Explaining grammaticalization (the standard way)1

Since nobody knows how to draw the line between lexical expressions and grammatical devices, it is natural to suppose that, in some sense, the transition from lexicon to grammar is a gradual one. There is a continuum, it seems, bounded by purely lexical items on one end and purely grammatical items on the other, with many expressions lying somewhere between these opposites. This, at any rate, is the view that underlies the notion of grammaticalization, which by definition is a process of language change in which an expression moves away from the lexical pole and toward the grammatical pole. This type of change is quite common, but it turns out that shifts in the opposite direction, away from the grammatical pole and toward the lexical pole, are practically nonexistent. The asymmetry between grammaticalization and degrammaticalization is the topic of the following remarks. There is a more or less standard view of grammaticalization, which has recently been challenged, in this journal, by Haspelmath (1999). The purpose of this note is twofold: I want to show how Haspelmath’s criticism can be met and discuss some of the problems his own proposal runs into. One of the best-known instances of grammaticalization is ‘‘Jespersen’s cycle’’: