Rescuing traditional ( historical ) linguistics from grammaticalization theory

There is a rich history, dating back, according to Heine (2003), at least to observations in the 18th century by Condillac (1746) and Horne Tooke (1857) (first published 1786), if not earlier, associated with the study of the phenomenon of grammaticalization, i.e. how grammatical elements arise out of less (or non-) grammatical elements. 1 Still, only in the past twenty-five or so years has it attracted considerable attention among professional linguists. Indeed, what began as an interesting observation – one might think of Givon's (1971) dictum that " to-day's morphology is yesterday's syntax " as the starting point for the 'modern' era of grammaticalization studies, though Meillet (1912) and Kurylowicz (1964) are also possible benchmark studies in this regard – has turned into a 'cottage industry' of sorts, and is now to the point where it can be considered a 'movement'. Among the evidence that points towards such a 'movement' are the following indicators. First, there is a huge amount of relevant literature now, with textbooks and surveys (e. among many others) all dedicated to different aspects of the study of grammaticalization phenomena. Second, there are now many conferences devoted to aspects of grammaticalization. 2 Third, 'grammaticalization' is mentioned specifically as a separate category in that part of a recent annual report of the editor of Language enumerating the different sub-areas for submitted papers (see Aronoff 2002) and it is a subheading in Library of Congress subject