deconstructing grammaticalization

Deconstructing grammaticalization Frederick J. Newmeyer Department of Linguistics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-4340, USA Abstract Grammaticalization is often regarded in the literature as a distinct process requiring explanatory machinery unique to its own domain. I argue, on the contrary, that ‘grammaticalization’ is simply a cover term for certain syntactic, semantic, and phonetic changes, all of which can apply independently of each other. 7 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Key word word文档格式规范word作业纸小票打印word模板word简历模板免费word简历 s: Grammaticalization; Language change; Functionalism 1. Overview To a certain degree, the di€erent research programs of di€erent schools of linguistics have led their practitioners to investigate — and attempt to explain — a di€erent set of natural language phenomena1. Generative grammarians, for example, have been consumed with such things as the intricacies of parasitic gap constructions, the precise conditions for the extraction of question elements, and the nuances of quantifier scope judgments. These problems have to a large extent been ignored in the literature of functional linguistics. 0388-0001/00/$ - see front matter 7 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S0388 -0001 (00)00021 -8 Language Sciences 23 (2001) 187–229 www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci E-mail address: fjn@u.washington.edu (F.J. Newmeyer). 1 This paper is excerpted from Chapter 5 of Newmeyer (1998) and appears here with the permission of MIT Press. It owes a great deal to the work of, and electronic conversations with, Lyle Campbell, Alice Harris, Richard Janda, and Brian Joseph. However, I must stress that none of these individuals bears any responsibility for ideas expressed here that are not directly attributed to them, nor do I wish to imply that they are necessarily in agreement with the rest. On the other side of the fence, there are phenomena which functionalists have shown far more interest in than have generativists. Without any doubt, the foremost of these is grammaticalization. And just as many generativists would claim that, say, parasitic gaps defy functional explanation, functionalists point to grammaticalization as presenting an equal challenge to generative grammar. Traugott and Ko¨nig (1991), for example, feel that ‘the study of grammaticalization challenges the concept of a sharp divide between langue and parole and . . .also challenges the concept of categoriality’ (p. 189). In the view of Heine et al. (1991, p. 1), ‘grammaticalization theory’ challenges what they see as the predominant conceptions of theoretical linguists since Saussure. Indeed, they feel that it calls for a ‘new theoretical paradigm’, counterposed to: [m]ost post-Saussurean models of grammar [which] rely — explicitly or implicitly — on the following tenets: (a) Linguistic description must be strictly synchronic. (b) The relationship between form and meaning is arbitrary. (c) A linguistic form has only one function or meaning. And Paul Hopper (1987) goes so far as to claim that ‘There is, in other words, no ‘‘grammar’’ but only ‘‘grammaticization’’ — movements toward structure’ (p. 148). In this paper I will put grammaticalization under the microscope and conclude that such claims are unwarranted. Indeed, I will conclude that there is no such thing as grammaticalization, at least in so far as it might be regarded as a distinct grammatical phenomenon requiring a distinct set of principles for its explanation (see Campbell, and Janda, this issue). Instead, I will attempt to demonstrate that the set of phenomena that fall under its label are a simple consequence of principles that any theory — whether formal or functional — would need to posit anyway. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the two principal ways that grammaticalization has been characterized, one as a distinct historical process that requires an independent ‘theory’ for its explanation and the other as an epiphenomenal result of independent processes. Section 3 defends at some length the latter option, arguing that the component parts of grammaticalization all occur — and must be explained — independently of each other. The following section (Section 4) takes on the question of the ‘unidirectionality’ of grammaticalization, demonstrating that it is falsified by the many attested and reconstructed upgradings from higher to lower degrees of grammatical content. I attempt to explain why downgradings do greatly eclipse upgradings in frequency. Section 5 raises two problems endemic to many studies of grammaticalization, one methodological and one theoretical. The former involves the frequent use of reconstructed forms as theoretical evidence. The latter is the postulation of ‘panchronic grammars’, that is, grammars combining synchronic and diachronic statements. Section 6 addresses the question of whether grammaticalization refutes the generative view of language, while Section 7 is a brief conclusion. F.J. Newmeyer / Language Sciences 23 (2001) 187–229188 2. What is the ‘true nature’ of grammaticalization? There are a variety of opinions in the literature on whether grammaticalization requires an inherent set of explanatory devices or is an epiphenomenal result of other principles. The following two sections outline these positions in turn (see Campbell et al., this issue). 2.1. Grammaticalization as a distinct process Both the major theoretical work devoted to grammaticalization, Heine, Claudi, and Hu¨nnemeyer’s Grammaticalization: A Conceptual Framework and the major introductory overview, Hopper and Traugott’s Grammaticalization, begin by describing it as an historical process (see also Joseph, this issue). What is common to most definitions of grammaticalization is, first, that it is conceived of as a process (Heine et al., 1991, p. 4). We define grammaticalization as the process whereby lexical items and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions, and, once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions (Hopper and Traugott, 1993, p. xv). Now, the term ‘process’ is often used informally to mean nothing more than ‘phenomenon to be explained’. Some of the references to grammaticalization as a ‘process’ seem simply to have this use of the term in mind. However, the term has another, much stronger, sense. In this use, a process is a phenomenon of a particular type, namely, one driven by a distinct set of principles governing the phenomenon alone. Let us call such a type of phenomenon a ‘distinct process’. The many references in the grammaticalization literature to unidirectional and deterministic pathways of development convey strongly the idea that it is an encapsulated phenomenon, governed by its own set of laws. For example: [G]rammaticalization . . .may be defined as the evolution of grammatical form and meaning from lexical and phrasal antecedents and the continued formal and semantic developments such material subsequently undergoes. The . . . lexical sources of particular grammatical forms . . . [undergo] formal and semantic changes which characterize their developmental histories. . . .As a lexical construction enters and continues along a grammaticalization pathway, it undergoes successive changes in meaning, broadly interpretable as representing a unidirectional movement away from its original specific and concrete reference and toward increasingly abstract reference. . . . [T]he most advanced grammatical forms, in their travel along developmental pathways, may have undergone continuous reduction from originally free, unbound items, to axes entirely dependent on their hosts (Pagliuca, 1994, p. ix). In the view of Hopper and Traugott (1993), two components of F.J. Newmeyer / Language Sciences 23 (2001) 187–229 189 grammaticalization, reanalysis and analogy, arise from independently needed mechanisms, but unidirectionality is said to be unique to that process: The subset of processes that are particular to grammaticalization are those that over time render more independent elements less independent (Hopper and Traugott, 1993, p. 62; emphasis added). Since a ‘distinct process’ requires a ‘distinct theory’, it is not surprising to see references in the literature to a ‘grammaticalization theory’, which makes ‘predictions’ about its subject matter. The implication that there is a predictive theory of grammaticalization per se recurs repeatedly, for example, in the functionalist literature (see for example Heine, 1990, p. 129, 220; Heine, 1993, p. 106; Bybee et al., 1994, pp. 9–22). 2.2. Grammaticalization as the result of other processes The implication that grammaticalization is a distinct process whose workings are to be attributed to a distinct theory contrasts with many other references that suggest that it is essentially an epiphenomenal result of independent historical developments, each of which falls out of some independent theory. For example Bybee and Pagliuca’s capsule scenario of the causes of grammaticalization suggests no process unique to it, much less the need for a distinct theory to explain the process: [W]e suggest that human language users have a natural propensity for making metaphorical extensions that lead to the increased use of certain items’. . . .Thus the paths of development leading to grammatical meaning are predictable, given certain lexical meaning as the starting point. As the meaning generalizes and the range of use widens, the frequency increases and this leads automatically to phonological reduction and perhaps fusion. (Pagliuca, 1982; Bybee and Pagliuca, 1985, p. 76). As far as unidirectionality is concerned, there have been a number of attempts to derive it from the (putative) unidirectionality of independent mechanisms and processes. For example, Bybee and Pagliuca (1985), Heine et al. (1991), and Haspelmath (1998) agree that part of the explanation lies in the fact that certain cognitive processes, in particular the human tendency to conceptualize abstract notions in terms of concrete notions by means of metaphor, are both universal and unidirectional. Haspelmath adds ‘the tendency for humans to associate pragmatic force with novelty (Lehmann, 1985)’ (Haspelmath, 1998, p. 55), which accounts for semantic changes in which no metaphor is involved, say, the reduction of full pronouns to agreement markers. He goes on to note that the phonetic reduction and merger aspect to grammaticalization is also the result of an independent process: the speaker’s desire for ease of production. This desire is often counterbalanced by the hearer’s need for perceptual clarity. But with F.J. Newmeyer / Language Sciences 23 (2001) 187–229190 familiar frequent items, clarity is less of an issue, so reduction wins out. Haspelmath concludes: ‘The unidirectionality of grammaticalization is [thus] an indirect e€ect of general principles of human cognition and behavior’ (Haspelmath, 1998, p. 58). It should be mentioned that nonfunctionalists who have addressed the issue of grammaticalization have been virtually unanimous in agreeing that its e€ects are epiphenomenal (see, for example, Roberts, 1993; Harris and Campbell, 1995; Joseph, 1996; Janda, 1995; see also other papers of this issue). Brian Joseph likens grammaticalization to lexical di€usion, in that there is clearly a di€usionary e€ect in the way that sound change is realized in lexical material, but one need not privilege Lexical Di€usion with the status of a ‘mechanism’ of change — instead, the well-known mechanisms of analogy and dialect borrowing together can give the di€usionary e€ect that has been referred to as ‘Lexical Di€usion’ (Joseph, 1996, p. 20). In the next section, I will argue that it is correct to view grammaticalization as an epiphenomenon. 3. The epiphenomenal nature of grammaticalization This section is devoted to arguing for the correctness of the view that the historical changes observed in grammaticalization are the product of well understood forces (see also Campbell, and Janda, this issue). Grammaticalization, as I will argue, is nothing more than a label for the conjunction of certain types of independently occurring linguistic changes. I begin in Section 3.1 by showing that grammaticalization cannot sensibly be conceived of as a distinct process. Indeed, the very idea that there can be such a thing as a ‘diachronic process’ will be challenged. Section 3.2 addresses the relationship between grammaticalization and reanalysis. It argues that there is no fixed order between the reanalysis, the semantic changes, and the phonetic reductions that comprise grammaticalization. And Section 3.3 stresses that each can occur without the other; it is only when the semantic and phonetic changes happen to converge with a certain type of reanalysis that we speak of ‘grammaticalization’ having taken place. 3.1. On the notion ‘diachronic process’ As noted in Section 2.1, the term ‘process’ is often used informally to mean nothing more than ‘phenomenon to be explained’. If such is all that is implied in calling grammaticalization a ‘process’, then no harm is done. But I feel that the term ‘process’ is dangerous when applied to set of diachronic developments. The reason for the danger is that it invites one to conceive of such developments as being subject to a distinct set of laws that are F.J. Newmeyer / Language Sciences 23 (2001) 187–229 191 independent of the minds and behaviors of individual language users. However, nothing transgenerational can be situated in any human faculty. Children are not born with racial memories that fill them in with the details of the history of the forms that they hear. They have no way of knowing whether some particular clitic in their grammar, for example, was once a full noun phrase or whether it is on its way to axhood. If it truly is the case that speakers are more likely to reanalyze an item as less lexical, rather than as more lexical, then we need to look at synchronic mechanisms, that is, at mechanisms that are rooted in the cognition and behavior of living speakers. Several decades ago Paul Kiparsky (1968) warned against the practice, all too common in historical linguistic studies, of disembodying language change from language speakers: The point is simply that a language is not some gradually and imperceptibly changing object which smoothly floats through time and space, as historical linguistics based on philological material all too easily suggests. Rather, the transmission of language is discontinuous, and a language is recreated by each child on the basis of the speech data it hears (p. 175). But to read the functionalist-oriented grammaticalization literature, one has the impression that words, morphemes, axes, and so on are literally driven to evolve in a particular way. Consider, for example, the quote from William Pagliuca in Section 2.1, which appears to conceptualize language change in such terms. There is some irony to the fact that Bernd Heine (1993) would open his book on the grammaticalization of auxiliaries with the following quotation from William Croft: ‘Languages don’t change; people change language’ (Croft, 1990, p. 257). The very definition provided by Heine of what auxiliaries are, namely, ‘linguistic items located along the grammaticalization chain extending from full verb to grammatical inflection of tense, aspect, and modality . . . ’ (p. 131), invites one to think of grammars apart from the minds and activities of speakers. No actual speaker can be expected to know where some item might fall along a particular chain. The focus of the book on these unidirectional chains of auxiliary development and on cognitively incoherent ‘panchronic’ statements (see below, Section 5.2) e€ectively negates the force of Croft’s aphorism, painting a picture in which languages are impelled to change regardless of what the people who speak them are disposed to do or think. Since grammaticalization is not a distinct process, there can be no such thing as ‘grammaticalization theory’, unless one intends that expression merely as a convenient way of referring to the set of independent theories needed to explain the phenomenon (see Joseph, this issue). The following sections, as they unfold, will provide further evidence that grammaticalization lacks the distinguishing characteristics of what one might reasonably call a distinct process. F.J. Newmeyer / Language Sciences 23 (2001) 187–229192 3.2. Reanalysis, semantic change, and phonetic reduction — their temporal ordering in grammaticalization The idea that grammaticalization is a distinct process is based in large part on its always passing through the same stages. However, there is no consensus on the question of what those stages are. Let us begin with the ordering of the semantic changes and the reanalysis. In the view of Heine (1993, p. 48), ‘[I]n the process of grammaticalization like the one considered here, conceptual shift precedes morphosyntactic shift . . . ’. Indeed, ‘conceptual is the first obligatory step in grammaticalization . . . ’ (p. 51; see also Givo´n, 1991b, p. 123). But for Hopper and Traugott (1993, p. 207), the components occur side-by-side: ‘In general it can be shown that meaning change accompanies rather than follows syntactic change’ (see also Bybee et al., 1991). Others (e.g. Harris and Campbell, 1995, p. 92), suggest that semantic changes can follow from reanalysis. As far as I have been able to determine, there is some degree of truth to all three of these positions. Sometimes the semantic changes precede the morphosyntactic changes, sometimes they accompany them, and sometimes they follow them. Since the position that semantic change is the result of reanalysis seems to be the most controversial, let me give a concrete example supporting it. Consider the development of English periphrastic do from its origins as an early Middle English causative verb. Kroch et al. (1982) argue that the rise of do in questions was a direct consequence of the shift of English word order to SVO — the use of do as a dummy allowed that order to be preserved even in questions. Evidence is provided by the fact that do was first used in this capacity where the inversion of the main verb with the subject produced the most extreme violations of SVO order. It then spread to other environments. But there is no evidence that the bleaching of the meaning of do played any role in the causation of this sequence of events. Quite the contrary, it was only as do was co-opted as a question marker that it lost its causative properties2. Other reanalyses seem inextricably linked to their accompanying semantic changes. In Finnish, for example, a noun-postposition unit meaning ‘on the chest’ was (optionally) reanalyzed as a simple postposition meaning ‘next to’ (Harris and Campbell, 1995). Let us say that the original — and still possible — structure of this phrase was (1): 2 Traugott and Ko¨nig (1991, p. 190) agree that the bleaching of the meaning of do took place very late in its historical development. See Hopper and Traugott (1993, pp. 89–90) for an account of the development of do that is somewhat di€erent from that provided by Kroch et al. They argue that the semantic changes observed in grammaticalization occur in two stages — the pragmatic enrichment (metonymy) occurs very early and starts the other developments on their way. Bleaching, however, is very late. F.J. Newmeyer / Language Sciences 23 (2001) 187–229 193 What could it possibly mean to claim that the meaning of the PP ‘on the chest’ changed to ‘next to’ without an accompanying reanalysis of that PP as a postposition? Such would imply that at some stage the embedded PP consisted of a full NP followed by a postposition which somehow compositionally yielded the meaning ‘next to’. That seems quite implausible. Semantic factors may have provided the ultimate motivation for the change, bu