Query Details

Query Subject:	Innovation of Functional Categories
Author:	Juergen Bohnemeyer
Submitter Email:	click here to access email

Linguistic LingField(s):	Historical Linguistics Semantics Syntax Typology

Query:	I'm looking for examples of functional categories - semantic distinctions expressed by inflections and/or function words - that were clearly innovated in a given language (family) at some point in a narrow sense of the term 'innovation'. Specifically, I'm interested in cases that fulfill both of the following criteria: (i) One or more members of the particular language family at some point grammaticalized a functional category that is not evidenced or cannot be reconstructed in the common ancestor of the family (ii) This grammaticalization was not in any obvious way contact- induced; i.e., there is no conclusive evidence and no obvious candidate for a model from which the newly minted category could have been diffused. To put this another way, you could say that what I'm looking for are neologisms of grammar. I will post a summary of the responses should the responses warrant this.
LL Issue:	22.2641
Date posted:	24-Jun-2011
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