Hopper & Trautgott Chapter 6

GRAMMATICALIZATION

Handout for LING 519/SARS 519

  1. This chapter deals with clause-internal changes, usu. referred to as Morphologization
    2. Examples from French and Buryat Mongolian:
      This is very common; can be seen in many languages that have long histories:
     
  2. Other kinds of clitics: the Dravidian sentential clitics:
  3. Sentential clitics can be sentence-final, or clause-final; can function as conjunctions (Drav. -u(m), Latin que ) In some lgs. they are "pro-clitic" or S-initial; others enclitic and final.

    4.  
  4. French examples of cliticized pronouns vs. full, spelled-out forms: older, cliticized forms ( il le lui donne or "X Y Z-to gives") is from the older Latin OV order; the newer order is VO order: "X gives the Y to Z." 'The baker gives the bread to thegirl.'

    5.  
  5. What about word-order in all of this? Can we assume that word order changes of the French type show an older pattern, or are there some typological or structural reasons why order comes out the way it does?

    6.  
  6. Bybee's Relevance hierarchy.

    7. Bybee proposes that semantic relevance is a hierarchy, and that some things will be more relevant, and therefore more closely bound (to the stem) than others, and there will be a hierarchical order.
     

  7. Semantic relevance not same as pragmatic relevance (which has motivation for meaning change.) Prag. rel. has to do with relevance to participants in communication.

    8.  
  8. Examples:

    1. Causation: relevant, directly affects state or event of being

      2.  
    2. Causatives are often expressed derivationally e.g. by a causative morpheme:

      3.  
    3. PNG, on the other hand, tends to be less fused, less bound because it's redundent, less relevant, doesn't express aspects of the situation, nor make distinctions in arguments of the verb.

      4.  
  9. Phonological Expressions of Morphologization.

  10. New Autonomous forms:
  11. Argument-Structure Marking, Functional-semantic Hierarchies; Morphological Generalization


    12. Argument-structure marking has to do with such things as marking 

    We also can see here certain hierarchies at work, esp. the animacy hierarchy and the definiteness hierarchy. 

  12. Loss of various markings, including whole paradigms.

    Examples of the French passé simple and the German preterit tenses; now used only in Literary dialects. Other examples from Tamil: dative-case marking on certain time expressions (and points of the compass, see below):

    LT Noun Dative ST form Ablative form
    naaLai + kku (ST) naaLekki naaLekki+lerundu
    day+acc. dative 'tomorrow' 'from tomorrow'

    An originally accusative-marked N has dative-case added, then ablative added to the defunct dative, instead of to the older naaLai (altho some dialects have naaLelerundu 'from tomorrow'). Relics of certain cases are found in English (to-day? to-morrow?), German, etc. Known as Demorphologization. can lead to strange phonotactics, and speakers may try to compensate by restoring something, a.k.a. phonological strengthening or regrammaticalization , e.g. demonstratives become definite articles.

    Another Example: S. Dravidian -ee "emphatic" in locative expressions:

    Literary Tamil
    Locatives     		Gloss Spoken Tamil
    Locatives
    viiTT-il in the house viiTTule
    meel on top meele
    kiiR below kiiRe
    anku there ange
    vaDakku (to the) north vaDakke
    meerku (to the) west meekke
    terku (to the) south tekke
    kiRakku (to the) east keRakke
    veLi outside veLiye

    When the LT and ST forms are compared, the ST forms appear with a final -e(e) which traditional grammarians analyze as the "emphatic particle" and simply state that ST locatives all have to appear with this final emphatic. In fact, however, if emphasis is needed, an additional e(e) has to be added: ange-y-ee "right there" etc. What has happened is that the emphatic e(e) has been incorporated into the locative, and has in some sense become the marker of locative, since it is the common feature of all the ST forms above, whether explicitly marked with le or not, as in "semantically locative" forms (most of the above: postpositions, points of the compass, etc.).

    Note also how the points of the compass are marked with a now redundant dative marker ( -ku ). The emphatic has now been fused with the locative, and bracketing between it and the locative is gone. The points of the compass are, in the case of 'east' and 'west' built upon and incorporate the locational postpositions meel 'up' and kiiR 'down' (since the geography of Tamilnadu is such that west is 'uphill' and east is 'downhill.') What was a Noun +Dative + Emphatic is now just an unmarked 'semantically locative noun.'


    haroldfs@ccat.sas.upenn.edu, last modified 2/18/05.