contribute to new grammatical forms do not involve this kind of fading. In recent years, a debate has arisen over how to constrain the term theoretically. Is grammaticalization to be distinguished from “lexicalization”, the creation and fixing of new words out of older patterns of compounding? If so, how is the line to be drawn between a form that is grammatical and one that is lexical? Should the term “grammaticalization” be extended to the study of the origins of grammatical constructions in general? If so, it will have to include broader issues such as word order change and the reanalysis of phrases. What principles govern these processes? Is grammaticalization a unidirectional event, or can change occur in the reverse direction? The authors of the papers in this volume approach these important questions from a variety of data types, including historical texts, creoles, and a typologically broad sample of modern and ancient languages.

Download or read book Reconstructing Grammar written by Spike Gildea and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2000-07-15 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comparative linguistics and grammaticalization theory both belong to the broader category of historical linguistics, yet few linguists practice both. The methods and goals of each group seem largely distinct: comparative linguists have by and large avoided reconstructing grammar, while grammaticalization theoreticians have either focused on explaining attested historical change or used internal reconstruction to formulate hypotheses about processes of change. In this collection, some of the leading voices in grammaticalization theory apply their methods to comparative data (largely drawn from indigenous languages of the Americas), showing not only that grammar can be reconstructed, but that the process of reconstructing grammar can yield interesting theoretical and typological insights.

Download or read book Grammaticalization and English Complex Prepositions written by Sebastian Hoffmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-04-11 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is a grammatical unit? How does grammatical structure evolve? How can we best investigate the mental representation of grammar? What is the connection between language use and language structure? This book aims to help answer such questions by presenting a detailed analysis of English complex prepositions (e.g. in spite of or with respect to) on the basis of large amounts of authentic language data dating from the Middle Ages until today.

Download or read book Grammaticalization as Economy written by Elly van Gelderen and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2004-08-31 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides much detail on the changes involving the grammaticalization of personal and relative pronouns, topicalized nominals, complementizers, adverbs, prepositions, modals, perception verbs, and aspectual markers. It accounts for these changes in terms of two structural economy principles. Head Preference expresses that single words, i.e. heads, are used to build structures rather than full phrases, and Late Merge states that waiting as late as possible to merge, i.e. be added to the structure, is preferred over movement. The book also discusses grammar-external processes (e.g. prescriptivist rules) that inhibit change, and innovations that replenish the grammaticalized element. Most of the changes involve the (extended) CP and IP: as elements grammaticalize clause boundaries disappear. Cross-linguistic differences exist as to whether the CP, IP, and VP are all present and split and this is formulated as the Layer Principle. Changes involving the CP are typically brought about by Head Preference, whereas those involving the IP and VP by Late Merge.