Introduction

We turn now to some central concerns in any discussion of language change, with focus on those that are particularly important for an understanding of grammaticalization. In particular, we attempt to answer the questions: what motivates change, what mechanisms lead to grammaticalization, what are its probable “paths” of progression through time, and what are its end results? Particular changes do not have to occur, nor do they have to go through to completion, though some degree of change is inevitable. As elsewhere in this book, therefore, we will be referring to phenomena that make change possible or facilitate it, sometimes singly, sometimes together, not to factors that are absolute or obligatory. In this chapter we consider two general mechanisms by which grammaticalization takes place: reanalysis primarily, and analogy secondarily. In Chapter 4 we will discuss speaker/hearer asymmetries and processes of meaning production and perception that motivate the operation of these mechanisms, and also some semantically motivated mechanisms including metaphor and metonymy. The unidirectionality of paths of change will be the subject of Chapters 5, 6, and 7. In Chapter 8 we will discuss grammaticalization in the context of the development of creoles.

Reanalysis and analogy have been widely recognized as significant for change in general, most especially morphosyntactic change. In reanalysis, the grammatical — syntactic and morphological — and semantic properties of forms are modified. These modifications comprise changes in interpretation, such as syntactic bracketing and meaning, but not at first change in form.

Introduction

Grammaticalization is the study of grammatical forms, however defined, viewed not as static objects but as entities undergoing change. It has had many practitioners, has been characterized in many different ways, and has occupied at various times both central and marginal positions in linguistics. In this chapter we will survey briefly the thought of some of the major figures in the early study of grammaticalization, mention some of the contemporary linguists who are interested in the subdiscipline, and briefly summarize some of the more recent developments. Other surveys of the history of grammaticalization can be found in C. Lehmann (1995 [1982]) and Heine, Claudi, and Hünnemeyer (1991a).

Earlier research on grammaticalization

The term “grammaticalization” itself was apparently coined by the French linguist Antoine Meillet, an Indo-Europeanist who at one time had been a student of Saussure. In a well-known definition, Meillet writes of “the attribution of grammatical character to an erstwhile autonomous word” (“l'attribution du caractère grammatical à un mot jadis autonome”; Meillet 1912: 131). Yet Meillet's ideas on the origins of grammatical forms have predecessors in earlier speculations that were often rooted in assumptions about the evolutionary development of human speech.

Perhaps the most sophisticated of these speculations about the origins of grammar was that proposed by the German philosopher and humanist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). In a published lecture entitled “On the genesis of grammatical forms and their influence on the evolution of ideas” (“Über das Entstehen der grammatikalischen Formen und ihren Einfluß auf die Ideenentwicklung”) given in 1822 he suggested that the grammatical structure of human languages was preceded by an evolutionary stage of language in which only concrete ideas could be expressed.

What is special about nouns?

I turn now to consideration of what sets nouns apart from verbs and adjectives. Using phrase structure and theta-role assignment to distinguish verbs from nouns and adjectives builds on relatively familiar techniques; syntacticians are accustomed to specifying the theta-grid of a lexical item and to having this grid determine the syntactic structure that the word appears in. The basic principles that regulate theta-role assignment are also very familiar. Working from this model, some generative linguists have attempted to define all of the syntactic categories in terms of their characteristic argument structures and/or the grammatical functions that they take (Jackendoff 1977; Bresnan 1982; Hale and Keyser 1993). But there is little evidence that this is the right approach. Simple nouns do not differ from adjectives in these respects: the phrase structure and theta-role assignment dynamics of John is a fool are essentially identical to those of John is foolish, for example, even though fool is a noun and foolish an adjective. As a result, we saw in the last chapter that both nouns and adjectives need a copular particle in order to be used predicatively, both tend not to take tense morphology, both need a different causativizer than verbs do, and both act like un ergative predicates. Nouns apparently differ from adjectives and verbs not in their argument structures, but along some other dimension altogether. Finding that dimension requires some theoretical inventiveness.

In the core chapters of this book, I have defended particular claims about what it is to be a noun, a verb, or an adjective. I have also argued that all natural languages have essentially the same three-way distinction among lexical categories. Grammatical systems that do not have one of these categories are perfectly imaginable. Such systems could achieve approximately the same expressive power as a three-category language by using periphrastic constructions built around the functional category that corresponds most closely to the absent lexical category. But such languages seem not to exist. In this final chapter, I step back from the details of particular languages and particular lexical categories to reflect briefly on what these results might show about the basic design of the human language capacity.

Some large-scale questions that are still to be faced are these. What exactly bears a category? Is it fundamentally roots that are categorized as nouns, verbs, and adjectives, or is it stems, or inflected words, or the minimal leaves of a syntactic tree, or the maximal X°s, or even larger phrases? For which of these linguistic units is category inherent, and for which is it derivative or even undefined? A logically similar and partially related set of questions concerns whether the category distinctions are fundamentally syntactic, semantic, or morphological in nature. One intriguing (and maddening) aspect of this topic is that whether something is a noun, verb, or adjective seems to have relevance in all three of these domains. Yet presumably the category distinctions inhere fundamentally in one domain and then project into the others; otherwise it would be a kind of coincidence that parallel categorial distinctions exist in each domain.

Throughout this book, I have assumed that adpositions (prepositions and postpositions) are not lexical categories, but rather functional categories. As such, they have more in common with determiners, pronouns, Pred, and complementizers than they do with nouns, verbs, and adjectives. It is therefore a good thing that my theory of lexical categories has no natural place for them. While this view of adpositions is far from unprecedented, it runs contrary to the more standard generative treatment, championed by Jackendoff (1977: 31–33), in which adpositions constitute a fourth lexical category, filling out the logical space of possibilities defined by the two binary-valued features +/−N and +/−V. In this appendix, I briefly outline some arguments in favor of classifying adpositions with the functional categories, focusing on evidence from incorporation patterns. I also claim that adpositions create a projection that has neither a referential index nor a theta-role. As a result, PPs do not make good arguments or good predicates, but make excellent modifiers. P can thus be thought of as an adjective-like functional category, much as determiner/pronoun is a noun-like functional category and Pred is a verb-like functional category. The properties I have discussed throughout this book as defining the lexical categories can thus be seen also to provide a partial typology of the functional categories.

Evidence that adpositions are functional

There has always been some uneasiness about including adpositions as a lexical category. The popularity of treating them as such has perhaps been caused more by the theoretical attraction of having all combinations of the features +/−N and +/−V be attested than by compelling empirical considerations.

Introduction

What is the essential property that makes verbs behave differently from nouns and adjectives in morphology and syntax? This question is perhaps the easiest place to begin, because there is an obvious starting-point in the widespread recognition that verbs are the quintessential predicates. They are inherently unsaturated expressions that hold of something else, and thus the nucleus around which sentences are typically built. Many linguists of different schools have recognized the significance of this. Among the formalists, Jackendoff (1977) partially defines verbs with the feature “+subject” (although this does not distinguish them from nouns, in his view). Among the functionalists, Croft (1991) identifies predication as the pragmatic function that provides the external motivation for the category verb. I argue for the precise version of this intuition stated in (1).

1. (1) X is a verb if and only if X is a lexical category and X has a specifier.

The discussion will unfold as follows. I begin by explaining why (1) is a plausible way of distinguishing verbs from other categories, and why it is more promising than some of the obvious alternatives (section 2.2). Next I explore (1)'s implication that predicate nouns and adjectives, unlike verbs, must be supported by a functional head I call Pred in order for the clause to have a subject (section 2.3), showing that this functional head is seen overtly in some languages (section 2.4). Even in languages where Pred is not realized phonologically – perhaps the majority – its presence can be detected by morphological tests; Pred frequently prevents categories other than verbs from combining with tense/aspect morphology (section 2.5) or causative morphemes (section 2.6), for example.

The essence of having no essence

In chapter 2, I considered what distinguishes verbs from nouns and adjectives. The difference, I claimed, was that only verbs take a specifier, a syntactic position that is normally assigned a theme or agent theta-role. This is a sharpened version of the widespread intuition that verbs are the prototypical predicates of natural language (see, for example, Croft [1991] and Bhat [1994]). In chapter 3, I turned to nouns, asking what distinguishes them from adjectives and verbs. The answer was that nouns alone have criteria of identity, which allows them to bear referential indices. This is a sharpened and generalized version of the common intuition that nouns are uniquely suited to the task of referring. Now it is time to look more closely at adjectives, not as a foil for the other categories, but in their own right. What distinctive property do adjectives have that underlies their various morphological and syntactic characteristics?

The strongest and most interesting answer to this question would be to say that there is nothing special about adjectives. They are already distinguished from verbs by not licensing a specifier, and from nouns by not having a referential index. Ideally, this should be enough to completely characterize their behavior. Such a theory would preserve an important aspect of the Chomskian insight that one needs only two binary features to distinguish three or four categories (+/−N and +/−V from Chomsky [1970], or +/−Subj and +/−Obj from Jackendoff [1977]). Any additional features would be logically superfluous and would raise questions about why there are not more categories than there are.

A theoretical lacuna

It is ironic that the first thing one learns can be the last thing one understands. The division of words into distinct categories or “parts of speech” is one of the oldest linguistic discoveries, with a continuous tradition going back at least to the Téchnē grammatikē of Dionysius Thrax (c. 100 BC) (Robins 1989: 39). Dionysius recognized that some words (ónoma, alias nouns) inflected for case, whereas others (rhēma, alias verbs) inflected for tense and person. This morphological distinction was correlated with the fact that the nouns signified “concrete or abstract entities” and the verbs signified “an activity or process performed or undergone.” The historical precedence of this linguistic insight is often recapitulated in contemporary education: often when students enter their first linguistics class, one of the few things they know about grammar is that some words are nouns, others are verbs, and others are adjectives. Linguistics classes teach them many fascinating things that go far beyond these basic category distinctions. But when those classes are all over, students often know little more about what it means to be a noun, verb, or adjective than they did at first, or indeed than Dionysius did. At least that was true of my education, and of the way that I learned to educate others.

For many years, most of what the Principles and Parameters (P&P) tradition of Generative Syntax has had to say about the lexical categories is that they are distinguished by having different values for the two binary distinctive features +/−N and +/−V in the following way (Chomsky 1970).

Scientific approaches (research traditions) and linguistic theories

In chapter 1, it was observed that typology is an empirical approach to the study of language, beginning with a cross-linguistic survey of language structure. In §1.2, and also §3.5 and §7.1, the typological approach was compared to the structuralist–generative approach to language. This book has illustrated how the typological approach analyzes a wide range of phenomena in morphosyntax and phonology. In this concluding chapter, we look again at the way in which typology is an approach to the study of language.

Philosophy of science presents a means to understand the nature of scientific theories or approaches. Philosophy of science is often invoked in linguistics in terms of falsificationism (Popper 1934/1959). Falsificationism is the doctrine that no piece of empirical evidence can prove a theory, while a single piece of evidence can falsify it. However, it has been recognized in the decades since Popper's work that acceptance or abandonment of a scientific theory is not an all-or-none affair; judgment of a theory is based not only on empirical problems (putative counterexamples) but also on conceptual problems (Quine 1951/1961; Kuhn 1962/1970; Lakatos 1970; Laudan 1977). In other words, there is no recipe for choosing a particular scientific theory, and in fact the evolution of scientific theories involves a substantial amount of interplay among parallel competing theories (Laudan 1977; Hull 1988).

This second edition of Typology and universals is almost completely rewritten from the first edition. Although the number of chapters and much of their content remains the same, many major changes have been made, largely due to the maturing of typology as an approach to language. The most important innovation is the systematic employment of the semantic map model, now widely used in typological research. Also, I have reorganized the material so that typological generalizations and their explanations are now more closely integrated.

Typology has also developed an independent institutional identity in the past decade. There is now a journal, Linguistic Typology, and an international association (the Association for Linguistic Typology [ALT]) with biennial conferences. A Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has been established in Leipzig, Germany, with a typologically oriented linguistics section under the direction of Bernard Comrie. These institutional developments also reflect a shift in the center of gravity in typology from the United States to Europe. Major typological studies have been published in the last decade or so by scholars based in Europe (including Russia, long a center of typological research). Some of this shift is reflected in this edition and in the references in the Bibliography.

This edition has benefited from the input of students in ten years of classes in typology at the University of Michigan and the University of Manchester, as well as shorter courses at the LSA Summer Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA in 1995, the Summerschool of the German Linguistics Society, Mainz, Germany in 1998, and the LOT Winterschool in Leiden, the Netherlands in 2000.