Jan Noordegraaf On Sweet on Horne

In an article published in a recent issue of the Bulletin, Therese Lindström showed that Henry Sweet (1845-1912) makes an interesting case for those who are interested in the history of the treatment of ‘grammaticalisation’ in Britain. As it appears, the distinguished name giver of our Society made a distinction between ‘full words’ and ‘form words’, i.e., between content words and function words, respectively. Lindström (2003: 11) rightly observed that “[s]everal times Sweet mentions that autonomous words can develop into function words – and he claims that this was a generally acknowledged process of change at the end of the nineteenth century, in other words taking no credit for having discovered this himself but instead emphasising that it is generally accepted – a comment which is important for us today in the study of grammaticalisation”. To the interested reader who might wish to know when this concept was first introduced into linguistics, I would like to point to some data which could be taken into consideration when writing the history of the phenomenon. When expatiating on the subject in his History of Language (1900) Sweet made a historiographical remark which I will quote in full: