Cognitive linguistics seminar
Speaker: Nadine Dietrich (University of Edinburgh)
Title: The seamlessness of grammaticalization
Abstract: Though grammaticalization has often been assumed to be a gradual process (Bybee 2015: 136; Croft 2010: 2f.; Hopper and Traugott 2003: 46f.), this gradualness hypothesis has equally often been challenged by those who observe that some of the main processes in grammaticalization such as reanalysis are by definition abrupt (Detges and Waltereit 2002: 152; Nørgård-Sørensen and Heltoft 2015: 267ff.). Some approaches accommodate this criticism by defining reanalysis as a succession of micro-steps that are in themselves abrupt but create the illusion of gradualness (Hopper and Traugott 2003; Traugott and Trousdale 2013: 74f.). More radically usage-based approaches see reanalysis i.e. the mechanism that brings about new structures as epiphenomenal to other processes such analogy, frequency effects and prototype effect, which do proceed gradually (De Smet 2009, 2014; Bybee 2006; Coussé 2018). In my talk, I will draw on this latter line of argumentation and formulate an even stronger argument: that grammaticalization is not only gradual, but seamless: Seamlessness differs from gradualness as it does not postulate discrete steps but seamless transitions: It assumes a strong functional and formal overlap between the earlier version of a grammaticalizing construction and its successor. Seamlessness implies further theoretical commitments in terms of the motivation for grammaticalization: Grammaticalization is assumed to be so seamless that it goes unnoticed in the speech community, which is at odds with accounts that argue that extravagance or expressivity are the cause for language change (Detges and Waltereit 2002; Haspelmath 1999, 2000; Petré 2016). Evidence for this hypothesis will be presented by drawing on existing studies as well on a corpus analysis I carried out for the development of be going to between 1550 and 1850 observing changes in semantic prototypes and concomitant syntactic and distributional changes.
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Cognitive linguistics seminar
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