Thoughts on Grammaticalization

On the Role of Grammaticalization in Creolization

On the grammaticalization of negative polarity items

0 Introduction The phenomenon of polarity sensitivity is not, in general, very well understood. Why is it that certain words and idioms have the peculiar property of occurring only in negative, interrogative or conditional contexts? It is intuitively clear that negative polarity items (NPIs) are not arbitrarily distributed over the lexicon. A field-worker analyzing an unknown language would pro...

Grammaticalization as Optimization

According to the neogrammarians and de Saussure, all linguistic change is either sound change, analogy, or borrowing.1 Meillet (1912) identified a class of changes that don’t fit into any of these three categories. Like analogical changes, they are endogenous innovations directly affecting morphology and syntax, but unlike analogical changes, they are not based on any pre-existing patterns in t...

Semantic Change in Grammaticalization

In this paper, I want to establish semantic reanalysis as an independent mode of meaning change in language history. My point of departure will be cases of language change that have traditionally been classed as „grammaticalization“, on one hand because we will find very nice instances of semantic reanalysis particuarly in that field, and on the other hand because I think that the notion of sem...

Grammaticalization and Semantic Maps:

Semantic maps have offered linguists an appealing and empirically rooted methodology for describing recurrent structural patterns in language development and the multifunctionality of grammatical categories. Although some researchers argue that semantic maps are universal and given, others provide evidence that there are no fixed or universal maps. This paper takes the position that semantic ma...