Book contents
- Uniformitarianism in Language Speciation
- Uniformitarianism in Language Speciation
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Uniformitarianism in Language Speciation
- 2 The Emergence of Creoles and Pidgins
- 3 Brokers on the Move
- 4 Why No French Creole nor Pidgin Developed in West Africa
- 5 The Ecology of Language Evolution
- 6 Another Piece of the Puzzle
- 7 Uniformitarianism and the Social Ecology of Anguilla’s Homestead Period
- 8 A Uniformitarian Lens on Creole Languages
- 9 The Evolution of Copula Systems in West African Pidgin
- 10 Determiner-Noun Fusion in Haitian Creole
- 11 Uniformitarianism and the Emergence of the Brazilian Variety of Portuguese
- 12 Recombination, Feature Pool, and Population Structure
- Language Index
- Subject Index
- Author Index
- References
12 - Recombination, Feature Pool, and Population Structure
Three Factors Bearing on “Grammaticalization”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2025
Book contents
- Uniformitarianism in Language Speciation
- Uniformitarianism in Language Speciation
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Uniformitarianism in Language Speciation
- 2 The Emergence of Creoles and Pidgins
- 3 Brokers on the Move
- 4 Why No French Creole nor Pidgin Developed in West Africa
- 5 The Ecology of Language Evolution
- 6 Another Piece of the Puzzle
- 7 Uniformitarianism and the Social Ecology of Anguilla’s Homestead Period
- 8 A Uniformitarian Lens on Creole Languages
- 9 The Evolution of Copula Systems in West African Pidgin
- 10 Determiner-Noun Fusion in Haitian Creole
- 11 Uniformitarianism and the Emergence of the Brazilian Variety of Portuguese
- 12 Recombination, Feature Pool, and Population Structure
- Language Index
- Subject Index
- Author Index
- References
Summary
The chapter argues that theories of grammaticalization as an independent unidirectional development of a lexical item into a functional item are misleading. Adopting a uniformitarian perspective, he submits that change involves three interrelated factors: The first, the process of recombination, refers to an innate human cognitive capacity which allows speaker/signer-learners (SL) to select specific linguistic features and recombine them into new syntactic variants. The second represents the feature pool of the variants to which SLs are exposed through contact; they are subject to the process of competition and selection. The third, commonly referred to as grammaticalization, has to do with population factors which may favor or hinder the spread of specific variants across a speech community.
Contrary to this approach based on universal multilingualism and contact as cornerstones of acquisition and change (Aboh 2015, 2020), classic examples of grammaticalization are particularly misleading because they aggregate different populations of different SL profiles as if they involved homogeneous monolingual or monomodal communities living in identical ecologies. Likewise, commonly used notions such as language-internal vs. contact-induced change become obsolete because they conceive of contact as the exceptional case. The author shows that language change is always the result of contact.
Information
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Uniformitarianism in Language SpeciationFrom Creolistics to Genetic Linguistics, pp. 450 - 482Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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