The semantic and pragmatic underpinnings of grammaticalization paths: The progressive to imperfective shift

This paper offers an analysis of a robustly attested semantic change in which progressive markers “spontaneously” emerge in languages, become entrenched in the grammatical system, and diachronically generalize by turning into imperfective markers. The pattern is cyclic in that the generalization is often followed by a re-emergence of new progressive markers. The analysis has a semantic component that characterizes the relation between the progressive and imperfective operators as a privative semantic contrast. Its dynamic component rests on the proposal that imperfective and progressive sentences crucially distinguish between two kinds of inquiries: phenomenal and structural inquiries (Goldsmith & Woisetschlaeger 1982). The trajectory — consisting of the recruitment of a progressive form, its categorical use in phenomenal inquiries, and its generalization to imperfective meaning — is modeled within the framework of Evolutionary Game Theory. The diachronic path is reconstructed as a cyclic pattern in which alternative communication strategies rise and fall in dominance over time due to the differences in communicative success and learnability associated with them. * For helpful discussion about content, I thank David Beaver, Cleo Condoravdi, Paul Kiparsky, Sven Lauer, Mokshay Madiman, Maria Piñango, Judith Tonhauser, and the Yale Semantics Reading Group. I also thank audiences at Sinn und Bedeutung 2014, colloquia at UT Austin, Stanford, University of Chicago, and Cornell for comments on previous versions of the material. I am grateful for the comments and criticism of three S&P reviewers, which improved the paper greatly. I thank very much the S&P editor in charge, Michael Franke, whose comments, questions, advice, and generosity in sharing technical expertise were critical in revising the paper. Prashanth Gandhiraj helped me develop the simulations presented in this paper and I thank him for the assistance. This paper began when I was Donald D. Harrington Fellow hosted by the Department of Linguistics at UT Austin, and I am grateful to them for fellowship support. The research presented here is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. INSPIRE–1248100. ©2015 Ashwini Deo This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).