Summary Details
| Query: |
History of Grammaticalization
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| Author: | Therese Lindstrom | |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email | |
| Linguistic LingField(s): |
Syntax
History of Linguistics |
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| Summary: |
Summary of the Query on the History of Grammaticalisation (13.1395.2)
Thank you to all of those who responded to my query regarding the history of the concept of grammaticalisation. I am sorry I have not posted a sum earlier, but this could not be helped. I hope you are still interested in hearing what people told me however. First of all I would like to thank Elena Bashir (University of Chicago), Stavros Skopeteas (University of Erfurt), Harold F. Schiffman (University of Pennsylvania), Sebastian Ross-Hagebaum (Rice University), Jacqueline Monschau (University of Bonn), Charley Rowe (University of Newcastle), Isabelle Buchstaller (University of Edinburgh) and Natalia Slaska (University of Sheffield). Below I will summarise the replies I got together with a brief list of references that were recommended. If anyone is interested in finding out more about how my research is going please either just drop me a line or have a look at my homepage which may at least give you some idea: http://www.shef.ac.uk/english/language/research/therese.html Sum: - One of the replies concerned the choice between ''grammaticalisation'' and ''grammaticisation''. The person who replied claimed that the latter term was more correct in the sense of 'development of a lexical item into a grammatical marker of some sort' and that the former term would have to have a meaning such as 'the process of becoming grammatical as opposed to ungrammatical'. This was supported by evidence such as that we say ''political'' but ''politicisation'', not *''politicalisation''. But the person who sent me this reply also thought that I would see a correlation between the age of the user and the choice of terminology. Grammaticisation presumably being the older term. - Someone else told me he thought the term had originated in Antoine Meillet''s writings. It is true that Meillet used the term in 1912 and 1915. This fact has often been mentioned in brief histories of grammaticalisation such as Lehmann (1982 [1995] and Hopper and Traugott (1993). - Another person who replied thought he had seen the term ''morphologisation'' somewhere. This has sometimes been used with meanings similar to grammaticalisation, e.g. by Tom Givon who has been seen as the person who revived grammaticalisation in the 1970s. He has sometimes split grammaticalisation into morphologisation and syntacticisation. The same person also thought he recalled seeing auxiliation somewhere, and quoted a line from somewhere online where Benveniste (1968:86-91) and Meillet (1994:387-420) are said to have described this process in Latin. Benveniste does not seem to have used the term ''grammaticalisation'', preferring to use ''auxiliation'' and ''mutation''. Whether Meillet actually used the term ''auxiliation'' at some point I have still not had time to check. But I have not seen it in any of his publications that I have read. - Another reply recommended that I have a look at the brief historical overviews in Hopper and Traugott and Lehmann, and noted that the term is usually put down to Meillet. I''d like to add that Heine et al (1991) ''Grammaticalization: A Conceptual Framework'' also has a brief historical description of grammaticalisation. But apart from these three brief treatments, there has not been that much written on the history of grammaticalisation. - Another helpful person told me that she had come across the term ''grammaticalisation'' for the first time in Wolfgang Dressler''s ''Morphonology'' (1980), but that she had also heard of and used the terms: ''lexicalisation'', ''fossilisation'' and ''freezing''. She looked upon ''grammaticalisation'' as a general term which would refer to processes in all aspects of the grammar. And when she first came across the term ''grammaticisation'' quite recently she was surprised because she''d never seen it before. References: Heine, Bernd et al. 1991. ''Grammaticalization: A Conceptual Framework'' Chicago / London: University of Chicago Press. Hopper, Paul and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 1993. ''Grammaticalization'' Cambridge: CUP. Kuteva, Tania. ''Auxiliation: An Enquiry into the Nature of Grammaticalization.'' OUP. Lehmann, Christian. 1982 [1995] ''Thoughts on Grammaticalization.'' Munich / Newcastle: Lincom Europa. Anyone who is interested in recent work on grammaticalisation is recommended to look at John Benjamins'' catalogue and the special issue on grammaticalisation from Language Sciences from last year. Thanks again to all of you who replied. Best regards, Therese P.S. If anyone wants to know who told me what in order to get in touch with them and ask them more, please let me know and I can forward you the details and their full replies if need be. - *********************************************************************************** Therese Lindstr?m, PhD Student University of Sheffield t.lindstrom@sheffield.ac.uk http://www.shef.ac.uk/english/language/research/therese.html |
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| LL Issue: | 13.2037 | |
| Date Posted: | 06-Aug-2002 | |
| Original Query: | Read original query | |
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