Degrammaticalization, exaptation and loss of inflection: Evidence from Slavonic

Recent work in grammaticalization has highlighted cases where former inflectional affixes have gained independence on an unexpected path towards clitic or full-word status. Such cases challenge the hypothesized unidirectionality of grammaticalization at the formal level (word > clitic > affix). This article considers two cases from Slavonic languages: in the first, various Slavonic languages reidentified a former conditional-mood personnumber inflection as the present tense of the perfect auxiliary ‘be’; in the second, the genitive singular -a inflection of Bulgarian masculine nouns was reidentified as a form of the definite article. In both cases, a former inflectional affix came to be identified with some other pre-existing less bound morph, allowing the languages to eliminate some inflectional category: person-number inflection on the conditional and case inflection on nouns respectively. These cases are part of general patterns of degrammaticalization in which obsolescent morphological markers are reassigned to productive functions, whether to an existing morph or to create a new morph (exaptation-adaptation). Since the new morph may be of any grammatical type, and language learners do not compare the new status of the morph with its old status, this inevitably leaves open the possibility of degrammaticalization if the new function of the morph happens to be less grammatical or more phonologically independent than its old function.