Theoretical and Empirical Issues in Grammaticalization (Typological Studies in Language)

Theoretical and Empirical Issues in Grammaticalization

Typological Studies in Language (TSL) A companion series to the journal Studies in Language. Volumes in this series are functionally and typologically oriented, covering specific topics in language by collecting together data from a wide variety of languages and language typologies.

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Volume 77 Theoretical and Empirical Issues in Grammaticalization Edited by Elena Seoane and María José López-Couso

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Theoretical and Empirical Issues in Grammaticalization Edited by

Elena Seoane María José López-Couso University of Santiago de Compostela

In collaboration with

Teresa Fanego

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

8

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Theoretical and empirical issues in grammaticalization / edited by Elena Seoane and María José López-Couso.        p. cm. (Typological Studies in Language, issn 0167-7373 ; v. 77) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. 1.  Grammar, Comparative and general--Grammaticalization.  I. Seoane, Elena. II. LópezCouso, María José. P299.G73T49    2008 415--dc22 2008009809 isbn 978 90 272 2989 2 (Hb; alk. paper) – isbn 978 90 272 2991 5 (set : alk. paper)

© 2008 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

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Table of contents

Address list Preface Introduction: Further reflections on grammaticalization Elena Seoane and María José López-Couso

vii ix 1

Swedish må and the (de)grammaticalization debate Peter Andersson

15

“Where grammar and lexis meet”: Composite predicates in English Laurel J. Brinton

33

On the grammaticalization and (inter)subjectivity of evidential (semi-)auxiliaries in Spanish Bert Cornillie Semantic, syntactic and constructional restrictions in the diachronic rise of modal particles in German: A corpus-based study on the formation of a grammaticalization channel Gabriele Diewald and Gisella Ferraresi Double indirect object marking in Spanish and Italian Andreas Dufter and Elisabeth Stark The emergence of particle clusters in Dutch: Grammaticalization under adverse conditions Jack Hoeksema

55

77 111

131

Antigrammaticalization, antimorphologization and the case of Tura Dmitry Idiatov

151

Can grammaticalization be parameterized? Jurgen Klausenburger

171

Possessive adjectives as a source of intensifiers Ekkehard König and Letizia Vezzosi

183

Information structure and grammaticalization Christian Lehmann

207

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Theoretical and Empirical Issues in Grammaticalization

From speech-situation evocation to hypotaxis: The case of Latin quamvis ‘although’ Torsten Leuschner

231

Grammaticalization waves. The Russian subjunctive mood and person/number marking Jens Nørgård-Sørensen

253

Discourse frequency and the collapse of the adposition vs. affix distinction in Lakota Regina Pustet

269

On the grammaticalization of the Spanish expression puede que María José Rodríguez Espiñeira and Belén López Meirama On the history and present behaviour of subordinating that with adverbial conjunctions in English Günter Rohdenburg

293

315

The regrammaticalization of linking elements in German Heide Wegener

333

Author index

357

Language index

361

Subject index

363

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Address list

Peter Andersson Institutionen för svenska språket Göteborgs Universitet Renströmsgatan 6 Box 200, 405 30 Göteborg, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] Laurel J. Brinton Department of English The University of British Columbia 397-1873 East Mall Vancouver, B.C. V6T 1Z1, Canada e-mail: [email protected] Bert Cornillie Departement Linguïstiek Faculteit Letteren Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Blijde Inkomststraat 21 B-3000 Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] Gabriele Diewald Germanistische und Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft Deutsches Seminar (Germanistik) Leibniz Universität Hannover Königsworther Platz 1 D-30167 Hannover, Germany e-mail: gabriele.diewald@germanistik. uni-hannover.de Andreas Dufter Institut für Romanische Philologie Fakultät für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Ludwigstrasse 25 D-80539 München, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

Gisella Ferraresi Institut für deutsche Sprache und Literatur II Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Grüneburgplatz 1 D-60629 Frankfurt a.M., Germany e-mail: [email protected] Jack Hoeksema Department of Dutch Faculty of Letters University of Groningen P.O. Box 716 9700 AS Groningen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] Dmitry Idiatov Departement Taalkunde Universiteit Antwerpen Universiteitsplein 1-A B-2610 Wilrijk Antwerpen, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] Jurgen Klausenburger Department of Linguistics University of Washington A210 Padelford Hall Seattle, WA 98195-4340, USA e-mail: [email protected] Ekkehard König Fachbereich Philosophie und Geisteswissenschaften Institut für Englische Philologie Freie Universität Berlin Gosslerstrasse 2-4 D-14195 Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

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Christian Lehmann Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft Philosophische Fakultät Universität Erfurt Postf. 900221 D-99105 Erfurt, Germany e-mail: [email protected] Torsten Leuschner Vakgroep Duits – Taalkunde Universiteit Gent Blandijnberg 2 B-9000 Gent, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] María José López-Couso Department of English University of Santiago de Compostela Avda. de Castelao s/n E-15782 Santiago de Compostela, Spain e-mail: [email protected] Belén López Meirama Departamento de Lengua Española University of Santiago de Compostela Avda. de Castelao s/n E-15782 Santiago de Compostela, Spain e-mail: [email protected] Jens Nørgård-Sørensen Department of Cross Cultural and Regional Studies Faculty of Humanities University of Copenhagen Snorresgade 17-19 DK-2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] Regina Pustet Institut für Deutsche Philologie Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Schellingstrasse 3 Rückgebäude D-80799 München, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

María José Rodríguez Espiñeira Departamento de Lengua Española University of Santiago de Compostela Avda. de Castelao s/n E-15782 Santiago de Compostela, Spain e-mail: [email protected] Günter Rohdenburg Uhlandstrasse 4 D-48161 Münster-Roxel, Germany e-mail: [email protected] Elena Seoane Department of English University of Santiago de Compostela Avda. de Castelao s/n E-15782 Santiago de Compostela, Spain e-mail: [email protected] Elisabeth Stark Romanisches Seminar Universität Zürich Zürichbergstrasse 8 CH-8032 Zürich, Switzerland email: [email protected] Letizia Vezzosi Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Antiche, Moderne e Comparate Università degli Studi di Perugia Via degli Offici 14 I-06123 Perugia, Italy email: [email protected] Heide Wegener Institut für Germanistik Postfach 60 15 53 Universität Potsdam D-14415 Potsdam, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

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Preface

This book and its companion volume (Rethinking grammaticalization: New perspectives, TSL 76) offer a representative sample of the contributions presented at the Third International Conference New Reflections on Grammaticalization (NRG3), held at the University of Santiago de Compostela, 17–20 July 2005. This was the third in a series of conferences which began in 1999 with the symposium organized by Ilse Wischer at the University of Potsdam, followed by a second conference organized by Olga Fischer, Muriel Norde and Harry Perridon at the University of Amsterdam in 2002. The great success of these meetings and the growing interest in grammaticalization phenomena over the past two decades prompted us to invite our colleagues in the field to follow the Pilgrims’ Way to Santiago de Compostela in 2005 to share some further reflections on grammaticalization. Attendance at the conference was close to 200, and the papers delivered (after a rigorous selection procedure by the NRG3 scientific committee) came to 120, proving that interest in grammaticalization remains unabated. The distinguished panel of plenary speakers featured William Croft (then of the University of Manchester, now at the University of New Mexico), Zygmunt Frajzyngier (University of Colorado), Anna Giacalone Ramat (University of Pavia), Paul Kiparsky (Stanford University) and Tania Kuteva (University of Dusseldorf). Out of the events organized to run concurrently with the main programme, special mention should be made of the five very productive conference workshops, whose titles are strongly suggestive of the wide range of interesting topics covered there: Reconstructing grammaticalization and the definition of grammar, Grammaticalization and language contact, English intensifiers and grammaticalization, Prototypes and grammaticalization – Grammaticalization as prototype? and The grammaticalization of nominalizers – East Asian perspectives. A great many people have assisted us in organizing the conference and editing this book and its companion. First and foremost, though, we owe a special debt of gratitude to the leader of our research group, Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization, Professor Teresa Fanego, whose invaluable guidance and support was unfailing throughout the whole process. Special thanks are also due to the two other core members of the group, Belén Méndez-Naya and Paloma NúñezPertejo; without their hard work, neither the conference nor these volumes would have been possible. To all three of you, our most heartfelt thanks.

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Preface

We would like to express our gratitude to all the participants for helping to make the conference such a success and to all the authors for their cooperation in the edition of the two volumes. We are also greatly indebted to the following colleagues who acted as anonymous external reviewers, for their insightful suggestions for improvements: Anders Ahlqvist, Minoji Akimoto, Henning Andersen, Umberto Ansaldo, John Ole Askedal, Joan Beal, Balthasar Bickel, Walter Bisang, David Bradley, Laurel J. Brinton, Concepción Company Company, Bert Cornillie, Sonia Cristofaro, William Croft, Hubert Cuyckens, Östen Dahl, Nicole Delbecque, Hans den Besten, Holger Diessel, Gabriele Diewald, Nina R. Dobrushina, Teresa Fanego, Gisella Ferraresi, Zygmunt Frajzyngier, Victor A. Friedman, Anna Giacalone Ramat, Tom Güldemann, Florian Haas, Jan Heegard, Paulette M. Hopple, Daniel Jacob, Brian D. Joseph, Johannes Kabatek, Torodd Kinn, Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Bernd Kortmann, Tania Kuteva, Ursula Lenker, Torsten Leuschner, Diana M. Lewis, Belén Méndez-Naya, Marianne Mithun, Michael Noonan, Muriel Norde, Hella Olbertz, Harry Perridon, Paolo Ramat, Matti Rissanen, Anette Rosenbach, Roula Svorou, Johan van der Auwera, Victoria Vázquez-Rozas and Thora Vinther. Special thanks are due to all the student helpers (over twenty of them!) who took care of every little detail before and during the conference. The help of our highly efficient editorial assistants, Pilar Castillo, Lidia Gómez and Iria Fernández, and that of several becarios de colaboración have been crucial in regard to various aspects of the edition of the volumes. Thanks are also due to the editorial staff of John Benjamins, in particular Kees Vaes, and the general editor of the TSL series, Michael Noonan, for their cooperation. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Autonomous Government of Galicia (grants nos. PGIDIT05PXIC20401PN and 2006/XA-133) and the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and the European Regional Development Fund (grants nos. HUM2004-00940 and HUM2007-60706). Santiago de Compostela, September 2007 Elena Seoane María José López-Couso

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Introduction Further reflections on grammaticalization Elena Seoane and María José López-Couso University of Santiago de Compostela

This book is a companion to Rethinking grammaticalization: New perspectives, also edited by María José López-Couso and Elena Seoane (TSL 76). The two volumes together offer a representative sample of the papers presented at the New Reflections on Grammaticalization 3 conference, held in Santiago de Compostela in 2005, and investigate the most relevant topics pertaining to grammaticalization studies today. The title of the present volume, Theoretical and empirical issues in grammaticalization, highlights the broad-ranging nature of the contributions it comprises and the fact that they all combine theoretical, empirical and/or methodological questions. Theoretical approaches to grammaticalization take centre stage in the offerings of Lehmann, Klausenburger, Brinton and Idiatov. In his contribution, Christian Lehmann examines the complex interplay between information structure and grammaticalization as one of mutual dependency. Information structure, he argues, is coded through existing grammatical constructions, such as presentational, identificational and anaphoric structures, and these are subject to grammaticalization the same as any grammatical construction. He illustrates his claim with a detailed analysis of the incipient grammaticalization of contrastive-focus cleft sentences and presentational cleft constructions in French. Information structure, furthermore, predetermines the course of grammaticalization at various syntactic levels between the complex sentence and the clause, so that any construction serving as the input to a grammaticalization path is conditioned by information structure. Thus, if a given construction is commonly associated with a certain information structure, its topical or presupposed components are liable to become subordinate and reduced, as Lehmann demonstrates with an analysis of the evolution of relative clauses in Ancient Greek. More surprisingly, he reveals that even the focalized elements of a construction can undergo grammaticalization, as shown in

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the evolution of pronominal interrogatives in French and the focussed progressive in Colonial Yucatec Maya. Also from a theoretical perspective, Jurgen Klausenburger’s “Can grammaticalization be parameterized?” aims at comparing and contrasting two radically different approaches to grammaticalization: a generative approach and a functional one. He first gives a critical account of Roberts and Roussou’s (2003) analysis of the evolution of the Romance future (Fr chanterai, Sp cantaré, It canterò), a classic case study in grammaticalization, and then compares their formal explanation in terms of parametric change with his own account of this grammaticalization process (Klausenburger 2000), which is an updated version of the synthesis/analysis cycle enhanced by the notion of the invisible hand (Keller 1994). Under Roberts and Roussou’s approach, he explains, three parameter changes are involved in the evolution of the future in Romance: (i) the development of Latin habere as a future/modal auxiliary; (ii) the change of habere into an element triggering head movement; and (iii) the evolution of habere into a pure affix (V triggering raised to a functional position). Their analysis runs into trouble when they attempt to account for the directedness (or non-randomness) of grammaticalization within a framework that proceeds from the assumption of random syntactic change; to resolve this conflict, they speculate on the existence of basins of attraction in parameter space. Klausenburger’s strongest criticism of Roberts and Roussou’s approach is that the introduction of the basins of attraction idea is merely a convenient deus ex machina to justify their equation of grammaticalization with parameter change. By contrast, his own alternative thesis, using the notion of the invisible hand, is presented as more transparent and economical, independent of any external explanatory principle. In his view, the change from a periphrastic structure like cantare habeo into the aforementioned inflected forms derives from the “unintended and even paradoxical consequence of efforts at effective communication.” The paradox is that the new forms are themselves doomed to become inefficient compared with their analytic source and are therefore destined ultimately to be replaced by new periphrases. It is what provokes, in the case of Spanish and French, the emergence of a new future constellation, namely the ‘go’-future (Fr je vais chanter, Sp voy a cantar). Laurel Brinton’s “‘Where grammar and lexis meet:’ Composite predicates in English” is another paper with a strong theoretical component and represents an important addition to the debate over the relationship between grammaticalization and lexicalization as complementary, rather than opposing, diachronic processes of language change. The author looks at composite predicates in English of the types ‘light verb (+ article) + deverbal noun’ (e.g. give an answer, take a walk) and ‘verb (+ article) + deverbal noun + preposition’ (e.g. put the blame on, pay attention to). Such combinations have been treated alternately as cases of lexicalization (cf. Claridge 2000) or of grammaticalization. According to Brinton

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Introduction

and Akimoto (1999), for example, certain aspects of the development of composite predicates, such as the decategorialization of the noun or the loss of syntactic variability of the combination, among others, make them close to standard cases of grammaticalization. Yet for others (cf. Quirk et al. 1985) these phrasal combinations rest at some intermediate point between grammar and lexis. Bearing in mind the definitions of grammaticalization and lexicalization proposed in Brinton and Traugott (2005), and using data from various sources on the historical development of composite predicates from Old English up to the present day, Brinton concludes that composite predicates do not form a unified class; on the contrary, they show strong indications of the existence of a gradient between lexicality and grammaticality. Thus, for example, some of these complex predicate types (e.g. lose sight of, cast doubt on) exhibit certain features characteristic of lexicalization (fossilization, loss of compositionality, lack of productivity) and should therefore be treated as lexicalized forms. By contrast, other composite predicates, especially those formed with the light verbs make, take, give, have and do (e.g. take a look at or make a decision), should be considered instances of grammaticalization rather than of lexicalization. Arguments which support this view include, among others, the semantic generality of the input verbs found in such combinations and the fact that composite predicates with light verbs are highly productive and tend to acquire an aspectual function while their meaning remains relatively transparent. Another topic that found favour at NRG3 was unidirectionality, still one of the hottest issues in grammaticalization studies. As is well known, the unidirectional nature of grammaticalization has been challenged by many (e.g. Newmeyer 1998, 2001; Lass 2000; Campbell 2001; Joseph 2001), but it is nevertheless widely considered one of its basic tenets (Haspelmath 2004). A general discussion of the matter of unidirectionality provides the starting point for Dmitry Idiatov’s paper, “Antigrammaticalization, antimorphologization and the case of Tura,” which then proceeds to challenge some of the key concepts associated with grammaticalization. He raises the critical question of what it actually means to be more or less grammatical and makes the interesting statement that affixes are not necessarily more grammatical in terms of their function than free words are. This leads him to call for a separation between morphologization and grammaticalization, two notions which most scholars have traditionally lumped together. Stemming from these insightful reflections, there follows a detailed examination of the concepts of degrammaticalization, antigrammaticalization and grammaticalization as they are currently used and also of that of grammatical meaning. Idiatov reviews these concepts and proposes a more restrictive definition for each of them. Thus, for example, he defines grammatical meaning via the notion of obligatoriness: a meaning is grammatical in a given language if speakers cannot choose to leave it unexpressed. The definition of grammaticalization in terms of grammatical meaning excludes from its scope the development of derivational affixes, which, for

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him, would be an example of morphologization. In other words, Idiatov would restrict the term grammaticalization to the development of content items into function items, and consider any subsequent changes (e.g. cliticization) not to be part of grammaticalization proper, an idea already mooted in Detges and Waltereit (2002). Antigrammaticalization, as the reverse of grammaticalization, would then refer to the change whereby grammatical linguistic signs come in certain linguistic contexts to encode non-grammatical meanings. On the basis of this definition, the few alleged examples of antigrammaticalization discussed in Haspelmath (2004) qualify only as instances of antimorphologization or decrease in morphological bonding. Finally, Idiatov illustrates this process with new data from the Eastern Mande language Tura, in which a verbal derivational suffix meaning ‘somewhere, anywhere’ becomes an autonomous word. A final question must inevitably be raised here: if the alleged cases of antigrammaticalization spotted so far are instantiations of antimorphologization, is antigrammaticalization, as Idiatov conceives of it, actually possible? His answer is clear: there is nothing to preclude antigrammaticalization and it probably does exist, but only as the result of chance (reanalysis, obsolescence), not as a linguistic tendency. Unidirectionality is also the central theme in the paper by Peter Andersson (“Swedish må and the (de)grammaticalization debate”), who believes that the frequent disagreements over the unidirectional nature of grammaticalization often derive from distinct interpretations of sometimes rather scanty data. He examines a case in point, namely the Swedish modal verb må, one of the examples of alleged degrammaticalization where a lexical meaning ‘feel’ is claimed to have developed from a modal meaning (cf. van der Auwera and Plungian 1998; Lehmann 2004; Traugott 2004). Andersson presents a detailed study of the historical development of the verb and, using illuminating data from Old Swedish, argues convincingly that the lexical meaning ‘feel’ of må did not develop from a modal meaning ‘can, may’ but, instead, directly from its original lexical meaning ‘have power, be strong,’ a meaning which can be found in the earliest sources alongside its more abstract, modal one. The development ‘have power, be strong’ > ‘feel’ is a well-attested type of semantic change and grammaticalization, while the change from modal ‘can’ to lexical ‘feel’ is typologically unusual and is not to be found in Swedish. Andersson concludes that Swedish må does not, therefore, represent a counterexample to the unidirectionality hypothesis, thus confirming a suspicion already voiced by Haspelmath (2004: 39). As with Brinton’s paper, discussed above, the contributions by König and Vezzosi and by Rohdenburg also testify to the ongoing fascination with grammaticalization in the history of English. In “Possessive adjectives as a source of intensifiers,” Ekkehard König and Letizia Vezzosi focus on the historical development of Old English agen, past participle of agan ‘possess,’ into Present-day English own, a development which exhibits some of the parameters identified in the lit-

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Introduction

erature as characteristic of grammaticalization, in particular semantic bleaching, decategorization and increase in pragmatic and syntactic scope (cf. Traugott and Heine 1991; Tabor and Traugott 1998; Hopper and Traugott 2003). In their diachronic account, König and Vezzosi provide conclusive data to show that agen had a specific semantic content encoding the core notion of possession which was extended to express all types of possession during the Middle and Early Modern English periods. At the same time, its distribution was gradually restricted to a preceding possessive pronoun or phrase (as in my own car) and concomitant focal stress. Synchronically, own is analysed as an attributive intensifier, roughly equivalent to the adjunct X-self ; alternative synchronic analyses are also explored in detail (for example, that which regards own as an anaphor in the sense of Binding Theory) but rejected in view of clear counter-evidence. In their concluding remarks, the authors make the interesting observation that analogous developments are attested in other European languages (e.g. German eigen, Italian proprio, Finnish oma) and further afield (e.g. Khoisan languages), which seems to suggest that there is a universal tendency to develop prenominal intensifiers distinct from their adnominal counterparts out of lexical stems expressing possession. The paper ends by providing a number of arguments to support this important hypothesis. Inspired by Joan Beal’s (1988) article “Goodbye to all ‘that’?,” Günter Rohdenburg’s contribution (“On the history and present behaviour of subordinating that with adverbial conjunctions in English”) offers interesting insights into the grammaticalization of adverbial connectives in English, more specifically into the history of the particle that as a marker of subordination. Making use of a wide range of electronic corpora, both historical and present-day, the paper submits a number of individual subordinators to detailed quantitative analysis. Most of the conjunctions examined by Rohdenburg (e.g. because, in case, assuming) confirm the unidirectional three-stage developmental scenario depicted by Beal for adverbial conjunctions since Middle English times: (i) less grammatical item involving obligatory that as a signal of subordination, (ii) optional and decreasing use of that, and (iii) firmly established grammatical item dispensing with the subordinating particle that altogether. However, the paper also provides empirical evidence that, with various forms, such as seeing, notwithstanding or by reason, the tendency to drop the subordination marker has been reversed to varying extents. Rohdenburg’s data show that with some of these connectives the presence of that has become virtually obligatory again in certain varieties of Present-day English, a process which he regards as a case of degrammaticalization. Interestingly, the behaviour of the conjunctions which have undergone such a process of degrammaticalization suggests that the increase in the use of that is paralleled by a decline of such forms as subordinating conjunctions. Moreover, in addition to the entrenchment factor discussed by Beal (1988), the article also draws attention to a range of other determinants of variation which may play a role in the

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distribution of the particle that as a marker of subordination in the case of both long-established conjunctions and more recent incorporations to the inventory of adverbial connectives. Some of the main factors affecting the selection of subordinating that include: stylistic considerations, with that being more frequent in formal texts; the Complexity Principle, whereby more explicit grammatical options tend to correlate with greater cognitive complexity; and the horror aequi Principle, which predicts the avoidance of the repetition of identical or near-identical and adjacent or near-adjacent grammatical forms. Another contribution on the grammaticalization of subordinating conjunctions, this time in Latin, is Torsten Leuschner’s “From speech-situation evocation to hypotaxis: The case of Latin quamvis ‘although’.” The author discusses a wellknown process of grammaticalization which leads from the Latin relative phrase quam vis (literally ‘as (much as) you want’), to an adverbial free-choice quantifier quamvis ‘however,’ used to modify adjectives and adverbs, and, finally, to a concessive subordinator quamvis ‘although.’ Drawing on data from Schaffner (1954) and Touranier (1994), he shows that, first, the adverb quamvis emerges as part of the grammaticalization of indefinite pronouns in -vis (e.g. quidvis ‘anything,’ quivis ‘anyone’) and, then, paratactic sequences in discourse are reanalysed as complex sentences, with quamvis being grammaticalized as a subordinator. This process of grammaticalization illustrates the tendency of subordinators to be renovated constantly, a tendency affecting the inventory of concessive connectives in particular. The latter are normally recruited from functional domains which are typically stable over time and quite small in number, one of them being expressions of free-choice quantification (cf. Traugott 1985; König 1988), as in the case of quamvis. Leuschner devotes special attention to the following aspects of the grammaticalization process: firstly, the diachronic relationship of concessivity and concessive conditionality; secondly, phenomena of layering in the Latin inventory of concessive subordinators; and, thirdly, the role of speech-situation evocation in creating a semantic-pragmatic bond between clauses which leads eventually to the grammaticalization of hypotaxis. Continuing in this vein, the papers by Cornillie, Rodríguez Espiñeira and López Meirama, and Dufter and Stark offer three further studies on grammaticalization phenomena in Romance. Bert Cornillie’s “On the grammaticalization and (inter)subjectivity of evidential (semi-)auxiliaries in Spanish” addresses two widely debated notions in grammaticalization studies: subjectification and intersubjectification. The former has been defined as the “process whereby meanings become increasingly based in the speaker’s subjective belief state, or attitude toward what is said” (Traugott 1989: 31), while the latter refers to the process whereby a grammaticalized form increasingly conveys the explicit expression of the speaker’s attention to the ‘self ’ of the addressee in both an epistemic and a social sense (cf. Traugott 2003: 128). Traugott and Dasher (2002) and Traugott

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Introduction

(2003) suggest a unidirectional shift from subjectivity to intersubjectivity, along the lines of the unidirectional cline of grammaticalization. In his paper on the Spanish evidential semi-auxiliaries parecer ‘seem’ and resultar ‘turn out to,’ Cornillie makes the case against such a claim, proposing instead an intersubjectivity > subjectivity shift. He shows that in the older and less grammaticalized evidential constructions parecer que (‘seem that’) and resultar que (‘turn out that’), the reference to knowledge is based on shared evidence, interpreted as an example of intersubjectivity (cf. Nuyts 2001: 34). By contrast, in the more grammaticalized epistemic constructions parecer + infinitive and resultar + infinitive, the source of knowledge is a kind of inference which does not take into account the addressee, allowing for a subjective reading exclusively. This shift from intersubjectivity to subjectivity is in keeping with that reported in Traugott and Dasher (2002) for other modals, such as English ought to, and leads the author to suggest that “deontic, epistemic and evidential modals may resist the unidirectionality of the subjectivity–intersubjectivity cline.” Cornillie leaves open the question of why intersubjectification applies to grammaticalized forms with a prominent discourse function (e.g. parenthetical constructions such as I promise you; cf. Traugott and Dasher 2002: 205–209), but not to other grammaticalized forms which convey attitudinal qualifications such as evidentiality and epistemic modality. Grammaticalized verbal forms in Spanish are also the focus of María José Rodríguez Espiñeira and Belén López Meirama’s “On the grammaticalization of the Spanish expression puede que,” in which they offer a historical analysis of the expression puede que (literally ‘it may be that’), as in Puede que llueva ‘It may rain.’ Scholars have so far failed to reach any agreement as regards the interpretation of this construction, which has been variously analysed as (i) a sequence involving an impersonal full verb (poder) belonging to the semantic and syntactic group of parecer (‘look, seem’), which behaves as a monovalent predicate taking a propositional argument, the que- (‘that-’) clause (Hernanz 1999); (ii) as a grammaticalized segment which behaves as an adverb equivalent to quizá(s), tal vez (‘maybe, perhaps’) followed by a clause (Gómez Torrego 1999); and (iii) as a periphrastic adverb (puede que) followed by a verbal form (Olbertz 1998). In order to disentangle this problem of analysis, Rodríguez Espiñeira and López Meirama set out to investigate the diachronic origin of the construction. Drawing on empirical evidence from historical Spanish, they test the hypothesis put forward in the etymological dictionary by Corominas and Pascual (1981), according to which puede que developed from the combination puede ser que (‘it may be that’). They demonstrate convincingly that the evolution of the source structure puede ser que into its derived unit puede que exhibits syntactic reduction and semantic specialization, with the new structure becoming restricted to the context of subjective epistemic possibility, which they regard as expressing an increase in subjectivity. The shift from puede ser que to puede que, therefore, is a good example of subjectification

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with limited grammaticalization, since puede que has not become an autonomous unit like the modal adverb quizá(s) nor has its reduced form pue que (documented only in rural or popular Spanish) been standardized. According to the authors, though, the reason why puede que has not gone all the way down the grammaticalization cline is that it faces strong competition from a wide range of adverbial items which express a similar meaning in Spanish, such as quizá(s), tal vez and posiblemente. The last paper dealing with grammaticalization processes in Romance is Andreas Dufter and Elisabeth Stark’s “Double indirect object marking in Spanish and Italian,” which marks an important addition to comparative syntax studies in Romance languages. The authors provide a corpus-based analysis of indirect object marking in Spanish and Italian, two languages where indirect objects can be coded either through minimal marking, i.e. by a clitic alone (e.g. Sp me gusta, It mi piace), or by means of a prepositional phrase with the case-marking preposition a, sometimes in combination with a co-indexed clitic pronoun (e.g. Sp me gusta a mí, It a me mi piace). Taking a set of five high-frequency verbs which normally occur with recipient or experiencer indirect objects, in the first part of the article the authors assess the relevance of some potential determinants of variation to the selection of clitic doubling in the contemporary spoken varieties of the two languages under investigation. The factors examined include the type of prepositional indirect object (pronominal vs. lexical), its thematic role in the clause (experiencer vs. non-experiencer), its position with respect to the verb (pre- vs. post-verbal) and register distinctions (formal vs. informal). The analysis of the corpus data reveals interesting distributional asymmetries between the two languages which show clitic-doubling to be more restricted in Italian than in Spanish with respect to both linguistic and extra-linguistic considerations. In the second part of the paper Dufter and Stark turn to explore the historical development of indirect object doubling in the two sister languages. On the basis of data from diachronic corpora in the case of Spanish and of the information provided by earlier research on the topic as well as metalinguistic judgements from the Renaissance period for Italian, they trace the evolution of preverbal pronominal indirect object doubling (e.g. Sp a mí me gusta, It a me mi piace), the most frequent type of non-minimal marking in Present-day Spanish and Italian. The authors argue that, while the frequency of double object marking has continuously increased in Spanish since the medieval period, the factors favouring the doubling of pronominal indirect objects have remained surprisingly stable over time. In Italian, on the other hand, clitic-doubling has become restricted to very specific contexts. Overall, Dufter and Stark’s paper not only gives us a better understanding of the grammaticalization of indirect object clitics into agreement markers in Spanish and Italian, it also has wider implications for more general analyses of argument encoding in Romance.

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Introduction

In another paper on case markers (“Discourse frequency and the collapse of the adposition vs. affix distinction in Lakota”) Regina Pustet studies the role of frequency in the grammaticalization of the system of morphological case marking in Lakota (Siouan, Central North America), traditionally portrayed as consisting of three or more suffixes and several dozen postpositions (cf. Buechel 1939, 1970; Boas and Deloria 1941). Pustet observes that the distinction between adpositions and case-marking affixes is not clear-cut. The main reason why a given element is often found functioning as both an adposition and a case-marking affix in the same language in the same period is that adpositions are one of the historical sources of case-marking affixes (cf. Heine et al. 1991), which leads to the synchronic attestation of different diachronic stages in the development of the various adpositions into affixal case markers. The resulting picture in the case of Lakota is one in which some case markers are used as suffixes exclusively, while others occur only as postpositions, with a number of elements functioning as both postpositions and case-marking suffixes. The distribution of these structural hybrids is neither random nor free, but appears to be determined by conditions which Pustet manages to ascertain in her paper. She shows that these determinants can best be defined in terms of discourse frequency, a factor which is rarely taken into account when examining developments of this kind. The data presented in this paper, therefore, corroborate other findings in the context of usage-based models of language change (e.g. Jurafsky et al. 2001) which indicate that certain processes of grammaticalization are frequency-governed, that is, they first take place in high-frequency collocations. Furthermore, Pustet demonstrates how the Lakota example is different from other cases of frequency-sensitive change in grammaticalization, such as the English combination of auxiliaries with the negator not, as in did not > didn’t, had not > hadn’t, etc., where reductive change (shortening of not to -n’t) occurs along with affix formation. The lack of formal reduction in the Lakota data makes them especially interesting for grammaticalization studies, since they present the opportunity of investigating affix evolution independently of reductive change, even if both are controlled or even triggered by discourse frequency. Two papers in the book analyse the grammaticalization of various particles, namely the contributions by Diewald and Ferraresi, and by Hoeksema. In “Semantic, syntactic and constructional restrictions in the diachronic rise of modal particles in German: A corpus-based study on the formation of a grammaticalization channel,” Gabriele Diewald and Gisella Ferraresi focus on the historical evolution of German modal particles, indispensable for the organization of spoken discourse since they serve a relational function, linking the utterance to a pragmatically given proposition. As previous research on the topic has shown, the development of modal particles from Old High German to Present-day German is a standard case of grammaticalization which follows typical semantic and

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functional paths. Using a multi-genre diachronic corpus of texts covering from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, Diewald and Ferraresi concentrate on two representatives of the modal particle class, namely schon and eben. They analyse the contextual features present where these two particles occur and assess the impact of such features on the reanalysis of the original scalar items as modal particles. In particular, the authors place special emphasis on the so-called critical and isolating contexts. As discussed in Diewald (2002), the critical context is a stage characterized by a high degree of structural and semantic ambiguity, and therefore invites alternative readings, including the new grammatical meaning. At a later stage in a grammaticalization process, isolating contexts refer to disambiguating contexts which favour one particular interpretation (the new grammatical meaning) to the exclusion of all other readings. In their attempt to uncover the critical and isolating contexts for the modal particles schon and eben in the corpus, Diewald and Ferraresi investigate three different groups of relevant features: (i) the morphological status of the item; (ii) syntactic-illocutive factors, such as sentence type, serialization and syntactic hierarchy; and (iii) structural and contextual features, such as the position occupied by the particle item in the sentence or its textually connective functions, which induce the interpretation of the source lexeme as a modal particle and are therefore responsible for the different types of critical and isolating contexts. Although the article is devoted to schon and eben, the authors suggest that the specific grammaticalization scenario successfully described in this paper can be generalized to the whole set of modal particles in German, despite their heterogeneous lexical sources and distinct semantic features. In his paper on Dutch particle clusters (“The emergence of particle clusters in Dutch: Grammaticalization under adverse conditions”) Jack Hoeksema investigates the fairly recent rise and development of some semantically specialized particle strings in Dutch, namely best wel, best eens and best wel eens, a topic which has received little attention so far, with the exception of the analyses by van der Wouden (2002) and Zwarts et al. (2002). He examines a large number of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first-century corpus examples and classifies them according to textual distribution, focussing on the co-occurrence of other items assumed to be relevant for their development. What he observes is that the particle combinations started out in the vicinity of modal verbs before expanding to contexts with cognitive verbs and predicative uses in copular sentences. As his title implies, clustering is especially likely to be found “under adverse conditions,” that is, in areas where grammaticalization by other means may be more difficult. In the author’s view, the formation of particle clusters is preferred to the grammaticalization of new discourse particles from lexical elements like nouns or adjectives, since the latter have to shed their original content when they grammaticalize, which results in an opaque semantic relationship between the original lexical item and the new particle. The formation of particle clusters, by contrast, involves the re-

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Introduction

utilization of existing elements which happen to co-occur frequently to create new specialized complex particles expressing new meanings. In these clusters, indeed, the particle combinations are more specialized than the separate particles used on their own. According to Hoeksema, the development of particle clusters can be viewed as part of a larger tendency among modern languages to expand the area in the lexicon which is concerned with the expression of evaluative speaker stance, where stylistic and lexical variation is especially relevant. This tendency, he claims, may in turn be related to the contemporary emergence of a wide variety of new genres such as editorials, column articles, sports journalism and e-mail, and the well-known pressure for stylistic innovation. This brings us to the last two papers in the volume: Nørgård-Sørensen’s “Grammaticalization waves. The Russian subjunctive mood and person/number marking” and Wegener’s “The regrammaticalization of linking elements in German.” Jens Nørgård-Sørensen’s contribution studies the origins and development of the Russian subjunctive from the Old Russian period, when there was a periphrastic subjunctive form consisting of the l-participle combined with an auxiliary. Over time, however, the auxiliary evolved into the verbal hypothetical particle by (as in Modern Russian poda-l by ‘I (you, he) would give’), a development which reflects some of the characteristic features of grammaticalization, in particular phonetic reduction, increased syntactic bondedness and semantic generalization or bleaching. While acknowledging this, Nørgård-Sørensen considers the process from a different angle, namely as part of a broader development involving several interrelated changes which have an effect on (i) other tense forms of the same periphrasis, such as the perfect, a prominent member of the paradigm of periphrastic forms containing an l-participle and a ‘be’-auxiliary, and (ii) the person/number marking system in general. This broader perspective is not incidental but stems from the author’s belief that grammaticalization operates in waves: a grammaticalization process is hardly ever an isolated event affecting a single grammatical form, but tends to have effects beyond its primary domain of operation. In other words, a change in one form will have consequences for other forms with which it is related syntagmatically and paradigmatically. Likewise, a change in the expression of one grammatical value may affect the expression of other grammatical values. Finally, Heide Wegener’s contribution is concerned with the historical development of German linking elements, that is, interfixes occurring at the juncture of the two constituents of a compound. The general assumption that linking elements are derived from homophonous inflectional (plural or genitive singular) suffixes is called into question in the paper. The author proposes an alternative pathway for linking elements assumed to have evolved from plural markers, taking into account that in many cases the left constituent of the compound has no plural meaning, neither synchronically nor diachronically, and that linking elements

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already existed in Old High German whereas plural markers are a later development dating from the Early New High German period. The paper develops the interesting hypothesis that the same Indo-European stem suffixes grammaticalized along parallel pathways to two different new functions: linking elements, on the one hand, and plural markers, on the other. This explains why the two types of elements are formally identical and also why the structure of left constituents is synchronically ambiguous. Wegener then turns to consider whether the development of linking elements in German constitutes a genuine case of grammaticalization. She shows that this is indeed the case for the linking element -s- which derived from a genitive marker. For those linking elements which have evolved from stem suffixes, however, the picture is somewhat more complex. A look further back in time shows how grammaticalization accounts for the development of these stem suffixes (which function as indicators of the declension class of the noun) out of original derivational affixes. At a later stage, the stem suffixes lose their function as class markers, become afunctional material (‘junk’ in Lass’s 1990 terminology) and are then refunctionalized or reanalysed either as plural markers or as linking elements. This development can therefore be interpreted as a case of regrammaticalization or exaptation. The paper closes with an overview of the various functions acquired by linking elements in Modern Standard German (prosodic and phonotactic functions in the case of the syllabic linking elements, processing functions for the non-syllabic linking element -s-), with a brief discussion of the implications of her analysis for linguistic and acquisition theory, particularly for the Level Ordering of the lexicon. We believe that the contributions included in this volume offer a tantalizing invitation to continue reflecting upon grammaticalization, one of the most fruitful and promising branches of historical linguistics over recent decades.

References Beal, Joan. 1988. Goodbye to all ‘that’? The history and present behaviour of optional ‘that’. In Graham Nixon & John Honey (eds.), An historic tongue: Studies in English linguistics in memory of Barbara Strang, 44–66. London: Routledge. Boas, Franz & Ella Deloria. 1941. Dakota grammar [Memoirs of the National Academy of Science 23(2)]. Washington DC: Government Printing Office. Brinton, Laurel J. & Minoji Akimoto. 1999. Introduction. In Laurel J. Brinton & Minoji Akimoto (eds.), Collocational and idiomatic aspects of composite predicates in the history of English, 1–20. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Brinton, Laurel J. & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2005. Lexicalization and language change. Cambridge: CUP. Buechel, Eugene. 1939. A grammar of Lakota: The language of the Teton Sioux Indians. St. Francis SD: St. Francis Mission. Buechel, Eugene. 1970. Lakota-English dictionary. Pine Ridge SD: Red Cloud Indian School.

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Campbell, Lyle. 2001. What’s wrong with grammaticalization? Language Sciences 23(2–3): 113– 161. Claridge, Claudia. 2000. Multi-word verbs in Early Modern English. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Corominas, Joan & José Antonio Pascual. 1981. Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico. Madrid: Gredos. Detges, Ulrich & Richard Waltereit. 2002. Grammaticalization vs. reanalysis. A semanticpragmatic account of functional change in grammar. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 21(2): 151–195. Diewald, Gabriele. 2002. A model for relevant types of contexts in grammaticalization. In Ilse Wischer & Gabriele Diewald (eds.), New reflections on grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 49], 103–120. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gómez Torrego, Leonardo. 1999. Los verbos auxiliares. Las perífrasis verbales. In Ignacio Bosque & Violeta Demonte (eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, 3323–3389. Madrid: Real Academia Española-Espasa Calpe. Haspelmath, Martin. 2004. On directionality in language change with particular reference to grammaticalization. In Olga Fischer, Muriel Norde & Harry Perridon (eds.), Up and down the cline: The nature of grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 59], 17–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Heine, Bernd, Ulrike Claudi & Friederike Hünnemeyer. 1991. Grammaticalization. A conceptual framework. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Hernanz, María Luisa. 1999. El infinitivo. In Ignacio Bosque & Violeta Demonte (eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, 2197–2396. Madrid: Real Academia EspañolaEspasa Calpe. Hopper, Paul J. & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization. 2nd edn. Cambridge: CUP. Joseph, Brian D. 2001. Is there such a thing as grammaticalization? Language Sciences 23(2–3): 163–186. Jurafsky, Daniel, Allan Bell, Michelle Gregory & William D. Raymond. 2001. Probabilistic relations between words: Evidence from reduction in lexical production. In Joan L. Bybee & Paul J. Hopper (eds.), Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure, 229–254. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Keller, Rudi. 1994. On language change. The invisible hand in language. London: Routledge. Klausenburger, Jurgen. 2000. Grammaticalization. Studies in Latin and Romance morphosyntax. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. König, Ekkehard. 1988. Concessive connectives and concessive sentences: Cross-linguistic regularities and pragmatic principles. In John A. Hawkins (ed.), Explaining language universals, 145–166. Oxford: Blackwell. Lass, Roger. 1990. How to do things with junk: Exaptation in language evolution. Linguistics 26: 79–102. Lass, Roger. 2000. Remarks on (uni)directionality. In Olga Fischer, Anette Rosenbach & Dieter Stein (eds.), Pathways of change: Grammaticalization in English, 207–227. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lehmann, Christian. 2004. Theory and method in grammaticalization. Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 32(2): 152–187. López-Couso, Maria José & Elena Seoane (eds.). 2008. Rethinking grammaticalization: New perspectives [Typological Studies in Language 76]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1998. Language form and language function. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.

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Newmeyer, Frederick J. 2001. Deconstructing grammaticalization. Language Sciences 23(2–3): 187–229. Nuyts, Jan. 2001. Epistemic modality, language, and conceptualization: A cognitive-pragmatic perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Olbertz, Hella. 1998. Verbal periphrases in a functional grammar of Spanish. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman. Roberts, Ian & Anna Roussou. 2003. Syntactic change. A minimalist approach to grammaticalization. Cambridge: CUP. Schaffner, Emil. 1954. Die Entwicklung des lateinischen Adverbs quamvis zur Konjunktion. PhD dissertation, Zurich University. Tabor, Whitney & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 1998. Structural scope expansion and grammaticalization. In Anna Giacalone Ramat & Paul J. Hopper (eds.), The limits of grammaticalization, 229–272. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Touranier, Christian. 1994. Syntaxe latine. Louvain-la-Neuve: Peeters. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1985. Conditional markers. In John Haiman (ed.), Iconicity in syntax: Proceedings of a symposium on iconicity in syntax, Stanford, June 24–26, 1983, 289–307. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1989. On the rise of epistemic meanings in English: An example of subjectification in semantic change. Language 57: 33–65. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2003. From subjectification to intersubjectification. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), Motives for language change, 124–139. Cambridge: CUP. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2004. Lexicalization and grammaticalization: Similarities and differences revisited. Paper presented at the University of Manchester, November 9th 2004. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Richard B. Dasher. 2002. Regularity in semantic change. Cambridge: CUP. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Bernd Heine (eds.). 1991. Approaches to grammaticalization. 2 vols. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Van der Auwera, Johan & Vladimir A. Plungian. 1998. Modality’s semantic map. Linguistic Typology 2: 79–124. Van der Wouden, Ton. 2002. Particle research meets corpus linguistics: On the collocational behavior of particles. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 16: 151–174. Zwarts, Frans, Ton van der Wouden & Víctor Sánchez-Valencia. 2002. The aspectual significance of event particles. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 16: 175–208.

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Swedish må and the (de)grammaticalization debate* Peter Andersson University of Gothenburg

The traditional assumption that grammaticalization is unidirectional has recently been challenged in the literature. Modal verbs have figured frequently in this debate. One of the alleged examples of degrammaticalization is the Swedish verb må, where the lexical meaning ‘feel’ is claimed by some to have derived from the modal meaning ‘may, can.’ However, it has been argued by others that the degrammaticalization analysis of må rests on a misinterpretation of the data. This paper provides a detailed study of the historical development of må, which so far has been missing from this debate. On the basis of a thorough analysis of the earliest sources available, I conclude that there is no evidence that the development of Swedish må constitutes degrammaticalization, the two modern uses of the verb deriving from the lexical meaning ‘have power, be strong.’

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Introduction

In recent years, the traditionally held assumption of the unidirectionality of grammaticalization has been challenged in a number of publications (Campbell 2001; Joseph 2001; Newmeyer 2001). In response to these challenges, the unidirectionality hypothesis has been defended by writers such as Börjars et al. (2002). One problem which quickly arises in the literature here is that in many cases the disagreement is founded on different interpretations of rather scant data. Modal verbs have been at the centre of this debate, since the alleged development of lexical verbs from auxiliaries would constitute degrammaticalization (van der Auwera and Plungian 1998; Beths 1999; Taeymans 2004). It is standardly assumed that grammaticalization, and hence degrammaticalization, may involve * I am grateful to Bo A. Wendt for checking some early Swedish examples, to Richard Hogg for his help with the Old English data, to Kerstin Norén for helpful discussions, to Kersti Börjars for critical reading and valuable comments, and to Johan van der Auwera, Cecilia Falk, Elisabeth Engdahl, Muriel Norde, Paolo Ramat, Christian Lehmann, Martin Haspelmath, Bernd Heine and an anonymous referee for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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Peter Andersson må ‘may’ [grammatical]

‘may’ [grammatical]

present må, past måtte

‘feel’ [more lexical]

present mår, past mådde

Diagram 1. Development of må in Swedish (van der Auwera 2002: 24)

changes in many linguistic dimensions: phonetic, morphological, syntactic or semantic (for a comprehensive account of the different types of changes, see Heine et al. 1991 and Lehmann 1995). Changes from a lexical to a modal verb would be instances of semantic grammaticalization and, hence, these alleged examples of demodalization would constitute semantic degrammaticalization.1 Of particular interest here is the claim made initially by van der Auwera and Plungian (1998) that the Swedish verb må ‘feel’ constitutes an example of degrammaticalization in that the lexical meaning is said to have developed from a modal use of the same verb. This claim is repeated in van der Auwera (2002) and has been taken up by Ramat (2001), Lehmann (2004) and Traugott (2004), amongst others.2 The development of this verb as posited by van der Auwera and Plungian (1998) is outlined in Diagram 1. Compared to similar developments of modal verbs in other Germanic languages (cf. the discussion of the cognate German mögen in Ziegeler 2004), the development of Swedish må from Old Swedish magha might perhaps be regarded as a more serious threat to the unidirectionality hypothesis. In this case, the semantic demodalization is assumed to be accompanied by morphosyntactic degrammaticalization in that the form of the lexical verb is regularized as mår and mådde. Van der Auwera and Plungian’s (1998) argument is based on two assumptions: a. Må ‘feel’ developed out of a modal verb in the late fourteenth century, and hence there was a stage in the development of Swedish when må had only a functional, modal meaning. b. The semantic change from functional to lexical verb was accompanied by formal changes. However, this development has been disputed. Börjars et al. (2002), for example, draw attention to data in Old Icelandic and show that the ‘feel’ meaning is . I use the label semantic grammaticalization as a term for the change in meaning, without discussing whether this constitutes a category shift (verb > auxiliary). . It should be noted here that Lehmann puts it more cautiously in that he states that må “appears to be a genuine case of degrammaticalization, provided the historical evidence is correct” (2004: 20).

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present in the old Sagas. They argue that this meaning has developed from the lexical precursor ‘be strong, have power’ through modification of its lexical meaning. They also show that the formal change, that is, the rise of the Swedish forms mår and mådde, actually took place long after the semantic split. From this they conclude that it is unlikely that må constitutes an example of degrammaticalization. Haspelmath (2004: 39) also considers the development of må in his discussion of potential counterexamples to grammaticalization and doubts the validity of the degrammaticalization analysis: Van der Auwera and Plungian (1998: 116–117) regard it as a counterexample to unidirectionality, but the morphological change in itself does not make the word less grammaticalized, and the semantic change does not go against any welldefined semantic grammaticalization path. So it is certainly not a good exception to unidirectionality.

What is lacking from this debate is detailed information about the actual development of må. An in-depth study of the data on which the disagreement rests is necessary if the debate is ever to be resolved. This paper is an attempt to provide such a detailed case study of må based on the earliest sources available and to evaluate the arguments for and against the degrammaticalization claims in light of what is found.

. Participant-internal modality and its pre-modal sources Modality has been well-studied in the literature and it is not my intention here to explore the phenomenon in any depth. Numerous ways of defining and subcategorizing modality have been proposed. However, since my aim is to evaluate the arguments put forward by van der Auwera and Plungian (1998), I will follow their terminology. They take a fairly narrow approach to what constitutes modality, defining it exclusively in terms of the semantic domain where possibility contrasts with necessity, hence excluding volition and evidentiality. According to them, both possibility and necessity can be either participant-internal or participant-external. PARTICIPANT-INTERNAL POSSIBILITY ability, capacity PARTICIPANT-INTERNAL NECESSITY need

PARTICIPANT-EXTERNAL POSSIBILITY permission PARTICIPANT-INTERNAL NECESSITY obligation

Diagram 2. Types of modality according to van der Auwera and Plungian (1998)

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Such a distinction gives rise to four different categories as outlined in Diagram 2, where parallel terms from the more traditional literature are provided.3 The essential category for the present discussion is the so-called participantinternal possibility, since this is the category from which the ‘feel’ meaning of må is assumed to have developed. The example of participant-internal possibility provided by van der Auwera and Plungian (1998: 80) is given in (1). (1) Boris can get by with sleeping five hours a night. Participant-internal possibility may then be interpreted as corresponding to the better known notion of ability as a type of root- or agent-oriented modality (see Coates 1983; Bybee et al. 1994: 176ff.).4 The different types of modality are illustrated by van der Auwera and Plungian (1998) in terms of semantic maps. Semantic maps provide a way of relating different meanings and thereby of making interesting crosslinguistic and historical generalizations about different modality types. Van der Auwera and Plungian link the semantic map of modality itself with pre- and post-modal meanings, and therefore they also indicate modalization and demodalization. An example of a semantic map is provided in Diagram 3, where the shaded box contains modal meanings, while the meanings to the left indicate pre-modal, lexical meanings.

‘be strong, know’

‘be permitted, dare’

participant-internal possibility participant-external possibility

deontic possibility

epistemic possibility

conditional

Diagram 3. Semantic map: Partial representation of the possibility domain (cf. van der Auwera and Plungian 1998: 91) . For a full table of terms, see van der Auwera and Plungian (1998: 82). . The latter terms usually refer to different kinds of non-epistemic modality including ability, willingness, obligation and permission. Palmer (2001: 7ff.) uses the superior concept event modality for these four types and divides them further into dynamic and deontic modality, respectively. Van der Auwera and Plungian (1998) avoid terms such as agent-oriented, as it indicates that the participant in the state of affairs has to assume the semantic role of agent, which is not always the case.

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The development from ‘be strong, have power’ to participant-internal possibility illustrated in Diagram 3 indicates a common historical path and one which modal må can be assumed to have undergone.5 Van der Auwera and Plungian (1998) emphasize the fact that these maps are semantic and consequently indicate differences and developments in meaning, not in form. It is, however, unclear how a purely semantic distinction between pre-modal and modal meanings can consistently be made. Consider, for instance, the example in (2), which involves one of the distinctions represented in Diagram 3. (2) a. b.

Oscar is permitted to leave Oscar may leave

Lexical Modal (participant-external possibility)

It would appear difficult to make a clear distinction between these two predicates without appealing to morphosyntactic criteria. This is not a problem unique to van der Auwera and Plungian (1998). The same issue arises for Bybee et al. (1994: 191): “We argue below that the permission sense can develop out of the root possibility sense, as it has in English for may and can. However, it is also possible to arrive at the grammatical sense of permission more directly, by the grammaticalization of a verb meaning ‘be permitted to’.” The claim that van der Auwera and Plungian (1998: 105) make about the development of må is summarized thus: Swedish må ‘may’ was an ordinary participant internal possibility modal, but in Middle Swedish it developed the meaning ‘feel’ as in feel good (Birkmann 1987: 311). In this new meaning, the verb acquired a different present and past tense. The ‘feel’ verb got an ending -r in the present, like regular verbs, and its past tense became mådde instead of modal måtte. Swedish now truly has two må verbs.

Two issues are worthy of note in relation to the above quotation. Firstly, reference is made to the idea that formal changes are relevant to the issue of degrammaticalization. The importance of formal properties in establishing the difference between lexical and modal verbs is something to which I will return in Section 5. Secondly, the underlying assumption is here made that the existence of a (semantically and formally) grammaticalized må is sufficient evidence that the ‘feel’ må developed from it. However, this ignores the possibility that a lexical meaning remained, from which ‘feel’ må could develop. In order to show that the lexical verb is an example of degrammaticalization, one would also need to show that there was a stage in the history of Swedish before the existence of the ‘feel’ meaning where må had only a functional and no lexical use. I will return to both these issues when I discuss the case of må in detail. . The fact that the Germanic må verb can be traced back to ‘be strong, have power’ is wellestablished in the literature (see, for instance, OED and OSM); therefore, the origin is an intransitive verb.

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. Early examples of modal and pre-modal må in Old Swedish According to Abraham (2003), mögen (Old High German mugan) is the earliest systematic modal verb in Germanic and also one which shows a remarkably wide variety of functions in the earliest sources. In his words, “[I]t occurs in functions ranging from the necessity pole (sharply deontic) down to the possibility pole including epistemic uses” (2003: 6).6 This also holds for Swedish må, from Old Swedish magha, although the present discussion will focus on the notion of participant-internal possibility and its pre-modal source. The data I will provide are from Old Swedish (1225–1374) and are drawn predominantly from texts relating to provincial laws and religious myths.7 All electronically available texts from this period have been considered.8 As already mentioned with regard to Diagram 3, participant-internal modality frequently develops by grammaticalization from predicates with meanings like ‘be strong, have power.’ This is the most likely development for the modal må, and indeed the earliest texts show examples of this meaning, as in (3) and (4).9 (3) Old Swedish Ciprianus sænde annan diæfwl som mera matte ok Ciprianus send.pst.sg other devil rel more må.pst.sg and samulundh for han som then førre Ciprianus in.the.same.way for him as the previous Ciprianus kalladhe then thridhia mest moghande. send.for.pst.sg the third most må.pret ‘Ciprianus called (for) another devil, who had more power and the same happened to him. Ciprianus then called the third most powerful.’ (Fornsvenska Legendariet; Codex Bildstenianus)

. From the earliest available Old Swedish texts, examples of epistemic uses are found. This meaning, however, seems to be restricted to this verb, which is interesting in itself. For a discussion of the cognate verbs (may, mögen) and of the emergence of epistemic modality as opposed to root (or deontic) modality, see Bybee et al. (1994) and van Gelderen (2004) for English, and Leiss (2002) and Abraham (2003) for German. . There are also several examples of må (magha) illustrating both lexical and modal uses in Swedish stone inscriptions from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. . All Old Swedish texts are collected from the database Fornsvenska Textbanken, Lund University. . Glosses focus exclusively on the relevant details, like verbal inflection. All forms of the verb under study in this paper will be glossed as må, including those in languages other than Swedish.

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(4) Old Swedish thu skal se at iak ma mera mz gudhz dygd you shall.2sg see.inf comp I må.inf more with God.gen virtue som pinas, æn thu som pinar. rel torture.pass than you rel torture.prs.sg ‘You will see that I who am tortured have more strength with the virtue of God than you who torture.’ (Fornsvenska Legendariet; Codex Bildstenianus) From the meaning ‘be strong, have power’ the meaning classed as modal in Diagram 3 developed, in particular participant-internal possibility, exemplified in (5) and (6). (5) Old Swedish mz ensamno ordhe han ma mik lækia en han with single word he må.prs.3sg me heal.inf if he wil. want.pres.3sg ‘With a single word he can heal me if he wants.’ (Fornsvenska Legendariet; Codex Bildstenianus) (6) Old Swedish [. . .] ok bygge sidhan thet bæzta han ma. and build.sbjv then the best he må.prs.3sg ‘then he should build the best he can’ (Magnus Erikssons stadslag) In neither of these two examples is the reading ‘have power’ or ‘have strength’ completely implausible. Indeed, there are examples where the ambiguity is even more conspicuous, as in (7). (7) Old Swedish hændir thæt sot a vegh oc ma igh til kyrkiu happen.prs.sg it illness on way and må.3sg not to church coma [. . .] come.inf ‘if it happens that it becomes ill on the way and has not the strength to/cannot come to church’ (Äldre Västgötalagen) Given that these examples represent a historical development, it is to be expected that examples like (7) – where it is difficult to distinguish between the two meanings – should occur. The close relation between the two meanings is, in fact, one reason why this is indeed a common historical development. However, to draw a semantic distinction between a lexical verb in (3) and (4) and a modal verb in (5) and (6), as predicted by Diagram 3, is by no means a straightforward matter.

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The forms of må in (3) and (4) are used intransitively and are modified by mera ‘more’ and can, therefore, be assumed not to be modal verbs. The alleged examples of modal verbs in (5) and (6), on the other hand, combine with non-finite verb phrases (though (6) is elliptic), yet this is a syntactic criterion being used to make a distinction in a semantic map. Naturally, changes in subcategorization behaviour may result from changes in meaning, and, in such cases, it would seem reasonable to use non-semantic argumentation to make a semantic distinction. In any case, this syntactic criterion seems inappropriate here, since in Present-day Swedish, just as in English, predicates which clearly exemplify the lexical meaning may also combine with a non-finite verb phrase, as in (8) and (9). (8) Modern Swedish Han hade inte kraft att gå till kyrkan. he have.pst not strength comp go.inf to church.def ‘He did not have the strength to go to church.’ (9) The chairman has the power to overrule the vote. Admittedly, there is a difference between the two types of subcategorization, since these unambiguously lexical predicates combine with a verb phrase containing an infinitival marker, whereas the alleged modal verbs combine with a bare infinitive. Nevertheless, this is a formal difference, not a semantic one, and it should be noted that må – like most members originating from the category preterite-present – takes bare infinitive complements from its earliest appearance in the language. Therefore, using this feature as a distinguishing criterion between early lexical and modal uses would be inadequate. On the basis of the data considered in this section it can be concluded that the meaning ‘be strong, have power’ can be found in the earliest sources, as can the more abstract, modal meaning. However, there appear to be no purely semantic criteria on which to draw this distinction, and it inevitably becomes necessary to rely on morphosyntactic criteria. Finally, this distinction is not in itself that crucial for the degrammaticalization debate. The main point relates to demodalization and hence to how the lexical ‘feel’ meaning developed. The claim implicit in van der Auwera and Plungian’s (1998) degrammaticalization analysis is that there was a time in the history of Swedish when there was no lexical meaning, so that the lexical meaning ‘feel’ can only have developed out of a functional, modal meaning. In order to demonstrate that this is so, however, it is necessary to show that there was a time when there existed only a modal meaning, and that the lexical meaning ‘feel’ arose after this point.

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. Early examples of må ‘feel’ in Swedish As seen above, the lexical meaning ‘be strong, have power’ existed side by side with its modal use in early Swedish. More importantly for the current discussion, the ‘feel’ meaning has also been present as a lexical meaning as far back as the earliest written documents available. The examples in (10) to (12) all illustrate this meaning in Old Swedish, while (13) shows a similar meaning in Middle Swedish:10 (10) Old Swedish [. . .] at wita wm sina hustru ok syni huru the comp know.inf if his.refl wife and son how the mattu må.pst.3pl ‘in order to find out how his wife and son were feeling’ (Fornsvenska Legendariet; Codex Bildstenianus) (11) Old Swedish hon sagde welkomen broder myn, huro mwn myn annar she say.pst.sg welcome brother my how may.prs.sg my other broder magha. brother må.inf ‘She said: Welcome my brother, how is my other brother feeling?’ (Erikskrönikan) (12) Old Swedish The swara at the känna han wäl laban they answer.prs.3pl comp they know.prs.3pl him well Laban Jacob spör hurw laban ma. Jacob ask.prs.sg how Laban må.prs.3sg ‘They answered that they knew Laban well. Jacob asks how Laban was feeling.’ (Pentateuchparafrasen) (13) Middle Swedish [. . .] ok sagde huru mat thu, Han som aldrigh förra and say.pst.sg how må.2pres you he rel never before taladhe swaradhe ginstan, Jak ma wäl. speak.pst.sg answer.pst.sg immediately I må.prs.1sg well . The early periods of Swedish are Runic Swedish (800–1225), Old Swedish (1225–1374) and Middle Swedish (1375–1525). For Old Swedish, the extant manuscripts are in these cases younger than the date given here, and are copies of earlier documents. However, philologists generally agree that they are sufficiently faithful copies and thus reflect an older stage of the language (Old Swedish) rather than the contemporary language.



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‘and said how are you feeling, he who never had talked before answered immediately, I am feeling well.’ (Järteckensbok) The example from Middle Swedish in (13) is regarded by van der Auwera and Plungian (1998) – following Birkmann (1987) – as the first occurrence of the meaning ‘feel’.11 However, there are six earlier examples of this meaning in the Old Swedish corpora, a number which at first may be considered remarkably low. However, taking into account the genres to which these early texts belong, it is not surprising that this meaning is rare; the majority of the examples are from legal texts, in which the ‘feel’ meaning is not likely to be found with any great frequency.12 It is noteworthy that in all the examples above må is combined with a manner adverb (hur in examples (10) to (12) and wäl in (13)), thus corresponding closely to the modern use of the same meaning. The clear conclusion is that the new lexical meaning is present in the earliest preserved stage of the Swedish language. The presence of both meanings in Old Swedish could of course still mean that the alleged degrammaticalization had taken place before Swedish began to be recorded. Such a claim, though, would be entirely speculative and could in principle be applied to any similar case where the existence of both the lexical and the functional use can be traced back to the earliest sources. The scarcity of clearly documented examples of demodalization and the wealth of clearly documented examples of modalization would seem to weaken the case for degrammaticalization substantially.

. Formal (de)grammaticalization of må The semantic change to which we have referred here as modalization is commonly taken to exemplify one specific dimension of grammaticalization, often described as semantic bleaching. Consequently, demodalization can be taken as a type of degrammaticalization. Different approaches to grammaticalization vary as to how closely changes in one dimension, such as semantics, are necessarily associated with changes in another dimension, such as morphosyntax. The fact that van der Auwera and Plungian (1998) represent the development as a semantic map indi. Birkmann (1987: 311) claims that må was used with the ‘feel’ meaning from the end of the fourteenth century, but offers no discussion as to why it is missing in Old Swedish. . A search of modern legal texts in the form of Svensk författningssamling, the collection of Swedish laws available electronically from 1998, yields no examples of the lexical må, though the use of the modal må with the meaning of external possibility or necessity is more common than in other modern text forms.

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cates a desire to separate semantic from formal change. However, as discussed in Section 2, distinguishing modal verbs from their lexical sources on purely semantic grounds is far from unproblematic. As seen in Section 3, this also holds for the specific case under discussion here, namely participant-internal modality and its source ‘be strong, have power.’ In practice, formal properties are of considerable importance for van der Auwera and Plungian’s degrammaticalization argument (cf. Section 2), as can be illustrated by the following quotation: [. . .] all depends on whether participant-internal må can be considered formally grammaticalized at the time that ‘feel’ må developed from it. This is an empirical question which we cannot at present answer (1998: 116).13

In view of this, I turn now to morphosyntactic aspects of grammaticalization.14 Two formal changes are relevant to the present discussion, namely the change in complement types and the regularization of form. As regards the former, lexical må combines with an adverb phrase which specifies its power or strength, as in the examples in (3) and (4). In the alleged modal meanings, on the other hand, it combines with a verb phrase, as in (5). The fact that in the latter cases the verb combines with a verb phrase and not an adjective phrase is of course consistent with a change from lexical to auxiliary verb. However, besides the fact that, as noted above, predicates with the original lexical meaning can still combine with a verb phrase (cf. (8) and (9)), this change in complement type is not indicative of grammaticalization per se. It is not, for instance, an example of what Lehmann (1995) describes as “reduction in scope.”15 With regard to the regularization of form, the quotation at the beginning of this section illustrates that this is the most important formal change for van der Auwera and Plungian (1998), who see it as degrammaticalization. However, the relation between the occurrence of the ‘feel’ meaning and the regularized form is far less direct than assumed by van der Auwera and Plungian. The time when the verb expressing ‘feel’ joins a major category in this sense is only the late sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries, when it acquires the forms mår and mådde, as illustrated in (14) and (15).

. In van der Auwera (2002), the reliance on formal criteria is not made explicit, even though the argument is the same. . However, it should be emphasized that, even though formal criteria could be used as evidence for grammaticalization or indeed degrammaticalization, I would not want to see morphosyntactic criteria used to establish whether or not a semantic change has actually taken place. . It is not entirely clear whether it is appropriate to associate reduction in scope in general with grammaticalization; see, for instance, Tabor and Traugott (1998).

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(14) Early New Swedish Och när Her Olof råkadhe säja fattigh man hur mår and when Mr Olof happen.pst say.inf poor man how må.prs du [. . .] you ‘and when Mr Olof happened to say poor man ‘how are you feeling” (Laurentius Petris svenska Krönika) (15) Early New Swedish Sveriges inbyggiare mådde väl. Sweden.gen inhabitant må.pst well ‘The inhabitants of Sweden felt well.’ (Johan Bureus, Personal notes; Sumlen) Given that examples of the ‘feel’ meaning are attested in the earliest records, the regularization of form took place at least three hundred years after the first semantic changes to ‘feel’ had taken place. In fact, I will argue in the next section that the time gap is considerably longer than that. These new forms show analogy with verbs such as spå ‘prophesize,’ nå ‘reach’ and klå ‘beat.’ The rise of this conjugation itself dates back to the sixteenth century, which suggests that this change is wholly unrelated to the semantic change which took place several hundred years earlier. Irrespective of this, van der Auwera and Plungian (1998) argue that the development from a verb belonging to the category preterite-presents to a regularly inflected verb at least shows a transition from a minor to a major category, which they claim can be regarded as indicative of degrammaticalization.16 However, the verb already belonged to the formally distinct group of verbs known as preterite-presents in its original lexical meaning, and hence this formal property appears to be independent of the status of må as a modal verb. It therefore seems unconvincing to use this alone as a criterion for claiming degrammaticalization.

. Van der Auwera (personal communication) agrees that the semantic part of the story needs to be corrected, but maintains that there are arguments for weak degrammaticalization. In his own words, “it is not the change from participant-internal to ‘feel’ that relates to the formal change, but the increasing out-of-placeness of the ‘feel’ uses that relates to the formal change.” It seems to me that describing the regularization which må has undergone as degrammaticalization would entail an unhelpful broadening of the notion of degrammaticalization. As Cecilia Falk has pointed out to me, several other Swedish verbs originating as preterite-presents have undergone similar processes of regularization, cf. kunni > kundi, vissi > visti, unna > unnar/unnande, äga > ägde (see Wessén 1969).

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. A comparison with early varieties of other Germanic languages In the preceding sections it has been shown that the ‘feel’ meaning of må can be found in Swedish as far back as the oldest extant texts. Beyond that, sources relating to earlier forms of Swedish can tell us little. However, given that the Germanic relatives of Swedish are also often well-documented, it is possible to follow the development of the cognate verbs in other languages. Let us first consider the closely related Old Icelandic, for which sources exist which predate those for Swedish. As already noted by Börjars et al. (2002), the ‘feel’ meaning can also be found in the earliest texts in Old Icelandic. In several of the Sagas we can find the corresponding ‘feel’ meaning for mega, as in (16) and (17). (16) Old Norse var hann spurdr hversu hann mætti be.pst.pass he ask.pret how he må.pst.sg ‘Was he asked how he felt?’ (Fornmanna Sögur VI) (17) Old Norse “Hversu mátti Sturla bóndi?” “Vel mátti hann,” how må.pst.sg Sturla yeoman well må.pst.sg he segir ferðamaðurinn. say.prs.3sg traveller “‘How was the yeoman Sturla feeling?” “He was feeling well,” says the traveller.’ (Sturlunga saga) I turn now to other Germanic varieties. If early attestations of the ‘feel’ meaning for the cognate verb can be found in these languages, then there are, in principle, two possible conclusions: either all the varieties have had similar, though unrelated, changes in the same verb after they developed from their Proto-Germanic source, or this lexical meaning can be traced back to Proto-Germanic. The latter would appear to be the more plausible conclusion, and indeed, the ‘feel’ meaning can also be attested for the cognate German mögen, as in (18), and for English may, as in (19) and (20). (18) Old High German Er vragote sî, ube sî erchanten einen man, he ask.pst.3sg them if they know.pst.3pl a man hieŠŠe Lâban si sprâchen daŠ er wole mahte. name.pst.3sg Laban they say.pst.3pl that he well må.sbjv.3sg ‘He asked them if they knew a man whose name was Laban. They said that he felt well.’ (The Book of Genesis 29.6)

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(19) Old English - a cwæð D he: Hu mæg he? Hi cwædon þæt he then say.pst.3sg he how må.prs.3sg he he say.pst.3sg that he wel mihte. well må.sbjv.3sg ‘Then he said. How was he feeling? He said that he was feeling well.’ (The Book of Genesis 29.6) (20) Old English Tha sæde se cnapa thæt he swithe wel mihte. then say.pst.3sg the boy that he very well må.sbjv.3sg ‘Then said the boy that he felt very well.’ (Ælfric’s Metrical Lives of The Saints) The examples in (18) and (19) are both found in the Book of Genesis and correspond to the Swedish example in (12) above. They can be dated to the late and early eleventh century, respectively; this ‘feel’ meaning is also attested in Old High German, that is, from the time between the seventh and the eleventh centuries (cf. DWB s.v. mögen 2). The example in (20) is taken from Ælfric’s Metrical Lives of the Saints, dated c. 1000 (cf. ASD s.v. magan 2). The same ‘feel’ meaning can also be found in Middle Dutch for mogen (cf. WNT s.v. mogen). To summarize, early attestations of the ‘feel’ meaning can be found in all the Germanic languages which have been examined for the present study, with examples from both West Germanic (German, English and Dutch) and North Germanic (Swedish and Icelandic). As already mentioned, it seems that an explanation in terms of similar changes occurring to the cognate verbs independently is implausible. Instead, I take the widespread presence of the ‘feel’ meaning in the cognate verbs as evidence that the development of such a meaning took place much earlier than has been assumed in the literature. The ‘feel’ meaning of the Germanic må verb, then, can be assumed to have arisen in Proto-Germanic. Although it is unlikely that we will find any direct evidence for how this new meaning developed, the most likely scenario is that it developed out of another lexical meaning, probably ‘be strong, have power.’

. Conclusions The alleged degrammaticalization analysis of må is once again summarized in Diagram 4.

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Swedish må and the (de)grammaticalization debate late 14th c. må ‘be strong’ ® må modal ‘can’ ® må ‘feel’ grammaticalization

degrammaticalization

Diagram 4. Development of Swedish må according to van der Auwera and Plungian (1998: 91)

In the light of the evidence presented in this paper, it can be safely claimed that the development of the meaning ‘feel’ took place much earlier than the late fourteenth century, and that a development from functional to lexical verb cannot be attested. There is, therefore, no evidence that må ‘feel’ developed from a modal verb by demodalization. On the contrary, the lexical meaning ‘feel,’ as well as the assumed original lexical ‘be strong, have power,’ has been present throughout the recorded history of Swedish. Hence, the only way to maintain the degrammaticalization claim would be to argue that the process took place at an early stage of the language, for which we have no records. As it now stands, it seems that, to cite Börjars (2003: 2), “in some cases, the enthusiasm for challenging the unidirectionality hypothesis appears to have led to an interpretation of data that is certainly open to criticism.” In view of the data examined in this study, an alternative development can be posited as illustrated in Diagram 5. Grammaticalization må ‘can’ må ‘be strong’ må ‘feel’ Specialization

Diagram 5. An alternative view of the development of må

The data analysed here appear to indicate that both changes illustrated in Diagram 5 took place as early as Proto-Germanic. The development of må ‘feel’ from a lexical verb meaning ‘be strong, have power’ is conceptually not implausible: ‘be strong’ > ‘have good/bad strength’ > ‘feel well/ill.’ This development is, in fact, more plausible than a typologically unusual change from a modal verb meaning ‘can’ to a lexical verb meaning ‘feel.’ Such a development may be defined in terms of specialization, whereby an original stative meaning combined with a manner

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adverb results in a closely related lexical sub-meaning. Note also in this respect the inference that strength usually presupposes health and vice versa. As for the rise of the modal meaning, on the other hand, it may be defined as generalization and later also as grammaticalization; the data provided strongly support this hypothesis.17 The modal meaning can then be assumed not to have any close relationship with the lexical meaning ‘feel.’ To conclude, the development of Swedish må (magha) shows no signs of degrammaticalization. On the contrary, the development reflects well attested types of semantic change and grammaticalization.

Abbreviations 1 2 3 comp def gen inf pass

first person second person third person complementizer definite genitive infinitive passive

pl pret prs pst refl rel sbjv sg

plural preterite present past reflexive relative subjunctive singular

References Abraham, Werner. 2003. Canonic and non-canonic deliberations about epistemic modality: Its emergence out of where? On an extended notion of grammatic(al)ization. In Jan Koster & Henk van Riemsdijk (eds.), Germania et alia. Digital volume dedicated to Hans den Besten. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam. (http://www.let.rug.nl/∼koster/ DenBesten/Abraham.pdf). ASD = An Anglo Saxon Dictionary. 1898. Ed. by Joseph Bosworth. Supplement by T. Northcote Toller (1921). Oxford: OUP. (Available on line at http://www.ling.upenn.edu/∼kurisuto/ Germanic/oe_bosworthtoller_about.html). Beths, Frank. 1999. The history of dare and the status of unidirectionality. Linguistics 37: 1069– 1110. Birkmann, Thomas. 1987. Präteritopräsentia: Morphologische Entwicklungen einer Sonderklasse in den altgermanischen Sprachen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Börjars, Kersti. 2003. Morphological status and (de)grammaticalization: The Swedish possessive. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 26(2): 133–163. Börjars, Kersti, Thorhallur Eythorsson & Nigel Vincent. 2002. On defining degrammaticalization. Paper presented at New Reflections on Grammaticalization 2, Amsterdam, April 2002. (Draft available at http://ling.man.ac.uk/Info/Staff/KEB/publications.html). . At which stage modal må can be considered grammaticalized is not clear. However, the participant-internal reading må lacks several auxiliary characteristics.

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Bybee, Joan L., Revere Perkins & William Pagliuca. 1994. The evolution of grammar: Tense, aspect and modality in the languages of the world. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Campbell, Lyle. 2001. What’s wrong with grammaticalization? Language Sciences 23(2–3): 113– 161. Coates, Jennifer. 1983. The semantics of the modal auxiliaries. London: Croom Helm. DWB = Deutsches Wörterbuch. 1854–1861. Ed. by Jacob Grimm & Wilhelm Grimm. (Available on line at http://dwb.uni-trier.de). Haspelmath, Martin. 2004. On directionality in language change with particular reference to grammaticalization. In Olga Fischer, Muriel Norde & Harry Perridon (eds.), Up and down the cline: The nature of grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 59], 17–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Heine, Bernd, Ulrike Claudi & Friederike Hünnemeyer. 1991. Grammaticalization: A conceptual framework. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Joseph, Brian D. 2001. Is there such a thing as grammaticalization? Language Sciences 23(2–3): 163–186. Lehmann, Christian. 1995. Thoughts on grammaticalization: A programmatic sketch. 2nd edn. Munich: Lincom. Lehmann, Christian. 2004. Theory and method in grammaticalization. Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 32(2): 152–187. Leiss, Elisabeth. 2002. Explizite und implizite Kodierung von Deontizität und Epistemizität: Über die grammatische Musterbildung vor der Entstehung von Modalverben. Jezikoslovije 3(1–2): 69–98. Newmeyer, Frederick J. 2001. Deconstructing grammaticalization. Language Sciences 23(2–3): 187–229. OED = Oxford English Dictionary. (Available on line at http://www.oed.com/). OSM = Ordbok Öfver Svenska Medeltids-språket. Ed. by Knut Fredrik Söderwall. 1884–1918. Lund. Palmer, Frank. 2001. Mood and modality. 2nd edn. Cambridge: CUP. Ramat, Paolo. 2001. Degrammaticalization or transcategorization? In Chris Schaner-Wolles, John Rennison & Friedrich Neubarth (eds.), Naturally! Linguistic studies in honour of Wolfgang Ulrich Dressler, presented on the occasion of his 60th birthday, 393–401. Torino: Rosenberg and Sellier. Tabor, Whitney & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 1998. Structural scope expansion and grammaticalization. In Anna Giacalone Ramat & Paul J. Hopper (eds.), The limits of grammaticalization, 229–272. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Taeymans, Martine. 2004. An investigation into the marginal modals dare and need in British Present-day English: A corpus-based approach. In Olga Fischer, Muriel Norde & Harry Perridon (eds.), Up and down the cline: The nature of grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 59], 97–114. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2004. Lexicalization and grammaticalization: Similarities and differences revisited. Paper presented at the University of Manchester, November 2004. Van der Auwera, Johan. 2002. More thoughts on degrammaticalization. In Ilse Wischer & Gabriele Diewald (eds.), New reflections on grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 49], 19–29. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Van der Auwera, Johan & Vladimir A. Plungian. 1998. Modality’s semantic map. Linguistic Typology 2: 79–124. Van Gelderen, Elly. 2004. Grammaticalization as economy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Wessén, Elias. 1969. Svensk Språkhistoria 1. Ljudlära och ordböjningslära. 8 uppl. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. WNT = Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal. 1994. Leiden: Hijhoff. Ziegeler, Debra. 2004. Redefining unidirectionality. Is there life after modality? In Olga Fischer, Muriel Norde & Harry Perridon (eds.), Up and down the cline: The nature of grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 49], 115–136. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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“Where grammar and lexis meet” Composite predicates in English Laurel J. Brinton University of British Columbia

Composite predicates in English of the form ‘light verb + (article) + deverbal noun’ (e.g. have a drink) and those of the form ‘verb + (article) + deverbal noun + preposition’ (e.g. lose sight of ) are typically treated as instances of lexicalization, though they also exhibit features characteristic of grammaticalization. Making use of the definitions of grammaticalization and lexicalization in Brinton and Traugott (2005) and of material on the historical development of composite predicates in English, this paper argues that there are important distinctions among composite predicate types which would suggest that some of these combinations are indeed lexicalizations, while others are better regarded as cases of grammaticalization. The paper thus provides strong evidence for a gradience view of lexicality and grammaticality, where grammaticalization and lexicalization are seen as complementary diachronic processes.

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Introduction

A frequently studied construction in Present-day English is the composite predicate.1 The basic structure of the composite predicate consists of a relatively meaningless light verb (Jespersen 1909–1949, VI: 117) plus a deverbal noun, which carries the primary eventive meaning of the construction. Typically, composite predicates are of the form verb (+ article) + deverbal noun (e.g. give an answer, have a drink, make a promise, take a walk, do a dive) or verb (+ article) + deverbal noun + preposition (e.g. lose sight of, run a test on, put the blame on, pay attention to, offer an apology for). . For full-length studies of composite predicates in Present-day English, see Olsson (1961), Cattell (1984), Akimoto (1989) and Allerton (2002). It should be noted, however, that the differing definitions of the composite predicate used by these scholars often lead to quite different inventories of composite predicates.

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The syntactic flexibility and semantic non-compositionality of composite predicates and their degree of idiomaticity depend upon a number of variables: a. The morphological form of the deverbal noun, whether it has a zero or a concrete derivational ending, e.g. make a wish vs. make a suggestion. b. The particular light verb used and the possibility of interchangeability, e.g. {have/take} a drink, {make/do} a study. c. The presence or absence of a definite or indefinite article, as in give a (*the) shove vs. give the (*a) slip vs. make (*a/*the) mention of. d. The presence or absence of a following prepositional phrase, e.g. take a walk vs. take control of.2 e. The possibility or impossibility of adjectival modification, as in give (brief ) attention to vs. catch (?quick) sight of. f. The possibility or impossibility of passivization or topicalization, as in make an adjustment ∼ an adjustment was made vs. have a look ∼ *a look was had. In the case of verb + noun + preposition + noun structures, whether only the so-called inner passive or only the outer passive occurs is also relevant. In inner passives, the deverbal noun becomes the subject of the passive, as in A suggestion was made to Mary. In the outer passive, by contrast, the object of the preposition becomes the subject of the passive, as in Mary was caught sight of. Also, both types occur, as in A deal was made with Mary side by side with Mary was made a deal with. g. The possibility or impossibility of pluralization of the deverbal noun, e.g. make examples of vs. *give attentions to. h. The existence or not of an equivalent simplex verb, e.g. make a mockery of ∼ mock vs. do homework, commit suicide. i. The possibility or impossibility of indirect object movement with give forms, e.g. give encouragement to him/give him encouragement vs. give birth to her/*give her birth. j. The nature of the nominal element, whether it is necessarily deverbal and eventive or whether it is sufficient if the entire construction is equivalent to a verb (give ear to = ‘listen’). k. Syntactic discontinuity between the light verb and the deverbal noun (see Bergs 2005: 221), e.g. run a race vs. run an arduous and exhausting 10 kilometre race. . Another structure commonly included with composite predicates is light verb + preposition (+ article) + deverbal noun, as in take into consideration, come to an end, put to flight (see Fraser 1976: 43–44 and types 4 and 5 in Allerton 2002). Claridge (2000: 108) finds this form to be of fairly low frequency (11.1 per cent) in her corpus. This type of composite predicate – if indeed it should be classified with composite predicates rather than with prepositional verbs – is not considered further in this paper.

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Ultimately these factors relate to whether composite predicates should be seen as grammaticalized or lexicalized forms, that is, whether they are regular formations which are approached analytically or whether they are idiosyncratic formations which must be accessed holistically (Lehmann 2002: 2–3). This paper makes use of the definitions for grammaticalization and lexicalization proposed in Brinton and Traugott (2005), as well as a number of studies of the historical development of composite predicates in English,3 to argue that there are important distinctions among composite predicate types which would suggest that, while some are indeed lexicalizations, others are not.

. Previous approaches to composite predicates as lexicalization or grammaticalization From a historical perspective, composite predicates have typically been treated as instances of (attenuated) lexicalization. In an article on combinations with have and take, Wischer (forthcoming), while admitting that “[t]he degree of lexicalisation [. . .] is difficult to determine,” particularly in the earlier stages of the language, concludes that such combinations enter the vocabulary as lexical units and are “semi-lexicalized,” in other words, syntactically but not always semantically lexicalized. Claridge speaks of the lexicalization or institutionalization of verb-nominal combinations, though she too sees this as a matter of degree (2000: 73, 78, 140, 157, 161). Traugott (1999: 259) concludes that, historically, the development of composite predicates is “best construed as lexicalization followed by idiomatization,” while for Bergs (2005: 218) historical changes result in a “gradience in lexicalization and idiomatization.” In contrast, Brinton and Akimoto (1999: 17) point out that aspects of the development of composite predicates, such as decategorialization of the noun and its increasing fusion with the verb, loss of syntactic variability, syntactic reanalysis of the construction and acquisition of discourse meanings, resemble changes characteristic of grammaticalization. Most synchronic studies also treat composite predicates as lexicalized or falling at the lexicalized end of the scale from unitary predicate to free formation.4 For example, Stein (1991) considers have a breath as being lexicalized because the relationship between breath and breathe is “synchronically no longer productive.” Likewise, in the case of have a drink, she judges that the deverbalized noun drink . See Visser (1963–1973: 138–141, 641–643), Claridge (1997, 2000: 94–95), Akimoto and Brinton (1999), Hiltunen (1999), Kytö (1999), Matsumoto (1999, 2000), Tanabe (1999), Traugott (1999), Iglesias-Rábade (2001), Moralejo-Gárate (2001, 2003) and Bergs (2005: 210–245). . In contrast, ten Cate and Vandeweghe (1991: 122) consider composite predicates in German and Dutch to have “a purely grammatical function” as “aspectual auxiliaries.”

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has shifted from ‘an instance, act of drinking’ to ‘an amount of liquid for drinking’ and consequently “has moved towards the lexicalization end of the scale” (1991: 11–12). Others equivocate over the status of composite predicates. Allerton (2002: 8) concludes that “[i]t is insufficient to mention such structures in the syntax, but it is equally inadequate simply to list them in the lexicon” because the latter would not bring out “the evident regularity of syntactic patterning” (2002: 17). Huddleston, Pullum et al. treat these forms as grammatically productive, including them in their chapter on clausal complements (2002: 290–296), but at the same time classify forms such as catch sight of, make fun of and make use of as “verbal idioms” which are more or less “fossilised” (2002: 288–289). Quirk et al. (1985) likewise discuss composite predicates in their chapter on complementation, seeing them as a type of prepositional verb but also admitting that, in the case of forms such as take account of or give way to, “idiomatic cohesion is a matter of gradience” (1985: 1158–1159, 1211–1212). Later, in a chapter on word formation, in a section on lexicalization, they go on to point out that, although they have treated phrasal and prepositional verbs as exhibiting a degree of separateness (as “a grammatical phenomenon”), they cannot ignore their fusion with and equivalency to single words (their “lexicalization aspect”). For example, they remark that, “on the one hand, lose sight of can be viewed as a single lexical item; on the other hand, it comprises three grammatical words, one of them (lose) with some morphological variation” (1985: 1530n). They judge that such phrasal lexical items illustrate the “gradience between grammar and lexicon, including a gradience in lexicalization” (1985: 1530n). Algeo, too, sees composite predicates as falling “[s]omewhere near the middle of the magnetic field of language [. . .] where grammar and lexis meet” (1995: 203). Much of the difference of opinion in synchronic accounts concerning the lexical or grammatical status of composite predicates centres on the meaning and status of light verbs. Light verbs are acknowledged to be far from meaningless (e.g. Stein 1991: 27; Brugman 2001: 575; Butt and Geuder 2001: 326), but in regard to function, they “have proven to be an interesting challenge [. . .] because they have properties that make it difficult to class them either with function words or with proper lexical verbs” (Butt and Geuder 2001: 323). They have been categorized as auxiliaries, similar in nature to tense or aspect markers, as functional elements which serve only to license predications and make no semantic contribution (Cattell 1984),5 as main verbs (Everaert and Hollebrandse 1995) and as a “lexically defective” separate syntactic class (Butt and Geuder 2001). Allerton . This view is consistent with the “argument transfer” position proposed by Grimshaw and Mester (1988), who argue that the light verb takes over the argument structure properties of the deverbalized noun.

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(2002: 7) sees light verbs as half-way between verbs and auxiliaries, and hence calls them thin verbs.

. Historical perspective The results of different historical studies of the composite predicate are often difficult to compare: varied types of corpora are used, different morphosyntactic and semantic definitions of the composite predicate are considered and, throughout the history of English, inventories of verbs and deverbal nouns have undergone various changes. Nonetheless, it is possible to make some generalizations about the development of composite predicates. It seems clear that the composite predicate is a native construction of Old English provenance. Akimoto and Brinton (1999) suggest that some do-composite predicates in Old English may be calques on Latin, while Burnley (1992) sees the composite predicate in Middle English as a calque on French constructions in faire, avoir, prendre and tenir and, to a lesser extent, on Scandinavian forms with get. However, most scholars, while acknowledging French as a strengthening or reinforcing influence, reject theories of foreign origin (cf. Iglesias-Rábade 2001: 150; Moralejo-Gárate 2003: 49, 147), seeing the composite predicate as part of the larger analytic tendency in the history of English. Historically, the composite predicate – or a composite predicate-like construction with eventive meaning – has always been available. In Old English, it is formed with don ‘do,’ habban ‘have,’ niman ‘take,’ sellan ‘give’ and later macian ‘make,’ with niman being replaced by take and sellan by give (both borrowings from Old Norse) in Late Old English or Early Middle English. Some illustrative examples are given in (1a–b) below.6 (1) Old English a. [. . .] and sealde him leafe to and give.pst.ind.3sg them leave.acc.sg to siþigenne forð. journey.infl.inf forward ‘[Martin] gave them leave to journey forward.’ (c. 1000, Ælfric’s Lives of Saints (Martin) 382; from Akimoto and Brinton 1999: 35)

. Many Old English examples are cited in Akimoto and Brinton (1999) as well as in Visser (1963–1973: 138–141, 641–643). Visser does not discuss the verb + preposition + noun type, except for some forms with be (1963–1973: 261–264), none dating from Old English.

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b. Þa namon ða heafod-men andan then take.pst.ind.3pl the chiefman.nom.pl umbrage.acc.sg ongean his lare. against his teaching.dat.sg ‘Then the chiefmen took umbrage at his teaching.’ (c. 1000, Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies I 14.1 214.30; from Akimoto and Brinton 1999: 38) In Old English, composite predicates are less frequent, semantically more transparent and less unified and fixed than today. The composite predicate often has an intransitivizing function. Refusing to commit themselves, Akimoto and Brinton conclude that “the Old English ‘V + N’ collocation is less fully grammaticalized, idiomaticized and lexicalized than its Modern English counterpart” (1999: 54). The Middle English period has been seen as the decisive stage in the development of the composite predicate: while the system of composite predicates was in an “embryonic” stage in Old English, “it was the ME [Middle English] period during which all the crucial steps in their evolution were taken [. . .] forming the basis for further syntactic and semantic refinement and especially for numerical expansion” (Claridge 2000: 95). Over the Middle English period, the numbers of composite predicates increase in all dialects and text types, and the composite predicate becomes a productive pattern (Iglesias-Rábade 2001: 147; MoralejoGárate 2003: 40, 147).7 This increase is facilitated by the large influx of French deverbal nouns at this time, such as affray, batayle, confessioun, complaynte, deliberacioun, promyse, querelle, reward.8 While composite predicates with no articles predominate (Visser 1963–1973: 138; Iglesias-Rábade 2001: 149–150, 161; Moralejo-Gárate 2001: 173, 2003: 59–62), article usage in the composite predicate, during this period in which the article system is emerging and stabilizing, is inconsistent at best (Matsumoto 1999: 88). Adjectival modification is limited and restricted to a small semantic range of adjectives such as good, grete, muchel and strang, which Matsumoto sees as essentially intensifiers (1999: 83; see also IglesiasRábade 2001: 151; Moralejo-Gárate 2003: 64–65, 148). The use of plural deverbal nouns is also infrequent. Moreover, the construction is rarely passivized, with only inner passives found (Matsumoto 1999: 88–89; Tanabe 1999: 120; Iglesias-Rábade 2001: 158; Moralejo-Gárate 2001: 175, 2003: 71), as shown in (2) below. . Bergs (2005: 237) does “not find support for the idea that the number of LVCs [composite predicates] grew steadily during the Late Middle English period,” though he later admits that there was probably a “general increase” in tokens and types which is obscured because of statistical problems (2005: 242). . Of the seven most common nouns occurring in composite predicates in Late Middle English (i.e. knowledge, answer, labour, will, heed, service and estate; see Bergs 2005: 226), four are Romance borrowings and three are of native origin.

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(2) Middle English There is sclaunder ylaid on me. there be.prs.ind.3.sg slander.nom.sg lay.pst.ptcp on me ‘There is slander laid on me.’ (13.., King Alisaumder 1553; from Visser 1963–1973: 2167) Denison (1993) argues that the first solid examples of outer passives, or what he terms complex prepositional passives, appear only in the fifteenth century: (3) Middle English a. and þes oþer wordis of þis bischop ouŠte and these other word.nom.pl of this bishop owe.pst.ind.3sg to be taken hede to to be take.pst.ptcp heed.acc.sg to ‘and these other words of this bishop ought to be taken heed of ’ (?c.1450 [?a1400] Wycliffe, Clergy May Not Hold Property 369.1; from Denison 1993: 154) b. So was the cursede kyng neuer made so be.pst.ind.3sg the cursed king.nom.sg never make.pst.ptcp sorwe fore. sorrow.acc.sg for ‘So the cursed king was never lamented.’ (c.1400, Mandeville 59.22; from Visser 1963–1973: 2171) Composite predicates in Middle English are generally transparent in meaning (Moralejo-Gárate 2003: 150), and Iglesias-Rábade (2001: 147) finds them quite limited semantically, focussed primarily on ‘being alert,’ ‘departing’ and ‘getting/receiving advice.’ Matsumoto (1999: 92) concludes that the composite predicate in Middle English is “partially but not highly idiomaticized,” while MoralejoGárate (2003: 150) recognizes a “loose degree of fixedness” in the Middle English composite predicate and a continuum from fixed (hence idiomatic) to non-fixed, or free.9 In Early Modern English, the frequency of composite predicates would appear to be almost identical to that found in Present-day English, from which Claridge (2000: 174) concludes that the pattern is by then fully established.10 As in . Interestingly, Bergs finds that the female writers of the Paston letters use more tokens of composite predicates than the men, but less modification and fewer “marked” patterns (e.g. passives). He concludes that the composite predicates used by the women are more formulaic, while those used by the men are less fixed and lexicalized (2005: 240–242). . Claridge (2000) finds a frequency of 1.7 per 1,000 words in the Lampeter Corpus (1640– 1730), while Kytö (1999) finds a frequency of 3.7 per 1,000 words in the Helsinki Corpus (1500–

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Middle English, the predominant form of the composite predicate in Early Modern English contains no article (see Hiltunen 1999: 142; Kytö 1999: 185; Claridge 2000: 137–140). Pluralization of the deverbal noun is rare (Kytö 1999: 179–180; Claridge 2000: 158, 246), and modification of it is “surprisingly low” (Claridge 2000: 157, see also 1997: 82). By Early Modern English, the deverbal nouns in composite predicates are predominantly Romance in origin, even those with a zero affix, such as escape, doubt, use or surprise (Claridge 2000: 136). Claridge finds that the deverbal nouns in composite predicates show a considerable semantic range, though the combination itself remains “overwhelmingly” literal or transparent in meaning (2000: 143, 145), with the noun retaining its usual semantic content. As regards passives, these remain uncommon, with inner passives (4a) still more frequent than outer passives (4b) (Claridge 2000: 161). (4) Early Modern English a. must be great Care taken how the Example of any particular Person is recommended to them in gross. (1712, Budgell, Spect. no. 337; from Visser 1963–1973: 2174) b. Pinks and Carnations will hold very well in London, in open Places, if they are taken care of in the Winter. (1722, Fairchild, The City Gardener; from Claridge 2000: 161) Claridge notes (2000: 162; see also Visser 1963–1973: 2163) that inner passives and modification of the noun seem to correlate, as is the case in (4a). According to Strang (1970: 101, quoted in Beal 2004: 85), from about 1800, the composite predicate “develops rapidly.” In Late Modern English, both the semantics and the syntax of the composite predicate undergo significant changes (e.g. combinations become fixed, idiomatic meanings arise). Studies of the composite predicate in this period are unfortunately scarce, however (but see Akimoto 2002a). Regarding Present-day English, corpus studies attest to the pervasiveness and productivity of the composite predicate (e.g. Stein and Quirk 1991; Algeo 1995). Biber et al. (1999: 1026–1029) find the forms widely distributed among different registers and dialects, with have-, make- and take-combinations more common in written registers. At first glance, the development of composite predicates would appear to be a case of lexicalization, if one takes lexicalization to be “adoption into the lexicon” – the broadest and most intuitive sense of this term (see Brinton and Traugott 2005: 18). Over time individual composite predicate constructions have become 1710) and Hiltunen (1999) a frequency of 1.3 per 1,000 words in his corpus of Early Modern English dramatic and poetic works. Claridge (2000: 173–174) explains this discrepancy in terms of the different types of texts examined, as well as by more or less restrictive definitions of the composite predicate used.

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progressively more fixed or fossilized, especially in article usage, modification and pluralization, but also in respect of syntactic operations such as passivization. The historical evidence seems to show a tendency toward fusion of the composite predicate construction into a lexical item which enters the “inventory” (the lexicon) and is accessed as a whole (Lehmann 2002). The same conclusion is reached if one thinks about idiomatization and loss of compositionality as criterial to lexicalization (another sense in which lexicalization is understood). Also consistent with lexicalization, composite predicates seem to be idiosyncratic, one-off developments, rather than following general and predictable patterns of change. The apparent increase of the outer passive, which retains the unity of light verb and deverbal noun (e.g. His exploits were made mention of ), may also provide evidence of lexical unity. Visser (1963–1973: 2163) suggests that a factor favouring the outer passive is the apprehension of the verb and the object “as a phonetic and semantic unit or as a kind of compound verb.” Akimoto (2002b) points to the stability of the inner passive and an increase in the outer passive in the modern period, particularly from the eighteenth century onwards, to argue for the increasing idiomatization of the composite predicate. However, the continued syntactic independence and flexibility of the composite predicate with respect to (i) the intervention of an adjective between the light verb and the deverbal noun, and (ii) the possibility of separating the light verb and the deverbal noun in passive constructions argue against the apprehension of composite predicates as lexicalized. For example, Claridge (2000: 157–158) notes that some combinations in her corpus are never found with modification (e.g. take effect, take part, lose sight of, give rise to, have recourse to, make way for) since they are, she asserts, “certainly single lexical items” (2000: 157); at the same time, composite predicates which she would regard as “very institutionalized” (2000: 157), such as take place in, make use of, find fault with, may have rather extensive modification. She admits that “[w]hile all of these are institutionalized, the noun is nevertheless salient and to a certain degree independent enough to make modification possible” (2000: 158). She also points out that the continued existence of the inner passive, which promotes the deverbal noun to subject position and thus separates it from its collocated light verb (e.g. Mention was made of his exploits), provides evidence against a lexicalized interpretation of composite predicates. Claridge notes that preposition stranding (i.e. inner passive) is most common with composite predicates such as take care of, take notice of, make use of, which otherwise possess a “high degree of internal cohesion.” She concludes that the preference for one type of passive over the other “depends very much on the individual combination” (2000: 161, 164). Observing that it is not easy to account for the divided usage in passivization of the composite predicate, Visser (1963–1973: 2163–2164), nonetheless, cites a “not negligible number” of Middle English and Early Modern English examples of the inner passive to refute the notion that the outer passive is a

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later development which in time replaces the inner passive.11 Before resolving this debate, however, we need to take a closer look at what is meant by lexicalization.

. Definitions of lexicalization and grammaticalization In the literature, lexicalization has been conceptualized in a number of ways: (i) as ordinary processes of word formation (e.g. songwriter), (ii) as a process of fusion creating simplex lexemes out of syntactic phrases or of compound and complex words, thus leading to a decrease in compositionality (e.g. nuts-and-bolts ‘practical details’), and (iii) as a process of separation creating independent lexemes out of derivational affixes or other parts of words, thus resulting in an increase in autonomy (e.g. ade ‘fruit beverage’). After reviewing these often contradictory definitions of lexicalization, Brinton and Traugott (2005) propose revised definitions of both lexicalization and the process to which it is often said to stand in opposition, namely grammaticalization. Our definitions are based on the assumption of gradience, according to which both lexical items and grammatical items exist on a cline. Lexical items form a cline defined with respect to degree of fusion in internal structure, and range from fully transparent to less transparent to idiosyncratic (Brinton and Traugott 2005: 94): L1 = Partially fixed phrases; for example, lose sight of, agree with. L2 = Complex semi-idiosyncratic forms; for example, unhappy, desktop. L3 = Simplexes and maximally unanalysable idiosyncratic forms; for example, desk, over-the-hill. Grammatical items, in turn, form a cline defined in respect to degrees of fusion with external elements (Brinton and Traugott 2005: 93): G1 = Periphrases; for example, be going to, as far as, in fact (in their early stages). G2 = Semi-bound forms like function words and clitics; for example, must, of, ’ll, genitive -s (function words may be cliticized in some positions, but free in others). G3 = Affixes, such as derivational morphology, which changes the grammatical class of the stem (e.g. the fairly productive adverbial affix -wise) and, most especially, inflectional morphology (very productive; sometimes default).

. A number of Visser’s examples (1963–1973: 2164–2176) contain nouns which are not deverbal (fight shy of, get the better of, give a wide berth to, give way to, lay eyes on, make away with, make a friend of, stand in awe of, take pains with) and hence I would not analyse these collocations as composite predicates.

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Both lexicalization and grammaticalization are conceived of as gradual (noninstantaneous) historical changes. Lexicalization is the change whereby in certain linguistic contexts speakers use a syntactic construction or word formation as a new contentful form with formal and semantic properties that are not completely derivable or predictable from the constituents of the construction or the word formation pattern. Over time there may be further loss of internal constituency and the item may become more lexical. (Brinton and Traugott 2005: 96)

Grammaticalization is the change whereby in certain linguistic contexts speakers use parts of a construction with a grammatical function. Over time the resulting grammatical item may become more grammatical by acquiring more grammatical functions and expanding its host-classes. (Brinton and Traugott 2005: 99)

The input to lexicalization tends to be an item which is highly specified semantically, while its output is a lexical, that is, a contentful item which is stored in the inventory and must be learned by speakers. It can be a form of any complexity, ranging from L1 to L2 to L3. Lexicalization typically involves fusion (erasure of phrasal or morphological boundaries) and often also semantic and pragmatic idiomatization, i.e. the semantic components lose their compositionality, and new meanings are idiosyncratic, sometimes more abstract, but other times more specific. Lexicalization results in a decrease in pattern productivity and may involve a decrease in token productivity (host-class reduction, see Himmelmann 2004).12 In contrast, the input to grammaticalization must be semantically general, while its output is a grammatical, that is, a functional form of any complexity, ranging from G1 to G2 to G3. In advanced cases, it may become semantically contentless (i.e. bleached, non-referential) or phonologically contentless but meaningful (e.g. zero inflection). Grammaticalization typically involves fusion with a host, sometimes followed by coalescence or reduction of phonological sequences. It also typically involves loss of concrete and literal meanings (idiomatization, bleaching) counterbalanced by the strengthening and eventual semanticization of more abstract, contextually-derived general meanings. Since grammaticalization always involves host-class expansion, it also leads to an increase in pattern and token productivity.

. Host-class reduction involves a decrease in the range of collocations with members of a relevant category in which a form participates.

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. Lexicalization, grammaticalization and the composite predicate In the case of composite predicates, we would appear to be dealing with neither fully lexicalized nor fully grammaticalized constructions. As lexical items, they fall between L1, i.e. partially fixed phrases, and L2, i.e. complex semi-idiomatic forms, on the scale of lexicality. As grammatical items, they would fall into the G1 category, i.e. periphrastic forms, on the scale of grammaticality, though we might expect that, historically, they would tend toward G2 status. Thus, the syntactic behaviour of composite predicates offers support for the gradience view. The evidence of fusion also makes it clear that we are dealing with some degree of coalescence (but obviously not complete coalescence) of these forms. In fact, there would appear to be good evidence to identify two categories of composite predicates which differ with respect to lexicalization and grammaticalization: a. The first is the composite predicate type which, according to Huddleston, Pullum et al. (2002: 289; see also Fraser 1976: 40–43), includes verbal idioms, such as curry favour with, cast doubt on, lose sight of, find favour with, pay tribute to, lay claim to and so on. b. The second includes composite predicates formed with the light verbs make, take, give, have and do, which appear to be productive in the modern period. . Lose sight of types: Lexicalization (L1/L2) We see that with only a few exceptions, composite predicates such as lose sight of or cast doubt on do not occur with an article. The zero-article in composite predicates has generally been associated with idiom formation. Thus, Claridge (2000: 137–140) speculates that composite predicates without an article possess a higher “degree of institutionalization [. . .] or even lexicalization” (2000: 140).13 Likewise, Akimoto (2002b: 12) sees the lack of an article as indicative of fixed unity (and of a preference for the outer passive), while Kytö (1999: 186) makes the more explicit claim that “zero modification is the strong-hold of idiom formation.” Otherwise, their behaviour is quite flexible: some allow no passives (*Favour was found with him, *He was found favour with), some allow inner passives only (Objection was raised to the plan, *The plan was raised objection to), some allow outer passives only (The mine was laid claim to, ?Claim was laid to the mine), and yet some others allow both types of passive (Tribute was paid to the hero, The hero was paid trib. However, because certain composite predicates with “a very idiomatic flavour,” such as put an end to or make a stand, contain an article, Claridge concludes that the presence of an article appears to be merely “a question of chance” (2000: 140).

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ute to). Similarly, some allow adjectival modification (cast serious doubt on), while others do not (*pay particular court to). Arguing for the lexical (or partially lexicalized) status of composite predicates of this type are the following factors: a. They are formed with a wide variety of verbs (not merely light verbs), often with a high degree of semantic specificity, including bear, catch, cross, curry, fall, find, get, grab, keep, lay, leave, lose, open, pay, put, raise, seize, set, show, steer. Therefore, they have the highly specified semantic content expected in lexicalization. b. They fall on the low end of the productivity scale. Some form completely nonproductive patterns, such as open fire on, seize control of, keep track of, while others show minimal productivity; for example, on the pattern of lose sight of, we find lose count (of ), lose track (of ), or on the pattern of pay court to, we find pay heed to or pay tribute to. Thus, they have the low pattern productivity characteristic of lexicalization. c. They often have non-compositional or highly idiomaticized meaning. For instance, in addition to its literal meaning ‘no longer be able to see,’ lose sight of has developed the metaphorical meaning ‘forget about, not keep fresh in one’s mind.’ More extreme examples are pay court to, meaning ‘pay courteous attention to,’ which, for many speakers of Present-day English, would be noncompositional, or curry favour with, meaning ‘behave ingratiatingly,’ which has lost any connection with the verb curry, meaning ‘rub down or dress a horse with a comb.’ d. Consistent with Himmelmann’s (2004) view of host class reduction or contraction (see above), we find that the possibilities of collocation are reduced. In the case of lose sight of, lose can be said to become fixed to sight of, and sight of to lose. One deverbal noun cannot be substituted for another (hence, *lose vision of ), nor can the verbs be exchanged (hence, *find sight of ). We can regard composite predicates of this type as instances of L1 (phrasal constructions) which, over time, have become more fossilized and less compositional. . Take a look at type: Grammaticalization (G1) In contrast, if we consider composite predicates consisting of the light verbs make, take, give, have and do which have emerged primarily since the Later Middle English period, we have quite a different situation. In this case, two factors are most telling: the semantic set of verbs used (Section 5.2.1) and their aspectual function (Section 5.2.2).

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.. Continuity of light verbs While the relative frequency of the light verbs appearing in the composite predicate fluctuates over time, the verbs used remain identical from Middle English to the present day: give, have, take, make and do. Table 1 shows results of frequency studies from Middle English to the present. This continuity of forms can be extended back to Old English if we consider the semantics of the light verbs, where ‘take’ is expressed by niman and ‘give’ by sellan. Thus, the same semantic set has been used throughout the history of English and, most importantly, these verbs are all of very general meaning. For example, Baron and Herslund (1998: 103) speak of their “bleached meaning” and the fact that they express only “the general idea of creation.” Allerton notes that high frequency verbs are general enough to fit in with the semantics of a wide range of eventive nouns (2002: 173). It is, in fact, impossible to substitute roughly synonymous verbs which have more specialized meaning in the composite predicate; thus, one can give a kick but not *bestow/grant/deliver/bequeath a kick, cf. give/bestow/grant/deliver/bequeath a book (Nickel 1968: 9). The semantics of these light verbs is therefore consistent with the semantic generality of the input of grammaticalization. .. Aspectual function The second factor favouring a grammaticalization interpretation is the emergence of the indefinite article in the composite predicate in the modern period. The indefinite article has been associated centrally with the expression of grammatical or lexical aspect in the composite predicate.14 Aspectual meaning is often – though not universally15 – seen as a hallmark of the composite predicate in Present-day English (Live 1973: 34). The composite predicate has been associated with the expression of grammatical aspect, namely perfectivity or boundedness (Renský 1964: 295; Prince 1972; Stein 1991: 17–18), and with lexical aspect, such as the expression of limited duration or “antidurativity” (Dixon 2005: 469–476; see also Wierzbicka 1982: 757, 759). More often, it is understood as adding telicity (Prince 1972; Baron and Herslund 1998: 102; . On the vexed distinction between grammatical and lexical aspect, see, for example, Smith (1997), who speaks of viewpoint and situation aspect. The latter is often known as Aktionsart. . For example, Allerton (2002) does not see aspect as a significant factor in what he calls “stretched verb constructions,” concluding that in 3/5 of the time, the Aktionsart remains unchanged in comparison with the simplex verb; in the remaining 2/5 of the time, “the selected thin verb is likely to play the major part in marking this ‘new’ eventuality type” (2002: 206). However, Allerton’s figures must be put into perspective, as he includes a wide range of types not typically classified as composite predicates, including those with be (e.g. be decisive, be a helper, be a threat, be of service). Of his six patterns, only one fits the definition of composite predicate adopted here.

make take have do give

Kytö (1999) Helsinki Corpus (types/tokens)

make have give take do

Algeo (1995) Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen Corpus (types/tokens)

have make give take

1 2 3 4 5

Early Modern English

1 2 3 4 5

Presentday English

1 2 3 4 5

* same frequency ** only give, take and have investigated

Matsumoto (1999) Middle English Dictionary (types)

Middle English

make have give/take take/give do

Algeo (1995) Brown Corpus (types/tokens)

have give/do make/give take/make do/take

Hiltunen (1999) Corpus of 17th c. drama, poetry and prose (types/tokens)

make/have have/make do give/take take/give

Moralejo-Gárate (2003) Helsinki Corpus (types/tokens)

give have take

Stein and Quirk (1991) British written texts (tokens)**

make take give have do

Claridge (2000) Lampeter Corpus V + N (+ P) (tokens)

have make take do give

Tanabe (1999), Bergs (2005) Paston Letters (tokens)

make take give have

Akimoto (1989) Survey of English Usage V + NØ (tokens)

make have/take give/give* take/have* do

Matsumoto (2000) 16th c. prose (types/tokens)

make have do take/give give/take

Matsumoto (2000) Malory (types/tokens)

Table 1. Ranking of light verbs in composite predicates in the historical periods

make give have/take take/have do

Matsumoto (2000) 17th c. prose (types/tokens)

make have/take take/have give do

Matsumoto (2000) Caxton (types/tokens) have make* do*/take take/do give

Matsumoto (2000) Margery Kempe (types/tokens)

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Brinton 1998: 49–51). Prince (1972) sees the composite predicate as containing a “semelfactive predicate” with the sense ‘(be) a bounded activity;’ the composite predicate converts an activity into an accomplishment and denotes a single completed action (1972: 413, 418, n. 3). Another view is that the composite predicate adds an intended endpoint to a situation, an endpoint which varies with the nature of the situation. For example, with a situation of unlimited duration, such as sleeping, the composite predicate have a sleep denotes a sleep of some limited length of time, while with an incremental situation, such as moving, the composite predicate make a move isolates one increment of the situation (see Brinton 1998). The presence of an indefinite article in the composite predicate (e.g. give a shrug, take a bite) favours the aspectual interpretation since it serves to single out a particular occurrence of an event or to denote one segment of an activity, with beginning and end, “cut out from an activity that has no boundaries” (Stein 1991: 17–18; see also Renský 1964: 295). Allerton (2002: 106) talks about the nominalization “reifying” the eventive meaning, turning an event or a quality into a thing and allowing reference to the beginning or end of a state. He notes that countable nouns occur in over 50 per cent of the examples in his corpus (2002: 127), which “certainly suggests that countability [. . .] might be one reason for the existence of stretched verb constructions.” Given the fact that many composite predicates in the Middle and Early Modern English periods have a zero article, most scholars are rightfully cautious about attributing aspectual meaning to the composite predicate in earlier periods of English. Although aspectual meaning is a possibility (see Tanabe 1999: 109–113, 130; Claridge 2000: 243; Iglesias-Rábade 2001: 159), as in: (5) Early Modern English A Presbyterian Lady too, that casts a sad looke with her eies for the down fall of her Faction (1650, Neville, Newes from the Exchange, or the Commonwealth of Ladies; from Claridge 2000: 243) the general consensus, as stated by Claridge, is that the historical data do “not warrant positing an overall aspectual difference between simple verb and [composite predicate]” and that aspectual meaning is “not a determining factor for [. . .] the use of the category as a whole” (2000: 245–246; see also Moralejo-Gárate 2003: 142). It is clear that we must look to the Late Modern English period for the development of aspectual meaning in the composite predicate, and such a study has yet to be done. During this period, the composite predicate comes to be associated with individuated, countable situations; hence a difference in meaning arises between bathe ‘(cause to) wash’ (on any occasion, unless the context indicated otherwise) and have a bath ‘indulge in a bath’ (on a particular occasion, for a bounded period of time). The aspectual function is particularly noticeable with complex predicates

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introduced by have; whereas main verb have is typically stative, light verb have is often not, especially if the deverbal noun originates in a process verb, for example, have a dance. The development of the dynamic have is more advanced in Britain, hence the preference for have a {bath, look, bite, drink, walk, guess} in British English and for take a {bath, look, bite, drink, walk, guess} in North American English (cf. Trudgill et al. 2002: 7; see also Algeo 1995: 215–216). A further grammatical/aspectual distinction arises between certain have and give/take complex predicates, in which the former expresses stative meaning and the latter dynamic meaning, as in have/take {pity on, control over, a place, a fancy for or to, a dislike, a picture} or have/give {an answer, a name, a report, a picture}. However, the stative vs. dynamic contrast does not hold in all cases; sometimes the variant forms are synonymous, as in have/take {a tour, a shower, a walk, a swallow, a seat, a nap, a look}. .. Other factors favouring grammaticalization In addition to the semantic generality of the input verbs and the acquisition of a clearly identifiable grammatical function, a number of other factors point to a grammaticalization interpretation: a. Composite predicates with make, take, give, have and do are highly productive. For example, the make a + noun pattern yields make a claim, make a promise, make a joke, make a decision, make a try, make a change (see Algeo 1995: 215– 216). Note that an increase in type and token frequency is characteristic of grammaticalization. b. Composite predicates exhibit host-class expansion (cf. Section 4 above), where a grammaticalizing form increases its range of collocations with members of the relevant category. In the case of composite predicates, although the set of light verbs remains restricted and stable throughout the history of English, the set of deverbal objects is large and expands over time. In Middle English, Romance borrowings swell the set of deverbal nouns considerably, so that by Early Modern English they predominate in the composite predicate construction. Moreover, in Present-day English, we see extension of these composite predicates to deverbal phrasal verbs, such as do a make-over, give a wipe-down, make a comeback, have a breakdown, give a handout (Stein 1991: 9). c. Composite predicates can also be understood as exhibiting what Himmelmann (2004) calls semantic-pragmatic expansion in that the meaning of the construction has been enriched by the addition of lexical aspectual meaning



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(telic Aktionsart, stative vs. dynamic contrast) to its eventive meaning. Note that, in this view, grammaticalization does not necessarily involve bleaching.16 A strong argument can be made, then, that the composite predicates with have, take, make, give and do have been (partially) grammaticalized. We can think of composite predicates of this type as instances of G1 (phrasal constructions) in which the noun phrase is decategorialized, and the verb has taken on a grammatical function. Were these phrasal constructions to be further grammaticalized, one would expect the light verb to move in the direction of G3, becoming a grammatical (derivational) prefix (not unlike the verbal aspectual prefixes of Slavic). Strictly speaking, it is not the light verb but the entire construction that is grammaticalized. This is compatible with the process which Lehmann (2004) describes for the grammaticalization of perfect have + past participle (e.g. hæbbe + writtene). He notes that have is “recategorized [. . .] from a full verb to an auxiliary, and the construction consisting of this auxiliary and the participle is grammaticalized into a member of the conjugation paradigm” (2004: 163). He further notes that this process differs from the types of conversion one sees in word formation, because recategorization happens in situ; it does not force have into a new context, as in the case of lateral conversions. In Lehmann’s words, “[t]he full verb becomes an auxiliary by being interpreted as part of a periphrastic form involving the participle that it combines with” (2004: 166).

. Conclusion The syntactic behaviour of composite predicates presents strong evidence for a gradience view of lexicality and grammaticality. Aspects of fusion make clear that we are dealing with forms with some (but not a complete) degree of coalescence. This paper has argued that composite predicates do not constitute a unified class historically, but develop differently along lines of grammaticalization and lexicalization, these understood as complementary, not opposing diachronic processes. Some composite predicates exhibit fossilization, loss of compositionality and lack of productivity characteristic of lexicalization. In contrast, others, especially those consisting of the light verbs make, have, take, give and do, are highly productive and have acquired grammatical functions while remaining relatively transparent . In discussing light verb constructions in Urdu, Butt and Geuder (2001; see also Butt 2003) see the semantics of light verbs as a case of polysemy, not of progressive bleaching resulting from grammaticalization (2001: 226). Moreover, they assert that, given the stability of light verbs over thousands of years, it is “very doubtful” that one can speak of grammaticalization (2001: 336).

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in meaning. These may therefore be seen as instances of grammaticalization rather than lexicalization.

Abbreviations 3 acc dat ind inf infl

third person accusative dative indicative infinitive inflected

nom pl prs pst ptcp sg

nominative plural present past participle singular

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Burnley, David. 1992. Lexis and semantics. In Norman Blake (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English language. Vol. II: 1066–1476, 409–499. Cambridge: CUP. Butt, Miriam. 2003. The light verb jungle. Harvard Working Papers in Linguistics 9: 1–49. Butt, Miriam & Wilhelm Geuder. 2001. On the (semi)lexical status of light verbs. In Norbert Corver & Henk van Riemsdijk (eds.), Semi-lexical categories: The function of content words and the content of function words, 323–370. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Cattell, Ray. 1984. Composite predicates in English. Syntax and semantics. Vol. 17. Sydney: Academic Press. Claridge, Claudia. 1997. A century in the life of multi-word verbs. In Magnus Lung (ed.), Corpus-based studies in English. Papers from the 17th International Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 17), 69–85. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Claridge, Claudia. 2000. Multi-word verbs in Early Modern English. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Denison, David. 1993. English historical syntax. London: Longman. Dixon, Robert M. W. 2005. A semantic approach to English grammar. 2nd edn. Oxford: OUP. Everaert, Martin & Bart Hollebrandse. 1995. The lexical representation of light verb constructions. In Jocelyn Ahers, Leela Bilmes, Joshua S. Guenter, Barbara A. Kaiser & Ju Namkung (eds.), Proceedings of the 21st annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 94–104. Berkeley CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society. Fraser, Bruce. 1976. The verb-particle combination in English. New York NY: Academic Press. Grimshaw, Jane & Armin Mester. 1988. Light verbs and Ø-marking. Linguistic Inquiry 19: 205– 232. Hiltunen, Risto. 1999. Verbal phrases and phrasal verbs in Early Modern English. In Laurel J. Brinton & Minoji Akimoto (eds.), Collocational and idiomatic aspects of composite predicates in the history of English, 133–165. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2004. Lexicalization and grammaticalization: Opposite or orthogonal? In Walter Bisang, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann & Björn Wiemer (eds.), What makes grammaticalization? A look from its fringes and its components, 21–42. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Huddleston, Rodney, Geoffrey K. Pullum et al. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: CUP. Iglesias-Rábade, Luis. 2001. Composite predicates in Middle English with the verbs niman and taken. Studia Neophilologica 73: 143–163. Jespersen, Otto. 1909–1949. A modern English grammar on historical principles. 7 vols. London: Allen and Unwin. Kytö, Merja. 1999. Collocational and idiomatic aspects of verbs in Early Modern English: A corpus-based study of MAKE, HAVE, GIVE, TAKE and DO. In Laurel J. Brinton & Minoji Akimoto (eds.), Collocational and idiomatic aspects of composite predicates in the history of English, 167–206. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lehmann, Christian. 2002. New reflections on grammaticalization and lexicalization. In Ilse Wischer & Gabriele Diewald (eds.), New reflections on grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 49], 1–18. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lehmann, Christian. 2004. Theory and method in grammaticalization. Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 32: 152–187. Live, Anna H. 1973. The take-have phrasal in English. Linguistics 95: 31–50. Matsumoto, Meiko. 1999. Composite predicates in Middle English. In Laurel J. Brinton & Minoji Akimoto (eds.), Collocational and idiomatic aspects of composite predicates in the history of English, 59–95. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Matsumoto, Meiko. 2000. Composite predicates with the verb do from Late Middle English through Early Modern English. Journal of the Faculty of Letters, Okayama University 34: 121–131. Moralejo-Gárate, Teresa. 2001. Composite predicates and idiomatisation in Middle English: A corpus-based approach. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 36: 171–187. Moralejo-Gárate, Teresa. 2003. Composite predicates in Middle English. Munich: Lincom. Nickel, Gerhard. 1968. Complex verbal structures in English. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (IRAL) 6: 1–21. Olsson, Yngve. 1961. On the syntax of the English verb with special reference to have a look and similar complex structures. Göteborg: Elanders Boktryckeri Aktiebolag. Prince, Ellen. 1972. A note on aspect in English: The take a walk construction. In Senta Plötz (ed.), Transformationelle Analyse, 409–440. Frankfurt: Anthenäum. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman. Renský, Miroslav. 1964. English verbo-nominal phrases. Travaux Linguistique de Prague 1: 289– 299. Smith, Carlota S. 1997. The parameter of aspect. 2nd edn. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Stein, Gabriele. 1991. The phrasal verb type ‘to have a look’ in Modern English. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (IRAL) 19: 1–29. Stein, Gabriele & Randolph Quirk. 1991. On having a look in a corpus. In Karin Aijmer & Bengt Altenberg (eds.), English corpus linguistics: Studies in honour of Jan Svartvik, 197–203. London: Longman. Strang, Barbara M.H. 1970. A history of English. London: Methuen. Tanabe, Harumi. 1999. Composite predicates and phrasal verbs in The Paston Letters. In Laurel J. Brinton & Minoji Akimoto (eds.), Collocational and idiomatic aspects of composite predicates in the history of English, 97–132. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ten Cate, Abraham P. & Willy Vandeweghe. 1991. Aspectual properties of complex predicates. In Carl Vetters & Willy Vandeweghe (eds.), Perspectives on aspect and Aktionsart [Belgian Journal of Linguistics 6], 115–132. Bruxelles: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1999. A historical overview of composite predicate types. In Laurel J. Brinton & Minoji Akimoto (eds.), Collocational and idiomatic aspects of composite predicates in the history of English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins: 239–260. Trudgill, Peter, Terttu Nevalainen & Ilse Wischer. 2002. Dynamic have in North American and British Isles English. English Language and Linguistics 6: 1–15. Visser, Frederikus T. 1963–1973. An historical syntax of the English language. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Wierzbicka, Anna. 1982. Why can you have a drink when you can’t *have an eat? Language 58: 753–799. Wischer, Ilse. Forthcoming. Lexicalisation of paraphrasal verb constructions with ‘have’ and ‘take’. In Dieter Kastovsky (ed.), Proceedings of the Conference on the History of the English Lexicon, Tulln, 2001.

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On the grammaticalization and (inter)subjectivity of evidential (semi-)auxiliaries in Spanish* Bert Cornillie University of Leuven and University of Antwerp

This paper discusses the processes of grammaticalization and subjectification observed in the Spanish evidential (semi-)auxiliaries parecer ‘seem’ and resultar ‘turn out to.’ The diachronic and synchronic analyses shed new light on Traugott’s claim of the unidirectional shift from subjectification towards intersubjectification, that is, “the development of meanings that encode speaker/writers’ attention to the cognitive stances and social identities of addressees” (Traugott 2003: 124). The central argument is that the evidential verbs under analysis clearly undergo grammaticalization, but do not corroborate the postulated correlation between the grammaticalization cline and intersubjectification. Rather, they suggest that less grammaticalized evidential constructions expressing intersubjective interaction precede the more grammaticalized constructions with a subjective reading.

.

Introduction

Subjectification and intersubjectification are widely debated notions in recent grammaticalization studies. Subjectification refers to “the historical pragmaticsemantic process whereby meanings become increasingly based in the speaker’s subjective belief state, or attitude toward what is said” (Traugott 1989: 31). Intersubjectification, in turn, is the process whereby a grammaticalized form increasingly conveys the explicit expression of the SP/W’s [speaker/writer’s] attention to the ‘self ’ of addressee/reader (AD/R) in both an epistemic sense (paying attention to their * I want to thank the audience of New Reflections on Grammaticalization 3 (Santiago de Compostela, 2005) and the anonymous referees for their critical comments, which seem to have resulted in an improvement of previous versions of the paper. The research reported in this paper has been made possible by the Interuniversity Attraction Poles Programme P6/44 of the Belgian State (Science Policy Department).

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presumed attitudes to the content of what is said) and in a more social sense (paying attention to their ‘face’ or ‘image needs’ associated with social stance and identity). (Traugott 2003: 128)

Traugott and Dasher (2002) and Traugott (2003) suggest a unidirectional shift from subjectivity to intersubjectivity, along the lines of the unidirectional cline of grammaticalization. In this paper, I will analyse the evidential semi-auxiliaries parecer ‘seem’ and resultar ‘turn out to.’ Since these two evidential verbs are grammaticalized and refer to the modes of knowing involved in uttering a statement, it seems worthwhile to address the question of whether this double unidirectionality holds for both of them. My hypothesis is that intersubjectification does not readily hold for the evidential or epistemic expressions, while it may be applied to parentheticals and other discourse-oriented forms. The paper is structured as follows: I first provide a synchronic description of parecer and resultar, paying special attention to the frequency distribution of their respective complements (Section 2). Section 3, then, gives a diachronic overview of the two verbs, where I try to show that there is a special link between the presence of adjectival attributes and the emergence of infinitival complements. In Section 4 I offer an (inter)subjectivity account of the different degrees of grammaticalization that characterize parecer and resultar. Finally, Section 5 discusses Traugott’s proposal of (inter)subjectivity against the background of my empirical observations. Section 6 sets out the conclusions of this study.

. A synchronic view As already mentioned, this paper deals with the Spanish evidential expressions parecer + infinitive ‘seem,’ as in example (1), and resultar + infinitive ‘turn out,’ as in (2). More specifically, it focusses on the alternation observed in Present-day Spanish between the constructions with an infinitive, as those in (1) and (2), and the structures involving a que-clause, as illustrated in (3) and (4). (1) Present-day Spanish Más bien se han floreado mutuamente y prometido more well refl aux cheer.ptcp mutually and promise.ptcp respaldo casi eterno. Esto parece confirmar que support.sg almost eternal this seem.3sg confirm.inf comp Fujimori y Hermoza están estrechando sus Fujimori and Hermoza be.prs.3pl strengthen.prog poss.3pl vínculos. tie.pl

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‘Rather they have cheered each other up and promised almost eternal support. This seems to confirm that Fujimori and Hermoza are strengthening their ties.’ (Notic:Perú:Caretas) (2) Present-day Spanish La escuela laica que escogimos para Philip the school.sg secular comp choose.pst.1pl for Philip resulta estar llena. result.prs.3sg cop full ‘The secular school that we chose for Philip turns out to be full.’ (Notic:España:ABC) (3) Present-day Spanish Parece que esto confirma que Fujimori y seem.prs.3sg comp this confirm.prs.3sg comp Fujimori and Hermoza están estrechando sus vínculos. Hermoza be.prs.3pl strengthen.prog poss.3sg tie.pl ‘It seems that this confirms that Fujimori and Hermoza are strengthening their ties.’ (4) Present-day Spanish Resulta que la escuela laica que escogimos result.prs.3sg comp the school.sg secular comp choose.pst.1pl para Philip está llena. for Philip cop full ‘It turns out that the secular school that we chose for Philip is full.’ In (1) and (2), parecer and resultar are considered to be more grammaticalized than in (3) and (4), since in the former instances they behave as semi-auxiliaries. The shift to the paradigm of the auxiliaries implies certain restrictions, such as, for example, the fact that present perfect forms with parecer + infinitive are not possible, as shown in (5). The combination resultar + infinitive is also subject to certain restrictions. Thus, whereas the finite verb admits perfect tense constructions, it can combine only with a small set of infinitives, such as the copulas ser and estar ‘to be’ or, occasionally, tener ‘to have,’ as exemplified in (6). (5) Present-day Spanish *Esto ha parecido confirmar que this aux seem.ptcp confirm.inf comp sus vínculos y debilitando a poss.3sg tie.pl and weaken.prog to

están estrechando be.prs.3pl strengthen.prog Montesinos. Montesinos

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(6) Present-day Spanish Se establecieron dos procesos diferentes para investigar [...] refl establish.pst.3pl two process.pl different to investigate a los individuos [...] pero uno de ellos ha resultado tener to the individual.pl but one of them aux result.ptcp have.inf defectos fundamentales y el otro es poco probable defect.pl fundamental.pl and the other be.prs.3sg little probable que concluya su tarea. comp finish.prs.sbjv.3sg poss.3sg task.sg ‘Two different processes were set up in order to investigate the individuals but one of them has turned out to have serious flaws and the other one is unlikely to finish its task.’ (Notic:España:ABC) It can be hypothesized that the restrictions regarding both the rejection or acceptance of the present perfect and the types of infinitives which they can take as complements correlate with the different positions that the two verbs occupy in the grammaticalization chain. In the remainder of this section I will try to show that this is indeed the case, since parecer proves to be better integrated into the auxiliary paradigm than resultar. My analysis is based on the online Corpus del Español, which includes data from both Spanish and Latin American sources. I used the sub-corpus of nonfiction prose (6,800,000 words) and the offline version of the spoken Habla Culta corpus (708,500 words). The latter sub-corpus of the Corpus del Español is used for forms which are too frequent to be extracted online, which is the case for parecer and resultar in spoken Spanish. The quantitative analysis provided below is based on a sample of 4,719 examples (cf. Table 1). In order to provide a usage-based account of Present-day Spanish, the observations made here have been checked for both peninsular and Latin American Spanish. Table 1. Frequency of parecer and resultar by sub-corpus

parecer resultar

Non-fiction prose

Spoken discourse

Total

2,315 1,327

856 221

3,171 1,548

Let us now analyse the frequency and distribution of parecer and resultar + infinitive as against other types of complementation, in both written and spoken media, and describe to what extent the different constructions compete with each other. Table 2 provides the distribution of parecer.

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Table 2. Frequency and distribution of the complementation patterns of parecer

Written % Spoken %

queclause

me/le parece que

Infinitive

Adjectival attribute

Nominal attribute

None

Other

Total

271 11.7 184 21.4

42 1.8 208 24.2

797 34.4 11 1.2

562 24.2 208 24.2

207 8.9 73 8.5

218 9.4 79 9.2

170 7.3 93 10.8

2,315 100 856 100

A look at the first three columns in Table 2 shows that nearly half of the occurrences of parecer in the corpus appear in clausal complementation patterns. Although parecer + infinitive competes with parece que in Present-day Spanish, the corpus data indicate that there are conspicuous differences between the spoken and the written language. While parecer + infinitive is most frequent in the written corpus (34.4 per cent), it hardly shows up in the spoken data (1.2 per cent), where me parece que (24.2 per cent) and parece que (21.4 per cent) constructions are the most frequent patterns as far as clausal complementation is concerned. The adjectival and nominal complements, by contrast, show roughly the same frequency in the spoken and the written corpora. Like parecer, resultar can combine both with an infinitive and with a queclause. Yet, the semi-auxiliary resultar seems to be less grammaticalized than parecer. Table 3 below shows not only that the grammaticalized construction resultar + infinitive is virtually non-existent in the spoken sub-corpus (0.4 per cent), but also that it is not frequent in the written medium either (5.5 per cent). In the latter sub-corpus, the overwhelming majority of resultar constructions have an adjectival attribute (77.3 per cent), which is in sharp contrast with the spoken data, where resulta que is the most frequent option (60.1 per cent). Table 3. Frequency and distribution of the complementation patterns of resultar

Written % Spoken %

queclause

Infinitive

Adjectival attribute

Nominal attribute

None

Other

Total

40 3.0 133 60.1

74 5.5 1 0.4

1026 77.3 57 25.7

111 8.3 9 4.0

6 0.4 13 5.8

70 5.2 8 3.6

1,327 100 221 100

A comparison of the data in Tables 2 and 3 reveals that resultar and parecer exhibit very different frequencies as regards their complementation patterns. While resultar shows a very low proportion of infinitival complements in both written and spoken Spanish, with parecer infinitives are fairly frequent, specially in written Spanish. As for adjectival complements, their proportion is balanced in both the written and the spoken language with parecer, while with resultar there is a notable

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contrast between their proportion in speech and in writing. Such pronounced differences call for an analysis of the diachronic data, which is undertaken in the next section.

. A diachronic overview From the point of view of diachronic subjectification (cf. Traugott 1989), the hypothesis concerning the grammaticalization of parecer and resultar is that it implies the progressive development from concrete readings into more abstract ones. A detailed analysis of the concrete and abstract readings of both parecer and resultar is therefore necessary in order to verify this hypothesis. For this purpose, in the following sections I examine a number of diachronic examples from the online Corpus del Español, beginning with parecer (Section 3.1) before continuing on to describe resultar (Section 3.2). . A diachronic view of parecer + infinitive The diachronic data from the Corpus del Español indicate an evolution of parecer from a verb of physical appearance involving movement into a speaker-oriented evidential auxiliary which is capable of combining with all kinds of infinitives. Bolinger (1991) describes parecer with examples from thirteenth-century Old Spanish, but does not discuss later instances. Below I refer to Bolinger’s comments where necessary and complement his analysis with illustrative examples from the Corpus del Español from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. In the thirteenth century, parecer is used as a verb denoting appearance or location, which can be understood both physically and metaphorically. Examples (7a) and (7b) below refer to physical appearance ‘appear, show up.’ This appearance or location reading can be considered a concrete reading of parecer. (7) Old Spanish a. [...] siempre se mueuen so ell orizon & non always refl move.prs.3pl under the horizon and no parece ninguno dellos. seem.prs.3sg none of.them ‘They always move under the horizon and no one of them shows up.’ (13th c., Alfonso X, Libros del saber de astronomía) b. De que me aduxiste en tan alto puyal. De qui of comp dat.1sg take.pst.2sg in such high place from here toda la tierra pareçe fastal mar. all the earth seem.prs.3sg to.the sea

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‘That you took me in so high a place. From here the whole world appears up to the sea.’ (13th c., Gonzalo de Berceo, Milagros de Nuestra Señora) Most significant is the fact that my thirteenth-century corpus data also contain nominal (8a) and adjectival (8b) attributes, which demonstrates that parecer also had a copular function at an early stage. In (8a) the writer compares the situation with a miracle, whereas in (8b) he states that the fruit looks red. In the latter case, the writer indicates that the reality may be different; in other words, the speaker does not express certainty about his perception. This implies that the subjective impression reading is also one of the concrete readings of parecer from the early stages of the Spanish language. Note that in (8b) the subject (esta junta), which agrees in number and gender with the attribute, occupies preverbal position, while in (8a) the grammatical subject of parecer is the postverbal que-clause. (8) Old Spanish a. E esto dize la ystoria porque parece and this say.prs.3sg the history because seem.prs.3sg milagro enla tierra que estaua yerma & seca miracle.sg in.the earth.sg comp cop.pst.3sg wild and dry & quemada dela calentura del sol tornar pesquera and burn.ptcp of.the heat.sg of.the sun.sg turn.inf lake.sg grande & muy abastada por el agua dela mar. big and very provide.ptcp by the water of.the sea ‘And history tells this because it seems a miracle to find a large lake provided with water from the sea in the wild, dry region which was burnt by the hot sun.’ (13th c., Anonymous, Gran conquista de Ultramar) b. pero [esta fruta] es fuert & dura de quebrantar, but this fruit.sg be.prs.3sg strong and hard of break.inf quando la quebrantan; fallan la de dentro when it.obj break.prs.3pl find.prs.3pl it.obj from within aspera & de color uerde & clara pero de fuera bitter and of colour green and clear but from outside parece uermeia; mas no con tan grand claridat. seem.prs.3sg red but not with such great clarity.sg ‘But this fruit is strong and hard to break, when they break it; they find the one inside rough green-coloured and clear, but outside it seems red, but not with great clarity.’ (13th c., Alfonso X, Lapidario) Bolinger (1991: 30) argues that these copular expressions result from a comparative construction with como ‘like,’ as in (9a) and (9b), which he paraphrases

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in terms of ‘it looked like’ or ‘it looked as if.’ According to Bolinger, this comoconstruction itself points to a widely productive adverbial combination with parecer in Old Spanish. My examples in (8) above illustrate that constructions without como coexisted with structures with como in the same period. (9) Old Spanish a. et paresçia como era uermeia. and seem.pst.3sg like be.pst.3sg red ‘And it looked like it was red.’ b. assi como oy en dia paresce so like today in day seem.prs.3sg ‘so like it appears today’ (13th c., Alfonso X, Estoria de España; from Bolinger 1991: 29–30) The parecer + infinitive construction as used in Present-day Spanish is not detected in the thirteenth century. Bolinger (1991: 34) mentions that, out of his 700 parecer examples from Old Spanish, only three combine with an infinitive, which was then necessarily preceded by the preposition de, as in (10a) to (10c), all from Bolinger (1991: 34). (10) Old Spanish a. [...] parescçe grieue de guerrrear Calatrava a aquellos seem.prs.3sg necessary of besiege.inf Calatrava to those que la uinien combater. comp it.obj come.prs.3pl fight.inf ‘It seems necessary to struggle for Calatrava against those who come to fight.’ (13th c., Alfonso X, Estoria de España) b. [...] quiero y dexar cient moros et want.prs.1sg there leave.inf hundred Moor.pl.m and cient moras, ca parescrie mal de leuar hundred Moor.pl.f because seem.cond.3sg bad of carry.inf moros nin mora. Moor.pl.m nor Moor.sg.f ‘I want to leave a hundred male and a hundred female Moors, because it would seem bad to carry Moors.’ (13th c., Alfonso X, Estoria de España) c. [...] nin paresçe bien de apartar se una de tantas. neither seem.prs.3sg good of split.inf refl one of many ‘Nor does it look well to split off one from many ones.’ (13th c., Alfonso X, Estoria de España)

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Yet, since the infinitival clause has a subject-like function in all these constructions, parecer in (10) cannot be considered the linking verb it is nowadays. Hence, the parecer + infinitive pattern does not seem to originate from this construction. An alternative hypothesis concerning the origin of parecer + infinitive is that it has arisen as a variant of the que-clause construction, which is attested from the earliest stages of the Spanish language. Bolinger (1991: 32) observes that parece que had a strong adverbial dimension at the time, as shown by the fact that the adverbs bien ‘well’ or manifiestamente ‘certainly’ often occur with parece que, as in (11a), from Bolinger (1991: 32). However, parece que was not restricted to these contexts. In fact, in the Corpus del Español I have found examples where me parece que (11b) and parece que (11c) appear without adverbs from the thirteenth century onwards. (11) Old Spanish a. Manifiestament[r]e paresçio que assi fue como el obviously seem.pst.3sg comp so be.pst.3sg like the judio dixo. jew.sg say.pst.3sg ‘It obviously appeared that it had happened like the jew had said.’ (13th c., Alfonso X, General Estoria) b. [...] a todos los altos hombres que eran ay: & to all the high man.pl comp be.pst.3pl there and dixo les assi. Amigos este combatir no me say.pst.3sg them.dat so friend.pl this fight.inf no me.dat parece que nos aprouecha: ca a ellos no seem.prs.3sg comp us.dat serve.prs.3sg because to them no podemos fazer daño. can.prs.1pl do.inf harm.sg ‘To all the important people who were there: and he told them like this. Friends, it does not seem to me that this fighting serves us, because we cannot hurt these men.’ (13th c., Anonymous, Gran conquista de Ultramar) c. El huesped fue & mucho alegre quando entendio the guest.sg be.pst.3sg and much happy when hear.pst.3sg estas palauras [...] pues paresçe que aquell cauallero these word.pl well seem.prs.3sg comp that man.sg era ally quando que vos fuistes librado dela be.pst.3sg there when comp you be.pst.2sg free.ptcp of.the

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mala prision çertas dixo el Rey uos dezides bad prison.sg right say.pst.3sg the king you say.prs.2sg verdat que el era ally. truth.sg comp he be.pst.3sg there ‘The guest was really happy when he heard these words; well it seems that this knight was there when you were liberated from the bad prison. Right, said the King, you speak the truth that he was there.’ (14th c., Anonymous, Cuento de Tristán de Leonís) Bolinger (1991: 38) also suggests that the infinitive constructions with parecer (12c) emerged as a result of the accidental formal resemblance between a sentenceinitial parece que construction (12a) and a left-dislocation one (12b).1 (12) Present-day Spanish a. Parece que el Etna arde siempre. seem.prs.3sg comp the Etna burn.prs.3sg always ‘It seems that the Etna is always glowing.’ b. Etna parece que arde siempre. the.Etna seem.prs.3sg comp burn.prs.3sg always lit. ‘Etna it seems that it is always glowing.’ (Bolinger 1991: 38) c. Etna parece arder siempre. Etna seem.prs.3sg burn.inf always ‘The Etna seems to be always glowing.’ According to Bolinger (1991: 38), constructions like the one in (12a) only need to move their third person subjects to the left of parecer, as in (12b), in order to achieve the first shift toward an infinitival construction. Importantly, he mentions that not all subjects move as easily to the left-dislocated position as third person subjects do, as shown in the constructions with first person yo in (13) below. The infelicitous left-dislocation, Bolinger contends, could account for the impossibility of having a first person subject with parecer + infinitive. (13) Present-day Spanish a. Parece que yo no soy seem.prs.3sg comp I not be.prs.1sg ‘It seems that I am not like that.’ b. *Yo parece que no soy I seem.prs.3sg comp not be.prs.1sg

así. so así. so

. These examples are taken literally from Bolinger (1991: 38), who uses Etna without an article, although Etna normally takes the definite article in Spanish (el Etna).

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c. ??Yo no parezco ser así. I not seem.prs.1sg be.inf so ‘I do not seem to be like that.’ Bolinger (1991: 37) states that, by the end of the sixteenth century, “the personalization of parecer with infinitive had been accomplished,” without detailing his assumption further. In this connection, it should be noted that the Corpus del Español contains examples of parecer + ser ‘be’ from as early as the late fourteenth century. I agree with Bolinger (1991) in that the role of the preverbal subject is crucial in the evolution of parecer. However, my data suggest that, rather than emerging from syntactic change via a left-dislocation structure, the parecer + infinitive pattern is an extension of the copular parecer + adjective construction. In example (14), the writer has recourse to parecer with the infinitival clause ser verde ‘to be green’ to express that reality as we see it is sometimes misleading: the reeds look fresh, but actually they are probably not. The infinitival construction can thus be seen as an extension of the combination parece + adjectival attribute, as exemplified in our earlier instance (8b), parece vermeia ‘seems red.’ (14) Medieval Spanish [...] por ende la maldat le aconpaña sienpre, through end the evil.sg him.dat accompany.prs.3sg always perdida la bondat. Al junco e al carrizo el lose.ptcp the goodness.sg to.the cane.sg and to.the reed.sg the tal es conparado, que paresçe ser verde e such be.prs.3sg compare.ptcp that seem.prs.3sg be.inf green and todo es desecado: fuera tiene frescura, everything be.prs.3sg dry.ptcp outside have.prs.3sg freshness.sg con que ha engañado la vista de los omnes que lo with comp aux mislead.ptcp the view of the man.pl comp it.obj tengan provado. have.prs.sbjv.3pl taste.ptcp ‘Finally evil always accompanies once goodness is lost. One can compare it with reeds, which seem to be green but are all dried out: outside they have a fresh look, with which they have misled the sight of the people who have tasted them.’ (1380, Canciller Pedro López de Ayala, Libro Rimado de Palacio) In the fifteenth century, verbs other than ser ‘be’ start to combine with parecer, and thus from then onwards the construction displays a wider lexical variety. Parecer combines with the infinitives mostrar ‘demonstrate,’ deleitarse ‘enjoy’ (15a) and llegar ‘arrive, reach’ (15b), among others.

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(15) Medieval Spanish a. [...] y aquellos que en tus largos vicios estan and those comp in poss.2pl long vice.pl be.prs.3pl lançados havnque paresce deleytarse no es throw.ptcp although seem.prs.3sg enjoy.refl not be.prs.3sg possible quela anima en vicios corronpida puede possible comp.the soul.sg in vice.pl corrupt.ptcp can.prs.3sg alegre biuir. joyful live.inf ‘And those [of you] who are thrown in your lavish vices; although you seem to enjoy it, it is impossible that a soul can live joyfully when it is corrupted in perversion.’ (15th c., Juan de Flores, Triunfo de amor) b. Donde después del pecado del primero padre ninguno where after of.the sin of.the first father.sg none onbre pudo llegar por que es man.sg can.pst.3sg arrive.inf by comp be.pst.3sg cercado del biuo fuego que sube tan alto surround.ptcp of.the vivid fire.sg comp go.up.prs.3sg so high que parece llegar cerca del cielo. comp seem.prs.3sg arrive.inf near of.the sky.sg ‘Where after the sin of the first father no man could arrive because it is surrounded by heavy fire which goes so high that it seems to reach the sky.’ (1482, Diego de Valera, Crónica de España) In the course of the sixteenth century, examples are attested of parecer with estar ‘be’ + gerund, as in (16) below. From then on, the range of infinitives which combine with parecer steadily becomes larger, making parecer an increasingly more transparent verb. (16) Classical Spanish De la otra parte acá del hondo valle, el río of the other part here of.the deep valley.sg the river.sg por su anchura más s’estiende. De la una through poss.3sg width.sg more refl.extend.prs.3sg of the one parte d’él verán alisos, que de lexos paresce estar part of.it see.fut.3pl alder.pl comp of far seem.prs.3sg be.inf cayendo sobre una tabla d’agua tan hermosa, tan clara. fall.prog over a table.sg of.water.sg so beautiful so clear ‘On the other side of the deep valley, the river widens. On this side you will see alders, which from far seem to be falling over a water table, so beautiful and so clear.’ (1540, Jorge de Montemayor, Obra selecta)

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The examples above show that the complements of parecer undergo an extension from adjectival attributes toward infinitives. The ‘appear’ reading of parecer seems to have died out and is nowadays expressed by aparecer ‘show up.’ Since parecer is “increasingly based in the speaker’s subjective belief state,” subjectification is clearly at stake (Traugott 1989: 31). The diachronic development presented above does not show, however, that the meaning of parecer changes radically, since there is only a narrowing down of meanings which were there already from the beginning. Indeed, my corpus data indicate that parecer does not undergo major metonymic changes: the only possible shift is that from a physical appearance reading to a subjective impression reading. Traugott’s notion of subjectification applies to parecer to the extent that this subjective reading of parecer is now conveyed by parecer + infinitive, which differs from parecer + adjective because of its clausal complementation. My data also show that, while the first infinitives which combined with parecer in the fourteenth century were exclusively copular ones, the range of infinitives later expanded to include all types of verbs. What we observe, therefore, is that, in the process, the verb becomes more transparent without acquiring a new meaning. Needless to say, further research is obviously needed in order to refine the aforementioned tendencies. . A diachronic survey of resultar + infinitive The verb resultar is relatively new in the Spanish language. It emerged in the fifteenth century and, at that time, had only a resultative meaning. As shown in example (17) below, resultar de denotes the result of the event expressed in the prepositional complement. Note that the preceding noun phrase, diez ducados ‘ten ducates’ does not agree with the finite form of resultar (resultó, third person singular) and, as a consequence, does not perform the subject function. (17) Medieval Spanish El escrivano diz: “Señor, diez ducados resultó de the clerk.sg say.prs.3sg mister ten ducate.pl result.pst.3sg of esta armada en que yo contribuí la ochava parte; this fleet.sg in rel I contribute.pst.1sg the eighth part.sg mandadme dar la ochava parte de estos diez docados”. order.imp.2pl give.inf the eighth part.sg of these ten ducate.pl ‘The clerk says: “Sir, ten ducates was the result of this war fleet to which I contributed the eighth part; make me receive the eighth part of these ten ducats”.’ (15th c., Cristóbal Colón, Textos y documentos completos de Cristobal Colón) It is in the course of the seventeenth century that we find examples of resultar with estar ‘be’ and with ser ‘be.’ However, this new construction does not immediately

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lead to an evidential reading. In (18), for example, resultar expresses the result of a lawsuit against Bernardo, rather than the speaker’s observation about the state of affairs being described. (18) Present-day Spanish BERNARDO: Presto venís a leer mi sentencia Bernardo ask.1sg come.prs.2sg to read poss.1sg verdict SECRETARIO: Estos son cargos. Primeramente Secretary these be.prs.3pl imputation.pl at.first resulta estar culpado don Bernardo de Cabrera en no result.prs.3pl be.inf blame.ptcp mr Bernardo de Cabrera in not haber agradecido a su majestad el haberle have.inf thank.ptcp to poss.3sg majesty.sg the aux.clit.3sg hecho Conde de Val, Almirante de la Mar. do.ptcp Conde de Val, Admiral of the Sea ‘Bernardo: I ask you, come and read my verdict. Secretary: These are the allegations. First, Don Bernardo de Cabrera turns out to be accused of not having thanked his majesty for having awarded him Count of Val and Sea Admiral.’ (1574–1644, Antonio Amescua, La adversa fortuna de Don Bernardo de Cabrera) In example (19) below, the concrete result is less central than the general assessment of the state of affairs as viewed by the speaker and probably also by other people. However, the preposition de is still present and the postposition of the subject leaves the agreement question open. (19) Modern Spanish [...] acto positivo de nobleza el no sujetarse a leyes tan act.sg positive of nobility the not bind.refl to law.pl so santas, ordenadas con acuerdo del más prudente, más saint order.ptcp with agreement of.the more prudent more docto y más grave senado del mundo: de que learned and more serious senate.sg of.the world of comp resulta ser menor el fruto que de ellas se result.prs.3sg be.inf less the fruit.sg comp of them refl consigue, que el daño de habituarse el obtain.prs.3sg than the harm.sg of become.used.to.refl the pueblo a la transgresión de leyes justas people to the violation.sg of law.pl just ‘a positive act of nobility [is] not respecting the laws so holy, and commanded with the agreement of the most cautious, most learned and most serious senate of the world: of which the benefit that they get from it turns

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out to be smaller than the damage of the people getting accustomed not to respect just laws’ (1626, Pedro Fernández Navarrete, Conservación de Monarquías y Discursos Políticos) Up until the nineteenth century, the subject is most often postposed and is, thus, to be considered as part of the subclause introduced by ser ‘be.’ In example (20), for instance, the lack of number agreement between los que son sordos ‘the deaf ’ (plural) and resulta (singular) indicates that the ser-complement functions as a complement clause similar to a que-structure. (20) Classical Spanish [...] pintavan a su Apollo con dos pares de oídos, paint.pst.3pl to poss.3sg Apolo with two pair.pl of ear.pl diciéndonos en ello que debe oír mucho el say.prog.dat.1pl in that comp must.prs.3sg hear.inf a.lot the sabio, i el oír anda en una balanza con la sage.sg and the hear.inf go.prs.3sg in a balance.sg with the lengua, de donde resulta ser menos habladores los language.sg of where result.prs.3sg be.inf less talkative the que son sordos. comp be.prs.3pl deaf.pl ‘They painted Apollo with two pairs of ears, telling us this way that a wise man must listen a lot, and listening is related to the language, from which it results that deaf people are less talkative.’ (1740, Gregorio Mayans y Siscar, Rhetorica) From the ninteenth century on, by contrast, the subjects often precede resultar, as shown in (21). (21) Modern Spanish Si el indianete ese resulta ser lo que if the Indian.sg this result.prs.3sg be.inf that comp aparenta, y, andando los días, te apunta pretend.prs.3sg and go.prog the days dat.2sg point.prs.3sg deseos de casarse contigo, por mí no lo wish.pl of get.married.refl with.you for dat.1sg not it dejes. leave.imp.2sg ‘If this Indian boy turns out to be what he seems to be, and, after a few days, expresses his desire to marry you, for my sake do not refuse.’ (1870, José María de Pereda, La Puchera)

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The number agreement between indianete and resultar (both singular) correlates with the backgrounding of the purely resultative reading. The first constructions where the subject and a finite form of the verb resultar agree in number contain an adjectival attribute, as is the case in (22). Hence, the first step in the attenuation of the resultative reading of the resultar + infinitive pattern is found in the resultar + adjective construction, which conveys a subjective, evaluative reading. (22) Present-day Spanish [...] no olvides que España ha sido una de las not forget.imp.2sg comp Spain aux be.ptcp one of the naciones que más talentos ha dado a la humanidad, nation.pl rel more talent.pl aux give.ptcp to the humanity.sg y, si ya de por sí, resulta difícil el and if already of through refl result.3sg.prs difficult the destacar en una ciencia cualquiera, cuánto más en la excell.inf in one science.sg whatever the more in the filosofía. philosophy.sg ‘Do not forget that Spain is one of the nations which has given most talented people to humankind, and, in itself, it appears difficult to be a star in any scientific field, the more so in philosophy.’ (1532, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Epistolario. Selección) The restrictions on the resultar + infinitive construction can be explained by the fact that the resultar + adjective pattern is almost non-existent before the nineteenth century. The Corpus del español has two examples of resultar imposible ‘turn out to be impossible’ from the sixteenth century and none from the seventeenth or the eighteenth century. The near absence of such adjectival constructions is in keeping with the strong resultative readings which characterized resultar in its earliest occurrences. For example, before the nineteenth century the vast majority of resulta que constructions were preceded by the preposition de ‘from,’ as in de todo lo dicho resulta que ‘from everything that was said it results that,’ and, hence, had a resultative interpretation. Therefore, the combination of resultar with all kinds of complements correlates with a semantic change which is increasingly common only from the nineteenth century on. The restrictions on resultar + infinitive are also probably due to the fact that both the resultar + infinitive and the resulta que patterns favour postposition of the subject. Thus, the late emergence of the infinitive with resultar does not derive only from the late development of adjectival complements with this verb, but is also related to the tendency for the subject to occur in postverbal position.

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. An (inter)subjectivity account The link observed between a subjective impression reading and the adjectival and infinitival complements, together with the fact that the speaker has difficulties identifying him/herself as subject of parecer and resultar + infinitive constructions, suggests that a functional account of parecer and resultar and their clausal complements is necessary. I will argue that the extension of the infinitival construction with the two semi-auxiliaries in question signifies a shift from a broader, intersubjective view with parece que and resulta que to a speaker-oriented, subjective view with parecer and resultar + infinitive. As far as evidential constructions are concerned, the intersubjective relation with the addressee is first and foremost interpreted in terms of shared evidence, whereas subjectivity concerns non-shared judgements confined to the speaker (cf. Nuyts 2001: 34). On the other hand, the reference to knowledge can also be labelled intersubjective when it encodes a request for confirmation directed to the addressee (cf. Ifantidou 2001: 196; Traugott 2003: 126). The source of information used with the parecer + infinitive construction is inference, more specifically, a kind of inference which does not take into account the addressee’s knowledge (cf. Cornillie 2007: Ch. 2). Thus, in (23) below, the author is writing on economic affairs and expects the government to take the decision not to accept the entire debt of the companies. S/he makes her/his point by using the expression todo parece indicar que ‘everything seems to indicate that.’ As we can see, the interlocutors or other people connected to the information are not involved in the inference made by the speaker/writer. (23) Present-day Spanish La segunda ley es la que tendrá que the second law.sg be.prs.3sg the rel have.fut.3sg comp decidir cómo reestructurar los pasivos de las empresas decide.inf how restructure.inf the asset.pl of the company.pl con el Estado. Es decir, la carne y cómo with the State.sg be.prs.3sg say.inf the meat.sg and how cortarla. Todo parece indicar que el cut.it.inf everything seem.prs.3sg indicate.inf comp the gobierno se inclina por aceptar únicamente las government.sg refl incline.prs.3sg for accept.inf only the deudas tributarias. debt.pl subject.to.tax ‘The second law is that one that will have to decide how to restructure the assets and liabilities of the companies with the State. That is, the meat

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and how to cut it. Everything seems to indicate that the government is inclined to accept only the debt subjected to tax.’ (Notic:Perú:Caretas) In the Hispanic linguistic literature, the infinitival and adjectival constructions with parecer, unlike the pattern with parece que, have been accounted for in terms of non-assertion and non-factivity (cf. Hernanz 1982: 235–237, 1999: 2232–2233; Porroche Ballesteros 1990: 129–136). This characteristic is in line with a subjective evidential statement based on the speaker’s subjective impression. In the case of parece que, by contrast, the expression can be based either on inference or on hearsay. In example (24), for instance, a person has travelled abroad, which seems to have had a good effect on him/her. The subsequent context confirms that the evidential judgement is shared by other people. The explicit mention of the shared evidence (según ellos ‘according to them’) clearly suggests that the statement is intersubjective. (24) Present-day Spanish Decidí respirar un poco y viajar fuera del decide.pst.1sg breath.inf a bit and travel.inf outside of.the país por unas semanas. Parece que el viaje country.sg for some week.pl seem.prs.3sg comp the trip.sg me hizo mucho bien; según ellos, tenía dat.1sg do.pst.3sg much good according.to them have.pst.1sg mejor semblante. better face.sg ‘I decided to breathe a bit and travel abroad for a couple of weeks. It seems that the journey did me good; according to them, I looked much better.’ (Notic:Perú:Caretas) By using a parece que construction, the speaker can interact with the hearer’s presumed attitude to what is said: the former seeks confirmation or refutation from the latter. The aforementioned examples show that the parece que construction allows for an intersubjective evidential statement, with the possibility of intersubjective speaker-hearer interaction. It may seem surprising that the less grammaticalized construction, parece que, has an intersubjective dimension, while the more grammaticalized one, parece + infinitive, clearly favours a subjective reading. However, this should not be problematic. On the one hand, Verhagen (2005) shows that intersubjectivity is a pervasive phenomenon in language which is not restricted to grammaticalized constructions. On the other hand, my own analysis has shown that, despite the present-day alternation, the infinitival pattern most probably does not derive from the que-clause construction (cf. Section 3 above).

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The same holds for the grammaticalization of resultar. By means of a resulta que construction, the speaker presents knowledge which is usually shared with other people with whom s/he is in touch, and implicitly inquires whether the addressee is informed about what is said. In example (4) above, for instance, the speaker reports that the school is full and, in doing so, also expresses his/her surprise (cf. Resulta que la escuela está llena, ‘It turns out that the school is full’). Resultar + infinitive, by contrast, has an inferential reading which includes personal evaluation. By using an infinitive in our earlier example (2) (cf. La escuela resulta estar llena, ‘the school turns out to be full’), the speaker does not present generally shared knowledge, but his/her own experience with the school administration which leads him/her to conclude that the school is full. Thus, the grammaticalization of the parecer + infinitive and resultar + infinitive constructions corresponds to a pattern of subjectification, but not to one of intersubjectification.

. Subjectification and intersubjectification Discussions on the intersubjective/subjective dimension of grammaticalized expressions rarely devote much attention to modality. For example, Traugott’s (2003) account of intersubjectification dwells almost exclusively on discourse markers and (Japanese) honorifics. Let us, therefore, look at two of the rare applications of (inter)subjectivity to modality. As far as the deontic modals are concerned, Traugott and Dasher (2002: 114) seem to agree with a shift from intersubjective to subjective meanings for these modals. They refer to Myhill (1995, 1996, 1997), who suggests that there is a set of “group-oriented” uses of modals which can be used “as a rhetorical device to try to convince the listener that there really is general agreement from other people so that the listener ought to agree” (Myhill 1997: 9), as happens with ought to in example (25) below (from Traugott and Dasher 2002: 114). (25) Norman: Are you doing anything relevant? Dick: You can’t get more relevant than Far Eastern studies. Ask me anything about the Far East and I’ll tell you the answer. That’s where everything’s happening. China, Vietnam, Japan, Korea. You name it. Norman: I guess I ought to know more about those things. I don’t know, I keep thinking there’s a lot of things I should know about. What is interesting in terms of the present discussion is that Traugott and Dasher (2002: 115, 128) mention that there has been a shift away from group-oriented (intersubjective) modal uses to more subjective ones. It is reasonable to assume that this shift happens at the same time as the grammaticalization of the verbs in question. In other words, given that the intersubjective modal meanings seem to

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precede the more subjective ones, deontic, epistemic and evidential modals may resist the unidirectionality of the subjectivity – intersubjectivity cline. The evolution of the performative verb promise is another example of intersubjectification preceding subjectification. Moreover, just like the two clausal constructions with parecer described above, promise presents a separate historical development of two apparently similar expressions. Traugott and Dasher (2002: 205–209) outline different evolutionary paths for the speech act construction I promise you (26a), which they call an epistemic parenthetical, and for the more grammaticalized epistemic “raising” construction of the verb promise (26b). (26) a. Middle English He losyth sore hys tyme her, I promyse yow he wastes badly his time here I promise you ‘He is wasting his time badly here, actually.’ (1469, Paston I 542; from Traugott and Dasher 2002: 207) b. Late Modern English The Capitol promised to be a large and handsome building, judging from the part about two thirds already above ground. (1795, Twin; from Traugott and Dasher 2002: 209) The parenthetical construction in (26a) can be considered intersubjective in that it serves to “comment on the statement being engaged in, and to acknowledge at the discourse level that AD/R [addressee/reader] might have doubts about SP/W’s [speaker/writer’s] message” (Traugott and Dasher 2002: 209). Interestingly, this parenthetical construction did not arise out of the subjectification of the verb promise in (26b). The corpus data available, at least, do not indicate that the epistemic raising construction was in evidence as early as the fifteenth century, as the parenthetical was. Moreover, the parenthetical belongs to a procedural class, whereas the epistemic raising construction experiences no increase in procedural meaning. In other words, the more grammaticalized subjective construction follows a different path of development, independently of the intersubjective potential of the verb promise. These two examples illustrate that the development of Spanish parecer and resultar is not exceptional and that intersubjective and subjective expressions do not need to undergo the same evolution. A crucial issue which remains unsolved is how to explain why intersubjectification applies to procedural, grammaticalized forms with a prominent discourse function, while it does not seem to hold for other grammaticalized forms such as modal auxiliaries which convey attitudinal qualifications like evidentiality and epistemic modality.

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. Conclusions This paper has shown that the Spanish evidential verbs parecer and resultar are not evenly distributed in the synchronic corpora and that this difference is probably related to their distinct diachronic development. The role of adjectival complements and the position of the subject have proved to be crucial in the development of the subjective, grammaticalized constructions of both semi-auxiliaries. Along these lines, it has been shown that parecer is far more advanced than resultar as far as its combination with an infinitive is concerned. My corpus data suggest that, as far as evidential expressions are concerned, intersubjectivity comes earlier and is most often found in less grammaticalized constructions in spoken discourse, while subjective statements are expressed by constructions which have undergone more advanced grammaticalization and which are more frequent in written discourse. The semi-auxiliaries parecer and resultar convey a kind of intersubjectivity different from that of discourse markers. They can refer to shared knowledge in linguistic interaction or rather invite the speaker to give his/her own appraisal of the state of affairs and, in doing so, express an intersubjective stance. However, subjective expressions of parecer and resultar do not seem to be susceptible of advanced intersubjectification. Therefore, both of the verbs analysed here have in common that they undergo subjectification, albeit to a different degree.

Abbreviations 1 2 3 aux clit comp cond cop dat f fut imp inf

first person second person third person auxiliary clitic complementizer conditional copula dative feminine future imperative infinitive

m obj pl poss prf prog prs pst ptcp refl rel sbjv sg

masculine object plural possessive perfect progressive present past participle reflexive relative subjunctive singular

References Bolinger, Dwight. 1991. Essays on Spanish. Words and grammar. Newark DE: Juan de la Cuesta. Cornillie, Bert. 2007. Evidentiality and epistemic modality in Spanish (semi-)auxiliaries. A cognitive-functional approach. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Hernanz, María Luisa. 1982. El infinitivo en español. Bellaterra: Ediciones de la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. Hernanz, María Luisa. 1999. El infinitivo. In Ignacio Bosque and Violeta Demonte (eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, 2197–2358. Madrid: Real Academia EspañolaEspasa Calpe. Ifantidou, Elly. 2001. Evidentials and relevance. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Myhill, John. 1995. Change and continuity in the functions of the American English modals. Linguistics 33: 157–211. Myhill, John. 1996. The development of the strong obligation system in American English. American Speech 71: 339–388. Myhill, John. 1997. Should and ought: The rise of individually oriented modality in American English. English Language and Linguistics 1/1: 3–23. Nuyts, Jan. 2001. Epistemic modality, language, and conceptualization: A cognitive-pragmatic perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Porroche Ballesteros, Margarita. 1990. Aspectos de atribución en español. Zaragoza: Pórtico. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1989. On the rise of epistemic meanings in English: An example of subjectification in semantic change. Language 57: 33–65. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2003. From subjectification to intersubjectification. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), Motives for language change, 124–139. Cambridge: CUP. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Richard B. Dasher. 2002. Regularity in semantic change. Cambridge: CUP. Verhagen, Arie. 2005. Constructions of intersubjectivity. Oxford: OUP.

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Semantic, syntactic and constructional restrictions in the diachronic rise of modal particles in German A corpus-based study on the formation of a grammaticalization channel Gabriele Diewald and Gisella Ferraresi University of Hannover and University of Frankfurt

This paper proposes a grammaticalization path for German modal particles by looking at their diachronic development from Old High German to the present day. Focusing on the history of schon and eben, the article analyses the contextual features which induce reinterpretation of the source lexeme as a modal particle, in particular the so-called isolating and critical contexts (cf. Diewald 2002). Special attention is placed on features such as sentence types, the complexity of the sentence and the position of the particle, among others. The corpus-based analysis of schon and eben suggests that, though the modal particles of German derive from various lexical sources and display different functional and semantic characteristics, they converge in a common grammaticalization path which follows parallel stages and mechanisms.

.

Introduction

The diachronic development of modal particles in German is a typical instance of grammaticalization (Autenrieth 2002; Ferraresi 2004; Diewald 2006). For a rough definition of the class of modal particles in Present-day German we follow the generally accepted assumption that the modal particles form a relatively closed class of items1 sharing the following properties: (i) non-propositional, pragmatic meaning or function (see below), (ii) propositional or utterance scope (in contrast to focus particles and scalar particles, which have constituent scope), (iii) no constituent . The core of this class consists of the following 15 extremely frequent items: aber, auch, bloß, denn, doch, eben, eigentlich, etwa, halt, ja, mal, nur, schon, vielleicht and wohl (Helbig and Buscha 1986: 487ff.).

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value (in contrast to adverbials), (iv) restricted to the middle field, that is, the topological section to the right of the finite verb in declarative sentences,2 and (v) associated with particular sentence types and/or illocutive functions.3 In this paper, we investigate some of the most prominent regularities of this grammaticalization process with the aim of finally being able to suggest a complete grammaticalization path for the modal particles, which is embedded in a general context-sensitive model for grammaticalization scenarios. For this reason special emphasis is placed on those contextual features which induce reinterpretation, in particular those structures which we call isolating and critical contexts (cf. Diewald 2002). We suggest that, though the source lexemes from which the particles are derived are heterogeneous, they converge in a common grammaticalization path which follows parallel, if not identical, stages and mechanisms. The investigation is based on diachronic corpora and entails a fine-grained analysis of a range of relevant contextual features for each single appearance of a particle item in the material. For this reason, and due to limited space, this paper concentrates on the diachronic development of only two modal particles, eben and schon, thereby illustrating the hypothesized general grammaticalization scenario for modal particles, which – cum grano salis – we suppose to be generalizable to all modal particles of German.4 The following section briefly describes our view of modal particles as grammatical elements. Section 3 then surveys recent research directly pertaining to this study, and in addition describes the corpus used here and lays out central assumptions for the diachronic investigation. Section 4 describes the method used in the diachronic study, discusses the list of contextual features and their respective impact on the reinterpretation of the particle items and presents the results of the investigation. The final section suggests some – still preliminary – generalizations of our findings.

. To our knowledge, this was first stated in Bublitz (1978: 36–37); cf. also Franck (1980: 20ff.) and Hentschel (1983: 46–47). . See Helbig (1994: 32ff.), who also discusses further criteria, among them the question of whether modal particles have the function of separating theme and rheme, as first postulated by Krivonosov (1977: 187–188) and Hentschel (1983: 43). For a critical discussion of this function of modal particles see Ferraresi (2006a, 2006b). . As reported in our presentation at the New Reflections on Grammaticalization 3 conference in Santiago de Compostela (July 2005), a parallel investigation of bloß, ruhig and wohl, in addition to eben and schon, is underway and further validates our suggestions.

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. Modal particles as grammatical elements The modal particles of German are a discourse-grammatical device indispensable for the organization and structuring of spoken discourse (cf. Diewald and Fischer 1998; Diewald 2006). A typical example is the use of eben in (1). (1) German Deutsch ist eben schwer. German.nom.sg be.prs.3sg eben.prt difficult ‘German is really difficult.’ While an unmodalized statement like Deutsch ist schwer (‘German is difficult’) is maximally independent of its communicative context and does not make reference to any other linguistic or non-linguistic entity, the modal particle eben in sentence (1) conveys the information that the speaker takes the proposition Deutsch ist schwer as given, as communicatively understood, and that s/he regards the statement as iterative. In other words, the modal particle is indicating or pointing to the fact that the speaker has held the opinion expressed by the proposition before and is now iterating it (cf. Ickler 1994: 391). We propose that the common grammatical function of the class of modal particles consists of relating the utterance to a proposition which the speaker regards as relevant and given and to which s/he relates the actual utterance. Therefore, modal particles relate the utterance to a specific type of pragmatic presupposition and, by referring back to something which is communicatively given, mark their utterance as non-initial. Since the interchange of initial and responsive turns is the decisive structural device of spoken interaction, this relational function of the modal particles is clearly an indispensable grammatical device for structuring discourse. With the help of modal particles, the speaker marks the turn as noninitial and responsive, and is therefore able to manipulate and modify the ongoing interchange.5 Beyond this common relational structure, each particle has a distinctive meaning of its own. These meanings, which build up the distinctive values of the grammatical paradigm of modal particles, are analogous to the meaning of conjunctions and conjunctional adverbs; for instance, eben indicates an iterative connection, aber an adversative one, ja is affirmative, auch augmentative, schon concessive, etc. Thus, we can form paradigmatic oppositions, as in (2), which highlight the distinctive semantic content of each particle in opposition to its neighbouring class members. . Similar views are expressed in Foolen (1989: 312–313) and Ickler (1994: 377).

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(2) German Deutsch ist eben/aber/ja/auch/schon schwer. These distinctive semantic features are inherent in the individual particle items and are derived from their respective lexical sources. As we focus here on contextual factors, this aspect of the development of modal particles need not concern us. What is of importance, however, is the retention of the common relational template, which will be treated in Section 3.2 below. As mentioned in Section 1, modal particles are typically restricted to specific sentence types. In Present-day German, the modal particles eben and schon show the following restrictions: eben is restricted to representative/assertive speech acts (statements, declarative sentences with an explanatory justificatory force) and, less frequently, to directive speech acts, whereas schon can also be used in directive speech acts as well as in assertive ones (cf. Thurmair 1989: 119ff.; Helbig 1994: 120ff.). In interrogative wh-sentences, schon turns the question into a rhetorical one by means of implicature (cf. Meibauer 1994).

. Previous research and general assumptions on the grammaticalization of modal particles . Previous studies The increased interest in modal particles in recent decades has led to a vast and rapidly growing literature. The following discussion therefore considers only diachronic work which is of immediate importance to the purpose of this paper. Hentschel (1986) provides the first study of the development of modal particles (in particular ja, doch, halt and eben) and claims that – seen from a purely functional perspective and disregarding morphosyntactic aspects, such as word class membership and position – the items ja and doch were already used as modal particles in the Old High German period (till 1050), thus laying the foundation for the development of particle functions in further items (see also Autenrieth 2002: 114). He claims that this development took place at a different pace for individual particles, with the decisive period being Early New High German (1350– 1650). Notwithstanding the fact that further changes concerning the integration of additional items into the class of modal particles took place in later centuries and are still going on today, other diachronic studies confirm these findings on the chronology of events. Thus, Burkhardt (1994: 140) holds that, while particles such as denn, doch and halt developed during the Middle High German period (1050–1350), most of them acquired their particle functions between the sixteenth

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and the eighteenth centuries. Similar views are held by Simon (1996), Autenrieth (2002) and Molnár (2002).6 Furthermore, it has been shown that modal particles develop according to typical and well-attested grammaticalization paths (cf. Diewald 1997, 1999; Autenrieth 2002; Molnár 2002; Diewald 2006). Autenrieth (2002), who gives an account of the diachronic development of eben, halt, ech(er)t, einfach, schlicht and glatt, considers semantic change and decategorialization (i.e. change from a major word class to a functional word class) as the relevant criteria for the grammaticalization of the modal particles. Molnár (2002), who looks at Early New High German texts from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, refers to Lehmann’s (1985) parameters of grammaticalization and focusses on the accompanying semantic change, which she interprets as an instance of subjectification. Beyond this, she treats the question of how far the topological restriction of the modal particle function in Present-day German to the middle field is connected to the diachronic development of the modal particles in Early New High German.7 In turn, Diewald (2006) shows that the model of three successive functional-semantic stages suggested by Traugott (1989) and Traugott and Dasher (2002) is relevant to the grammaticalization of the German modal particles as well, which, with some minor shifts of focus and perspective, may be summarized as a succession of the following stages of functional-semantic development: referential function > text-connective function > indexical-grammatical function. In her description of the development of English discourse particles such as indeed, in fact and besides, Traugott (1999) shows that, in the case of particles, this functional shift is accompanied by changes in scope, topological position and word class. At the first stage, the referential source lexemes or structures have adverbial functions as verb-phrase adverbials. At the second stage, they acquire the syntactic status of sentence adverbials and fulfil text-connective functions, and, finally, as discourse markers with speaker-based indexical functions, they extend to utterance scope. . Burkhardt (1994: 140) suggests the following chronological order: sixteenth century eben and wohl, seventeenth century schon and nineteenth century bloß and ruhig. . The question of a possible causal correlation between the rise of the middle field and the rise of the class of modal particles has been debated since it was first proposed by Abraham (1990, 1991) that the rise of the middle field, i.e. the sentence bracket, is a necessary condition for the development of a class of modal particles not only in German but also universally. Later studies, making use of corpus data, however, have come to the conclusion that the data do not support this hypothesis (see Autenrieth 2002: 238), because (i) modal particle functions in German were present before the rise of the middle field (e.g. Hentschel 1986: 112; Autenrieth 2002: 114; Molnár 2002: 120) and (ii) as Molnár (2002: 120, n. 1) points out, languages like Hungarian show a fully developed modal particle class without anything resembling a middle field and without topological restrictions on the modal particles. For the development of the middle field in Early New High German, see Schildt (1981) and Reichmann and Wegera (1993: 430ff.).

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As regards grammaticalization processes in general, Diewald (2004) argues that single diachronic changes, whether semantic, syntactic or other, do not constitute sufficient conditions for a process of grammaticalization to take place. The latter must be defined independently of the structural and semantic changes accompanying it as a fundamental change in the functional and semiotic status of the items in question, which includes the paradigmatic aspect of the integration of an item into a grammatical paradigm. We may summarize this section by stating that the results of these earlier studies allow us to proceed from the following assumptions about the development of modal particles in German: a. Modal particles in Present-day German form a closed class with a bundle of typical features. b. The development of modal particles is a case of grammaticalization. c. The development began with old particles such as ja and doch in different types of pragmatic uses. d. Other particles also underwent this development at a later stage in the history of German. e. The decisive period for the formation of the grammatical class of modal particles was Early New High German, with later centuries, in particular the eighteenth century, being important for the diffusion of the new class. f. The development follows typical semantic and functional paths. The subsections below set out our more specific assumptions about the semantic core structure and the nature of isolating and critical contexts, from which the diachronic investigation proceeds. . A common semantic template of source items and its retention We suggest that, though heterogeneous, the source lexemes for modal particles have a common semantic feature which allows them to be analysed as relational, in the sense that they create relations between different entities. The relational structure of the modal particles is the common semantic kernel of the whole class of modal particles and also of the source lexemes for modal particles. The main feature of all these items is their scalarity, in that they are either gradable (or scalar) adjectives or scalar adverbs, like schon (cf. Löbner 1990). We assume with Bierwisch (1987: 103) that “graduierbare Adjektive eine Relation repräsentieren, die einem Objekt x einen Wert y auf einer bestimmten Skala zuordnen” [gradable adjectives represent a relation which assigns the value y (on a certain scale) to an object x], a scale being defined as a set with a linear order (cf. Löbner 1990).

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The main function of these source lexemes is, therefore, to create a relation between individuals and degrees on a given scale; either two entities explicitly mentioned in the text are compared in the terms of the relevant scale, or an entity is related to the norm fixed by the scale, in both cases inducing a contrast. The sentences in (3a) and (3b) below compare the value which the object in question assumes on the salient scale with a (different) given value. (3) German a. Dieser Weg this.nom.sg path.nom.sg ‘This path is level.’ b. Der andere the.nom.sg other.nom.sg ‘The other path is rough.’

ist eben. be.prs.3sg eben.adj Weg ist holprig. path.nom.sg be.prs.3sg rough.adj

The basis of this inherent contrast can be any regularity (e.g. the average in a relevant class of objects; cf. Löbner 1990: 144). The contrast in (3a) and (3b) can also be interpreted as situation-internal, where one path is compared to the other one. This means that the interpretation of gradable adjectives is contextdependent, since the truth condition of the sentence containing them depends on a contextually-defined standard of comparison. In this function they modify an individual, that is, they are anchored to referential elements. Bierwisch (1987) distinguishes between dimensional and evaluative adjectives. The first group contains adjectives such as lang ‘long,’ kurz ‘short,’ alt ‘old,’ jung ‘young’ and neu ‘new,’ whereas the second comprises adjectives such as faul ‘lazy,’ fleißig ‘diligent,’ schön ‘beautiful’ and hässlich ‘ugly.’ According to Löbner (1990), however, this distinction is not necessary, since what distinguishes the two classes is only the type of the ordering relation (with the first group, the scale is closed, since it has maximal and minimal elements). Source lexemes for modal particles are found in both classes: whereas eben is a typical dimensional adjective, schon originally derives from the evaluative adjective schön ‘beautiful’ through the development from the temporal adverbial (see below). Considering the lexical semantics of the single particles, we can determine the following differences: eben has the local concrete meanings ‘smooth, level, flat,’ etc., that is, it is a dimensional adjective ordering to points on a scale in the linear dimension. Beyond this oldest meaning, it also has the temporal meaning ‘just’ and a scalar meaning of ‘precisely, exactly.’ As shown in Section 2, the meaning of the modal particle eben can be specified as ‘iterative’ because it indicates that the proposition has been held before, is generally known or is a truism, and is now ‘repeated’ and thus emphasized. This is the meaning which developed most recently, in the Early New High German period, presumably around 1500 (DWB). To illustrate these Present-day German meanings of eben, the following

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simplistic examples may suffice here, (4) showing the concrete local meaning, (5) the temporal meaning, (6) the meaning ‘exactly’ and (1) above, repeated here for convenience as (7), the meaning of the modal particle. (4) German Die Landschaft war eben und the.nom.sg landscape.nom.sg be.pst.3sg eben.adj and menschenleer. deserted ‘The landscape was flat and deserted.’ (5) German Ich gehe eben zur Post. I go.prs.1sg eben.adv to=the post.office ‘I will just pop to the post office.’ (6) German Eben dieses Buch wollte ich haben. eben.prt this.acc.sg book.acc.sg want.pst.1sg I have.inf ‘That is just/exactly the book I wanted.’ (7) = (1) German Deutsch ist eben schwer. German.nom.sg be.prs.3sg eben.prt difficult ‘German is really difficult.’ In turn, schon as a temporal adverb has the meaning ‘already,’ that is, it is a scalar adverb which is used to denote a positive phase p which has been reached in contrast with a negative one ∼p. The phases can be interpreted as temporal (8) or local (9), but also on a more evaluative scale (see Löbner 1990). As a modal particle, schon implies a negative proposition ∼p which is negated (10). (8) German Der Zug ist schon da. The.nom.sg train.nom.sg be.prs.3sg schon.prt there ‘The train is already here.’ (9) German Hannover ist schon in Niedersachsen. Hannover.nom.sg be.prs.3sg schon.prt in Lower.Saxony ‘Hannover is already in Lower Saxony.’ (10) German es wird schon werden. it.nom become.fut.3sg schon.prt become.inf ‘It will work out all right.’ (DWB s.v. schon)

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In example (10) wird werden is contrasted with the implicit negative sentence wird nicht werden, for which there is no evidence. The latter usage arose, according to the DWB, in the seventeenth century. A careful scrutiny of the data, however, reveals that the modal particle interpretation of schon is already present in the sixteenth century (cf. Ferraresi 2004). This brief consideration of the meaning of these particles reveals that they show the same relational, scalar meaning. What has happened to them diachronically? Because we suppose that the relational template, which is responsible for the scalar meaning, is retained in all uses, it must be reinterpreted, that is, saturated in a different way. We think that modal particles lose their anchor – specifically in the isolating context (see below) – when there is no more evidence that they modify a noun or a proposition, that is, that they relate individuals to a scale. This permits the reinterpretation of these lexemes – through the recovering of contextually-given information – as functional elements relating to some pragmatic presuppositions; in this way, they realize their relational component entailed in their semantic kernel on a shifted scale. This qualitative common feature is the trait which, at first, can – as we hypothesize – trigger reinterpretation in the critical context; the reinterpretation is then solidified in the isolating context (for a definition of the context types, see Section 3.3 below). In this way the source lexemes converge in a common grammaticalization path where the critical context in all cases shows parallel specific features which induce the interpretation of the source lexeme as a modal particle. . Context types: Isolating contexts and the critical context We suppose that, in any instance of grammaticalization, we observe a succession of diachronic stages which are associated with specific context types (cf. Diewald 2002). The context types relevant here are the isolating contexts and the critical context. The isolating context is a specific linguistic context which favours one reading of a polysemous or heterosemous item to the exclusion of other readings. This is achieved by the contextually triggered dominance of one or more linguistic features which typically evoke the reading in question. The existence of an isolating context for a new grammatical meaning marks the consolidation of that grammaticalization process, since here the new grammatical meaning becomes formally isolated as a separate meaning from the older, more lexical meaning(s). Thus, the new grammatical meaning is no longer dependent on conversational implicature, and the linguistic element under grammaticalization has become truly polysemous. Example (11) illustrates an isolating context for the more lexical reading of eben ‘exactly, quite’ as an adverb.

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(11) New High German [. . .], dass ihn seine Gemuethsunruhe eben so that him his.nom.sg restlessness.nom.sg eben.adv so stark quaelte, als die Krankheit much.adv plague.pst.3sg as the.nom.sg illness.nom.sg ‘that his restlessness plagued him just as much as his illness’ (18th c., BA Christian Fürchtegott Gellert 995) The isolating effect is due to the fact that the comparison between the two entities which are contrasted on a scale, namely restlessness and sickness, is explicitly spelled out by the correlative structure so . . . als. In this environment, the reading of eben as an intensifying particle (modifying so) is the most prominent one and almost obligatory. Example (12) shows an isolating context for eben as a modal particle. As noted out in the last section, the modal particle eben – like every modal particle – links the utterance to a pragmatically given unit, that is, some propositional entity supposed to be given in the ongoing discourse. A tentative paraphrase for this interpretation is ‘I iterate the proposition which has been present in the communicative context before.’ (12) German Seine Gemuethsunruhe quält ihn eben. his.nom.sg restlessness.nom.sg plague.prs.3sg him eben.prt ‘His restlessness plagues him (I iterate the proposition which has been present in the communicative context before).’ In this context, an interpretation as intensifying or scalar particle is excluded for syntactic reasons, as there is no constituent which could function as a head. Likewise, the reading ‘exactly’ and a temporal interpretation are excluded for semantic reasons. Thus, the reading as modal particle, i.e. a reading which reinterprets the relational structure as connecting the utterance to a pragmatically presupposed proposition, is the most plausible, nearly obligatory one. While the isolating contexts are disambiguating contexts, the critical context, by contrast, is a particular stage in a grammaticalization process characterized by multiple structural and semantic ambiguities. It thus invites several alternative interpretations, among them the new grammatical meaning. The following example illustrates the notion of critical context for the item eben. (13) German Seine Gemuethsunruhe quält ihn eben so his.nom.sg restlessness.nom.sg plague.prs.3sg him eben.prt so stark. much ‘His restlessness plagues him eben so much.’

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There are two possibilities for interpreting eben in this example. Firstly, it can be seen as a focus particle modifying so, as in (11) above. The paraphrase for this reading is: (13’) ‘His restlessness plagues him just as much.’ However, since the comparison is not spelled out here, and no mention is made of an entity which might serve as the anchor for a comparison, this reading is possible but not dominant. Instead, there is a second, equally possible reading, namely the interpretation as a modal particle, as in (12) above. (13”) ‘His restlessness plagues him so much (I iterate the proposition which has been present in the communicative context before).’ For schon, two different steps in the development towards a modal particle must be specified. The first sees the initial distinction between the evaluative adjective/adverb schön ‘beautiful’ and the temporal adverb schon ‘already,’ both scalar elements, which, according to different grammars and dictionaries, happened between the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries.8 The second concerns the rise of schon as a modal particle, which – as already mentioned – should be dated to the sixteenth century. For reasons of space, we cannot discuss here all the different factors involved in the process,9 and in what follows we will outline only some of the most relevant ones. We suppose that, in a context where the evaluative adverb is preceded by an intensifying particle like gar ‘completely,’10 the evaluative adverb first discards its relation to a nominal constituent and assumes scope on the whole verb phrase. Consider in this respect example (14). (14) Early New High German Nu gyngk die sonne gar schone uf, [. . .] now go.prs.3sg the.nom.sg sun.nom.sg quite beautifully up unde die nacht was ouch schone and the.nom.sg night.nom.sg be.pst.3sg also beautifully

. According to the DWB, the graphical distinction between the modal adverb schön ‘well’ and the temporal adverb schon ‘already’ is made quite consistently by Luther (sixteenth century) but not by other authors of the same period. We have no criteria for distinguishing between schön and schon in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries at all. . Moreover, a much larger corpus for Middle and Early New High German should be considered, since we found only ten relevant occurrences of schon in our fourteenth century material (see below). . Gar has undergone a similar shift in meaning from ‘manured’ to ‘completely.’

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erlauchtet mit dem gestirne unde wol light.up.ptcp with the.dat.sg heavenly.body.dat.sg and nicely geziret. decorated ‘Now the sun rose beautifully and the night was also beautifully lit by the heavenly body and nicely decorated.’ (15th c., B 253, 49) In this sentence it is not the sun that is beautiful, but the event of the sunrise. Through the intensifier gar the whole event in its completeness is being referred to. The underlying scale is thus shifted later towards a temporal dimension, where the grades are realized as phases and the visual component is lost. The adverb schon consequently takes the positive position on the temporal scale. Although significant, temporal and aspectual factors will not be discussed here. In the second step, that is, the passage from temporal schon to modal particle, the temporal relation to the event is lost and shifted to a pragmatic one, where the asserted event is contrasted by means of the modal particle to an implicit, presupposed negation of the same event (which corresponds to the negative phase on the temporal scale). In example (15) below the notion of critical context is illustrated for schon; while the temporal component cannot be ruled out completely, the modal reading seems to be prominent. (15) Early New High German Vnd solt eyn mensch schon and shall.prs.sbjv.3sg a.nom.sg man.nom.sg schon.prt verdampt werden vnd west daz, noch sol damn.ptcp become.inf and know.prs.3sg that still shall.prs.3sg er nicht verzweiffeln, dy weil er lebt hye auff erden he not despair.inf as long.as he live.prs.3sg here on earth vnd sein vernunfft hat. and his.nom.sg reason.nom.sg have.3sg.prs ‘And should a man also be damned and know it, still he shall not despair as long as he lives here on earth and is in full possession of his senses.’ (15th c., B 133, 50) It has already been mentioned in the preceding context that a man should behave himself if he does not want to be damned. In example (15) the positive phase ‘to become damned’ is contrasted with the negative one mentioned before. A typical isolating context for a modal interpretation of schon is the presence of stage level predicates, which are not compatible with a temporal reading, as is the case of ‘be Turks’ in example (16) below.

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(16) Early New High German die nemmen allemal auch mit sich jre Janitscharen / they take.prs.3sg always also with them their Janizaries welche mit grossen langen Benglen vorangehn / who with great.dat.pl long.dat.pl club.dat.pl go.ahead.prs.3pl vnd das Volck (wanns auch schon Türcken and the.acc.sg people.acc.sg (if even schon.prt Turks weren) auß dem weg schlagen. be.prs.sbjv.3pl out.of the.dat.sg way.dat.sg drive.away.prs.3sg ‘They always bring with themselves their Janizaries, who go in front with great long clubs and drive away the people (even if they are Turks).’ (16th c., B 125, S.34, 21–24) The aim of Section 4 below is, firstly, to identify the contextual features responsible for the grammaticalization of modal particles in German, that is, to single out those contextual cues which build up isolating and critical contexts, and, secondly, to show how they converge and lead to a common class of modal particles.

. Diachronic investigation . Corpus and method Our corpus contains 41 different sections of texts from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century with a total of 580,421 words. The texts are taken from the Bonner Frühneuhochdeutsches Korpus, Gloning’s collection and the Bibliotheca Augustana, and are listed with their abbreviations in the Appendix; detailed information on the corpora can be obtained on the respective web sites listed there. In contrast to earlier studies, our corpus assembles a relatively broad range of text types, registers and genres.11 As the aim of this research is to describe and understand the interplay of as many relevant contextual factors as possible, the focus is not on quantitative, but on qualitative aspects, that is, on an extensive evaluation of each particle item in its context. This requires a detailed list of contextual features and their possible values, which was compiled according to basic assumptions about grammaticalization processes and insights obtained during the study. The relevant features were divided into three subgroups, which were investigated successively. The first group concerns the morphology of the items in . Autenrieth (2002), for example, investigates a small number of complete works and finds a greater quantity of particles but less variation as to genre and text type. She also applied a less fine-grained analysis with no systematic classification of contexts and context types.

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question (Section 4.2). The second group encompasses speech act distinctions, sentence types and rough serialization data, all of which were suspected of influencing the development of the modal particles (Section 4.3). While the morphological and syntactic-illocutive features could be derived from general assumptions and prior knowledge, the third group of features had to be set up experimentally as work proceeded. It concerns the most specific features, and the various combinations of their values produce the most interesting contextual constellations, among them several types of isolating and critical contexts (Section 4.4). Given that the more general aim of this study is to develop a context-sensitive grammaticalization scenario for the whole class of modal particles in German, the list of features includes distinctions which will be needed for a larger group of particles. Although it is expected that other features will have to be added in follow-up studies, we propose that the general structure of our feature grid here is valid for the grammaticalization of modal particles. In the following sections, the features and their values are expounded in the order mentioned above. . Total figures and morphological status As eben and schon have heterosemes in other word classes and enter into wordformation processes, the first step in the diachronic research was to ascertain the total number of the lexical items eben and schon in the whole corpus and to evaluate their morphological status. We applied the following threefold distinction: a. Morphological particle, i.e. uninflected and unbound. b. Part of compound, i.e. all types of word formation. c. Inflected as adjective, which is potentially relevant only for eben and for the first step in the development of schon (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries). Tables 1a and 1b display the morphological status of the particle items. Since we considered only the predicative position, not a single instance of (c) above was found in our corpus. This value is therefore omitted in these tables. The second Table 1a. Eben: Total figures and morphological status Century

Total number of words

Total number of eben (percentage in total number of words)

Morphological particle

Part of compound

14th c. 15th c. 16th c. 17th c. 18th c. Total

130,507 160,649 112,833 87,230 89,202 580,421

14 (0.010) 15 (0.009) 39 (0.034) 58 (0.066) 109 (0.122) 235 (0.040)

1 6 38 50 83 178

13 9 1 8 26 57

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Table 1b. Schon: Total figures and morphological status Century

Total number of words

Total number of schon (percentage in total number of words)

Morphological particle

Part of compound

14th c. 15th c. 16th c. 17th c. 18th c. Total

130,507 160,649 112,833 87,230 89,202 580,421

10 (0.008) 44 (0.027) 22 (0.019) 53 (0.061) 133 (0.149) 262 (0.045)

10 44 22 48 133 257

0 0 0 5 0 5

column gives the quantity of text (in number of words) for each century and the third column gives the total numbers of eben and schon respectively, with their percentage with respect to the total number of words in brackets. As can be seen, both the total and the relative numbers of occurrences of eben tend to increase steadily from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. With schon the same observation can be made with the exception of the sixteenth century, where there is a slight decrease. This can be explained by the definitive orthographic distinction between the adverb and (later) modal particle schon, on the one hand, and the adjective schön ‘beautiful,’ on the other. The morphological status of the particles also shows an interesting development. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries eben occurs within word formation in the majority of cases (22 out of 29 examples), comprising nominal and adjectival compounding (ebenbild ‘image,’ ebenchrist ‘fellow Christian,’ ebenmensch ‘fellow man,’ uneben ‘uneven,’ ebengleiche ‘exactly the same,’ ebenmäßig ‘regular, well-proportioned, even,’ ebenso ‘alike, in the same way’), with a preponderance of the former type. In the sixteenth century this changes radically, with only one instance out of 39 being a compound (ebenso), while the remaining occurrences are unbound and uninflected, i.e. morphological particles. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, word formation gains ground again, but shows markedly different frequencies; while nominal and adjectival compounds are very rare, the compound adverbials ebenfalls (deriving from a nominal compound in the genitive) predominate, as does ebenso, to a lesser degree. These elements clearly have text-connective functions and thus mirror the predicted overall tendency of items grammaticalizing into discourse functional particles to pass through a stage in which they mark textual cohesion (cf. Section 3.1 above). In the same way, although schon does not enter into nominal compounds as eben does, up to the sixteenth century it appears – though rarely – in the conjunction obschon, which introduces conditional concessive clauses. Only those instances which are morphological particles, i.e. non-bound and uninflected, are significant for the further development of modal particles and for

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a classification of sentence types and communicative functions, which is discussed in the following section. . Sentence types and structural types Since many modal particles are restricted to particular sentence types, we hypothesize that their diachronic development shows traces of this sensitivity to structural and speech act distinctions. The second step in our empirical work, therefore, consisted of classifying every sentence containing a particle item according to the features and values included in Table 2.12 Table 2. Features for sentence type Feature labels and brief description

Feature value labels and brief description

E

Sentence type

F

Complexity of sentence

G

Type of complexity (applies only to value 2 in feature F) Type of subordinate clause (applies only to value 2 in feature G)

1 2 3 4 5 1 2 1 2 1 2 3

H

Statement/Verb second Yes/No-question Wh-question Imperative Expressives/Verb final Simple sentence Complex sentence Coordination Subordination Adverbial clause Complement clause Attributive clause

Tables 3a and 3b below show the distribution of values for eben and schon respectively. Table 3a. Sentence types for eben Century Number of eben as particle 14th c. 15th c. 16th c. 17th c. 18th c. Total

1 6 38 50 83 178

Values of E 1 2 3 4 5 1 6 37 47 80 171

0 0 0 0 0 0

0 0 0 2 1 3

0 0 1 1 2 4

0 0 0 0 0 0

Values of F 1 2

Values of G 1 2

0 1 2 4 4 34 4 46 13 70 23 155

0 1 0 4 3 31 2 44 18 52 23 132

Values of H 1 2 3 1 0 0 0 4 0 10 5 16 18 17 9 12 14 26 41 40 51

. Features are labelled by letters and feature values are labelled by numbers; the labels are chosen on an arbitrary basis.

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Table 3b. Sentence types for schon Century Number of schon as particle 14th c. 15th c. 16th c. 17th c. 18th c. Total

9 42 24 48 133 256

Values of E 1 2 3 4 5 9 28 24 44 122 227

0 0 0 2 6 8

0 0 0 0 14 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 5 0 0 7 14 0

Values of F 1 2

Values of G 1 2

Values of H 1 2 3

2 7 1 41 2 22 3 45 32 101 40 216

1 6 18 23 1 21 6 39 21 80 47 169

3 0 3 1 1 21 17 2 2 20 10 9 31 29 20 72 42 55

As can be seen from Tables 3a and 3b, eben and schon show a strong preference for statements, syntactically realized as complex subordinating clauses. In Present-day German, both eben and schon as modal particles clearly favour declarative statements (and, less frequently, imperatives). The diachronic facts, as far as they can be ascertained from these tables, point in the same direction, since the particle uses of eben and schon exhibit a preference for declarative statements from the very beginning. As for type of subordination, the findings here show a relatively even distribution among the adverbial, complement and attributive classes, with the latter group showing a slight predominance in the case of eben. Furthermore, because particles open up a relational structure which can be anchored in the textual or the pragmatic space, whereby textual relations take either an anaphoric or a cataphoric direction, we also ascertained the relative position of the particle-containing clause with respect to serialization and syntactic hierarchy. For obvious reasons, these features apply only to complex sentences, i.e. those with value 2 for feature F, or to subordinate clauses, i.e. those with value 2 for feature G. The serialization features used here are given in Table 4. Table 4. Features for serialization Feature labels and brief description

Feature value labels and brief description

I

1 2 1 2

J

Serialization of particle-containing clause (applies only to value 2 in F) Location of particle item in subordination (applies only to value 2 in G)

Particle in first clause Particle in second clause/non-first clause Particle in matrix clause Particle in subordinate clause

Tables 5a and 5b render the results for the serialization of the clauses containing eben and schon in the corpus. Concerning the relative position of eben and schon in complex sentences, Tables 5a and 5b show that both items have a slight tendency to appear in non-first clauses and in subordinate clauses. This seems to reflect their strong textual connective function in the course of their historical development. Due to the broad range of variation in relatively small quantities of data here, it is not possible to draw further conclusions.

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Table 5a. Relative position of eben in complex sentences Century

Total number of 2 in F

14th c. 15th c. 16th c. 17th c. 18th c. Total

1 4 34 46 70 155

Values of I 1 2 1 3 20 16 29 69

0 1 14 30 41 86

Total number of 2 in G 1 4 31 44 52 132

Values of J 1 2 0 3 17 17 23 60

1 1 14 27 29 72

Table 5b. Relative position of schon in complex sentences Century

Total number of 2 in F

14th c. 15th c. 16th c. 17th c. 18th c. Total

7 41 22 45 105 220

Values of I 1 2 1 16 11 13 40 81

6 25 11 32 65 139

Total number of 2 in G 6 24 21 39 86 176

Values of J 1 2 2 3 2 7 31 45

4 21 19 32 55 131

. Contextual features providing cues for a particular reading of a particle item As mentioned in Section 4.1 above, the features of the third group are more specific to the grammaticalization of the modal particles, as they are responsible for various types of isolating and critical contexts. The features which we found significant for this process so far are labelled L and M. As can be seen in Table 6, feature L displays a structurally distinguishable position for the development of a modal particle, that is, a potentially isolating context for readings other than modal particle readings (value 1), as well as structural features which may be conducive to the development of a modal particle reading (value 2). These values are further sub-classified by lower-case letters in order to be able to pin down the exact contextual surroundings of a particle (subvalues). Feature M, on the other hand, contains contextual factors which provide interpretative cues for any type of connective function of the particle beyond the structural features assembled under feature L. In other words, the values of feature M determine the type of textual anchoring realized in the clause containing the particle (including absence of explicit textual anchoring). The values of L and M are specified in Table 6 and explained in the remainder of this section.

Structural position potentially significant for modal particle interpretation

2

M Contextual factors 0 (semantic, etc.) which 1 provide interpretative cues for any type of connective 2 function of the particle beyond the structural features assembled under feature L

d

c

a b

d

c

b

a

None of the other values applicable Negation or other particle left and adjacent to particle item Subordinating conjunction left to the particle, adjacent or with unstressed monosyllabic item in between Particle item appears as a constituent with the copula-like verbs werden ‘become’ and bleiben ‘remain’

Particle item appears within a noun phrase or a prepositional phrase Particle item appears as a predicative element with the copula verb sein ‘to be’

Particle item as first constituent of verb-second clause Particle item modifies a conjunction

Feature sub-value labels and brief description

Phoric relations – anaphoric or cataphoric – as expressed by demonstrative pronouns, etc.

No textual cues as to a textually connective function Textually expressed comparison and/or equation

Structural position where modal particle reading is virtually excluded for structural reasons

1

L

Structurally distinguishable position for the development of modal particles

Feature value labels and brief description

Feature labels and brief description

Table 6. Contextual features relevant to the interpretation of the particle

See below eben so . . . als/eben wie ‘eben so. . . as/eben as’ eben das ‘eben this’

Das wird/bleibt schon ‘this becomes/remains schon’

See below [. . .] nicht eben [. . .], [. . .] doch schon [. . .] ‘not eben, surely schon’ ob schon, ob er schon ‘if schon, if he schon’

Eben/Schon kam er herein ‘eben/schon he came in’ [...], eben weil er herein kam ‘eben because he came in’ der eben hereingekommene Gast ‘the guest who eben came in’ Das Land ist eben ‘the land is eben’

Examples

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Before we discuss these features, it is important to note that every process of grammaticalization entails preconditions, factors which enable the transformation of an element into a grammatical item, but which do not themselves constitute this change. An important precondition which is not explored here is that the semantic abstraction of the item in question must have proceeded to a certain degree (cf. Section 2 above), which we assume is achieved via the reinterpretation of an abstract semantic template (cf. Section 3.2). Let us now turn to the features in Table 6. As mentioned above, feature L assembles structurally distinguishable positions relevant to the development of modal particles. Some of its values provide isolating contexts for non-particle readings, whereas others provide conditions which do not prevent or even invite a modal particle reading. Value 1 of feature L refers to a structural position where a modal particle reading is virtually excluded for structural reasons, that is, those positions mark the isolating contexts for non-particle readings. The sub-values a, b, c and d provide further specification of the contextual features which lead to the isolating context. Sub-value L1a specifies that the particle item appears as the first constituent of a verb-second clause. As this is the isolating context for the use of a particle item as an adverbial, the reading as a modal particle is excluded here. For eben there is no example of this kind in the corpus, but see the example given in Table 6 (Eben kam er herein). For schon only one example in the corpus seems to exhibit this value – (17) below – even if there is some uncertainty about the clause structure, as the preverbal position of schon could be the Vorfeld (i.e. the preverbal position in verb-second languages), but also the Mittelfeld (i.e. the field between the finite and the non-finite part of the verb) preceding the verb phrase. In any case, schon is a temporal adverb here, since it is contrasted with noch ‘still.’ (17) New High German [. . .] die irrthümer [. . .] entweder schon mögen the.nom.pl errors.nom.pl either schon.adv may.prs.3pl geschehen seyn, oder noch geschehen können happen.ptcp be.inf or still happen.ptcp can.prs.3pl ‘the errors may either already have happened, or can still happen’ (17th c., BA Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 3, 47) Sub-value L1b refers to a context where the particle item modifies a conjunction, that is, it appears to the left of a conjunction, like eben in example (18) below.

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(18) Early New High German Eben wie die M[ue]nchen vnd Pfaffen bey vns eben.prt like the.nom.pl monk.nom.pl and priest.nom.pl at us auch gethan haben. also do.ptcp have.prs.3pl ‘Just like the monks and priests did at our place.’ (16th c., B 135, 546) The particle item is used here as a focus particle to modify the conjunction, whereby the two items form a kind of complex conjunction, fulfilling the connective function together. Being an isolating context for a non-particle function, this context is not directly relevant to the grammaticalization of the modal particle function. However, we suggest that it nevertheless plays an important role in the grammaticalization scenario for the following reason. One necessary step in the reinterpretation of the relational structure is the acquisition of propositional scope. Conjunctions establish relations between propositions and indeed have propositional scope. We suggest that, in the pre-conjunctional position of the particle, the property of having propositional scope, which originates from the conjunction, is transferred to the adjacent particle. Thus, the pre-conjunctional position of the particle item is significant, because it clearly indicates that this reinterpretation (the acquisition of sentential scope) has taken place and that a necessary preparatory stage on the way to becoming a modal particle has been reached. This context type is not frequent for eben (only two instances in the data), but it does play an important role in the development of other modal particles, such as bloß. No instance has been found in our corpus where schon precedes a conjunction. Sub-value L1c is assigned when the particle item appears within a noun phrase or prepositional phrase, which also constitutes an isolating context for nonparticle readings, such as the reading as a focus particle, as in (19), or an adverb, as in (20). (19) New High German Eben dieses, versetzte ich, ist mein eben.prt that.nom.sg reply.pst.1sg I be.prs.3sg my.nom.sg propos. suggestion.sg.nom ‘Exactly that, I replied, is my suggestion.’ (18th c., BA Johann Gottfried Schnabel, 20b)

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(20) New High German a. Auß eben besagter Ursach wurde for eben.adv mentioned.dat.sg reason.dat.sg become.pst.3sg auch das lesen der Poeten und also the.nom.sg reading.nom.sg of.the poet.gen.pl and anderer Heidnischen Fablen keinen other.gen.pl heathen.gen.pl fable.gen.pl no.dat.pl einfeltigen/jungen und ohngelehrten [. . .] gestanden. simple/young.dat.pl and uneducated.dat.pl allow.ptcp ‘For the just mentioned reason, simple, young and uneducated persons were not allowed to read the poets and other heathen fables.’ (17th c., B 217, 481) b. ich hielt mich fuer verbunden, ihm selbst einen I regard.pst.1sg myself for bound him self an.acc.sg Sessel zu reichen und mich dadurch an dem armchair.acc.sg to hand.inf and myself thus on the.dat.sg mir schon beschwerlichen Ceremoniell zu to.me schon.adv tedious.dat.sg ceremony.dat.sg to raechen. revenge.inf ‘I felt bound to hand him an armchair myself, thus revenging myself on the ceremony that had already become tedious to me.’ (18th c., BA Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, 2245) The frequency of this type of context increases for eben in the eighteenth century (five out of 38 examples in the sixteenth century, five of 50 occurrences in the seventeenth century and 25 out of 83 instances in the eighteenth century), whereas no relevant increase is observable for schon (four out of ten examples in the fourteenth century, 11 out of 44 instances in the fifteenth century, nine out of 22 occurrences in the seventeenth century and 21 out of 133 examples in the eighteenth century), which confirms earlier findings. Sub-value L1d is assigned when the particle item appears as a predicative element with the copula verb sein ‘to be,’ constituting the isolating context for the predicative adjective, as in (21). (21) Early New High German Es ist aber dise Statt Tripolis zimlich it be.prs.3sg however this.nom.sg city.nom.sg Tripolis quite groß / [. . .] / vnd ligt inn ainer lustigen gegne / big and lie.prs.3sg in a.dat.sg pleasant.dat.sg area.dat.sg

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an den vorbergen des hohen at the.dat.pl foothill.dat.pl of.the high.gen.sg Gebürges Libani, die gegen dem mountain.range.gen.sg Lebanon which towards the.dat.sg M[oe]hr gar eben. sea.dat.sg rather eben.adj ‘The city of Tripolis, however, is quite big and is situated in a pleasant area at the foot-hills of the high mountain range of the Lebanon, which is rather flat towards the sea.’ (16th c., B 125, 135) As schon is an adverbial in the second stage of its development, this is an isolating context only for eben, though it remains rare, with only two instances in the whole corpus. It is, however, very important for particles like ruhig and so needs to be listed as a feature value here. Value 2 of feature L indicates structural constellations which are potentially significant for a modal particle interpretation, that is, structures which do not form explicit isolating contexts for non-particle readings like those in L1. Sub-value L2a marks items where none of the other values apply. Examples of these maximally underspecified structures in terms of isolating features are given in (22a–b) below. (22) New High German a. Man befahl, eben die Marter an mir one order.pst.3sg eben.prt the.acc.sg torture.acc.sg to me vorzunehmen. to.apply ‘They ordered the torture to be applied to me.’ (18th c., BA Christian Fürchtegott Gellert, 1518) b. ich hoffe Sie werden schon zu lernen I hope.prs.3sg you become.prs.2sg schon.adv to learn.inf angefangen haben? begin.ptcp have.inf ‘I hope you have already begun to study?’ (18th c., BA Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) As this is a structurally neutral position, the interpretation of the particle item is highly dependent on the values of the other features, which turns this value L2a into a potential critical context for the development of a modal particle interpretation. This will be discussed below in this section. With 116 instances for eben and 144 for schon, this value is very frequent in the corpus (eben: one in the fourteenth century, one in the fifteenth century, 27 in the sixteenth century, 38 in the seventeenth century, 49 in the eighteenth cen-

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tury; schon: none in the fourteenth century, 12 in the fifteenth century, 12 in the sixteenth century, 21 in the seventeenth century, 99 in the eighteenth century). Sub-value L2b is assigned if there is a negative or other particle to the left of and adjacent to the particle item, as in examples (23a–b) and (24a–b). (23) New High German a. Es ist nicht eben nöthig daß alle it be.prs.3sg not eben.prt necessary that all.nom.pl schlußformen heißen. conclusion.nom.pl be.called.prs.3pl ‘It is not necessary that all be called conclusions.’ (17th c., BA Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 4, 51) b. haben sie sich einander nicht schon have.prs.3pl they themselves each.other not schon.adv gekriegt beym kragen? get.ptcp at=the collar.dat.sg ‘Have they not yet collared each other?’ (18th c., BA Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 208) (24) New High German a. Mein GOTT, ich verlange ja eben nicht reich my God.nom.sg I ask.prs.1sg ja.prt eben.prt not rich an zeitlichen Gütern zu seyn, [. . .] in transitory.dat.pl good.dat.pl to be.inf ‘My God, I JA eben do not ask to be rich in transitory goods,’ (18th c., BA Johann Gottfried Schnabel 2, 45) b. Denn es werffen sich immer mehr und mehr for it throw.prs.3pl themselves always more and more Scribenten auf, die einem neu=begierigen Leser writer.nom.pl up that a.dat.sg curious.dat.sg reader.dat.sg an diejenige Nase, so er doch schon to that.acc.sg nose.acc.sg which he though schon.adv selbst am Kopffe hat, noch viele himself at=the face.dat.sg have.prs.3sg still many.acc.pl kleine, mittelmäßige und grosse Nasen small.acc.pl medium.acc.pl and large.acc.pl nose.acc.pl drehen wollen. put.on.inf want.prs.3pl ‘For there are more and more writers who want to put many more small, medium and large noses on [= make fun of] a curious reader

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The diachronic rise of modal particles in German 

in addition to the one s/he has in his/her face.’ (18th c., BA Johann Gottfried Schnabel 1, 10) The ambiguous status of the negation marker in this period makes it difficult to interpret this context. Depending on the type of particle to the left, it may favour a non-particle adverbial reading (as in example (23a) above) or a reading as a modal particle (as perhaps in (24a)). This double particle construction seems to act as a critical context here since it creates ambiguities and thus invites reinterpretation. Instances of this kind are not very numerous in our data: 22 for eben (five in the fifteenth century, three in the sixteenth century, nine in the seventeenth century and five in the eighteenth century) and 16 for schon (six, two and eight instances in the fifteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, respectively). To evaluate this structure fully, it would be necessary to conduct a detailed analysis of the item to the left of the particle, which is not possible in the current paper. Sub-value L2c has a subordinating conjunction to the left of the particle, adjacent to it or with an unstressed monosyllabic item in between, as in (25a–b). (25) Early New High German a. Wie eben vmb solcher vrsach willen as eben.prt for such.gen.sg reason.gen.sg sake.dat.sg Christus hie h[ue]lfft allerley krancken / die zu Christ.nom.sg here help.prs.3sg all sick.dat.sg who to jm gebracht wurden / vnd nur sein him bring.ptcp become.pst.3sg and only his.acc.sg kleid anr[ue]rten gown.acc.sg touch.pst.3pl ‘as just for such reason Christ helps all the sick who have been brought to him and have only touched his gown’ (16th c., B 135, 244) b. Dann ob sich schon die Hispanier then if themselves schon.prt the.nom.pl Spaniard.nom.pl mit grosser Macht vnnd Gewalt darzu with great.dat.sg might.dat.sg and force.dat.sg thereto geru_estet / vnd jhr bestes darauff haben prepare.pst and their.acc.sg best.acc.sg thereon have.pst.3pl gewandt / haben sie doch keinen Passz zu give.ptcp have.pst.3pl they still no.acc.sg entry.acc.sg on Wasser oder zu Landt darein ko_ennen finden. water or on land.dat.sg therein been.able.to.inf find.inf ‘Then although the Spaniards prepared themselves with great might and force and gave their best, they could still find no entry, neither by sea nor by land.’ (16th c., B 245, 11)

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This type of constellation is a critical context to trigger an optional modal particle reading. Thus, eben in (25a) is ambiguous between a scalar particle modifying the adjacent prepositional phrase (see paraphrase (25a’)) and a modal particle reading, in which the proposition is marked as pragmatically presupposed (paraphrase (25a”)). In the latter reading, the writer implies that, of course, his audience already knows about Christ helping the sick. (25a’) ‘as exactly for such reason [. . .]’ (25a”) ‘as for such reason – I iterate what has been known before [. . .]’ For eben, sub-value L2c appears only twice in the whole corpus (once in the sixteenth century and once in the eighteenth century). For schon, this type of context also displays ambiguity between older readings and the modal particle reading, where the whole construction is often a concessive clause. In such clauses, schon permits – after the evaluation of the context – only the modal reading, that is, a temporal reading is possible only if the sentence is read without considering the context. In concessive clauses a fact is being referred to whose existence is a precondition for another fact; thus, in contrast to conditional clauses, p is presupposed. In example (25b) above a temporal reading would make no sense, since there is no negative phase in the temporal sense in the previous context. Rather, the speech was about the trouble which the Spaniards had in conquering the country, and the contrast is thus with the pragmatic presupposition ‘they did not succeed in doing their best.’ This type of context for schon is realized in 31 instances in the whole corpus (three in the fifteenth century, ten in the sixteenth century, 13 in the seventeenth century and five in the eighteenth century). Sub-value L2d is assigned when the particle item appears as a constituent with the copula-like verbs werden ‘become’ and bleiben ‘remain.’ The corpus contains only examples with schon in the first step (ten occurrences in the fifteenth century), as in (26). (26) Early New High German Item wilt dv din faß ym thus will.prs.2sg you your.acc.sg barrel.acc.sg in=the herbest bereiten, daß din win autumn.dat.sg prepare.inf that your.nom.sg wine.nom.sg schon belibet. schon.adj stay.prs.3sg ‘Thus you will prepare your barrel in the autumn so that your wine remains.’ (15th c., G Das Weinbuch, 441)

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Table 7. Combination of feature values indicating the critical context Century

14th c. 15th c. 16th c. 17th c. 18th c. Total

Total number of words/ number of morphological particles 130,507 160,649 112,833 87,230 89,202 580,421

/ / / / / /

1 6 38 50 83 178

eben

schon

L2a and M0

L2b and M0

L2c and M0

L2d and M0

L2a and M0

L2b and M0

L2c and M0

L2d and M0

1 1 5 19 11 37

0 5 1 7 3 16

0 0 1 0 1 2

0 0 0 0 0 0

0 12 12 21 99 144

0 6 0 2 8 16

0 3 10 13 5 31

0 10 0 0 0 10

Feature M, as already mentioned, indicates contextual factors (semantic factors, etc.) which provide interpretative cues for any type of connective function of the particle beyond the structural features assembled under feature L. In other words, the values of this feature are concerned with the type of anchoring for the relational structure expressed in the particle items. The value 0 for feature M indicates that there is no explicit textual cue for a text-connective function of the particle. In this context, the process of loosening textual connections in favour of gaining pragmatic saturation of the relational structure is very likely to occur. We found in our data that the combination of value M0 and value L2a provides the most frequent critical context for the reinterpretation of eben and schon as modal particles. This is rendered in Table 7 (first column for each particle). As the table shows, the combination of M0 with L2a for eben spreads markedly in the seventeenth century, which is in line with the findings of earlier studies, as it shows that the critical stage in the development of eben as a modal particle corresponded to the latter part of the Early New High German period. In turn, the use of schon as a modal particle is already present in the late fifteenth century, with a consolidation of this function in the sixteenth century.13 The combination of these two values, which express underspecification, leads to highly opaque contexts which invite several alternative readings, among them the reading as a modal particle, i.e. pragmatic saturation of the relational template. This triggers the grammaticalization of the modal particle function. A typical example is (22a) above, repeated here as (27). . For eben the figures for value M0 in isolation are the following: total 65 (one in the fourteenth century, six in the fifteenth century, 11 in the sixteenth century, 27 in the seventeenth century and 20 in the eighteenth century). For schon the figures are: total 262 (ten in the fourteenth century, 44 in the fifteenth century, 22 in the sixteenth century, 53 in the seventeenth century and 133 in the eighteenth century).

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(27) = (22) New High German Man befahl, eben die Marter an mir one order.pst.3sg eben.prt the.acc.sg torture.acc.sg to me vorzunehmen. to.apply ‘They ordered the torture to be applied to me.’ (18th c., BA Christian Fürchtegott Gellert 1518) Due to the underspecification expressed by the combination of values L2a and M0, this is a highly opaque context which allows three readings for eben in example (27): a. As a temporal adverb ‘just now:’ ‘They ordered the torture to be applied to me just now.’ b. As a scalar particle modifying the following NP ‘the very torture:’ ‘They ordered the very torture to be applied to me.’ c. As a modal particle: ‘They ordered the torture to be applied to me – I iterate this.’ The range of choices as well as the likelihood of any single interpretation is variable. However, all instances with this combination of values show ambiguity of this kind and all of them allow the modal particle interpretation as one of the alternative readings. In our corpus data, we found hardly any isolating context for the reading of eben as a modal particle. The most likely candidate is example (28) below, where eben is followed by other particles, thus preventing a reading as a scalar particle. (28) New High German Doch allzu sicher durffte ich eben auch nicht trauen, but all=too sure dare.pst.1sg I eben.prt also not trust.inf derowegen practicierte mich durch allerhand because.of.which make.pst.1sg me through all.kinds Umwege. detour.acc.pl ‘But I could also not dare to proceed in too confident a way; because of this I made all kinds of detours.’ (18th c., BA Johann Gottfried Schnabel, 210) The scarcity of isolating contexts for the modal particle eben is easily explained by the fact that eben is a young modal particle, which, in the time span examined here, was about to develop its modal particle function. There are, therefore, critical contexts allowing a modal particle reading, but not yet contexts requiring such a reading to the exclusion of others. The question of which types of context provide

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The diachronic rise of modal particles in German 

reliable isolating contexts for the interpretation of eben as a modal particle must be left to further studies. Value 1 of M is assigned in the case of a textually expressed comparison and/or equation. This value is relevant mainly to eben and other particles like aber, denn or gleich, but not to schon. By expressing the comparative relation explicitly via linguistic material, this is a context which emphasizes the text-connective function of the particle, and thus, at the same time, is an isolating context for a non-modal particle reading. An example is (29). (29) New High German Diser Zwist scheinet eben so wichtig / this.nom.sg dispute.nom.sg seem.prs.3sg eben.prt as important als der Streit der Trojanischen Grandes. as the quarrel.nom.sg of.the Trojan nobility ‘This dispute seems just as important as the quarrel of the nobility of Troy.’ (17th c., B 217, 65) The comparative relation is fully expressed by so . . . als. The most plausible interpretation is that eben modifies so and thus emphasizes the equation between the two compared entities (an ongoing quarrel and the quarrel of the nobility of Troy). As soon as the second part of the comparative relation is omitted, i.e. the clause introduced by als, the reading of eben becomes ambiguous (the value changes from M1 to M0; compare example (13) above). For eben the value M1 is found 70 times in our corpus data (11 in the sixteenth century, ten in the seventeenth century and 49 in the eighteenth century). Value 2 for feature M marks phoric relations – anaphoric or cataphoric – as expressed by demonstrative pronouns and other deictic and connective elements and thus, like M1, provides an isolating context for the non-modal particle interpretation of the particle item as a textual connective particle. An example for eben is given in (30). (30) Early New High German Vnd das es eben derselbig sein Leib sei / and that it eben.prt the.same his body.nom.sg be.prs.sbjv.3sg den er vns im H. Sacrament gibt / welchen which he us in=the holy sacrament.dat.sg give.prs.3sg that er vor der welt leben an dz Creütz he for the.gen.sg world.gen.sg life.acc.sg to the cross.acc.sg dargeben hat give.ptcp have.pst.3sg ‘and that it is exactly the same body, which he gives to us in the Holy Sacrament, that he gave to the Cross for the life of the world’ (16th c., B 155, 94)

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In (30) a cataphoric relation is expressed by the demonstrative pronoun derselbig and the following restrictive relative clause (eben derselbig sein Leib sei/den [. . .]). As a focus particle, eben, which probably carries stress, combines with the following demonstrative pronoun, and this combination points cataphorically to the following relative clauses. For eben the value M2 is found 43 times in the corpus (16 in the sixteenth century, 13 in the seventeenth century and 14 in the eighteenth). We suggest that this type of connective function is an important step towards the modal particle function of eben (as postulated by Traugott 1999; see Section 3.1 above), whereas for schon other factors should be considered, such as the type of predicate and its aspectuality.14

. Conclusions The aim of this paper was to determine, on the basis of a large and heterogeneous diachronic corpus, the common factors inducing the grammaticalization path from quite different source lexemes to modal particles in Present-day German. Due to space constraints, we focussed our attention on the particles schon and eben. The former derives its modal particle use in two steps from the evaluative adjective schön ‘beautiful’ through the temporal adverb schon ‘already,’ whereas the latter originates in the adjective ‘flat’ and arrives at its modal particle use by way of the adverb ‘exactly.’ The common semantic template shared by these two lexemes – we assume that the other modal particle source lexemes can be treated in the same way – is their scalar nature, which is present in every step of the process. In our proposal, this shared semantic kernel remains through the development from lexical to grammatical items, and what changes are the relations which they create: as evaluative or dimensional adjectives or adverbs, they create intratextual relations, modifying nouns or events on the relevant scales. The syntactic dependence between the modified constituent and the adjectives or adverbs is lost as soon as the context impedes the right interpretation. The relational character of the scalar elements, however, is realized in the pragmatic context, since a pragmatic presupposition is recovered in different ways depending on the semantics of the single modal particle. This passage takes place in different stages associated with specific context types. What is significant for the grammaticalization process is the isolating context, which admits only the new interpretation, and so is a prerequisite for the item to participate in the grammatical paradigm of modal particles. This passage, however, is only a consolidation of one of the possible readings triggered in the critical context, which is characterized by a high degree of ambiguity. . For schon the temporal phoric relation requires further analysis, which we leave for future research.

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Through the assignment of certain values to a number of defined parameters concerning the internal and external relation of sentences, such as sentence types, complexity of sentences, correlation with the context or factors like the position of the particle in the sentence, we were able to evaluate, in a first approximation, which of these features are the most relevant and how they correlate with each other. For example, our data show that the majority of context types favoured by such elements are subordinate clauses which take the position after the main clause. This feature has been interpreted by the cohesive function which modal particles assume after they have lost their dependence on clause-internal constituents. Moreover, we found that each lexeme keeps its own lexical semantics to a certain degree – besides the relational traits common to other modal particle source lexemes, which has an impact on the path followed by the single items. Thus, the function which eben assumes in comparisons or equations is of relevance, whereas for schon it is rather temporal relations that play an important role. Further examinations of more fine-grained criteria, such as temporal and aspectual factors in the development and interpretation of modal particles or the semantic and syntactic constitution of comparative structures, would constitute interesting lines of future research in this area.

Abbreviations 1 2 3 acc adj adv dat fut gen

first person second person third person accusative adjective adverb dative future genitive

inf nom pl prs prt pst ptcp sbjv sg

infinitive nominative plural present modal particle past participle subjunctive singular

References Abraham, Werner. 1990. Zur heterogenen Entfaltung der Modalpartikeln im Ahd. und Mhd. In Anne Betten (ed.), Neuere Forschungen zur historischen Syntax des Deutschen [Reihe Germanistische Linguistik 103], 124–138. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Abraham, Werner. 1991. The grammaticalization of the German modal particles. In Elizabeth Closs Traugott & Bernd Heine (eds.), Approaches to grammaticalization. Vol. II, 331–380. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Autenrieth, Tanja. 2002. Heterosemie und Grammatikalisierung bei Modalpartikeln. Eine synchrone und diachrone Studie anhand von eben, halt, e(cher)t, einfach, schlicht und glatt. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Bierwisch, Manfred. 1987. Semantik der Graduierung. In Manfred Bierwisch & Ewald Lang (eds.), Grammatische und konzeptuelle Aspekte von Dimensionsadjektiven, 91–286. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Bublitz, Wolfram. 1978. Ausdrucksweisen der Sprechereinstellung im Deutschen und Englischen. Untersuchungen zur Syntax, Semantik und Pragmatik der deutschen Modalpartikeln und Vergewisserungsfragen und ihrer englischen Entsprechungen [Linguistische Arbeiten 57]. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Burkhardt, Armin. 1994. Abtönungspartikeln im Deutschen: Bedeutung und Genese. Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 22: 129–151. Diewald, Gabriele. 1997. Grammatikalisierung. Eine Einführung in Sein und Werden grammatischer Formen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Diewald, Gabriele. 1999. Die Entwicklung der Modalpartikel aber: Ein typischer Grammatikalisierungsweg der Modalpartikeln. In Hans Otto Spillmann & Ingo Warnke (eds.), Internationale Tendenzen der Syntaktik, Semantik und Pragmatik. Akten des 32. Linguistischen Kolloquiums in Kassel 1997, 83–91. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Diewald, Gabriele. 2002. A model for relevant types of contexts in grammaticalization. In Ilse Wischer & Gabriele Diewald (eds.), New reflections on grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 49], 103–120. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Diewald, Gabriele. 2004. Entwicklungen und Fragen in der Grammatikalisierungsforschung. Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 32(2): 137–151. Diewald, Gabriele. 2006. Discourse particles and modal particles as grammatical elements. In Kerstin Fischer (ed.), Approaches to discourse particles [Studies in Pragmatics 1], 403–425. Oxford: Elsevier. Diewald, Gabriele & Kerstin Fischer. 1998. Zur diskursiven und modalen Funktion der Partikeln aber, auch, doch und ja in Instruktionsdialogen. Linguistica 38: 75–99. DWB = Deutsches Wörterbuch. Neubearbeitung. 1965. Ed. by Jacob Grimm & Wilhelm Grimm. Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR, Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (eds.). Leipzig: Hirzel. Ferraresi, Gisella. 2004. Unterdeterminiertheit in der Schnittstelle Syntax-Semantik bei Grammatikalisierungsphänomenen am Beispiel von schon. Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 32(2): 245–261. Ferraresi, Gisella. 2006a. Informationsstrukturelle Bedingungen bei deutschen Modalpartikeln. In Maurice Vliegen (ed.), Variation in Sprachtheorie und Spracherwerb. Akten des 39. Linguistischen Kolloquiums, Amsterdam 2004, 79–87. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Ferraresi, Gisella. 2006b. Partikeln und Satzadverbiale. Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede. Deutsch als Fremdsprache 4/2006. Foolen, Ad. 1989. Beschreibungsebenen für Partikelbedeutungen. In Harald Weydt (ed.), Sprechen mit Partikeln, 305–317. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Franck, Dorothea. 1980. Grammatik und Konversation. Stilistische Pragmatik des Dialogs und der Bedeutung deutscher Modalpartikeln. Königstein: Scriptor. Helbig, Gerhard. 1994. Lexikon deutscher Partikeln. Leipzig: Enzyklopädie. Helbig, Gerhard & Joachim Buscha. 1986. Deutsche Grammatik: Ein Handbuch für den Ausländerunterricht. Leipzig: Enzyklopädie. Hentschel, Elke. 1983. Partikeln und Wortstellung. In Harald Weydt (ed.), Partikeln und Interaktion [Reihe Germanistische Linguistik 44], 46–53. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

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Hentschel, Elke. 1986. Funktion und Geschichte deutscher Modalpartikeln: Ja, doch, halt und eben. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Ickler, Theodor. 1994. Zur Bedeutung der sogenannten ‘Modalpartikeln’. Sprachwissenschaft 19: 374–404. Krivonosov, Aleksej. 1977. Deutsche Modalpartikeln im System der unflektierten Wortklassen. In Harald Weydt (ed.), Aspekte der Modalpartikeln. Studien zur Deutschen Abtönung, 176– 216. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Lehmann, Christian. 1985. Grammaticalization: Synchronic variation and diachronic change. Lingua e Stile 20: 303–318. Löbner, Sebastian. 1990. Wahr neben falsch. Duale Operatoren als die Quantoren natürlicher Sprache. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Meibauer, Jörg. 1994. Modaler Kontrast und konzeptuelle Verschiebung. Studien zur Syntax und Semantik deutscher Modalpartikeln [Linguistische Arbeiten 314]. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Molnár, Anna. 2002. Die Grammatikalisierung deutscher Modalpartikeln. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Reichmann, Oskar & Klaus-Peter Wegera. 1993. Frühneuhochdeutsche Grammatik. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Schildt, Joachim. 1981. Zur Ausbildung des Satzrahmens. In Gerhard Kettmann & Joachim Schildt (eds.), Zur Ausbildung der Norm der deutschen Literatursprache auf der syntaktischen Ebene (1470–1730). Der Einfachsatz. [Bausteine zur Sprachgeschichte des Neuhochdeutschen 56(I)], 235–284. Berlin: Akademie. Simon, Horst J. 1996. Zur Problematik einer Geschichte der deutschen Abtönungspartikeln. Fallstudien anhand eines Sprachlehrbuchs von 1424. Sprachwissenschaft 21: 262–300. Thurmair, Maria. 1989. Modalpartikeln und ihre Kombinationen [Linguistische Arbeiten 223]. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1989. On the rise of epistemic meanings in English: An example of subjectification in semantic change. Language 65: 31–55. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1999. The rhetoric of counter-expectation in semantic change: A study in subjectification. In Andreas Blank & Peter Koch (eds.), Historical semantics and cognition [Cognitive Linguistics Research 13], 177–196. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Richard B. Dasher. 2002. Regularity in semantic change. Cambridge: CUP.

Appendix: Primary sources Corpora: B = Bonner Frühneuhochdeutsches Korpus: (http://www.ikp.uni-bonn.de/dt/forsch/fnhd/) BA = Bibliotheca Augustana: (http://www.fh-augsburg.de/∼harsch/augustana.html) G = Gloning Korpus: (http://staff-www.uni-marburg.de/∼gloning/etexte.htm) List of texts: Fourteenth century: Meister Eckart: Von abgescheidenheit (G), Text 231 Rulmann Merswin: Mannen (B), Text 151 Buch Köln (B), Text 141 Altdeutsche Predigten I (B), Text 251 Psalter Dresden (B), Text 121 Buch Altväter (B), Text 131 Mönch von Heilsbronn: Namen (B), Text 221 Hans Mair: Troja (B), Text 242 Benedektinerregel (B).

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Fifteenth century: Johannes von Tepl: Der Ackermann (BA), Das Weinbuch: Hie vahet an alle artzenie von dem wine (G), Text 133 Handschrift Pillenreuth Mystik (B), Text 213 Gerold Edlibach: Chronik (B), Text 123 Hans Neidhart: Eunuchus des Terenz (B), Text 253 Johannes Rothe: Chronik (B), Text 243 Johann Wonnecke von Cube: Hortuns Sanitatis (B), Text 223 Gualtherus Burlaeus: Vita (B), Text 233 Hieronymus Brunschwig: Chirurgie (B), Text 143 Johannes Tauler: Sermon (B), Text 153 Johann Koelhoff: Chronik (B). Sixteenth century: Text 155 Johann Gropper: Gegenwärtigkeit (B), Text 235 Jörg Wickram: Nachbarn (B), Text 115 Sigmund Herberstein: Moscouia (B), Text 135 Veit Dietrich: Summaria (B), Text 125 Leonhart Rauwolf: Beschreibung (B), Text 145 Johannes Mathesius: Passionale (B), Text 245 Walter Ralegh: Amerika (B), Text 255 Johann Bange: Chronik (B). Seventeenth century: Kepler, Bericht vom neuen Stern (G), Eine gedruckte Berliner Zeitung aus dem Jahr 1626 (G), Text 117 Deo Gratias (B), Text 217 Gotthard Heidegger: Mythoscopia (B), Die verwüstete vnd verödete Schäferey (BA), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Ermahung an die Deutschen, Öffentliche Assekuranzen, Von der Weisheit, Vom Nutzen der Vernunftkunst (BA), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Unvorgreifliche Gedanken betreffend die Ausübung und Verbesserung der Teutschen Sprache (G). Eighteenth century: Johann Gottfried Schnabel (BA), Christian Fürchtegott Gellert (BA), Berliner Privilegirte Zeitung (BA), Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: Sudelbuch A (BA), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Briefe (BA).

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Double indirect object marking in Spanish and Italian* Andreas Dufter and Elisabeth Stark University of Munich (LMU) and University of Zurich

The emergence of doubly marked indirect objects in Spanish and Italian might seem to constitute another example of parallel grammatical evolution in Romance. However, whereas indirect object doubling in contemporary Spanish is obligatory in many cases and always possible elsewhere, it is highly constrained in Italian, both with respect to linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. This article investigates the distribution of indirect object doubling with several verbs of high frequency in Italian and Spanish, analysing contemporary spoken varieties as well as diachronic corpora. We argue that, while in Spanish the overall frequency of clitic-doubling has shown a steady increase since medieval times, for pronominal indirect objects, the factors favouring double object marking have remained surprisingly stable over time. In Italian, by contrast, indirect object doubling has become restricted to certain prototypical contexts of occurrence.

.

Introduction

As closely related Romance languages, Spanish and Italian share a large number of grammatical properties. Some of these are inherited from Vulgar Latin; others, however, constitute independent innovations, often with surprisingly parallel outcomes. In particular, both languages have developed two sets of pronominal object expressions: clitic pronouns, which are generally constrained to occurrences adjacent to a verb, and strong pronouns, which can be found in a wider range of syntactic environments. Indirect objects in contemporary Spanish and Italian can be overtly expressed by a clitic alone, as illustrated in (1a) and (2a) below. In addition to this minimal marking, both languages permit strong object pronouns to function as indirect object arguments, preceded by the case-marking preposition * We are grateful to Concepción Company Company, Daniel Hole, Wulf Oesterreicher and Cinzia Russi, as well as to two anonymous reviewers, for their many valuable comments, and to the STABLAB at the University of Munich (LMU) for statistical advice. The usual disclaimers apply.

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a. With strong pronominal indirect objects, however, an interesting difference between Spanish and Italian can be observed: in all varieties of Present-day Spanish, these pronominal objects require the presence of an additional co-indexed indirect object clitic, irrespective of their position before or after the finite verb. Therefore, (1b) and (1c) are grammatical, whereas (1d) and (1e) are not. In Italian, however, double pronominal indirect object marking appears to be avoided in formal and written registers (cf. (2b) and (2c) below). This was perhaps most concisely formulated in a squib by Cortelazzo (1984) entitled “Perché ‘a mí me gusta’ sì e ‘a me mi piace’ no?” (‘Why A mí me gusta yes and A me mi piace no?’). In contrast to Spanish, Standard Italian does permit single prepositional indirect object marking with strong pronouns, as in (2d) and (2e). (1) Spanish a. Me gusta. me.cl pleases b. A mí me gusta. to me.pron me.cl pleases c. Me gusta a mí. me.cl pleases to me.pron d. *A mí gusta. to me.pron pleases e. *Gusta a mí. pleases to me.pron ‘I like it.’ (2) Italian a. Mi piace. me.cl pleases b. ?A me mi piace.1 to me.pron me.cl pleases c. ?Mi piace a me. me.cl pleases to me.pron d. A me piace. to me.pron pleases e. Piace a me. pleases to me.pron ‘I like it.’ . For the sake of convenience, we note the limited acceptability of (2b) and (2c) with a question mark, without thereby committing ourselves to any judgement about grammaticality.

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With lexical indirect objects, clitic-doubling is also found more often in Spanish than in Italian, and has become obligatory for indirect objects appearing preverbally, as in (3a). For postverbal indirect objects, as in (3b), recent work (cf. Becerra Bascuñán 2006; Company Company 2006) shows that double marking is steadily gaining ground as well, and predominates over single prepositional indirect objects overwhelmingly in varieties of American Spanish. By contrast, the presence of a co-indexed clitic is always optional in Italian, and is mostly restricted to contextually marked constructions, such as clause-external, dislocated indirect objects, as in (4) (possibly with an additional intonational break, indicated by a comma; cf. Benincà et al. 1991: 133–138). (3) Spanish a. A María ??(le) to Mary her.cl b. ?(Le) gusta a her.cl pleases to ‘Mary likes it.’

gusta. pleases María.2 Mary

(4) Italian a. A Maria, le/gli to Mary her.cl b. Le/Gli piace, a her.cl pleases to ‘Mary likes it.’

piace.3 pleases Maria. Mary

The data presented so far suggest that, with prepositional indirect objects, cliticdoubling is highly restricted in Present-day Standard Italian, whereas it is unmarked in all contemporary varieties of Spanish. However, grammatical descriptions of the two languages tend to provide somewhat vague – and at times, incompatible – accounts of indirect object marking variants. In particular, it has been claimed for Spanish that preverbal pronominal doubling, as in (1b), is restricted to contrastive indirect objects (Real Academia Española 1973: Section 3.10.4). With respect to indirect objects in general, Fernández Soriano (1999: 1246) maintains that clitic-doubling occurs frequently in Spanish, and especially so with strong . For some native speakers at least, Gusta a María is as unacceptable as A María gusta. Notice, however, that the former construction type continues to be admitted by descriptive grammars and is solidly attested in corpora of contemporary Spanish, at least with some verbs which govern indirect objects (e.g. Juan regaló un libro a su novia ‘Juan offered a book to his girlfriend,’ cited by Company Company 2006: 535). . The variation indicated in example (4a) between the (normative) feminine indirect object clitic le, reflecting gender concord, and the masculine indirect object clitic gli is widespread (cf. Section 4 below).

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pronouns, whereas it is impossible in Italian. On the other hand, indirect object clitic doubling has repeatedly been classified as a characteristic of spoken Italian in general or of ‘advanced’ varieties of Italian (italiano avanzato) which presumably foreshadow future stages of the standard language. Following Cortelazzo (1984: 27), A me mi piace (2b) would become the only spontaneously produced form (“l’unica forma spontanea”) in contemporary Italian. Many studies, notably Koch (1993, 1994), hypothesize that clitic-doubling of pronominal indirect objects in Italian is on its way towards grammaticalization. Italian would thus ultimately follow the same diachronic path as Spanish, though somewhat later than its Iberian sister. The aim of the present contribution is to provide a corpus-based analysis of indirect object markings in Spanish and Italian. For this purpose, we analysed the indirect objects of a small set of highly frequent verbs presented in (5), which prototypically govern recipient or experiencer indirect objects. (5) Spanish Italian

dar decir parecer gustar, encantar dare dire sembrare, parere piacere ‘give’ ‘say’ ‘seem’ ‘please’

Section 2 will examine the distribution of marking types illustrated in (1) through (4) in contemporary spoken Italian and Spanish. In particular, we will investigate if, and possibly how, the frequency of clitic-doubling co-varies with each of the following parameters: (i) the syntactic type of the prepositional indirect object (pronominal vs. lexical); (ii) its thematic role (experiencer vs. others); (iii) its position with respect to the governing verb (pre- vs. postverbal); and (iv) the register of the conversation (formal vs. informal). In Section 3, we will turn to the evolution of clitic indirect object doubling in both Spanish and Italian, presenting data from diachronic corpora as well as metalinguistic judgements on the topic. Section 4, in turn, will be devoted to a general discussion which seeks to situate our synchronic and diachronic corpus results within a more general account of argument encoding in Romance. We will conclude in Section 5 by briefly addressing the question of whether the contemporary variation observed can be held to reflect grammaticalization in progress (cf. Kliffer 1998, with regard to clitic-doubling in French and Spanish).

. Indirect object marking in contemporary spoken Spanish and Italian Our examination of present-day spoken language is based on C-ORAL-ROM, a recently published corpus assembling comparable samples of conversation in four major Romance languages: Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian (cf. Cresti and Moneglia 2005). For each of these languages, the corpus provides roughly

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25–30 hours of transcribed speech containing approximately 300,000 words. All 193 Spanish conversations were recorded in Madrid, featuring 410 speakers of different regional and social backgrounds in a wide variety of situations. A similar sociolinguistic and situational diversity was aimed at in the Italian material, which consists of 204 conversations, most of them recorded in Florence, with a total of 451 participants. All recordings were made in natural environments and were transcribed orthographically, supplemented by prosodic annotations. In addition, each conversation is classified according to situation type and formality level. For our analysis, we examined all the occurrences of the verb lexemes given in (5) above which govern (overt) indirect objects. Objects dislocated from the core clause by a prosodic break were excluded. As already noted, clause-internal indirect objects can be realized minimally, that is, by a clitic only, or non-minimally, by a prepositional phrase containing a strong pronoun or a lexical noun phrase, possibly in combination with a coindexed indirect object clitic. The overall distribution of the resulting indirect object coding types for Spanish and Italian is given in Table 1. Table 1. Indirect object marking types and their distribution (C-ORAL-ROM) Marking type

Spanish # %

%

89.1

992

85.7

0

29

2.5

cl only (It Mi piace)

(minimal)

a pron only (It A me piace)

(non-minimal single)

0

a NP only (It A Maria piace)

(non-minimal single)

13

0.8

82

7.1

cli + a proni (It Le piace a lei)

(non-minimal double)

126

7.3

48

4.1

cli + a NPi (It Le piace a Maria)

(non-minimal double)

48

2.8

7

0.6

Total

1,529

Italian #

1,716

100

1,158

100

As Table 1 clearly illustrates, clitic-only marking predominates by a wide margin in both vernaculars.4 Interestingly, minimal codings occur even more often in Spanish than in Italian. Therefore, while the data presented in (1) to (4) suggest that the grammaticalization of double indirect object marking has progressed further in . The preponderance of non-lexical indirect objects in spoken discourse correlates with the overall rarity of lexical arguments in spoken discourse, predicted, on grammar-external grounds, by the theory of Preferred Argument Structure (cf. Du Bois 2003 for a synopsis).

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the spoken varieties of Spanish than in those of Italian, our overall findings do not support this hypothesis. With strong pronominal indirect objects, clitic-doubling is generalized in Spanish (7.3 per cent vs. zero), irrespective of focus structure, and predominates in Italian as well, with 4.1 as against 2.5 per cent (pace Real Academia Española 1973 and Fernández Soriano 1999). For lexical indirect objects, however, there is an interesting asymmetry: as with strong indirect object pronouns, double marking is preferred over single marking in Spanish (2.8 vs. 0.8 per cent), while its presence remains sporadic in Italian (0.6 per cent vs. 7.1 per cent). A more fine-grained picture of indirect object coding tendencies is presented in Table 2, where token frequencies of indirect object marking types (clitic only, prepositional phrase only (a + noun phrase/strong pronoun) and double indirect object marking) are given for the individual verbs under consideration. Table 2. Distribution of indirect object marking types for individual verbs (C-ORAL-ROM)

Sp dar Sp decir Sp parecer Sp gustar/encantar It dare It dire It sembrare/parere It piacere

minimal # cl only

non-minimal # single # double (PP only) (PP + cl)

% non-minimal markings among all indirect objects

328 825 142 234 191 493 198 110

7 4 0 2 63 24 8 16

12.8 4.3 19.8 22.3 27.1 6.6 11.2 24.1

41 33 35 65 8 11 17 19

Clearly, the ratio of non-minimal indirect object marking differs considerably in accordance with the semantics of the governing verb. With the sole exception of verbs of giving (Sp dar, It dare), we find similar tendencies for both languages. In particular, clitic indirect object doubling occurs more often with verbs of liking (Sp gustar, encantar, It piacere) than with verbs of saying (Sp decir, It dire).5 More generally, doubling seems to be favoured by predicates selecting an experiencer indirect object. Among the verbs which function as prototypical raising verbs (Sp parecer, It parere and sembrare, all ‘seem’), the higher frequency of nonminimal marking with parecer is very likely to be caused by its secondary uses as a psych predicate similar to gustar (cf. Sp ¿Qué te parece la idea? ‘Do you like the . The differences in non-minimal marking frequency between Sp decir and It dire do not reach statistically significant levels (Fisher Exact test: p > 0.05). The same holds for Sp gustar and encantar compared to It piacere.

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idea?,’ cf. Torrego 1996). Even more telling are the heavily divergent rates of doubling with the prototypical verbs of giving: unlike its Italian cognate, Sp dar can be employed in a wide range of complex predicates which do not assign a recipient role to their indirect objects but rather an experiencer role. It is precisely in such cases that indirect object doubling occurs with dar, whereas all seven singlemarked strong pronominal or lexical indirect objects of dar encode a recipient. Some typical contexts of double marking are provided in (6). (6) Contemporary spoken Spanish (C-ORAL-ROM) a. a mí me daría mucha vergüenza. to me.pron me.cl would.give much shame ‘I would feel very ashamed.’ (efamdl16) b. ¿y a ti te da igual? and to you.pron you.cl give.prs.3sg the.same? ‘And you don’t mind?’ (efamcv03) c. a mí me da risa a veces. to me.pron me.cl give.prs.3sg laughter sometimes ‘It makes me laugh sometimes.’ (efammn01) For clitic-doubled strong indirect object pronouns – the most frequent double coding type in both languages – another pronounced tendency which emerges for the relative ordering of pronominal prepositional phrase and clitic is that both corpora contain significantly more instances of strong pronominal indirect objects preceding the governing finite verb (i.e. of the type Sp A mí me gusta (1b), It A me mi piace (2b)) than of the reverse order (i.e. of the type Sp Me gusta a mí (1c), It Mi piace a me (2c)). The relevant figures are given in Table 3 below. Table 3. Position of doubled indirect object strong pronouns with respect to the verb (C-ORAL-ROM)

Sp dar Sp decir Sp parecer Sp gustar/encantar It dare It dire It sembrare/parere It piacere

# preverbal

# postverbal

24 4 28 48 4 3 11 15

1 9 7 5 3 4 6 2

Within doubly marked strong indirect object pronouns, the preference for preverbal instead of postverbal position is particularly strong with verbs of liking (Sp gustar, encantar, It piacere). The verbs which do not follow the general trend

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is the pair Sp decir and It dire ‘say.’ To test whether this distributional asymmetry co-varies with thematic role, we searched all clauses containing both a strong pronominal indirect object (such as Sp a mí, a ti, It a me, a te) and a co-indexed indirect object clitic with verbs other than those previously considered. For both languages, tokens of the two relative orderings were counted separately for experiencer and non-experiencer indirect objects. The resulting percentages in Table 4 imply that the preference for preverbal double marking is limited to experiencer indirect objects (governed by verbs such as Sp aburrir ‘bore,’ sorprender ‘surprise,’ It preoccupare ‘bother,’ interessare ‘be of interest’), while both orderings are equally common for the other semantic types (see Section 4 below for discussion). Table 4. Position of doubled indirect object strong pronouns with respect to other verbs than those analysed in Table 3 (C-ORAL-ROM)

Sp other experiencer IOs Sp other non-experiencer IOs It other experiencer IOs It other non-experiencer IOs

% preverbal

% postverbal

76 54 81 50

24 46 19 50

We turn next to the prevailing type of preverbal clitic-doubled strong experiencer pronouns, as in utterances such as Sp A mí me gusta, cited in (1b), or It A me mi piace (2b), which figure in the title of Cortelazzo (1984). Once again, Cortelazzo’s choice of first person singular pronouns reflects a clear-cut distributional trend since, among all preverbal pronominal indirect object doublings, more than half of the indirect objects are first person singular. While the preponderance of first person singular pronouns is likely to constitute a characteristic feature of orality, there is another asymmetry in our data which does not derive from spoken communication in general. The data in Table 5 show that, within the most typical psych verbs (Sp gustar, encantar, It piacere), first person singular indirect objects are not only the most frequent category, but also significantly more prone to be doubly marked than other person-number combinations.6 Finally, Spanish and Italian appear to differ in the socio-stylistic value assigned to preverbal pronominal clitic-doubled indirect objects. At least for the verbs analysed in this paper, we did not find a significantly higher proportion of this type of construction in formal Spanish conversations, as opposed to informal ones (6.3 per cent vs. 5.3 per cent of all indirect object occurrences, respectively; Fisher Exact test: p = 0.54).7 By contrast, the type A me mi piace appeared consid. The preference for doubled clitics to occur with preverbal first person singular pronouns is also reported by Barrenechea and Orecchia (1970) for the spoken Spanish of Buenos Aires. . Cf., however, the register differences reported in Becerra Bascuñán (2006: 140–141).

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Table 5. Doubling of preverbal indirect object pronouns with the psych verbs Sp gustar/encantar, It piacere (C-ORAL-ROM) 1sg

Other

Total

Sp gustar/encantar # preverbal IO prons # IO clitics % pronominal IO doubling

38 172 22.1

10 115 8.7

48 287 16.7

It piacere # preverbal IO prons # IO clitics % pronominal IO doubling

11 79 13.9

4 56 7.1

15 135 11.1

erably more often in informal Italian speech than in formal registers (1.4 per cent vs. 0.4 per cent). Nevertheless, the few tokens observed do not permit us to draw any firm conclusions here. Summarizing our results for indirect object marking in contemporary spoken language, we find that in general, minimal, clitic-only marking predominates in Spanish and Italian. Within the minority of non-minimal markings, both languages favour clitic-doubling over single marking with strong indirect object pronouns. For lexical indirect objects, by contrast, clitic-doubling is preferred in Spanish, but is marginal in Italian. Moreover, in both vernaculars, clitic-doubling is most likely to appear with preverbal pronominal indirect objects which encode experiencer arguments. Within this subclass of indirect object codings, first person singular experiencer arguments account for more than half of all pronominal indirect objects. On the whole, our findings are in line with Cortelazzo’s (1984), since clitic-doubling is more restricted for indirect objects in Italian than in Spanish. However, we disagree with Cortelazzo precisely because of the special case referred to in the title of his paper. Irrespective of normative judgements, not only Sp A mí me gusta, but also It A me mi piace appear to represent prototypical cases of double indirect object marking. The following section will address the diachrony of indirect object codings in Italian and Spanish.

. The evolution of double indirect object marking Our investigation of change in Spanish indirect object codings is based on the Corpus del español (created by Mark Davies and searchable online at www.corpusdelespanol.org). This database comprises a 100,000,000-word collection of texts, organized by century, from Old Castilian to Present-day Spanish. Earlier descriptions of pronominal object marking, cited in Rini (1991), assumed a gradual transition from clitic-only to double pronominal codings, with additional



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strong object pronouns originating as disambiguating or emphatic devices (cf. Riiho 1988 for an in-depth historical investigation). However, single strong pronominal indirect objects, as in (7) below, are attested alongside clitic-only objects well before clitic-doubled objects. (7) Old Spanish A mi lo dizen, a ti dan las orejadas. to me.pron it say.prs.3pl to you.pron give.prs.3pl the ears ‘To me they say it, upon your ears it falls.’ (c. 1140, Cantar de Mio Cid, v. 3304; from Marcos Marín 1978: 77) In the present study, we concentrate on tracing the evolution of preverbal pronominal indirect object doubling, which, as noted above, constitutes by far the most frequent type of double marking in present-day spoken language. This construction is also attested as early as in the Cantar de Mio Cid, but occurs with any significant frequency in the Corpus del español only in the fourteenth century. Although the number of occurrences of the construction is too low to lead to any definite conclusions, these occurrences do suggest a preference for doubling first person singular and/or experiencer indirect objects. Illustrative examples are cited in (8a–c). (8) Old Spanish a. a mí non me pesa. to me.pron not me.cl grieve.prs.3sg ‘It does not grieve me.’ (c. 1140, Cantar de Mio Cid, v. 1480) b. a mi me plazera. to me.pron me.cl please.fut.3sg ‘I will like it.’ (c. 1335, Juan Manuel, Libro de las armas) c. a Él le plaziendo, muriera. to him.pron him.cl like.ger die.fut.3sg ‘If He (God) likes it, he will die.’ (1378–1406, Pero López de Ayala, Rimado de Palacio) Unfortunately, the Corpus del español does not currently allow searches for nonadjacent clausemate expressions with an arbitrary number of words intervening, and hence we were unable to take into account systematically all occurrences of pronominal doubling. Therefore, we selected a prototypical subset of double indirect objects and limited our searches to combinations of a mí and me (including its orthographic variant a mi me) within the same clauses which function as arguments of decir, dar, parecer and gustar.8 For each of these verbs, we calculated the . Since Sp encantar ‘please’ occurs far less frequently in written than in contemporary spoken speech, we excluded it from consideration in our diachronic investigation.

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percentage of clitic-doubled a mí (or a mi) among all occurrences of me, counting both preverbal and postverbal clitics, both orthographically bound and free. The resulting figures for written Spanish are provided in Table 6.9 Table 6. Percentage of doubling with first person singular indirect objects in written Spanish (Corpus del español)

decir dar parecer gustar

16th c.

17th c.

18th c.

19th c.

20th c.

1.3 3.0 10.1 0

1.4 2.2 7.7 0

0.7 2.6 6.2 9.4

1.0 3.6 5.6 10.8

0.9 2.7 5.5 6.9

Given the claim that indirect object clitic-doubling has been undergoing a process of grammaticalization in Modern Spanish, one might expect the proportion of clitic-doubled a mí to grow over time. However, the data from the Corpus del español show precisely the opposite development for all four of the verbs considered. Even more noteworthy is the fact that the relative proneness of the individual verbs to take clitic-doubled pronouns remains constant throughout. For all the centuries in which decir and parecer are attested with clitic-doubled pronominal indirect objects, the proportion of clitic-doubling is much higher with parecer than with decir. As Table 6 shows, similar observations hold for the other pairings of verbs. The somewhat delayed clitic-doubling with gustar can be explained by the fact that, in older stages of Spanish, this verb was construed transitively (see Melis 1998 for a detailed account). In the older argument structure, the experiencer was coded as the subject and the stimulus as direct object, a usage now considered archaic. While one has to wait until the second half of the eighteenth century for the first attestations of gustar with experiencer indirect objects, clitic-doubling is rapidly gaining acceptance with this new argument coding. Turning now to twentieth-century Spanish, an important difference in the frequency of clitic-doubling can be found when comparing written and oral usages in the Corpus del español. In Table 7, the figures already given in Table 6 above for the written language are repeated for convenience, alongside which the respective percentages for spoken Spanish in the same corpus are given. As can be seen, with all four verbs considered, double first person singular indirect objects are much more likely to occur in spoken than in written Spanish (cf. also Becerra Bascuñán 2006: 112–120). For Italian, tracing the historical evolution of double indirect object marking turns out to be more difficult, as diachronic corpora comparable to the Corpus del . Note that, for the twentieth century, the Corpus del español provides separate subsets of transcribed oral and written Spanish, including a wide range of American varieties.



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Table 7. Percentage of doubling with first person singular indirect objects in twentieth century Spanish (Corpus del español)

decir dar parecer gustar

written

spoken

0.9 2.7 5.5 6.9

1.7 6.6 14.6 13.9

español are not currently available. For this reason, our description will be based on the data presented and discussed in D’Achille (1990a, 1990b). This author analyses three different registers,10 namely (i) ‘near spoken’ (e.g. testimonies), (ii) ‘normal prose’ and (iii) ‘elevated style,’ from the earliest Italian texts up to the eighteenth century, distributed across five periods. These five periods follow key moments in Italian linguistic history (cf. D’Achille 1990a: 20–22): a. The very first attestation until 1250. b. Old Italian (1250–1375, Boccaccio’s death). c. The period before the standardization in Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua (1375–1525). d. The period before the first edition of the Vocabolario of the Accademia della Crusca (1525–1612). e. The period from 1612 to 1799, before the use of spoken or near-spoken language in a written, even highly literary style, is first admitted and subsequently extended, with the arrival of realism, verism and so on. D’Achille (1990a) examines those syntactic phenomena which are considered typical of spoken communication and which have been disapproved of repeatedly in prescriptive and poetological discourse. Dislocation constructions feature prominently among these phenomena. This implies, at least with respect to linear order, the same type of non-minimal indirect object marking illustrated in (2b), (2c) and (4). Table 8 below gives an overall impression of the quantitative development of the attested left- and right-dislocations of indirect objects. Even though Table 8 does not provide specific information about the evolution of the type A me mi piace, it shows a slight decrease of left-dislocated indirect objects over time. This decline is particularly sharp in the highest register, and less so in the lowest, which suggests an increasing disfavouring of left-dislocated indirect objects in Standard Italian. Moreover, and crucially in our context, double indirect object marking is attested in various subtypes from the very beginning of Italoromance. Two pieces of literary evidence are adduced in (9a–b) below. . D’Achille’s classification parameters are ‘private vs. public communication,’ ‘spontaneity,’ ‘phoneticity,’ ‘hearer-directedness’ and ‘expressivity.’

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Table 8. Evolution of double indirect object marking in Italian across different registers (D’Achille 1990a: 195) –1250 #

1250–1375 # %

1375–1525 # %

1525–1612 # %

1612–1799 # %

9.4 15.0 22.4

17 18 4

13.1 16.2 10.0

32 16 2

15.4 8.2 2.3

postverbal (right-dislocated) indirect object + cl near spoken 0 3 18.8 11 30.6 normal prose 0 5 20.8 6 17.6 elevated style 0 3 16.7 0 0

19 13 1

47.5 30.2 50.0

9 7 0

33.3 10.4 0

preverbal (left-dislocated) indirect object + cl near spoken 1 6 50.0 10 normal prose 0 20 19.6 24 elevated style 0 13 25.0 19

(9) Old Italian a. Calandrinoi , se la prima glii era paruta Calandrino if the first.one him.cl be.pst.3sg appeared.ptcp parve amarissima. amara, questa glii bitter this.one him.cl appear.pst.3sg extremely.bitter ‘Calandrino, if the first one seemed bitter to him, this one seemed extremely bitter to him.’ (c. 1350, Boccaccio, Decameron VIII, 6) b. A voii , mesere Petro amico spetiale, lo signore Deo to you.pron sir Peter friend special the lord God dia la sua gratia e bona ventura. vei you.cl give.sbjv.3sg the his grace and good luck ‘To you, Sir Peter, my special friend, shall the Lord give his grace and good luck.’ (1243, Guido Faba, Parlamenti) Both (9a) and (9b) show indirect object left-dislocations, in the former case with a proper name (i.e. a noun phrase), in the latter with a strong pronoun in a prepositional phrase (cf. examples (4a) and (2b) for Present-day Standard Italian). Furthermore, D’Achille (1990a: 291) explicitly mentions the type A me mi piace, which – contrary to other types of dislocations – seems to decrease continuously over time in all three registers. A look at some metalinguistic judgements from the Renaissance period of the Italian questione della lingua, that is, academic discussion about the appropriate variety to be chosen for high literature, illustrates the restrictive normative attitude towards apparently widespread doubling constructions. The principal criticism is that they are stylistically superfluous, anomalous and so on, especially pronominal doubling. An instance of this is found in Pietro Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua (1525; for further details see D’Achille 1990a: 100–103). At the same time, the structural similarities between the Italian and Spanish constructions and the

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different frequencies and degrees of markedness are described in the metalinguistic literature as early as 1560 by the Napolitan author Giovan Mario Alessandri in his Paragone della lingua toscana et castigliana: Si raddoppiano molto frequentemente due pronomi in un medesimo caso obliquo, dove è forza ch’uno d’essi abbandi: Siendome possibile a mi, a sì, Dios a mi me salve, a mi no me pesa tanto [. . .]. Rarissimo è questo modo di dire a’ Toscani, e si fugge assai come cosa soperchia; a’ Castigliani è frequentissimo et proprio, ma non di maniera che ’l porre i semplici non sia molto più in uso. (D’Achille 1990a: 106) [Very often two pronouns are doubled for one and the same oblique case, so that automatically one of them becomes superfluous: it me being possible for me, for one, God for me me rescues, to me me it is not so difficult [. . .]. This way of saying is very infrequent with the Tuscans, and it is avoided as a superfluous thing; it is very frequent and typical with the Castilians, but still the single pronoun is used much more.]

Finally, Radtke (1987) points out that the type A me mi piace (in both the present and the past tense) is given as the unmarked form in a seventeenth century handbook for learners of Italian (Fabre 1626). Taken together, all this evidence suggests that the construction has been attested since the very beginning of Italoromance writings and that it had a continuous history until Present-day Standard Italian, being marked as non-standard since the sixteenth century. We might also bear in mind that both recipients and experiencers are among the first attestations, as can be seen in the examples under (9) above.

. Discussion At least since Givón (1976), grammaticalization theory has amply demonstrated a crosslinguistic evolutionary trend for anaphoric pronouns co-indexed with clauseexternal topical verb arguments. Over time, these pronouns are reduced to verbal clitics and, ultimately, agreement affixes. At the same time, the dislocated topics which originally served as antecedents of the clause-internal pronouns become gradually integrated into the clause. In addition, Givón (1976: 152, 1984: 139) formulates several hierarchies for the likelihood of arguments to encode topical referents. Unlike direct objects, indirect objects tend to rank high on these scales of topic affinity, since most of them are definite and refer to animate and, in particular, human participants directly involved in the event denoted by the proposition. Among human referents, it is the addressee and, even more so, the speaker him-

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self who enjoy highest topic affinity.11 Grammaticalization theory therefore predicts that indirect objects, and above all first person pronouns, will develop more rapidly into verbal clitics and affixes than direct object pronouns. This general prediction is indeed borne out in the evolution of Romance (cf. Koch 1993). When we consider the degree of grammaticalization of Spanish and Italian indirect object clitics, overall frequencies suggest that Spanish has progressed further than Italian (cf. Silva-Corvalán 1984). Likewise, traditional accounts (cf. Llorente Maldonado de Guevara and Mondéjar 1974), together with analyses informed by modern syntactic theory, tend to consider Spanish object clitics to be further advanced on their way toward morphologization (cf. Enrique-Arias 2000 and Franco 2000, among others; for a critical discussion, cf. García-Miguel 1991). Moreover, Spanish indirect object clitic doubling is acquired early and almost without any errors by children (Torrens and Wexler 2000). With respect to semantics and pragmatics, the indirect object clitics le and les (and their combinatorial variant se) of Standard Spanish do not exhibit any special restrictions on doubling (GutiérrezRexach 2003), which sets them apart from direct object clitics. Viewed from a broader perspective, the preponderance of indirect object double marking over doubling of direct objects may be added to a number of converging arguments for an overall trend toward ‘dative strengthening’ in the history of Spanish (Company Company 2001).12 With Italian, we saw in Section 3 a global decrease of indirect object doubling and its exclusion from literary usage. The only major surviving types, at least in informal spoken Italian, are found precisely in those constructions where experiential involvement is highest, namely those in which speakers express emotions and subjective preferences or, conversely, aversions. Furthermore, Spanish and Italian have witnessed a remarkable loss of semantic distinctions in indirect object clitics. Both in the singular and in the plural, gender distinctions have been lost in Spanish (cf. Sp le and its morphophonological variant se ‘him.dat, her.dat’), and are preserved only in Standard Italian (cf. It gli ‘him.dat’ vs. le ‘her.dat,’ cf. (4b)), whilst regularly collapsed in informal spoken varieties of the language, which generalize the masculine singular form gli. . However, we found several instances of utterance-initial Sp A mí me [. . .] as well as It A me mi [. . .], which are not attributable to topic-marking, since the discourse referent is the already introduced currently active speaker. In these cases, doubling of object pronouns seems to be employed as a strategy to obtain the next turn in lively conversation. . Note that this trend is by no means restricted to the standard variety, but emerges most strikingly in the evolution of non-standard systems of clitic object marking: while leísmo, the appearance of dative clitics for direct objects, has become more and more widespread, reverse phenomena of accusative clitics encoding indirect objects (so-called laísmo and loísmo) are restricted to a handful of rural dialects (cf. Fernández-Ordóñez 1999, and references cited there).

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Moreover, colloquial Italian also employs gli instead of standard loro for plural indirect objects. A similar observation can be made for Spanish, where no number distinction is expressed by se, and the singular le has gradually come to be preferred with plural objects over plural les in many varieties (cf. Company Company 2006: Section 6.6.2). Whereas earlier discussions of incipient object agreement in Romance take this reduction of categorical distinctions as evidence against a full-blown agreement system in Spanish (Heger 1966: 37), more recent accounts interpret the weakening of gender and number distinctions as ‘depronominalization,’ i.e. loss of referential autonomy (Company Company 2001: 23–25). For lexical objects in Spanish, the increase in double marking of indirect objects parallels the rise of non-minimal, prepositional marking of direct objects, as in Sp Veo a Juan ‘I see John,’ where the direct object is formally indistinguishable from an indirect object (cf. Company Company 2003 for the interrelatedness of changes in object codings). With pronominal indirect objects, however, double marking seems to have functioned predominantly to mark thematic role rather than to encode syntactic case or definiteness since its earliest attestations (cf. Montrul 1996; see Suñer 1999 for a different view).13

. Conclusion Our study of the synchronic patterning and the diachrony of double indirect object marking in Spanish and Italian has revealed that clitic-only marking continues to be the most frequently used type, even in informal spoken language. While our corpus of contemporary spoken Italian does provide us with the very same types of non-minimal indirect object marking which appear in spoken Spanish, only the prototypical case of first person experiencer indirect object shows roughly comparable rates of double marking in both languages. In all other cases, Spanish speakers appear to double indirect objects more readily than Italian speakers, who tend to restrict doubling by and large to informal situation types. By contrast, Spanish favours indirect object doubling in all registers of speech, though double pronominal marking is much less likely to be employed in writing. This asymmetry can be explained by universal characteristics of oral communication (cf. Koch and Oesterreicher 1990). Therefore, it does not appear justified to con. For a corpus of contemporary written Spanish, containing both journalistic and literary texts, Koontz-Garboden (2002) reports that only animacy, but not definiteness, favours indirect object doubling to a significant extent. Since experiencer arguments are necessarily animate, whereas they need not be definite, we may interpret this finding as an additional indication of the predominantly role-marking function of doubling.

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sider spoken varieties of Spanish or Italian to be further advanced towards the grammaticalization of object clitics into agreement markers. With respect to linguistic factors influencing the likelihood of double indirect object pronouns, the evolution of Spanish does not provide evidence for any change at all. In particular, we failed to find a marked increase in clitic-doubling for the most frequent type of pronominal indirect objects. It is the very same constellations of first person pronominal indirect objects and experiencer predicates that appear to favour clitic doubling from the outset. From a more comprehensive perspective, taking the evolution of variation into account, Spanish appears more conservative than previously assumed. Similar claims of diachronic stability have been made for the history of Italian indirect object doubling (cf. Benincà 1986: 231). However, the Italian corpus evidence suggests that the dropping of ‘redundant’ pronouns imposed by standardization has considerably restricted double marking not only in its sociolinguistic distribution, but also with respect to linguistic contexts. Therefore, we are inclined to be skeptical about the widely assumed trend toward grammaticalization for indirect object clitics in Romance.

Abbreviations 3 cl dat fut ger io pl

third person clitic pronoun dative future gerund indirect object plural

pron prs pst ptcp sbjv sg

strong pronoun present past participle subjunctive singular

References Barrenechea, Ana María & Teresa Orecchia. 1970. La duplicación de objetos directos e indirectos en el español hablado en Buenos Aires. Romance Philology 24: 58–83. Becerra Bascuñán, Silvia. 2006. Estudio diacrónico y sincrónico del objeto indirecto en el español peninsular y de América [Études Romanes 57]. Copenhagen: Tusculanum. Benincà, Paola. 1986. Il lato sinistro della frase italiana. Balkan-Archiv 11: 213–243. Benincà, Paola, Giampaolo Salvi & Lorenza Frison. 1991. L’ordine degli elementi della frase e le costruzioni marcate. In Lorenzo Renzi (ed.), Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione. Vol. I: La frase. I sintagmi nominale e preposizionale, 115–225. Bologna: Il Mulino. Company Company, Concepción. 2001. Multiple dative-marking grammaticalization: Spanish as a special kind of primary object language. Studies in Language 25: 1–47.

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Company Company, Concepción. 2003. Transitivity and grammaticalization of object. The diachronic struggle of direct and indirect object in Spanish. In Giuliana Fiorentino (ed.), Romance objects. Transitivity in Romance languages [Empirical Approaches to Language Typology 27], 217–260. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Company Company, Concepción. 2006. El objeto indirecto. In Concepción Company Company (ed.), Sintaxis histórica de la lengua española. Vol. I: La frase verbal, 479–574. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México y Fondo de Cultura Económica. Cortelazzo, Manlio. 1984. Perché ‘a mí me gusta’ sì e ‘a me mi piace’ no? In Günter Holtus & Edgar Radtke (eds.), Umgangssprache in der Iberoromania. Festschrift für Heinz Kröll, 25–28. Tübingen: Narr. Cresti, Emanuela & Massimo Moneglia (eds.). 2005. C-ORAL-ROM. Integrated reference corpora for spoken Romance languages [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 15]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. D’Achille, Paolo. 1990a. Sintassi del parlato e tradizione scritta della lingua italiana. Analisi di testi dalle origini al secolo XVIII. Roma: Bonacci. D’Achille, Paolo. 1990b. I fenomeni di ‘tematizzazione’ di fronte alle codificazione cinquecentesca. In Emanuele Banfi & Patrizia Cordin (eds.), Storia dell’italiano e forme dell’italianizzazione. Atti del XXIII congresso internazionale di studi della Società di Linguistica Italiana (SLI). Trento – Rovereto, 18–20 maggio 1989, 283–294. Roma: Bulzoni. Davies, Mark. Not dated. Corpus del español. <www.corpusdelespanol.org>. Du Bois, John W. 2003. Argument structure: Grammar in use. In John W. Du Bois, Lorraine E. Kumpf & William J. Ashby (eds.), Preferred Argument Structure: Grammar as architecture for function [Studies in Discourse and Grammar 14], 11–60. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Enrique-Arias, Andrés. 2000. Spanish object agreement markers and the typology of object agreement morphology. In Steven Dworkin & Dieter Wanner (eds.), New approaches to old problems. Issues in Romance historical linguistics [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 210], 149–164. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Fabre, Antoine. 1626. Grammaire pour aprendre les langues italienne, françoise, et espagnole. Roma: Corbelletti. Fernández Soriano, Olga. 1999. El pronombre personal. Formas y distribuciones. Pronombres átonos y tónicos. In Ignacio Bosque & Violeta Demonte (eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española. Vol. I, 1209–1273. Madrid: Espasa Calpe. Fernández-Ordóñez, Inés. 1999. Leísmo, laísmo y loísmo. In Ignacio Bosque & Violeta Demonte (eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española. Vol. I, 1317–1397. Madrid: Espasa Calpe. Franco, Jon. 2000. Agreement as a continuum: The case of Spanish pronominal clitics. In Frits Beukema & Marcel den Dikken (eds.), Clitic phenomena in European languages [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 30], 147–189. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. García-Miguel, José María. 1991. La duplicación de complemento directo e indirecto como concordancia. Verba 18: 375–410. Givón, Talmy. 1976. Topic, pronoun and grammatical agreement. In Charles N. Li (ed.), Subject and topic, 149–188. New York NY: Academic Press. Givón, Talmy. 1984. Syntax. A functional-typological introduction. Vol. I. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gutiérrez-Rexach, Javier. 2003. Constraint interaction at the semantics/pragmatics interface: The case of clitic doubling. In Katarzyna M. Jaszczolt & Ken Turner (eds.), Meaning through language contrast. Vol. I [Pragmatics and Beyond, New Series 99], 335–354. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Heger, Klaus. 1966. La conjugaison objective en français et en espagnol. Langages 3: 19–39.

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Kliffer, Michael D. 1998. Clitic duplication in western Romance. A case of grammaticalization. LACUS Forum 24: 421–434. Koch, Peter. 1993. Le ‘chinook’ roman face à l’empirie. Y a-t-il une conjugaison objective en français, en italien et en espagnol et une conjugaison subjective prédéterminante en français? In Gerold Hilty (ed.), Actes du XXe congrès international de Linguistique et Philologie Romanes. Vol. III, 169–190. Tübingen: Francke. Koch, Peter. 1994. L’italiano va verso una coniugazione oggettiva? In Günter Holtus & Edgar Radtke (eds.), Sprachprognostik und das ‘italiano di domani.’ Prospettive per una linguistica ‘prognostica’ [Tübinger Beiträge zur Linguistik 384], 175–194. Tübingen: Narr. Koch, Peter & Wulf Oesterreicher. 1990. Gesprochene Sprache in der Romania: Französisch, Italienisch, Spanisch. [Romanistische Arbeitshefte 31]. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Koontz-Garboden, Andrew. 2002. A quantitative analysis of Spanish indirect object doubling. In James F. Lee, Kimberly Geeslin & Joseph Clancy Clements (eds.), Papers from the 4th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, 193–211. Somerville MA: Cascadilla. Llorente Maldonado de Guevara, Antonio & José Mondéjar. 1974. La conjugación objetiva en español. Revista Española de Lingüística 4: 1–60. Marcos Marín, Francisco. 1978. Estudios sobre el pronombre. Madrid: Gredos. Melis, Chantal. 1998. Sobre la historia sintáctica del verbo gustar. In Actas del IV congreso internacional de Historia de la Lengua Española. Vol. II, 295–305. Madrid: Arco Libros. Montrul, Silvina A. 1996. Clitic-doubled dative ‘subjects’ in Spanish. In Karen Zagona (ed.), Grammatical theory and Romance languages. Selected papers from the 25th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 133], 183–195. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Radtke, Edgar. 1987. A me mi piace als Standardform im Seicento? Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 103: 370–379. Real Academia Española. 1973. Esbozo de una nueva gramática de la lengua española. Madrid: Espasa Calpe. Riiho, Timo. 1988. La redundancia pronominal en el iberorromance medieval [Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie; Beihefte 222]. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Rini, Joel. 1991. The redundant indirect object constructions in Spanish: A new perspective. Romance Philology 45: 269–286. Silva-Corvalán, Carmen. 1984. Semantic and pragmatic factors in syntactic change. In Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Historical syntax [Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs 23], 555–573. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Suñer, Margarita. 1999. Clitic-doubling of strong pronouns in Spanish: An instance of object shift. In Jon Franco, Alazne Landa & Juan Martin (eds.), Grammatical analyses in Basque and Romance linguistics. Papers in honor of Mario Saltarelli [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 187], 233–256. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Torrego, Esther. 1996. Experiencers and raising verbs. In Robert Freidin (ed.), Current issues in comparative grammar [Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 35], 101–120. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Torrens, Vincenç & Kenneth Wexler. 2000. The acquisition of clitic-doubling in Spanish. In Susan M. Powers & Cornelia Hamann (eds.), The acquisition of scrambling and cliticization [Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics 26], 279–297. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

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The emergence of particle clusters in Dutch* Grammaticalization under adverse conditions Jack Hoeksema University of Groningen

A relatively new development in Dutch is the emergence of particle clusters, i.e. combinations of adjacent discourse or modal particles which co-occur frequently. While the existence of such clusters is widely recognized, their development has not been studied in any detail. This paper examines the emergence of a number of these combinations, such as best wel, best eens and best wel eens. It is argued (a) that clustering is especially likely to be found in areas where grammaticalization by other means may be difficult, (b) that the clusters express more specialized meanings than their simple counterparts, and (c) that their distribution is determined largely by the semantics of the expressions with which they combine. The paper also argues that the rise of these specialized clusters is part of a general and quite pervasive drift of the language toward greater specialization in the lexicon which can also be seen elsewhere.

.

Introduction

The development of discourse and modal particles from ordinary lexical items is often viewed as an instance of grammaticalization (cf. Abraham 1991; many of the papers in Van der Wouden et al. 2002; Wegener 2002, among others). Some languages abound in such particles, for instance Dutch and German (cf. Diewald and Ferraresi, this volume), while others, such as English and French, appear to make do by and large without them.1 When Modern Dutch or Modern German is compared to its medieval predecessor, we note that both the number of discourse * I would like to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers of this paper for their insightful suggestions, as well as to the editors of this volume for their detailed comments and ideas for improvement. . See Schourup (1985) and Schiffrin (1987), however, for a discussion of English discourse markers. It lies outside the scope of this paper to describe in detail the differences between German-type discourse particles and English-type discourse markers. One remarkable

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particles and their text frequency have increased significantly in the modern era (from 1600 to the present). This paper presents a case study of a small set of Dutch particles and the clusters formed from these items, in particular best ‘best,’ wel ‘well,’ eens ‘once,’ best wel, best eens and best wel eens. These expressions are quite interesting in their own right, especially the clusters, but their development has received very little attention.2 In this paper, however, I propose to use them as evidence of a much more wide-ranging claim which I have presented elsewhere on the basis of a different topic (Hoeksema 2002a, 2005), namely that certain parts of the lexicon, especially those relating to evaluative speaker stance, are constantly specializing and thus require rapid lexical expansion. Though new and no doubt controversial, this claim is eminently testable now that larger electronic corpora of historical text material have become available. Moreover, in my view, this specialization process is not unique to Dutch, since its effects are found in English and German as well, for instance in the rapid increase in number as well as text frequency of their degree adverbials.3 Rapid expansion may have different effects in different areas of the lexicon. In the case of degree adverbials, there is usually, at least initially, a transparent relation between the etymological meaning of the adverbial and its degree meaning. For instance, in I am terribly sad, we may still feel that a paraphrase such as I am sad in a terrible way, i.e. I am very sad, is not too far off, while examples such as I am terribly happy show that terribly has developed into a near-synonym of very. Given this transparent relation, it is a fairly simple task to add more items of a similar nature to the inventory of degree adverbials, for instance awfully, wonderfully, desperately, frightfully and so on. In the case of discourse particles, by contrast, the relation between the use of a given item as a particle and its original use and meaning is often rather more opaque. One obvious consequence is that new particles do not develop easily. A fundamental semantic leap has to be made in order for German mal ‘once,’ for instance, to turn into a focus adverb meaning ‘even’ in the context of negation, as in example (1) below. (1) German Sie hat nicht mal angerufen. she have.prs.3sg not once up.call.pst.ptcp ‘She did not even call up.’ difference though is that English discourse markers often require comma intonation (cf., for example, Tabor and Traugott 1998), whereas Dutch and German discourse particles do not. . Notable exceptions are Zwarts et al.’s (2002) analysis of the Dutch particle clusters wel eens and al eens, and Van der Wouden’s (2002) more general corpus study of particle combinations. . Another spectacular case of rapid innovation and development is the lexical domain of sentence adverbs like unfortunately, allegedly, hopefully or ironically, expressions of speaker stance par excellence, which did not exist until a few centuries ago (cf. Swan 1988).

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Further expansion of this part of the lexicon through the creation of new items from scratch will always be possible, given that it was possible in the past, although the process will not be a common one.4 Instead, a language may re-use its particle vocabulary by developing new uses for existing particles (leading to polysemy) or by forming idiomatic particle clusters, in which particles combine to form more specialized complex particles. This paper is structured as follows: in Section 2 I provide a brief discussion of grammaticalization theory as it relates to the matter at hand, and in Section 3 I offer some evidence for the existence of rapid lexical expansion in certain areas of the lexicon. In Section 4 I examine the particle best and in Section 5 some particle clusters based on best. The discussion relies on corpus data which I have collected from printed as well as computer-readable texts. Finally, my conclusions are presented in Section 6.

. Grammaticalization as specialization Before moving on to the case study, it may be useful to address briefly the more general issue of how particles and particle clusters fit into the larger framework of grammaticalization theory. Of the many interpretations of grammaticalization, the one to which I subscribe is fairly minimalistic. In my view, grammaticalization involves the process whereby lexical items are recruited for special lexically-restricted contexts and . One of the reviewers points out that my claim that developing new discourse particles from lexical items is difficult and rare appears to be contradicted by the fact that a language like German has developed over a dozen discourse particles in precisely this way. However, it should be noted that these items serve a wide variety of functions. Some appear only in questions, others in commands and adhortatives, some express speaker attitude, some discourse relations and so on. Given such a wide variety of functions, a dozen or so particles is not actually that many. If each discourse particle were to develop a special form for three or more environments, as I will argue has been the case with Dutch best (cf. Section 4 below), the number of lexicallydistinct particles in German would have to increase greatly beyond their current number. In the area of degree adverbs, this is precisely what we find in Dutch, English and German, but as far as discourse particles are concerned, no such lexical explosion has been attested. However, German, just like Dutch, makes heavy use of a variety of complex discourse particles created by stringing existing particles together. Consider, for instance, the German example in (i) below, where the particle string is in bold type. (i)

German So schön war es nun auch wieder nicht. so pretty be.pst.3sg it now also again not ‘It was pretty, but it was not that pretty.’

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constructions where they were not previously employable.5 For instance, auxiliary verbs often start out as main verbs; once these verbs are used as auxiliaries, they form part of a different construction, one which is severely restricted lexically. The change which this entails constitutes grammaticalization and since use in a different construction often goes hand in hand with meaning change, grammaticalization tends to lead to polysemy. Grammaticalization in this sense need not be unidirectional (although it is uncommon to see items used in specialized constructions move into more general open-class constructions),6 nor does it necessarily involve a cline or the presence of phonological reduction (cf. Janda 2001 for extensive discussion of these points). A view on grammaticalization which is close to the one I adopt here is found in Traugott (2001).7 Note that the above definition of grammaticalization is fairly broad and includes developments which are not frequently mentioned in studies on grammaticalization, such as the development of negative polarity items out of non-polarity items (cf. Section 3 below and Hoeksema 1994), adverbs of degree out of regular adjectives and adverbs (cf. Peters 1990; Lorenz 2002) or the use of main verbs in the swarm-construction (cf. Fillmore 1968; Salkoff 1983; Dowty 2001). For example, while it may appear at first that (2a) and (2b) represent a pair of constructions in which certain lexical verbs may be employed, it is clear that (2b) is more restrictive and that many verbs are barred from it, often for reasons which are less than obvious. (2) a. Bees are swarming in the garden. b. The garden is swarming with bees. Consider also the examples in (3). (3) a. The hills are alive with the sound of music. b. *The hills are dead/dying with the sound of music. . Diewald (2002: 114ff.) speaks in this connection of isolating contexts: contexts which unambiguously show the result of grammaticalization. She explains that change often arises in ambiguous contexts (critical contexts) where an item is used in a new way, but still compatible with old restrictions; this new way of using the item is then extended to contexts where previous usage would have precluded it from appearing. The oldest occurrences of best are indeed often compatible with a superlative interpretation and a discourse particle reading. This ambiguity later disappears, because best in its superlative interpretation is nowadays obligatorily preceded by an article, while the discourse particle best is not. . For a discussion of degrammaticalization, see, for example, some of the papers in Campbell (2001) and those in Wischer and Diewald (2002) and Fischer et al. (2004). . Given the above characterization, it is clear that grammaticalization is best viewed from the perspective of Construction Grammar, where lexically-restricted constructions are of central concern.

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It would not be unreasonable to suppose that the exclusion of dead or die from the construction exemplified in (2b) and (3a–b) is due to semantic reasons. By contrast, however, the counterparts of live and die are both permitted in the Dutch version of the construction, as shown in (4). (4) Dutch Het leeft/sterft hier van de muggen. it live/die.prs.3sg here of the flies ‘This place abounds with flies.’ Likewise, crawl is frequently employed in this construction, whereas creep is not, as examples (5a–b) show. (5) a. The field was crawling with rabbits. b. *The field was creeping with rabbits. As is well known, a tell-tale sign of grammaticalization is semantic bleaching (cf., for instance, Traugott and Heine 1991). Note that, in sentences like (5a), crawl has lost its usual manner-of-motion meaning and denotes only the existence of a large number of rabbits.

. Domains with rapid lexical expansion As mentioned in Section 1, there is growing evidence that the Dutch lexicon is expanding rapidly in the area of expressions for evaluative speaker stance. In this section I briefly review some of that evidence. An area which is growing fast, both in English and Dutch, is that of indefinite negative polarity items meaning ‘anything’ (Hoeksema 2001, 2002b). Instead of Fred didn’t say anything all evening, speakers of English have at their disposal a large variety of options, among them the following: (6) Fred didn’t say {a word/a syllable/a dicky bird/a thing/a blessed word/a damn thing/shit/dick all/fuck all/bugger all/jack shit} all evening. Expressions indicating minimal amounts or minimal extents are listed as polarity items. These have also come to include in the last two centuries numerous expressions with a taboo origin, such as sexual and scatological terms, and terms originating in religion and folk belief, such as terms for the devil, hell, thunder, lightning and anything involving blessings or curses. Figure 1 (under the heading “minimizers”) shows the expansion of the Dutch lexicon in this particular area. Even faster growth is observed in the domain of degree adverbs, especially those intensifiers used to indicate a high degree (cf., for instance, Stoffel 1901; Borst 1902; Van Os 1989; Peters 1990; Klein 1998). Consider the examples in (7).



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(7) I am very/beastly/bitterly/dead/exceptionally/quite/really/truly/extraordinarily/infinitely/bloody/darn/massively/highly/deeply/greatly/galactically/ extremely/phenomenally/unspeakably/utterly/vastly/awfully disappointed. The “high degree” category in Figure 1 also shows how fast this growth has been since 1600 (cf. Hoeksema 2005). Finally, there has also been a steady increase in the set of verbs and adjectives found in the swarm-construction, as illustrated in Figure 1. 250 201 200 150

189

125 80

100 57 50 3 6 0

9 12 3

1200

1600

19 28

41

40 8

5

13

0

high degree

1700

1800

minimizers

1900

2000

swarm-verbs

Figure 1. Lexical growth in three areas in Dutch

The factors behind this growth appear to be twofold: on the one hand, stylistic diversification and, on the other, semantic specialization. Different speakers/writers may use different expressions to give the same meaning; once a number of items are in place, there is a clear tendency toward semantic specialization. For instance, some degree adverbs may modify comparatives, whereas many others may not: infinitely worse is acceptable while *awfully worse and *highly worse are not. Some adjectives, such as possible, permit only a few modifiers; compare very possible, quite possible with *awfully possible, *darn possible. Moreover, some modifiers combine with only a few adjectives: precious little, precious few, vs. *precious many, *precious rare. Finally, some only combine with certain semantic classes: radically different vs. *radically similar, radically new vs. *radically old. All three areas represented in Figure 1 have in common that they involve evaluative expressions which present the perspective of the speaker in some degree or amount. Stylistic variation and semantic specialization here are rampant.

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. The Dutch particle best The Dutch item best, just like English best, started out as the superlative of good, and is, in fact, still often used as such. In addition, it may also be employed, though with certain restrictions, as a positive adjective meaning ‘good, OK.’ An example of this latter use of best is given in (8) below, where best, like all the other particles under analysis, is glossed as prt. (8) Dutch Dat vind ik best. that find.prs I prt ‘That is OK with me.’ Morever, best can also be used as a particle (i) in modal contexts,8 (ii) with verbs of cognition, such as weten ‘know’ or begrijpen ‘understand,’ and (iii) in front of predicates,9 as shown by examples (9) to (11) respectively. (9) Dutch Dat zou best kunnen. that would prt can.inf ‘That would be entirely possible.’/‘That may very well be.’ (10) Dutch Dat weet je best. that know.prs you prt ‘You know that very well.’ . Modal verbs and modal adjectives have rather special characteristics from the perspective of degree modification. Many regular degree adverbs, such as zeer ‘very,’ are barred from modifying modal expressions. (i)

Dutch Dat is zeer {slecht/*mogelijk} that be.prs.3sg very {bad/*possible} ‘That is very bad.’

Here, however, forms related to good are all possible, in particular goed, zeer wel and best. Consider (ii). (ii) Dutch Dat is {goed/zeer wel/best} mogelijk that be.prs.3sg {well/very well/best} possible ‘That is quite/very possible.’ These expressions are clearly used as degree modifiers here, not as manner adverbs. See also Kennedy and McNally (2005) on the two uses of well. . By predicate I mean the elements following the copular verb, normally a noun or adjective phrase.



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(11) Dutch Je bent best lief. you be.prs.2pl prt sweet ‘You are sweet alright.’ Figure 2 below, based on a corpus of almost 2,200 occurrences of best,10 shows that the occurrences of best in modal contexts are the oldest of the three particle uses of best. Instances of this first occur in texts from around the middle of the nineteenth century (the popular novel Ferdinand Huyck by Jacob van Lennep from 1840, for example, contains several occurrences). Around 1900, combinations with cognition verbs become popular, and, soon after that, combinations with gradable predicates emerge.11 In the group of modal contexts, the most common combinations involve best and a modal auxiliary verb (cf. example (9) above). The modal verbs which combine with best are the so-called weak modal verbs kunnen ‘can,’ mogen ‘may’ and zullen ‘will, shall,’ as well as willen ‘want’ and durven ‘dare,’ which grammatically are classed as modal verbs. The strong modal moeten ‘must,’ however, does not combine with best, as shown in (12). (12) Dutch *We moeten best uitkijken. we must prt out.look.inf . The corpus is based primarily on electronical texts, such as newspapers available through LexisNexis, various CD-ROMs and the rich collection of historical literature on the website of the Digital Library of Dutch Literature (www.dbnl.org). Examples from printed books, newspapers and magazines have also been collected. Only a single example dates from the eighteenth century, the rest is from the period 1840–2006. This is not due to limitations of the sources, but because the particle use of best does not date back any further. . Some sentences were problematic for classification, for instance because they involved both a cognition (main) verb and a modal auxiliary verb. The problem here is whether to classify the occurrences of best as involving combinations with modals or combinations with cognition verbs. Since the modal environment is the earliest one attested, it is likely that the earliest occurrences of best in these ambiguous contexts were licit due to the presence of the modal. A conservative classification would therefore treat the earliest ambiguous cases as instance of modal contexts. For later occurrences, the same classificatory step was taken, for the sake of consistency. The number of ambiguous cases is, however, not very high, so the conclusions of the paper will not be affected by this conservative classification scheme. It is conceivable that the existence of ambiguous cases may be the trigger for best spilling over onto contexts other than modal ones (cf. Diewald (2002) for a discussion of the importance of ambiguous contexts for grammaticalization; cf. also footnote 5). However, the data for the crucial period 1880–1920, when the diversification of uses took place, are not sufficiently abundant to analyse the matter in any detail.

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The emergence of particle clusters in Dutch  100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

95.8 81.3 67.9 55.1 35.6 16.4

15.7 4.2 0 < 1900 N=71

15.7

9.3

3 1900-1950 N=299 modal

1950-2000 N=756

cognition verb

2000-2006 N=492

predicate

Figure 2. Chronological distribution of the particle best in three contexts (in percentages)

Other modal contexts may also elicit the use of this particle, modal infinitives, for example, as in (13), and adjectives in -baar ‘-able,’ as in (14), which have a modal meaning component. (13) Dutch Dat is best te doen. that be.prs.3sg prt to do.inf ‘That is entirely doable.’ (14) Dutch Zoiets is best denkbaar. such be.prs.3sg prt conceivable ‘Such a thing is quite conceivable.’ It is reasonable to assume that contexts of this kind involving modal predicates may explain the subsequent use of best with non-modal predicates, as in (11) above. The set of verbs of cognition which combine with best appear to be the same as those which combine with full well in English (cf. (15) and (16) below), and with the cluster zeer wel ‘very well’ in Dutch (cf. (17) and (18) below).12 This suggests . The verbs and verbal idioms of cognition involved are, in order of decreasing frequency: weten ‘know’ (84 occurrences), begrijpen ‘understand’ (57 instances), snappen ‘understand’ (18 examples), geloven ‘believe,’ zien ‘see, understand’ (five occurrences each), begrip hebben voor ‘have understanding for = understand’ (three instances), in de gaten hebben ‘be aware of,’ merken ‘notice,’ zich realiseren ‘realize’ (two examples each), beseffen ‘realize,’ inzien ‘realize,’ kennen ‘know,’ aannemen ‘suppose’ and doorzien ‘see through’ (one instance each).

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the existence of a close parallel between English and Dutch best, the superlative of English good/Dutch goed, and English well/Dutch wel, the adverbial counterparts of English good/Dutch goed. Compare: (15) He knows/realizes/understands it full well. (16) *Ed dances/sings/writes/drives full well. (17) Dutch Ik begrijp dat zeer wel. I understand.prs.1sg that very well ‘I understand that very well.’ (18) Dutch *Hij danste zeer wel.13 he dance.pst.3sg very well Unlike full well in English, which only combines with cognition verbs, Dutch zeer wel may also combine with modal verbs, as in (19), and adjectives, as in (20), making the parallel with best even more complete. (19) Dutch Dat zou zeer wel kunnen. that would very well can.inf ‘That would be very possible.’ (20) Dutch Regenval is zeer wel mogelijk. rainfall be.prs.3sg very well possible ‘Rainfall is entirely possible.’ Both full well and zeer wel have to be viewed as specialized clusters which appear in only a fraction of the sentence types where they used to show up. In this respect, they are similar to the clusters with best, discussed in the next section. A typical property of (at least some) modal particles in Dutch is that they cannot be topicalized.14 This property clearly distinguishes them from regular adjectives and adverbials. The examples in (23) to (25) below correspond to those in (9) to (11) above and demonstrate that, while best as a modal particle cannot be topicalized, topicalization is possible as a predicative or an adverb, as in examples (21) and (22).

. This example would be acceptable in older Dutch, but is no longer used. . A similar situation holds in German.

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(21) Dutch Best vind ik het niet. prt find.prs I it not ‘It is not OK with me.’ (22) Dutch Best zingt hij niet. prt sing.3sg.prs he not ‘He does not sing well.’ (23) Dutch *Best zou dat kunnen. prt would that can.inf (24) Dutch *Best weet je dat (niet). prt know.prs.2sg you that (not) (25) Dutch *Best was het leuk. prt be.pst.3sg it nice

. The particle clusters best eens, best wel and best wel eens Figure 3 below shows the frequency of the various clusters analysed in the present paper.15 Occurrences of the sequence best eens are nearly as old as the first appearances of the particle best on its own,16 though it is not until the mid-twentieth century that best eens makes a significant jump in frequency. It is reasonable to suppose that what we are dealing with here is accidental co-occurrence of two high-frequency items. The retreat of best eens in the latter period (from 15 to ten per cent) is due to the rise of best wel eens, which, as we will see later on, appears in much the same set of contexts as best eens. As for best wel, it makes a more sud. The total number of occurrences is 53 for the period before 1900, 247 for the period 1900– 1950, 922 for 1950–2000 and 622 for 2000–2006. . The oldest occurrence I have been able to trace is from D.P. Bohn-Beets, Onze Buurt (1861). (i)

Dutch Gij [...] kunt mij dus best eens aan het een en ander hebbedingetje [...] you can me thus prt at the one and other thingy helpen. help.inf ‘You could therefore help me very well to obtain one or the other knick-knack.’



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den appearance in the 1970s, while best wel eens is attested since the 1960s (not counting one isolated occurrence in 1889). These particle clusters are illustrated in (26) to (28). 100

92.2

90.6 72.2

80

67.7

60 40 20 0

5.21.3 1.3 0 < 1900 N=77 best

7.5

1.2 0 0.6

1900 1950 N=330 best eens

best wel

14.7 7.54.2 1.3 1950 2000 N=1,047 best wel eens

11.7 9.4

7.6 3.6

2000 2006 N=729 other

Figure 3. Chronological distribution of best and its clusters (in percentages)

(26) Dutch Het zou best eens kunnen. it would prt can.inf ‘It is quite possible.’ (27) Dutch Ik ben best wel ijdel. I be.prs.1sg prt vain ‘I am pretty vain.’ (28) Dutch Ik zou hem best wel eens willen ontmoeten. I would him prt want.inf meet.inf ‘I would like to meet him some time.’ The category “other” in Figure 3 comprises the following clusters, which are not studied in this paper: best een keer, best eens een keer, best eens een keertje, best nog een keer, best nog eens, best nog wel, best nog wel een keer, best nog wel eens, best weer eens, best wel een keertje and best wel eens een keertje. None of these clusters is very frequent, the most common being best nog eens, which appeared 11 times in my material. In these clusters, een keer ‘one time’ is a variant of eens ‘once,’ een keertje is its diminutive and nog ‘yet’ and weer ‘again’ are temporal particles.

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The emergence of particle clusters in Dutch 

The distributional characteristics of best and its three most common clusters are summarized in Table 1.17 Table 1. Distribution of best and its three most common clusters (only data from 2000–2006) Item N best best eens best wel best wel eens

Modal %

271 68 13 44

55.0 100 15.1 78.6

Cognition verb N %

Predicate N %

Other N %

46 – 3 –

175 – 70 2

– – – 10

9.3 – 3.5 –

35.5 – 81.4 3.5

– – – 17.9

Total N 492 68 86 56

As Table 1 shows, best eens is restricted to modal contexts.18 As is the case with best on its own, best wel is found in all three categories of contexts, but primarily with predicates. Finally, best wel eens shows a distribution which mostly resembles that of best eens (78.6 per cent of occurrences are in modal contexts), but differs from all other best-clusters in that it may also occur in instances which do not relate to any of the three relevant contexts (17.9 per cent of occurrences); cf. example (29). (29) Dutch Hij heeft best wel eens gelogen. he have.prs.3sg prt lie.pst.ptcp ‘He has definitely lied (occasionally).’ These contexts are also typical for wel eens, analysed by Zwarts et al. (2002) as an imperfective marker. Perhaps, therefore, we ought to view best wel eens as having a double derivation: as a combination of best plus wel eens and as a variant of best eens with intervening wel. . In order to show the specialization of the various particles and particle clusters more clearly, only data for the current millennium are used in this table. The distributional patterns evolve over time and become gradually more pronounced. The frequency of the clusters is not stable either, but increases over time (cf. Figure 2). . One difference between best and best eens is that the former may combine with stative modal predicates, such as mogelijk ‘possible,’ whereas the latter may not. (i)

Dutch Het is best mogelijk dat het gaat regenen. it be.prs.3sg prt possible that it go.prs.3sg rain ‘It is entirely possible that it will rain.’

(ii) *Het is best eens mogelijk dat het gaat regenen. In my corpus data, there are 59 occurrences of best with mogelijk, but none of best eens with a stative modal predicate of this kind.

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Within the set of modal contexts, there are some major distinctions which are worth discussing. For instance, modal adjectives and other non-verbal modal expressions, such as mogelijk ‘possible’ or in staat ‘capable,’ combine with best but not with best eens (cf. footnote 18). The latter expression is used strictly with modal auxiliaries. Thus, no non-verbal modal contexts in the corpus feature best eens, and introspective judgements likewise rule best eens out. (30) Dutch a. *Dat is best eens mogelijk. that be.prs.3sg prt possible b. *Hij is best eens in staat tot moord. he be.prs.3sg prt capable of murder These restrictions make sense if we take into account that best eens combines the modal features of best with a requirement of aspectual eens, namely that it modifies events and not states (cf. Zwarts et al. 2002). This is illustrated by the examples in (31) below. Their translation is tricky, as there is no exact counterpart in English. Moreover, note that eens, in addition to its aspectual use, can also be employed as a temporal adverb meaning ‘one time, once,’ a use by no means restricted to event predicates and which should be disregarded here. The two uses of eens are distinguished syntactically by the fact that the temporal adverb, but not the aspectual particle, can be topicalized (cf. (31c)).19 (31) Dutch a. Jan kuchte eens. Jan cough.pst once ‘Jan gave a cough.’ b. Jan was eens ziek. Jan be.pst.3sg once sick ‘Jan was sick at one time.’ c. Eens kuchte Jan. once cough.pst.3sg Jan ‘Once, Jan coughed.’ . Further complications arise if we consider the use of eens in imperatives and adhortative sentences such as the following: (i)

Dutch Wees eens lief voor je moeder. be.imp prt nice to your mother ‘Please treat your mother nicely.’

Here likewise there is no ban against predicative contexts.

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The emergence of particle clusters in Dutch 

Modal auxiliaries may combine with event predicates, but the predicates mogelijk and in staat are strictly stative. Wel eens, on the other hand, is perfectly compatible with stative predicates (cf. also Zwarts et al. 2002), so it should not come as a surprise that best wel eens may also combine with predicates/predicatives, as in (32) below, given our hypothesis that best wel eens may derive from wel eens, in combination with best (see above). (32) Dutch Hij is best wel eens in staat tot moord. he be.prs.3sg prt capable of murder ‘He is occasionally quite capable of murder.’ Among modal verbs, there is a distinction between contexts with single modals, such as kunnen or willen, and the more clearly counterfactual contexts with double modals, such as zou kunnen ‘might can = could possibly’ and zou willen ‘might want,’ as Table 2 below shows. In this table, the category “other” covers best wel, best nog wel, best nog eens, etc. There is also a significant difference between zal ‘will,’ used mainly as a future auxiliary or epistemic modal, and zou ‘would,’ a counterfactual or irrealis modal. Note in particular that best eens is especially common with double modals (especially zou kunnen, to a lesser extent zou willen), and that it is more frequent with counterfactual zou than with future or epistemic zal.

Table 2. Distribution of best and clusters over various modal contexts Modal

best N

kunnen ‘can’ zou kunnen ‘could possibly’ willen ‘want’ zou willen ‘might want’ zal ‘will’ zou ‘would’

%

best eens N %

best wel eens N %

Other N %

Total N

461 95

84.6 36.5

56 112

10.3 43.1

11 47

2.0 18.1

17 6

3.1 2.3

545 260

114 40

78.1 49.4

15 23

10.3 28.4

4 7

2.7 8.6

13 11

8.9 13.6

146 81

48 18

75.0 62.1

3 5

4.7 17.2

6 1

9.4 3.4

7 5

10.9 17.2

64 29

As soon as clusters emerge and achieve some degree of frequency, they tend to specialize and compete with previously established uses of best. This is noticeable even in the cluster best eens, which is limited to modal contexts throughout the period studied. However, within that set of contexts, specialization continues: the double modal zou kunnen gradually becomes the preferred environment of this cluster, as can be seen in Table 3.

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Table 3. Modal contexts for best eens Modal

< 1940 N %

1940–1990 N %

1990–2006 N %

kunnen ‘can’ zou kunnen ‘could possibly’ willen ‘want’ zou willen ‘might want’ zal ‘will’ zou ‘would’

10 3 2 1 – 1

30 41 5 13 1 3

17 68 8 9 2 1

6.1 12.0 13.3 14.3 0 14.3

15.4 43.2 13.5 31.1 7.7 17.6

9.6 48.6 8.5 24.3 4.7 16.7

. Conclusions In this paper, I have discussed the emergence of particle clusters based on the particle best in Dutch. Both this particle and the clusters based on it are of fairly recent origin; to judge from the written record, they go back no further than the nineteenth century. Starting out with quite a limited distribution involving only modal contexts, best has since spread to two other environments: combinations with verbs of cognition, such as weten ‘know’ or begrijpen ‘understand,’ and gradable predicates, usually in copular constructions. Clusters based on best show up in subsets of these contexts and thus constitute more specialized variants of best. I have argued that the contexts of modal and cognition verbs are also of relevance for other types of expressions, including degree modifiers (full well in English, heel wel in Dutch) and negative polarity items. A tendency to create semantically specialized clusters of particles is by no means restricted to the combinations studied in the present paper. In Hoeksema (2002a), similar developments were noted in the area of polarity-sensitive focus adverbs in Dutch, such as ook maar ‘also but = even,’ zelfs maar ‘even but = even,’ zelfs ook maar ‘even also but = even’ and ook slechts ‘also only = even,’ among others. In the last two centuries, these clusters have developed out of existing focus particles and show systematically greater specialization than the particles out of which they are constructed. It is to be hoped that work within the framework of grammaticalization theory will shed additional light on the whens and whys of particle cluster formation. A tendency toward increasing specialization can be seen in many areas of the lexicon and may lead to rapid lexical expansion as a result of borrowing, enlisting existing words for new purposes and re-using resources through combination into clusters. I have argued that clustering is especially likely to be found in areas where grammaticalization by other means may be more difficult, hence the subtitle “grammaticalization under adverse conditions.” This paper offers a number of examples where this process of rapid lexical expansion can be seen at work,

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The emergence of particle clusters in Dutch 

including degree modifiers and negative polarity items. I have hypothesized that the lexical areas involved relate to expressions of evaluative speaker stance, where stylistic and lexical variation may be more relevant than in other lexical domains, such as motion verbs or geographical adjectives. Another question, which I cannot fully answer here, is why the Dutch lexicon shows such great diversification and growth in the modern period, whereas at other stages, such as medieval Dutch, the language did not experience a comparable development. It might be speculated that one reason for a more sophisticated stylistic variation is the growth of literacy since the invention of the printing press, which has brought a much larger proportion of the population into contact with written registers. Written language has much less need for lexical parsimony than spoken language, since writers usually have enough time to look for the best word or idiom to express their thoughts and to convey the stylistic effects which they hope to achieve. Speakers do not have that luxury, since they need to find a word quickly or else lose the floor. However, the rise of literacy is not the only relevant development since the Middle Ages. Of equal importance might be judged the emergence of a wide variety of new genres, each with their own stylistic innovations, such as editorials, columns, sports journalism or e-mail, which have completely altered the nature of written language. Finally, the very nature of spoken language itself has probably changed remarkably over time, partly under the influence of the written language, partly as a result of exposure to mass media such as radio, television and, more recently, the Internet. For historical linguistics, the study of monotonically growing areas of the lexicon is important, because it suggests that not all parts of the lexicon are alike and that arguments based on parsimony, often invoked in historical linguistics (e.g. an expression disappears because another takes its place), may have a more limited validity than is sometimes envisaged. More work needs to be done to see how widespread the phenomenon is and what its ultimate causes are.

Abbreviations 1 2 3 inf pl

first person second person third person infinitive plural

prs prt pst ptcp sg

present particle past participle singular

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References Abraham, Werner. 1991. The grammaticalization of the German modal particles. In Elizabeth Closs Traugott & Bernd Heine (eds.), Approaches to grammaticalization Vol. II, 331–380. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Borst, Eugen. 1902. Die Gradadverbien im Englischen. Heidelberg: Winter. Campbell, Lyle (ed.). 2001. Grammaticalization: A critical assessment (Special issue of Language Sciences 23(2–3)). Diewald, Gabriele. 2002. A model for relevant types of contexts in grammaticalization. In Ilse Wischer & Gabriele Diewald (eds.), New reflections on grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 49], 103–120. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Dowty, David R. 2001. The semantic asymmetry of “argument alternations” (and why it matters). In Geart van der Meer & Alice G. B. ter Meulen (eds.), Groninger Arbeiten zur germanistischen Linguistik 44, 171–186. Groningen: Center for Language and Cognition. Fillmore, Charles. 1968. The case for case. In Emmon Bach & Robert T. Harms Holt (eds.), Universals in linguistic theory, 1–88. Austin TX: Rinehart and Winston. Fischer, Olga, Muriel Norde & Harry Perridon (eds.). 2004. Up and down the cline: The nature of grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 59]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hoeksema, Jack. 1994. On the grammaticalization of negative polarity items. In Susanne Gahl, Andrew Dolbey & Christopher Johnson (eds.), Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 273–282. Berkeley CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society. Hoeksema, Jack. 2001. Rapid change among expletive polarity items. In Laurel J. Brinton (ed.), Historical linguistics 1999. Selected papers from the 14th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Vancouver, 9–13 August 1999, 175–186. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hoeksema, Jack. 2002a. Polarity-sensitive scalar particles in early modern and present-day Dutch. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 16: 53–64. Hoeksema, Jack. 2002b. Minimaliseerders in het standaard Nederlands. Tabu 32(3–4): 105–174. Hoeksema, Jack. 2005. Rijkdom en weelde van het Nederlands. Tabu 34(1–2): 1–12. Janda, Richard D. 2001. Beyond pathways and unidirectionality: On the discontinuity of transmission and the counterability of grammaticalization. Language Sciences 23(2– 3): 265–340. Kennedy, Christopher & Louise McNally. 2005. Scale structures, degree modification, and the semantics of gradable predicates. Language 81(2): 345–381. Klein, Henny. 1998. Adverbs of degree in Dutch and related languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lorenz, Gunter. 2002. Really worthwhile or not really significant? A corpus-based approach to the delexicalization and grammaticalization of intensifiers in modern English. In Ilse Wischer & Gabriele Diewald (eds.), New reflections on grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 49], 143–161. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Peters, Hans. 1990. English boosters: Some synchronic and diachronic aspects. In Günter Kellermann & Michael D. Morrisey (eds.), Diachrony within synchrony: Language history and cognition. Papers from the International Symposium at the University of Duisburg, 529– 545. Bern: Peter Lang. Salkoff, Maurice. 1983. Bees are swarming in the garden. Language 59(2): 288–346. Schiffrin, Deborah. 1987. Discourse markers. Cambridge: CUP. Schourup, Laurence C. 1985. Common discourse particles in English conversation. New York NY: Garland.

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Stoffel, Cornelis. 1901. Intensives and down-toners. Heidelberg: Winter. Swan, Toril. 1988. The development of sentence adverbs in English. Studia Linguistica 42(1): 1–17. Tabor, Whitney & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 1998. Structural scope expansion and grammaticalization. In Anna Giacalone Ramat & Paul J. Hopper (eds.), The limits of grammaticalization, 229–272. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2001. Legitimate counterexamples to unidirectionality. Paper presented at the University of Freiburg, October 2001. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Bernd Heine (eds.). 1991. Approaches to grammaticalization. Vol. I. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Van der Wouden, Ton. 2002. Particle research meets corpus linguistics: On the collocational behavior of particles. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 16: 151–174. Van der Wouden, Ton, Ad Foolen & Piet van de Craen (eds.). 2002. Particles. Special issue of the Belgian Journal of Linguistics 16. Van Os, Charles. 1989. Aspekte der Intensivierung im Deutschen. Tübingen: Narr. Wegener, Heide. 2002. The evolution of the German modal particle denn. In Ilse Wischer & Gabriele Diewald (eds.), New reflections on grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 49], 379–394. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Wischer, Ilse & Gabriele Diewald (eds.). 2002. New reflections on grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 49]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Zwarts, Frans, Ton van der Wouden & Víctor Sánchez-Valencia. 2002. The aspectual significance of event particles. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 16: 175–208.

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Antigrammaticalization, antimorphologization and the case of Tura* Dmitry Idiatov University of Antwerp

This paper revises some of the central notions in grammaticalization studies by scrutinizing such key terms as grammatical meaning, grammaticalization, degrammaticalization and antigrammaticalization. It is argued that the alleged counterexamples to the unidirectionality hypothesis, described as cases of antigrammaticalization by Haspelmath (2004), do not entail a change from less to more grammatical, since affixes are not necessarily more grammatical than free words. Such cases are interpreted here as representing only a qualitative decrease in morphological bonding, a change which is thus termed antimorphologization. Finally, as a sample case of (partial) antimorphologization, the paper discusses the verbal derivational suffix |-LÁ| from the Eastern Mande language Tura.

.

Introduction

In recent years, various scholars have questioned the validity of the unidirectionality hypothesis (e.g. Newmeyer 1998; Lass 2000; Campbell 2001; Janda 2001). On the whole, Haspelmath (2004) offers a convincing response to this criticism. While acknowledging the existence of counterexamples to unidirectionality, he * The Tura data discussed in the present paper were gathered in Ivory Coast in FebruaryApril 2002. This field trip was conducted as part of the project Lexicology of Eastern Mande languages in the context of Mande linguistic comparison (http://www.unizh.ch/spw/afrling/ prjbsch/mande.htm) funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Important assistance was also given by the Ivorian branch of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. I also gratefully acknowledge the GOA (Geconcerteerde Onderzoeksactie) Mood and Modality project of the University of Antwerp and the project P6/44 (Belgian Federal Government, Interuniversity Attraction Poles) for financial support. Moreover, I would like to express here my gratitude to the Tura people with whom I worked for their valuable assistance and their time, particularly to Goh Soupou Mardoché, from the village of Kpata, and Gilbert Bakayoko, from the village of Dio. With respect to the present paper, special thanks are due to Mark Van de Velde. Finally, I am grateful to two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. Any mistakes that remain are, of course, my own responsibility.

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points out that the number of genuine cases of reversal of grammaticalization, referred to as examples of antigrammaticalization, is very small (he lists eight such cases) and, therefore, does not undermine the importance of unidirectionality for grammaticalization studies. Thus, he sees unidirectionality as “the most important constraint on morphosyntactic change” rather than as an “absolute universal.” However, given the concession that counterexamples exist, the terms tendency or statistical universal (Haspelmath 2004: 23), may be more appropriate. In the present paper, I will show that cases of alleged antigrammaticalization represent at best nothing more than an evolution from less to more morphological bonding. I will call such an evolution antimorphologization and illustrate it using an unusual case from the Mande language Tura. Antigrammaticalization, meanwhile, will be defined in terms of loss of obligatoriness in the marking of a category. In Section 2.1, I will examine the terms degrammaticalization, antigrammaticalization and grammaticalization as they are currently used. I will also address the notion of grammatical meaning, which is of paramount importance for any discussion of (de-, anti-)grammaticalization, and propose a stricter definition of (anti-)grammaticalization in terms of obligatoriness. In Section 2.2, I will take a closer look at the cases of antigrammaticalization proposed by Haspelmath (2004) and will introduce the notion of antimorphologization. This relates to the more usual term demorphologization in the same way as antigrammaticalization relates to degrammaticalization. Finally, in Section 3, I will present a case of antimorphologization from Tura (Niger-Congo, Mande, Eastern Mande; Ivory Coast).

. Terminology . De-, anti- and simple grammaticalization In the conclusion of her paper on the history of the English s-genitive, Rosenbach (2004: 89) cautions the reader: It should be stressed that the assessment of whether the s-genitive is a case of degrammaticalization is interpretation which heavily depends on how (de)grammaticalization is defined in the first place. As the discussion [. . .] has shown, however, the defining properties of what should constitute a genuine case of (de)grammaticalization are not yet agreed on, and various interpretations are possible.

To this caveat we can add that part of the problem lies in the terms themselves: they are often too vague and inconsistent to demand any consistency of interpretations from the users. Moreover, the terms are overused and downgraded to the level of common language words with prototype-like semantics. Consequently, the epistemological value of such terms as tools of linguistic analysis is

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low. The term degrammaticalization, for instance, has been used in the literature to refer to several different kinds of linguistic change. Heine (2003: 165) lists the following recurrent uses: (i) loss of grammatical meaning, (ii) mirror image reversal, (iii) lexicalization, (iv) euphemism, (v) exaptation, (vi) adaptation, (vii) replacement and (viii) upgrading. Haspelmath (2004) also mentions, among other processes, delocutive word formation, back-formation, conversion and retraction. In other words, the term degrammaticalization is extended to cover a number of quite heterogeneous phenomena, involving both “upgrading” and “downgrading.” Haspelmath (2004: 27) goes even further and says that these processes do “not [. . .] have anything in common.” Several attempts have been made to narrow the term degrammaticalization and thus increase its explanatory and predictive power. Quite logically, all of them reduce degrammaticalization to the reverse of grammaticalization. Thus, Bybee et al. (1994: 40) and Hopper and Traugott (2003: 134) see degrammaticalization as a term that refers to changes which violate the following schematic cline: [phrases /words > non-bound grams > inflection]. Lehmann (2004: 170) defines degrammaticalization as “the reverse of grammaticalization [, as] a process in which a linguistic sign gains in autonomy, i.e. it becomes relatively free from constraints of the linguistic system.” In keeping with the reversal idea of this narrower approach, Haspelmath (2004: 27–28) replaces degrammaticalization with antigrammaticalization, which he understands as “a change that leads from the endpoint to the starting point of a potential grammaticalization and also shows the same intermediate stages.” He emphasizes that the term antigrammaticalization “is intended to cover any type of change that goes against the general direction of grammaticalization (i.e. discourse > syntax > morphology).” In order to discuss degrammaticalization, therefore, we need to agree on the definition of grammaticalization. Here are some recent definitions.1 Grammaticalization is defined as the development from lexical to grammatical forms (or functional categories), and from grammatical to even more grammatical forms. (Heine 2003: 163) [Grammaticalization] is a term referring to the change whereby lexical items and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions and, once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions. (Hopper and Traugott 2003: 231) A grammaticalization is a diachronic change by which the parts of a constructional schema come to have stronger internal dependencies. (Haspelmath 2004: 26) . A more extensive overview of the extant definitions of grammaticalization can be found in Campbell and Janda (2001), for example.



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Grammaticalization of a linguistic sign is a process in which it loses in autonomy by becoming more subject to constraints of the linguistic system. (Lehmann 2004: 155)

These definitions of grammaticalization differ in two main respects. The first point of difference is whether the definition explicitly makes use of the notion grammatical (and appeals explicitly to the notion of grammar, in general). The second is whether the definition allows for the inclusion of (i) syntactic change under the notion of grammaticalization, such as the change from a freer to a more fixed word order, and/or (ii) discourse-oriented changes, like the development of discourse markers. A positive answer to these questions is often not spelled out in the definition itself, but becomes apparent only when concrete cases of alleged grammaticalization are discussed. The question of what the notion grammatical actually signifies is usually touched upon only briefly or simply passed over as something supposedly obvious to everybody. Such equivocation leads to a proliferation of suggested types and tokens of grammaticalization. Almost all interpretations of grammaticalization (and, consequently, of deand antigrammaticalization) seem to have in common an inclination to a conscious or unconscious equation of being (more) grammatical with being (more) morphologically bound. Examples of this attitude abound; take, for instance, Hopper and Traugott’s (2003) cline of grammaticality [content item > grammatical word > clitic > inflectional affix] or a comparable one by Bybee et al. (1994) [phrases/words > non-bound grams > inflection]. However, it is not clear to me why a grammatical word or a non-bound gram is less grammatical (or less grammaticalized) than an affix with the same function. A less abstract example of this approach would be Haspelmath’s (2004) imaginary case of two related languages, one with a future-tense affix and another with a future-tense auxiliary, for which it is suggested that, in accordance with the unidirectionality principle, the futuretense affix has grammaticalized through a stage of a future-tense auxiliary, while the reverse development is rather unlikely. Here again, a question imposes itself: in what respect is a future-tense affix more grammatical than a full-fledged futuretense auxiliary? The difference lies in their morphological status on the bonding cline [free word > clitic > affix] rather than in their grammaticalization status. Both are linguistic signs which serve to express the same grammatical meaning. Furthermore, it is preferable to restrict the term grammaticalization to changes affecting linguistic signs (morphemes as minimal linguistic signs and word-forms as maximally independent linguistic signs), thus excluding syntactic change. The latter is substantially different in that it affects relations between, and relative positions of, word-forms (in fact, not even concrete word-forms but their

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categories, such as nouns, verbs, etc.).2 Including syntactic change under the notion of grammaticalization significantly undermines the epistemological value of the unidirectionality generalization. Defreeze or repragmatization of word order is very different from regain of lost (lexical or derivational) information or deautomatization, which, according to Lehmann (2004: 183–184), are the main factors responsible for the unidirectionality of grammaticalization. Definitions of (de-, anti-)grammaticalization which invoke the notion of grammatical meaning should be preferred. After all, the term at stake is grammaticalization. The notion of grammatical meaning is best defined via the notion of obligatoriness: a meaning is grammatical in a given language if the speaker cannot choose to leave it unexpressed.3 Strictly speaking, of course, it is not the meaning itself which is grammatical but a set of mutually exclusive meanings, a grammatical category, to which that meaning belongs (cf. Plungian 2000: 107). In other words, obligatoriness necessarily implies paradigmaticity and equipollent oppositions. An important consequence of this is that a given meaning is grammatical or non-grammatical only with respect to a particular linguistic system. It cannot be grammatical a priori, universally.4 Admittedly, crosslinguistically some meanings turn out to be grammatical much more frequently than others and can thus be described as prototypical grammatical meanings, but still prototypical is not the same as universal. It is also important to notice that the criterion of obligatoriness does not necessarily imply that the border between the domains of grammatical and non-grammatical meanings is always strict and clear. As Plungian (2000: 105–106, 130) notes, obligatoriness can also be gradual. An interesting discussion of some often-cited counterexamples to the applicability of the obligatoriness criterion can be found in Plungian (2000: 136–140).5 Note also that grammatical is not the same as inflectional (as it is, for instance, for Mel’ˇcuk 1993). Grammatical meanings can also be of a classifying type, such as . Note that this does not equate grammaticalization with morphologization because it does not exclude word-forms expressing grammatical meanings analytically, such as auxiliaries. . The idea to use obligatoriness as a criterion for distinguishing grammatical meanings is not new. See, for example, Jakobson (1971). . That certain meanings are grammatical in any language (especially when expressed by affixes) often seems to be taken for granted. The following quote from Lass (2000: 219) is particularly illustrative in this respect because of its straightforwardness: “One could imagine a case where a prefix meaning ‘motional’ and one meaning ‘directional’ (surely ‘grammatical items’) could fuse into a verb meaning ‘turn’ or ‘go”’ (italics added). . Among other topics, Plungian discusses the Turkic and Iranian languages in which the markers of case and number have often been claimed to be facultative. He also examines some cases when obligatoriness is inappropriately used to refer to what can at best be described as lexical obligatoriness (Apresjan 1980: 17–19). I discuss a similar example by van Marle (1996) in footnote 7.



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the substantival gender in languages like Russian. They can be subdivided into semantic (notional) and syntactic (relational) meanings (cf. Zaliznjak 1967: 23–24; Plungian 2000: 123–126). The main distinctive feature of the “syntactic grammemes” is that “strictly speaking, they do not express any meaning in the true sense. That is, they do not correspond to any properties of the real world (unlike grammemes of number, tense or aspect)” (Plungian 2000: 124). However, it is not uncommon for a given grammeme to have both semantic and syntactic functions. When defined in terms of the criterion of obligatoriness, grammatical meanings are opposed to non-grammatical meanings as obligatory meanings vs. non-obligatory meanings. As has already been pointed out, the way in which the two kinds of meanings are expressed formally is of little relevance, since both can be expressed with either root morphemes or non-root morphemes (affixes or non-segmental morphemes). Phrased in more traditional terms, for the nongrammatical meanings this formal distinction results in a division into lexical meanings and derivational meanings respectively.6 Note that in the Anglo-Saxon linguistic tradition derivational meanings are often also subsumed under grammatical meanings. However, this makes the notion of grammatical meaning inconsistent with that of grammatical category, because certain kinds of allegedly grammatical meanings, i.e. those involved in derivation, then happen to be unable to form a grammatical category (Plungian 2000: 126–127). Consenquently, I view the difference between inflection and derivation as one between grammatical and non-grammatical meanings, since grammatical is defined in terms of obligatoriness. In accordance with the foregoing discussion, the following definition of grammaticalization can be proposed: Grammaticalization is a term referring to the change whereby linguistic signs with non-grammatical meanings come in certain linguistic contexts to encode grammatical meanings; grammatical being defined by means of the criterion of obligatoriness.

The definition of grammatical in terms of obligatoriness has several consequences for the notion of grammaticalization. First, it excludes the development of derivational affixes.7 Second, it excludes those cases in which words from open part. Plungian (2000: 120) notes that the difference between lexical and derivational meanings is “purely formal,” that is, “lexical meanings are expressed with root morphemes, while derivational with non-root morphemes (i.e. non-segmental morphemes or, more frequently, affixes).” Of course, a root morpheme may form a word by itself. . One anonymous reviewer argues that “derivational affixes have been shown to be obligatory in specific contexts,” referring to van Marle’s (1996) discussion of Dutch inhabitatives, such as Amsterdamm-er ‘Amsterdamer (male inhabitant of Amsterdam)’ vs. Amsterdam-se ‘Amsterdamer (female inhabitant of Amsterdam).’ In particular, van Marle (1996: 72) notes that in

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of-speech categories, such as nouns or verbs, acquire the status of a closed partof-speech category, such as adverbs, adpositions, conjunctions, etc., since they do not form a paradigm sensu stricto (even an analytic one). For similar reasons, it excludes the so-called modal auxiliaries of the Germanic languages and the development of discourse markers. Among other things, it bars such alleged cases of antigrammaticalization as the preposition out becoming the verb out in English or må ‘may’ to må ‘feel’ in Swedish (cf. Andersson, this volume). Antigrammaticalization, as the reverse of grammaticalization, refers then to the change whereby grammatical linguistic signs come in certain linguistic contexts to encode non-grammatical meanings.8 This kind of reverse change is easier to conceive of for semantic grammatical meanings (for instance, plural and singular of the category number), than for purely syntactic ones (see above). The main reason is that semantic grammatical meanings are notionally quite similar to meanings typically expressed by derivational means, as, for instance, the plural and the singular are similar to the collective and the singulative respectively. Furthermore, semantic grammatical meanings are far more likely to come into conflict with the meaning of the lexeme with which they have to combine, as, for instance, the plural with mass nouns and the singular with collective and “corporate” (Corbett 2000: 188–191) nouns. These two factors may give rise to derivational uses of grammemes. For example, the form drops can refer not only to the plural of the word drop, but also to a (dose of) medicine measured by drops (e.g. eye drops). Similarly, beads can refer both to the plural of bead and to a string of beads used for counting prayers (especially the Roman Catholic rosary). The important thing, however, is that in the latter uses drops and beads are still grammatically Dutch “if a person in question is a woman, the female inhabitative must be used,” although it would probably be more correct to say inhabitative of feminine (grammatical) gender. Thus, you can only say Marie is een echte Amsterdam-se ‘Mary is a real Amsterdamer (feminine gender, female sex)’ but not *Marie is een echte Amsterdamm-er ‘Mary is a real Amsterdamer (masculine gender, male sex).’ At the same time, this is held to be possible with other kinds of personal derivatives, where the distinction is said to be between female sex vs. male/neutral to sex. Thus, you can say both Marie is een goede vertel-ster ‘Mary is a good story-teller (feminine gender, female sex)’ and Marie is een goede vertell-er ‘Mary is a good story-teller (masculine gender, neutral to sex).’ Note, however, that, in the case of the inhabitative derivational morphology, obligatoriness is of a rather different kind from that of grammatical meanings. It occurs at the level of lexical nomination, in the same way as does the difference between verpleeg-ster ‘nurse (only female)’ vs. verpleg-er ‘nurse (only male)’ (from the verb verpleg-en ‘nurse’), or, to make things even more obvious, moeder ‘mother’ vs. vader ‘father.’ As with inhabitatives, in the latter two cases you can only say Marie is een goede verpleeg-ster/moeder ‘Mary is a good nurse/mother,’ but not *Marie is een goede verpleg-er/vader ‘Mary is a good (male) nurse/father.’ . For the same reasons as those discussed by Haspelmath (2004), this excludes delocutive word formation, back-formation, conversion and phonogenesis with a grammeme as the source, as well as developments from semantically empty parts of morphemes to full-fledged morphemes.

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plural. Therefore, this particular derivational use of the plural grammeme hardly qualifies as antigrammaticalization. The situation would be somewhat different, however, if drops-medicine and beads-rosary had become grammatically singular. We would then obtain a perfect proportion drop-Øsg :drop-s-Øsg =bead-Øsg :bead-sØsg (the so-called Greenberg square), which would imply that -s here is a collective derivational affix homophonous to, and originating in, the plural grammeme -s. In other words, this would be an example of branching antigrammaticalization. I call it branching because, in this case, the original grammeme is preserved intact in the language. If, on the other hand, the grammeme is lost, the antigrammaticalization appears as non-branching or linear.9 As an example of this kind of antigrammaticalization, the Swedish property-bearer suffix -er, as in dummer ‘stupid person’ vs. dum ‘stupid,’ which, according to Norde (1997: 230), goes back to the Old Norse nominative suffix, seems to present a good case.10 This example is cited by Haspelmath (2004: 32) under the rubric “loss of an inflectional category with traces,” but dismissed because for Haspelmath derivation is as grammatical as inflection. Note, however, that not all traces count as antigrammaticalization, but only those which are non-grammatical morphemes at the same time. A subsequent decrease in morphological bonding in such an antigrammaticalized linguistic sign is also possible as well, but would require some rather fortuitous concourse of circumstances (cf. Section 2.2 below). A direct change from a linguistic sign with a grammatical meaning to a linguistic sign with a lexical meaning without any intermediate derivational stage is somewhat more difficult to imagine, but it should not be excluded a priori. In my view, the chances of a process of this kind occurring are highest when the grammeme is expressed by a clitic or an autonomous word. Given that derivational uses of grammemes are relatively common and that grammemes are far from immune to becoming obsolete, it would not be surprising to find a relatively high incidence of antigrammaticalization from grammemes to derivational linguistic signs in the languages of the world. Nevertheless, unlike grammaticalization, antigrammaticalization appears to be much more a matter of chance than of tendency, because the processes which presumably contribute to it most, such as reanalysis and, particularly, loss of grammemes, are rather accidental themselves. . In principle, I would anticipate that a change appearing as a linear antigrammaticalization (always?) presupposes a branching antigrammaticalization at an earlier stage, although more research is surely needed here. Note, however, that there is an important potential pitfall: it is too easy to explain away the absence of a branching antigrammaticalization at an earlier stage as being due to the lack of evidence needed to reconstruct it. . In Modern Swedish, nouns have preserved only one overtly marked case, the genitive.

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. Antigrammaticalization and antimorphologization As noted in Section 2.1 above, there is a tendency in the literature to identify grammaticalization to a great extent with morphologization, that is, a change from an autonomous word-form to an affix (usually via the stage of a clitic). A parallel trend of identifying de- or antigrammaticalization with the reverse of morphologization seems to be even stronger. Consider, for instance, the various definitions given in Section 2.1, as well as Haspelmath’s (2004: 29) “real exceptions” to the unidirectionality generalization cited below: a. b. c. d. e. f. g. h.

English and Mainland Scandinavian genitive suffix -s > clitic =s. Irish first person plural subject suffix -muid > independent pronoun muid. Japanese adverbial subordinator -ga ‘although’ > free linker ga ‘but.’ Saami abessive suffix *-ptaken > clitic =taga > free postposition taga. Estonian question marker -s > clitic =es > free particle es. English infinitive prefix to- > proclitic to=. Modern Greek prefix ksana- ‘again’ > free adverb ksana ‘again.’ Latin rigid prefix re- ‘again’ > Italian flexible prefix ri- (e.g. ridevo fare ‘I must do again’).

Several remarks are in order here. First, for some of the cases of antigrammaticalization, the existence of an upgrading change is still disputed (see Traugott 2001; Heine 2003; Lehmann 2004). Second, for another segment of them, it has still to be shown that the original affix did express a grammatical meaning. For instance, the Latin rigid prefix re- ‘again’ is at best a derivational affix: its meaning is not a grammatical one. Finally, the semantics of the antigrammaticalized elements hardly differs from that of their predecessors or is at least not less grammatical than that of their predecessors. Importantly, this is the case no matter how the notion of grammatical meaning is understood, unless one equates having grammatical meaning with being an affix, which hardly anybody has done explicitly yet. In other words, the difference between the modern elements and their predecessors in (a) to (h) above lies in their morphological status on the bonding cline [free word > clitic > affix] and, in a few cases, perhaps in some minor semantic developments along the way.11 Therefore, I believe that it is more correct to refer to the alleged antigrammaticalizations listed in (a) to (h) as cases . For instance, a shift from ‘although’ to ‘but’ in the case of Japanese ga or the development of a restriction on the ’s-marked possessors to the preposed position, which has matched the restriction on co-occurrence of articles with noun phrases containing a referential/definite preposed modifier/specifier (cf. [*the] my house, [*the] this house, [*the] John, [*the] John’s house, etc.).

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of antimorphologization, or decrease in morphological bonding.12 The term morphologization is thus understood as increase in morphological bonding on the cline [free word > clitic > affix]. Reanalysis appears to be an important factor in antimorphologization and, since “there are no limits on reanalysis itself ” (Detges and Waltereit 2002: 191), there should in principle be no limits on antimorphologization either. However, it is clear that possibility is not the same as necessity, let alone predisposition. What is more, as a rather accidental process, reanalysis as such is not the best candidate for creating predispositions. Interestingly, however, the linguistic signs involved in the changes in (a) to (h) do seem to have something in common. The first observation, which admittedly may be somewhat trivial, is that they all lie along the outer border of their host, making it easier for them to split away. The second observation concerns semantics rather than form, although it is indirectly related to the first observation. In the majority of cases, the meanings of the elements involved in the changes in (a) to (h) could be characterized as being of low relevance to the lexical meanings of their hosts, in the sense of Bybee (1985). Thus, case marking, as the genitive in (a) and the abessive in (d), is assigned to the noun phrase as a whole in a given syntactic context with usually little impact on the semantics of the noun itself. Nominalization marking, as the adverbial subordinator in (c) and the infinitive marker in (f) can be broadly defined, would normally just give the verbal phrase the syntactic possibilities of an adverbial or a nominal without having much influence on the meaning of the verb itself. Similarly, the interrogative marker in (e), the subject marker in (b) and ‘again’ in (g) and (h) would not usually be expected to have much impact on the lexical meaning of their hosts. In other words, even if antimorphologization on the whole is indeed a matter of chance rather than a tendency, bound linguistic signs with less relevant kinds of meanings may, all things being equal, be more likely to undergo antimorphologization. Furthermore, when the antimorphologization of a given linguistic sign is accompanied by the acquisition of a radically new meaning, it is the low relevance of the target meaning that may prove decisive, rather than the degree of relevance of the original meaning. This appears to be the case with the (partial) antimorphologization of the verbal derivational suffix |-LÁ| from the Eastern Mande language Tura described in Section 3 below. The original, valence-decreasing meaning of |-LÁ| is clearly much . I am somewhat reluctant to call the change in (h), the development of the Italian flexible prefix ri-, a case of antimorphologization. Firstly, however flexible it may be, ri- is still a prefix. Secondly, I wonder whether ridevo fare and devo rifare really mean exactly the same thing. In other words, I wonder whether in the first case the idea of repetition does not rather relate to the obligation (i.e. one was obliged to do the action the first time and now one is again obliged to do the same action), while in the second case it relates to the action but not necessarily to the obligation (i.e. there was no obligation to do the action when one did it for the first time, but now one is obliged to do the same action again).

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more relevant to the meaning of the verb than its new focalizing/nominalizing function. Admittedly, the notion of relevance is not unproblematic, but it seems to be a step in the right direction.

. A case of antimorphologization in Tura . Tura verbs in |-LÁ|: Preliminaries In Tura, 24 verbs from a total of about some 200 end in |-LÁ|. The notation |-LÁ| here stands for (i) -l¢f after f, as in d¥fl¢f ‘stop’ (related to the verb d¥f ‘stand; wait; stop’); (ii) for -ná after a nasal vowel, as in zînná ‘put down; come/go down, descend’ (related to an intransitive verb zîn ‘touch’); and (iii) for -lá elsewhere, as in seelá ‘turn’.13 In example (1) |-LÁ| behaves like a suffix in that the verbal TAM-marking attaches to its right before any postverbal constituents. (1) Tura òô d¥f-l¥f-’ (yáálé). 3sg.sbj.neg.tam stand.LÁ\tam-tam yesterday ‘He did not stop (yesterday).’ The semantics of |-LÁ| often appears to be rather vague. Thus, Bearth (1971: 170) analysed it, for lack of a better term, as a derivational suffix with an intensive meaning (“valeur intensive”). However, in many instances |-LÁ| can be analysed as a special kind of valence-decreasing morpheme. For the purposes of the present paper it suffices to characterize it broadly as a derivational morpheme meaning ‘somewhere, anywhere,’ as illustrated in (2) and (3) with the verb yaa and its derivative yalá, both meaning ‘to sit down.’ Roughly speaking, |-LÁ| marks deletion (or sometimes facultativity) of the location adverbial which is normally obligatorily expressed with the base verb as an indirect object or circumstantial. Usually, this derivation concerns motion verbs and (change of) posture verbs (for a discussion, see Idiatov 2003). A comparable derivation affecting a direct object has been described in the literature as deobjective, indefinite object deletion or absolutive (cf. Haspelmath and Müller-Bardey 2004: 1131). By analogy, a few labels could be suggested for the derivation at issue here, for instance, (locative), deobliquative (or deoblique), delocative, indefinite location adverbial deletion or locative absolutive.

. In conformity with the practical orthography, tones in the examples are marked as follows: á (high tone), â (mid-high tone), a (mid-low tone), à (low tone) and ...’ (a high or mid-high toned morpheme consisting of a copy of the preceding vowel).



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(2) Tura a. yalá! sit.down.LÁ ‘Sit down!’ b. *yaa! sit.down (3) Tura a. yaa gbààn¢7 tà (zé)! sit.down chair on here ‘Sit down on the chair (here)!’ b. ?yalá gbààn¢7 tà (zé)! sit.down.LÁ chair on here ‘Sit down on the chair (here)!’ Historically, |-LÁ| goes back to a demonstrative root *tá ‘there,’ which evolved into the demonstrative láà ‘that’ in Present-day Tura. Cognates of this affix are represented throughout Eastern Mande, both in its Southern branch, where it typically has the form |-LÁ|, and in its Eastern branch, where it often has the form |-L¢ 7|. The latter element goes back to another demonstrative root *t¢7 ‘there,’ which evolved into the demonstrative t¢7/l¢7 ‘there (not far)’ in Present-day Tura. . Tura verbs in |-LÁ|: A case of antimorphologization The suffix|-LÁ| has undergone partial antimorphologization in Tura. This manifests itself in the development of the possibility for Tura verbs ending in |-LÁ| to be split up by adnominal modifiers. In such cases |-LÁ| is analysed as a weakly autonomous word, as illustrated in (4), which contains the verb d¥fl¢f ‘stop’ as in (1) above. This construction is used primarily for the purpose of predicate focus and in order to give a predicate the combinatorial possibilities of a noun. The same results can be achieved by placing the verb in direct object position relative to the auxiliary verb wô ‘accomplish, do,’ which in turn takes all the tense-aspectmodality marking of the verb, as in (5). Following Bearth (1971: 171–176), this construction is called wô-transposition (“transposition en wô”) and the former – |-LÁ|-transposition (“transposition en -lá”). (4) òô d¥f d¢77¥ kê l¥f-’. 3sg.sbj.neg.tam stand new a.certain -LÁ [=trns]\tam-tam ‘He did not stop again.’ (5) òô d¥f-l¢f d¢77¥ kê wô-’. 3sg.sbj.neg.tam stand.LÁ new a.certain do[=trns]\tam-tam ‘He did not stop again.’

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|-LÁ|-transposition exists as an alternative to the regular wô-transposition. The two kinds of verb-transposing construction are functionally identical, except in one case. According to Bearth (1971: 174–175), in one type of subordinate clauses the wô-transposition of a verb ending in |-LÁ| implies a causal ‘since’-reading of the subordinate clause in question, as in (6), whereas the|-LÁ|-transposition of the same verb implies a temporal ‘when’-reading, as in (7). Note that |-LÁ| of d¥fl¢f ‘stop’ in (4) and (7) preserves its form l¥f even when separated from the verb root. (6) é d¥f-l¢f-’ wô-’ láà 3sg.sbj.tam stand.LÁ.foclz do[=trns]\tam-tam tm14 ‘since he stopped’ (7) é d¥f-’ l¥f-’ láà 3sg.sbj.tam stand.foclz LÁ|[or trns]\tam-tam tm ‘when he stopped’ The morphological status of |-LÁ| in examples like (4) and (7) is exceptional: it is a derivational morpheme, which is an integral part of the verb d¥fl¢f ‘stop,’ and at the same time it is a word used to transpose the verbal word of which it is part. The situation is even stranger in (8), where the transposed verb is gbálá ‘thunder; roar, shout.’ The element |-LÁ| in gbálá (and several other verbs) is not, and, as comparative evidence seems to confirm, has never been, an affix. In (8), |-LÁ| does not have any meaning of its own. Thus, it is a necessary, but meaningless part of the verb gbálá (which is indicated by a Ø-sign as one of its possible glosses) and, at the same time, it is a word which is used to transpose the verbal word of which it is part.15 Idiatov (2003, 2005) proposes the terms quasi- or pseudo-word(form) to characterize the morphological status of such elements.16,17

. TM stands for terminal marker, which serves the function of marking certain types of clauses. . A reviewer has suggested a parallel with the change in colloquial American English of the verb hiccup, “in which the -up part is etymologically just a part of the root [...] but is treated by some speakers as if it were the particle up,” as in He was hiccupping, He was hicking up. Although, admittedly, the two cases considerably resemble each other, there is at least one important difference as well. The “liberation” of -up from hiccup creates a new lexical entry, hick up (instead of, or for some speakers probably side by side with, the original hiccup), while this is hardly the case with gbá ... lá, which is just a form of gbálá under transposition (cf. also the paragraph preceding examples (13) and (14)). . The notion of pseudo-words is related to a more general discussion of the so-called sub- or quasi-morphemic entities. A good introduction to this topic can be found in Kubrjakova (2000). . Idiatov (2005) also discusses a comparable phenomenon in Tura numerals and gives some typological parallels of pseudo-words.

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(8) lâ-’ gbá d¢77¥ kê lâ-’. rain.predm thunder1 new a.certain thunder2 [=Ø=trns]\tam-tam18 ‘It thundered again.’ The|-LÁ|-transposition must have appeared as a result of the development of a possibility for an alternative structural analysis of the verbs ending in |-LÁ| as consisting of an ordinary verb and its transposer. A prerequisite for such a development would have been the existence of an ordinary wô-transposition, particularly of its bare variety, that is, a wô-transposition where the verb transposed by wô is not modified by anything (e.g. a focalizer or an adnominal modifier). Since the semantic difference between a verb ending in |-LÁ| and its base verb is subtle, the verb ending in |-LÁ| may well appear to be structurally identical to such a construction. Only the transposer varies, |-LÁ| instead of wô. Furthermore, the development of |-LÁ|-transposition must have been facilitated by a certain bleaching of the original semantics of |-LÁ|. The process just described is illustrated by examples (9) to (12). (9) òô gw77 bân-’ zúlú-lèè bhà. 3sg.sbj.neg.tam stone drop\tam-tam wash-place\l on ‘He did not drop the stones in the washing place.’ (10) òô gw77 bân wô-’ zúlú-lèè bhà. 3sg.sbj.neg.tam stone drop do[=trns]\tam-tam wash-place\l on ‘He did not drop the stones in the washing place.’ (11) òô gw77 bân-nâ-’ (s¢7¢7 tà). 3sg.sbj.neg.tam stone drop.LÁ\tam-tam ground on ‘He did not drop the stones (on the ground).’ (12) òô gw77 bân nâ-’ (s¢7¢7 tà). 3sg.sbj.neg.tam stone drop LÁ\tam-tam ground on ‘He did not drop the stones (on the ground).’ Examples (9) and (10) illustrate the use of the verb bân ‘drop’ (or ‘fall,’ when used intransitively) without and with the wô-transposition, respectively. The verb bân has a |-LÁ|-derivative bânná ‘drop’ (or ‘fall,’ when used intransitively), as in (11). The semantic difference between these two verbs is subtle, just as between most other base and |-LÁ|-derived verbs. Speakers are usually unaware of any difference and will claim that they mean the same. Yet, these verbs are far from being freely interchangeable. Generally speaking, bânná usually implies that there are several objects falling and, in contrast to bân, accentuates the idea that the exact end-point of their falling is not relevant. This tends to translate into the idea of dispersion of . PREDM stands for predicative marker, which is an auxiliary-like morpheme with a sentenceconstituting function.

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the falling objects. The washing place referred to in (9) and (10) is a small, clearly defined site in the Tura village which is covered with stones and where a Tura man washes himself. Consequently, the stones are conceived of as being dropped all together in a single clearly defined place, whereas in (11) the stones are dropped somewhere on the ground, for instance, just to get rid of them. Being quite similar semantically, examples (10) and (11) may also easily appear to be structurally identical as far as their predicates are concerned. Thus, a further step allowing for an alternative analysis of (11) as (12) is very easy to conceive. Once such a choice becomes available, there is nothing to restrain the first part of a |-LÁ|-derived verb from being modified by any kind of adnominal modifiers, as is possible for their wô-transposed base verbs. It should be mentioned in this respect that, strictly speaking, there is no way to decide for the verbs ending in |-LÁ| whether one is dealing with a transposition or not when the first part of such a verb is not modified by anything. Only indirect arguments indicate that, at least in the modern language, the analysis in (11) should be preferred to that in (12). Firstly, the transposition has a clear functional load in Tura. It pertains to the domain of focalization, which is very prominent in this language. Consequently, it would be somewhat strange for a whole class of verbs to be permanently ambiguous between focalized and non-focalized forms. Secondly and most importantly, for most Tura verbs which do not end in |-LÁ|, the wô-transposition without even a focalizer modifying the verb, as in (10), is not very natural, though not impossible. In addition, there are a few largely idiomatized exceptions. For instance, for the verb kuan ‘steal’ a bare wô-transposition, as in (13), is very common, in fact even more common than the use of the verb kuan on its own, as in (14). Note in this respect that kuan is also one of the few verbs which can be used as a noun (meaning ‘theft’) outside of the wô-transposition without any additional morphology. In other words, a construction like (13) could also be glossed as 3pl + ‘theft’ (i.e. ‘theft of them’) + ‘do.’ (13) òô à¡] kuan wô-’. 3sg.sbj.neg.tam 3pl steal do[=trns]\tam-tam ‘He did not steal them.’ (14) òô à¡] kuan-’. 3sg.sbj.neg.tam 3pl steal\tam-tam ‘He did not steal them.’ At the same time, it seems reasonable to suppose that “bare” wô-transpositions, as in (10), were more common previously. In other words, the use of a modifier (especially a focalizer) within this construction must have become more or less conventionalized for most verbs only at a later stage. At first, the predicate was focalized using only the ‘do’-periphrasis (wô-transposition). Over the course of

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time, the emphatic nature of this structure became somewhat bleached. In fact, it is not unlikely that this natural process of attrition was hastened by the aforementioned ambiguity. As a result, the structure in question needed to be reinforced by an explicit focalizer for it to have a clear emphatic reading. The same bleaching favoured the use of all kinds of adnominal modifiers with the transposed verb when no special emphasis on the predicate itself but rather on its modifying property was implied. This path of development seems to me to be most plausible because of its iconicity. Once |-LÁ|-transposition became fully established alongside with the wôtransposition, it became available to verbs like gbálá ‘thunder; roar, shout,’ where |-LÁ| is not a suffix, by analogy with the other verbs ending in |-LÁ|, where |-LÁ| is a suffix, a development which no doubt further contributed to the blurring of the original semantics of |-LÁ|. On the functional level, the partial antimorphologization of |-LÁ| described above can be viewed as an instance of adaptation (Heine 2003) or, maybe more accurately, reparadigmatization (Vincent 1995).19 In other words, in addition to its original valence-decreasing derivational meaning, |-LÁ| has acquired the possibility of acting simultaneously as a transposer, a function which used to be the preserve of the regular transposer wô.

. Conclusion In the present paper I have scrutinized the terms grammaticalization, degrammaticalization and antigrammaticalization. It has been shown that, in their current use, these terms often suffer from vagueness and internal inconsistency, which translates into a proliferation of their extensions, undermines their epistemological value as tools of linguistic categorization and makes the unidirectionality tendency look weaker than it really is. For these terms to remain viable and meaningful, more restrictive definitions are desirable. Since it is grammaticalization that is at stake, I have advocated a definition based on the notion of grammatical meaning, the latter being best defined in terms of obligatoriness. This excludes from the scope of grammaticalization, among other things, the development of derivational affixes. I also believe that grammaticalization should be restricted to changes affecting linguistic signs, because syntactic change is substantially different. A definition of grammaticalization which encompasses both types of change is, I fear, . Note, however, that in the case of Tura the reparadigmatization has been driven by formal and not by functional matching of the two structures, wô-transposition and a simple verb ending in |-LÁ|. For Vincent (1995: 439), the two structures match when they have “the same morphosyntactic dimensions – be they number, person, case or whatever.”

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bound to be too abstract to remain sufficiently valuable from an epistemological point of view. In turn, antigrammaticalization, as the reverse of grammaticalization, refers to the change whereby grammatical linguistic signs come in certain linguistic contexts to encode non-grammatical meanings. It is also possible to distinguish between branching antigrammaticalization (when a grammeme undergoes antigrammaticalization in certain linguistic contexts but, on the whole, is preserved by the language) and linear antigrammaticalization (when the grammeme as such disappears from the language). This distinction may prove to be epiphenomenal in the end, since a linear antigrammaticalization is likely to presuppose a branching antigrammaticalization at an earlier stage. Still, it may be useful to have this distinction for descriptive purposes. Reasoning on the basis of the proposed definition of antigrammaticalization, I have argued that the few alleged cases of antigrammaticalization, which Haspelmath (2004) qualifies as the only real antigrammaticalizations discovered until now, are at best only cases of what I proposed to call antimorphologization or decrease in morphological bonding. Finally, I also presented in detail an interesting case of (partial) antimorphologization of the verbal derivational suffix |-LÁ| from the Eastern Mande language Tura. Although Haspelmath’s (2004) cases of antigrammaticalization are better described as cases of antimorphologization, this does not mean that antigrammaticalization is not possible at all. In principle, nothing seems to preclude antigrammaticalization, and in all probability it does occur here and there in the languages of the world. However, unlike grammaticalization and morphologization, both antigrammaticalization and antimorphologization appear to be much more a matter of chance rather than of tendency. To a large extent, this seems to be due to the accidental nature of the processes which contribute to them most, such as reanalysis and obsolescence. It would also appear that linguistic signs of certain kinds of meanings may be more likely than others, all things being equal, to become involved in antigrammaticalization or antimorphologization. Thus, antigrammaticalization is most easy to conceive of for semantic grammatical meanings than for purely syntactic ones, while antimorphologization seems to prefer linguistic signs whose meanings have low relevance to the lexical meanings of their hosts.

Abbreviations 3 foclz l neg pl predm

third person focalizer grammatical low tone negation plural predicative marker

sbj sg tam tm trns

subject singular tense-aspect-modality terminal marker transposer

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References Apresjan, Jurij D. 1980. Tipy informacii dlja poverxnostno-semanticheskogo komponenta modeli ‘Smysl ⇔ Tekst’ (Types of information for the surface semantic component of the model Meaning ⇔ Text). In Jurij D. Apresjan, Izbrannye trudy, Vol. 2: Integral’noe opisanie jazyka i sistemnaja leksikografija (Selected works, Vol 2: Integral description of language and systemic lexicography), 8–101. Moscow: Jazyki russkoj kul’tury. Bearth, Thomas. 1971. L’Énoncé toura. Norman OK: SIL. Bybee, Joan L. 1985. Morphology: A study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bybee, Joan L., Revere Perkins & William Pagliuca. 1994. The evolution of grammar: Tense, aspect, and modality in the languages of the world. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Campbell, Lyle. 2001. What’s wrong with grammaticalization? Language Sciences 23(2–3): 113– 161. Campbell, Lyle & Richard D. Janda. 2001. Introduction: Conceptions of grammaticalization and their problems. Language Sciences 23(2–3): 93–112. Corbett, Greville G. 2000. Number. Cambridge: CUP. Detges, Ulrich & Richard Waltereit. 2002. Grammaticalization vs. reanalysis. A semanticpragmatic account of functional change in grammar. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 21(2): 151–195. Haspelmath, Martin. 2004. On directionality in language change with particular reference to grammaticalization. In Olga Fischer, Muriel Norde & Harry Perridon (eds.), Up and down the cline: The nature of grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 59], 17–44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Haspelmath Martin & Thomas Müller-Bardey. 2004. Valence change. In Geert Booij, Christian Lehmann, Joachim Mugdan & Stavros Skopeteas (eds.), Morphology: A handbook on inflection and word formation, Vol. 2, 1130–1145. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Heine, Bernd. 2003. On degrammaticalization. In Barry J. Blake, Kate Burridge & Jo Taylor (eds.), Historical Linguistics 2001: 15th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Melbourne, August 2001, 163–179. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hopper, Paul J. & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization. 2nd edn. Cambridge: CUP. Idiatov, Dmitry. 2003. Struktura glagola v jazyke tura (Zapadnaja Afrika, semja mande): Element |-LÁ| (The Toura verb structure (Mande; West Africa): the element |-LÁ|). MA thesis, St. Petersburg State University. Idiatov, Dmitry. 2005. The exceptional morphology of Tura numerals and restrictors: Endoclitics, infixes and pseudowords. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 26(1): 31–78. Jakobson, Roman. 1971. Boas’ view of grammatical meaning. In Roman Jakobson (ed.), Selected writings II: Word and language, 489–496. The Hague: Mouton. Janda, Richard D. 2001. Beyond ‘pathways’ and ‘unidirectionality’: On the discontinuity of language transmission and the counterability of grammaticalization. Language Sciences 23(2–3): 265–340. Kubrjakova, Elena S. 2000. Submorphemische Einheiten. In Geert Booij, Christian Lehmann & Joachim Mugdan (eds.), Morphology: A handbook on inflection and word formation. Vol. 1, 417–427. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Lass, Roger. 2000. Remarks on (uni)directionality. In Olga Fischer, Anette Rosenbach & Dieter Stein (eds.), Pathways of change: Grammaticalization in English, 207–227. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lehmann, Christian. 2004. Theory and method in grammaticalization. Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 32(2): 152–187. Mel’ˇcuk, Igor A. 1993. Cours de morphologie générale (théorique et descriptive). Vol. 1: Introduction et première partie: Le mot. Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal & Paris: CNRS Éditions. Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1998. Language form and language function. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Norde, Muriel. 1997. The history of the genitive in Swedish: A case study in degrammaticalization. Amsterdam: Vakgroep Skandinavische taal- en letterkunde. Plungian, Vladimir A. 2000. Obshchaja morfologija: Vvedenie v problematiku (General morphology: Introduction in the problematics). Moscow: Editorial URSS. Rosenbach, Anette. 2004. The English s-genitive: A case of degrammaticalization? In Olga Fischer, Muriel Norde & Harry Perridon (eds.), Up and down the cline: The nature of grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 59], 73–96. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2001. Legitimate counterexamples to unidirectionality. Paper presented at the University of Freiburg, October 2001. Van Marle, Jaap. 1996. The unity of morphology: On the interwovenness of the derivational and inflectional dimension of the word. In Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds.), Yearbook of morphology 1995, 67–82. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Vincent, Nigel. 1995. Exaptation and grammaticalization. In Henning Andersen (ed.), Papers from the 11th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Los Angeles, August 1993, 433–445. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Zaliznjak, Andrej A. 1967. Russkoe imennoe slovoizmenenie (Russian nominal inflection). Moscow: Nauka.

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Can grammaticalization be parameterized?* Jurgen Klausenburger University of Washington

Taking the development of the Romance future from Latin as a starting point, this contribution reviews Roberts and Roussou’s (2003) attempt to reconcile grammaticalization with formal syntactic theory and compares it to a functional account of grammaticalization. The paper shows that the parameter approach of Roberts and Roussou, which assumes that syntactic change is random, cannot account for the non-randomness of grammaticalization and is thus forced to resort to an external explanatory principle, namely the existence of basins of attraction in parameter space. By contrast, the functional approach defended in this study, an updated version of the synthesis/analysis cycle based on the concept of the invisible hand in language change (cf. Keller 1994), reveals itself as an independent and more transparent approach to grammaticalization.

.

Introduction

The history of the future and the conditional in Romance must be framed within the overall evolution of verb structures from Latin into the Romance languages (French, Spanish and Italian), as shown in Figure 1.

Latin

French

Spanish

Italian

HABEO CANTATUM HABEBAM CANTATUM CANTARE HABEO CANTARE HABEBAM HABERE HABEO CANTATUM HABERE HABEBAM CANTATUM

j’ai chanté j’avais chanté je chanterai je chanterais j’aurai chanté j’aurais chanté

he cantado había cantado cantaré cantaría habré cantado habría cantado

ho cantato avevo cantato canterò canterei avrò cantato avrei cantato

Figure 1. CANTARE ‘to sing’ (Klausenburger 2000: 155)

* I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their lucid and helpful comments on this paper, which have undoubtedly helped me to improve it.

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The future and conditional structures in bold type represent a classic case study of (complete) grammaticalization, but all six of the developments depicted in Figure 1 above represent degrees of grammaticalization. The first two structures illustrate the preservation of Latin periphrastic forms in the evolution of the present and past perfect in the Romance languages; however, the verb habere has been shifted from a lexical verb to an auxiliary in Latin, signifying an important phase in the direction of grammaticalization. On the other hand, the last two combinations are purely virtual reconstructions out of the modern forms: habré cantado or avrò cantato do not stem from the given Latin forms, but are to be seen as an application of the already re-syntheticized Romance future morphology to the auxiliary haber/avere. These are all changes examined thoroughly in the classical historical grammars of the Romance languages over the last 150 years, typically within the synthetic/analytic cycle framework. Modern grammaticalization theory has been able to update and improve the explanatory capacity of the traditional model, but it can also be seen as continuing that model’s essential claims and implications, the spirit of which was also captured by Edward Sapir some time ago in his notion of drift in historical linguistics (1921). The purpose of this paper is to review critically the most recent attempt to integrate an explanation of grammaticalization into theoretical syntax, namely Roberts and Roussou’s (2003) study. I will suggest that their attempt is best understood if viewed in direct comparison with an updated version of the synthesis/analysis cycle as enhanced by the notion of the invisible hand, as found in Klausenburger (2000).

. General discussion of alternative analyses Before we examine the details of each of the aforementioned approaches, let us first identify their principal features. Figure 2 provides a summary of Roberts and Roussou’s formal analysis, while Figure 3 encapsulates what the syntactic rebracketing under structural change in Figure 2 is meant to accomplish.1 It is interesting to note that the summary of the evolution of the Romance future/conditional in the synthesis and analysis schema of Schwegler (1990), as given in Figure 4 below, more or less duplicates Figure 3, although using slightly different terms and emphases.

. Mesoclisis is the insertion of a clitic between the stem and a suffix, as exemplified in Presentday Portuguese ver-me-a ‘s/he will see me.’

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(a) i. ii. iii. (b) i. ii. iii. (c) i. ii. iii.

Structural change: [TP[VP XP t habeo [T habeo]]] > [TP XP [T habeo]] Parametric change: T* Move > T* Merge Cause: morphological irregularity/meaning of habeo Structural change: [TP XP [T habeo]] > [T Infinitive [T habeo]] Parametric change: T* Merge > T* Merge/Move Cause: reduced productivity of leftward XP movement (weakening of OV) Structural change: [TP [T V + Af] [VP t V]] > [TP [T V + Af] [VP tV + Af ]] Parametric change: T* Merge/Move > T* Move Cause: loss of trigger for T* Merge/Move (e.g. mesoclisis)

Figure 2. Formal analysis of the evolution of the future and the conditional (Roberts and Roussou 2003: 195) (1) Development of habeo into future/modal auxiliary. (2) Change of habeo into element triggering head movement. (3) Evolution of habeo into pure affix (suffix).

Figure 3. Alternative summary of the evolution of the Romance future and conditional (Roberts and Roussou 2003: 58) (1) Semantic reanalysis of habeo. (2) Loss of morphosyntactic freedom of habeo (= cliticization). (3) Phonological binding of infinitive + habeo (= affixation). (4) Decrease of morphological variation of habeo.

Figure 4. Synthesis/analysis framework (Schwegler 1990: 132–133)

A comparison of the analyses in Roberts and Roussou (2003) and Schwegler (1990) is presented in Figure 5. Roberts and Roussou

Roberts and Roussou

Schwegler

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

(a)(i) (b)(i) (c)(i)

→ → →

(1) (2) (3)

→ → →

(1) (2) (3), (4)

Figure 5. Equivalences between the analyses in Roberts and Roussou (2003) and Schwegler (1990).

One important aspect of Schwegler’s portrayal is his focus on the semantics in the change of habere, while purely syntactic, structural features are highlighted in Roberts and Roussou’s analysis. In Schwegler there is also specific reference of phonetic, phonological and morphological aspects of the change-over, mentioned only indirectly in the formalization by Roberts and Roussou. Still, there seems to



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be consensus on the three (or four) basic steps necessary to describe this evolution. The crux of the formal analysis, sub-step (ii), relates to parametric change, the real innovation introduced by Roberts and Roussou, and has no equivalence in the traditional account. These authors also add sub-step (iii), cause. In a sense, some of this information is covered in the four steps of Schwegler’s schema, at least in (a.iii) (cf. Figure 2). The loss of Latin OV word order is not specifically mentioned in Schwegler (1990; cf. Figure 4), but it is usually included in the traditional changeover from synthesis to analysis, and also in the evolution of analytic (periphrastic) structures into synthetic (inflectional) manifestations. Mesoclisis, in addition, has always been posited as a step prior to the final result of suffixation of habere in the Romance future and conditional. So far I have attempted to underline some common features between the more traditional synthesis/analysis approach, which metamorphosed into the grammaticalization account, and the parameter approach of Roberts and Roussou, in order to demonstrate that the latter should not be looked on as a complete break with its antecedents. As a matter of fact, it cannot be so if its object is to conceptualize the essence of grammaticalization. As it stands, after a first look at the formal analysis, the steps proposed there would seem to constitute a plausible pathway of change. They may even be considered preferable to previous accounts on grounds of greater systematic rigour and theoretical significance, given that they are motivated by Principles and Parameters syntax. As will be discussed presently, however, this neat picture obscures some serious flaws and difficulties in the application of parameter theory to grammaticalization.

. Roberts and Roussou (2003) Roberts and Roussou come to the realization that “we must reconcile the evidence for pathways of change at the descriptive level with the fact that an explanatory account of syntactic change must involve random parameter change” (2003: 210). As a consequence, their analysis of the evolution of the Romance future and conditional outlined in Figure 3 above cannot be accomplished without reconciling the fact that their theory assumes, as default setting, the existence of randomness of syntactic change with the fact that grammaticalization represents the essence of non-randomness, that is, a clear cline, pathway or drift in syntactic change. They believe that they can achieve that reconciliation by invoking (un)markedness for the relevant parametric changes. A purely formal, not substantive, concept of markedness is proposed, with the hierarchy F* Merge/Move > F* Move > F* Merge > F*. This is a formal definition, since it involves simply counting the number of formal feature syncretisms, by which the Move process would be more marked than the less marked Merge, while Merge/Move constitutes the most marked op-

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tion. They claim that such markedness may be independently motivated, as it ensues from the learning algorithm (Roberts and Roussou 2003: 214). The parametric changes observed in the evolution of the Romance future and conditional are repeated in Figure 6 below. (a) F* Move > F* Merge (b) F* Merge > F* Merge/Move (c)

F* Merge/Move > F* Move

Figure 6. Parameter changes in the evolution of the Romance future and conditional

This is just a typical example of how, according to Roberts and Roussou, parameters change in clusters, within basins of attraction, created by markedness. These are “the parameter-space equivalents of the forces that cause stars to bunch together into galaxies,” which “reduce the hyperastronomical range of possibilities [. . .] to a sufficiently small range of possibilities for language types and diachronic drift to be discernible” (Roberts and Roussou 2003: 218). Change (a) is shared by all the examples presented in their analysis and may be said to be the essential representation of grammaticalization conceived of as parameter change. Every parametric change is expected to go from more to less markedness. In the Romance future and conditional history, however, the opposite change-over seems to have taken place in (b). The authors explain this exception at length, pointing out that such a parametric change “arises only in ‘head-final’ systems and only in this way, and if, as seems natural, this option is the principal means by which new affixes are created, then we can understand the general preference for suffixal morphology in the world’s languages” (2003: 54). Overall, in the various cases they examine, the overwhelming majority of parametric changes do fit neatly into a transition from more to less markedness. In Section 4 below, I will compare and contrast this approach to one carried out within a more functional framework. However, certain elements of this proposal are open to criticism immediately. Firstly, if the learning algorithm forces a modification of the randomness of parameter change, why not consider that non-randomness is the default circumstance? Why not abandon randomness of parameter change, as van Gelderen (2004) apparently has? Secondly, if randomness is absolutely necessary to maintain the integrity of the theory at hand, why not concede that grammaticalization cannot be explained by parameter change? Such a possibility is, in fact, envisaged by Roberts and Roussou when they express doubt about “the entire enterprise of looking at syntactic change from the point of view of Principles and Parameters theory. This is the conceptual problem caused by the size of the parameter space” (2003: 217). They subsequently introduce markedness to resolve the problem. Finally, even with the introduction of markedness, in addition to the randomness of parameter change in an attempt to force it into the



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grammaticalization mould, the essence of the latter has not been successfully explained: it is not just any parameter shifts from more to less markedness which are involved, but, specifically, only those which constitute a grammaticalization cline. Merely adding markedness in no way makes it possible to predict the pathways of change inherent in all instances of grammaticalization. . Klausenburger (2000) As mentioned in Section 1, Klausenburger’s (2000) interpretation of grammaticalization can be viewed as an updated version of the synthesis/analysis cycle enhanced by the concept of the invisible hand, an idea taken from the economic theory of Adam Smith in the eighteenth century.2 Schwegler’s (1990) four steps for the evolution of the Romance future and conditional, given briefly in Figure 4 above, can now be expanded as in the following more complete account: a. Semantic reanalysis of habere, from full lexical verb to a marker of futurity. b. Loss of morphosyntactic freedom, manifesting increasing lack of transportability and separability of the auxiliary. c. Phonological binding of infinitive + habere, the whole sequence gaining one primary stress, with various phonetic reductions in consequence. d. Decrease in morphological variation of the auxiliary habere, as it is no longer inflected for mood, and the tense and aspect possibilities become limited to the present and the imperfect/perfect. Schwegler (1990: 133) summarizes the evolution in this way: While semantic reanalysis must have occurred prior to any type of synthesis, it is clear that diachronically these processes overlapped and interacted. Though the morphological and phonological conditions were decisive in shaping the morphemes of modern Romance future forms, without continued semantic relevance between cantare and habere the construction would never have conflated into a single inflectional lexeme.

Keller (1994: 90) explains his application of the invisible hand to language (change) as follows: On the left of the box is the micro-level, on the right the macro-level. The microlevel is the level at which one can situate the actions of the individuals involved, plus the relevant circumstance of their actions; the macro-level is the language in an hypostatized sense. The box represents the cumulative process which functions as a bridge between micro-level and macro-level.

. The concept was originally taken from Dutch writer and social critic, Bernard de Mandeville, and his Fable of the Bees (1705).

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Figure 7 below represents Keller’s outline of invisible hand processes. ecological intentional actions > conditions

invisible hand process

casual consequences > explanandum

Figure 7. The invisible hand (adapted from Keller 1994: 90)

How might such a sequence be applied to grammaticalization? Let us envisage the following scenario. It starts with the micro-world of intentional actions, individual acts of communication by the most effective means available to the speaker, consisting of (i) concrete, or specific, concepts at a semantic level, and (ii), periphrastic, or syntactically ‘robust,’ structures at a formal level. The explananda are the grammaticalized forms, affixes, most likely suffixes. Following Keller’s outline, we can deduce that the intentional actions of communication metamorphose, by way of the invisible hand process, into the common causal consequences of (i) semantic weakening (bleaching) or generalization and (ii) phonetic erosion. In addition, we can argue that the resulting grammaticalized form contradicts the concrete periphrasis which existed originally, as it can no longer fulfil the goal of the intentional actions, namely that of communicating effectively. This leads to the well-documented cycle of synthesis and analysis, or, equivalently, to the continuum of grammaticalization, the beginning of a new set of intentional actions, in turn, however, again doomed, as though they were programmed for self-destruction. Grammaticalization may therefore be seen as the unintended and even paradoxical consequence of efforts at effective communication, resulting from the invisible hand process. The paradox subsists on two levels, as (i) effective communication becomes ineffective and needs to be compensated by new efforts and (ii) every grammaticalization continuum appears to be programmed for selfdestruction. Obviously, (ii) captures the actual essence of the paradox, of course, since the loss of effective communication must be due to the inexorable weakening or destructive evolution which is so characteristic of grammaticalization. In Figure 8 below, the evolution of the Romance future and conditional given in Figure 1 is repeated for convenience. Latin

French

Spanish

Italian

CANTARE HABEO CANTARE HABEBAM

je chanterai je chanterais

cantaré cantaría

canteró canterei

Figure 8. Latin periphrasis > Romance suffixation

The inflectional (suffixal) nature of the Romance forms represents complete grammaticalization, ineffective in comparison with its source, the Latin periphrasis.

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There is evidence, at least in the case of Spanish and French, that a new continuum, or cycle, has begun for the future constellation in the form of the ‘go’-future (e.g. Spanish Voy a cantar, French Je vais chanter). The invisible hand effect for grammaticalization would predict that this new cline is also programmed for self-destruction, and that it will lead to an inflectional structure, again a weakened communicative result in comparison with the original periphrasis. However, whether or not the final output will in fact be prefixation remains to be seen. How has the analytic/synthetic cycle been updated by this proposal? Firstly, the grammaticalization framework discussed here is no longer reliant on the traditional dichotomy analytic vs. synthetic, revealed now as superfluous and unsustainable. It is replaced by degrees of grammaticalization, the gradual movement along a predictable cline, left-branching/right-branching syntax > clitic > affix > (zero). The question as to the synthetic or analytic nature of a given structure is no longer necessary since it is considered irrelevant. Secondly, the grammaticalization cline can be fleshed out further using the concepts contributed in Hall (1992) and Bauer (1995), incorporated into the detailed scenario shown in Figure 9 below. RIGHT-BRANCHING ---------------------------------------------------------------LEFT-BRANCHING | GRAMMATICALIZATION = weakening a. semantic b. phonetic | FLIRTING (advanced grammaticalization) | REBUFFING (probable)----------------------------------------------------JOINING (most likely) [Two ‘cohorts,’ unstable, [One ‘cohort,’ less unstable, more costly for perception] less costly for perception] | | *PREFIX SUFFIX [Grammaticalization aborted, | debilitating effect reversed, (LOSS) form becomes robust again] [Potential, real endstation of grammaticalization]

Figure 9. Scenario for grammaticalization (after Klausenburger 2000: 87)

This schema raises two points: a. Left-branching syntax, leading as a result of grammaticalization to suffixation, is much more likely to reach its inflectional end-point than right-branching architecture, which would be expected to lead to prefixation. Such variable outcomes are predicted by the universally attested suffixation preference (or prefixation dispreference). Hall (1992) develops a perception/processing framework to explain this uneven distribution.

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b. With respect to the evolution of Romance verbs, the complete grammaticalization of the future and conditional can be accounted for in this way, while the partial grammaticalization of the compound past (Latin habeo cantatum) finds its motivation in the rejection of potential prefixation. An alternative proposal, as suggested in Fuss (2005: 153), rejects such a notion, however, claiming that the dominating SVO word order in contemporary Romance languages, especially in French, motivates prefixation, while the extant Romance suffixation may be seen merely as a remnant structure of the Latin SOV period.

. On the (non-)randomness of linguistic change After the presentation of my paper at New Reflections on Grammaticalization 3 (Santiago de Compostela, July 2005), one questioner raised the point of whether a case could be made for grammaticalization clines to be essentially random. Such a view would appear to be capable of accommodating parameter syntax and its random changes. However, Roberts and Roussou (2003) do not base their arguments on such an assumption. They clearly feel that it is necessary to adjust grammaticalization as a non-random evolution on the basis of their notion of basins of attraction, which are controlled by (un)markedness. Why would they not try to make their case ‘more easily’ by finding random features in grammaticalization also? Such an approach would tie in closely with the well-known fact that linguistic change is inherently unpredictable. The idea of randomness could then be included among the characteristics of unpredictability. Although the grammaticalization case of the Romance future (and conditional) has been discussed above in a way that gives the impression of homogeneity and non-randomness, there are heterogeneous aspects to the subject if we look at it more closely and expand our analysis to other Romance languages, as outlined in Figure 10. Latin

cantare habeo voleo cantare debeo cantare venio ad cantare vado (ad) cantare

Rumanian

Sardinian

Surselvan

Modern Spoken French

Modern Spoken Spanish

vais chanter

voy a cantar

vói(u) cîntá deppo cantare

Figure 10. Romance future formations

végnel a cantar

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 Jurgen Klausenburger

In addition to the Latin auxiliary habere, other modals, like volere ‘to want,’ debere ‘to owe,’ venire ‘to come’ and vadere, ire ‘to go,’ have been used, and continue to be used, in various Romance languages and dialects (Rumanian, Sardinian, Surselvan, Modern Spoken French and Spanish) to form the future (if not the conditional). There has been, therefore, non-predictable choice in the various parts of the Romania, and, in a very real sense, the selection of habere in post-infinitival position and its later complete grammaticalization, as outlined above, might be seen as a random development. Furthermore, the degree and timing of this grammaticalization varies from language to language, French having run through the complete cline by the time of the first attestation of the language (Strassburg Oaths, 842), and Spanish showing separate suffixes (mesoclisis) in the medieval period, just as Modern European Portuguese still does today, at least optionally. Thus, randomness also enters into the specifics of this change. The question arises, however, as to whether this definition of randomness will suffice to explain the nature of grammaticalization, in both Principles and Parameters and in functional guises. The fact is that some sort of (uni)directionality must be included in our analysis of any grammaticalization change, and this is achieved in a general way by a certain sense of markedness, noted above. As Newmeyer (2005: 101) puts it, “one would assume that if parametric change were directional, there would have to be counterbalancing non-parametric change to keep the balance of typological factors in stasis (assuming that stasis is indeed the case).” The rise of new periphrastic structures in response to (complete) grammaticalization changes constitutes one such development within the invisible hand framework. Positing parametric change exclusively (in the Principles and Parameters framework) would not seem to account for all the facts. One would perhaps have to envisage the existence of random (uni)directional changes, an oxymoronic juxtaposition at first glance. As an anonymous reviewer has pointed out, however, “this could permit certain changes to contradict themselves mutually, thus preventing an overall unidirectional logic and general tipping over of the typological stasis.” It is probably most accurate to posit both non-random and random aspects in grammaticalization. Such a dichotomy is easily detectable in the functional approach, as the rise of a particular periphrastic structure would be seen as random, while the actual grammmaticalization into affixation (of the auxiliary in the case of the Romance future evolution) must be considered non-random, most likely unidirectional.

. Comparison and conclusion Let us now review and compare the details of the two approaches to grammaticalization presented in the preceding pages. The nature of grammaticalization and

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Can grammaticalization be parameterized?

the notion of (non-)randomness can be summarized in the following logically possible choices, in relation to the Principles and Parameters approach: a. Choice 1: Grammaticalization is considered non-random, parameter change is seen as random; basins of attraction will convert randomness into nonrandomness. b. Choice 2: Grammaticalization is considered non-random, theory allows nonrandom parameter change; no conversion is necessary. c. Choice 3: Grammaticalization is considered random, parametric change is seen as random; no conversion is necessary. These three options can be schematized as shown in Figure 11.

Choice 1 Choice 2 Choice 3

Grammaticalization

Parametric change

Basins of attraction

–R –R +R

+R –R +R

+ – –

Figure 11. Grammaticalization and (non-)randomness

Choice 1 was obviously the option selected by Roberts and Roussou (2003); they would appear to have considered Choice 2 as well, though ultimately rejected the possibility. Choice 3, in turn, is the option examined and evaluated in Section 5 above. The functional approach allows no such potentially variable interpretations. As already mentioned, a random side to the renewal component of grammaticalization may be apparent, but the evolutionary process itself has never been considered anything but (uni)directional and non-random. That attitude clearly establishes that the two rival approaches are never equivalent. They might seem equivalent, given that each begins with a core framework (either the Parameters-withinMinimalism syntactic theory or an updated version of the synthesis/analysis cycle), and is then supplemented by an extra theoretical layer (either the markedness and basins of attraction hypothesis or the invisible hand). However, we cannot reasonably equate the status of the two additional mechanisms. The mechanism of basins of attraction, invoked in Roberts and Roussou (2003) in order to convert the default random nature of parameter change to non-randomness, has all the features of an add-on, something not required by the syntactic theory chosen. On the other hand, the updated version of the synthesis/analysis cycle equates to grammaticalization, and there is nothing separate about it. The concept of the invisible hand, moreover, captures directly what we assume occurs during grammaticalization; it might be called its motivating force. Putting it succinctly, grammaticalization and the invisible hand are one and the same.



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 Jurgen Klausenburger

Ockhamite reasoning selects the invisible hand approach over the markedness account, as this extra layer leads to a less parsimonious solution in Roberts and Roussou (2003). Choice 2 above would certainly take care of the problem. However, the authors are not willing to make that choice, as it would lead to altering the nature of parameter change, as they conceive of it. Finally, Choice 3 would also solve the extra-layer issue, but only at the cost of altering the notion of grammaticalization. Such a change would be too costly, because it would force us to describe grammaticalization inaccurately, ignoring all that has been discovered so far about this crucial linguistic change (cf. Marchello-Nizia 2006).

References Bauer, Brigitte. 1995. The emergence and development of SVO patterning in Latin and French. Diachronic and psycholinguistic perspectives. Oxford: OUP. Fuss, Eric. 2005. The rise of agreement. A formal approach to the syntax and grammaticalization of verbal inflection. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hall, Christopher. 1992. Morphology and mind. A unified approach to explanation in linguistics. London: Routledge. Keller, Rudi. 1994. On language change. The invisible hand in language. London: Routledge. Klausenburger, Jurgen. 2000. Grammaticalization. Studies in Latin and Romance morphosyntax. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Marchello-Nizia, Christiane. 2006. Grammaticalisation et changement linguistique. Bruxelles: De Boeck and Larcier. Newmeyer, Frederick J. 2005. Possible and probable languages. A generative perspective on language typology. Oxford: OUP. Roberts, Ian & Anna Roussou. 2003. Syntactic change. A minimalist approach to grammaticalization. Cambridge: CUP. Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language. An introduction to the study of speech. New York NY: Harcourt and Brace. Schwegler, Armin. 1990. Analyticity and syntheticity. A diachronic perspective with special reference to Romance languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Van Gelderen, Elly. 2004. Grammaticalization as economy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Possessive adjectives as a source of intensifiers Ekkehard König and Letizia Vezzosi Free University of Berlin and University of Perugia

This paper examines the diachronic development of Present-day English own, analysed here as a pre-nominal intensifier equivalent to the adjunct X-self, from the Old English form agen, past participle of the verb agan ‘own, possess.’ In its evolution, agen underwent a number of changes identified in the literature as characteristic of grammaticalization, specifically semantic bleaching, decategorization and increase in pragmatic and syntactic scope. The fact that comparable changes can also be observed in other languages (cf. German eigen, Italian proprio) suggests that the grammaticalization of a lexical item expressing the notion of possession into an attributive intensifier such as own cannot be entirely fortuitous and clearly requires an explanation.

.

Introduction

In most dictionaries and textbooks the English word own is categorized as an adjective with a possessive meaning, a sense also found in related words such as owner, to own, etc. A closer look reveals, however, that such a syntactic and semantic categorization is quite problematic. Syntactically, own exhibits peculiar restrictions not found in any other member of the adjective class. In a series of stacked attributive adjectives, it must always come first,1 and it is restricted to following a possessive pronoun (cf. (1a)), also when it follows a be-predication, as in (1b), or when part of a prepositional phrase, as in (1c). (1) a. My own big black car was clearly visible. b. My time is my own. c. I would like to have a key of my own. . If we use the term possessive adjective to denote ‘his, her, its’ and so on, then own is invariably the second of a series of adjectives. Note that the fixed expression an own goal is a relic of an earlier use and, thus, an exception to this rule. The peripheral position of own in a noun phrase and its close association with possessive pronouns sometimes gives rise to another categorization, that of own as belonging to the class of determiners and pronouns.

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 Ekkehard König and Letizia Vezzosi

Similarly, a description of its meaning in terms of ‘belonging’ (Cambridge International Dictionary of English) or as “adding force to the idea of possession” (Dictionary of Contemporary English) can be applied to own in sentences like those in (2) quite accurately, but becomes problematic in sentences like those in (3), where we can hardly speak of own as conveying a forceful idea of possession. (2) a. I would like a little house to call my own. b. These are Mary’s own children. c. I saw it with my own eyes. (3) a. His own failure to come surprised us even more. (cf. Seppänen 1975) b. After her own brief imprisonment she showed more sympathy with the victims of the regime. c. My own losses were much greater. What we find in examples like those in (3) is more the vague notion of possession typically associated with the genitive or possessive pronouns. Thus, the noun phrases in (3a) and (3c) could simply be analysed as subjective genitives (‘he failed to come,’ ‘what I lost was much more’), whereas (3b) seems to be a straightforward case of an objective genitive (‘they imprisoned her’). A semantic analysis of own in terms of possession is even more problematic in situations like (4) below, where own is excluded from clearly possessive contexts. All of the following sentences are fine without own; it is the addition of this expression that makes them inappropriate. (4) a. b. c. d.

John lost his (*own) temper. Don’t lose your (*own) head. John is tall for his (*own) age. I’d go out of my (*own) mind.

The admissibility or inadmissibility of own in these contexts clearly has nothing to do with the idea of possession. In instances such as (3), the essential point of using own seems to be an emphatic quality, roughly paraphrasable by stressing the possessive pronoun or by omitting own and substituting a stressed personal pronoun for it (‘That HE failed to come surprised us even more’). Analogously, own is probably unacceptable in (4) because, though a possessive relationship is clearly specified in these contexts, it cannot be expressed forcefully, i.e. contrastively. The traditional analysis of own as an adjective emphasizing the idea of possession is therefore inadequate. However, it is not completely misleading, since a vague notion of possession, often called appurtenance or appartenance (cf. Seiler 1983, 2000), is still part of its meaning. The problem with that analysis is that it is incomplete and, moreover, that it is more appropriate to the earlier stages of the history of English than to Present-day English.

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Possessive adjectives as a source of intensifiers

In the present paper we will analyse the historical development of own from the past participle of the verb agan ‘to own’ to its modern meaning and use, a development which we regard as a clear case of grammaticalization. Since any diachronic account of a historical process can only be judged complete if its result is clearly captured, we will begin our story of own by describing its current meaning and use in as much detail as possible. We will then turn to the earlier stages, Old English and Middle English, leading up to the situation in Present-day English. . Between lexis and grammar: Late Modern English own The decisive breakthrough in the analysis of own came with the realization that this item was closely related to self -forms in English, that is, to both reflexive pronouns (John fancies himself ) and so-called emphatic pronouns, or, as we will refer to them, intensifiers (I would like to talk to the boss himself ). The actual content of these analyses, however, depended strongly on the kind of description proposed for such self -forms. The first to notice the connection between own and self -forms was Seppänen (1975), but his analysis did not have much impact on subsequent discussions, since it was couched in a framework which was outdated by the time his article was published. Subsequent discoveries of the connection took two different directions, emphasizing either (i) the relationship between own and the specific use of self -forms as reflexive pronouns (reflexive anaphors), or (ii) the relationship between own and self -forms used as intensifiers (emphatics). It is not our intention to give a full historical summary of these analyses and the order in which they were proposed. Instead, we will discuss these different interpretations and analyses systematically, together with the observations on which they are based. . Own as an anaphor A first major group of analyses is based on the observation that own and self -forms in English are closely related in the use of self -forms as (reflexive) anaphors. These analyses follow the general framework of Binding Theory (cf. Chomsky 1981). One of the principal insights of this theory is the observation that there is a certain complementarity in the distribution of personal pronouns (now called pronominals) and reflexive pronouns (now called reflexive anaphors): the former find their antecedent outside a local domain (i.e. not in the same clause), whereas the latter find their antecedents purely in this local domain (i.e. they “are bound”; Chomsky 1981: 218).2 . Accordingly, in a sentence like Mary thinks that Jane admires heri/*j /herself*i/j , only the subject of the subordinate clause (Jane) can be the antecedent of the following reflexive (herself ), and only the subject of the higher clause (Mary) can bind the personal pronoun (her).



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 Ekkehard König and Letizia Vezzosi

The common denominator in our first group is the view that own should also be regarded as a kind of reflexive anaphor or anaphoric atom (cf. Fiengo and Higginbotham 1981; Quirk et al. 1985; Hellan 1988; Burzio 1991; Saxon 1991; Safir 1995). Discussions surrounding the reasons for that claim have increased our knowledge of the syntactic and semantic properties of own enormously. In what follows, we will attempt to disentangle the different arguments put forward in support of an analysis of own as an anaphor and offer a critical assessment of each. a. Combinations of possessive pronoun + own cannot be used ostensively and so are not referentially free. Consider, for instance, how example (5b) is certainly awkward in a way that (5a) is not. (5) a. Take his coat not hers! (ostensive gesture) b. Take his own coat, not hers! (ostensive gesture) As far as we can see, the assumption that a pronoun accompanied by own is somehow contextually given in its reference and not established by a gesture seems to be basically correct. The conclusion that it is therefore a reflexive anaphor, however, is not a sound one. The deviance of (5b) seems to be due primarily to the nature of the contrasting item (alternative), as is shown by the following, much more acceptable, reformulation. (5) c. Take his own coat, not the one he borrowed from me. (ostensive gesture) d. This is my own book, not yours. (ostensive gesture) If the ostensive gesture seems out of place even here, this is due to the fact that the prosodic emphasis is on own rather than on his, as would normally be the case when the referent of a possessive pronoun is identified by a gesture. Note that the parallel example (5d) without ostensive gesture would be equally unusual. None of the peculiar uses of own with an accompanying ostensive gesture would indicate that a combination of possessive pronoun + own needs to be bound in some way. b. The second type of argument has to do more specifically with Principle A of Chomsky’s Binding conditions: “An anaphor is bound in its governing category” (Chomsky 1981: 218). There are several minimal pairs with and without own which suggest that a combination of possessive pronoun + own is more referentially dependent than the pronoun alone. Examples like (6) below show that a subject (John) is selected as antecedent, rather than an object or part of an object, and (7) suggests that his own cannot relate to an antecedent which does not govern it, i.e. John. Moreover, as is pointed out in Quirk et al. (1985: 363), a possessive pronoun + own selects the closest (understood) subject as an antecedent, as shown in (8).

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Possessive adjectives as a source of intensifiers 

(6) Johni seems to love his brotherj ’s dog more than [his own]i/*j son. (7) ?Johni ’s sister hates [his own]i dog. (8) The Housing Associationi are encouraging peoplej ej to buy [their own]*i/j houses. None of these structures, however, proves that own or its combination with a possessive pronoun is an anaphor, as demonstrated very convincingly by Zribi-Hertz (1995: 367–370). Given the right context, the co-indexations excluded in (7) and (8) become much more plausible: (9) My friendi already knew that Mary disliked animals, but hei has been taking tranquilizers since hei heard the awful news: Johnj ’s sister hates his ownj/i dog as well. (10) The developersi are encouraging peoplej to ej buy [their own]i/j houses. In other words, the indexations marked as correct in (6) and (7) are simply the ones which make most sense in those particular contexts. Even clearer evidence for the analysis of a possessive pronoun + own as a reflexive anaphor is provided by examples of the following kind, where the preferred reading has the subject as the antecedent of his own. (11) a. Sherer benefits from being his own coach [. . .] (www.mlive.com/sports/ aanews/index.ssf?/base/sports-1/1151505634138030.xml&coll=2) b. Ephraim was the dupe of his own scheming. (British National Corpus F9.1902.UK.40309) These examples are similar to reflexive structures. In fact, they are like reflexive structures with a focussed reflexive pronoun in English (John tricked HIMSELF), or like reflexive structures with a reinforced reflexive pronoun in languages like German (Johan hat sich selbst übertölpelt), in that they assert unexpected and thus remarkable reflexivity. Therefore, there can be no doubt about the default and highly relevant character of a reading where his own is bound by the subject, as in (11). The only question which remains is, is it the only possible one? In our opinion this question has to be answered negatively, since highly unlikely as other interpretations might be, they could be forced by a suitable context (cf. (12a)). Note, moreover, that a possessive pronoun accompanied by own may be free, i.e. anaphoric or cataphoric, just like any other use of the possessive pronoun (cf. (12b)). (12) a. N. Bollettieri does not want to become the coach of T. Haas’s brother, but he certainly does not mind being his own coach.3 b. His own dog bit George.

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 Ekkehard König and Letizia Vezzosi

c. Combinations of possessive pronoun + own in English may correspond to genuine reflexive possessives in other languages (e.g. sin in Scandinavian, suus in Latin, svoj in Russian, etc.). Consider (13). (13) Swedish a. Larsi tvättar sini bil. Lars clean.prs.3sg his.refl car ‘Lars is cleaning his (own) car.’ b. Larsi tvättar hansj bil. Lars clean.prs.3sg of.him car ‘Lars is cleaning his [i.e. somebody else’s] car.’ Genuine reflexive possessives, however, are subject-oriented as far as their possible antecedents are concerned. On the other hand, the combination of possessive pronoun + own may have the same overall effect and result in the same interpretation as a default case, but does so as a result of semantic and pragmatic rules (see Section 2.2 below). Other interpretations are possible with salient referents given in the context, so that these complex expressions are not part of the grammatical system of English.4 . Own as a pre-nominal intensifier The central point of the second group of analyses, discussed in varying detail by Moyne (1971), Cantrall (1973), Quirk et al. (1985), Baker (1995), König and Siemund (1996), König (1997) and Siemund (2000), inter alia, is that own is simply the counterpart of the intensifier X-self 5 in attributive positions. The most important elements of this argument are the following:

. Languages like German or Dutch, which have another type of possessive pronoun derived from demonstratives (German dessen), use this other pronoun in cases where co-reference with a more topical pronoun is not intended. Cf. the German counterpart of the English example (12a): N. Bollettieri möchte nicht den Bruder von T. Haas trainieren, aber er möchte durchaus dessen eigener Trainer sein. . Analogous phenomena can be observed with reflexive markers in certain argument positions in languages like German. Since there is no reflexive marker in German for the genitive case, the language has to resort to combinations of personal pronoun + intensifier in such cases. That does not mean, however, that we find genuine reflexive anaphors in cases like the following: Eine Stadt vergewisserte sich ihrer selbst ‘A city was making sure of its own position.’ . X-self or self-form is used to refer to expressions like myself, yourself, himself, herself, yourselves, etc. in adjunct positions, i.e. in examples like The Chancellor himself will address the meeting.

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Possessive adjectives as a source of intensifiers 

a. Own and intensifiers with -self are in complementary distribution. In contrast to many other languages, including Old English, Mandarin, Turkish and Bengali, the intensifier X-self is excluded from attributive positions in Present-day English. In Old English, for instance, genitive forms of seolf (sylf ) could be used before nouns and did in fact compete with the earlier form of own (agan) in such contexts (cf. König and Vezzosi 2006; Vezzosi 2006). (14) Old English [. . .] and syððan hit his discip(ul)um sealde to þicganne and then it.acc his disciple.dat.pl give.pst.3sg to consume for his sylfes lichaman and for his agan blod. for his self.gen body.acc and for his own.acc blood.acc ‘and then he gave it to his disciples to take and eat as if it were his own body and his own blood’ (Wulfstan, Policy 3 (Joselin) 17) b. Own can be paraphrased, in many cases at least, by expressions with self -forms or with stressed forms of personal or possessive pronouns.6 This implies a different syntax: the semantic contribution of own, attribute to the head noun phrase in sentence (15a), is realized by means of an adjunct in sentence (15b). Examples like these show that own and intensifiers of the type X-self are equivalent semantically, though different in their syntax. (15) a. We were even more surprised at the old man’s own death. (Seppänen 1975: 297) b. We were even more surprised by the death of the old man himself. c. Just like intensifiers with -self, own is always focussed and therefore stressed. In examples like (16a), the insertion of own seems to be essential, since the preceding pronoun (its), in contrast to his in (16b), cannot carry stress. (16) a. Poland is a free country, too free for its OWN good. b. John prefers Mary’s cat to HIS. d. The different uses generally distinguished for intensifiers have a clear parallel in examples with own as far as their semantic interpretation is concerned.7 As originally observed by Edmondson and Plank (1978), three uses of the intensifier . The fact that self -forms are not admissible as paraphrases of own in certain contexts may simply be a consequence of the fact that the relevant intensifiers cannot be combined with nonsubject pronouns in Standard English (cf. Did he deliver it into our own hands? – Did he deliver it into our hands (*into the hands of us ourselves?). . As noticed by one anonymous reviewer, syntactically speaking own always functions in adnominal constructions. Therefore, only the semantic criteria elaborated by Edmondson and Plank (1978) are relevant for its interpretation.

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 Ekkehard König and Letizia Vezzosi

self -form are usually distinguished on the basis of both formal criteria (adjacency to the noun phrase with which they agree, etc.) and semantic criteria, namely adnominal, adverbial inclusive and adverbial exclusive. These three uses can also be distinguished for own (cf. (17a–c) below). Given the distributional distinctions between own and the intensifiers ending in -self, the relevant paraphrases obviously involve some reordering. (17) a. We knew that Ellen’s daughter had left her husband. Then came the news that Ellen’s own marriage had ended in disaster. (adnominal use; ‘the marriage of Ellen herself ’) b. He always makes his own breakfast. (adverbial exclusive use, ‘alone;’ ‘He always makes breakfast himself ’) c. After her own brief imprisonment she showed more sympathy with the victims of the regime. (adverbial inclusive use, ‘too;’ ‘After she had herself been imprisoned’) e. The formal distinction between adnominal and adverbial intensifiers, on the one hand, and attributive ones, on the other, is purely coincidental. In a wide variety of languages (e.g. Turkish (kendi), Mandarin Chinese (ziji-de), Japanese (zibun-), Persian (xod-), Punjabi, Tamil, etc.), a single form – or, at least, very similar forms – is used in both adnominal-adverbial and attributive contexts. f. Finally, the inadmissibility of examples like those in (4), John lost his (*own) temper, etc., is easy to explain if own is analysed as an intensifier. Intensifiers are always focussed and thus evoke alternatives, but in (4) there are no alternatives available, that is, John cannot lose somebody else’s temper, head or mind. All of these arguments support an analysis of own analogous to that of adnominal intensifiers. Just like adnominal himself or herself, own can be analysed as expressing an identity function, as pointed out by Eckardt (2001) and Hole (2002). Applied to an example like (2b), These are Mary’s own children, where the intensifier is in construction with the genitive phrase Mary’s, all that own does is to map the referent of Mary onto the referent ‘Mary.’ However, such a contribution to the meaning of a sentence is trivial and it seems to be for precisely that reason that intensifiers are always focussed and therefore stressed. This focussing has the effect of evoking alternatives to the identity function. Applied to the value of the co-constituent of own, i.e. Mary, the alternatives are other possessors (i.e. parents) of the children. Since these alternatives are a function of ‘Mary,’ they must also be defined with the help of the value ‘Mary.’ Therefore, in our specific example (2b), plausible alternatives to the value of the constituent with which own interacts (Mary’s) are ‘the children of Mary’s neighbours’ or ‘the children Mary was asked

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to look after,’8 and so on. The assumption that own can forcefully express the notion of possession is the result of this focussing, of this evoking of alternatives and contrastive meanings for own. According to such an analysis, the function of own is a focalizing one, that is, it affirms a selection between referential alternatives. Therefore, if own still retains a sort of ‘possessivity,’ it is because of the possessive interpretation of the possessive pronoun or the genitive noun phrase to which it is bound. The other uses of own, exemplified in (17b–c), are therefore analysed analogously to whatever procedure is appropriate to the analysis of adverbial uses of self -forms. Interesting suggestions for such an analysis are detailed in Gast (2005). . Preliminary conclusion Zribi-Hertz (1995), whose arguments we have been following mainly in rejecting the view that a possessive pronoun + own should be analysed as an anaphor, does not opt for the directly opposing view of analysing these forms as intensifiers, but notes that the expression shares properties with both anaphors and intensifiers. Accordingly, she subsumes complex expressions like one’s own under the category of “focalized unspecified bindable expression” (UBE), together with French luimême and Old English hine+self(ne) (Zribi-Hertz 1995: 360). Furthermore, these expressions are characterized as being endophoric, that is, their antecedent must be sought in their discourse context. As pointed out above, the closest subject may be the most salient of all the possible antecedents, or even the only one, but the right context may force or, at least, suggest another reading. For reasons which may be inferred from the preceding discussion, and which we cannot elaborate on in any greater detail in this paper, we do not share her view in relation to this compromise. We regard own and its counterparts in other languages as a straightforward case of an intensifier coming to fill a gap in the distribution of the adnominal and adverbial intensifiers. In other words, it is an attributive intensifier which has been conditioned by the historical developments which will be discussed in the following sections. As such, the status of own falls somewhere between the system of lexical expressions and that of grammatical expressions. Its highly abstract meaning (expressing an identity function) and the tight restrictions on its syntax, as well as its integration into the paradigm or lexical field of intensifiers, make this expression a functional category or function word which has undergone significant changes from its earlier meaning and use as a de-verbal adjective derived from a verb of possession. . Note that in (17a) the alternative evoked by own in combination with the possessor phrase Ellen is specified in the preceding context: ‘Ellen’s daughter.’



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. Present-day English own and Old English agen: Relatedness and divergence The Present-day English form own derives etymologically from the Old English word agen, which has often been described as an emphatic adjective (cf. Farr 1905; Mossé 1952; Campbell 1959; Mitchell 1985). By emphatic adjectives we mean items that “intensify the noun or the pronoun they modify by redundancy, that is, they restate a concept which is already expressed elsewhere” (Ingersoll 1978: 204). Formally, however, Old English agen is the reconstructed past participle of the Old English verb agan ‘possess,’ and, functionally, it coincides only in part with Present-day English own. The divergence is probably due to their different morphological status and meaning. . Specific properties of Old English agen We can attempt to retrace its original meaning on the basis of a comparison with other lexemes derived from the same stem as agen. Even if the relatedness with agan ‘possess, own’9 is not fully conclusive, the comparison with forms derived from agen is quite illuminating: the de-adjectival verb agnian/ægnian is glossed as ‘to possess,’ but also ‘to prove or claim as one’s own.’ Its past participle geagenud means ‘adopted,’ that is, ‘what is owned, possessed by law,’ and the abstract noun agnung indicates both ‘ownership’ and ‘declaration or proof of ownership.’ All these items, then, clearly imply both ‘possession’ and, moreover, ‘legal or rightful possession.’10 Unlike Present-day English own, Old English agen cannot completely exclude this semantic implication in that it can also be used to express what ought to be owned, what is ‘owned as of right,’11 as in (18a), and not merely what someone possesses, as in (18b).

. Like habban ‘have,’ agan belongs to the class of possession predicates (cf. Schendel 1992), which express a state of possession. . This analysis of agen as an adjective denoting possession is further supported by cognate expressions in other Germanic languages. The cognate form eigen in Modern German is related to Eigentum ‘possessions,’ sich aneignen ‘to take possession of,’ enteignen ‘to dispossess,’ sich eignen ‘to lend oneself to’ and eigentlich ‘basically,’ to mention only a few examples. . Agan thus expresses a normative component, in addition to the notion of possession. This semantic component plays a significant role in the development of ought to into a modal auxiliary. A similar combination of normative and possessive components can be observed in the German verb gehören (lit. ‘belong to’), which contrasts with besitzen in precisely this respect. In certain constructions the possessive component has weakened and the normative one is clearly dominant: Pauls Haare gehören geschnitten ‘Paul’s hair ought to be cut;’ Das gehört sich nicht ‘That is not done;’ Du gehörst ins Bett/zu Arbeit/in die Schule ‘You should be in bed/at work/at school.’

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Possessive adjectives as a source of intensifiers 

(18) Old English a. Forðæm, ðonne ðonne we ðæm ðearfum hiera therefore then when we the.dat.pl poor.dat.pl of.them neidðearfe sellað, hiera ægen we him need.acc.pl give.prs.ind.pl of.them own.acc.sg we they.dat sellað, nalles ure. give.prs.ind.pl neg.at.all ours.acc.sg ‘Therefore, whenever we give the poor what they need, we give them but their due, not at all ours.’ (Cura Pastoralis 45.337.23) b. He ne mæg his agne aberan, and he.nom not can his own.acc.sg.n bear.inf and wolde ðeah maran habban [. . .] want.pst.ind.3sg nevertheless more have.inf ‘He cannot bear his own [his possession], and nevertheless wanted to have more’ (Gregory the Great, Dialogi, Prefatio 7.53.1) Examples such as (18a–b), and to an even greater extent those in (19), show that agen was already used contrastively, that is, as a means of evoking alternatives to what is possessed. In (19) and also in (18) – albeit less obviously – those alternatives are contextually given. It is therefore quite plausible to assume that agen was already prosodically prominent in such examples. (19) Old English a. Æfter þæm eall þeos worold geceas after that all this.nom.sg world.nom.sg choose.pst.ind.3sg Agustes frið and his sippe [...] þæt hie his August.gen peace and his family that they his underþeowas wurden: ne ferþan þætte subject.nom.pl become.pst.ind.3pl not therefore comp ænigum folce gelicade his ægenu every.dat.sg folk.dat.sg please.pst.ind.3sg of.him own.nom.sg æ to healdenne, buton on þa wisan þe law.nom.sg to hold.infl except in the.acc.pl way.acc.pl rel Agustus bebead. Augustus.nom order.pst.ind.3sg ‘After that the entire world chose Augustus’s peace and his family that they became his subjects: therefore it did not happen that every people obeyed the law belonging to them, but according to the way Augustus ordered.’ (Orosius, Historiae adversum paganos, 15.132.8)

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b. Fela spella him sædon þa many.acc.pl story.acc.pl of.him say.pst.ind.3pl the.nom.pl Beormas ægþer ge of hiera agnum lande ge Beorm.nom.pl both and of.them own.dat.sg land.dat.sg and of þæm landum þe ymb hie utan of the.dat.pl land.dat.pl rel around they outside wæron ac he nyste hwæt þæs be.pst.ind.3pl but he neg.know.pst.ind.3sg what the.gen.sg soþes wæs [...] true.gen.sg be.pst.ind.3sg ‘The Beormes told him many stories both about the land belonging to them and about the land they were close to, but he did not know what was true.’ (Orosius, Historiae adversum paganos, 1.14.27) How this focussing and, thus, contrastive use of agen developed cannot be deduced from the available historical data. It is only on the basis of an accurate synchronic reconstruction that we can hope to achieve some insight into the process. A reconstruction of this nature would take roughly the following form: in a context of a possessive pronoun, agen (like Present-day English own) selects a subset B from a basic set A of things possessed, and opposes it to the set-theoretical complement of B with respect to A. The effect can be observed with any restrictive modifier (e.g. his black shirt), though not all pre-nominal adjectives are restrictive. The adjectives most similar to agen and own in English are personal and private, which display the same effect of contrast through the selection of subsets like own in the context of a preceding possessive pronoun (cf. (19c–d) below). (19) c. This is my personal copy of the book. d. He made some notes for his private use. Note that both personal and private are focussed in these examples and select subsets from a basic set of possessa.12 The collocations in which agen occurs throw additional light on the meaning of agen, since these occurrences clearly appear to be sensitive to the prototypicality of the possessive relationship (cf. Heine 1997) encoded in the preceding genitive noun phrase. Thus, a search analysis based on the Helsinki Corpus shows that in nine out of ten cases, the genitive noun phrases or pronouns refer to humans. Moreover, the relation between the head noun phrase and the referent of the pos. We are not claiming, of course, that personal, private and own are synonymous. Note, for example, the following subtle differences between these three similar lexemes in the context of the noun life: my own life – as opposed to that of others, my private life – as opposed to my public life, my personal life – the choices I have made in my life.

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sessive corresponds either to the prototypical dimensions of possession (in a ratio of six out of ten) – property, kinship terms, part-whole relationships, as in (20a) – or to less prototypical ones (three out of ten instances), including psychological or physical properties, as in (20b). Much less frequently (in one out of ten instances), agen contrastively reasserts a more vague notion of possession, the already mentioned appurtenance (Seiler 1983, 2000), often in connection with abstract nouns, as in (20c). The low frequency of vague possessive relationships turns out to be even lower if we look at tokens as well as types: agen seems to be limited almost exclusively to such abstract nouns as willan/lust ‘will, desire,’ (ge)þonc ‘thought,’ (ge)ðeaht/dom ‘judgement,’ life/deaþ ‘life/death,’ þearf ‘need’ and geleafa ‘belief.’ (20) Old English a. Gif man mannan ofslea, agene if man.nom.sg man.acc.sg kill.pst.sbjv.3sg own.acc.sg scætte and unfacne feo money.acc.sg and unstained.acc.sg property.acc.sg gehwilce gelde. someone.dat.sg pay.pst.sbjv.3sg ‘If one killed a man, they paid their own money and unstained property to someone.’ (Anglo-Saxon Laws 30) b. On ðæm dagum Ulcinienses and Thrusci on the.dat.pl day.dat.pl Ulciniens.gen and Thruscus.gen ða folc forneah ealle forwurdon for hiora the.nom.pl folk almost all.nom.pl die.pst.ind.pl for of.them agnum dysige. own.dat.sg foolishness.dat.sg ‘On that day the Ulcinienses and Thrusci people almost all died because of their own foolishness.’ (Orosius, Historiae adversum paganos, 3.87.16) c. Ðæt is ðonne ðonne hie beoð that be.prs.ind.3sg then when they be.prs.ind.pl gefylled mid hiera ægnum geðeahte. fill.pst.ptcp with of.them own.dat.sg counsel.dat.sg ‘That is the time when they will be filled with their own counsel.’ (Cura Pastoralis 42.306.10) .. Semantic and functional extension of Old English agen Even in Old English the use of agen represents more than a mere reinforcement of the possessive relationship between the possessive pronoun and the head noun. There is a gradual extension from contexts where the alternatives evoked by agen

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are given explicitly (19a–b) to contexts where they are given only implicitly, that is, not mentioned in the context following, as in (21a) below. (21) Old English a. Witodlice se mæssepreost of þære certainly the.nom.sg mass-priest.nom.sg from the.dat.sg tide þe he þone had underfeng time.dat.sg rel he the.acc.sg office.acc.sg accept.pst.ind.3sg wæs lufigende his wæscestran swa be.pst.ind.3sg love.prs.ptcp of.him house-keeper.acc.sg so swa his agne swuster [...] as of.him own.acc.sg sister “Certainly the high-priest, in that time when he received the office, loved his house-keeper as much as his own sister.” (Gregory the Great, Dialogi, Prefatio, 12.275.27) b. Ac manigra manna gewuna is but many.gen.pl man.gen.pl custom.nom.sg be.prs.ind.3sg ðæt hie hie mid ðissum wordum comp they they.acc with this.dat.pl word.dat.pl ladiað and cueðað: We brucað defend.prs.ind.pl and say.prs.ind.pl we use.prs.ind.pl ures ægnes, ne gitsige we nanes oðres we.gen.sg own.gen.sg not desire we none.gen.sg other.gen.sg monnes. man.gen.sg ‘But it is custom of many men that they defend themselves with these words and say: we make use of our own [what rightfully belongs to us], we do not desire that of any other man.’ (Cura Pastoralis, 45.337.18) Quite similarly to Present-day English own, Old English agen seems to establish co-reference between a preceding possessive pronoun and the subject. In the case of agen, however, this turns out to be merely a side effect of the fact that there is no other antecedent for the possessive pronoun. This is shown by the following two examples, which are remarkable also because their counterparts in Present-day English would have a stress on both own and on the noun phrase following it. Like the examples given in (11) for Present-day English, these cases imply unexpected and thus remarkable co-reference (Levinson 1991).

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(22) Old English a. [...] hi sculon eowian on hiora agnum they shall.prs.ind.pl show.inf on of.them own.dat.pl weorcum eall ðæt hi eft læran willð mid work.dat.pl all that they ever learn.inf will.prs.ind.pl with hiora wordum. of.them word.dat.pl ‘They shall show through their own works all that they afterwards will teach with their words.’ (Cura Pastoralis 64.461.24) b. Æfter þæm Xersis wearþ his agenre after that.dat.sg Xerses become.pst.ind.3sg of.him own.dat.sg þeode swiþe unweorþ [...] people.dat.sg very contemptible ‘After that Xerses became very contemptible even to the very people that belong to him.’ (Orosius, Historiae adversum paganos, 2.5.84.23) .. Syntactic properties of agen in Old English Unsurprisingly, the available texts point up the syntactic properties of Old English agen much more clearly than its semantic ones. Unlike Present-day English own, Old English agen behaves like an adjective: it is used both predicatively (though not frequently) and, more typically, in attributive position. In the latter use, it can precede a noun with which it agrees in number, case and gender (see examples (22a–b) above), or follow an indefinite pronoun, in which case it is inflected for the genitive case, as in (23a). Like any other adjective, it can be preceded by a determiner, a possessive pronoun (cf. (22a–b)), a genitive noun phrase and a definite article. If unmodified, agen generally triggers a non-referential reading of its head noun phrase, or refers to a generic possessor, as in (20a) above. (23) Old English a. Be þæm is swiðe sweotol þæt about that.dat.sg be.prs.ind.3sg very clear comp ða rican on þæm woruldwelan the.nom.pl rich.nom.pl on the.dat.sg world.property nabbað nænne sundorcræft; ac neg.have.prs.ind.pl none.acc.sg wonder.power.acc.sg but him bið se wela utane he.dat be.prs.ind.3sg the.nom.sg richness from.outside cumen and ne mæg utane nauht agnes come.pst.ptcp and not may from.outside nothing own.gen.sg habban. have.inf

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‘Therefore it is absolutely clear that the rich do not have any exceptional power on the worldly possessions; but richness has come to him from outside and he cannot have anything of his own from outside.’ (Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae, 27.62.32) b. [. . .] ða wolde he hit habban him to then will.pst.ind.3sg he it have.inf he.dat to agnum anwalde [. . .] own.dat.sg control.dat.sg ‘Then he wanted to have it under his own control’ (Cura Pastoralis, 17.121.18) . The development of Old English agen in Middle and Early Modern English During the Middle English period, ouen13 displays fewer (if any) restrictions with regard to its head noun: in Late Middle English (cf. Mustanoja 1960) the expression even modifies gerunds (example (24a)), a context from which Old English agen was excluded. In this situation, ouen cannot possibly express any idea of possession in the strict sense of the term, but relates the referent of the possessor to the possessum in the abstract manner characteristic of the genitive case. For the same reason it is only acceptable for Middle English ouen to be combined with genitive noun phrases or pronouns whose referents are not human (cf. (24b)). (24) Middle English a. The Chief Justice [. . .] is right sory of þe matier þat is cause of your noun [= own] comyng hedir. ‘The Chief Justice is very sorry for the matter that is the reason of your own coming here.’ (1444, Paston 2.13) b. Fro þe same liuer gone furþe weyes and neckes beringe þe superfluites off þe forseide digestioun to her owne places. ‘From the same liver further ways and necks depart bearing the superfluities produced by the above-mentioned digestion to their own places.’ (1398, Chauliac 3) While in many instances Middle English ouen still reinforces the relationship between a genitive noun phrase or a pronoun and its head noun, by Early Modern English own seems already to have acquired a certain independence from its head noun phrase, but more evidently so in Late Modern English, and forms a seman. We use the form ouen to cover all the orthographic variants of the word, such as awen, owen, aŠen, oŠen, etc.

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tically and formally indivisible cluster with the preceding genitive noun phrase or pronoun. This happens with complex predicates, as in example (25a) below, where their own butchers and poulteres are not just opposed to somebody else’s butchers, but their own contrasts gentlemen with somebody else, and the meaning of the entire sentence is paraphrasable as ‘Gentlemen, who in the game season become themselves butchers and poultry specialists.’ The analogy with the adnominal intensifier goes even further: own modified by a possessive pronoun can occur alone without a nominal head, manifesting a behaviour similar to that of intensifying self -forms, as becomes evident in example (25b), where the sentence means only that ‘he finally came to himself.’ It is precisely at this time, namely in Late Modern English, that we start finding instances of own in the exclusive or inclusive adverbial uses, as illustrated in (25c). (25) Late Modern English a. Gentlemen, who in the game-season [. . .] become their own butchers and poulteres. (Windham, Sp.Parl. 18 Apr.) b. In Cambridge he finally came into his own as teacher and colleague even more than as editor of the Cambridge Modern History [. . .] (muse.jhu.edu/journals/victorian_studies/v044/44.1altholz.html) c. Cherishing it into a small fire, we boiled our own chocolate, the cook being ill. (Hoffmeister’s Trav. Ceylon & India) In these contexts, own has relinquished most of its implications of possession and interacts semantically with the referent of the genitive noun phrase in a way not dissimilar to the adnominal intensifier, both of them expressing an identity function. Syntactically, what were just tendencies in Old English (cf. Fischer 2000) become compulsory in Middle English: first of all, the clear preference for agen to be modified by a genitive noun phrase or pronoun develops into a fixed construction [possessive (pronoun or noun phrase) + ouen] and, consequently, ouen comes to occupy a fixed post-determiner position in the noun phrase. There are still occasional instances of ouen without a determiner, as illustrated by example (26a) below, an option no longer available by Early Modern English, where for non-referential noun phrases and/or noun phrases modified by a quantifier or indefinite article, the only alternative is the so-called double genitive construction, as in (26b). (26) Middle English a. Mid oŠen zuorde man may him-zelue sle [. . .] ‘By means of his own word one may kill himself.’ (Ayenbite 48/25) b. [...] he ne hath nouŠt of his owene to helpe hym self with. (HC; The Gild of St. Fabian and Sebastian Aldergate)

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. From agen to (his) own The change from Old English agen to Present-day English (his) own involves changes in both meaning and distribution, and can be regarded as a case of grammaticalization. Even if the development does not include all the parameters identified by Lehmann (1982, 1995),14 we certainly find semantic bleaching (from rightful and legitimate possession to all kinds of possessive relations), contextual generalization (from more to less prototypical possession), decategorization (loss of adjectival properties), and the development of syntagmatic dependencies (restriction to preceding possessive pronouns). What we do see, therefore, is a change from a less grammatical item (adjective) into a more grammatical item (intensifier expressing an identity function) or, more precisely, from a possessive adjective to an intensifier. The grammaticalization process affecting agen must already have been in full swing in Old English, if we accept Hopper’s (1991) view that layering is a sign of the emergence of new grammatical forms or constructions (see also Heine 2003). Combinations of sylf and agen like those in (27a–b) are frequently attested in Old English, so that agen must already have been replacing the Old English intensifier self in that period. (27) Old English a. Se Hælend [. . .] is gehaten the.nom.sg Saviour be.prs.ind.3sg name.pst.ptcp Word [...] and he sylf cwæð forði þæt Word and he self say.pst.ind.3sg therefore comp seo spræc nære þe he þa the.nom.sg language neg.be.pst.ind.3sg rel he then spræc to him his sylfes agen spræc, speak.pst.ind.3sg to he.dat of.him self.gen.sg own language ac his Fæder spræc [. . .] but of.him father.gen.sg language ‘The Saviour is called Word and he himself said henceforth that the language that he then spoke to them was not his own language, but his Father’s language.’ (Ælfric, Homilies 10.67) b. [...] he hine þa forlet to his agnes he he.acc.sg then let.pst.ind.3sg to of.him own.gen.sg sylfes dome [. . .] self.gen.sg judgement.dat.sg ‘He let him (go) to his own judgement.’ (Gregory the Great, Dialogi, 1.13.16) . We refer here to the four classic parameters of semantic reduction, context generalization, decategorization and attrition (Lehmann 1982).

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Possessive adjectives as a source of intensifiers 

The change of agen into (his) own is clearly not the result of metaphorical transfer, but more one of conventionalizing conversational implicatures and strengthening informativeness (cf. Traugott and König 1991). The primary contexts in which the use of Old English agen is relatively stable and syntagmatically predictable belong to the semantic field of possession. Reassertion of the possessive relationship in terms of rightfulness or legitimacy, in the context of a preceding possessive pronoun, amounts to singling out a subset of things possessed which may be opposed to the set-theoretic complement relative to a basic set: my rightfully possessed items as opposed to other items. Where agen follows a possessive pronoun of the same person as a preceding subject, it may also trigger unexpected co-reference between the possessive marker and the subject of the clause, as in the Presentday English example John betrayed his own family, where his is more likely to be interpreted co-referentially with John, as happens in the corresponding example without own. During the Middle English period, ouen increased its syntactic scope and came to be associated more and more frequently with less prototypical possession or more generally with appurtenance, that is, those relations expressed by the objective and the subjective genitive. Syntactic extension of this kind favours the conventionalization of pragmatic meanings implied in certain contexts. The contrastive quality originally associated with the notion of possession in certain contexts comes to be generally associated with most, and then all, uses of own as a result of a metonymic change (X betrayed the people he belonged to > X betrayed his own people): agen as a means of identifying X becomes a means of evoking alternatives to X, analogously to the adnominal intensifier. It is not the single lexeme that becomes grammaticalized, but the entire construction possessive + agen (cf. Bybee 2003): agen loses its morphological status as a free adjective (cf. decategorization) along with its possessive meaning (semantic reduction), and ouen/own ends up forming an inseparable cluster with its preceding determiner, either a genitive noun phrase or a possessive pronoun. The segment his [agen noun] is then re-analysed as [[his agen] noun] and integrated into the paradigm of intensifiers, functioning as the genitive form of himself (cf. Vezzosi 2002). In terms of possessive meaning the expression retains only as much as is needed to be compatible with these possessive determiners. If we do not observe all the hallmarks of grammaticalization in this case, it is mainly due to the fact that own is invariably focussed and thus stressed, and under such conditions of focal stressing, phonological or morphological attrition, another parameter of grammaticalization, cannot be expected to occur.15 . As pointed out by one anonymous reviewer, Lehmann himself, in his talk at New Reflections on Grammaticalization 3 (Santiago de Compostela, July 2005), claimed that only non-focal material may be grammaticalized (cf. Lehmann, this volume).

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. Conclusion The foregoing discussion has shown that the development of agen to (his) own is clearly an instance of grammaticalization presenting some of the parameters identified in the literature, namely semantic bleaching, decategorization and increase in pragmatic and syntactic scope (cf. Traugott and Heine 1991; Tabor and Traugott 1998; Hopper and Traugott 2003). Given the prosodic prominence that Presentday English own has and that agen must have acquired at some point in time, it is not possible to demonstrate the process in detail on the basis of textual material, only to reconstruct it synchronically on the basis of plausible analogies. As is well-known, changes in prosody and focus marking cannot be observed from written texts. Note, moreover, that our analysis of own (like that of other intensifiers) suggests that the widespread assumption that only unfocussed and unstressed material can be grammaticalized should be reconsidered or even abandoned. The change described above is a pervasive tendency observable throughout Europe and beyond. The development outlined for English own has clear parallels in a wide variety of other languages, notably in other Germanic languages (cf. Norwegian egen) and in Romance (Italian proprio, French propre), where prenominal intensifiers are also different from their adnominal counterparts and also derive from a lexical stem expressing ‘possession.’ Further parallels have also been found among Khoisan languages, where the pronominal system for the third person is identical to the corresponding intensifiers and derives from a lexical stem expressing possession (cf. Güldemann 2002).16 These numerous parallels in other languages require a general explanation. Is this coincidence due to common Latin and/or Greek models17 or does it conform to a wider or even universal tendency? We believe that these parallels correspond to a general tendency for the reasons propounded below. Firstly, all languages have intensifiers with several uses (cf. König and Gast 2006), and intensifiers typically evoke alternatives to the referent of the noun phrase which they modify. Moreover, it is well known that, crosslinguistically, intensifiers typically derive from expressions for body parts and that the more abstract meaning described for intensifiers develops from these concrete meanings as a result of a metaphorical change. Since people are also the prototypical possessors, it is not surprising that they should be contrasted with contextual alternatives too. In the latter case, the abstract meaning of the intensifier develops through metonymic transfer roughly along the following lines: POSSESSION > APPUR. See also Heine et al. (1993: 163), according to whom the Swahili and Baka languages use a nominal lexeme ‘owner’ to form the intensifier ‘himself.’ . For a more detailed discussion of the topic, see Vezzosi (2006).

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Possessive adjectives as a source of intensifiers 

TENANCE > SUBSET RELATION > EVOKING OF ALTERNATIVES (through emphatic assertion of identity). Evidence for our hypothesis also comes from the well-attested relationship between attributive and adnominal intensifiers or reflexive anaphors: some languages use the adnominal intensifier attributively (Italian, Mandarin, Japanese), whereas a number of others develop a special intensifier just for the possessive context (most European languages). An additional group develops their reflexive anaphor from an originally attributive intensifier: regional varieties of Dutch are a case in point (e.g. Hij wast zijn eigen ‘he washes himself ’).18 If our analysis is correct, attributive intensifiers could also be expected to be further reinforced by other emphatic elements. This is exactly what we find is happening, not only in English, as illustrated in (28a–c), but in many other European languages, as shown in (29a) and (29b–c) for Italian and German respectively. (28) a. The following is my own personal opinion and from my own experience. (www.fabrisia.com/mythoughts.htm) b. I am well on my way to making the Apple Store my very own personal office. (www.atpm.com/11.05/segments.shtml) c. My very own name is a beautifully illustrated, personalized book that helps children learn better and spell their name. (www.iseeme.com/oriveownna.htm) (29) a. Italian Pacifista radicale [. . .] Chomsky resta un aguerrito pacifist radical Chomsky remain.prs.ind.3sg a tough avversario del suo proprio stesso paese. opponent of his.sg.m own.sg.m self.sg.m land ‘As a radical pacifist Chomsky is still a tough opponent of his very own country.’ (www.ilsole24ore.com/fc?cmd=art&codid=20.0) b. German Ich habe das Template auf meinen I have.prs.ind.1sg the template on my.acc.sg.m eigenen privaten Internetseiten ausprobiert. own.acc.sg.m private.acc.sg.m Internet.page.pl try.pst.ptcp ‘I tried out the template on my very own Internet pages.’ (www.joomlaportal.de/mambo-templates/7579-Tabelle-wird-nichtihrem-platz-angezeigt.html) . Intensifiers are known to play a major role in the development, reinforcement and renovation of reflexive pronouns or markers, without being anaphors in all cases. In this case, it is the attributive intensifier that shows up as a reflexive marker.

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c. German Das ist in deinem ureigensten Interesse. that be.prs.ind.3sg in your.dat.m very.best.dat.sg interest ‘That is in your own best interest.’ Examples like the preceding suggest that own and its counterparts in German and Italian have not only lost most of their original possessive meanings but are even losing some of their emphatic quality as attributive intensifiers. As a result both of these aspects will frequently be reinforced by elements whose development was quite similar to that of own.

Abbreviations 1 3 acc comp dat f gen ind inf infl m

first person third person accusative complementizer dative feminine genitive indicative infinitive inflection masculine

n neg nom pl prs pst ptcp refl rel sbjv sg

neuter negation nominative plural present past participle reflexive relative subjunctive singular

References Baker, Carl Leroy. 1995. Contrast, discourse prominence, and intensification, with special reference to locally free reflexives in British English. Language 71: 63–101. Burzio, Luigi. 1991. The morphological basis of anaphora. Journal of Linguistics 27(1): 1–60. Bybee, Joan L. 2003. Mechanisms of change in grammaticization: The role of frequency. In Brian D. Joseph & Richard D. Janda (eds.), Handbook of historical linguistics, 602–623. Oxford: Blackwell. Campbell, Alistair. 1959. Old English grammar. Oxford: Clarendon. Cantrall, William R. 1973. Why I would relate own, emphatic reflexives, and intensive pronouns, my own self. Chicago Linguistics Society 9: 57–67. Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris. Eckardt, Regine. 2001. Reanalysing selbst. Natural Language Semantics 9(4): 371–412. Edmondson, Jerold A. & Frans Plank. 1978. Great expectations: An intensive self analysis. Linguistics and Philosophy 2: 373–413. Farr, James M. 1905. Intensives and reflexives in Anglo-Saxon and Early Middle English. Baltimore MD: J.H. Furst. Fiengo, Robert & James Higginbotham. 1981. Opacity in NP. Linguistic Analysis 17: 395–421.

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Fischer, Olga. 2000. The position of the adjective in Old English. In Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, David Denison, Richard M. Hogg & Christopher B. McCully (eds.), Generative theory and corpus studies, 153–182. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Gast, Volker. 2005. The grammar of identity. PhD dissertation, Freie Universität Berlin. Güldemann, Tom. 2002. Die Entlehnung pronominaler Elemente des Khoekhoe aus dem !UiTaa. In Theda Schumann, Mechthild Reh, Roland Kießling & Ludwig Gerhardt (eds.), Aktuelle Forschungen zu afrikanischen Sprachen, 43–61. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe. Heine, Bernd. 1997. Possession: Cognitive sources, forces and grammaticalization. Cambridge: CUP. Heine, Bernd. 2003. Grammaticalization. In Brian D. Joseph & Richard D. Janda (eds.), Handbook of historical linguistics, 575–601. Oxford: Blackwell. Heine, Bernd, Tom Güldemann, Christa Kilian-Hatz, Donald A. Lessau, Heinz Roberg, Mathias Schladt & Thomas Stolz. 1993. Conceptual shift: A lexicon of grammaticalization processes in African languages. Afrikanische Arbeitspapiere 34(5). Hellan, Lars. 1988. Anaphora in Norwegian and the theory of grammar. Dordrecht: Foris. Hole, Daniel. 2002. Agentive selbst in German. In Graham Katz, Sabine Reinhard & Philip Reuter (eds.), Sinn und Bedeutung VI – Proceedings of the 6th Annual Meeting of the Gesellschaft für Semantik, Osnabrück, October 2001, 133–150. Osnabrück: Institute of Cognitive Science. Hopper, Paul J. 1991. On some principles of grammaticalization. In Elizabeth Closs Traugott & Bernd Heine (eds.), Approaches to grammaticalization, Vol I, 17–35. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hopper, Paul J. & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization. 2nd edn. Cambridge: CUP. Ingersoll, Sheila Most. 1978. Intensive and restrictive modification in Old English. Heidelberg: Winter. König, Ekkehard. 1997. Towards a typology of intensifiers. Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Linguists, Paris, July 1997. CD-Rom. Oxford: Pergamon. König, Ekkehard & Volker Gast. 2006. Focused assertion of identity. A typology of intensifiers. Linguistic Typology 10(2): 223–276. König, Ekkehard & Peter Siemund. 1996. Selbst-Reflektionen. In Gisa Harras (ed.), Wenn die Semantik arbeitet. Festschrift für Klaus Baumgärtner, 277–302. Tübingen: Niemeyer. König, Ekkehard & Letizia Vezzosi. 2006. On the historical development of attributive intensifiers. In Andrew J. Johnston, Ferdinand von Mengden & Stefan Thim (eds.), Language and text. Current perspectives on English and Germanic historical linguistics and philology, 151–168. Heidelberg: Winter. Lehmann, Christian. 1982. Thoughts on grammaticalization. A programmatic sketch. Vol. 1 [Arbeiten des Kölner Universalien-Projekts 48]. Cologne: Universität zu Köln, Institut für Sprachwissenschaft. Lehmann, Christian. 1995. Thoughts on grammaticalization: A programmatic sketch. 2nd edn. Munich: Lincom. Levinson, Stephen C. 1991. Pragmatic reduction of the binding conditions revisited. Journal of Linguistics 27: 107–161. Mitchell, Bruce. 1985. Old English syntax. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon. Mossé, Ferdinand. 1952. Handbook of Middle English. Translation by James A. Walker. Baltimore MD: John Hopkins. Moyne, John A. 1971. Reflexive and emphatic. Language 47(1): 141–163. Mustanoja, Tauno F. 1960. A Middle English syntax. Part 1: Parts of speech [Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki XXIII]. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.

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Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman. Safir, Ken. 1995. Semantic atoms of anaphora. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 14: 545– 589. Saxon, Leslie. 1991. On one’s own: The semantics and pragmatics of reflexives. In Roberta L. Ishihara & Carol P. Georgopolis (eds.), Interdisciplinary approaches to language: Essays in honour of S.-Y. Kuroda, 501–517. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Schendel, Herbert. 1992. A valency description of Old English possessive verbs. In Matti Rissanen, Ossi Ihalainen, Terttu Nevalainen & Irma Taavitsainen (eds.), History of Englishes: New methods and interpretations on historical linguistics, 418–436. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Seiler, Hansjakob. 1983. Possession as an operational dimension of language. Tübingen: Narr. Seiler, Hansjakob. 2000. Language universals research: A synthesis. Tübingen: Narr. Seppänen, Aimo. 1975. On the Modern English ‘adjective’ own. Anglia 93: 293–306. Siemund, Peter. 2000. Intensifiers: A comparison of English and German. PhD dissertation, Freie Universität Berlin. Tabor, Whitney & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 1998. Structural scope expansion and grammaticalization. In Anna Giacalone Ramat & Paul J. Hopper (eds.), The limits of grammaticalization, 229–272. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Bernd Heine (eds.). 1991. Approaches to grammaticalization, 2 vols. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Ekkehard König. 1991. The semantics-pragmatics of grammaticalization revisited. In Elizabeth Closs Traugott & Bernd Heine (eds.), Approaches to grammaticalization. Vol I, 189–218. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Vezzosi, Letizia. 2002. Some observation on agen: Towards a semantic interpretation. In Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Studies in English historical linguistics and philology, 433–450. Bern: Peter Lang. Vezzosi, Letizia. 2006. From agen to his own. In Nikolaus Ritt, Herbert Schendl, Christiane Dalton-Puffer & Dieter Kastovsky (eds.), Medieval English and its heritage. Structure, meaning and mechanisms of change [Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature 16], 147–164. Bern: Peter Lang. Zribi-Hertz, Anne. 1995. Emphatic or reflexive? On the endophoric character of French luimême and similar complex pronouns. Journal of Linguistics 31: 333–374.

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Information structure and grammaticalization* Christian Lehmann University of Erfurt

This contribution investigates the interaction and mutual dependency between information structure and grammaticalization. With examples taken from, among others, cleft sentences and relative constructions in Ancient Greek, French, Latin and Yucatec Maya, the study shows how decisions made at the level of information structure condition the course of grammaticalization at various syntactic levels, and how, on the other hand, grammaticalization levels out contrasts of information structure.

.

Introduction

The slogan “from discourse to syntax” (Sankoff and Brown 1976; Givón 1979) has been with us since the early days of work on grammaticalization. The genesis of grammar – firstly, syntax – out of pre-grammatical, textual structure has come to represent one of the corner-stones of the theory of grammaticalization. Among the topics which have received much attention in this regard are the grammaticalization of topic to subject (Shibatani 1991) and the condensation of combinations of sentences into one (Hackstein 2004). In this contribution, the focus will be on the information structure (alias functional sentence perspective) which obtains at the higher levels of grammatical structure. The issue is twofold: on the one hand, information structure is present in the source constructions which undergo grammaticalization and may direct their course; on the other, information structure is itself susceptible of grammaticalization. We will supply empirical evidence for the following theses: (i) information structure is part of grammatical structure. Consequently, it may come about by grammaticalization, may show different degrees of grammaticalization and may dissolve by grammaticalization; (ii) the grammaticalization of any other element or construction may be conditioned by the information structure assigned to it. * I thank Knud Lambrecht for helpful criticism of a draft version.

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 Christian Lehmann

. Basic notions of information structure . The nature of information structure The information structure of a sentence1 concerns the way in which the content of propositions is packaged in discourse depending on the speaker’s assessment of the current state of the universe of discourse. Information structure is part of linguistic structure, that is, it has structural and functional aspects. As a functional domain, information structure comprises the following subdomains: a. Presupposition vs. assertion of propositions (known vs. not yet known). b. Identifiability and activation of referents (status of mental representations in the addressee’s mind, from active to brand-new unanchored). c. Topic vs. focus status of elements of propositions (predictability vs. unpredictability of relations between propositions and their elements). The structural aspects are twofold. First, the propositions, predications and referents which are related in information structure are coded by lexical and grammatical means, which implies that any knowledge that speakers and hearers may entertain which is not thus coded in a sentence is irrelevant for its information structure. Second, some of the concepts of information structure may be grammaticalized in individual languages, which means that there may be grammatical markers that correspond more or less closely to certain functions of information structure. Here we will chiefly be concerned with the topic-focus articulation of a sentence (item (c) above). The other two subdomains – presuppositions and the status of referents in the awareness of interlocutors – will be mentioned in passing. A referent has the function of the topic of a proposition if, in that particular discourse, the proposition is about that referent (Lambrecht 1994: 127, 131). A proposition may be about more than one referent; thus, a sentence such as (1) below may have more than one topic. A topic must be in the universe of discourse; a topic expression must therefore be a referring expression. There is a Topic Accessibility Scale according to which a referent is better suited as a topic the more active it is in the awareness of the interlocutors. The typical topic expression is a clitic personal pronoun. Its position in the sentence is determined by its syntactic and semantic function, and is therefore not relevant to information structure.2 If a referent is not sufficiently active, it . The following conception essentially stems from Lambrecht (1994). . Lambrecht (1994: 202) argues that the position of pronominal expressions in the sentence tends to be fixed by rules of grammar and is therefore not amenable to functional explanations in terms of information structure.

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Information structure and grammaticalization 

has to be evoked by a lexical noun phrase. However, for it to be the topic of its clause would violate the Principle of the Separation of Reference and Role (PSRR, Lambrecht 1994: 185): “Do not introduce a referent and talk about it in the same clause.” In such cases, the topic is split into a left-dislocated noun phrase which announces the topic and a resumptive pronoun which represents the topic for the predication. The lexical noun phrase typically occupies the position preceding the initial sentence boundary. Constructions such as left-dislocation serve the purpose of making referents available as topics which would not, at that point in the discourse, be sufficiently high on the Topic Accessibility Scale and which, therefore, need special introduction.3 This syntactic separation obeys Lambrecht’s PSRR. Example (1) illustrates two things at once: first, a resumed topic which consists of the left-dislocated i bambini and the resumptive pronoun li; second, the two topics i bambini and quando piove. (1) Italian I bambini quando piove li portiamo a scuola in macchina. the children when rains them take.we to school in car ‘The kids, when it rains, we take them to school by car.’ (Banti 2005: 2) The meaning of a sentence is represented by a set of propositions that may be subdivided into presupposition and assertion. Given this, the focus may be defined (Lambrecht 1994: 213) as “the semantic component of a pragmatically structured proposition whereby the assertion [. . .] differs from the presupposition.”4 The focus is, thus, the central part of the assertion of a sentence, just as the topic is the central part of the presupposition. This is represented in Schema 1.

Schema 1. Central notions of information structure (Lambrecht 1994)

Both topic and focus may be contrastive. A construction with a contrastive topic X may be paraphrased by as for X. . ., while a construction with a contrastive focus X may be paraphrased by it is X that. . .. In (2), John and Paul are contrastive topics, Linda and Sue are contrastive foci. This is proved by the paraphrase test in (2’). . Left-dislocation serves “to promote a referent on the Topic Accessibility Scale from accessible to active status, from which point on it can be coded as a preferred topic expression, i.e. as an unaccented pronominal” (Lambrecht 1994: 183). . It would follow from this definition that the focus is that part of a sentence which is in the scope of such highest-level operators as illocutionary force, negation and quantification (Banti 2005: 3).

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 Christian Lehmann

(2) Who married whom? – John married Linda, and Paul married Sue. (2’) Who married whom? – As for John, it was Linda he married, while as regards Paul, it was Sue he married. At the same time, constructions such as these, which transcend the clause level, are often the input to the grammaticalization of topic and focus. . Relations between information structure and grammaticalization The two main sections of this paper (Sections 3 and 4 below) will be devoted to the interaction of information structure with grammaticalization. These two concepts belong to distinct theoretical levels, and their interaction is therefore no straightforward matter. Two entirely different kinds of interdependence between the two domains can be deduced from their nature. As seen in Section 2.1, information structure is a notion which has both functional/semantic and structural aspects, just as grammatical categories like tense, and syntactic functions like the indirect object. These categories and functions are subject to grammaticalization, that is, they can evolve and dissolve into something different through grammaticalization. Their genesis is semantically motivated, but the more they are grammaticalized, the more they become arbitrary components of language-specific grammatical structure. All of that applies, in principle, to the notions of information structure, too. The three dimensions enumerated in Section 2.1 are primarily universal communicative functions which may or may not be fulfilled in a language by particular grammatical structures, which may evolve and change by grammaticalization. The main difference between the notions underlying those grammatical categories and functions, on the one hand, and the notions underlying information structure, on the other, is that the former serve, exclusively or at least partially, the cognitive function of language, while the latter only serve the communicative function. Consequently, grammaticalization of these two main functional domains draws on different kinds of input. Items and constructions serving the cognitive function of language are recruited mainly among the lexical items of the language. By contrast, the temporal order of chunks of utterances reflecting the order of communication and prosody reflecting the relief of ongoing thought and argument are much more prominent in the genesis of constructions which serve the communicative function of language. Although formatives such as focus markers and topic markers do evolve by grammaticalization of lexical items, the evolution of basic formal structure – syntactic and morphological constructions with their sequential and prosodic properties – out of information structure is much more important in this regard. The grammaticalization of information structure will be the topic of Section 3.

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Information structure and grammaticalization

The second way in which information structure interacts with grammaticalization follows from the asymmetry constitutive of the three dimensions enumerated in Section 2.1. Each of these dimensions is bipolar, with one member prominent in speech and demanding the hearer’s attention, and the other providing the background. The first member is elaborated in linguistic expression, while the second may be reduced. In grammaticalization, then, the communicative asymmetry is reflected in syntactic dependence where pragmatically backgrounded material attaches to pragmatically foregrounded material. The conditioning of grammaticalization by information structure will be examined in Section 4.

. Grammaticalization of information structure . Contrastive-focus cleft-sentence .. Incipient grammaticalization The operations of information structure are highly abstract. They are concerned with the manipulation of the universe of discourse and of the flow of information into the mind of the hearer, not with concepts which denote a concrete thing.5 The grammatical means employed to mark information structure are therefore more subtle from the beginning. They are seldom recruited from among lexical items. In example (3), a new topic is announced explicitly by a circumlocution involving the lexical verb concern. Similarly, in (4), the extrafocal clause of a suspension focus is introduced by a lexical verb such as know or guess. (3) As far as the king of France is concerned, he is bald. (4) You know/Guess who is coming for dinner tonight: the king of France! Such verbs make explicit the relation of the referent to the predication or to the hearer’s consciousness. The constructions of (3) and (4) are not (yet) specific grammatical constructions assigned to a particular information structure. They do, however, share with the latter the immaterial features mentioned, namely order of components and prosody. In the following subsections, we will see the genesis of two kinds of cleft-sentence out of regular syntactic constructions. The most explicit syntactic strategy of contrastive focus is sentence-clefting. It involves the formation of a complex sentence of the structure of S3 in Schema 2.

. The relation of denotation is between a sign, including its concept, and a physical object. For instance, apple has a denotation while presupposition does not.



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 Christian Lehmann [ [ ∆ X ]S1 [ . . . ]S2 ]S3 expletive/zero subject non-verbal predicate focus expression extrafocal clause [ non-verbal clause ] [ open clause ] [ main clause ] [ dependent clause ]

Schema 2. Cleft-sentence

The subject of the main clause is semantically empty. It depends on the syntax of the language whether it requires an expletive subject there, just as it depends on the language whether it requires a copula with non-verbal predicates.6 If both are missing, the main clause of a cleft-sentence reduces to the focussed constituent. The extrafocal clause commonly takes the form of a complement clause subordinated by the universal subordinator ‘that.’ It is open in the sense that one of its arguments or satellites, namely X, is missing. The order of S1 and S2 is not crucial, though that shown is generally more common.7 The cleft-sentence is the grammatical construction functioning as argument focus construction in many languages, among them French, where it is practically the only construction available for that information structure, and Italian, where it is optional. The construction is partly motivated: it reflects the separation of focus and presupposition by a two-clause structure, and it reflects the attention cline between focus and presupposition by the asymmetric syntactic status of main clause and dependent clause. Finally, it puts the focus expression, and nothing else, into the predicate of the main clause, thus assigning the focus the canonical syntactic function for new information. However, not all aspects of the construction are motivated. Neither of the two clauses composing it has itself argument focus. Argument focus is, instead, a non-compositional semantic property of the ‘cleft-sentence’ grammatical construction as a whole (Lambrecht 1994: 230). In that respect, the cleft-construction evinces incipient grammaticalization. The notions articulating information structure which appear in Schema 1 are not autonomous components which could be identified with sentence constituents. Information structure is relational (cf. Lambrecht 1994): all of it is relative to a certain speech situation. The assertion is relative to its presupposition; something may be more or less topical; and the focus is the difference between presupposition and assertion. Two guiding principles follow from this: firstly, it is not possible for a particular component of information structure to be gram. The term non-verbal clause is intended to cover clauses both with a nominal and with a copula predicate. . This means that the distinction between clefting and pseudo-clefting is not made on the basis of clause order. Instead, the criterion is the nature of the extrafocal clause: in the case of pseudo-clefting, it is a free relative clause.

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Information structure and grammaticalization 

maticalized in isolation. What can be grammaticalized is a certain articulation of information structure. Secondly, grammaticalization of information structure means that pragmatic relations lose their specificity, differences between pragmatic components are levelled out. Thus, the topic cannot be grammaticalized, but the cline between topic and comment can be levelled out. Likewise, the difference between focus and presupposition can be smoothed out. In French, the focus cleft-sentence displays the structure of Schema 2. Although it is constructed according to high-level and general syntactic rules, it already exhibits some symptoms of grammaticalization. (5) French a. C’est qui? – Ce sont les étudiants. it.is who it are the students ‘Who is that? – Those are/It’s the students.’ b. C’est les étudiants qui ont raison. it.is the students who have reason ‘It’s the students who are right.’ In the simple copula sentence (5a), the verb agrees in number with its complement, while in the main clause of a cleft-sentence (5b) it does not. This points to a loss of grammatical differentiation, thus to some degree of grammaticalization of the cleft-sentence. .. The levelling of focality According to the “rule of accommodation for presupposition” (Lambrecht 1994: 67), if an expression requiring a certain presupposition is used, it forces that presupposition, that is, after the utterance the presupposed proposition enters the universe of discourse, whether the hearer had entertained that proposition previously or not. In other words, if the hearer did not entertain that proposition before, he is asked by the utterance to accommodate it. On the basis of the rule of accommodation, a presupposition may be conventionalized and grammaticalized.8 A cleft-sentence of the general structure [ [ ∆ is X ] [ extrafocal clause ] ] (cf. Schema 2) presupposes that the extrafocal clause applies to some Y and asserts that Y = X. By the rule of accommodation, a cleft-sentence may be used in a situation where the presupposition of the extrafocal clause is not shared. The audience is then asked to accommodate that presupposition. If that use of the construction becomes conventionalized, it becomes “an indirect way of communicating the content of that proposition” (Lambrecht 1994: 71). In a sentence such as (6),9 . The following account stems from Lambrecht (1994: 70–71). . Such examples are legion; cf. C’est Voltaire qui a dit: “Un lion mort ne vaut pas un moucheron qui repire.” (http://www.simimpact.com/, 10.07.05).

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 Christian Lehmann

(6) French C’est Jean-Paul Sartre qui a dit que l’homme était condamné it.is Jean-Paul Sartre who has said that the.man was condemned à inventer l’homme. to invent the.man ‘It’s Jean-Paul Sartre who said that man was doomed to invent man.’ (http://www.beurfm.net /forums/viewtopic.php, 8 June, 2004) there is nothing in the surrounding context to suggest that anybody actually said the proposition of the extrafocal clause. In view of the fact that pragmatic accommodation of the proposition presupposed by the extrafocal clause is conventionalized in the cleft-sentence, this construction becomes more grammaticalized10 and ceases always to code contrastive focus. . Presentational cleft-sentence The French presentational cleft-sentence codes an all-new utterance, as in (7). (7) French Y a le téléphone qui sonne! there has the telephone which rings ‘The telephone is ringing!’ (Lambrecht 1994: 194) In such an utterance, not only the predication on the referent, but the referent itself is new. The utterance therefore has to fulfil two functions at the same time, which should be separated via the PSRR. A rather explicit and iconic way of doing this is to introduce first the referent and then to make the relevant predication, and it is precisely this which underlies the French y a-cleft-construction in example (7) above. It consists of two clauses: first, an existence predication introduces the referent, and then a relative clause provides the predication. The subordination of the predication under the introduction of the referent calls attention to the fact that the latter is not a topic for the predication. Today this construction is grammaticalized in colloquial French (cf. Lambrecht 1994: 234). Symptoms of this include the following: (i) there is apparently an existence predication which, however, does not assert the existence of anything; (ii) the complement of the existence predication may be definite, as in (7); (iii) by structure and intonation, the relative clause

. Commenting on similar examples from Italian, Berretta (2002: Section 5.2) finds that the cleft-sentence is losing its focussing force. Hyman (1984: 80) generalizes that “languages, through their grammars, could ‘harness’ the pragmatics and create a formal system for focus.”

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looks like a restrictive one, but it could never be semantically restrictive given the definiteness of its antecedent.11 In this respect, the French presentational cleft-construction has been desemanticized. The two clauses are not construed separately and compositionally; instead, the first clause contributes only a referent, and the second a predication, to the unitary act of making a thetic statement. Again, like the focus cleft-sentence discussed above, the presentational cleft-sentence evinces incipient grammaticalization. . Reduction of emphasis Emphasis arises when there is a conflict between presupposition and assertion. One function of periphrastic do in English is to mark emphasis in this sense. Following Lambrecht (1994: 71–72), emphatic do in English is grammaticalized in three stages: a. Fully contrastive contradiction. Example (8) below involves a presupposition – ‘it is doubted that speaker paid addressee back’ – which is contradicted by the assertion. (8) I did pay you back. b. Attenuated contradiction. Example (9) involves a presupposition – ‘one might think that I did not even insult him.’ Once again, the assertion contradicts it but, as the presupposition itself is weaker, the contradiction is weaker, too. (9) I was afraid to hit him; I did insult him, though. c. Non-contradictory emphasis. Example (10) involves no presupposition to suggest that the speaker does not hope that the dog is for sale. There is just a weak emphasis on the verb, paraphrasable by I really hope. (10) I do hope that doggie’s for sale. (song line) As Lambrecht (1994: 72) puts it, “the emphatic do-construction has become a conventionalized grammatical way of expressing emphasis.” The semantic aspect of the grammaticalization through stages (a) to (c) is the gradual loss of a presupposition. The history of emphatic do is, thus, a story of the levelling of information structure.

. The antecedent of a restrictive relative clause is indeterminate (neither definite nor generic). In a restritive relative construction such as Le téléphone qui sonne ‘the telephone that is ringing,’ the antecedent of the relative clause is téléphone, not le téléphone (cf. Lehmann 1984: Ch. V.2). In (7), however, the antecedent of qui is actually le téléphone.

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. Information structure conditioning grammaticalization . Relative clauses A textual combination of two clauses can coalesce into a complex sentence if they are related at the level of semantics and information structure.12 Two kinds of semantic connection between the two clauses are of relevance for their coalescence, namely interpropositional and anaphoric (technically, endophoric) relations. Here we will concentrate on the latter. If the connection between two adjacent clauses is by anaphora, information structure may shape the functioning of anaphora and the pronouns will receive different functions depending on whether they prepare a topic to be resumed (as kwit in (12) below), or resume an existent topic (as tòn in (16)). At the start, the two clauses are at the same syntactic level; in this sense the construction is symmetric. Combining the two clauses into a sentence leads to parataxis, but such structures have the potential to become asymmetric by grammaticalization. Then the question arises as to which of the two clauses becomes subordinate to the other. As we will see, this alternative is essentially decided by assigning information structure to each complex. We start from a textual combination of two clauses S1 and S2 which are in an anaphoric relation such that the first introduces a referent Xi that the second resumes by Yi . The general constellation is depicted in Schema 3.13 [ . . . Xi . . . ]S1 [Yi . . . ]S2

Schema 3. Anaphoric connection

As an example, consider (11), which is an ambivalent translation of the Hittite example in (12) below. (11) From the campaign I brought some booty; with that I adorned them. a. (As for) the booty I brought home from the campaign, with that I adorned them. b. From the campaign I brought some booty, with which I adorned them. . This idea is traced back to the nineteenth century in Hackstein (2004: Section 1). . The idea of alternate information structures giving rise to different relative constructions is put forward in Sankoff and Brown (1976). Cf. also LaPolla (1995: 316–318) on the information structure difference between a pre-nominal relative clause and a post-nominal “descriptive clause” in Mandarin Chinese. The analyses presented below are from Lehmann (1984: Ch. VI.1.1).

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The textual sequence of the two clauses of (11) can be used, in a particular discourse, with the information structure of version (a) or with that of version (b). .. The preposed relative clause There are two variants of the constellation Schema 3 which differ in their information structure. In the first alternative, Xi is indefinite and specific and is introduced as something to be resumed. The whole clause S1 , which is a left-dislocated topic, serves to characterize and possibly even identify this referent. Proto-IndoEuropean marks this information status of a noun phrase by the clitic indefinite pronoun *kwis.14 Since S2 takes Xi thus characterized up anaphorically by Yi , S1 as a whole constitutes an external topic for S2 . This interpretation of (11) is made explicit in (11a). Example (12) offers a natural text example from Hittite. (12) Hittite KASKALz-a kwit assu utahhun campaign-abl indf.acc.sg.inan booty bring.home.pst.1sg apedanda halissiyanun. n-at conn-3.inan.acc d3.ins adorn.pst.1sg ‘With the booty that I had brought home from the campaign, I adorned them.’ (from Lehmann 1984: 179) The construction is called the correlative diptych. It is the dominant variant of the Old Hittite relative construction. The pronoun kwis, marking the Xi of Schema 3, is already a relative pronoun. The overwhelming majority of the relative clauses of the text corpus are preposed like (12), and only a few are postposed or even postnominal. The latter variants will not be illustrated from Hittite; the Hittite data merely serve to show that the preposed relative clause belongs to a stage which was common to Hittite and Latin. Sentence (13) is an example from Old Latin. (13) Latin ab arbore abs terra pulli qui from tree.abl.sg from ground.abl.sg off-shoot.nom.pl indf.nom.pl nascentur, eos in terram deprimito be.born.fut.3pl them in ground.acc.sg push.down.imp (originally): ‘from the tree there will be off-shoots growing up from the ground; those you have to push back into the ground;’ (synchronically): ‘the off-shoots of the tree that will grow up from the ground have to be pushed back into the ground’ (Cato Agr. 51) . Lambrecht (1994: 83) mentions a couple of languages which use a numeral classifier to mark this function.

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If the correlative diptych were the only type of relative construction to be found in the Latin text corpus, we would probably not feel entitled to call the indefinite pronoun a relative pronoun.15 However, this particular relative construction is gradually ousted by its positional variants, so that it does not survive into a single Romance language. The first step in this grammaticalization is the interpretation of the preposed clause as a clausal noun phrase. If that noun phrase is semantically definite in the discourse context, as it must be in (14), our reanalysis is confirmed. (14) Latin quae mihi antea signa misisti, ea rel.acc.pl.n me.dat before statue.acc.pl send.prf.2sg it.acc.pl.n nondum vidi. not.yet see.prf.1sg ‘The statues you sent me the other day, I have not seen yet.’ (Cic. Att. 1, 4, 3) Example (14) contains another symptom of the subordination of the first clause to the second, namely the initial position of the relative pronoun. The clitic indefinite pronoun cannot at this stage introduce a clause, but the relative pronoun now functions simultaneously as a subordinator. In (14), the relative clause is still left-dislocated and serves as the topic for the subsequent main clause. This is not the case in (15). (15) Latin cave tu idem faxis alii beware you.nom.sg same.acc.sg.n do.prf.sbjv.2sg other.nom.pl quod servi solent! rel.acc.sg.n slave.nom.pl use.3pl ‘Don’t you do the same which the other slaves tend to do!’ (Pl. As. 256) In (15), the relative clause codes an accommodated presupposition (cf. Section 3.1.2), is thus thematically backgrounded and it is postposed. The construction is called the inverted diptych. It is the diachronic basis of the post-nominal relative clause, which we may illustrate by a somewhat clumsy, non-Ciceronian variant on (14). (14’) Latin Nondum signa quae mihi antea misisti not.yet statue.acc.pl rel.acc.pl.n me.dat before send.prf.2sg vidi. see.prf.1sg ‘I have not yet seen the statues you sent me.’ . Given, however, that the indefinite pronoun had been reinforced (ali-qui) in Old Latin, the original intepretation of (13) must be regarded as reconstructed.

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In (15) and (14’), the information structure which motivated the formation of the relative construction in the first place is levelled in the sense that the relative clause can play any role in the information structure of its matrix sentence. This is an example of the genesis of a particular syntactic construction on the basis of a textual combination of two clauses pre-structured by information structure which is subsequently levelled out. .. The postposed relative clause In the other assignment of information structure to (11), summarized in (11b), S1 of Schema 3 contains a comment on the referent of Xi which may already be in the universe of discourse, while S2 makes an additional comment on that referent, resuming it with the definite pronoun Yi . Proto-Indo-European had a weakly demonstrative personal pronoun *so-/to- ‘that,’ which was typically used in the function of Yi of Schema 3. It is illustrated in (16) from Homeric Greek. (16) Ancient Greek allà tí moi tôn êdos, epeì but int.nom.sg.n I.dat dem.gen.pl pleasure.nom.sg since phílos o¯´leth’ hetaîros, Pátroklos, dear.nom.sg.m perish.pst.3sg friend.nom.sg.m Patroklos.nom.sg.m tòn ego`¯ perì pánt¯on tîon hetaír¯on [dem.acc.sg.m I over all.gen.pl esteem.pst.1sg friend.gen.pl.m îson emêi kephalêi; tòn apo´¯ lesa. like.acc.sg.m my.dat.sg.f head.dat.sg.f] dem.acc.sg.m lose.aor.1sg ‘But what pleasure do I yet have in those things after my dear friend perished, Patroklos, whom I esteemed over all friends like my head; him I lost.’ (Hom. Il. 18, 80–82) By their structure, both of the clauses introduced by tòn ‘him, that one’ may be independent. The first (though not the second) of them may also be construed as a relative clause. It would be non-restrictive since it could not form a narrower concept of its head noun. This construction lies on the threshold between paratactic anaphoric clause and relative clause. In (17), the second clause can still be interpreted as independent. Here, however, the antecedent is indeterminate. The second clause may form a more specific concept on the basis of the antecedent concept (as there are islands not surrounded by the ocean); so, if taken as a subordinate clause, it could be a restrictive relative clause.

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(17) Ancient Greek eîdon gàr nêson t`¯en péri póntos see.pst.1sg for island.acc.sg.f [dem.acc.sg.f around sea.nom.sg.m apeíratos estephán¯otai. infinite.nom.sg.m surround.3sg] ‘For I saw an island which is surrounded by the infinite ocean.’ (Od. 10, 194–195) In (18), the head noun éridos together with the relative clause identify a referent which is established in the universe of discourse. Here, the second clause can no longer be alternatively construed as an independent comment on that referent. (18) Ancient Greek oud’ Agamémn¯on lêg’ éridos neg.however Agamemnon.nom.sg.m desist.pst.3sg quarrel.gen.sg.f t`¯en prôton ep¯epeíl¯es’ Akhillêï. [dem.acc.sg.f first threaten.aor.3sg Achilles.dat.sg.m] ‘Agamemnon, however, did not let go the quarrel that he had earlier threatened Achilles with.’ (Hom. Il. 1, 318–319) We now have a restrictive relative clause introduced by the relative pronoun ho-/to-. It is no longer restricted to additional comments on a pre-established referent. In (19), the noun phrase containing a relative clause of this kind is even a left-dislocated topic. (19) Ancient Greek ta`¯ s dè st´¯el¯as ta`¯ s hist¯a [...] det.acc.pl.f however column.acc.pl.f [rel.acc.pl.f erect.pst.3sg Sés¯ostris, hai mèn pleûnes oukéti Sesostris.nom.sg.m] det.nom.pl.f Ø most.nom.pl.f not.still phaínontai perieoûsai appear.3pl be.left.ptcp.prs.nom.pl.f ‘most of the columns that Sesostris had put up do no longer seem to be extant’ (Hdt. 2, 106) Observe that at the end of this development, what started out as a postposed relative clause ends up in the same kind of construction as that found at the beginning of the evolution of the preposed relative clause (cf. (12) above). We found exactly the converse to be true for the original preposed relative clause (cf. example (15)). This shows that a syntactic construction may be linked to a particular information structure at its genesis but in the course of its grammaticalization that information structure is levelled out, so that the grammaticalized construction becomes compatible with diverse information structures which originate independently from

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it. The initial function of the construction and its elements in information structure does not persist until the end; there comes a point where the origin becomes unimportant, and constructions of opposite origin can fulfil the same grammatical function. . Pronominal interrogatives We return to the topic of the cleft-sentence already touched upon in Section 3.1. Here, however, the issue is not the grammaticalization of the focus construction but instead the grammaticalization of the pronominal interrogative. The basic illocutionary force of this construction derives from marking an indefinite pronoun as focus, which thereby becomes an interrogative pronoun. In many languages, sentence-initial position of the interrogative pronoun suffices to produce that effect, as in (20) from Classical Latin. (20) Latin a. quis nescit [. . .] who ignores ‘Who does not know [. . . ]?’ (Cic. de orat. 2, 62, 5) b. quid fieri potest [. . .]? what be.done can ‘What can be done [. . . ]?’ (Iust. Dig. 34, 2, 6, 1, 5) In Latin, the cleft-sentence is not a grammatical construction. Sentences that look like it are ordinary relative constructions. However, constructions of this kind do occur with some regularity if what is in focus is an interrogative pronoun, as in (21). (21) Latin a. quis est qui nesciat [. . .] who is who ignores ‘Who does not know [. . . ]?’ (Cic. de orat. 2, 45, 4) b. Quid est igitur quod fieri possit? what is then which be.done can ‘What then can be done?’ (Cic. Verr. 1, 1, 32) Since the cleft-sentence is not grammaticalized, such constructions are maximally emphatic. Moving towards French, the interrogative pronoun itself loses in substance, and the cleft-sentence gradually becomes a dedicated grammatical construction for interrogative pronoun questions. Here are two examples from Old French (apud Rouquier 2002: 101, 110).

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(22) Old French Qui est ce, diex, qui m’aparole? who is it gods who me.addresses ‘Who is it, oh gods, who is speaking to me?’ (Renart IV, 233) (23) Old French Et savez vos que ce est que vos m’avez otroié? and know you what it is that you me.have empowered ‘And do you know what it is that you have empowered me to do?’ (Mort Artu 14, 13) Example (22) has a vocative between the focus and the extrafocal clause, while (23) has subordinate-clause word order in the interrogative clause. This shows that the cleft-interrogative was not yet fully grammaticalized at this stage. It still marks some kind of insistence (Rouquier 2002: 100–101). In Modern French, as illustrated by (24), the cleft-sentence is the default and often the only possible construction for most interrogative pronoun questions. While the erstwhile structural apparatus of the cleft-construction becomes part of a renovated interrogative pronoun ([kjεski] ‘who,’ [kεsk6] ‘what’),16 the particular focus on the questioned constituent vanishes. The relief of the information structure is flattened and reduced to the standard focus associated with pronominal interrogatives. (24) French C’est qui qui me parle? it.is who who me speaks ‘Who is speaking to me?’ Before we conclude, let us take a look back at the Latin stage. The collocation quis est qui/quid est quod which undergoes the grammaticalization illustrated by (21) to (24) regularly occurs in another context with the meaning ‘there is anyone who/anything which,’ typically after the conditional conjunction, as in (25). (25) Latin a. si quis est qui his if indf.pron.nom.sg be.3sg.prs rel.nom.sg dem.abl.pl delectetur delight.3sg.prs.sbjv.pass ‘if there is anybody delighted by such things’ (Cic. Tusc. 5, 102, 3) . According to Lambrecht (personal communication), speakers strongly tend to say qu’estce qui instead of qui est-ce qui, that is, in this particular environment, the qui-que contrast is neutralized. Reduction of the paradigm is another symptom of grammaticalization.

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b. si quid est quod fieri if indf.pron.nom.sg be.3sg.prs rel.nom.sg do.pass.inf possit can.3sg.prs.sbjv ‘if there is anything that can be done’ (Cic. Att. 11, 16, 5, 5) The resemblance between (21) and (25) is superficial: firstly, the pronoun quis/quid has interrogative force in (21), but is an indefinite pronoun in (25). Secondly, the verb esse is a copula in (21), but a verb of existence in (25). This could not be the other way around: the focus construction of (21) is associated with identification, while the indefinite quantification of (25) is associated with existence. In a pronominal interrogative, it is the identification of the indefinite which is at stake; this is highlighted by the cleft-construction. It is this information structure which then provides the frame for the grammaticalization of the construction. . Focussed progressive aspect In principle, the X representing the focus in Schema 2 may be any constituent of S2 . However, the finite verb of S2 cannot easily be focussed in a cleft-construction, for at least two reasons. Firstly, the predicate of S1 cannot be a finite verb because otherwise its minimal syntactic structure (which requires a nominal predicate) could not be guaranteed. Secondly, clefting would cause its place in S2 to become empty, so that S2 would no longer be a clause. The solution to the first problem is to nominalize the focussed verb. The solution to the second problem is to represent it by a pro-verb in S2 , which is usually a verb meaning ‘do.’ Example (26) illustrates this strategy from English. (26) lying is what he does in between eating babies and denying old people their social security. (http://www.phantasytour.com/phish/boards_thread.cgi, 12.07.05) The primary function of verb focus is to concentrate on the meaning of the verb itself while relegating everything depending on it to the presupposition. Nominalizing the verb serves this purpose well, because nominalization generally involves valence reduction. The English verb-focus construction results from a regular combination of independently existing syntactic operations, that is, it is not grammaticalized as such. In Colonial Yucatec Maya, sentence-clefting takes the general form of Schema 2, as illustrated by (27). (27) Colonial Yucatec Maya ma’ lawa lawa a mèent-ik-e’x in kol [neg at.random]S1 [sbj.2 make-dep-2pl poss.1sg milpa]S2 ‘Don’t make my cornfield at haphazard!’ (Cordemex s.v. lawak bik)

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Main clause and extrafocal clause according to Schema 2 are indexed in the interlinear gloss. Yucatec Maya is one of those languages which have neither a dummy subject nor a copula nor a universal subordinator. The only aspect of (27) which proves that it is a complex sentence is the dependent status of the extrafocal verb. The verb-focus construction follows the same pattern. I will first illustrate it from Modern Yucatec Maya because it involves as a pro-verb the same verb which happens to function as a full verb in (27). (28) Modern Yucatec Maya a. h kíim-ih. pst die-cmpl(sbj.3) ‘He/she/it died.’ b. kíim-il t-u mèent-ah. die-incmpl pst-sbj.3 make-cmpl ‘What happened is he died.’ (lit. ‘Dying is what he did.’) (Hk’an 620.3) The focussed verb goes into the incompletive status, which is morphologically identical to a nominalized verb. The extrafocal clause of (28b) has an aspect of its own, and its verb is the Modern Yucatec Maya verb meaning ‘make, do.’ The construction is fully productive. The verb-focus construction with this particular pro-verb was already available in Colonial Yucatec Maya. However, in addition, the language possessed a construction which was syntactically similar, except that it used a different proverb. There was a verb kib ‘do,’ which was totally irregular. Its dependent status is suppletive ka’h, as appears in (29), which is itself a focus construction (although not a verb-focus construction). (29) Colonial Yucatec Maya balam-il u ka’h Pedro. tiger-advr sbj.3 do.dep Peter ‘Peter makes the tiger.’/‘Peter is like a tiger.’ (lit. ‘Tiger-like is what Peter does.’) (1995, Arzápalo Marín, III s.v. cah3 ) This is the verb chiefly used in Colonial Yucatec Maya verb-focus constructions, as in (30). (30) Colonial Yucatec Maya kambes-ah in ka’h ti’ pàal-alo’b. teach-incmpl sbj.1sg do.dep loc child-pl ‘I am teaching the children.’ (Coronel 1620:72) The information structure of the last two examples is the same. The syntactic structure is essentially the same, too, except that the focus in (30) is the main verb that is missing from its extrafocal clause. The internal syntax of the extrafocal

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clause has been adapted in that what was the direct object of the verb has become a prepositional object. No such adaptations are necessary if the focussed verb is intransitive. The verb-focus construction is marked with plurivalent verbs. As already suggested by the translation of (30), the same construction functions as the progressive in Colonial Yucatec Maya. The paradigm observed in (31) may be gathered from the first colonial grammar (Coronel 1620: 71–72). (31) Colonial Yucatec Maya a. hàan-al bíin u kib. eat-incmpl go sbj.3 do.sbjv ‘He is going to eat.’ b. lúub-ul t-u kib-ah. fall-incmpl pst-sbj.3 do-cmpl ‘He fell.’ c. hàan-al u ka’h. eat-incmpl sbj.3 do.dep ‘He is eating.’ d. hàan-al u kib-ah. eat-incmpl sbj.3 do-cmpl17 ‘He was eating.’ It would seem that, when pure verb focus is intended, the extrafocal clause exhibits its own aspectual auxiliary, with corresponding verb statuses (cf. (31a–b)), whereas a progressive reading results if no aspect is marked (cf. (31c–d)). The progressive aspect views what the verb designates as an ongoing situation in which the referent of the subject is. The functional locus of the progressive aspect is therefore in intransitive verbs.18 This verb-focus construction is well suited to being grammaticalized into a progressive aspect, resulting in what we dub focussed progressive. In Modern Yucatec Maya, the progressive category has been renewed on a different structural basis which we need not go into here. However, the fate of the focussed progressive construction is a subject worth following up. The pro-verb kib is fossilized in Modern Yucatec, where only the form ka’h survives in a couple of contexts. The general verb meaning ‘make, do’ is now mèent (with its variant bèet), and is employed in the verb-focus construction (as in (28b)). The Colonial focussed progressive construction is only used in the modern immediate future, illustrated by (32) (to be compared with (31a). . The suffix -ah is completive for transitive, incompletive for intransitive verbs. . Sufficient evidence for this is provided, inter alia, by the documented history of the evolution of the progressive aspect in English and in substandard German; see Lehmann (1991: Section 3.2).

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(32) Modern Yucatec Maya bíin in ka’h kíim-il. go sbj.1sg do.dep die-incmpl ‘I am going to die.’ (FCP 395) The interlinear gloss of (32) is etymological. It makes explicit a focussed progressive where the verb bíin ‘go’ is focussed. The rest of the extrafocal clause depends on the focussed verb if that stays in its clause. The grammaticalization of the construction involves, among others, the following steps: a. bíin ‘go’ is semantically bleached. b. The incompletive verb remaining in the extrafocal clause is reinterpreted as the main verb. c. The internal structure of the complex ‘bíin subject_clitic ka’h’ is blurred; it is reanalysed as a discontinuous immediate future auxiliary with internal inflection. d. The whole sentence ceases to be complex; it is reinterpreted as a single clause. e. Whatever remains of the focal emphasis on the initial verb vanishes; the construction becomes open to different information structures which may be superimposed. The model for this complex reanalysis is the structure of the simple fully finite clause, in which the initial auxiliary combines with the enclitic subject pronoun and is followed by the verbal complex (as, for example, in the extrafocal clause of (28b)). The result of the change conforms exactly to that model. Just to complete a somewhat circuitous argument: the Yucatec data provide evidence of two interlinked grammaticalization paths: a. Verb-focus construction > focussed progressive > (simple) progressive. b. Focussed progressive of auxiliary ‘go’ > (simple) immediate future. Development (b) is not at issue here. It needed to be mentioned only because history is always more convoluted than diachronic typology. It so happened in the history of Yucatec Maya that the last stage of path (a) had scarcely been reached (in Colonial constructions such as (31c) and (31d)), when the category of the progressive was renewed from a different source. The only trace left in the modern language of what was the Colonial focussed and simple progressive is in the morphological structure of the immediate future, as in (32). The latter is, nevertheless, a useful example for our purposes because it proves the complete loss of the underlying focus semantics. The story of the Yucatec Maya focussed progressive is a clear case of the grammaticalization of a construction which was motivated as a marked focus construction, whose information structure was levelled over time, but whose resulting

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structural properties still reflect the marked original information structure. It remains only to add that the progressive aspect of other languages has a similar origin; cf., for instance, Güldemann (2003) for Bantu.

. Conclusions The relationship between grammaticalization and information structure is twofold. On the one hand, information structure is subject to the same coding constraints as anything else in language: either it can be inferred from the linguistic or extralinguistic context, from the meaning of the sentence itself or on the basis of universal principles of semiosis, or it must be coded. Coding is therefore necessary if a particular intended information structure differs from what would be the default for the given sentence or what would be inferred on the basis of universal principles or other clues. As observed in Section 3.1.1, the operations of information structure are not concerned with concepts which denote something concrete. The grammatical means employed in marking information structure are therefore immaterial (that is, non-concrete) from the beginning. At a stage not too long past their genesis, such grammatical constructions as (7) do not involve a single (grammaticalized) lexical item. They make use of existent grammatical constructions such as presentational, identificational or anaphoric constructions, and specialize these for the functions of information structure. Such grammatical constructions which code information structure are subject to grammaticalization just like any other grammatical construction. As always in grammaticalization, the degree of complexity shrinks from the text level via the sentence and clause levels down to the phrase level. The lower the level of linguistic complexity, the more closely the coding unit corresponds to a single proposition. However, a single proposition cannot embody a contrast such as presupposition vs. assertion, topic vs. comment or focus vs. presupposition; information structure requires at least two propositions which may be opposed in some way. As a consequence, the relief that is constitutive of the various dichotomies of information structure is levelled out under grammaticalization. What remains, in the end, is the simple topic-comment clause, where the topic is highly activated, that is, represented by a clitic pronoun. On the other hand, any construction serving as the input to a grammaticalization channel is shaped by information structure. Some lexical items in the construction are focussed, others are topical or are at any rate present in the presupposition. If a certain construction is conventionally associated with a certain information structure, such components of it that are topical or presupposed are particularly liable to become subordinate and reduced. That much can be generalized

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from the evolution of relative clauses analysed in Section 4.1 above. What may come as rather unexpected is that even the regular focus status of a component of a construction does not protect it from grammaticalization; witness the pronominal interrogatives and the focussed progressive analysed in Sections 4.2 and 4.3. The generalization here is that the particular information structure which shapes the initial construction is a presupposition for the course of grammaticalization that it takes; in other words, the same lexical-syntactic constellation in a different information structure would not embark on that grammaticalization path. The complex interplay between grammaticalization and information structure thus consists in a mutual dependency: grammaticalization constrains and formalizes information structure and information structure conditions and directs grammaticalization. The precise formulation of these conditions remains as a challenge for future work in grammaticalization.

Abbreviations 1 2 3 abl acc advr aor cmpl conn d3 dat dem dep det f fut gen imp inan incmpl indf

first person second person third person ablative accusative adverbializer aorist completive connector, -ive deictic of third person dative demonstrative dependent determiner feminine future genitive imperative inanimate incompletive, noncompletive indefinitive

inf ins int loc m n neg nom pass pl poss prf pron prs pst ptcp rel s sbj sbjv sg

infinitive instrumental interrogative locative masculine neuter negation nominative passive plural possessive perfect pronoun present past participle relative sentence subject subjunctive singular

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References Arzápalo Marín, Ramón (ed.). 1995. Calepino de Motul. Diccionario Maya-Español. 3 vols. México D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Banti, Giorgio. 2005. The typology of information structure: Theoretical issues and open questions. Paper presented at the University of Erfurt, January 2005. Berretta, Monica. 2002. Ordini marcati dei costituenti maggiori di frase: Una rassegna. In Silvia Negro & Bice Mortara Garavelli (eds.), Temi e percorsi della linguistica. Scritti scelti di Monica Berretta. Vercelli: Mercurio: 149–199. Coronel, Juan. 1620. Arte en lengua de maya, recopilado y enmendado. México: La Imprenta de Diego Garrido. Givón, Talmy. 1979. From discourse to syntax: Grammar as a processing strategy. In Talmy Givón (ed.), Discourse and syntax [Syntax and Semantics 12]. New York & London: Academic Press: 81–112. Güldemann, Tom. 2003. Present progressive vis-à-vis predication focus in Bantu. A verbal category between semantics and pragmatics. Studies in Language 27(2): 323–360. Hackstein, Olav. 2004. From discourse to syntax: The case of compound interrogatives in IndoEuropean and beyond. In Karlene Jones-Bley, Martin E. Huld, Angela della Volpe & Miriam Robbins Dexter (eds.), Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference. Los Angeles, November 7–8, 2003 [Journal of Indo-European Monograph Series 49], 257– 298. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man. Hyman, Larry M. 1984. Form and substance in language universals. In Brian Butterworth, Bernard Comrie & Östen Dahl (eds.), Explanations for language universals [Linguistics 21/1], 67–87. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information structure and sentence form. Topic, focus and the mental representations of discourse referents [Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 71]. Cambridge: CUP. LaPolla, Randy. 1995. Pragmatic relations and word order in Chinese. In Pamela Downing & Michael Noonan (eds.), Word order in discourse [Typological Studies in Language 30], 299– 331. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lehmann, Christian. 1984. Der Relativsatz. Typologie seiner Strukturen – Theorie seiner Funktionen – Kompendium seiner Grammatik. (LUS 2). Tübingen: G. Narr. Lehmann, Christian. 1991. Grammaticalization and related changes in contemporary German. In Elizabeth Closs Traugott & Bernd Heine (eds.), Approaches to grammaticalization. Vol. II, 493–535. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Rouquier, Magali. 2002. Les interrogatives en ‘qui/qu’est-ce qui/que’ en ancien français et en moyen français. Cahiers de grammaire 27: 97–120. Sankoff, Gillian and Penelope Brown. 1976. The origins of syntax in discourse: A case study of Tok Pisin relatives. Language 52: 631–666. Shibatani, Masayoshi. 1991. Grammaticalization of topic into subject. In Elizabeth Closs Traugott & Bernd Heine (eds.) Approaches to Grammaticalization. Vol. II, 93–133. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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From speech-situation evocation to hypotaxis* The case of Latin quamvis ‘although’ Torsten Leuschner Ghent University and University College Ghent

The present article describes the grammaticalization of the Latin subordinator quamvis ‘although,’ which illustrates the tendency of concessive connectives to be renovated continuously from a small number of stable functional domains. Quamvis is shown to derive from one such typical source domain for concessives, namely free-choice quantification: first, the relative phrase quam vis (literally ‘as (much as) you want’) is grammaticalized as an adverbial quantifier meaning ‘ever so, however;’ later, when sequences of independent sentences (in which the first contains quamvis) are reanalysed as a complex sentence construction, quamvis is further grammaticalized as subordinator. The issues discussed in the paper include the diachronic relationship of concessivity with concessive conditionality, various phenomena of layering in the inventory of Latin concessive subordinators, and the role of speech-situation evocation in the grammaticalization of quamvis.

.

A grammaticalization approach to Latin quamvis

Antoine Meillet not only invented the term grammaticalization, but was also one of the first linguists to point out that subordinating conjunctions in many languages have a tendency to be renovated ceaselessly and thoroughly (Meillet 1921). In fact, the “diversité infinie” of conjunctions and the often great conceptual distance between them and their diachronic sources (1921: 169) held such a fascination for him that he failed to realize that the source domains for new subordinating conjunctions are actually quite limited in number and functionally well-motivated. The task of pointing this out fell to a later generation of functional typologists like Traugott (1985) and König (1988). They drew on large, cross-genetic language samples to show that expressive means for such important semantic domains as * I am grateful to the editors and organizers of New Reflections on Grammaticalization 3 (Santiago de Compostela, July 2005) for their excellent work, to two anonymous reviewers and to Wim Verbaal for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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conditionality and concessivity are generally derived from no more than a handful of lexical source types. In the case of concessivity, for instance, there are only five: (i) emphatic assertions of truth, (ii) expressions for remarkable co-occurrence, (iii) expressions for obstinacy, spite or contempt, (iv) conditionality and (v) (universal or free-choice) quantification. The present paper concentrates on the renovation of concessive subordinators in Latin from the last-named source domain, that is, free-choice quantification. The subordinator in focus is quamvis, one of the standard concessive subordinators of Classical and Late Latin, as illustrated in (1). (1) Latin hoc ille natus quamvis patrem suum numquam viderat thus that.one born although father his never he.had.seen [Rabirius] tamen [. . .] in paternae vitae similitudinem deductus est. Rabirius yet in paternal life similarity led is ‘Being of such descendance, although he had never seen his father, Rabirius was nonetheless led to live according to the paternal model.’ (Cicero; from Touranier 1994: 151) As a concessive subordinator, quamvis coexisted with quamquam and also with the -si-group of subordinators, which comprises etsi, etiamsi and tametsi and is based on the conditional subordinator si ‘if ’ prefaced by a focus particle. In contrast to quamquam and the si-compounds, however, quamvis is clausal in origin, comprising quam and the second person form of the verb velle ‘want.’ Quamvis was thus originally an addressee-oriented phrase meaning ‘as (much as) you want’ – not unlike its less frequent synonyms quamtumvis, containing quantum ‘how much,’ and quamlibet/quamlubet, which comprises quam and the frozen verb form libet/lubet ‘it may please (you).’ The objective of the present paper is a simple one: to describe the rise of concessive quamvis in terms of a grammaticalization path, as part of the largescale renovation of concessive subordinators in Latin. Not that the association of quamvis with grammaticalization is in itself new: Meillet, who mentions quamvis in passing (1921: 172), already regards the formation of subordinating conjunctions as a case of grammaticalization (1921: 169). Fruyt (1998: 884) also refers to quamvis, briefly but explicitly, in her survey of grammaticalization in Latin, while Schaffner’s (1954) philological account of quamvis reads like a treatise on grammaticalization, even if the term is never actually mentioned. The potential for controversy lurks in the relationship of quamvis with the corresponding series of free-choice indefinite pronouns in -vis (e.g. quivis ‘anyone,’ quidvis ‘anything,’ etc.). The idea that these pronouns arose through grammaticalization has been

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challenged by Joseph (2004): Joseph claims, citing doubts by Rosén (2000)1 about the validity of certain grammaticalization parameters at the formation stage, that this seemingly classic instance of grammaticalization “evaporates upon closer examination of the evidence” (Joseph 2004: 54). Does this mean, we might wonder, that the status of quamvis as a case of grammaticalization is also in doubt? Should quamvis, too, be “rescued” from grammaticalization (Joseph 2004: title) rather than subsumed under it? As I hope will be borne out in the pages that follow, the rise of quamvis from discourse is too interesting to get side-tracked by such quibbles. The first parts of the study are devoted to the formation of quamvis as a subordinator via an intermediate stage as an adverb meaning roughly ‘ever so, however.’ During the first phase (Section 2), the adverb quamvis can be observed emerging from second person free-relative clauses as one outcome of the grammaticalization of the -viscompounds in general. During the second phase (Section 3), routine sequences of independent sentences, the first of which contains quamvis, are grammaticalized into a complex sentence construction, with quamvis as subordinator. Initially, the meaning of the subordinator is concessive-conditional (‘however, even if ’), but it ultimately also appears in an unambiguously concessive sense (‘although’), as illustrated in (1) above. This double emergence from discourse makes quamvis a particularly interesting instance of grammaticalization among the concessive subordinators of Latin, and therefore quamvis is a good candidate for what one might call a revealing expression (cf. Hagège’s notion of “revealing language,” 1993: 3–4). This characteristic provides the basis for subsequent discussion (Section 4), in which I suggest that the grammaticalization of the -vis-compounds together may be regarded as a diachronic consequence of the synchronic phenomenon of “speech-situation evocation” (Schwenter and Waltereit 2005). To conclude, I set the grammaticalization of quamvis in the larger context of the renovation of concessive subordinators in Latin, not omitting some final illustrations of the brief reappearance of quamvis as a Latinism in the vernacular writings of two Old Italian clerics (Section 5).

. The rise of the -vis-compounds from free-relative clauses As mentioned earlier, quamvis derives from a clause meaning literally ‘as (much as) you want’ and was originally a member of the paradigm of -vis-compounds arising from free-relative clauses. Before we survey this development, it may be helpful to recall some basic facts about free-choice quantification. In light of recent . Joseph erroneously refers to Rosén (2000) as (2002).

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literature on the subject (cf. Leuschner 2006: Ch. 5 for discussion and references), we can assume that, even though free-choice quantifiers may at times give rise to quasi-universal effects, they represent a distinct type of quantification which has (at least) two semantic characteristics of its own: arbitrariness and intensionality (Tovena and Jayez 1999; cf. also Giannakidou 2001). It is precisely these two characteristics which account for the use of second person forms of volitional verbs like velle in source expressions for free-choice quantifiers (cf. Haiman 1974). After all, combinations of such forms with “indeterminate” quantifiers like wh-words (Bhat 2000) can easily be interpreted as expressing a challenge to the addressee: pick one member at random from the set of items or values as described by the rest of the sentence and see whether the proposition in question comes out true for this particular case. Once such challenges are routinized, the original addressee-orientation may be lost and grammaticalization may result. The free relatives from which the -vis-compounds arose in Early Latin and Early Classical Latin were interpreted as expressing exactly the kind of challenge described above. The grammaticalization path in this instance is a simple one and can be represented schematically as follows (Haspelmath 1997: 133–135; cf. Rosén 2000: 98–104): (2) You may take what you want > You may take anything Although quite a number of verb forms would occur as object to the wh-word in such constructions (including third person libet/lubet), combinations of this kind did typically involve the second person singular. Consider, in this connection, examples (3) to (6) below, all from Plautus, which show the occurrence of both second and third person singular forms. (3) Latin dicat quod quisque volt. he.may.say what anybody wants ‘He may say what everybody wants (to hear).’ (third person singular; Schaffner 1954: 21) (4) Latin opta id quod ut contigat tibi vis. wish.imp this what that it.may.happen to.you you.want ‘Wish for whatever you want to happen to you.’ (second person singular; Rosén 2000: 101) (5) Latin quando vis veni. when you.want come.imp ‘Come whenever you want.’ (second person singular; Schaffner 1954: 20)

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(6) Latin dic, impera mihi quid lubet quo vis modo. speak.imp order.imp to.me what pleases in.what you.want manner ‘Speak, order me (to do) what pleases (you) in whatever way you like.’ (third and second person singular; Schaffner 1954: 19) As these examples show, the wh-word and the verb do not strictly speaking need to be adjacent, though in practice they often are. This is the starting point for a process known in the philological literature as hypostasis (e.g. Rosén 2000: 99), which involves changes along both the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes. Paradigmatic variability is lost through fossilization of the second person form vis; on the syntagmatic axis, variability is also lost and bondedness gained, eventually resulting in the formation of compounds through univerbation. Since “free choice indefinites are typically stressed” (Haspelmath 1997: 143–144; for details, cf. 1997: 122–128), these changes are not accompanied by morphophonemic attrition, a fact construed by Joseph (2004) as somehow refuting the assumption of grammaticalization. In the Latin of Plautus, the hypostasized compounds resulting from the changes just described are fully established side by side with the original relative clauses. Here follow a few examples (as cited by Rosén 2000: 98–99) which show pronouns with various wh-words being used either nominally or attributively, including concord. (7) Latin isti quibus quidvis sat es those for.whom anything.nom enough is ‘those for whom anything at all is enough’ (8) Latin quodvis donum [. . .] optato. any.acc present.acc wish ‘Wish for any present you like.’ (9) Latin in quovis loco in any.abl place.abl ‘in any place you like’

(nominal)

(attributive)

(attributive)

Parallel changes can be observed with quamvis, with the same broad range of variation initially observable in persons other than the second singular. Consider the following examples, from Schaffner (1954: 19–20):

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(10) Latin turbent porro quam velint. they.may.cause.confusion further as.much.as they.may.want ‘May they continue to cause confusion as much as they like.’ (Terence; third person plural) (11) Latin audacter quam vis dicito. daringly as you.want speak.imp ‘Speak as daringly as you want.’ (Plautus; second person singular) (12) Latin exspectate facinus quam vultis improbum expect.imp.pl crime as you.want evil ‘expect ever so evil a crime’ (Cicero; second person plural) At this point, two usage patterns could have emerged for quamvis: as a modifier of verbs, as suggested by forms like (10), and as a pre-modifier with adjectives or adverbs, as in (11) and (12). In fact, hypostasized quamvis is recorded in the data only with the latter function. Its use in examples like (13) and (14) below (both from Lucretius, cited in Schaffner 1954: 7) is obviously analogous to the attributive use of other -vis-compounds attested in (8) and (9) above. (13) Latin sed quamquam facile est ei [. . .] quamvis multos locos but even.though easy is for.him as.you.want many places comparare tamen [. . .] compare yet ‘but even though it is easy for him to compare as many places as you want/any number of places, yet [. . . ]’ (14) Latin id licet hinc quamvis hebeti cognoscere this is.possible therefore ever.so insensitive.abl recognize corde. heart.abl ‘It is therefore possible to recognize this with ever so insensitive a heart/no matter how insensitive a heart.’ What remains debatable, however, is whether quamvis could really have been restricted to this function, as our data suggest. According to Schaffner (1954: 16), quamvis was probably used to modify verbs as well, given pre-grammaticalization patterns like (10), and the absence of this function for more strongly grammaticalized quamvis in the data is purely coincidental. We will return to this point later on.

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For the time being, several other facts are worth noting. One is the striking tendency of the newly formed -vis-compounds to lose their original sense of addressee-orientation. In (13), for example, the phrase containing quamvis can still be interpreted as if the addressee were being challenged to imagine any number of places at will. However, in (14) it is clear that all that is being suggested is an arbitrary, end-of-scale degree of insensitivity. Contra Rosén (2000) and Joseph (2004), the rise of the -vis-pronouns did, therefore, involve desemanticization. This is confirmed by cases like (15), where the -vis-compounds cannot possibly be interpreted as expressing second person reference any longer. (15) Latin licet mihi libere quidvis loqui. it.is.allowed to.me freely anything say ‘I have the right to freely say anything/what I want/*what you want.’ (Plautus; from Schaffner 1954: 21) Further evidence in favour of grammaticalization is paradigmaticization, as shown by the appearance of the nominative quivis (Schaffner 1954: 20), as in (16) and (17). (16) Latin Iuppiter / non minus quam vostrum quivis formidat malum. Jupiter not less than of.you.pl anyone fears misfortune ‘Jupiter fears misfortune no less than anyone among you.’ (Plautus) (17) Latin ut quivis intellegere posset so.that anyone understand may.be.able ‘so that anybody (at all) can understand’ (Cicero) Since the apparent source *qui vis is ungrammatical, this form could not have emerged from relative clauses along with the others, and must therefore be due to a subsequent completion of the paradigm through analogy (Schaffner 1954: 21–22).

. Quamvis: From adverb to subordinator . Bonding and reanalysis Once quamvis had been grammaticalized as a compound adverbial quantifier through the changes described above in Section 2, two new directions of development opened up. One possibility was for desemanticization to continue and for the arbitrariness element in the lexical meaning of quamvis to be lost as well, while

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its syntactic function as pre-modifier was retained. The change is attested in the use of quamvis as an intensifier (‘very, quite’), as the following examples illustrate (both from Schaffner 1954: 8). (18) Latin quamvis ridiculus est ubi uxor non adest. very amusing is where wife not is.present ‘He is very amusing when his wife is not present.’ (Plautus) (19) Latin quamvis sordida res et invenusta est. quite ugly matter and distasteful is ‘It is quite an ugly and distasteful matter.’ (Catullus) In both examples the context makes it clear that no free-choice quantification is intended, only intensification (cf. Schaffner 1954). The other, more significant possibility was for quamvis to retain the arbitrariness element in its lexical meaning and change its syntactic function, that is, to become a subordinator. This change, called the “Konjunktionalisierung” (conjunctionalization) of quamvis by Schaffner (1954: 25), can only be accounted for on the basis of larger, functionally motivated patterns in discourse. We noted earlier that statements with -vis often express commands or permission, but that is not all: the relevant examples with quamvis often involve what Hopper and Traugott (2003: 178) call “bonding,” that is, a tendency for the quamvis-sentence to be functionally subordinate to a subsequent proposition. Example (20) is a classic instance. (20) Latin sed sint quamvis boni – non sunt meliores quam nos. but they.may.be ever.so good not they.are better than we ‘But may they be ever so good – they are not better than we are.’ (Cicero; from Schaffner 1954: 8) Note the (concessive) subjunctive here, a clear sign of bonding reflecting the semantic-pragmatic subordination of the quamvis-clause to the next sentence. On the syntactic level, on the other hand, we clearly have parataxis, as shown by the fact that quamvis follows the verb rather than precedes it. A hypotactic version with quamvis as subordinator would have read as follows (Schaffner 1954: 8): (20’) Latin ∼ sed quamvis sint boni The eventual change to subordinator came about as a consequence of the reanalysis of paratactic sequences involving quamvis as complex sentences. The clause with quamvis thus became syntactically subordinate as well as semantically-

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pragmatically subordinate, as represented in the following schema, from Wiegand (1987: 300): Stage 1 discourse strategy Stage 2 > discourse strategy ∼ syntax strategy Stage 3 > syntax strategy

Schema 1. Quamvis: From discourse to syntax

The transitional stage 2 is illustrated in my data by some striking examples like (21) to (23) below, each of which can be analysed as either parataxis or hypotaxis. In the case of parataxis, quamvis is read as an adverb (‘as x as you want, ever so x’), whereas in the case of hypotaxis it is read as a subordinator (‘however x’). (21) Latin locus hic apud nos quamvis subito venias place here with us quamvis unexpectedly you.may.come (Plautus; from Schaffner 1954: 9) semper liber est. always free is Parataxis: ‘A place with us here, may you come as unexpectedly as you want, is always free.’ Hypotaxis: ‘A place with us here, however unexpectedly you should come, is always free.’ (22) Latin nihil agis dolor! quamvis sis molestus, nothing you.achieve pain quamvis you.may.be annoying numquam te esse confitebor malum. never you to.be I.will.admit evil (Cicero; from Schaffner 1954: 9) Parataxis: ‘You will not achieve anything, Pain! You may be as annoying as you want, I will never admit to you being evil.’ Hypotaxis: ‘You will not achieve anything, Pain! However annoying you may be, I will never admit to you being evil.’ (23) Latin crede mihi quamvis contemnas murmura famae / hic tibi believe me quamvis despise murmur of.gossip this to.you (Propertius; from Schaffner 1954: 12) pallori Cynthia versus erit. pallor.dat Cynthia verse will.be Parataxis: ‘Believe me: you may despise the murmur of gossip as much as you want, this verse will make you turn pale, Cynthia.’ Hypotaxis: ‘Believe me: however much you may despise the murmur of gossip, this verse will make you turn pale, Cynthia.’

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In the paratactic reading, we find routine combinations of two independent sentences which are bonded by the semantic-pragmatic subordination of S1 under S2 (represented by “⇔” in Schema 2 below), with quamvis functioning as an adverb in S1. In the hypotactic reading, the sequence has been reanalysed as a single complex sentence S, with quamvis functioning as subordinator in s1 (which is now represented by a small <s> to signal its syntactically subordinate status). Schema 2, adapted from the diagram in Hopper and Traugott (1993: 169), represents this change from paratactic to hypotactic quamvis.2 [quamvis ADV S1] [quamvis SR s1]

Schema 2. Quamvis: From parataxis to hypotaxis

Note that Schema 2 requires little change semantically: even in the hypotactic reading, the subordinator is not yet wholly concessive (‘although’), but may instead be paraphrased more properly as ‘however x,’ that is, as a concessive conditional (cf. below). This means that the free-choice meaning of the adverbial quantifier can be seen to persist (in the sense of Hopper 1991) in the subordinator during the reanalysis. On the syntactic level, on the other hand, there is an interesting point of controversy. For at least one pair of scholars (Hofmann and Szantyr 1965: 603), it is not clear that the paratactic reading postulated is really viable in all the cases listed above. Example (23), for instance, is doubtful in their opinion, and the same ambiguity could, in principle, be maintained for (24), another example cited by Schaffner (1954: 12) as representing the transitional pattern. (24) Latin quamvis spernat voluptates eas [. . .] ego tamen [. . .] (Cicero) quamvis he.may.despise pleasures these I yet Parataxis: ‘he may despise these pleasures ever so much, I for my part [. . . ]’ Hypotaxis: ‘however much he may despise these pleasures, I for my part [. . . ]’ The basis for the doubt is that the element modified by quamvis in such cases is a verb phrase, not an adjective or an adverb, as in examples like (21) and (22). It is here, then, that we come up against the problem that there are no examples in the . For unclear reasons, the diagram has been removed from the second edition of the same work (Hopper and Traugott 2003), even though the point it illustrates has remained unchanged.

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Latin data of hypostasized quamvis modifying a verb phrase. This could make it philologically unsound to regard cases like (23) and (24) as potentially paratactic. Instead, they would have to be viewed as representing the final, hypotactic stage only, and hence, in the parlance adopted in Section 3.2 below, as attesting only the actualization of the reanalysis. Something worth noting in this connection is that this philologically conservative view needs to assume an additional clause-internal reanalysis (“Gliederungsverschiebung” or ‘structure shift’) which is much more dramatic than any clauseinternal change required if one supports the view that quamvis could always have had scope over entire verb phrases. Under the conservative view, quamvis had to be reanalysed from forming part of the adverbial or adjectival phrase in which it functioned as a pre-modifier, to functioning as a separate constituent in the clause. The change is represented in Schema 3 below, based on Schaffner (1954: 41), who is summarizing an earlier version by Hofmann and Szantyr (1965: 603). [[quamvis ADJ/ADV] verb]S1 > [quamvis [(ADJ/ADV)]] verb]s1

Schema 3. Scope expansion of quamvis

This theory has potential implications from the point of view of grammaticalization because it implies an expansion of the clause-internal scope of quamvis: from its restricted scope over adjectives or adverbs only, quamvis would have widened its scope to take in the entire clause where it now functions as a subordinator. It thus contradicts the directionality inherent in Lehmann’s grammaticalization parameter of syntactic scope, which was originally supposed to lead from greater to smaller scope (Lehmann 1995: 143–148). How relevant or decisive this contradiction actually is, however, is another matter, given that the parameter of syntactic scope has proved to be the most troublesome of the original grammaticalization parameters anyway (cf. Tabor and Traugott 1998). . Actualizing the reanalysis As we know from the literature on historical syntax, reanalysis is covert, that is, it affects underlying structure and is not directly observable on the surface. If and when a given reanalysis does become manifest in surface structure, this change can be seen as a separate process which is often termed actualization (see Harris and Campbell 1995: 77–89 for a detailed discussion). If one accepts Hofmann and Szantyr’s (1965) version of events, examples where quamvis takes scope over the entire clause represent the actualization of the reanalysis process. In other words, if reanalysis of quamvis as a subordinator must, on philological grounds, have taken place in situations involving an adjective or an adverb, as in (21) and (22) above, the use of quamvis without an adjective or an adverb is new and can be viewed as

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a manifestation of the reanalysis, that is, as actualization. In a Schaffner-style analysis, on the other hand, quamvis was always available for use without an adjective or an adverb, so its occurrence according to the pattern of (23) and (24) does not count as actualization. According to this view, the use of quamvis as a subordinator in elliptical clauses gains in significance, because it seems to provide a genuine manifestation of the newly acquired function of quamvis as a subordinator. Examples of this occur from the first century AD onwards (Schaffner 1954: 11). Consider (25) and (26) below. (25) Latin quicumque senator voluerit fieri, quamvis puer, quamvis whoever senator had.wanted to.be.made even.if boy even.if indignus, quamvis ex eo loco ex quo non liceret [. . .] unworthy even.if from that place from which not it.was.allowed factum esse semper. made be always ‘[That] whoever had wanted to be made a senator, even if a boy, even if unworthy, even if from an ineligible place, has always been made one.’ (Cicero) (26) Latin quamvis non rectum quod iuvat rectum putes. even.if not right what it.is.useful right you.may.consider ‘Even if (it is) not right, you may regard as right what is useful.’ (Publilius) From the philologically conservative point of view, however, these examples do not contain anything substantially new. Fortunately, there is evidence of actualization in other phenomena. Instructive cases include our original example (1), repeated now for convenience, and also (27). (1) Latin hoc ille natus quamvis patrem suum numquam viderat thus that.one born although father his never he.had.seen [Rabirius] tamen [. . .] in paternae vitae similitudinem deductus est. Rabirius yet in paternal life similarity led is ‘Being of such descendance, although he had never seen his father, Rabirius was nonetheless led to live according to the parental model.’ (27) Latin quamvis nulla mei superest tibi cura Nearea / although none to.me is.more.than for.you worry Naeara sis felix. you.may.be happy

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‘Although I worry about no one more than you, Naeara, may you be happy.’ (Lygdamus; from Schaffner 1954: 10) As well as the fact that quamvis can no longer possibly be interpreted as an adverb, we know that examples like (1) and (27) represent the third stage in Schema 1 for two other reasons: (i) because quamvis is unambiguously concessive (it has lost its original character of free-choice quantifier and instead now introduces a clause which describes a simple fact), and (ii) because the mood in the quamvis-clause is no longer the subjunctive but the indicative (viderat, superest). How does this usage pattern come about? To begin with, we might note that ‘although’ is not the only paraphrase offered in the literature for quamvis as a concessive subordinator. An alternative is ‘even if,’ as in the following example (Schaffner 1954: 10): (28) Latin ut [. . .] quamvis civis Romanus esset in crucem that even.if citizen Roman he.were on cross tolleretur he.would.be.hung ‘that even if he were a Roman citizen, he would be crucified’ (Cicero) When ‘although’ and ‘even if ’ are lumped together as concessive in the literature, what is often overlooked is the semantic distinction between ‘even if ’-clauses and concessives. ‘Even if ’-clauses are essentially a variety of ‘if ’-conditionals with multiple antecedents (König 1986): ‘if ’-conditional: ‘even if ’-conditional:

if x then q if {p, ∼p} then q

Schema 4. ‘If ’- and ‘even if ’-conditionals

To evoke the multiple antecedent, a conditional subordinator may be combined with a (scalar-)additive focus particle which marks the antecedent in question as ranking high among a range of alternative values on some contextually appropriate scale. One possibility, represented in Schema 4, is for the relevant set to consist of two items: p and its negation, ∼p. This is what happens in example (28) above, as shown by (28’) and (28”) below. While (28’) represents a paraphrase of (28) as a series of ‘if ’-conditionals, (28”) represents the background assumption or “concessive presupposition” (König 1986, 1988) concerning the link between protasis and apodosis in this case. (28’) If he is a Roman citizen [= p], he will be crucified [= q]; if he is not a Roman citizen [= ∼p], he will be crucified [= q]. (28”) Normally, someone who is a Roman citizen is not crucified.

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The ranking of the alternative antecedent values in (28’) takes into account the fact that the status of a person as a Roman citizen would not normally lead one to expect crucifixion (a form of punishment reserved for non-citizens at the time). The speaker selects p for mention in (28) because, given this background assumption, it leads to a stronger statement q than the alternative, ∼p. What, we might ask ourselves, is the relationship between our three readings for quamvis, and which one, if any, constitutes the actualization? Though the ‘even if ’ and ‘however’ readings are by no means fully interchangeable, it is clear that they are very similar: both are quantificational and evoke a set of antecedent values. In the case of ‘however,’ the set tends to be larger and open-ended, and moreover is specified as consisting not of any random value, but of degrees along a scale: if {degree a, degree b, degree c, ...} then q. In short, both are concessive-conditional. Just as with ‘even if,’ the set evoked in ‘however’-clauses includes an end-of-scale condition under which we would not normally expect the consequent to be true or materialize. This is clearly demonstrated in example (21) above, repeated here for convenience along with its hypotactic paraphrase. (21) Latin locus hic apud nos quamvis subito venias place here with us quamvis unexpectedly you.may.come semper liber est. always free is ‘A place with us here, however unexpectedly you should come, is always free.’ As with ‘even if,’ the concessive-conditional interpretation of ‘however’ arises on the basis of background assumptions like (21’). (21’) Normally, if we arrive at someone’s house without any notice at all, we cannot expect them to put us up for the night. The extreme value which this yields can be paraphrased as an ‘even if ’-clause, as in (21”). (21”) Even if you arrive without any notice at all, there will be a place for you. These similarities indicate that the ‘however’ and ‘even if ’ readings of quamvis are really no more than context-dependent interpretations of one and the same expression. ‘Even if ’ readings are encouraged in cases like (28) above, where the focus of quamvis is on the polarity of the protasis and the set of antecedent values consists, therefore, of only p and ∼p. The distinction is, in other words, a matter of interpretation-in-context, which then becomes a question of finding the right paraphrase in English; it is not a circumstance of Latin. Not surprisingly, the genuinely concessive ‘although’ reading of quamvis started out similarly as a purely contextual effect. As we know, all that is needed

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for the transition from ‘even if ’ to ‘although’ is for the relevant antecedent value to be interpreted as given on grounds of context or implicature (cf. König 1986). Example (29) allows for either reading, depending on additional contextual information. (29) Latin quamvis res mihi non placeat, tamen contra hominum quamvis matter to.me not pleases yet against of.men auctoritate pugnare non potero. authority fight not I.will.be.able.to ‘Even if/even though I don’t like the matter, nonetheless I will not be able to fight the authority of the men.’ (Cicero; from Touranier 1994: 689) In cases where the potential set of antecedents is larger and composed of degrees, a concessive interpretation is particularly natural. Even in pre-reanalysis situations, that is, with unambiguous parataxis, it may be difficult to tell whether quamvis refers to a scale of values whose precise materialization is unclear or whether the appropriate extreme value is already clear from the context. For instance, in our earlier example (20) the implication is that, despite the subjunctive sint, ‘they’ are ranked high on the pertinent scale of goodness – although not as high as ‘we.’ This ambiguity is reflected by occasional attempts in the texts to clarify the givenness of the value in question even under the subjunctive. It is for this purpose that the sicut ‘as (indeed)’-clause is added to the quamvis-clause in (30). (30) Latin huc accedit quod, quamvis felix ille sit, sicut to.this it.is.added that though happy this.one he.may.be as est, tamen in tanta felicitate nemo potest esse [. . .] is yet in so.great luck nobody can be ‘Add to this that, though he be happy, as indeed he is, nonetheless no one can be this lucky.’ (Cicero; from Touranier 1994: 689) When the subjunctive comes to be dropped regularly in favour of the indicative in quamvis-clauses during the first century AD, this indicates that the factual concessive ‘although’ reading has been established as a conventional, rather than just contextual, reading of quamvis. For those with a philologically less conservative view concerning reanalysis, it is this change, along with the use of quamvis in elliptical clauses, as in (25) and (26) above, that constitutes a genuine actualization of the reanalysis which led to the use of quamvis as a subordinator in the first place.3 . An anonymous reviewer questions the relevance of the indicative as evidence of the actualization of the reanalysis, suggesting that “there appears to be no particular connection between the indicative and hypotaxis.” However, it is well-known that several subordinating conjunctions

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. Quamvis as a revealing expression In his book The language builder, Hagège (1993: 3–4) proposes the notion of a “revealing language,” that is, a language which, confronted with some particular research question, can offer insights not revealed by others. Assuming that one can speak not only of revealing languages but also of revealing constructions or revealing expressions, our discussion so far would suggest that quamvis makes a good candidate for a revealing expression among concessive subordinators in Latin and beyond. This idea is not completely new. Kortmann (1997), for example, appeals to quamvis (together with quamquam and several other non-concessive Latin subordinators like postquam ‘after,’ etc.) to reveal a particular areal-typological pattern in adverbial subordinators in Europe. As it turns out, subordinators which incorporate quantifiers closely related to interrogative words (such as quam ‘how much?’) are distinctive of the Romance languages, of certain languages spoken in the Southern Balkans and of Maltese (1997: 225). Though he declines to speculate on the relationship between external influence and language-internal renewal, Kortmann does note that Latin, with its high overall proportion of qu-subordinators, may have “set the pattern for subordinators incorporating quantifiers, not just for Romance but possibly also Albanian” and a number of others (1997: 226).4 Within the more limited purview of the present paper, the main reason why quamvis is more revealing than other (concessive) subordinators is that it is based on a formerly independent sentence: together with the other -vis-compounds, it underwent an extra evolutionary step from discourse to syntax. Haspelmath’s Indefinite pronouns (1997) exploits this revealing character of clausally-based expressions to the full in a discussion of the grammaticalization of indefinite pronouns from every conceivable angle, on the basis of a sample of 40 plus 100 languages, including Latin (1997: 129–156). His functional-typological approach contrasts with the more ‘traditional’ methodology advocated by critics like Joseph (2004), who would rather look at each change individually and “let the chips fall as they may” (2004: 59). From the more traditional point of view, there is little to be gained from routinely do take the indicative in Classical Latin (see, for example, Hofmann and Szantyr 1965), at least in part so as to distinguish between different senses (the best-known examples being cum and dum), and that the indicative occurs systematically not only with quamvis but also with other concessive connectives in both Latin (e.g. quamquam) and Romance (e.g. French bien que and Spanish aunque). What is really at issue is not the connection between the indicative and hypotaxis tout court, but between the indicative and particular meaning relations. As for concessivity (see König 1986, 1988), the indicative is motivated precisely because concessive subordinate clauses signal facts rather than sets of hypothetical conditions (as in, for instance, the diachronically earlier, quantificational reading of quamvis). Hence it is plausible to interpret the introduction of the indicative in factual contexts as yet another surface manifestation of the reanalysis of quamvis as a subordinating conjunction. . I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for drawing my attention to this issue.

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analysing individual changes as manifestations of larger patterns or tendencies in language, and seeking to explain given changes by referring to similarites with other changes, on the one hand, and the functional embeddedness of language, on the other. The other sense in which quamvis is a revealing expression is closely related to the first and has to do with the specific expressive motivation for its grammaticalization, namely speech-situation evocation. According to Schwenter and Waltereit (2005), speech-situation evocation is a strategic pretence by speakers who use language as if in a speech situation, and is a potential “locus for diachronic change.” What speech-situation does is create bridging contexts which enable addressee-oriented expressions, like the original vis-relatives, to start down the path of grammaticalization. Its diachronic effects can be seen at work, inter alia, in so-called asyndetic conditionals, a type of conditional whose protasis has the internal structure of a polar interrogative. Conditionals of this kind are found throughout Germanic, including English (e.g. Should you fall ill, you can join us later), and also in parts of Romance and a few other languages. They are often explained as grammaticalizations of interrogative-declarative sequences in which the interlocutor’s intervening turn is skipped, presupposing the interlocutor’s consent to the proposition expressed by the interrogative (Jespersen 1940: IV, 334; cf. Van den Nest 2005). (31)

A1 : (B: A2 :

Interrogative/protasis? Yes) Declarative/apodosis

An important step towards grammaticalization is the monological use of such sequences in written texts to evoke a dialogue with the reader. At this stage, the sequence displays bonding but not yet unification, as illustrated, for instance, by the following passage in (32) below from the Latin Bible, the Vulgate, which contains four conditionals. The first two conditionals have the form of a paratactic interrogative-declarative sequence, whereas the second pair is hypotactic with si ‘if ’ as subordinator in the protasis (text and translation from Thiele and Stier 1981: 680–681). (32) Latin Alligatus es uxori? noli quaerere solutionem. Solutus bound you.are to.wife do.not seek divorce divorced es ab uxore? noli quaerere uxorem. Si autem acceperis you.are from wife do.not seek wife if however you.take uxorem, non peccasti, et si nupserit virgo, non wife not you.have.sinned and if will.marry virgin not peccavit. she.has.sinned

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‘Art thou bound unto a wife? Seek not to be loosed. Art thou loosed from a wife? Seek not a wife. But and if thou marry, thou hast not sinned; and if a virgin marry, she hath not sinned.’ (King James Bible 1 Cor. VII, 27–28) The Greek original displays the same interrogative-declarative sequence. Phrasing a protasis (especially a second person one) in the form of a question, even though any actual exchange is impossible, is an extremely efficient manner of involving the addressee in the construction of the hypothetical world in question, and, in the case of consent, of committing him all the more strongly to the action or conclusion expressed in the apodosis; not surprisingly, the latter is often an imperative. The same motivation is at work in the formation of the -vis-compounds, as seen in many of the transitional examples cited earlier. For the second phase in the grammaticalization of quamvis, its conjunctionalization, we can also appeal to speech-situation evocation as a contributing factor, this time to a special type known as Rhetorical Dialogues (Popovici 1981; cf. Herring 1991). Rhetorical Dialogues are attempts by speakers and writers to anticipate and pre-empt undesirable presuppositions and potential objections on the part of the addressee. It has been observed that Rhetorical Dialoguing is a frequent function of concessive-conditional expressions and a contributing factor in their grammaticalization (Leuschner 2006). It is also the function of sentences like that in example (21) above, where the free-choice quantifier quamvis enables the speaker to extend his invitation to spend the night while dispelling any potential qualms on the part of the visitor concerning shortness of notice. Since Rhetorical Dialogues are by definition a means of backgrounding potentially controversial issues, they help motivate semantic-pragmatic bonding between independent sentences and thus contribute towards the eventual grammaticalization of hypotaxis.

. Conclusion Having examined the formation and subsequent conjunctionalization of quamvis in terms of grammaticalization and speech-situation evocation, let us return finally to the starting-point of the present paper, namely the renovation of concessive subordinators. Even though inventories of subordinators are subject to this renovating tendency quite generally (cf. Meillet’s seminal 1921 paper), concessives are especially affected, given the “constant need one has to express concessivity with ever renewed force” (Meillet 1921: 173, my translation; cf. König 1988). The result in grammaticalization terms is layering, that is, the synchronic coexistence of older, more grammaticalized expressive means with newer, less grammaticalized ones (Hopper 1991). Thus, the synchronic coexistence of concessive quamvis (and quamlibet) with quamquam and other, conditional-based subordinators, like

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etsi, etiamsi and tametsi, can be regarded as layering, with each type of marker representing a separate diachronic turn in the spiral of renovation in Latin. In turn, the -si- and -vis-/-libet-/-lubet-groups later became older layers vis-àvis new additions to the concessive inventory. Thus, having witnessed the retreat of older concessive quamquam before newly concessive quamvis from the first century AD, detailed stylistic research shows that fourth century quamvis, though still in use as both an adverb and a subordinator, was not only receding in terms of absolute frequency, but also becoming associated with more backward-looking, literary registers (Spevak 2000). The main up-and-coming concessive subordinator from the third century AD is the adverb licet, based originally on a verb form meaning ‘it may be’ (Spevak 2000: 118–120; also Meillet 1921: 172–173; Schaffner 1954: 29–33; Hofmann and Szantyr 1965: 605). Example (33) shows licet as an adverb in parataxis, while in (34) it is unambiguously a subordinator. (33) Latin dicam equidem – licet arma mihi mortemque I.will.speak in.turn maybe with.violence me and.with.death minetur. he.may.threaten ‘I will speak out in turn – he may threaten me with violence and death.’ (Virgil; from Schaffer 1954: 31) (34) Latin urbes [. . .] licet Graecis nominibus appellentur [. . .] primigenia cities though Greek names they.may.be.called original tamen nomina non amittunt. yet names not they.shed ‘The cities, though they bear Greek names, still do not shed the original names.’ (Ammianus Marcellinus; from Spevak 2000: 119)5 Reminiscent of licet, which incidentally tends to shed the subjunctive for the indicative as it establishes itself as a subordinator (see Hofmann and Szantyr 1965: 605), is the adverb esto, based on an archaic imperative of esse ‘be.’ There are, however, no clear indications in the data that esto ever really attained the status of a subordinator (Hofmann and Szantyr 1965). Yet another layer in the inventory of subordinators came to be formed due to the tendency in Late Latin to create a whole series of new subordinators from adverbs which had originally appeared in . As Wim Verbaal (personal communication) reminds me, Ammianus Marcellinus is not necessarily a reliable source concerning matters of Latin, given that he was Greek-speaking by origin and acquired Latin as a second language (a fact which often shows through in his style). Nonetheless, his use of licet in (34) is typical enough of his period and genre (see Spevak 2000) to be cited here without reserve.

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collocations with genuine subordinators like ut, quod, cum and si. Thus, it has been suggested that the ellipsis even affected compounds like concessive(-conditional) etiamsi, the -si being omitted to yield etiam as concessive(-conditional) subordinator (Löfstedt 1936: 54; cf. Stempel 1964: 430–435 for further discussion, including later observations from Romance). Though the history of concessive subordinators in Latin reaches its end with these late developments, it is interesting to observe quamvis being given a late, if brief, lease of life in northern dialects of Old Italian, where it shows up in both prose and poetry written in the vernacular, often (but not necessarily) translated by clerics from Latin (Miltschinsky 1917: 128–131). Nevertheless, quamvis is hardly ever used on its own in these texts, not even if it corresponds directly to quamvis (or licet) in the Latin original. Rather, it is almost invariably followed immediately by de(o) ‘God’ and usually, also, by the subordinator che ‘that.’ The whole phrase (which, needless to say, has numerous phonetic and orthographic variants) then functions as a concessive-conditional or concessive subordinator, often introducing a clause in the subjunctive (Miltschinsky 1917: 130). Consider (35) and (36) below. (35) Old Italian quamuis=de che un homo sia peruerso [. . . ], e dou amar quel even.if=Lord that a man be perverse I must love that homo [. . .] man ‘Even if a man be perverse, I must love that man.’ (lit. ‘As (much as) you want, Lord, that a man be perverse, I must love that man.’) (36) Old Italian quamuis de que pillato sauesse che cristo no era even.though Lord that Pilate knew.sbjv that Christ not was degno de morte, anpo per temor mondana el lassa worthy of death yet out.of fear wordly he released barában ladro e criste comando che fisse flagellao. Barnabas thief and Christ ordered that be flogged ‘Even though Pilate knew that Christ was not worthy of death, nonetheless out of worldly fear he released Barnabas the thief and had Christ flogged.’ Quamvis in these examples from Old Italian is clearly part of a routinized invocation to God, representing a learned re-motivation of its original sense in a new, Christian-vernacular context.

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Abbreviations abl acc adj adv dat imp

ablative accusative adjective adverb(ial) dative imperative

nom pl S/s sbjv sr

nominative plural sentence subjunctive subordinator

References Bhat, D. N. Shankara. 2000. The indefinite-interrogative puzzle. Linguistic Typology 5(4:) 365– 400. Fruyt, Michèle. 1998. La gramaticalización en latín. In Benjamín García-Hernández (ed.), Estudios de lingüística latina. Actas del IX Coloquio Internacional de Lingüística Latina, 877–890. Madrid: Ediciones Clásicas. Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2001. The meaning of free choice. Linguistics and Philosophy 24: 659– 735. Hagège, Claude. 1993. The language builder: An essay on the human signature in morphogenesis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Haiman, John. 1974. Concessives, conditionals, and verbs of volition. Foundations of Language 11: 341–360. Harris, Alice C. & Lyle Campbell. 1995. Historical syntax in cross-linguistic perspective. Cambridge: CUP. Haspelmath, Martin. 1997. Indefinite pronouns. Oxford: OUP. Herring, Susan C. 1991. The grammaticalization of rhetorical questions in Tamil. In Elizabeth Closs Traugott & Bernd Heine (eds.), Approaches to grammaticalization, Vol. I, 253–284. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hofmann & Szantyr 1965 = Hofmann, Johan B. 1965. Lateinische Syntax und Stilistik. Mit dem allgemeinen Teil der lateinischen Grammatik. Neubearbeitet von Anton Szantyr. München: Beck. Hopper, Paul J. 1991. On some principles of grammaticalization. In Elizabeth Closs Traugott & Bernd Heine (eds.), Approaches to grammaticalization, Vol. I, 17–36. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hopper, Paul J. & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 1993. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: CUP. Hopper, Paul J. & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization. 2nd edn. Cambridge: CUP. Jespersen, Otto. 1909–1949. A Modern English grammar on historical principles. 7 vols. London: Allen and Unwin. Joseph, Brian D. 2004. Rescuing traditional (historical) linguistics from grammaticalization theory. In Olga Fischer, Muriel Norde & Harry Perridon (eds.), Up and down the cline: The nature of grammaticalization [Typical Studies in Language 59], 45–71. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. König, Ekkehard. 1986. Conditionals, concessive conditionals and concessives: Areas of contrast, overlap and neutralization. In Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Alice ter Meulen, Judy Snitzer Reilly & Charles A. Ferguson (eds.), On conditionals, 229–246. Cambridge: CUP.

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König, Ekkehard. 1988. Concessive connectives and concessive sentences: Cross-linguistic regularities and pragmatic principles. In John A. Hawkins (ed.), Explaining language universals, 145–166. Oxford: Blackwell. Kortmann, Bernd. 1997. Adverbial subordination: A typology and history of adverbial subordinators based on European languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Lehmann, Christian. 1995. Thoughts on grammaticalization: A programmatic sketch. 2nd edn. Munich: Lincom. Leuschner, Torsten. 2006. Hypotaxis as building-site: The emergence and grammaticalization of concessive conditionals in English, German and Dutch. Munich: Lincom. Löfstedt, Einar. 1936. Adverbia und adverbiale Ausdrücke in konjunktionaler Funktion. In Einar Löfstedt (ed.), Vermischte Studien zur lateinischen Sprachkunde und Syntax, 47–55. Lund: Gleerup. Meillet, Antoine. 1921. Le renouvellement des conjonctions. In Antoine Meillet (ed.), Linguistique historique et linguistique générale, 159–174. Paris: Champion. Miltschinsky, Margarete. 1917. Der Ausdruck des konzessiven Gedankens in den altnorditalienischen Mundarten, neben einem Anhang, das Provenzalische betreffend. Halle: Niemeyer. Popovici, Vasile. 1981. Dialogues rhétoriques. Degrés 9: i1–i6. Rosén, Hannah. 2000. Grammaticalization in Latin? Two case studies. Glotta 76: 94–112. Schaffner, Emil. 1954. Die Entwicklung des lateinischen Adverbs quamvis zur Konjunktion. PhD dissertation, Zurich University. Schwenter, Scott & Richard Waltereit. 2005. Presupposition accommodation and language change: From additivity to speech-act marking. Paper presented at FITIGRA, Leuven, February 2005. Spevak, Olga. 2000. La distribution des morphèmes concessifs en latin tardif. Glotta 76: 113–132. Stempel, Wolf-Dieter. 1964. Untersuchungen zur Satzverknüpfung im Altfranzösischen. Braunschweig: Westermann. Tabor, Whitney & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 1998. Structural scope expansion and grammaticalization. In Anna Giacalone Ramat & Paul J. Hopper (eds.), The limits of grammaticalization, 229–272. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Thiele, C.G.G. & Rudolph Stier (eds.). 1981. Novum Testamentum tetraglotton. Archetypum Graecum cum versionibus Vulgata Latina, Germanica Lutheri et Anglica Authentica in usum manualem. Zurich: Diogenes. Touranier, Christian. 1994. Syntaxe latine. Louvain-la-Neuve: Peeters. Tovena, Lucia M. & Jacques Jayez. 1999. Any: From scalarity to arbitrariness. In Francis Corblin, Jean-Marie Marandin & Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin (eds.), Empirical issues in formal syntax and semantics II, 39–57. The Hague: HAG. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1985. Conditional markers. In John Haiman (ed.), Iconicity in syntax: Proceedings of a symposium on iconicity in syntax, Stanford, June 24–26, 1983, 289–307. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Van den Nest, Daan. 2005. Asyndetische Subordination diachronisch. Konditionalen zwischen Diskurs und Syntax. Germanistische Mitteilungen 62: 29–43. Wiegand, Nancy. 1987. Causal connectives in the early history of English: A study in diachronic syntax. PhD dissertation, Stanford University.

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Grammaticalization waves The Russian subjunctive mood and person/number marking Jens Nørgård-Sørensen University of Copenhagen

This paper shows that grammaticalization does not manifest itself in particular modifications affecting a single grammatical form, but rather operates in waves, spreading recursively from one form or paradigm to others. I illustrate this idea with the analysis of the grammaticalization of the Russian subjunctive mood, which evolved from the Old Russian periphrasis with an l-participle and an auxiliary; over time, the auxiliary developed further into the Modern Russian hypothetical particle by. This grammaticalization process is shown here to have an effect on other members of the paradigm of periphrastic forms containing an l-participle as well as on the Russian person/number marking system in general.

.

Introduction

This paper focusses on the insight that a grammaticalization process is hardly ever an isolated event affecting a single grammatical form, but tends to have effects beyond the domain that it primarily concerns, effects which have often been ignored in the literature. A grammatical form can in this sense be visualized as an organism with a number of tentacles, each one touching a range of other forms with which it is related syntagmatically, paradigmatically or indeed both. It follows from this that a change in the expression of one grammatical value may affect the expression of other grammatical values as well. If a grammatical form, which by definition is a member of a closed paradigm, is exposed to a change in content, other members of the same paradigm must somehow be affected. The influence of a change can often be traced even beyond the paradigm(s) which it directly concerns. Thus, grammaticalization does not manifest itself in a number of particular modifications, but rather as waves spreading recursively from one form or paradigm to

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 Jens Nørgård-Sørensen

others. In this paper I will illustrate this idea with the development of the Russian subjunctive mood form.1 My point of departure will be the development of the subjunctive mood in Russian. Old Russian included a periphrastic subjunctive mood form, consisting of the l-participle combined with an auxiliary, as in (1). (1) Old Russian poda-l-˘u by-x˘u. give.ptcp.sg.m be.aor.1sg ‘I would give.’ The l-participle, marked by the formant -l-, was an active resultative participle. Even by the time of the very earliest Slavic texts, though, it appeared only in periphrastic tense and mood forms.2 Over the course of time, however, the auxiliary developed into the verbal hypothetical particle by; cf. the Modern Russian subjunctive in example (2). (2) Modern Russian poda-l by. give.pst irr ‘I (you, he) would give.’ This development reflects at least some of the features which are said to be characteristic of elements moving down the grammaticality cline (Hopper and Traugott 2003: 142; Fischer et al. 2004: 2), in particular, phonetic reduction, increased syntactic bondedness and semantic generalization (bleaching). In this study, however, I will consider the process from a somewhat different angle; it will be viewed as part of a broader development including several interrelated changes, which have an effect on other tense forms of the same auxiliary as well as on the person/numbermarking system.

. Data Since the meaning and function of a linguistic form may only be identified within the domain of the paradigm(s) of which it forms part, the subjunctive mood in Russian should be analysed in the light of other periphrastic verb forms including the l-participle. Two such periphrases existed in Old Russian, the more prominent being the perfect, which was formed by combining the l-participle with the . I use the term subjunctive mood in a broad sense (modus coniunctivus), so that it also covers the mood forms occasionally referred to as the conditional mood. . Lexicalized uses are here disregarded as they are not relevant for this paper.

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Table 1. Perfect and subjunctive paradigms in Early Old Russian for pisa-ti ‘paint, write’ Preterite l-participle + ‘be’ prs man/woman

Subjunctive l-participle + ‘be’ aor man/woman

1sg 2sg 3sg

pisa-l-˘u/pisa-l-a jes-m˘ı pisa-l-˘u/pisa-l-a je-si pisa-l-˘u/pisa-l-a jes-t˘ı

pisa-l-˘u/pisa-l-a by-x˘u pisa-l-˘u/pisa-l-a by pisa-l-˘u/pisa-l-a by

1du 2du 3du

pisa-l-a/pisa-l-ˇe jes-vˇe pisa-l-a/pisa-l-ˇe jes-ta pisa-l-a/pisa-l-ˇe jes-ta

pisa-l-a/pisa-l-ˇe by-xovˇe pisa-l-a/pisa-l-ˇe by-sta pisa-l-a/pisa-l-ˇe by-sta

1pl 2pl 3pl

pisa-l-i/pisa-l-y jes-m˘u pisa-l-i/pisa-l-y jes-te pisa-l-i/pisa-l-y s-ut˘ı

pisa-l-i/pisa-l-y by-xom˘u pisa-l-i/pisa-l-y by-ste pisa-l-i/pisa-l-y by-ša

auxiliary ‘be’ in the present tense. Table 1 provides the paradigms for the perfect and the subjunctive mood in Early Old Russian (eleventh century) for the verb pisa-ti ‘paint, write.’3 As Table 1 illustrates, both the perfect and the subjunctive were formed by combining the l-participle with a form of the verb byti ‘be’ in auxiliary function. Not surprisingly, in order to form the perfect the auxiliary appeared in the present tense. By contrast, to form the subjunctive the auxiliary adopted the aorist form.4 The two forms are preserved in Modern Russian, though in a markedly simplified shape, exemplified in Table 2 for the verb pisat’ ‘paint, write.’5 A comparison between Tables 1 and 2 reveals that several changes have taken place. In addition to the loss of the dual, which is not relevant in this study, we note that the auxiliary has disappeared from the perfect, whereas in the subjunctive the former aorist auxiliary has developed into the uninflected hypothetical particle by. Let us now consider several examples from different historical periods to illustrate the transition from the Old Russian to the Modern Russian systems as laid out in Tables 1 and 2 above. All examples are taken from chronicles, a basically narrative text type in Medieval Russian literature which is stylistically fairly . While Old Russian possessed a complex system of several past tense forms (aorist, imperfect, perfect, pluperfect I, pluperfect II), Modern Russian has only one left, the historical perfect, traditionally labelled the preterite. . The fact that the aorist, which otherwise appeared as a tense form, was used in Old Russian to express a mood has to do with historical factors which fall out of the scope of this study. . For reasons which will become clear later in this paper, it is reasonable to speak of an l-form rather than an l-participle in relation to Modern Russian.

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 Jens Nørgård-Sørensen

Table 2. Perfect and subjunctive paradigms in Modern Russian for pisat’ ‘paint, write’ Perfect (personal pronoun) + l-form man/woman

Subjunctive (personal pronoun) + l-form + enclitic particle by man/woman

1sg 2sg 3sg

ja pisa-l/pisa-l-a ty pisa-l/pisa-l-a on pisa-l/on-a pisa-l-a

ja pisa-l/pisa-l-a by ty pisa-l/pisa-l-a by on pisa-l/on-a pisa-l-a by

1pl 2pl 3pl

my pisa-l-i vy pisa-l-i oni pisa-l-i

my pisa-l-i by vy pisa-l-i by oni pisa-l-i by

homogeneous.6 Our first instances come from the Tale of Bygone Years (Povest’ vremennyx let), also known as the Primary Chronicle or the Nestor Chronicle, after its compiler Nestor, who completed it around 1120, partly on the basis of older texts. The examples belong to the oldest known copy Codex Laurentianus, dating from the fourteenth century. (3) Old Russian [...] da i az˘u blagoslovlen˘ıe podal˘u byx jemu and also I blessing give.ptcp.sg.m be.aor.1sg him ‘and I would also give him my blessing’ (1074, Primary Chronicle) (4) Old Russian [...] da byxom oboronili rus˘ıskuju zemlju ot that be.aor.1pl defend.ptcp.pl.m Russian soil from poganyx pagans ‘(in order) that we could defend the Russian soil against the pagans’ (1096, Primary Chronicle) (5) Old Russian [...] da byša ne prol’jali mene radi krovi that be.aor.3pl not shed.ptcp.pl.m me sake blood ‘(in order) that they should not shed blood for my sake’ (1097, Primary Chronicle) Examples (3) to (5) reflect the original Old Russian system, where the participles inflect for number and gender, and the auxiliaries for number and person. These examples are representative of the Primary Chronicle, a source which con. I am indebted to Karin Larsen for making her electronic corpus of Old Russian chronicle texts available to me.

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tains only a small number of forms not adjusting to the old standard, among them the periphrastic verb form in the second clause of example (6) below.7 (6) Old Russian Ašˇce byste ˇcelovˇeci byli to v˘u dne by jeste if be.aor.2pl people be.ptcp.pl.m then at day irr be.prs.2pl prišli. come.ptcp.pl.m ‘If you had been human, you would have come by daylight.’ (1074, Primary Chronicle) Example (6) is a counterfactual conditional construction where the verbs of both clauses should be in the subjunctive mood. In the antecedent clause we find the expected form, namely an auxiliary in the aorist in combination with a participle, both of them with the expected inflections. The consequent clause, on the contrary, contains a form consisting of three elements: (i) the uninflected particle by, (ii) the inflected auxiliary ‘be’ in the present tense and (iii) the l-participle, inflected as in Old Russian. The expected Old Russian form would be byste prišli. In other words, a change has taken place, which has left the participle unaffected but has replaced the old auxiliary with a combination of the uninflected particle by (which marks the subjunctive mood) plus the corresponding auxiliary in the present tense. Example (6) represents, therefore, an early attestation of a new subjunctive mood form which was eventually to gain ground and reach a fairly regular status in subsequent centuries. I will refer to this tripartite periphrastic form as the intermediate form, as opposed to the old form illustrated in Table 1 and the new form given in Table 2. Correspondingly, I will speak of the old system, the intermediate system and the new system. The existence of a transitional stage of the kind to which I refer as the intermediate system was first pointed out by Chaburgaev (1978: 45–46). We now turn to the First Novgorod Chronicle, which represents another dialectal area and, apparently, a slightly later state of development. Consider examples (7) and (8). (7) Old Russian bog˘u nam˘u znamenija kažet˘u da byxom˘u sja god us sign gives that be.aor.1pl refl pokajali ot grˇex˘u našix˘u. repent.ptcp.pl.m from sins our ‘God gives us signs so that we should repent of our sins.’ (1230, First Novgorod Chronicle) . Note that the segment by is glossed as irr in examples where it should be interpreted as an uninflected particle rather than as an inflected auxiliary.

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(8) Old Russian [...] prosjašˇce pomoci po krestijan’stvu pomogli by asking help according.to Christianity help.ptcp.pl.m irr este po nas be.prs.2pl for us ‘asking for help in a Christian manner: would you help us’ (1381, First Novgorod Chronicle) As compared to the Primary Chronicle, illustrated in our earlier examples (3) to (5), the intermediate form has extended its domain in the First Novgorod Chronicle. In the part of the Novgorod Chronicle examined, which covers the period 1111– 1446, the following regularities have been observed: a. First person singular and plural: auxiliary in the aorist + participle (old form) (cf. (7)). b. Second person singular and plural: by + auxiliary in the present tense + participle (intermediate form) (cf. (8)). c. Third person singular: by + participle (old/intermediate form). d. Third person plural: byša + participle (old form). Since this is one of the oldest texts offering a relatively transparent reflection of the intermediate paradigm for the subjunctive mood, in what follows we will consider each of these forms in turn. Third person plural forms reflect the old system (byša + participle), but these are so few in number that the data cannot be considered significant. However, in terms of markedness (cf. Andersen 2001a), it is not surprising that a new form is attested earlier in the singular than in the plural. In the third person singular, in turn, we also find a form which seems to have been shaped on the basis of the old system. However, from sources reflecting Old Russian vernacular, we know that the third person singular present of byti ‘be,’ jest˘ı, had virtually been lost by this time in all non-emphatic positions, including its copula and auxiliary functions (Gorškova and Charburgaev 1981: 310; Zaliznjak 1995: 161). Old Russian vernacular sources also show that the present tense of byti eventually disappeared in all persons and numbers, and that, not surprisingly, this development was first observed in the maximally unmarked third person (on markedness, see below). Consequently, the intermediate form would only include the present-tense auxiliary in the marked first and second person forms. In the maximally unmarked third person singular, by contrast, there would be no formal person/number marking, as shown in Table 3, which illustrates the intermediate system of the subjunctive mood form for masculine, singular and plural (cf. the similar paradigm in Chaburgaev 1978: 48).

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Table 3. Intermediate system of the subjunctive paradigm 1sg 2sg 3sg

pisal˘u by jesm˘ı pisal˘u by jesi pisal˘u by

1pl 2pl 3pl

pisali by jes-m˘u pisali by jes-te pisali by

It should be emphasized that the intermediate system has been reconstructed on the basis of evidence from several sources. Unlike the old and the new systems, the intermediate system is not reflected in a fully consistent way in any text. In the First Novgorod Chronicle, for instance, the intermediate form is standard in the second person, while the old form is preserved in the first person. This runs somewhat counter to the expectations of the markedness relations in a personmarking system. The third person is obviously the maximally unmarked form. As to the relation between the first and the second persons, it is natural to interpret the first person as unmarked, because from a cognitive point of view the second person presupposes the first person. In other words, the conception of the second person arises within the conception of the first person inasmuch as we cannot speak of a second person if we do not take the first person as given. According to the principle of markedness agreement proposed by Andersen (2001a: 30–34), then, one might expect an internally motivated change such as the one considered here to appear first in the third person, then spread to the first person and eventually to the second person. Pursuing the same line of reasoning, the development reflected in the First Novgorod Chronicle and other Old Russian texts must be interpreted as involving a different conceptualization of the markedness relations for the person forms of the subjunctive mood, according to which the second person is perceived as unmarked in relation to the first person. A likely explanation for this somehow surprising development in the Old Russian subjunctive mood paradigm can be outlined as follows: both in the singular and in the dual, the second person form was identical to the maximally unmarked third person form (cf. Table 1 above); this syncretism is likely to have caused a parallel treatment of the second and third person forms in the singular and in the dual and, by extension, also in the plural. The result would be a simplified markedness structure with the first person form as marked in relation to an unmarked second-third person form. The new paradigm eventually spread to the first person as well. Thus, in the fifteenth century texts from the Moscow Chronicle Compilation (Moskovskij letopisnyj svod) the intermediate form was the only possible one in the third and the second persons, and even in the first person it was prevailing. Compare in this connection examples (10) and (12) to the old forms still occurring in (9) and (11).

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(9) Old Russian [...] ašˇce byx rekl˘u im slovo o six if be.aor.1sg say.ptcp.sg.m them word about these ‘if I would say a word to them on these matters’ (1437, Moscow Chronicle Compilation) (10) Old Russian [...] ˇcto by jaz javil vam˘u kak našemu gosudarstvu that irr I show.ptcp.sg.m you how our government byti v našej otˇcinˇe 8 be in our homeland ‘(in order) that I could show you how our government of our homeland will be’ (1478, Moscow Chronicle Compilation) (11) Old Russian [...] da prestali byxom ot zol našix that desist.ptcp.pl.m be.aor.1pl from evils our ‘(in order) that we should desist from our evils’ (1460, Moscow Chronicle Compilation) (12) Old Russian [...] ˇcto by [...] ne pogibli jesmy za svoju that irr not perish.ptcp.pl.m be.prs.1pl for our izmˇenu deception ‘(in order) that we should not perish because of our deception’ (1456, Moscow Chronicle Compilation) In certain contemporary and later sources, such as in the Second Novgorod Chronicle, from the sixteenth century, the old form was restored as dominant, but it is reasonable to assume that this was due to stylistic factors or, more specifically, to the tendency to observe the Church Slavonic norm in writing.9 There is no doubt that the examples adduced above (cf. (6), (8), (10) and (12)) reflect a transitional state between the Old Russian and the Modern Russian systems, and therefore the paradigm proposed in Table 3 should be seen as an intermediate system be. Note that in this example there is no present-tense auxiliary. The reasons for its absence will be considered below. . Literacy was introduced in the oldest Russian state (with Kiev as the capital) in the tenth century with the adoption of Christianity. The Scriptures and other texts were imported to Russia from Byzantium and were written in a South Slavic, Old Bulgarian language into which they had been translated in the ninth century. This language, known as Old Church Slavonic, or, in a later variant with local modifications, as Russian Church Slavonic, served as the de facto norm of the written language until the eighteenth century.

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tween the Old Russian and the Modern Russian paradigms given in Tables 1 and 2 respectively. The intermediate subjunctive form has not attracted much attention10 and is not considered in general historical grammars of Russian. In his detailed account of the grammar of the Old Novgorod dialect, Zaliznjak (1995: 125) provides three examples from fourteenth century birch bark letters, a collection of letters and notes for daily use which, though limited in quantity, constitutes one of the most significant collections of texts unequivocally reflecting an Old Russian vernacular. His three examples are all second person, as can be seen below. (13) Old Russian a. by jesi dale irr be.prs.2sg give.ptcp.sg.m ‘you would give’ (Birch bark letter no. 610) b. by jes˘ı oun˛el˘u irr be.prs.2sg take.ptcp.sg.m ‘you would take’ (Birch bark letter no. 446) c. bi este poixali irr be.prs.2pl ride.ptcp.pl.m ‘you would ride’ (Birch bark letter no. 497) Zaliznjak (1995) rightly emphasizes that this form is only attested in the second person and not in the first person. Though it is not possible to draw reliable conclusions on the basis of only three examples, it should be mentioned that these limited data are in accord with findings from the chronicle texts, and confirm the markedness relations proposed in our earlier discussion of the actualization process. According to Zaliznjak, the subjunctive forms in (13) differ from the standard Old Russian subjunctive in that the l-participle has been replaced by the perfect. From a purely formal point of view, the singular examples (13a) and (13b) could actually be obtained merely by replacing the l-participle with the perfect. However, substitution of a finite for a non-finite form does not appear as a persuasive description of a change, and, if Zaliznjak’s claim were correct, the isolated plural example (13c) would have looked quite different. The examples from the birch bark letters confirm the interpretation proposed above that the change from the old to the intermediate subjunctive can be seen as a replacement of the auxiliary by an uninflected particle by and a form identical to the original present tense auxiliary. The l-participle did not undergo any formal modification and was not replaced by any other form.

. As already mentioned, a remarkable exception is Chaburgaev (1978).

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. Interpretation Clearly, the development considered in the previous section was gradual, and should be identified as an actualization process, that is, a gradual manifestation of a new system shaped by one or more structural innovations (or reanalyses; cf. Andersen 2001b: 225–226). From this definition it follows that an actualization process presupposes one or more reanalyses of the system. Before presenting an overall interpretation of the changes, we will consider some earlier discussions of related phenomena. Regarding the tense and mood systems, the early development of Old Russian closely resembles that of Old Polish. Both languages saw a simplification of the tense system with the result that the perfect was left as the only past tense form. In connection with certain aspects of the theory of language change, Andersen (1987, 1990) summarizes the development of the perfect and the subjunctive in Polish. He points out that, after the loss of all other past tense forms, the present tense auxiliary of the perfect was no longer opposed to any other past tense forms. This enabled two reinterpretations: (i) the original present tense auxiliary was reinterpreted as a simple person/number marker and (ii) the original l-participle was reinterpreted as a finite non-present form (Andersen 1987: 26). A similar interpretation of the corresponding Russian development has been launched by Russian historical linguists. Gorškova and Chaburgaev (1981: 311), for example, point out that in informal Old Russian texts (i.e. texts with only minor Church Slavonic influence) first and second person perfects occur with either the auxiliary or the personal pronouns ‘I,’ ‘you,’ etc., but hardly ever with the two forms together. The same regularity has been noted for the entire corpus of Novgorod birch bark letters11 (eleventh to fifteenth centuries; cf. Zaliznjak 1995: 124; Nørgård-Sørensen 1997: 4–5). Gorškova and Chaburgaev (1981: 312– 313) conclude that the syntactic synonymy of the present tense auxiliary (jesm˘ı, etc.) and the personal pronoun (ja ‘I,’ and so on) indicates that the auxiliary had lost its function as predicative centre (i.e. its finite function) and had become a pure marker of person (cf. also Chaburgaev 1978: 45). This interpretation has been challenged by Prokopova (1991: 61–62), though only for the Early Old Russian period (eleventh and twelfth centuries). In Modern Russian the former l-participle is obviously a finite past tense form, paradigmatically opposed to the present tense and, for the imperfective verbs, also to the periphrastic future. That the reinterpretations of the participle and the auxiliary were linked in an overall reanalysis seems convincing for both Russian and Polish. In view of the interpretations of the Old Polish and Old Russian develop. There is one exception only (cf. Nørgård-Sørensen 1997: 5)

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ments, as mentioned above, a detailed description of such a reanalysis will now be given. The transition from the old to the intermediate system must have been caused by two interrelated reanalyses, a primary reanalysis affecting the perfect, and a secondary reanalysis affecting the subjunctive, as shown below. a. Reanalysis 1: Perfect – Participle → finite form. – Auxiliary: finite form (marker of tense/mood and person/number) → marker of person/number (first and second person). b. Reanalysis 2: Subjunctive – Participle → finite form (cf. Reanalysis 1). – Auxiliary: finite form → hypothetical particle by + marker of person/number (first and second person). Example: first person singular: byx˘u (particle by + marker of first person singular -x˘u). In the old system the auxiliary was the finite form and thus both a marker of tense/mood and of person/number. The tense/mood-marking function is sentence-constituting and therefore primary to the person/number-marking function. As a result of Reanalysis 1, this primary function is taken over by the former participle, and as a consequence only the previously secondary function of person/number marking is left for the former auxiliary. This interpretation implies that, in the subsequent actualization process, there would be two competing person/number markers: the personal pronoun (‘I,’ ‘you,’ etc.) and the former auxiliary. This allowed for three ways of expressing person and number in the perfect, as illustrated in (14a–c).12 (14) Old Russian: Intermediate system a. dal˘u jesm˘ı. give.pst.sg.m 1sg [formerly: be.prs.1sg] b. ja dal˘u. I.nom give.pst.sg.m c. ja dal˘u jesm˘ı. I.nom give.pst.sg.m 1sg ‘I gave/have given.’ The variant in (14c) has exactly the same shape as the corresponding form in the old system. However, after the reanalysis it would contain two elements, namely the pronoun ja ‘I’ and the former auxiliary jesm˘ı, with identical functions as . Note that the l-form is glossed in these examples as a (past) tense and not as a participle.

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person/number markers. From a superficial point of view this does not look much like a change, since in terms of person/number marking (14c) would also be redundant in the old system. There is, however, an important difference. In the old system one of the redundant forms, the auxiliary jesm˘ı, also fulfilled the additional (and primary) function of tense/mood-marking. This is a type of redundancy characteristic of agreement relations, where the redundant function is not the only one realized by the form in question. It can therefore be argued that the general function of agreement is to mark syntactic relations through redundancy. In the intermediate system, by contrast, the two redundant forms are, simply, identical in content, and the combination of the two does not contribute to the specification of the syntactic structure. Not surprisingly, the theoretically possible (14c) variant never gained ground and rapidly fell out of use after the reanalysis. This leaves us with the types in (14a) and (14b), which were actually used as synonymous markers of person/number for a certain period of time. This situation is clearly reflected in the Novgorod birch bark letters (eleventh to fifteenth centuries). As noted above (cf. Section 2), in these letters the perfect appears with no auxiliary in the third person, while in the first and second persons we find either the personal pronoun or the auxiliary, but, except for a single case (Nørgård-Sørensen 1997: 5) never the two together. It seems as if a rule was operating according to which there must be one, and only one, marker of (the first and the second) person. This rule still applies in Modern Russian, where first and second person preterites and subjunctives with no pronoun are clearly elliptical, since they no longer contain an auxiliary. Reanalysis 2 was closely connected to Reanalysis 1, and – as the data suggest – it roughly coincided with it (see also the data considered in Chaburgaev 1978). However, for reasons which will be discussed below, Reanalysis 2 takes a secondary position as motivated by Reanalysis 1. Let us now consider the details of Reanalysis 2. The participle of the subjunctive is identical to that of the perfect. Therefore, after the reanalysis it came to fulfil the same function as in the case of the perfect construction, that is, it became the finite form. In the old system the subjunctive mood auxiliary (e.g. byx˘u) had a paradigmatic relation to the perfect auxiliary (jestem, etc.). Therefore, when the latter was reanalysed into something quite different, it must have influenced the function of the former. The result was a conceptual split of the two functions of the auxiliary byx˘u, so that the mood-marking function became associated with the stem by-, whereas the person/number-marking function was linked to the desinence -x˘u. Again, it can be argued that this was already so in the old system and that, consequently, it does not look much like a reanalysis. However, the crucial effect of the reanalysis was that the stem morpheme gained a more independent status, since it might now appear independently, that is, with no desinence, in the cases in which the person/number marking was taken care of by some other elements. The elements

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Grammaticalization waves 

which could alternatively mark person/number were the personal pronouns and the former present-tense auxiliary (jestem, etc.). Taking into account that person and number could not be marked more than once in the same phrase, we are left with a triple person/number-marking system in the subjunctive, as shown in (15a–c). (15) Modern Russian a. dal˘u by-x˘u. give.pst.sg.m irr-1sg [formerly: be.aor.1sg] b. ja dal˘u by. I.nom give.pst.sg.m irr c. dal˘u by jesm˘ı. give.pst.sg.m irr 1sg [formerly: be.prs.1sg] ‘I should give.’ Note that the glosses in (14) and (15) have been set up to reflect the result of the reanalyses proposed. The former l-participle has become a finite form; in isolation it marks the past tense, while in combination with the particle by it marks the subjunctive mood. The glosses further indicate that jesm˘ı is a simple marker of person/number, while by-x˘u is a combination of two morphemes: a marker of mood and a marker of person/number. This interpretation of the two former auxiliaries is the background for the claim made above that Reanalysis 2 was motivated by Reanalysis 1 (though roughly coinciding with it). It is reasonable to assume that, when the maximally unmarked present tense form of the ‘be’-auxiliary (jesm˘ı, etc.) lost its finite function and, thus, left the paradigm of ‘be’-auxiliaries, this paradigm fell apart. The forms only lived on either in a stylistically marked function or as semantically reanalysed elements – as in the case of the former aorist (byx˘u, etc.). Actually, two more peripheral members of the former paradigm of ‘be’-auxiliaries were also reanalysed as particles (cf. Chaburgaev 1978: 42). All three forms (15a–c) are widely attested in Old Russian texts of various kinds. Indeed, several examples of the (15a) variant (cf. examples (9) and (11)) and the (15c) variant (cf. examples (6), (8) and (12)) have already been provided here. For an example of the (15b) alternative, see (10) above, where jaz is a variant of the personal pronoun ja ‘I.’

. Concluding remarks Having proposed an interpretation of the data in terms of a set of reanalyses, some more general questions will now be considered. In order to shed more light on the period of transition from the old to the intermediate system, we shall first consider

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certain implications of the reanalyses at issue. Let us assume, that at a certain point in time, some speakers had already reanalysed the system, while others had not. What kind of output would the two groups of speakers produce? A comparison of the two paradigms provided in Tables 1 and 3 reveals that, for the third person singular, the maximally unmarked and undoubtedly the most frequent finite verb form, the old and the intermediate systems would produce identical output. For the first and the second persons, in turn, both groups of speakers might produce the (14a) and (15a) variants. These forms would not mean the same thing to the two groups of speakers, though they would be fully acceptable to both, and the differences of interpretation would not disturb communication. The (14b) and (15b) variants, on the other hand, would be produced only by speakers having reanalysed the system. To speakers sticking to the old system they would appear as reduced forms and thus would not be especially disturbing. Since the variant in (14c) is merely peripheral, (15c) becomes the only manifestation of the new system, which must have been unacceptable to speakers (or rather hearers) who had not reanalysed the system. The form is incomprehensible if jesm˘ı is perceived as a present tense form of the verb ‘be.’ As we have seen, the (15c) type is the form extending its domain from the twelfth century onwards in a gradual actualization process. As it appears, although the reanalyses changed the meaning of the individual morphemes fairly radically, they only had a limited effect on the formal appearance of the periphrastic verb forms considered. This situation provides ideal conditions for the spread of the reanalyses in the language community. The transition from the intermediate to the modern system is, in principle, simpler. The (14b) and (15b) variants spread at the expense of their alternatives, and are the only ones left in Modern Russian. However, this is the result of a long actualization process with a number of problems calling for further analyses. For example, there is evidence that the former present-tense auxiliary (cf. the variants (14a) and (15c)) disappeared earlier in the first person than in the second person (Prokopova 1991: 61). This is in accordance with the expectations on the basis of the principle of markedness agreement discussed above. Moreover, the role of stylistic factors also calls for further investigation. The (14a) and (15a) variants, that is, the forms which are identical to those of the old system, were preserved until the late eighteenth century as high-register forms, a fact which is obviously connected closely to the actualization process considered here. However, an investigation of these and other related questions is beyond the scope of the present study. It should be emphasized that the transition from the intermediate to the modern system did not involve any further reanalyses. The ground for the modern system was already laid as a result of the two reanalyses proposed above. They established a system of alternative person/number markers, and, in the subsequent actualization process, all but one went out of use.

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Grammaticalization waves 

Although the above discussion has concentrated on an analysis of the historical development of the Russian subjunctive, we have also dealt with other issues, not least the paradigm of auxiliaries and the system of person/number marking. As already noted, this is not accidental. Grammatical forms can be described as members of one or more paradigms, so that the reanalysis of a given grammatical form cannot be an isolated event. On the contrary, all grammatical forms of the paradigm(s) concerned will be somehow affected. We have illustrated this point by interpreting the development of the subjunctive in the light of the perfect, a prominent member of the paradigm of periphrastic forms containing an l-participle and a ‘be’-auxiliary to which the subjunctive also belonged. A reanalysis is likely to have further consequences for grammatical categories other than the one(s) directly affected. Thus, we have seen how the reanalysis of the Russian tense/mood system had secondary, though quite far-reaching, effects on person/number marking. In fact, it appears to have provided the conditions for a new development in the person/number-marking system. I consider this as a fragment of a grammaticalization wave: a change in one grammatical sub-system interferes with another sub-system and brings about a change in the latter. The present paper has been restricted to a small number of illustrative facts. Nevertheless, the story of this grammaticalization wave could have been extended both at the beginning and the end.

Abbreviations 1 2 3 aor du irr m

first person second person third person aorist dual irrealis masculine

nom pl prs pst ptcp sg refl

nominative plural present past participle singular reflexive

References Andersen, Henning. 1987. From auxiliary to desinence. In Martin Harris & Paolo Ramat (eds.), Historical development of auxiliaries, 21–51. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Andersen, Henning. 1990. The structure of drift. In Henning Andersen (ed.), Historical linguistics 1987. Papers from the 8th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, 1–20. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Andersen, Henning. 2001a. Markedness and the theory of linguistic change. In Henning Andersen (ed.), Actualization. Linguistic change in progress, 21–57. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Andersen, Henning. 2001b. Actualization and the (uni)directionality of change. In Henning Andersen (ed.), Actualization. Linguistic change in progress, 225–249. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Chaburgaev, Georgij A. 1978. Sud’ba vspomogatel‘nogo glagola drevnich slavjanskich analitiˇceskich form v russkom jazyke (The fate of the auxiliary of old Slavic analytic verb forms in Russian). Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta. Serija Filologija 4: 42–53. Fischer, Olga, Muriel Norde & Harry Perridon. 2004. Introduction: In search of grammaticalization. In Olga Fischer, Muriel Norde & Harry Perridon (eds.), Up and down the cline: The nature of grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 59], 1–16. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gorškova, Klavdija V. & Georgij A. Chaburgaev. 1981. Istoriˇceskaja grammatika russkogo jazyka [Russian historical grammar]. Moscow: Vysšaja škola. Hopper, Paul J. & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization. 2nd edn. Cambridge: CUP. Nørgård-Sørensen, Jens. 1997. Tense, aspect and verbal derivation in the language of the Novgorod birch bark letters. Russian linguistics 21: 1–21. Prokopova, T. I. 1991. Glagol’naja kategorija vremeni (The verbal category of tense). In Vladimir V. Kolesov (ed.), Drevnerusskij jazyk domongol’skoj pory, 48–72. Leningrad: Izd. Leningradskogo Universiteta. Zaliznjak, Andrej A. 1995. Drevnenovgorodskij dialekt (The old Novgorod dialect). Moscow: Škola Jazyki russkoj kul’tury.

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Discourse frequency and the collapse of the adposition vs. affix distinction in Lakota* Regina Pustet University of Munich (LMU)

Adpositions and case marking affixes are usually regarded as strictly separate categories in synchronic grammars. Discourse data from the Siouan language Lakota reveal, however, that such a rigid categorial distinction is simply a theoretical construct which cannot be maintained: many elements which have been classed as postpositions also figure as affixal case markers in this language. The focus of this paper is on identifying the factors which determine the distribution of these structural hybrids. It is shown that the realization of individual case markers as either postpositions or suffixes in Lakota is controlled by their collocational frequency in discourse, a factor rarely discussed in studies of this type. The Lakota data also show that, although both affix evolution and formal reduction are controlled by discourse frequency, affixes may develop without concomitant reductive change.

.

Adpositions vs. case-marking affixes

Adpositions and case marking affixes might be considered strictly separate categories in the grammar of any language. At least, this is the impression one gains from typological practice, which requires working with grammars of all kinds of languages. In assembling grammars of languages which have both adpositions and case marking affixes, it is no doubt useful to establish a rigid distinction between these two categories, so that any given case role-marker can be conveniently assigned to a single structural category. But to what extent is such a treatment of the matter an accurate representation of the facts? Diachronic approaches to language have shown that, at least in developmental terms, the distinction between adpositions and case marking affixes is anything but clear-cut, given that the former constitute one of the historical sources of the latter (cf., for example, Heine et al. * I am indebted to the Lakota speakers Della Bad Wound and Dorothy Rose Wilson for language data and helpful discussion of the issues raised in this study.

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1991). Moreover, language change is a gradual, step-by-step process, which precludes the possibility that previously non-existent categories arise in a language spontaneously, out of the blue. Therefore, if a language creates a new category of case marking affixes out of adpositions or other source elements, this innovation is unlikely to act on all elements involved simultaneously and with the same speed. Instead, at an initial stage just a few elements will begin to exhibit affixal characteristics, and they will do so only in a limited set of contexts; later, the process will gather momentum and expand to include a larger set of elements and an increasing number of contexts. Given the gradual nature of this process, it is not unrealistic to expect that, in a language which is equipped with both adpositions and case marking affixes, different diachronic stages of the development of individual source elements into affixal case markers can be observed at the same time. A synchronic scenario in which a fixed set of elements function as adpositions only while another set of elements function exclusively as case marking affixes, may be nothing more than a fiction which is descriptively inappropriate for the languages in question. Sceptics will presumably argue that languages like Latin do attest this state of affairs, and it would be hard to disprove the claim for a language like Latin for which only written records exist, records which conform to a grammar writing tradition which takes for granted the rigid separation between case marking affixes and adpositions. A strict categorial separation of adpositions and case marking affixes would imply that an element which functions as an adposition cannot be used as an affix and vice versa. The system of morphological case role marking in Lakota (Siouan, Central North America) has been portrayed as consisting of three or more suffixes and several dozens of postpositions (Buechel 1939: 113–114, 118, 1970: 40; Boas and Deloria 1941: 143). However, closer inspection of Lakota discourse data shows that the separation of postpositions from case marking suffixes cannot be sustained for this language. There are indeed case markers which are used in Lakota as suffixes exclusively and others which occur only as postpositions. But there are also numerous elements which function both as postpositions and as case marking suffixes, a fact which has been ignored in grammatical descriptions of Lakota so far. Instead, the case markers in question have been classed as regular postpositions. An example is the element (-)ópta ‘through,’ which appears as a postposition in (1) and as a suffix in (2). (1) Lakota thí-ki ópta ibláble. house-def through 1sg.ag.go ‘I went through the house.’

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The collapse of the adposition vs. affix distinction in Lakota 

(2) Lakota thi-Áópta ibláble. house-through 1sg.ag.go ‘I went through the house.’ Still, these structural hybrids would not pose a problem for grammar writing if they could be used as either suffixes or postpositions in any context. This is not the case in Lakota, however. The analytical challenge, in this case, lies in finding out if the occurrence of a hybrid as a suffix or as a postposition is, at least to some degree, predictable, that is, in determining the conditions which govern its appearance in either shape. As it turns out, these conditions can be defined in terms of discourse frequency. Most Lakota postpositions and postposition-suffix hybrids originate in serial verb constructions (Pustet 2000). Although developments of adpositions into case-marking affixes are among the most thoroughly studied aspects of grammaticalization (e.g. Heine et al. 1991), in such analyses the factor of discourse frequency is rarely taken into account. The data presented in this paper corroborate more recent research in the context of usage-based models (e.g. Jurafsky et al. 2001) which demonstrates that certain processes of grammaticalization first take place in highfrequency collocations. An English example is the combination of auxiliaries with the negator not, as in did not > didn’t, had not > hadn’t, should not > shouldn’t, would not > wouldn’t, could not > couldn’t, cannot > can’t, etc., where reductive change (shortening of not to -n’t) occurs along with affix formation. The Lakota case is different from such instances of frequency-sensitive change in grammaticalization, since the latter involve affix development accompanied by reductive change. Lakota shows that affix evolution can be independent of reductive change, even though both are controlled or even triggered by discourse frequency. Processes of affix development without concomitant reductive change have, of course, already been documented in the literature on grammaticalization.

. Argument marking in Lakota In Lakota, case roles are marked by means of four structural devices: word order, agreement markers on the predicate, case suffixes and postpositions. The first two strategies are exclusively used with core arguments. Only obliques, that is, noncore arguments, are coded by means of the elements dealt with in the present study, namely case suffixes and postpositions. Example (3) below presents a clause which illustrates the use of word order (SOV in Lakota) and verb agreement. The roles of agent and patient of the canonical transitive clause are not coded morphologically in the noun phrase, but rather

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by means of word order: the agent noun phrase precedes the patient noun phrase. Further, the person/number affixes on the predicate differentiate between agentive and patientive case roles. (3) Lakota wichá˚sa ki hená pteblé˚ska ki wichá-Ø-khuwa-pi. man def dem.dist cow def 3pl.pat-3.ag-chase-pl.ag ‘Those men are chasing the cows.’ The three case markers which always figure as suffixes and never as postpositions and which are still used productively in Lakota are the following: a. -(ya)ta ‘locative/directional.’ b. -(ya)takiya ‘directional.’ c. -(ya)ta(h ˛ a) ˛ ‘source, partitive, locative.’ Examples of these elements in combination with the referent pahá ‘hill’ are given in (4) to (6). (4) Lakota pahá-ta hill-on/to ‘on/to the hill’ (5) Lakota pahá-takiya hill-to(wards) ‘to(wards) the hill’ (6) Lakota pahá-tah ˛ a˛ hill-from ‘from the hill’ One of the above elements, namely -(ya)ta(h ˛ a) ˛ ‘source, partitive, locative,’ exhibits the alternative postpositional variants et´ah ˛ a˛ and et´a˛ ‘source, partitive, locative,’ with which it is interchangeable in many contexts (Pustet, forthcoming). Taken together, the suffixal and postpositional versions of the source marker can be regarded as a special type of postposition-suffix hybrid. This is why, in the analysis of discourse distribution of hybrids conducted in Section 3, et´ah ˛ a/et´ ˛ a/-(ya)t ˛ ah ˛ a/ ˛ -(ya)ta˛ ‘source, partitive, locative’ is included. Table 1 comprises the group of case markers which have never been found to occur as affixes in the context of the present investigation, and which can, therefore, be regarded as pure postpositions. The database used here is Deloria (1932), a collection of traditional Lakota narratives, together with grammatical-

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Table 1. Pure postpositions in Lakota ektá él étkiya glakí˛ya˛ ihákab isákhib ithókab itkób iyópteya iyúweh˚ kichí ób ú˛ ú˛ yuhá

‘at, in, to’ ‘at, in, to’ ‘towards’ ‘across (from)’ ‘behind’ ‘right by’ ‘in front, ahead of ’ ‘towards’ ‘through, past’ ‘across’ ‘with’ (comitative) ‘with’ (comitative) ‘because of ’ ‘with’ (instrumental) ‘with’ (comitative)

ity judgements of native speakers.1 Examples (7) and (8) illustrate the use of postpositionally marked constituents in Lakota. (7) Lakota wakpála-ki ektá ibláble. river-def to 1sg.ag.go ‘I went to the river.’ (8) Lakota Joe kichí wa-Áú. Joe with 1sg.ag-come ‘I am coming with Joe.’ Table 2 lists the postposition-suffix hybrids which occur in Deloria (1932). Comparing the lists in Tables 1 and 2 shows that hybridization is widespread among Lakota postpositions, with hybrids actually outnumbering pure postpositions. Examples (9) and (10) illustrate the use of the hybrid (-)aglágla ‘along.’

. The element él ‘at, in, to’ has been classed as a pure postposition rather than as a hybrid despite the fact that it also occurs as a suffix in the Deloria corpus, albeit in a single collocation only, thí-l ‘in the house’ (thí ‘house’ plus él ‘in’). The reason for this decision is that neither of the two Lakota speakers consulted in the course of the present study accepts suffixal use of él ‘at, in, to’ in combination with thí ‘house’ or in any other collocation.

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Table 2. Lakota suffix-postposition hybrids (-)aglágla (-)ak´a(l) ˛ (-)aÁínap/aÁínam ˛ (-)aÁóhomni (-)chok´ay ˛ a˛ (-)chóla (-)égna et´ah ˛ a/et´ ˛ a/-(ya)t ˛ ah ˛ a/-(ya)t ˛ a˛ (-)icágla (-)ithánu˛g (-)iw´akab ˛ (-)khayéla/ikh´ ˛ ayela ˛ (-)khiyéla/ikhíyela (-)lazáta (-)ma(hél) (-)ogná (-)óha˛ (-)ohómni ˚ (-)ohláthe (-)ók˚sa˛ (-)opháya (-)ópta (-)wakál ˛

‘along’ ‘on top of ’ ‘beyond, behind, on the other side of ’ ‘around’ ‘in the middle of ’ ‘without’ ‘among’ ‘from, at, in, some of ’ ‘beside’ ‘on both sides of ’ ‘above’ ‘close to’ ‘close to’ ‘behind’ ‘inside’ ‘inside’ ‘among’ ‘around, halfway around’ ‘under’ ‘around’ ‘along’ ‘across, through’ ‘above’

(9) Lakota mayá(-ki) aglágla máni. cliff(-def) along walk ‘He is walking along the cliff.’ (10) Lakota mayá-Áaglagla máni. cliff-along walk ‘He is walking along the cliff.’ Clear structural criteria can be applied to determine whether an individual hybrid functions as a suffix or a postposition. The most important of these is that, while postpositions carry independent stress, as (-)aglágla ‘along’ does in (9), suffixes do not; in (10), for example, suffixal (-)aglágla ‘along’ loses its stress. If the head noun of a suffixally used hybrid is monosyllabic, the stress is placed on the second syllable of the resulting noun-plus-suffix complex, as the contrastive pairs (11) vs. (12), and (13) vs. (14) demonstrate.

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(11) Lakota mní(-ki) mahél yaká-pi. ˛ water(-def) inside sit-pl ‘They are sitting in the water.’ (12) Lakota mni-máhel yaká-pi. ˛ water-inside sit-pl ‘They are sitting in the water.’ (13) Lakota ˚ hé(-ki) ak´a˛ ná˚z˛i. mountain(-def) on stand ‘S/he is standing on the mountain.’ (14) Lakota ˚ he-Áák al ˛ ná˚z˛i. mountain-on stand ‘S/he is standing on the mountain.’ The loss of independent stress in suffixal hybrids is particularly noticeable if in the postpositional version of the hybrid the stress is placed on the second syllable, as happens with (-)mahél ‘inside’ and (-)ak´al ˛ ‘on top of.’ In such cases, the stress migrates to the first syllable of the hybrid when it is suffixed to a monosyllabic head noun (cf. examples (12) and (14) above). In hybrids whose postpositional versions are stressed on the first syllable, such as (-)égna ‘among,’ loss of independent stress in suffixal usage is less conspicuous. The noun-plus-suffix complex will carry stress on the second syllable if the head noun is monosyllabic, that is, on the syllable which is also stressed in the basic ˚ postpositional variant of the hybrid. The collocation of (-)égna ‘among’ with hé ˚ ‘mountain’ illustrates this: he-Áégna ‘among the mountains.’ In certain collocations with monosyllabic head nouns, an alternative stress pattern is possible in which the noun-plus-suffix complex is stressed on the first syllable. Thus, with (-)chóla ‘without’ in combination with ch´a˛ ‘wood,’ both ch´a-chola ˛ and cha-chóla ˛ ‘without wood’ are acceptable. If the head noun is nonmonosyllabic, the suffixally used hybrid may retain a weak secondary stress, represented by ` in (15). (15) Lakota pahá-Áak`a˛ ná˚z˛i. hill-on stand ‘S/he is standing on the hill.’ Articles cannot appear in combination with pure suffixes and suffixally used hybrids, although the preceding noun can still be interpreted as definite or

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indefinite, as required by the context. Example (16), for instance, where the hybrid (-)ak´al ˛ ‘on top of ’ functions as a suffix but is combined with a definite article, is ungrammatical. This is true also of (17), in which the definite article is followed by the suffix -takiya ‘to(wards).’ (16) Lakota ˚ *he-kí-ak al ˛ mountain-def-on (17) Lakota *pahá-ki-takiya hill-def-to(wards) Two of the hybrids listed in Table 2 may be shortened when used as suffixes, namely et´ah ˛ a/et´ ˛ a/-(ya)t ˛ ah ˛ a/-(ya)t ˛ a˛ ‘source, partitive, locative’ and (-)ma(hél) ‘inside.’ In the case of the former, the short suffixal forms -(ya)tah ˛ a˛ and -(ya)ta˛ occur in a wide variety of lexical contexts (cf. Pustet, forthcoming), while in that of the latter, the short form -ma is found in combination with just a single lexical item, namely thí ‘house.’ (18) Lakota thi-máhel yaká-pi. ˛ house-inside sit-pl ‘They are sitting in the house.’ (19) Lakota thi-má yaká-pi. ˛ house-inside sit-pl ‘They are sitting in the house.’ All pure postpositions and hybrids can also be used adverbially, that is, without the noun phrase or other constituent which they modify being overtly expressed, as in examples (20) and (21). (20) Lakota ektá ibláble. to 1sg.ag.go ‘I am going to him/her/it/there.’ (21) Lakota mahél yaká-pi. ˛ inside sit-pl ‘They are sitting inside (of it).’ Such cases are not considered in the frequency analyses presented in Sections 3 and 4 below.

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. Frequency data The following quantitative data were obtained by means of a full analysis of the Deloria corpus (1932), which consists of about 70,000 words. In this section my aim is to show that hybrids, when functioning as suffixes, show a preference for certain head nouns, such as thí ‘house,’ ch´a˛ ‘wood, forest’ and mní ‘water,’ and that these head nouns happen to be high-frequency items, which suggests that collocational frequencies should be taken into account when attempting to clarify under what circumstances a hybrid is realized as a suffix. . Text distribution of hybrids Table 3 summarizes the distributional data for the hybrids listed in Table 2 as represented in the Deloria (1932) corpus. Column six contains the number of different types of collocations in which a given hybrid is encountered. For instance, (-)aglágla ‘along’ is found in combination with seven different lexical items, that is, head nouns, namely blé ‘lake,’ ch´a˛ ‘wood(s),’ mayá ‘cliff,’ mní ‘water,’ óhuta ‘bank, shore,’ wakpá ‘river’ and wakpála ‘creek.’ Column seven, then, provides the respective frequency of these individual collocations. Thus, (-)aglágla ‘along’ occurs five times with mní ‘water,’ three times with mayá ‘cliff,’ twice with blé ‘lake’ and ch´a˛ ‘wood(s)’ and once with óhuta ‘bank, shore,’ wakpá ‘river’ and wakpála ‘creek.’ Column five shows that some elements never occur as postpositions in the corpus (although elicitation work with Lakota native speakers has demonstrated that these elements are used as postpositions). Regarding the use of hybrids in specific collocations, elicitation work reveals the following patterns: Pattern (a): case marker X is obligatorily suffixed when used with a certain head noun. Pattern (b): case marker X must be realized as a postposition when used with a certain head noun. Pattern (c): case marker X can be realized either as a suffix or as a postposition when used with a certain head noun. Regarding pattern (a), examples (22) and (23) indicate that the hybrid (-)lazáta ‘behind’ must be realized as a suffix in combination with the head noun thí ‘house,’ since a postpositional construction would be ungrammatical for this particular collocation. The same is true for the collocations in the contrastive pairs (24) vs. (25) and (26) vs. (27).

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Table 3. Distribution of hybrids in Deloria (1932) Gloss

Total Suffixal Non-suffixal occurrences (postpositional) occurrences

Number of different types of collocations

(-)aglágla

‘along’

15

12

3

7

(-)ak´a(l) ˛

‘on top of’

21

8

13

8

(-)aÁínap

2

2

0

1

(-)aÁóhomni (-)chok´ay ˛ a˛ (-)chóla

‘beyond, behind, on the other side of’ ‘around’ ‘in the middle of’ ‘without’

1 1 4

1 1 3

0 0 1

1 1 3

(-)égna

‘among’

11

4

7

6

et´ah ˛ a/et´ ˛ a/ ˛ -(ya)tah ˛ a/-(ya)t ˛ a˛

‘from, at, in, some of’

263

227

36

60

(-)icágla (-)khayéla/ikh´ ˛ ayela ˛ (-)khiyéla/ikhíyela

‘beside’ ‘close to’ ‘close to’

2 1 6

2 1 6

0 0 0

1 1 4

(-)lazáta

‘behind’

4

4

0

2

(-)ma(hél)

‘inside’

101

98

3

9

(-)ogná

‘inside’

7

2

5

4

˚ (-)ohláthe (-)ók˚sa˛ (-)opháya (-)wakál ˛

‘under’ ‘around’ ‘along’ ‘above’

6 1 2 6

2 1 2 6

4 0 0 0

6 1 1 1

Size of individual collocations (i.e. number of tokens within collocation types) 1×5 items 1×3 2×2 3×1 1×7 items 1×4 2×3 4×1 1×2 items 1×1 item 1×1 item 1×2 items 2×1 1×5 items 1×2 4×1 1×90 items 2×19 1×13 1×12 1×10 2×6 2×5 4×4 3×3 10×2 33×1 1×2 items 1×1 item 2×2 items 2×1 1×3 items 1×1 1×67 items 1×16 1×8 1×3 2×2 3×1 1×3 items 1×2 2×1 6×1 items 1×1 item 1×2 items 1×6 items

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The collapse of the adposition vs. affix distinction in Lakota 

(22) Lakota thi-lázata yaké. ˛ house-behind sit ‘S/he is sitting behind the house.’ (23) Lakota *thí(-ki) lazáta yaké. ˛ house(-def) behind sit (24) Lakota thi-Áóha˛ ibláble. house-among 1sg.ag.go ‘I am walking among the houses.’ (25) Lakota *thí ki oh´a˛ ibláble. house def among 1sg.ag.go (26) Lakota cha-Áák ˛ a˛ yaké. ˛ tree-on sit ‘S/he is sitting on the tree.’ (27) Lakota *ch´a˛ ki ak´a˛ yaké. ˛ tree def on sit However, there are differences in the grammaticality judgements of individual speakers regarding suffixal use of hybrids. Thus, (27) is unacceptable only in the speech of one of the two informants who contributed elicitation data to the present project, even though both speakers represent the same dialect, namely that spoken on Pine Ridge Reservation. Table 4 provides the inventory of hybrid-head noun collocations which require the obligatory suffixation of the hybrid in the speech of speaker A, with annotations on speaker B’s usage of the collocations in question. Since only a restricted set of high-frequency nouns was investigated in this respect, the list may not be complete.2 . The combination thí lazáta is possible, but in this case, lazáta ‘behind’ cannot be interpreted as specifying the location of thí ‘house.’ Instead, in examples like (i)

Lakota thí lazáta yaké ˛ house behind sit

lazáta ‘behind’ must be rendered by an adverb, i.e. an element without nominal reference, with the resulting translation of ‘the house sits last.’

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Table 4. Hybrid collocations in which suffixation is obligatory in the speech of speaker A (* indicates postpositional version also acceptable in the speech of speaker B)

(-)ak´a(l) ˛ ‘on top of ’ (-)chóla ‘without’ (-)égna ‘among’ (-)lazáta ‘behind’ (-)ma(hél) ‘inside’ (-)óha˛ ‘among’

ch´a˛ ‘wood(s)’

mní ‘water’

chaÁák ˛ al* ˛ chachóla* ˛ chaÁégna ˛

mnichóla

thí ‘house’

thilázata thimá(hel)* thiÁóha˛

chaÁóh ˛ a* ˛

Table 5. Frequency of nouns occurring with suffixal hybrids in Deloria (1932) Noun thí ‘house’ ch´a˛ ‘wood(s)’ mní ‘water’ pahá ‘hill’ wakpála ‘river’ mayá ‘cliff ’ tha˛ ‘body’ thezí ‘stomach’ chakú ˛ ‘road’ thiyópa ‘door’ á ‘armpit’ hó ‘voice’ ˚ ‘mountain’ hé i˚stá ‘eye’ makhá ‘earth, ground’ natá ‘head’ óhuta ‘shore, banks’ phéta ‘fire’ ˚siná ‘blanket, shawl’ wichóthi ‘camp’

Number of occurrences with suffixal hybrids 79 24 15 5 4 3 3 3 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

Interestingly, and certainly not coincidentally, the nouns ch´a˛ ‘wood(s),’ mní ‘water’ and thí ‘house,’ the only nouns which require affixation of certain hybrids in elicitation, are also those which occupy the top three positions in the scale of overall frequency of occurrence of nouns which carry suffixed hybrids in the Deloria corpus. The exact figures are given in Table 5. Assuming that the change from adposition to affix is frequency-sensitive, the above correlation is not surprising. Regarding pattern (b) (case marker X must be realized as a postposition when used with a certain head noun), consider examples (28) and (29), which show that, in combination with thí ‘house,’ the hybrid (-)aÁóhomni ‘around’ cannot figure as a suffix. See also examples (30) vs. (31) and (32) vs. (33).

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The collapse of the adposition vs. affix distinction in Lakota 

(28) Lakota thí-ki aÁóhomni iyáye. house-def around go ‘S/he is going around the house.’ (29) Lakota *thi-ÁáÁohomni iyáye. house-around go (30) Lakota ch´a-ki ˛ iw´akab ˛ okí˛ye. tree-def above fly ‘It is flying above the tree.’ (31) Lakota *cha-Áíw ˛ akab ˛ okí˛ye. tree-above fly (32) Lakota thí-ki ogná maké. ˛ house-def inside 1sg.pat.sit ‘I am sitting in the house.’ (33) Lakota *thi-Áogna maké. ˛ house-inside 1sg.pat.sit Examples of pattern (c) (case marker X can be realized either as a suffix or as a postposition when used with a certain head noun) include (-)mahél ‘inside’ in combination with ch´a˛ ‘wood(s), tree,’ as in examples (34) and (35), and (-)iw´akab ˛ ‘above’ in combination with thí ‘house,’ as in (36) and (37). (34) Lakota ch´a-ki ˛ mahél yaká-pi. ˛ tree-def inside sit-pl ‘They are sitting in the tree.’ (35) Lakota cha-máhel ˛ yaká-pi. ˛ tree-inside sit-pl ‘They are sitting in the tree.’ (36) Lakota thí-ki iw´akab ˛ okí˛ye. house-def above fly ‘It is flying above the house.’

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(37) Lakota thi-Áíwakab ˛ okí˛ye. house-above fly ‘It is flying above the house.’ Even a superficial glance at the data in Table 6 below indicates that the overall text frequency of a case marker determines its frequency of occurrence as an affix. The higher the overall frequency (column three), the more likely suffixation seems to become (column five). Consider in particular et´ah ˛ a/et´ ˛ a/-(ya)t ˛ ah ˛ a/-(ya)t ˛ a˛ ‘source, partitive, locative,’ with 227 suffixal occurrences out of 263, and (-)ma(hél) ‘inside’ with 98 suffixal occurrences out of 101. In Table 6, overall frequency and suffixal frequency are rank-ordered (see columns four and six, respectively) to expose any correlation between the two parameters. The data in these columns show that there are ten positions in the scale for the overall frequency of hybrids in the corpus, and nine positions for their frequency of occurrence as suffixes. In order Table 6. Ranking of overall vs. suffixal frequencies of hybrids in Deloria (1932) (bold type indicates top 50 per cent of positions in ranking hierarchy)

et´ah ˛ a/et´ ˛ a/ ˛ -(ya)tah ˛ a/ ˛ -(ya)ta˛ (-)ma(hél) (-)ak´a(l) ˛ (-)aglágla (-)égna (-)ogná (-)khiyéla/ ikhíyela ˚ (-)ohláthe (-)wakál ˛ (-)chóla (-)lazáta (-)aÁínap (-)icágla (-)opháya (-)aÁóhomni (-)chok´aya ˛ (-)khayéla/ ˛ ikh´ayela ˛ (-)ók˚sa˛

Translation

Total occurrences as suffix and non-suffix

‘from, at, in, some of ’

263

‘inside’ ‘on top of ’ ‘along’ ‘among’ ‘inside’ ‘close to’

Rank

Occurrences as suffix

Rank

1

227

1

101 21 15 11 7 6

2 3 4 5 6 7

98 8 12 4 2 6

2 4 3 6 8 5

‘under’ ‘above’ ‘without’ ‘behind’ ‘beyond, behind, on the other side of ’ ‘beside’ ‘along’ ‘around’ ‘in the middle of ’ ‘close to’

6 6 4 4 2

7 7 8 8 9

2 6 3 4 2

8 5 7 6 8

2 2 1 1 1

9 9 10 10 10

2 2 1 1 1

8 8 9 9 9

‘around’

1

10

1

9

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The collapse of the adposition vs. affix distinction in Lakota 

to make a potential correlation between the two parameters visible, the first five positions in each scale are marked in bold type. What we find is that there is a pronounced overlap between the rank-positions of individual hybrids in both scales, which essentially verifies the hypothesis formulated above: that the higher the overall frequency of a given hybrid, the greater the likelihood that it will be realized as a suffix rather than as a postposition. The elements et´ah ˛ a/et´ ˛ a/-(ya)t ˛ ah ˛ a/-(ya)t ˛ a˛ ‘source, partitive, locative’ and (-)ma(hél) ‘inside’ occupy positions one and two in both scales. The next two elements, ak´al ˛ ‘on top of ’ and (-)aglágla ‘along,’ trade positions between the overall and the suffix scale. The former element ranks at position three in the scale of overall frequency and at position four in the scale of suffixal frequency, while the reverse is true for the latter element. The elements occupying position five in each scale, that is, (-)égna ‘among’ in the scale of overall frequency and (-)khiyéla/ikhíyela ‘close to’ and (-)wakál ˛ ‘above’ in the scale of suffixal frequency, each rank somewhat lower in the opposite scale, but still high enough to substantiate the claim that there is a correlation between the position of elements in the two scales. . Text distribution of some pure postpositions The present study might close on this note. However, it seems advisable at this point to take a look at the frequency data on pure postpositions as well. If the overall text frequency of Lakota case markers really determines whether they appear as suffixes or not, it can be expected that no pure postpositions will be found in approximately the same frequency range as hybrids. In other words, their frequency should, by and large, be lower than that of hybrids. The data in the Deloria corpus show, however, that Lakota is equipped with pure postpositions which are approximately as frequent in discourse as the most frequently used hybrids. Table 7. Distribution of three pure postpositions in Deloria (1932)

ektá

Gloss

Total Number of different types of collocations

Size of individual collocations (i.e. number of tokens within collocation types)

‘at, to’

93

69

7 57

7 38

2×6 items 1×5 10×2 56×1 7×1 items 2×5 items 1×4 3×3 2×2 30×1

étkiya ‘towards’ kichí ‘with’ (comitative)

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The three most frequent pure postpositions in the Lakota corpus are ektá ‘locative, directional’ (93 occurrences), kichí ‘comitative’ (57 occurrences) and étkiya ‘towards’ (seven occurrences), cf. Table 7. Although ektá ‘locative, directional’ is in the same frequency range as one of the most frequent hybrids, that is, (-)ma(hél) ‘inside’ (101 occurrences), it never figures as a suffix. This indicates that, though overall text frequency does promote the suffixation of case markers, it is only one of the factors responsible for suffix development in Lakota.

. Contrastive analysis of the distribution of hybrids vs. pure postpositions The frequency data given in Tables 3 and 7 can be transformed into graphical representations in which the type and token frequencies of collocations, listed in the two rightmost columns of the tables, take centre stage. Comparing the distributional patterns obtained for hybrids, on the one hand, and for pure postpositions, on the other, we gather further insights regarding the motivating factors of case suffix vs. postposition use in Lakota. To avoid distorting the results, only items which are roughly in the same overall frequency range are compared. The hybrids (-)ma(hél) ‘inside’ and et´ah ˛ a/et´ ˛ a/-(ya)t ˛ ah ˛ a/-(ya)t ˛ a˛ ‘source, partitive, locative’ (Figures 2 and 4 respectively) can be assigned to the group of items characterized by high frequency of occurrence, as can the pure postpositions ektá ‘locative, directional’ and kichí ‘comitative’ (Figures 1 and 3 respectively). If we compare the distributional profiles of the pure postposition ektá ‘locative, directional’ and the hybrid (-)ma(hél) ‘inside,’ striking discrepancies emerge. The pie chart for ektá ‘locative, directional’ is composed of a multitude of mostly small portions or slices (cf. Figure 1), indicating graphically the wide variety of nouns with which this element combines to form collocations. Individual collocational frequencies remain low, meanwhile, none of them exceeding a frequency value of six. The situation is the exact opposite in the case of (-)ma(hél) ‘inside,’ as we can see in Figure 2. Some of the few slices constituting this chart might actually be better described as chunks: one of them has a frequency value of 67 and thus covers about two thirds of the chart.3 The same basic contrast can be seen in the distributional data for the pure postposition kichí ‘comitative’ and the hybrid et´ah ˛ a/et´ ˛ a/-(ya)t ˛ ah ˛ a/-(ya)t ˛ a˛ ‘source, partitive, locative’ represented in Figures 3 and 4. The pie chart for the former element is composed of a high number of mostly infrequent collocations, none of which exceeds a frequency value of five, while the pie chart for the latter contains a number of large segments showing frequency values of up to 90. . This collocation involves the head noun thí ‘house’ mentioned in Section 2 above as the only head noun which may bring about the shortening of (-)ma(hél) ‘inside’ to -ma.

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The collapse of the adposition vs. affix distinction in Lakota 

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

6 6

5 2 2 2 2 2 2

1 1

2 1

2 1

1

1

2 1

1

1

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

1

2

Figure 1. Distributional profile of the pure postposition ektá ‘locative, directional’ (93 occurrences)

2

2 1 1 1

3

8

16

67

Figure 2. Distributional profile of the hybrid (-)ma(hél) ‘inside’ (101 occurrences)

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1

1

1

1

1

1

5

1 5

1 1 1 1 1

4

1 1 1 3

1 1 1 3

1 1 1

3

1 1 1

1

2 1

1

1

1 1

2

Figure 3. Distributional profile of the pure postposition kichí ‘comitative’ (57 occurrences)

2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 4

2

1111111111 11111 1111 1 1 111 111 11 1 1 1 21

90

4 4 4 5 5 6 6

19 10 12 13

19

Figure 4. Distributional profile of the hybrid et´ah ˛ a/et´ ˛ a/-(ya)t ˛ ah ˛ a/-(ya)t ˛ a˛ ‘source, partitive, locative’ (263 occurrences)

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The collapse of the adposition vs. affix distinction in Lakota 

This leads us to conclude that the triggering factor for the transformation of postpositions into suffixes in Lakota is not the overall frequency of the elements under consideration, but rather the extent to which they occur in individual collocations of high frequency. The hypothesis proposed on the basis of the data in Table 6 must, therefore, be refined. High overall text frequency of a case marker, in and of itself, is not responsible for suffix formation in Lakota, but merely acts to increase the likelihood of the suffixal form appearing in high-frequency collocations. High-frequency collocations, in turn, provide the structural environment which, ultimately, fosters the transformation of postpositions into casemarking suffixes. Thus, high overall discourse frequency of a case marker is not a prerequisite for attainment of suffixal status. Given this, we can assume that even a low-frequency case marker occurring with only a single head noun may develop into a suffix if the collocation in question reaches a certain frequency threshold. The analysis of items of lower overall frequency is far less conclusive than the data on the high-frequency case markers discussed above, but it does at least not étkiya ‘towards’

(-)ogná ‘inside’

(-)khiyéla / ikhíyela ‘close to’

(7 occurrences)

(7 occurrences)

(6 occurrences)

1

1

1

1

1

3

1 1

2 1

1

1

1

2

1

1

(-)wakál ‘above’

(-)ohláthe ‘under

(6 occurrences)

(6 occurrences)’ 1

1 1

1

6

1

1

Figure 5. Distributional profiles of the lower-frequency pure postposition étkiya ‘towards’ and of four lower-frequency hybrids

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refute the general claims made by this study. Expanding the database to make a larger set of hybrids and postpositions accessible to detailed analysis would require the use of much larger text corpora. This would move lower-frequency items into a frequency range which yields more substantial results. In Figure 5, the data on the third-most frequent pure postposition in the Deloria corpus, namely, étkiya ‘towards’ (seven occurrences) are compared to the figures obtained for the four hybrids which are in the same frequency range in the corpus (that is, six to seven occurrences). In the case of the postposition étkiya, the frequency value of the individual collocations involved never exceeds one, while the frequency of individual collocations in which the four hybrids are encountered ranges between one and six. Although the tendencies are less clear here than with the high-frequency Table 8. Percentage of suffixal occurrence vs. percentage of most frequent collocation of hybrids in Deloria (1932) Gloss

(-)aglágla (-)ak´a(l) ˛ (-)aÁínap

‘along’ ‘on top of ’ ‘beyond, behind, on the other side of ’ (-)aÁóhomni ‘around’ (-)chok´ay ˛ a˛ ‘in the middle of ’ (-)chóla ‘without’ (-)égna ‘among’ et´ah ˛ a/et´ ˛ a/˛ ‘from, at, in, (ya)tah ˛ a/-(ya)t ˛ a˛ some of ’ (-)icágla ‘beside’ (-)khayéla/ikh´ ˛ ayela ˛ ‘close to’ (-)khiyéla/ikhíyela ‘close to’ (-)lazáta ‘behind’ (-)ma(hél) ‘inside’ (-)ogná ‘inside’ ˚ (-)ohláthe ‘under’ (-)ók˚sa˛ ‘around’ (-)opháya ‘along’ (-)wakál ˛ ‘above’

Total of occurrences

Suffixal occurrences

% share of suffixal occurrences in total

Number of items in most frequent collocation

% share of most frequent collocation in total

15 21 2

12 8 2

80.0 38.1 100

5 7 2

33.3 33.3 100

1 1

1 1

100 100

1 1

100 100

4 11 263

3 4 227

75.0 36.4 86.3

2 5 90

50.0 45.5 34.2

2 1 6 4 101 7 6 1 2 6

2 1 6 4 98 2 2 1 2 6

100 100 100 100 97.0 28.6 33.3 100 100 100

2 1 2 3 67 3 1 1 2 6

100 100 33.3 75.0 66.3 42.9 16.7 100 100 100

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items discussed above, hybrids again exhibit a smaller number of larger pie slices in their distributional profiles, while pure postpositions show a larger number of smaller slices. The hypothesis about the correlation between high frequency of individual collocations and greater likelihood of realization of hybrids as suffixes can be further corroborated. For this purpose, on the basis of the data given in Table 3 above, for each hybrid in the Deloria corpus, I have calculated both the percentage of suffixal occurrences in the total of occurrences, and the percentage covered by the most frequent individual collocation in the total of occurrences. The results are presented in Table 8. In the case of (-)aglágla ‘along,’ the 12 suffixal occurrences in a total of 15 occurrences in the sample constitute 80.0 per cent of the total. The individual collocation with the highest frequency in the corpus is the one with mní ‘water,’ which occurs five times. It makes up 33.3 per cent of the total 15 occurrences of (-)aglágla ‘along.’ Figure 6 graphically represents the relative percentages for suffixal use and frequency of the most common collocation for each hybrid. We observe that, by and large, suffixal occurrence of individual hybrids decreases with the frequency value for the most frequent collocation. These results can be taken as proof of the above hypothesis regarding the dependence of suffixal realization of hybrids on collocational frequency.

100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 % suffixes

% largest collocations

Figure 6. Percentage of suffixal occurrence vs. percentage of most frequent collocation of hybrids in Deloria (1932)

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. Theoretical conclusions regarding diachronic change In the light of the findings presented above, some general theoretical claims can be made regarding the course of diachronic formation of affixes from free elements. The development of affixes from adpositions is, obviously, frequency-sensitive or, more accurately, sensitive to the frequency of individual collocations. Further, the transformation of adpositions into affixes apparently spreads gradually from one collocation to another. The higher the overall discourse frequency of a free element in connection with a specific linguistic item, the more likely affixation becomes. The development of affixes is thus governed by the same frequency-based principles as the much more widely studied phenomenon of reductive change, as in Jurafsky et al. (2001). Reductive change in linguistic elements is first observed in the most frequent collocations in which they occur. It should be noted that the discourse analyses conducted in Jurafsky et al. (2001) are technically more sophisticated and comprehensive than the ones carried out in this study. However, the simpler and more specialized approach chosen here proves the point that affix formation is frequency-governed just as clearly as mathematically more refined methods. The Lakota data discussed above are of special interest in the context of grammaticalization studies in that they offer the opportunity to investigate the phenomenon of affix formation more or less in isolation from reductive change. In fact, only two of the numerous case markers analysed above exhibit shortened variants. In contrast, in the most extensively cited instances of affix development in the extant literature (for various examples, cf. Bybee 2001), such as cliticization of the English auxiliaries will and would in collocations like I’ll and you’d, affix formation is concomitant with reductive change. On the basis of the analysis of Lakota postposition-suffix hybrids, however, it can be concluded that the development of affixes from free elements, though subject to frequency pressure, is independent of reductive change. Moreover, compared to examples like English I will > I’ll, Lakota hybrids document a more advanced stage of affix development, since, at least in specific collocations such as thi-lázata ‘behind the house’ (cf. Table 4), use of the hybrid as a suffix is obligatory. This does not seem to be the case with -’ll, since the choice between this reduced form and the full form will is free in all contexts, except in clause-initial position, where a lexical host to which the suffix -’ll could be attached is missing. Although aimed at shedding more light on the diachronic process of affix development, the present study relies exclusively on synchronic data. How, then, can we be sure that Lakota is transforming adpositions into affixes, rather than affixes into adpositions? To answer this question, we can argue deductively on the basis of a multitude of examples from research into language change that

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The collapse of the adposition vs. affix distinction in Lakota 

grammaticalization channels are mostly unidirectional. Elements at one end of a grammaticalization channel develop into elements at the other end, which differ from the source elements with respect to specific structural, semantic or otherwise defined features. The reverse process, however, occurs very rarely. In the particular case of the grammaticalization channel which turns free elements into affixes, counterexamples to the tenet of unidirectionality are relatively hard to find (for an overview, cf. Campbell 2001). An almost overused English example is the creation of the noun ism (as in The world of science is full of isms) out of the suffix -ism. These more general theoretical considerations aside, for at least one of the hybrids under investigation in this study, namely et´ah ˛ a/et´ ˛ a/-(ya)t ˛ ah ˛ a/-(ya)t ˛ a˛ ‘source, partitive, locative,’ there are diachronic analyses available which demonstrate that the element behaves as predicted by grammaticalization theory with respect to the directionality of change. An additional analysis of the diachronic data processed in Pustet (forthcoming) shows that the use of the suffixal variants of the source marker et´ah ˛ a/et´ ˛ a/-(ya)t ˛ ah ˛ a/-(ya)t ˛ a˛ is on the rise, while the frequency of the postpositional variants is declining. As a possible alternative approach to the Lakota data, the noun-plus-suffixal hybrid compounds could be analysed as lexicalized configurations with adverbial status (Paul Kiparsky, personal communication). One such example is German nachhause ‘home.directional,’ as in (38). (38) German ich geh-e nachhause. 1sg.sbj go.prs-1sg.sbj home ‘I am going home.’ Nachhause ‘home.directional’ can be broken down into the preposition nach ‘to(wards),’ the noun Haus ‘house’ and an obsolete case marker -e. Although nachhause ‘home.directional’ is still morphologically transparent for German native speakers, it appears as a separate entry with adverbial status in German dictionaries. Such forms are equivalent to collocations containing suffixal hybrids like thi-máhel ‘in the house’ in Lakota in that (i) only a single syllable in the complex word is stressed (nachháuse), and (ii) article use is prohibited. Just like Lakota, German inserts articles between adposition and head noun; in combination with prepositionally used nach ‘to(wards),’ an article will be present in most contexts. It can be assumed that constellations like nachhause ‘home.directional’ are fossilized high-frequency freezes which originate in the same frequency-sensitive mechanism that creates case-marking suffixes out of postpositions in Lakota. Thus, in the German case as well, a historically prior adposition-plus-head-noun construction is involved. Consequently, developments from adpositions to case-marking affixes should have taken place in German too, albeit on a far less regular basis than in Lakota. In Modern German, there are actually only a few forms whose

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structural composition is equivalent to that of nachhause. These notable differences in productivity suggest that Lakota case-marking suffixes which originate in postpositions must indeed be analysed as independent suffixal elements, rather than as fossilized components of lexicalized freezes. It remains to be seen to what extent a rigid categorial distinction between adpositions and affixal case markers can be sustained in other languages which allegedly have this distinction once discourse studies are included in the research agenda. One of the goals of the present study has been to demonstrate that descriptive accuracy and subtlety in language documentation can be enhanced by taking into account the descriptive dimension of discourse frequency. Some day, after much improvement in the technical aspects of language documentation, frequency-sensitive grammars might be written.

Abbreviations 1 3 ag def dem dist

first person third person agentive definite demonstrative distal

pat pl prs sbj sg

patient plural present subject singular

References Boas, Franz & Ella Deloria. 1941. Dakota grammar [Memoirs of the National Academy of Science 23(2)]. Washington DC: Government Printing Office. Buechel, Eugene. 1939. A grammar of Lakota: The language of the Teton Sioux Indians. St. Francis SD: St. Francis Mission. Buechel, Eugene. 1970. Lakota-English dictionary. Pine Ridge SD: Red Cloud Indian School. Bybee, Joan L. 2001. Phonology and language use [Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 94]. Cambridge: CUP. Campbell, Lyle. 2001. What’s wrong with grammaticalization? Language Sciences 23(2–3): 113– 161. Deloria, Ella. 1932. Dakota texts. New York NY: G. E. Stechert. Heine, Bernd, Ulrike Claudi & Friederike Hünnemeyer. 1991. Grammaticalization. A conceptual framework. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Jurafsky, Daniel, Allan Bell, Michelle Gregory & William D. Raymond. 2001. Probabilistic relations between words: Evidence from reduction in lexical production. In Joan L. Bybee & Paul J. Hopper (eds.), Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure, 229–254. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pustet, Regina. 2000. Lakota postpositions. International Journal of American Linguistics 66: 157– 180. Pustet, Regina. Forthcoming. Discourse frequency and language change: The case of Lakota eta(h ˛ a)/-t ˛ a(h ˛ a) ˛ ‘from’. In Hubert Cuyckens, Walter de Mulder, Michèle Goyens & Tanja Mortelmans (eds.), Variation and change in adpositions of movement. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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On the grammaticalization of the Spanish expression puede que* María José Rodríguez Espiñeira and Belén López Meirama University of Santiago de Compostela

This paper examines the emergence and historical evolution of the Spanish expression puede que (‘it may be that’). Historical corpus data confirm that puede que developed from the combination puede ser que (‘it may be that’), as put forward by Corominas and Pascual (1981), and that its development entails formal reduction, semantic specialization and an increase in subjectivity. However, the grammaticalization of puede que is not complete, since it has not achieved the status of an autonomous item and its reduced form pue que is only found in rural or popular Spanish. Such limited grammaticalization is attributed here to the fierce competition offered by other epistemic adverbials available in the language, such as quizá(s) and posiblemente.

.

Introduction

The expression analysed in this paper consists of the third person singular present indicative form of the modal verb poder ‘to be possible’ followed by a clause introduced by the complementizer que ‘that.’ Some scholars argue that, in cases like (1) below, puede is an impersonal full verb which behaves as a monovalent predicate with a propositional argument (the que-clause). Such an analysis can be found in Hernanz’s Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española (1999: 2234), where the verb poder is included within a semantic and syntactic category whose prototype is parecer (‘look, seem’), illustrated in example (2). (1) Present-day Spanish Puede [que llueva]A1 may.prs.3sg comp rain.sbjv.prs.3sg ‘It may be raining.’/‘It may rain.’

* We would like to express our gratitude to two anonymous referees for their useful observations and comments on this paper.

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(2) Present-day Spanish Parece [que llueve]A1 look.prs.3sg comp rain.prs.3sg ‘It looks as if it is raining.’ Hernanz’s analysis is a surprising one, taking into account that the verb poder (‘can, to be able to, may’) is usually considered an auxiliary verb, a grammatical item which has no argument structure of its own but rather forms a periphrasis with the infinitive which follows it (e.g. No puedo pagar tanto ‘I can’t pay that much;’ Los hipopótamos pueden nadar ‘Hippos can swim;’ Puedes pasar ‘You may come in’). That analysis, however, is challenged by Gómez Torrego in chapter 51 of the same volume, on the topic of verbal periphrases. Gómez Torrego (1999) argues that constructions like (1) do not erase the auxiliary nature of poder. In cases such as these the clause is not a subordinate one, dependent on puede, but a clause preceded by a “grammaticalized segment” which behaves as an adverb and is equivalent to quizá(s) or tal vez (‘maybe, perhaps’). He provides no evidence for this argument, but merely alludes in a footnote to the work of Olbertz (1998) on Spanish verbal periphrases. In Section 5.1.2.2.2 of that book, Olbertz examines the expression puede que and explicitly rejects the analysis of poder as a complement-taking predicate on the basis of the verb’s inherent restrictions: “in the complement construction, it can only be in the present tense, and cannot be negated or questioned” (Olbertz 1998: 148), as illustrated in (3) to (6) below. (3) Present-day Spanish *Podía que lloviera. may.ipfv.pst.3sg comp rain.sbjv.pst (4) Present-day Spanish *Podrá que llueva. may.fut.3sg comp rain.sbjv.prs (5) Present-day Spanish *No puede que llueva. neg may.prs.3sg comp rain.sbjv.prs (6) Present-day Spanish *¿Puede que llueva? may.prs.3sg comp rain.sbjv.prs Furthermore, the verb poder, in contrast to parecer, does not allow the substitution of a pronoun for the postverbal clause. Compare in this connection (7) and (8). (7) Present-day Spanish – Parece que va a llover. look.prs.3sg comp rain.aux.fut.3sg ‘It looks as if it is going to rain.’

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On the grammaticalization of the Spanish expression puede que 

– Sí, lo parece / – Sí, eso parece. yes it.acc.n look.prs.3sg yes that look.prs.3sg ‘Yes, it does.’/‘Yes, it looks like it.’ (8) Present-day Spanish – Puede que llueva. may.prs.3sg comp rain.sbjv.prs.3sg ‘It may be raining.’/‘It may rain.’ –*Sí, lo puede / –*Sí, eso puede / Puede. yes it.acc.n may.prs.3sg yes that may.prs.3sg may.prs.3sg ‘It may.’ Despite her interesting observations, Olbertz (1998) does not provide a conclusive analysis of the expression puede que. In her own words (1998: 149–150), it is obvious that the case of puede que cannot be settled in a satisfactory way within this context. Hence, I confine myself to the conclusion that puede que occupies some intermediate position in between a verbal construction and a periphrastic adverb. However, it will have become clear that the existence of puede que does not mean that poder is a complement taking predicate, and consequently, that puede que does not represent any challenge to the semi-auxiliary analysis.

She acknowledges that, given its rigidity and semantic value, syntactically the expression resembles the modal adverb quizá(s) (‘perhaps’) more than a modal verb. If puede que is analysed as a periphrastic adverb, a resegmentation or reanalysis, such as that in (9), must be proposed. (9) Present-day Spanish [Puede que ]modal adverb llueva. may.prs.3sg comp rain.sbjv.prs.3sg We believe that, in order to throw some light on the analysis of puede que, a review of its origin and diachronic development is necessary. In their etymological dictionary, Corominas and Pascual (1981; s.v. poder) maintain that the form from which puede que developed is the combination puede ser que (‘it may be that’). The aim of this paper, therefore, is to examine both expressions, puede ser que and puede que, in order to illustrate the differences between their modal semantic properties and attempt to determine the fixation process undergone by puede que. Empirical evidence used in this study is drawn from historical material found in the CORDE and DAVIES corpora, in addition to data on contemporary Spanish from the CREA corpus. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 is devoted to a discussion of the terms grammaticalization and lexicalization and their application to the phenomenon studied. Section 3 looks at the origin of puede que and at the distinctive behavioural properties which mark out the source expression puede ser que from

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the derived puede que; we believe that structural differences (in terms of, for example, polarity, tense and clause type) are linked to semantic differences in the area of modality and derive from the interaction between epistemic modality and evidentiality. Following Nuyts (2001), we reinterpret the original distinction between objective and subjective epistemic modality established by Lyons (1977) and followed by many others, as a dimension based on (i) the strength of the evidence which justifies the epistemic judgement and (ii) the degree of responsibility assumed by the speaker. Finally, in Section 4 the development of puede que will be analysed in terms of subjectification with partial grammaticalization only, given that the modal marker which is produced does not achieve the status of an autonomous word.

. Grammaticalization vs. lexicalization In Spanish grammars, the fixation of puede que has been cited variously as an example of grammaticalization (Gómez Torrego 1999) or of lexicalization (SilvaCorvalán 1995).1 In both cases, the authors limit themselves to apportioning categories, without going on to provide any detailed theoretical analyses or insights. Gómez Torrego does allude to the syntactic immobilization of the form puede, and Silva-Corvalán concedes the lexicalized status of both puede que and puede ser que on the following bases: (i) both forms are used specifically to express epistemological possibility, (ii) they only take the third person singular form and (iii) they are structures which lack a subject. The only difference identified between the two expressions is that negation is restricted to puede ser que. A theoretical problem which must first be addressed here is the nature and meaning of the terms grammaticalization versus lexicalization. The term grammaticalization has been applied to two different fields, which have sometimes been regarded as subtypes of grammaticalization (cf. Wischer 2000: 356). The first of these might be considered the traditional and canonical one and operates at the propositional level: it applies to various processes which result in the codification of grammatical units (abstract grammatical categories such as tense, aspect, mood, etc.). The second type operates at the textual or discourse level and has been termed pragmaticalization or subjectification. Both processes share “the shift from relatively open class to relatively closed class, operator status” (Traugott 1999: 181). The process of fixation which puede que has undergone is better understood as pertaining to the second type, and presents the following characteristics: . Similar conflicts of opinion have been discussed by Giacalone Ramat (1998: 120) and Brinton (2002: 69).

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On the grammaticalization of the Spanish expression puede que 

a. No phonological erosion occurs, only phonetic reduction owing to the elimination of the verb ser. b. No semantic weakening of the original referential meaning is observed; instead, semantic specialization takes place: puede que retains one meaning, the epistemic subjective one, out of the numerous meanings possessed by the original form (puede ser que). c. Integration of the new form into a morphological paradigm does not occur; the new form increases its frequency of use, but does not become an obligatory unit for speakers. d. No fusion or coalescence between the new form and the constituents found within its domain (in this case the complementizer que) is achieved. e. The new form loses some syntagmatic variability with respect to the original structure, but is not limited to filling a particular slot: it is usually found in sentence-initial position, but may be used to focalize sentential constituents. f. The new form functions as an extra-propositional operator, like a marker of modality whose domain extends over a proposition (the content of a clause). According to Brinton (2002), the term lexicalization encompasses different meanings (she lists nine current definitions), some of them incompatible and others overlapping.2 In the broadest sense, lexicalization is used to describe a process by which a grammatical word becomes a lexical word, that is, a process equivalent to degrammaticalization. In this study our main interest is in the use of lexicalization to designate reductive processes, of which there are basically two: (i) the conversion of a syntactic construction into an idiom due to its loss of compositionality, a process also known as idiomatization, and (ii) the process whereby independent words are formed from more complex constructions, that is, univerbation or desyntacticization. In the second instance, lexicalization involves the creation of new lexemes from syntactic structures. Autonomous units which result from a process of reduction frequently belong not to open classes (lexemes) but to classes which are more or less closed (prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs, particles); it is in precisely such cases as these that grammaticalization and lexicalization converge.3 As will be seen in Sections 3 and 4, the expression puede que exhibits partial desyntacticization, given that the internal structure of the source . Several other authors have noted the similar, complementary and overlapping nature of the processes occurring within lexicalization and grammaticalization, since the two phenomena share certain features (cf. Giacalone Ramat 1988; Wischer 2000; Brinton 2002; Lehmann 2002). In this sense, Hopper (1998: 148–149) prefers to use the labels structuration and routinization as generic terms. . According to Wischer (2000: 255), however, some cases of linguistic change seem to be difficult to classify as one or the other, especially in connection with the idiomatization of syntagms, which acquire a modal or discourse function.

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construction is weakened, though the resulting expression does not attain the status of an autonomous lexeme; we will return to this issue once the main characteristics of the phenomena under consideration here have been analysed. Based on the fact that the expression puede que derives from puede ser que, we maintain that: a. The derived expression consists of two grammatical units: the fixed verbal form of a modal verb and a complementizer. b. The source expression is a regular syntactic structure, whereas the derived one is more opaque, since the complementizer has lost its original functional role; consequently, there is structural reduction of a complex construction.4 c. The derived expression does not attain the degree of fixation of a lexeme (there are no bound forms). For this reason, it has been analysed in different dictionaries either as a periphrastic adverb (incomplete univerbation) or as a locution (idiomatization). The challenge is to investigate how closely the structure adapts to these assumptions.

. Analysis of the data . Origin of the structure As mentioned in Section 1 above, according to Corominas and Pascual (1981), the expression puede que results from the elision of the verb ser (‘be’) in the construction puede ser que (‘it may be that’). Given that there is no phonological evidence for the loss of an element here, we believe that the origin of the new form must be demonstrated by syntactic and semantic tests. Firstly, if the construction derives from a periphrasis with an existential lexical verb (ser), that would account for the original functional value of the complement clause which represented the argument of a monovalent predicate. The omission of the existential verb explains how a modal verb like poder could be combined with a complement clause. Since the medieval period, the Spanish modal auxiliary poder has accepted monovalent predicates such as acaecer, acontecer, ocurrir or suceder (all meaning ‘happen, take place’) or the verb ser (‘be’) with the meaning of existence, by far the most frequent. Furthermore, in the medieval and classical periods (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), the infinitive could precede the modal verb. The anteposition of the infinitival form, as in example (10) below, brought the modal verb into . For Lehmann (2002), while grammaticalization reduces the autonomy of an item and regulates it, lexicalization reduces the inner structure of an item and adds it to an inventory.

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On the grammaticalization of the Spanish expression puede que 

contact with the complementizer que (‘that’), thus favouring the dropping of the existential ser and the development of the expression puede que:5 (ser) puede (ser) que > puede que (be.inf) may.ind.prs.3sg (be.inf) comp > may.ind.prs.3sg comp (10) Classical Spanish de alguna ninfa homicida/ ser puede que la of any nymph murderous be.inf may.ind.prs.3sg comp the deidad en muerte tenga piedad/ de quien no la deity in death have.sbjv.prs.3sg pity of who not it.acc.f tuvo en vida have.ind.pst.prf.3sg in life ‘for some murderous nymph it may be that the deity will take pity in death on her that in life had none’ (CORDE 1599–1622) It seems appropriate, therefore, to look at the date of the first appearance and the diachronic evolution of both expressions, puede que and puede ser que, and to compare them with other expressions with similar meanings, such as es posible que ‘it is possible that,’ posiblemente ‘possibly’ and quizá(s) ‘perhaps.’ Table 1 provides the figures for all these expressions in the DAVIES corpus. As will be seen, the quantitative data in Table 1 corroborate the qualitative data presented in Section 3.2 below. Table 1. Distribution of puede que and semantically related expressions in the DAVIES corpus 13th c. 14th c. 15th c. 16th c. 17th c. 18th c. 19th c. 20th c. Total puede ser que puede que pueda ser que pueda que es posible que posiblemente quizá(s)/quiçab(e)

52

8

49

176

201

277

98 198

3

184 14 1

4

4

1

21

3

2

310 5 804

552 2 1,096

188 1 420

428 5 3,531

229 1,266 328 540 11 23 5 5 524 2,024 733 746 5,010 10,874

On the basis of the observed data, we find that puede que is first recorded in the DAVIES corpus in the eighteenth century and is gradually consolidated in the modern and contemporary periods. It does not compete with the adverb quizá(s) . Hopper (1998: 153) points out “the importance of seeking the sources of a grammatical construction in a specific discourse collocation, or at least a context, wherever possible.”

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and its variants, which are the most frequent choice to express doubt in the Spanish language.6 It seems, however, that the formula puede que was already available in earlier stages of the language, since the first clear instances of its use are found in the Cancionero (fifteenth century) and in collected letters from the seventeenth century. Consider example (11) below. (11) Classical Spanish La otra nao dicen se hizo á la the other boat say.ind.prs.3pl refl.3 made.ind.pst.prf.3sg to the mar, puede que libre mejor. sea may.ind.prs.3sg comp escape.sbjv.prs.3sg better ‘The other boat, they say, made for the sea, and may yet make good its escape.’ (CORDE 1636) As the data in Table 1 show, the increase in frequency of puede que is accompanied by a decrease in frequency of the verbal form puede ser que, with which it shares some contexts of use. Leaving aside issues of diachronic evolution, in what follows we will try to establish some patterns of distribution for both structures and in this way investigate whether there are specific conditions for their use. That comparison will provide us with the necessary data to determine the degree of fixation of puede que. . Semantic differences between puede ser que and puede que Silva-Corvalán (1995) considers that both expressions are lexicalized and that their use is restricted to expressing epistemic possibility.7 Epistemic modality refers to an evaluation (typically on the part of the speaker) of how the different options pertaining to a specific state of affairs will apply to the world, that is, the degree of likelihood of a given state of affairs. Epistemic possibility represents a neutral or intermediate stage in the epistemic scale going from absolute certainty to improbability, and hence expresses a weak commitment on the part of the speaker to the real state of affairs. Given that puede ser que and puede que exhibit a num. According to the data provided by Ramat and Ricca (1994: 296–298), the formation of epistemic modal adverbs shows parallel tendencies in European languages, since they agglutinate a modal and/or existential verb and/or a complementizer. They may be categorized into (i) opaque items (English perhaps, Dutch misschien, Italian forse, Spanish quizá(s); (ii) transparent items (English maybe, French peut-être, Catalan potser, Russian može byt’); and (iii) semi-transparent items (Serbian-Croatian možda, literally ‘can-that,’ Albanian mbase, literally ‘hold/suppose-that,’ Rumanian poate c˘a, literally ‘(it) may that’). . The deontic values of obligation and permission are excluded as there is no animate and morally responsible entity to be influenced.

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On the grammaticalization of the Spanish expression puede que 

ber of syntactic differences, it is interesting to investigate whether these reflect any semantic difference in the domain of epistemic modality or related dimensions.8 Table 2 summarizes some contributions made in this area. Table 2. Semantic differences in the field of epistemic modality (+ evidentiality) Modal value

Meaning

Lyons (1977)

Hengeveld (1988)

Traugott (1989)

Nuyts (2001)

Objective epistemic

‘It is obvious from evidence that. . .’

Objective epistemic

Objective Weakly (modal subjective adjectives: It is possible that. . .)

Intersubjective

Subjective epistemic

‘I conclude that. . .’

Subjective epistemic

Epistemological Strongly (modal subjective adverbs: Possibly. . .)

Subjective

In the literature on epistemic modality special attention has been paid to the notions of objective and subjective understanding of a given state of affairs (cf. Lyons 1977: 797–800; Hengeveld 1988: 236–238; Olbertz 1998: 400ff.). According to Lyons, objective epistemic statements are based on facts; thus, speaker judgements of the probability of some state of affairs involve the expression of an objectively determinable chance factor. By contrast, subjective epistemic utterances are based on intuitions, so that speaker judgements on the likelihood of some state of affairs involve a purely subjective guess. In Lyons’s view, therefore, we are dealing with two qualitatively different types of epistemic modality. A number of authors have noted that, within the domain of knowledge and belief, it is difficult to identify a truly objective modality. Consequently, a number of alternative interpretations have emerged, expressed in terms of a gradation. One of these is the approach proposed by Traugott (1989), which distinguishes between little or weakly subjective and strongly subjective. According to Nuyts (1992, 2001), however, the distinction requires a different explanation, based on the interaction between epistemic modality and evidentiality.9 In his opinion, we intuitively recognize that some epistemic expressions are more subjective than others. Yet attitudinal difference cannot be based on a ‘true for the speaker’ vs. ‘true in the real world’ distinction. Our judgements regarding grades of probability of a state of . Cf. Nuyts (2001: 30): “If there are alternative expressions for one semantic category, then there must be reasons for their existence, which cause them to be used in (sometimes slightly) different ways.” . The evidential domain refers to the linguistic means of indicating how the speaker obtains the information on which s/he bases an assertion.

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affairs are based on some sort of evidence or guarantee, without which we cannot qualify the state of affairs epistemologically. What varies, therefore, is the quality and status of our evidence for the epistemic judgement and the quality of the evidence, in turn, depends on the strength and soundness of the experiences, proofs or other corroborating elements. What Nuyts refers to as status is conditioned by the accessibility of the source information and by the conclusions drawn: either the speaker is seen as solely responsible for the epistemic evaluation (subjective) or it is understood that his or her conclusions and the source of information are also accessible to the interlocutor, that is, that the speaker assumes that the listener is able to share his/her epistemic judgement (intersubjectivity-objectivity). In the words of Nuyts (2001: 35), [i]n order to avoid confusion with the traditional conception of the dimension of subjectivity, then, I will henceforth use the terms ‘subjective’ vs. ‘intersubjective’ evidentiality (rather than subjective vs. objective modality) to name the categories in this domain.

In our opinion, puede ser que and puede que share certain contexts, those expressing subjective epistemic possibility. In the case of puede ser que, the context provides information about the responsibility assumed by the speaker (cf. example (12) below). Puede que becomes the specialized item used to express this notion (cf. example (13)). Moreover, the periphrasis with existential ser conveys notions of objective (or intersubjective) epistemic modality, which puede que does not (cf. (14)), and thus favours the intersubjective value. The context in (14) suggests that the speaker considers that there are only a limited number of possible options which explain the state of affairs, and hopes that the reader shares this belief without misgiving. (12) Present-day Spanish Se me planteó una duda personal que refl.3 me.dat rise.ind.pst.prf.3sg a doubt personal which puede ser que después se la may.ind.prs.3sg be.inf comp later you.dat it.acc.f comente. comment.sbjv.prs.1sg ‘I was presented with a personal doubt upon which I may comment later.’ (CREA 1995) (13) Present-day Spanish Como muchos de mis consejos, puede que este like many of my suggestions may.ind.prs.3sg comp this te parezca obvio. you.dat seem.sbjv.prs.3sg obvious

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On the grammaticalization of the Spanish expression puede que 

‘Like many of my suggestions, this may seem obvious to you.’ (CREA 1993) (14) Present-day Spanish Hay dos posibilidades para que la mujer del there.be.ind.prs.3 two possibilities for comp the wife of.the oficial esté hoy sola en la playa: puede official be.sbjv.prs.3sg today alone on the beach may.ind.prs.3sg ser que su marido esté de servicio, o que be.inf comp her husband be.sbjv.prs.3sg on duty or comp no haya querido venir. En cualquiera de las dos not have.sbjv.pst.3sg wanted come.inf in either of the two hipótesis es fácil entender su disgusto. hypotheses be.ind.prs.3sg easy comprehend.inf her displeasure ‘There are two possible reasons as to why the official’s wife is alone on the beach today: it may be that her husband is on duty, or that he did not want to come. In either case, her displeasure is quite understandable.’ (CREA 2001) . Syntactic differences between puede ser que and puede que There are several distinctive behavioural properties of the expressions puede ser que and puede que in relation to polarity, tense and clause type, which we will attempt to explain in what follows. a. Puede ser que allows for interrogative contexts, whereas puede que does not. In (15) the speaker makes available to the listener a potential evaluation for the discussion (i.e. orients the listener’s potential response). Puede ser que is also used with great frequency in interrogatives introduced by cómo ‘how’ (¿cómo puede ser que? cf. (16)), in which the speaker shows his/her surprise and incredulity at the state of affairs in the complement clause; it concerns known facts which are, hence, accessible to both speaker and listener. Once again, this does not work with puede que. (15) Present-day Spanish Y digo yo, el amor también se acaba, and say.ind.prs.1sg I the love also refl.3 end.ind.prs.3sg ¿no? ¿No puede ser que Sofía y Ramón ya not not may.ind.prs.3sg be.inf comp Sofia and Ramón already no se amen? not recp.3 love.sbjv.prs.3pl ‘And I say, love also ends, doesn’t it? Might it not be that Sofia and Ramón no longer love each other?’ (CREA 2001)

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(16) Present-day Spanish Nos preguntamos, ¿cómo puede ser que un refl.1pl ask.ind.prs.1pl how may.ind.prs.3sg be.inf comp a gran número de buceadores españoles deban realizar large number of divers Spanish must.sbjv.prs.3pl practise.inf su deporte de forma ilegal? their sport in manner illegal ‘We ask ourselves, how is it that a large number of Spanish scuba divers have to practise their sport illegally?’ (CREA 2001) b. The periphrasis puede ser que is the only structure which occurs in negative contexts with the meaning ‘it is not possible that.’ The negative marker merely complements the epistemic expression as it is, and transfers the qualification to the negative side of the scale; thus, example (17) below expresses impossibility. When the complement clause refers to time in the past, the periphrasis indicates the speaker’s surprise or incredulity about the specific true fact expressed in the ‘that’-clause, as in (18). (17) Classical Spanish Eso no puede ser – respondió don that not can.ind.prs.3sg be.inf reply.ind.pst.prf.3sg don Quijote–: digo que no puede ser que Quijote say.ind.prs.1sg comp not may.ind.prs.3sg be.inf comp haya caballero andante sin dama. there.be.sbjv.prs.3sg knight errant without lady ‘That cannot be,’ replied Don Quijote, ‘I say that a knight errant without his lady cannot be.’ (CORDE 1605) (18) Present-day Spanish No puede ser que me lo not may.ind.prs.3sg be.inf comp me.dat it.acc.n hayan robado todo. have.sbjv.prs.3pl robbed everything ‘They cannot [lit. It cannot be that they] have robbed me of everything, surely!’ (CORDE 1944) c. In contrast to intersubjective (objective) epistemic modality, which does allow for differences in tense and mood, subjective epistemic modality is characterized by its closeness bound to the act of speech. Thus, as seen in Table 3, poder ser que accepts the use of different verbal tenses and moods, contrary to the temporal

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Table 3. Variants of puede ser que and puede que in the CORDE corpus Total prs.ind prs.sbjv pst.ipfv.ind pst.pfv.ind fut.ind cond.ind pst.sbjv fut.sbjv

puede ser que pueda ser que podía ser que pudo ser que podrá ser que podría ser que pudiera ser que pudiere ser que

1,363 30 128 177 527 679 246 6

Total puede que pueda que

559 1

restriction to the present (indicative and subjunctive) which characterizes puede que.10 d. Unlike puede que, the periphrastic puede ser que can appear in the protasis of a conditional sentence, where a hypothetical situation is presented, the completion of which depends on the apodosis. The protasis, therefore, can only refer to a possible point of view or hypothesis and not to the epistemic commitment of the speaker. A small number of examples for the protasis of a conditional sentence are recorded in the CORDE corpus (15 examples of si puede ser que between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, and only one instance of si pudiera ser que, dating from the nineteenth century). No example with puede que was found, however.11 e. Another point of dissimilarity between puede ser que and puede que is that the former can usually be combined with a ponderative bien ‘well’ to intensify the verbal predicate which forms the periphrasis; this construction is documented since the fourteenth century. We believe that the adverb bien reinforces the sense of intersubjectivity (objective possibility), and hence serves to confirm, or indeed to reaffirm, the state of affairs expressed by the complement clause (cf. (19)).

. The variant pueda que originates in the combination of pueda ser que with a subjunctive induced by that of the subordinate clause. Its use appears to be infrequent and occurrences in the corpora are limited to medieval and Latin American texts. . The virtual disappearance of the conditional structure with puede ser que from the seventeenth century onwards coincides with the spread of the es posible que-construction during the so-called Classical Spanish period (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), as Table 1 illustrates. Once the modal adjective became established in the Classical period, the es possible que-structure began to appear in the protasis of a conditional sentence.

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 María José Rodríguez Espiñeira and Belén López Meirama

(19) Modern Spanish Bien puede ser que aquí no haya well may.ind.prs.3sg be.inf comp here not be.sbjv.prs.3sg nadie oculto. no.one hidden ‘It may well be that there is no one hiding here.’ (CORDE 1851–1855) f. Finally, it is worth mentioning that the combination of negation with the periphrasis puede ser que is attested in the earliest documented uses of the form. Here we find a preponderance of negative statements which present a modalized predication also in a negative form, that is, an external negation is combined with an internal one (cf. example (20)). This structure is not possible with puede que. (20) Classical Spanish E non puede ser que non guarezca and not may.ind.prs.3sg be.inf comp not recover.sbjv.prs.3sg con esta cura. with this remedy ‘And it is not possible that he does not recover with this remedy.’ (CORDE 1500) The double negation in (20) has the effect of creating an affirmative statement with a sense of inevitability, that is, ‘something has to happen;’ in such contexts what is expressed is an inherent necessity that the situation described in the complement clause actually come about. The meaning is closer to a dynamic than an epistemic modality, if we understand by this not only a reference to potentialities, but also to the intrinsic necessities pertaining to any participant in the state of affairs, which Nuyts (2006) has called situational dynamic.12 Our diachronic data show that the frequency of use of this double negation structures declines over time, undoubtedly as a consequence of the consolidation of puede ser que in the domain of epistemic modality.13 In short, the source structure of the periphrasis puede ser que involves an additional evidential meaning from its earliest uses, no doubt owing to its . There is no agreement amongst linguists about the integration of this subtype into modal categories. Lyons (1977: 800) argues that necessity and impossibility constitute the extremes of the scale of quantification allowed in objective epistemic modality. Other authors, however, include inherent necessity as a type of deontic modality. . In the CORDE corpus the percentage of examples with double negation shows a progressive decline from Medieval to Classical Spanish: 64.28 per cent (thirteenth century), 44.64 per cent (fourteenth century), 30.50 per cent (fifteenth century), 8.9 per cent (sixteenth century) and 2.9 per cent (seventeenth century).

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syntax, that is, to the impersonal nature of the construction, and also to the suggestion inherent in the use of the existential ‘be’ that the modal evaluation is a property of the state of affairs. For this reason, in epistemic constructions with this periphrasis it is understood that the opinion expressed is founded on or motivated by facts, which in turn allows the listener to share that opinion. The subjective value appears when the context indicates that the speaker is directly implicated in the epistemic evaluation and takes responsibility for it. For the source periphrasis puede ser que this value is contextually inferable, whereas in the case of its derived form puede que it is an inherent value. Such an evolution corroborates one of the hypotheses proposed by Traugott (1989: 41) on the development of epistemic meanings: “they started out as weakly subjective and became strongly subjective.” Traugott attributes a weakly subjective value to evidentially-based paraphrases, such as ‘It is obvious from evidence that [. . .]’ and a strongly subjective value to readings in which the speaker presents him or herself as solely responsible, such as ‘I conclude that [. . .].’ The distinction thus bears some similarity to that of the (inter)subjectivity thesis of Nuyts (2001): the stronger the evidential support for the epistemic qualification, the more intersubjective it will be. Indeed, according to Traugott (1989: 43), stronger subjective meanings arise later than weak subjective ones (“meanings tend to move toward greater subjectivity”). This can be applied to the present case: the periphrasis puede ser que supports intersubjective (weakly subjective or more objective) meanings because its syntactic structure underlines the sense of ‘obvious (im)possibility based on the evidence,’ and contextually develops more subjective meanings, which consolidate the derived form puede que. This evolution confirms Traugott’s Tendency III for paths of semantic change: “Meanings tend to become increasingly based in the speaker’s subjective belief state/attitude toward the proposition” (Traugott 1989: 35). Therefore, the construction puede que can express such notions as the speaker’s doubt or weak commitment to the truth of the proposition. Notions of doubt, uncertainty or subjective belief are more prominent in those cases where puede que co-occurs with other expressions with these characteristics, as illustrated in examples (21) to (24) below. (21) Modern Spanish Estarían seguramente en buena posición, y puede be.cond.3pl probably in good position and may.ind.prs.3sg que algunos días tuvieran convidados a su mesa. comp some days have.sbjv.pst.3pl guests at their table ‘They would probably have a good situation, and on certain days they might have guests at their table.’ (CORDE 1885–1887)

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(22) Modern Spanish Porque te ibas al descanso, al because refl.2sg go.ind.pst.ipfv.2sg to.the rest to.the Purgatorio quizás, puede que al Cielo. purgatory perhaps may.ind.prs.3sg comp to.the heaven ‘Because you were heading towards your rest, to Purgatory perhaps, maybe to Heaven.’ (CORDE 1903) (23) Present-day Spanish ¿Por qué lo hice? [...] Quizá fuese why it.acc.n do.ind.pst.prf.1sg perhaps be.sbjv.pst.3sg porque el italiano me empujaba suavemente, because the Italian me.acc push.ind.pst.ipfv.3sg gently sin dejar de sonreír-me; o porque su sonrisa without stop.inf of smile.inf-me.dat or because his smile amable me lo rogaba. Acaso curiosidad; kind me.dat it.acc.n beg.ind.pst.ipfv.3sg perhaps curiosity puede que aburrimiento. may.ind.prs.3sg comp boredom ‘Why did I do it? Perhaps it was because the Italian was pushing me gently, smiling at me the whole time; or because his friendly smile begged me to. Maybe curiosity; maybe boredom.’ (CORDE 1963) (24) Present-day Spanish Sí, cree que la besaron en los yes think.ind.prs.3sg comp her.acc kiss.ind.pst.prf.3pl on the hombros o puede que fuera en los labios shoulders or may.ind.prs.3sg comp be.sbjv.pst.3sg on the lips o en los ojos [...] or on the eyes ‘Yes, she thinks she was kissed on the shoulders or it may have been on the lips or the eyes.’ (CORDE 1970)

. Features supporting the grammaticalization of puede que The construction under analysis does not fulfil the requirements of grammaticalization sensu strictu. However, understood in a broad sense, puede que may be considered to have undergone grammaticalization. Thus, for example, we observe that the process of reduction of a syntactic structure to a unit which behaves as a modality marker does take place, although the loss of phonological consistency

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On the grammaticalization of the Spanish expression puede que 

is not clearly marked (it is a case of ellipsis). Subjectification also occurs, since the resulting unit specializes in its use, expressing subjective epistemic meanings; quite the opposite of what happens with its antecedent, the modal periphrasis with ser, which expresses a largely (inter)subjective epistemicity as well as inherent necessity. Puede que gains frequency of occurrence from the eighteenth century to the present day. Yet that expansion is accompanied by neither paradigmatic integration nor obligatorification; it is associated with the periphrasis from which it derives, and with modal particles such as quizá(s), tal vez (‘perhaps’), posiblemente (‘possibly’), but there are no specific contexts in which its use is obligatory. Furthermore, in contrast to its source, puede ser que, the contexts of appearance of puede que are restricted to affirmative utterances. Finally, no fusion with near constituents is produced. To summarize, as shown in the schema below, the source construction is a regular syntactic structure and the target a modality marker in which the complementizer is recognizable as a unit though its original functional role has been lost. As a marker, it behaves as a grammatical unit functioning as a proposition-oriented operator; in terms of syntax, it behaves as a disjunct adverb (or sentence adverb). source form > target form puede ser que puede que a. phonetic reduction (ellipsis) b. semantic specialization (affirmative clause → dubitative statement) c. subjectification (only epistemic subjective) d. increase in frequency e. speaker’s choice (puede que, puede ser que, quizá(s), posiblemente, tal vez, etc.) f. loss of syntactic transparency Regarding distribution, puede que usually heads a clause or a clause representative element, as in puede que sí (‘maybe’), puede que no (‘maybe not’), although it also combines with phrasal constituents, such as adjective phrases (25), prepositional phrases (26), noun phrases (27), adverbial phrases (28), and so on. (25) Present-day Spanish Es también curioso, y puede que muy be.ind.prs.3sg also curious and may.ind.prs.3sg comp very indicativo. indicative ‘It is also curious, and perhaps most significant.’ (CREA 1990)

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 María José Rodríguez Espiñeira and Belén López Meirama

(26) Present-day Spanish Lo había hecho sin querer, it.acc.n have.ind.pst.ipfv.3sg done without want.inf puede que por miedo. may.ind.prs.3sg comp for fear ‘He had done it without thinking, perhaps out of fear.’ (CREA 1984) (27) Modern Spanish Ramona es una amiga de la amada, o una amada Ramona be.ind.prs.3sg a friend of the loved or a loved de segunda clase; tal vez una confidente; puede que of second class maybe a confidante may.ind.prs.3sg comp una parienta; quizás una hermana casada [...] a relative perhaps a sister married ‘Ramona is a friend of the sweetheart, or a sweetheart, second class; perhaps a confidante; or a relative; or a married sister.’ (CORDE 1852–1882) (28) Present-day Spanish A los cinco minutos de llegar al agua, puede at the five minutes of arrive.inf at.the water may.ind.prs.3sg que antes, estaba ya en el infierno. comp earlier be.ind.pst.ipfv.3sg already in the hell ‘Five minutes after arriving at the water, maybe even sooner, he was already in hell.’ (CREA 1988) Therefore, the construction under analysis arises from contextual and distributional restrictions and is limited to dubitative statements, but does not acquire the autonomy of modal adverbs such as quizá(s) (cf. Table 4 below). The quizá(s) adverb, which derives from the Latin construction qui sapit (‘who knows’), has experienced in Spanish a complete process of grammaticalization (with full lexicalization) and has become an autonomous word, as the various contexts illustrated in (29) to (32) and the summary in Table 4 show. Table 4. Distribution of quizá(s) and puede que

quizá(s) puede que

+Pause

Isolated

Between pauses

End position

Interrogative utterance

+ –

+ –

+ –

+ –

+ –

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(29) Classical Spanish – Quizá, Sancho – respondió don Quijote–, no se perhaps Sancho reply.ind.pst.prf.3sg don Quijote not refl.3 extenderá el encantamento. [Cf. *Puede que, Sancho...] extend.ind.fut.3sg the enchantment ‘– “Perhaps, Sancho,” replied Don Quijote, “the enchantment may not spread.”’ (CORDE 1615) (30) Present-day Spanish – Igor: ¿Sabes qué te digo, Dimitri? Igor know.ind.prs.2sg what you.dat say.ind.prs.1sg Dimitri La gente como tú y como yo, somos más felices the people like you and like I be.ind.prs.1pl more happy que estos pobres perros. Somos [...] más felices que un than these poor dogs be.ind.prs.1pl more happy than a rey. king – Dimitri: Quizá. [Cf. *Puede que] Dimitri perhaps ‘– Igor: “Do you know what I say, Dimitri? People like you and me, we are happier than these poor dogs. We are happier than a king.” – Dimitri: “Perhaps.”’ (DAVIES 1996) (31) Present-day Spanish Alhambra Tales es el libro, quizá, que Alhambra Tales be.ind.prs.3sg the book perhaps which demuestra más amor por show.ind.prs.3sg more love for España. [Cf. *el libro, puede que, que...] Spain ‘Alhambra Tales is perhaps the book which shows the greatest love for Spain.’ (CREA 1990) (32) Present-day Spanish ¿Ofendido? ¿Hice algo que lo offended do.ind.pst.prf.1sg anything which him.acc molestó al caballero? ¿Una palabra indebida, disturb.ind.prf.3sg to.the gentleman a word improper quizá? [Cf. una palabra indebida, *puede que?] perhaps ‘Offended? Did I do something to offend you, sir? An improper word, perhaps?’ (DAVIES 1984)



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María José Rodríguez Espiñeira and Belén López Meirama

In (29) the adverb quizá is followed by a pause, while in (30) it constitutes a complete speaking turn; in (31) it is interpolated between the relative pronoun que and its antecedent el libro; finally, in (32) it is isolated in final position in an interrogative construction. In none of these positions is it possible to substitute puede que. Finally, the construction puede que exhibits one further interesting feature, which has not been mentioned in the literature so far: in the corpora of texts reflecting non-standard speech there is, from the nineteenth century onwards, a variant which shows phonetic reduction: puede que [Ápwe.ðe.ke] > pue que [Ápwe.ke]. Illustrative examples are offered in (33) and (34). (33) Modern Spanish ¡Pus pue que se le figure well may.ind.prs.3sg comp refl.3 him.dat suppose.sbjv.prs.3sg al birriagas de este hombre que yo tengo a menos el to.the ridiculous of this man that I scorn.ind.prs.1sg det ser morena! be.inf dark.haired ‘It may just be that this clown of a man has got the notion that I think less of myself for being dark-haired!’ (CORDE 1871) (34) Present-day Spanish Pero si tú no te queres ir, pue but if you not refl.2sg want.ind.prs.2sg go.inf may.ind.prs.3sg que hasta te ocupen: tienen una comp even you.acc engage.sbjv.prs.3pl have.ind.prs.3pl a criatura y tú la puedes cargar [...] baby and you her.acc may.ind.prs.2sg carry.inf ‘But if you do not want to go, they just might engage you: they have a baby and you could carry it.’ (CORDE 1916)

. Conclusion The examination of the construction puede que reveals evidence of a process of formal reduction of a syntactic structure which culminates in a semi-transparent item. Semantic specialization also occurs, with the new structure becoming restricted in its modal function to the context of subjective epistemic possibility. The evolution of the source structure puede ser que into its derived unit puede que can therefore be regarded as marking an increase in subjectivity. However, the fixation process is incomplete: puede que has not become an autonomous unit,

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On the grammaticalization of the Spanish expression puede que

unlike the modal adverb like quizá(s), nor has its reduced form pue que been standardized, but documented only in rural or popular Spanish. The reason for this is that the expression puede que must compete with a wide range of modalizing expressions with a similar meaning, such as quizá(s), tal vez, posiblemente and so on. The culmination of the process would imply the creation of a new word with a grammatical meaning, which would enlarge the Spanish lexicon, in which event lexicalization would be a consequence of the process of grammaticalization.

Abbreviations 1 2 3 acc aux comp cond dat det f fut ind inf

first person second person third person accusative auxiliary complementizer conditional dative determiner feminine future indicative infinitive

ipfv m n neg pfv pl prf prs pst recp refl sbjv sg

imperfective masculine neuter negation perfective plural perfect present past reciprocal reflexive subjunctive singular

References Brinton, Laurel J. 2002. Grammaticalization versus lexicalization reconsidered: On the late use of temporal adverbs. In Teresa Fanego, María José López-Couso & Javier Pérez-Guerra (eds.), English historical syntax and morphology: Selected papers from 11 ICEHL, 67–97. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Corominas, Joan & José Antonio Pascual. 1981. Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico. Madrid: Gredos. CORDE: Real Academia Española. Data Bank (CORDE) [on line]. Corpus diacrónico del español. (Accessed April–June 2005). Size: 236.709.914 words. CREA: Real Academia Española. Data Bank (CREA) [on line]. Corpus de referencia del español actual. (Accessed April–June 2005). Size: 150.778.934 words. DAVIES: Davies, Mark. Not dated. Corpus del español. Size: 100 million words. Giacalone Ramat, Anna. 1998. Testing the boundaries of grammaticalization. In Anna Giacalone Ramat & Paul J. Hopper (eds.), The limits of grammaticalization, 107–127. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Gómez Torrego, Leonardo. 1999. Los verbos auxiliares. Las perífrasis verbales. In Ignacio Bosque & Violeta Demonte (eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, 3323–3389. Madrid: Real Academia Española-Espasa Calpe. Hengeveld, Kees. 1988. Illocution, mood and modality in a functional grammar of Spanish. Journal of Semantics 6(3–4): 227–269. Hernanz, María Luisa. 1999. El infinitivo. In Ignacio Bosque & Violeta Demonte (eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, 2197–2396. Madrid: Real Academia EspañolaEspasa Calpe. Hopper, Paul J. 1998. The paradigm at the end of the universe. In Anna Giacalone Ramat & Paul J. Hopper (eds.), The limits of grammaticalization, 147–158. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lehmann, Christian. 2002. New reflections on grammaticalization and lexicalization. In Ilse Wischer & Gabriele Diewald (eds.), New reflections on grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 49], 1–18. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics. London: CUP. Moreno Cabrera, Juan C. 1998. On the relationship between grammaticalization and lexicalization. In Anna Giacalone Ramat & Paul J. Hopper (eds.), The limits of grammaticalization, 209–227. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nuyts, Jan. 1992. Subjective vs. objective modality: What is the difference? In Michael Fortescue, Peter Harder & Lars Kristoffersen (eds.), Layered structure and reference in a functional perspective, 73–98. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nuyts, Jan. 2001. Epistemic modality, language and conceptualization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Nuyts, Jan. 2006. Modality: Overview and linguistic issues. In William Frawley (ed.), The expression of modality, 1–26. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Olbertz, Hella. 1998. Verbal periphrases in a functional grammar of Spanish. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Ramat, Paolo & Davide Ricca. 1994. Prototypical adverbs: On the scalarity/radiality of the notion of adverb. Rivista di Linguistica 6: 289–326. Silva-Corvalán, Carmen. 1995. Contextual conditions for the interpretation of ‘poder’ and ‘deber’ in Spanish. In Joan L. Bybee & Suzanne Fleischman (eds.), Modality in grammar and discourse, 67–105. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1989. On the rise of epistemic meanings in English: An example of subjectification in semantic change. Language 65(1): 31–55. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1999. Grammaticalization and lexicalization. In Keith Brown & Jim Miller (eds.), Concise encyclopedia of grammatical categories, 177–184. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Wischer, Ilse. 2000. Grammaticalization versus lexicalization. ‘Methinks’ there is some confusion. In Olga Fisher, Anette Rosenbach & Dieter Stein (eds.), Pathways of change: Grammaticalization in English, 355–370. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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On the history and present behaviour of subordinating that with adverbial conjunctions in English* Günter Rohdenburg University of Paderborn

The development of adverbial conjunctions since Middle English times has been described by Beal as a unidirectional process of grammaticalization leading from a less grammatical item involving an obligatory marker of subordination that, via the optional and decreasing use of the particle, to a more grammatical item excluding that. The present paper offers a corpus-based analysis of the history of this subordinating particle with a number of adverbial conjunctions, focussing on a range of factors influencing its distribution, among them the following: entrenchment, style, the Complexity Principle, and the horror aequi Principle. The paper also draws attention to a handful of counterexamples, where the earlier tendency to dispense with the subordination marker has been reversed, and tries to explain such cases of degrammaticalization in terms of concomitant (and possibly prior) frequency changes.

.

Introduction

This paper focusses on adverbial conjunctions such as those in (1a–d), which either involve or may have involved an optional or obligatory that as an explicit marker of subordination.1 (1) a. admitting, assuming, barring, being, considering, excepting, granting, notwithstanding, presuming, providing, saving, seeing, supposing b. given, granted, provided c. besides, directly, except, for, immediately, now, so, without * This study was carried out within the Paderborn research project Determinants of Grammatical Variation in English, which is supported by the German Research Foundation (Grant Ro 2211/1–3). . The most comprehensive survey to date of adverbial subordinators in English and other European languages is provided by Kortmann (1997).

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 Günter Rohdenburg

d. because, by reason, by the time, for all, for fear, in case, in regard, on account, on the basis, on/upon (the) condition, on the grounds, to the extent For example, in (2) below the use of that with the subordinator now can still be said to be optional in British English. (2) Now (that) you mention it [. . .] My point of departure for the current study is Joan Beal’s (1988) pioneering article aptly called “Goodbye to all ‘that’?” Her analyses are based almost exclusively on first and last attestations – in the OED and other sources – of the competing variants of a total of 27 items. Beal’s main findings may be summarized as follows: [. . .] conjunctives followed by ‘that’ [. . .] continually appear in the language as items which make the transition from other word classes to that of subordinating conjunction. (Beal 1988: 65) [. . .] association with ‘that’ will arise when a form is beginning to be used as a conjunctive, but when that form is established as a conjunctive in its own right, ‘that’ may be dropped. (Beal 1988: 60) [. . .] the more recently a form has become used as a conjunctive, the more likely it is to be followed by ‘that’ in PDE [Present-day English]. (Beal 1988: 61) Adopting the perspective of grammaticalization theory (e.g. Lehmann 1985, 1995; Haspelmath 1989; Traugott and Heine 1991; Diewald 1997; Hopper and Traugott 2003), we can say that Beal has essentially described the development of adverbial conjunctions since Middle English times as a unidirectional process of grammaticalization. In particular, she has argued that both long established conjunctions and more recent additions to the category have tended to follow the same evolutionary path, which leads from a less grammatical item involving an obligatory that, via the decreasing use of that, to a more grammatical item excluding that altogether.2 Two recent cases illustrating the change from obligatory that to its optional use are provided in examples (3) and (4). (3) So you don’t get lost, I’ll draw you a map. (Beal 1988: 65) (4) At the High Court, the water companies and water authorities asked Sir Nicolas Browne-Wilkinson, [. . .] to strike out the claims on the basis they were frivolous. (1990, The Times) . In a similar vein, Lehmann (1993: 332), in his discussion of German nachdem/indem/seitdem plus daß, says that “[o]nce the construction is fixed, the semantically (almost) empty subordinator daß becomes dispensable. [. . .] The case of the English conjunctives since, after or more recently, so in the sense of so that is, of course, analogous.”

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Subordinating that with adverbial conjunctions in English 

Beal’s study, which represents only the beginning of a potential research paradigm, offers a great deal of scope for further extensions and refinements. The article does not, for example, subject a single lexical item to a quantitative analysis in either a historical or a present-day corpus;3 this is one of the gaps which the present paper attempts to fill. Moreover, apart from the entrenchment factor, Beal’s article pays hardly any attention to other general constraints determining the use of subordinating that. Yet, as noted in Section 2 below, there are several additional factors influencing its distribution. Section 3 provides a detailed analysis of three prototypical cases of grammaticalization, which illustrate the developmental pattern suggested by Beal. In Section 4, however, a handful of cases will be presented which show that the tendency to drop the marker of subordination has been reversed to varying degrees and an attempt will be made to explain such developments in terms of concomitant frequency changes. Finally, Section 5 presents a summary of conclusions drawn.

. Some general factors determining the distribution of that . Stylistic contrasts The general tendency, which holds for both Present-day English and earlier periods of the language, has been described by Quirk et al. (1985: 999) in the following terms: “The omission of an optional that in the complex subordinators tends to lower the level of formality.” In fact, this is only one manifestation of a more general principle, proposed by John Haiman (1983) and which, I suggest, is neatly captured by the phrase “more form – more formal.” For instance, we would expect a quality newspaper, such as The Times or The Guardian, to use more formal and (also more) explicit variants to a greater extent than a tabloid like The Daily Mail. These expectations are indeed confirmed for both British and American English. A typical case involving for fear is shown in Figure 1 below. In order to eliminate any potentially distorting complexity effects (see Section 2.2), the analysis has been confined to adjacent personal pronouns as subjects in the subordinate clause. . It seems worth pointing out that the kind of quantitative analyses carried out in this study would have been impossible in 1984 when Joan Beal wrote her paper, as none of the electronic corpora used here were available at the time. The historical databases supporting the analyses in this paper, which deal mostly with low-frequency items and span several centuries, represent virtually all those which the Paderborn project has been able to acquire or compile itself. Admittedly, they are still far from ideal both in terms of size and of composition. The Appendix provides a list of these Primary Sources with the approximate number of words of each text collection.

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 Günter Rohdenburg 100% 90% 80%

percentage of that

70% 77/141

60% 50% 40%

15/43 20/75

30% 20%

12/97

10% 0% The Daily Mail (1993–1994)

The Times (1990–1994)

The Detroit Free Press The Washington (1992–1995) Times (1990–1992)

Figure 1. The variable use of subordinating that with for fear in selected British and American newspapers (contextual restriction: adjacent personal pronouns as subjects)

As Figure 1 shows, there is a distinct regional contrast, with American English preserving a lower rate of that-usage (cf. Section 4 below). In both British and American English, however, it is the more formal language of serious newspapers (The Times and The Washington Times) that displays higher ratios of the more complex and explicit variant than the less serious tabloid press (The Daily Mail and The Detroit Free Press). . Some implications of the Complexity Principle The most important and potentially the most distorting factor is provided by a general processing tendency which I refer to as the Complexity Principle (cf., for example, Rohdenburg 1996, 2002, 2003, 2006a, 2006b): in the case of more or less explicit grammatical options, the more explicit one(s) will tend to be favoured in cognitively more complex environments. In other words, an increased processing load tends to favour greater structural explicitness.4 In the case of variable that with adverbial conjunctions, it can be shown that the competing alternatives have always been remarkably sensitive to the Complexity Principle. In the present paper I will take a brief look at two kinds of complexity effects found both in earlier forms of English and at present. . The Complexity Principle accounts for a wide range of related variation phenomena in English. These include, for instance, the rivalry between that and zero as object clause links (cf., for example, Rissanen 1991; Rohdenburg 1996: 160–164, 2006b) and that between who/which, that and zero as relativizers (cf., for example, Tottie 1995; Hawkins 2003: 192–194).

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Subordinating that with adverbial conjunctions in English 

The first effect concerns the complexity of the adverbial clause subject. In all periods, noun phrase subjects, as in (5b), have consistently shown a strikingly greater dependence on the variant with that than pronominal ones, as in (5a). (5) a. Supposing (that) they are late again [. . .] b. Supposing (that) some of the trains are late again [. . .] With this in mind, let us consider the evidence in Figure 2, which deals with four different conjunctions in four different kinds of corpora.5 In addition, we generally find a parallel division between shorter and longer noun phrase subjects. This is a distinction which Figure 2 does not represent.

OED

Figure 2. The variable use of subordinating that with the conjunctions supposing, now, on/upon condition and in case

Secondly, there has always been a noticeable tendency to include the marker of subordination whenever the dependent clause is separated from the conjunction proper by some intervening material, as in (6a). (6) a. Assuming, however, (that) these analyses are correct [. . .] b. Assuming (that) these analyses are correct [. . .] Figure 3 shows a striking contrast between discontinuous structures and continuous ones concerning the distribution of subordinating that with the conjunction assuming in British English newspapers. While not reflecting the actuation of grammatical change, the Complexity Principle does allow us to make an important evolutionary prediction: in the case of changes tending towards reduced grammatical explicitness, we can expect the . The analysis involving now is based only on a representative selection of relevant examples.

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 Günter Rohdenburg 100% 90%

41/47

percentage of that

80% 70% 60% 50% 40%

262/841

30% 20% 10% 0% insertions

remaining cases

Figure 3. The effect of insertions on the distribution of subordinating that with the conjunction assuming in selected British newspapers (t92–93, g92–93)

less explicit options to be first established in less complex environments. This is exactly what we find with subordinators starting to drop an earlier obligatory that. Take the case of the novel clause linker on the basis (that) briefly mentioned in Hopper and Traugott (2003: 185). At present the few examples omitting that in British quality papers are typically associated with pronominal subjects, as in example (4) above. This is clearly seen in Figure 4, which distinguishes between three kinds of environments. 1,659/1,668

100%

258/258

percentage of that

98% 1,072/1,114 96% 94% 92% 90% adjacent pronominal subjects

adjacent nominal/sentential subjects

insertions

Figure 4. The variable use of subordinating that with on the basis in selected British newspapers (t90–97, g90–97, d91–94)

As Figure 4 shows, with pronominal subjects, that-deletion is already found in 3.8 per cent of the total. By contrast, nominal and sentential subjects dispensing

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Subordinating that with adverbial conjunctions in English 

with subordinating that represent only 0.5 per cent of the relevant cases, and in examples involving insertions the change has not even got under way. Notice that, in order to visualize these effects, Figure 4 had to be confined to the upper end of the scale. . The rivalry between subordinating and coordinating uses A related observation made by several scholars is that even an older conjunction cannot dispense with the subordinating signal if the same item is also used in a coordinating function. This, it has been said, was once true of both for and but, in which case the subordinating function had to be made explicit by the use of that. More precisely, in the case of for, Rissanen (1989) has shown that the subordinating signal did not become obligatory until the coordinator for had evolved into a distinct and well-established category. The final stages of this development, leading to the disappearance of subordinating for, are shown in Figure 5. In other words, the eventual demise of the subordinating function of for was foreshadowed by the adoption of that as an obligatory marker of subordination.

16/16

100% 90% 6/8

percentage of that

80% 70% 60% 50% 40%

7/19

30% 20% 10%

12/ca. 750

22/ca. 524

5/ca. 492

0% 1420–1500

1500–1570 presence of subordinating features

1570–1640 other

Figure 5. The variable use of subordinating that with the conjunction for in the Helsinki Corpus between 1420 and 1640 (from Rissanen 1989: 7–10)

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 Günter Rohdenburg

. Implications of the horror aequi Principle Another factor whose influence has to be taken into account involves the tendency – presumably found in all languages – to avoid the repetition of identical (or near-identical) and adjacent (or near-adjacent) grammatical forms (cf. Rohdenburg 2003: 236–242, 2006a, 2007). The tendency, which is referred to as the horror aequi Principle, would, for example, affect structures such as the following: (7) a. Assuming, that is, (that) this is correct [. . .] b. Assuming (that) that (analysis) is correct [. . .] c. He pointed out that, assuming (that) this was correct [. . .] In environments like these, the variant involving the extra that is and has always been avoided, to varying degrees. In this respect, consider the analysis presented in Figure 6, which deals with two classes of insertions, horror aequi sensitive that is and all others. As can be seen, horror aequi largely asserts itself at the expense of the Complexity Principle. 39/40 100% 90%

percentage of that

80% 70% 60% 50% 40%

39/91 262/841

30% 20% 10% 0% t92–t93, g92–g93

t90–t01, g90–g00 d91–d00, M93–M00

examples involving no insertions

that is insertion

t92–t93, g92–g93 other kinds of insertions

Figure 6. The effect of two classes of insertions on the distribution of subordinating that with the conjunction assuming in selected British and American newspapers

. Prototypical cases of grammaticalization In the course of my investigations into relevant adverbial conjunctions I have so far looked at just over 20 items in various present-day and historical corpora. The findings of this – mostly unpublished – research largely confirm the expectations

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Subordinating that with adverbial conjunctions in English 

raised by Beal’s (1988) analysis.6 In perhaps two thirds of all cases, an earlier obligatory use of that or a strong association of the conjunction with that has given way to a progressively weaker association. At least in the early stages of the relevant subordinators, the diminishing use of that is generally reflected in a dramatic increase in frequency of the conjunction. Two long established items illustrating this pattern are because and in case. Part of their early histories is shown in Figures 7 and 8 respectively. Figure 7 traces two correlated developments: the that-variant falls into disfavour while the overall frequency of the conjunction rises steadily.7 FREQ

18/19

1.1

90%

1.0

80%

0.9 0.8

70%

0.7

60%

0.6

50%

0.5

40%

0.4

30%

0.3

9/49

20%

12/ca. 160

10%

frequency index

percentage of that

100%

0.2 7/ca. 200

0%

0.1 0.0

1350–1420

1420–1500

1500–1570

1570–1640

Figure 7. The evolution of because (that) in the Helsinki Corpus (from Rissanen 1989: 8–9)

Figure 8, which shows the early stages of in case, presents a similar picture, even though the limited data are no more than suggestive.8 In both cases, then, it would appear that the use of that is correlated inversely with the frequency index involved. While the variant with that became obsolete in the case of because a few centuries ago, it still represents a theoretical possibility with in case. In conformity with Beal’s (1988) prediction, this developmental pattern seems to have been . In addition to the present paper, the phenomenon of variable that with adverbial conjunctions is also discussed in Rohdenburg (1996: 165–166, 1998: 196–197, 2000: 38–39, 2006b: 54– 55) and in Rohdenburg and Schlüter (2000: 456–458). . The frequency index used in the analyses based on corpora other than the OED (Figures 7, 9, 10, 11, 12 and 14) corresponds to the total number of examples divided by the absolute number of words multiplied by 1,000. . The frequency index used in the analyses based on the OED (Figures 8 and 13, Tables 1 and 4) corresponds to the total number of examples divided by the absolute number of relevant quotations multiplied by 1,000.

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 Günter Rohdenburg

repeated with a number of later additions to the category. Figure 9 shows the evolution of assuming, one of the most recent cases.9

Figure 8. The evolution of in case (that) (and its spelling variants) in the quotations of the OED between 1350–1599 100%

0.007

27/28 FREQ

90%

0.006 24/33 0.005

70% 60%

0.004

50% 0.003

40% 33/114

30%

0.002

frequency index

percentage of that

80%

20% 0.001

10%

0.000

0% *1800–*1829 (NCF, MNC)

*1830–*1869 (NCF, LNC, ETC)

(1960s–1990s) BNC (wridom 1)

Figure 9. The evolution of assuming (that) in a selection of (predominantly fictional) British corpora

. In Figure 9 (and also in Figures 10, 11 and 12) asterisks are used to indicate the date of birth of the authors concerned.

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Subordinating that with adverbial conjunctions in English 

Here, too, we can observe a fairly consistent correlation between the decreasing use of that and the overall increase of the item in question. These findings are corroborated by the evidence found in the OED, as shown in Table 1 below.10 Table 1. The evolution of the conjunction assuming (that) in the quotations of the OED

1829–1945 1946–1983

that

ø

total

% that

frequency index

11 (3) 7 (1)

– 8

11 (3) 15

100% 46.7%

0.0132 0.0542

. Examples of degrammaticalization If we assume that the scenario described by Beal (1988) is indeed characteristic of the majority of surviving adverbial conjunctions, there are at least a handful of intriguing counterexamples. With these, an earlier tendency to drop the marker of subordination has been arrested and has even been reversed to varying degrees. The clearest examples of this kind of degrammaticalization are represented by seeing, notwithstanding and by reason. In what follows these three subordinators will be considered in turn. Figure 10 illustrates that with seeing, as already pointed out by Franz (1893), the reversal seems to have gone to completion. The use of that or other regionally flavoured markers of subordination (as, as how) is now found to be virtually obligatory again in the context of Standard English. The development has by now affected both complex and simple environments. Therefore, the usual asymmetry between pronominal subjects and noun phrase subjects has completely disappeared. This contrasts with other competing uses of the form seeing, as shown in Table 2. Table 2. The use of variable that introducing complement clauses dependent on the verb form seeing (outside of progressives) in The Daily Telegraph for 1992

adjacent pronominal subjects adjacent nominal subjects

that

ø

total

% that

1 5

6 –

7 5

14.3% 100%

Here, the relevant contrast is well preserved and pronominal subjects are rarely associated with the complementizer that. The development shown in Figure 10 is . The figures given in brackets refer to those instances involving material inserted between assuming and the subject of the adverbial clause.

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 Günter Rohdenburg

Figure 10. The evolution of seeing (that/as/as how) in selected British corpora

seen to be somewhat less of a mystery once we realize that the increasing use of that is largely paralleled by a dramatic decline of seeing as an adverbial conjunction. Essentially similar developments are found with notwithstanding and by reason. Figure 11 displays part of the evolution of by reason, which fell from use as a conjunction during the nineteenth century. The data in Figure 11 suggest that the increase in that was preceded by a general decline of the conjunction. 100%

0.030 FREQ

90%

15/20

80%

0.020

60% 50% 40%

0.015 85/271

30%

4/14

0.010

20%

0.005

frequency index

percentage of that

70%

0.025

10% 0%

0.000 1518–1700 (EEPF)

1705–1780 (ECF)

*1800–*1869 (NCF, MNC, LNC)

Figure 11. The evolution of by reason (that) in a series of historical corpora

The evolution of notwithstanding over the last three centuries can be seen in Figure 12. In its conjunctive function, notwithstanding appears to be either

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Subordinating that with adverbial conjunctions in English 

obsolete or moving towards this state in other than legal and official uses. The last attestation in the OED dates from 1859. 16/16

100% 90%

FREQ

0.015

53/67

80% percentage of that

0.010

60% 50%

22/52

40% 30% 20%

0.005

10/46

frequency index

2/3

70%

11/118

10% 0.000

0% 1705–1780 (ECF)

*1720–*1759 (NCF)

*1760–*1799 (NCF)

*1800–*1839 (NCF)

*1840–*1867 1960s–1990s (NCF) (BNC wridom 1)

Figure 12. The evolution of notwithstanding (that) in a series of British corpora

In both cases, therefore, it has been shown that the decline and eventual demise of the conjunctive function is foreshadowed by an increasing use of that even outside complex and formal environments. In this respect, the evidence in Figures 11 and 12 is supported by the data presented in Tables 3 and 4 below. Another indication of the approaching demise of the conjunctive force of notwithstanding and by reason may be seen in the strengthening of these clause linkers by means of the fact (cf. the last columns in Tables 3 and 4).11 Table 3. The evolution of notwithstanding (that) in the CHT (1785–1992)

1787–1887 1912–1975

that

ø

total

% that

the fact that

4 14

9 –

13 14

30.8% 100%

1 6

Table 4. The evolution of by reason (that) in the quotations of the OED

1530–1699 1700–1799 1800–1899 1900–1987

that

ø

total

% that

frequency index

of the fact that

37 – 3 –

40 14 – –

77 14 3 –

48.1% 0% 100% –

0.132 0.051 0.004 –

– – 1 –

. In Table 3 the only example of notwithstanding the fact that is dated 1871. In turn, the three nineteenth-century instances of by reason that belong to the time-span 1820–1869.

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 Günter Rohdenburg

100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

0.12 0.10

FREQ

0.08 7/16

0.06 0.04

7/33 4/29

0.02

1/32

frequency index

frequency of that

There are one or two other suspected cases of degrammaticalization, whose interpretation is, however, less clear, including for fear and now. In the case of for fear (Figure 13) the frequency curve shows a clear downward trend for the last two and a half centuries. Yet, the change tending towards the reestablishment of subordinating that (or lest) has not reached a very advanced stage.

0.00 1600–1699

1700–1799

1800–1899

1900–1987

Figure 13. The evolution of for fear (that/lest) in the quotations of the OED

Figure 14. The evolution of now (that) in selected British and American corpora

Finally, Figure 14 summarizes the history of now (that). The frequency curve, with its repeated ups and downs between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, does not reveal a clear (downward) trend. Nevertheless, there is a striking increase of that during this period. Comparing British and American English in

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Subordinating that with adverbial conjunctions in English 

the FLOB, FROWN and CSPAE databases, we find that the latter change has gone almost to completion in both written and spoken American English. Yet, as shown in Figure 14, while British English is lagging behind American English, it tends to use the simple subordinator much more frequently than American English. The regional contrast, then, does indeed provide the expected frequency-based correlation. . Conclusion We have seen that the use of variable that with the class of adverbial subordinators is determined by several general and stable factors, including stylistic tendencies, the Complexity Principle and the horror aequi Principle. More importantly, Beal’s fundamental hypothesis concerning the unidirectional decrease and loss of extra that has been challenged on several counts. However, both the numerous examples showing the expected trend and the handful of cases which have undergone a process of degrammaticalization are largely accounted for by the respective entrenchment values. More specifically, the rise of that parallels and foreshadows the decline and demise of a given conjunction. Perhaps this interpretation could be extended to the subordinating uses of for and but which were suppressed and entirely supplanted by coordinating ones. Of course, one is left wondering whether and to what extent the Complexity Principle and the – admittedly vague – entrenchment concept should be viewed simply as different manifestations of the same phenomenon.

References Beal, Joan. 1988. Goodbye to all ‘that’? The history and present behaviour of optional ‘that’. In Graham Nixon & John Honey (eds.), An historic tongue: Studies in English linguistics in memory of Barbara Strang, 44–66. London: Routledge. Diewald, Gabriele. 1997. Grammatikalisierung. Eine Einführung in Sein und Werden grammatischer Formen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Franz, Wilhelm. 1893. Zur Sprache des älteren Neuenglisch. Englische Studien 18: 422–451. Haiman, John. 1983. Iconic and economic motivation. Language 59: 781–819. Haspelmath, Martin. 1989. From purposive to infinitive: A universal path of grammaticalization. Folia Linguistica Historica 10: 287–310. Hawkins, John. 2003. Why are zero-marked phrases close to their heads? In Günter Rohdenburg & Britta Mondorf (eds.), Determinants of grammatical variation in English, 175–204. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Hopper, Paul J. & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization. 2nd edn. Cambridge: CUP. Kortmann, Bernd. 1997. Adverbial subordination: A typology and history of adverbial subordinators based on European languages [Empirical Approaches to Language Typology 18]. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Lehmann, Christian. 1985. Grammaticalization: Synchronic variation and diachronic change. Lingua e Stile 20: 303–318. Lehmann, Christian. 1993. Theoretical implications of grammaticalization phenomena. In William A. Foley (ed.), The role of theory in language description, 315–340. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Lehmann, Christian. 1995. Thoughts on grammaticalization: A programmatic sketch. 2nd edn. München: Lincom. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman. Rissanen, Matti. 1989. The conjunction for in Early Modern English. NOWELE 14: 3–18. Rissanen, Matti. 1991. On the history of that/zero as object clause links in English. In Karin Aijmer & Bengt Altenberg (eds.), English corpus linguistics: Studies in honour of Jan Svartvik, 272–289. London: Longman. Rohdenburg, Günter. 1996. Cognitive complexity and increased grammatical explicitness in English. Cognitive Linguistics 7: 149–182. Rohdenburg, Günter. 1998. Clarifying structural relationships in cases of increased complexity in English. In Rainer Schulze (ed.), Making meaningful choices in English: On dimensions, perspectives, methodology and evidence, 189–205. Tübingen: Narr. Rohdenburg, Günter. 2000. The complexity principle as a factor determining grammatical variation and change in English. In Ingo Plag & Klaus-Peter Schneider (eds.), Language use, language acquisition and language history: (Mostly) empirical studies in honour of Rüdiger Zimmermann, 25–44. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Rohdenburg, Günter. 2002. Processing complexity and the variable use of prepositions in English. In Hubert Cuyckens & Günter Radden (eds.), Perspectives on prepositions, 79–100. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Rohdenburg, Günter. 2003. Cognitive complexity and horror aequi as factors determining the use of interrogative clause linkers in English. In Günter Rohdenburg & Britta Mondorf (eds.), Determinants of grammatical variation in English, 205–250. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Rohdenburg, Günter. 2006a. The role of functional constraints in the evolution of the English complementation system. In Christiane Dalton-Puffer, Dieter Kastovsky, Nikolaus Ritt & Herbert Schendl (eds.), Syntax, style and grammatical norms: English from 1500–2000, 143– 166. Bern: Peter Lang. Rohdenburg, Günter. 2006b. Processing complexity and competing sentential variants in Present-day English. In Wilfried Kürschner & Reinhard Rapp (eds.), Linguistik International: Festschrift für Heinrich Weber, 51–67. Lengerich: Pabst Science Publishers. Rohdenburg, Günter. 2007. Functional constraints in syntactic change: The rise and fall of prepositional constructions in Early and Late Modern English. English Studies 88(2): 217– 233. Rohdenburg, Günter & Julia Schlüter. 2000. Determinanten grammatischer Variation im Frühund Spätneuenglischen. Sprachwissenschaft 25: 443–496. Tottie, Gunnel. 1995. The man Ø I love: An analysis of factors favouring zero relatives in written British and American English. In Gunnel Melchers & Beatrice Warren (eds.), Studies in Anglistics [Stockholm Studies in English 85], 201–215. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell. Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Bernd Heine. 1991. Introduction. In Elizabeth Closs Traugott & Bernd Heine (eds.), Approaches to grammaticalization, Vol. II, 1–14. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Subordinating that with adverbial conjunctions in English

Appendix: Primary Sources BNC CHT

British National Corpus (size: 100,000,000 words). Changing Times (a selection of nearly 15,000 original articles from The Times and The Sunday Times 1785–1992). Chadwyck-Healey (size: 11,721,365 words). CSPAE Corpus of Spoken Professional American English (transcripts of conversations occurring between 1994 and 1998). Athelstan (size: 2,000,000 words). d91-d00 The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph on CD-ROM 1991–2000. Chadwyck-Healey (size: 370,506,131words). DFP92-DFP95 The Detroit Free Press on CD-ROM 1992–1995. Knight Ridder Information Inc. (size: 102,989,512 words). ECF Eighteenth-Century Fiction. 1996. Chadwyck-Healey (size: 9,702,696 words, omitting duplicates). EEPF Early English Prose Fiction. 1997–2000. Chadwyck-Healey (size: 9,562,865 words). ETC Early Twentieth Century Corpus (a selection of British and American writings by authors born between 1870 and 1896). Project Gutenberg (size: 17,000,000 words).12 ETC/B British writings in the ETC (size: 4,801,408 words). FLOB Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English (Freiburg replication of the LOB corpus, with texts from the 1990s). ICAME (size: 1,000,000 words). FROWN Freiburg-Brown Corpus of American English (Freiburg replication of the Brown Corpus, with texts from the 1990s). ICAME (size: 1,000,000 words). g90-g00 The Guardian (including The Observer 1994–2000) on CD-ROM 1990–2000. Chadwyck-Healey (size: 387,988,348 words). LNC Late Nineteenth-Century Corpus (a selection of British and American writings, complementary to the NCF, by authors born between 1830 and 1869). Project Gutenberg (size: 48,000,000 words). LNC/B British writings in the LNC (size: 20,817,802 words). M93-M00 The Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday on CD-ROM 1993–2000. ChadwyckHealey (size: 206,762,410 words). MNC Mid-Nineteenth Century Corpus (a selection of British and American writings, complementary to the NCF, by authors born between 1803 and 1828. Project Gutenberg (size: 17,000,000 words). MNC/B British writings in the MNC (size: 10,082,876 words). NCF Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 1999–2000. Chadwyck-Healey (size: 37,589,837 words). OED The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn. (Version 1.13). 1995. Oxford University Press. t90-t01 The Times and The Sunday Times on CD-ROM 1990–2001. Chadwyck-Healey (size: 527,188,793 words). W90-W92 The Washington Times (including Insight on the News) on CD-ROM. 1990–1992. Wayzata Technology (size: 93,889,488 words). wridom 1 Fictional/narrative component of the British National Corpus (BNC) (size: 18,863,529 words). . The list of texts making up this corpus, as well as those for the LNC and MNC below, are available on request from the Paderborn project (email: [email protected]).

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The regrammaticalization of linking elements in German Heide Wegener University of Potsdam

Linking elements in German are generally assumed to have developed either from suffixes indicating the genitive singular or from plural markers. For the linking elements homophonous with plural markers, however, the explanation is doubtful for a number of reasons. The present paper proposes an alternative explanation for the development of such interfixes, according to which both linking elements and plural markers have been grammaticalized from the same old Indo-European stem suffixes which indicated the declension class of the noun. After the decline of the original endings, the indicators of moribund inflectional classes became afunctional ‘junk’ and were then reanalysed either as plural markers or as linking elements. The development of linking elements can thus be shown as a case of exaptation or regrammaticalization.

.

Introduction

In this paper it is argued that the linking element -(e)s- evolved from an inflectional suffix, that of the genitive case, whereas the linking elements -e-, -er- and -(e)n-, homophonous with plural markers, followed a different path of development (cf. Section 2). It will be shown in Section 3 that these linking elements originated in stem suffixes, and that they are essentially independent of plural markers, their homophony being explained by the fact that they both evolved from the same source. Section 4 then considers whether this development, in which linking elements re-functionalize moribund morphological material can be classified as either grammaticalization or regrammaticalization. An overview of the new functions which the linking elements have acquired in Modern Standard German is provided in Section 5. Finally, Section 6 discusses the results of this study and their implications for linguistic theory and acquisition theory.

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. Linking elements and inflectional suffixes In German, interfixes1 called linking elements may occur between the two constituents of a compound, such as Kind-er-geld (‘child benefit’) or Hund-e-biss (‘dog bite’). Four formally distinct linking elements exist:2 -(e)s-, -(e)n-, -e- and -er-, the former two occurring in both syllabic and non-syllabic variants, -es-/-sand -en-/-n-. It is generally assumed that these linking elements developed from homophonous inflectional suffixes. In what follows, we will first examine which inflectional suffixes are possible candidates for sources of these linking elements. The linking elements -(e)s- and -(e)n- are homophonous with genitive singular suffixes. In this function -(e)s- applies to nouns of the strong inflection class (masculines and neuters), while -(e)n- occurs in nouns of the weak inflection class (masculines and, until the eighteenth century, feminines and neuters; cf. Paul 1917: 79). On the other hand, the linking elements -e-, -er- (and again -(e)nand -s-) are homophonous with plural suffixes, -e and -er applying to nouns of the strong inflection class, -(e)n to nouns of the weak inflection class and -s only to certain specific kinds of nouns (vowel final nouns, onomatopoeias, proper names and borrowings; cf. Wegener 2005a). As can be seen, functions and forms overlap. In order to find the origin of linking elements, it seems then necessary to differentiate between genitive singular suffixes, on the one hand, and plural suffixes, on the other. . Grammaticalization from a genitive suffix When the linking element is identical to one of the genitive singular suffixes, as with -(e)s or -(e)n, the general assumption that linking elements evolved from inflectional suffixes is justified. This is so because left constituents with one of these suffixes have developed from a modifier phrase and are hence known as improper compounds or genitive compounds (cf. Demske 1999, 2001). (1) Present-day German a. -es: des Kind-es Vater > der Kind-es-vater of the child-gen.sg father the child-le-father ‘the father of the child’ ‘the child’s father’ -s: des Teufel-s Weib > das Teufel-s-weib of the devil-gen.sg wife the devil-le-wife ‘the wife of the devil’ ‘she-devil’ . This term goes back to Malkiel (1958) and is used by Fleischer and Barz (1995), Dressler et al. (2001) and Libben et al. (2002). . Theoretically, there also exists a zero linking element, but this is of no interest in the present study.

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The regrammaticalization of linking elements in German 

b. -en: des Bär-en Haut > die Bär-en-haut of the bear-gen.sg skin the bear-le-skin ‘the skin of the bear’ ‘the bear skin’ -n: der Marie-n Kirche > die Marie-n-kirche of Mary-gen.sg church the Mary-le-church ‘the church of St. Mary’ ‘the St. Mary’s church’ Following Demske (1999), it is due to the lexicalization of noun phrases with prenominal modifier phrases that genitive compounds arise in the Early New High German period. In the syntactic constructions in the left column in (1) above, the suffix is interpreted as a genitive marker, whereas in the compounds in the right column the formally identical suffix has become a linking element: the article is no longer in the genitive case but agrees with the right constituent in the nominative. Without the presence of the article, the functionally crucial intonation contour of compounds and the orthographic norm of German to write compounds as one word, the structure would be ambiguous between [[Kindes] Vater] and [Kindesvater]. It should also be noted that during the lexicalization process the first constituent changes its reading from a referential to a generic interpretation (see below). The non-syllabic variant of -s- has further developed into a genuine linking element, since it occurs on weak feminine nouns where it cannot be interpreted as a genitive case marker:3 weak feminine nouns never marked the genitive with -s and, as illustrated in (1c) below, have lost their case marking completely in Modern German. (1) c. Present-day German der Prüfung_ Note > die Prüfung-s-note of the exam_ mark the exam-le-mark ‘the mark of the exam’ ‘the exam mark’ Section 4 below addresses the question of whether this development can be considered an example of grammaticalization. . Assumed grammaticalization from a plural suffix For the linking elements -er-, -e-, -(e)n- and -s-, two different cases must be distinguished. In Modern German no genitive plural suffix exists, the genitive plural ending being identical to that of the nominative. In other words, a nominative plural form may also be a genitive plural form. . Therefore, it is called non-paradigmic (Fuhrhop 1998), since it is morphologically inappropriate as a genitive marker.

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 Heide Wegener

The left constituent may bear plural meaning and appear with one of the four plural suffixes of Modern Standard German: (2) Present-day German -er: der Kind-er Krankheit of the children-gen.pl illness ‘the illness of the children’ -e: der Hund-e Meute of the dogs-gen.pl pack ‘the pack of dogs’ -en/-n: der Frau-en Rechte of the women-gen.pl rights ‘the rights of women’ -s: der Leutnant-s Garde of the lieutenants-gen.pl guard ‘the guard of lieutenants’

> die Kinder-krankheit the children-illness ‘the children’s illness’ > die Hunde-meute the dogs-pack ‘the pack of dogs’ > die Frauen-rechte the women-rights ‘the women’s rights’ > die Leutnants-garde the lieutenants-guard ‘the lieutenants’ guard’

In (2), the left constituent may also be a relic of a genitive modifier phrase, but since German has lost its marker for the genitive plural, there is no linking element in these compounds. Thus, the suffix indicates plural meaning, belongs to the left constituent and is not an interfix at the juncture of the two constituents. Note also that, due to its generic interpretation, the left constituent may bear plural meaning without a plural suffix (Buchhändler ‘book seller’), but there also exist opposing pairs such as Arzthaus ‘house of a doctor’ vs. Ärztehaus ‘house of doctors.’ Formally identical structures may occur, however, in compounds whose left constituent does not bear plural meaning, such as those in (3). In these cases, the structure of left constituents is synchronically ambiguous. (3) Present-day German -er-: Kind-er-star child-le-star ‘child star’ -e-: Hund-e-hütte dog-le-house ‘dog-house, kennel’ These compounds are proper compounds, a juxtaposition of two nouns like those with bare nouns (Haustür ‘house door,’ Torwart ‘door man’), and their left constituent is not a reanalysed syntactic phrase with a genitive suffix. The interfix inside the compounds has no plural meaning and must, hence, be considered as a linking element. Because of the existence of this formal identity between the interfixes and the plural suffixes, it has been claimed that the linking elements occurring in these

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The regrammaticalization of linking elements in German 

compounds originate from plural suffixes or even that the linking elements are plural suffixes (cf. Clahsen et al. 1996: 116; Wiese 1996: 138). These claims will be questioned in Section 3 below. In the analysis which follows I will concentrate on -er-, which is a clear plural suffix, whereas -en- and -s- are ambiguous between a plural and a genitive suffix. The assumption that linking elements originate from plural suffixes meets with serious problems in the following ways: a. If the linking elements had evolved from plural suffixes, we would then expect the left constituents to bear plural meaning at least initially. However, there are cases, like those in (4), where the left constituent has no plural meaning, either synchronically or diachronically. (4) Present-day German -er-: Kindergesicht child-le-face ‘child’s face’ Likewise: Bilderrahmen ‘picture frame,’ Kleiderbügel ‘coat hanger,’ Hühnerei ‘hen’s egg,’ Ein-Kinder-Trend lit. ‘one-childrentrend,’ ‘trend to one child.’ -e-: Hundehütte ‘dog-house’ (cf. example (3) above), Tagelohn ‘day labour,’ Schweinebraten ‘roast pork,’ Gänsefeder ‘goose feather.’4 b. Similarly, the same linking elements occur in derivatives5 whose bases have no plural meaning either. Consider, for example, the adjectives in (5a) and the verbs in (5b) below. (5) Present-day German a. einräd-r-ig one.wheel-le-derivative suffix ‘one-wheeled’ Likewise: einblätt-r-ig ‘one-leaved’ (vs. einäug-ig ‘one-eyed’), bein-er-n ‘bony,’ gläs-er-n ‘glassy,’ hölz-er-n ‘wooden’ (vs. gold-en ‘golden’) b. blätt-er-n leaf-le-infinitive suffix ‘to leaf ’ Likewise: ei-er-n ‘to wobble (like an egg),’ wild-er-n ‘to poach’ (vs. heft-en ‘to pin’), bevölk-er-n ‘to populate,’ begeist-er-n ‘to inspire’ (vs. beäug-en ‘to inspect’) . Gänse is the old form of the genitive singular. . Linking elements occur in compounds and in derivatives; see Fleischer and Barz (1995: 32).

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c. These linking elements even occur in copulative compounds whose left constituent cannot be analysed as a modifying genitive phrase; compare Kindfrau (‘nymphet’) vs. Kinderfrau (‘nanny’). (6) Present-day German a. Geist-er-fahrer ghost-le-driver ‘wrong way driver’ Likewise: Kleid-er-schürze ‘coat apron,’ Kind-er-star ‘child star’ (quoted as example (3) above) b. Waise-n-kind ‘orphan child,’ Laie-n-prediger ‘lay preacher’ d. Linking elements date from Old High German, whereas the homophonous plural markers developed later, in the Early New High German period (cf. Wegera 1987). Examples of Old High German compounds with a “compositionsvocal” (Grimm 1878) are given in (7) below (for details, cf. Section 3.1). (7) Old High German -a-: tag-a-sterro day-le-star ‘day star, morning star’ -i-: naht-i-gal night-le-singer ‘nightingale’ -o-: spil-o-hûs game-le-house ‘game house, gambling house’ -ir-: lemb-ir-bah lamb-le-brook ‘lamb brook’ The composition vowels are the precursors of the present-day linking elements: lemb-ir-bah > Lämm-er-bach.6 As noted by Demske (1999: 150), compounding with one of the interfixes was already quite productive in Old High German, a period when plural suffixes were not yet available. Therefore, the linking elements -er-, -(e)n- and -e- cannot originate in plural suffixes. In view of this, it is necessary to look for another source.

. The full vowels of Old High German reduced to schwa vowels in Middle High German.

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The regrammaticalization of linking elements in German 

. The stem building suffixes of Indo-European It is known that the plural suffixes originate from stem suffixes (cf. Wurzel 1980; Greenberg 1991; Wegener 2005b). This source is also relevant for linking elements. The formal identity of linking elements and plural suffixes is explained by the fact that both have been grammaticalized from the old Indo-European stem-building suffixes of the ir- class, the n- class and the a-, o- or i-class (fused to -e). It is morphologically pure coincidence that the same suffixes have been grammaticalized in parallel pathways into two different new functions. Semantically, the conceptual closeness between genericity and plurality may have favoured this development. We might also recall here Bradley’s semantic definition of compounds: an AB is “a B which has some sort of relation to an A or to A’s in general” (1904: 113, cited by Becker 1992: 8). We should also take into account that the structure of Indo-European and Old High German nouns consisted of three parts, namely a root, a special stem suffix for each inflection class and an inflectional suffix indicating the grammatical categories of number and case. In Middle High German the stem suffixes were -ir, reduced to -er, -en and -a or -i (reduced to -e). In describing the grammaticalization process of linking elements from stem suffixes I will concentrate on the suffix -ir/-er. . Grammaticalization of linking elements from stem suffixes In Indo-European there existed an inflection class for neuters known as s-stems. In Old High German the members of this class had largely agricultural meanings, the so-called “Hühnerhofdeklination” (‘chicken yard declension’) which comprised less than a dozen nouns with primarily collective meaning (for example, lamb ‘lamb,’ kalb ‘calf,’ huhn ‘chicken,’ ei ‘egg,’ blat ‘leaf,’ hrind ‘cattle’). In IndoEuropean this class possessed the stem building suffix -*es, in Proto-Germanic -iz, which occurs in all forms of the paradigm, hence being an element of stem formation. (8) a. Proto-Germanic Sg. Nom. hrind-iz Pl. Nom. hrind-iz-o Gen. hrind-iz-aza Gen. hrind-iz-om Dat. hrind-iz-ai Dat. hrind-iz-omoz Acc. hrind-iz Acc. hrind-iz-o Through Verner’s law, the voiced spirant [z] becomes the sonorant [r]. The suffix -iz then changes to -ir in Old High German and, due to the phonological reduction of unstressed syllables, later becomes -er in Middle High German. Moreover, as early as in the Pre-Old High German period, the suffix -iz is deleted at the end

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of polysyllabic words (for details, see Wurzel 1980: 445). The consequence of this partial loss in the paradigm is that there are now forms with and without the suffix, whose presence or absence is phonologically conditioned. Thus, -ir cannot occur at the end of the word, as illustrated in (8b) below. (8) b. Pre-Old High German Sg. Nom. hrind Pl. Nom. hrind-ir-u Gen. hrind-ir-es Gen. hrind-ir-o Dat. hrind-ir-e Dat. hrind-ir-um Acc. hrind Acc. hrind-ir-u Since -ir is now absent in two forms of the paradigm, it can no longer be regarded as a stem suffix. At this stage, the suffix cannot be interpreted at all, either as a stem suffix or as a marker of a grammatical category. In other words, -ir becomes afunctional junk in the sense of Lass (1990); see Section 4 below. However, since the Old High German period, there existed compounds like lemb-ir-bah (cf. (7) above), containing the ancient stem suffix which linked the two constituents. These compounds preserved the stem suffix now forming an interfix, which, as already mentioned, Grimm (1878) called a “compositionsvocal,” that is, a linking element. The suffix, then, survived within compounds and was reanalysed here as a linking element. This also explains the co-occurrence of synonym compounds with and without the linking element: since the Old High German period, speakers can take as left constituent (apart from the genitive marked root) either the pure root or the stem with the stem suffix, as shown in (9). (9) Present-day German a. Rind-er-braten vs. Rind-fleisch cow-le-roast cow-meat ‘roast beef ‘beef ’ The compounds could thus preserve the stem suffix between the two constituents. In this function, its semantics (if there was a semantic feature at all, see below) has been completely lost, bleached out. One of the variants could become the dominant compositional stem (Fuhrhop 1998), so that even recent formations could show up with the linking element (cf. (10) below). Since analogy is pervasive in the formation of compounds (cf. Becker (1992) for German and Krott (2001) for Dutch), left constituents with linking elements can now even occur in copulative compounds. (10) Geist-er-fahrer (‘ghost driver’), Kind-er-star (‘child star’)

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The regrammaticalization of linking elements in German 

. Grammaticalization of a stem suffix into a plural marker In a second and partially parallel grammaticalization process, the same stem suffix develops into a plural marker, as shown in Wurzel (1980) and Wegener (2005b). Recall that in Pre-Old High German (cf. (8b) above) the suffix occurs only in some forms of the singular, but in the entire plural. This is the moment where morphology is called into action: in systematizing the paradigm – and by analogy to other classes – the semantically empty suffix is given up entirely in the singular. (8) c. Old High German Sg. Nom. hrind Pl. Nom. hrind-ir Gen. hrind-es Gen. hrind-ir-o Dat. hrind-e Dat. hrind-ir-um Acc. hrind Acc. hrind-ir The new distribution leads to a new interpretation of the suffix: since -ir is present only in the plural forms, it is reanalysed as a plural marker. Thus lembir, ‘lamb’ in Old High German, comes to mean ‘lambs’ in New High German. The result is a morphological reanalysis, the stem building suffix turning into a plural suffix. (9) b. New High German Sg. Dat. Rind-e Pl. Dat. Rind-er-n cow-Ø-dat cow-pl-dat Therefore, we have a double grammaticalization process for -er (and likewise for -e and -en/-n), which is summarized in Table 1 below. Table 1. Double grammaticalization of the -er suffix a. Grammaticalization of the stem suffix into the linking element Indo-European Old High German Early New High German New High German Stem suffix Linking element Linking element Linking element ir > er –––––––––––––––––––→ lemb-ir-bah –––––––––––→ kind-er-bett ––––––––––––––––––––→ Kind-er-star b. Grammaticalization of the stem suffix into the plural suffix Indo-European Old High German Early New High German New High German Stem suffix Plural suffix Plural suffix Plural suffix ir > er –––––––––––––––––––→ lemb-ir-um ––––––––––––→ lemb-er-n –––––––––––––––––––––––→ Lämm-er-n

Since Old High German times, speakers have been able to choose for compounding not only between left constituents in their nominative or genitive forms (proper and improper compounds), but also between forms with and without the (stem) suffix. The only restriction is that the suffix must be part of the paradigm, a restriction which is retained from the former status of the interfix as a stem building suffix of a certain inflection class. Therefore, we find varying forms like those

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in (11a), (11b) and (11d), but never forms like those in (11c). Neither -e- nor -erwere extended to other inflection classes,7 the relevant factor being the syllabicity of the linking element, the schwa (for the functional motivation of the syllabic linking elements, see Section 5.1). (11) a. b. c. d.

Rind-fleisch ‘beef,’ Rind-s-braten, Rind-er-braten ‘roast beef ’ Schwein-s-braten, Schwein-e-braten ‘roast pork’ *Rindebraten, *Schweinerbraten kind-gerecht, kind-gemäß, kind-er-freundlich (all ‘suitable for children’)

The choice between the different possibilities is determined by dialectal preferences (for example, in apocopating dialects of Southern Germany -s- is preferred) and by phonotactic and prosodic functions which the linking elements fulfil (see Section 5.1 for an explanation of the forms in (11d) above). Only in rare cases is there a semantic differentiation. Consider in this connection the following pairs of words: Herz-ens-kummer (‘problem of the heart,’ metaphorical sense) vs. Herz-kammer (‘ventricle,’ medical sense), Kind-bett (‘childbed’) vs. Kind-er-bett (‘cot’) or the previously mentioned pair Kind-frau (‘nymphet’) vs. Kind-er-frau (‘nanny’). The double grammaticalization of the stem suffix results in two formally identical but nevertheless distinguishable morphs: linking elements, on the one hand, and plural suffixes, on the other. This double grammaticalization process explains why the structure of left constituents can be synchronically ambiguous: they may consist of (a) stem + plural suffix or (b) stem + linking element: (12) Present-day German -er: a. Kind-er-chor b. Kind-er-star child-pl-choir child-le-star ‘children’s choir’ ‘child star’ -en: Frau-en-rechte Frau-en-stimme woman-pl-rights woman-le-voice ‘women’s rights’ ‘woman’s voice’ -e: Hund-e-meute Hund-e-hütte dog-pl-pack dog-le-house ‘pack of dogs’ ‘dog-house’

. Since final schwa is at risk of being deleted, the linking element -en- substitutes -e: Zitatenschatz ‘collection of quotations,’ but plural Zitate. In many other cases, -en- has been part of the paradigm when the nouns in question belonged to the weak inflection class but changed to the strong one: Hahnenkamm (‘cockscomb’), but genitive singular des Hahns, plural Hähne in New High German.

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The regrammaticalization of linking elements in German 

Left constituents ending in -s are likewise synchronically ambiguous: they may consist of (c) stem + genitive suffix or (d) stem + plural suffix: (12) Present-day German c. Kuckuck-s-ei d. Kuckuck-s-paar cuckoo-gen.sg-egg cuckoo-pl-pair ‘cuckoo’s egg’ ‘pair of cuckoos’ The preceding discussion allows us to conclude that the linking elements of New High German evolved from the following sources: a. The genitive singular suffix -(e)s, origin of the linking element -s-. b. The stem suffixes -e, -er, -(e)n, source of the linking elements -e-, -er-, -(e)n-.

. The problem of unidirectionality in grammaticalization processes Let us now discuss whether the developments described so far represent genuine instances of grammaticalization, an issue of some interest if we consider that the origins of the linking elements have always posed problems for grammaticalization theory. In the current discussion of the unidirectionality and irreversibility of grammaticalization processes (see Fischer and Rosenbach 2000; Traugott 2001), the development of the German linking elements (and that of the plural markers; cf. Wegener 2005b) raise the question of whether we are in fact looking at grammaticalization or rather regrammaticalization (or degrammaticalization). The data in Section 3 show that none of the linking elements of German originate in a lexical element or in a less grammatical element, as claimed by the standard definition of grammaticalization: “a lexical unit or structure assumes a grammatical function, or [...] a grammatical unit assumes a more grammatical function” (Heine et al. 1991: 2). In an earlier but similar definition of the process, Kuryłowicz (1965: 52) cites an example which is relevant to the present analysis: “[g]rammaticalization consists in the increase of the range of a morpheme advancing from a lexical to a grammatical or from a less grammatical to a more grammatical status, e.g. from a derivational formant to an inflectional one.” In the analysis which follows, it seems necessary to distinguish between linking elements originating in a case suffix and those originating in a stem suffix. In the case of -s-, the suffix, as a genitive marker, already had a grammatical function. This, then, conforms to the standard definition of grammaticalization, which states that a morph advances from lexical to grammatical status or from a less grammatical to a more grammatical status, thereby losing substance both on the phonological and on the semantic sides. With respect to phonological reduction,

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the criterion is fulfilled: whereas the genitive case marker appears in a syllabic and a non-syllabic variant, the linking element is always non-syllabic, consisting of only one segment. With respect to semantic reduction, we can maintain that -(e)s had less grammatical meaning and more semantic weight as a genitive case marker than as a linking element.8 In this function it even fulfils a third criterion: in certain compounds it is obligatory (cf. Section 5.2 below). Consequently, the transformation of the case marker -(e)s into the linking element -s- can be considered a case of semantic bleaching and of grammaticalization. This process can be modelled as shown in Figure 1. higher semantic value

lower or no semantic value -s as case affix

-s- as linking element

Figure 1. Grammaticalization of the linking element -s

By contrast, the linking elements -e-, -(e)n-, -er- already had highly grammatical functions as stem suffixes or theme vowels without any semantic content, indicating only the declension class of the noun. In fact, they had less semantic weight than inflectional markers. As a consequence, it seems questionable to consider the change of a stem suffix into a linking element as an example of grammaticalization in the sense of the standard definition given above. From the preceding evidence, therefore, the only valid conclusion is that the development of word internal suffixes to linking elements cannot be described in terms of the general definition of grammaticalization. With respect to phonological reduction, the grammaticalization criterion is fulfilled: the full vowels of the Old High German stem suffixes have reduced to schwa, -a, -i and -o turn into /-6/, -on becomes /-6n/ and -ir reduces to /-!/ (vocalized -r). The linking elements of Present-day German are all reduced syllables. Nevertheless, it must be borne in mind that phonological reduction is not specific to linking elements, but affects all inflectional suffixes. With respect to semantic reduction, however, the answer seems to be negative: the three syllabic linking elements -e-, -en-, -er-, being stem building suffixes already, have “no particular meaning, they are only there for the sake of proper morphological form” . The genitive indicates a vague relation of attribution, whereas compounds indicate any relation between the two nouns, so Kopf eines Kindes (‘head of a child’) is only one of the meanings of Kindskopf (rather metaphorically ‘to be like a little boy’).

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(Booij 1997: 35); in other words, they are empty morphs (Booij 1997: 35, following Matthews 1972). The change of these suffixes into linking elements, then, does not represent at first sight an increase of grammaticality since the latter do not assume a more grammatical function than the former. The sources of these linking elements, the Indo-European and Old High German stem suffixes, are thematic vowels or consonants without any apparent content. However, this is not the whole story. If we go further back in the history of the language, we find that the original stem suffixes had been word formation affixes. Therefore, the development constitutes a change from a derivational formative to a more grammatical affix, in keeping with the expectations of grammaticalization theory. Consider, in this respect, Kuryłowicz’s (1965) example for the development of a less grammatical into a more grammatical element: “e.g. from a derivational formant to an inflectional one.” Let us take as an example the suffix -ir, which, as seen in Section 3.1 above, contributed collective meaning to a small class of Indo-European neuter nouns. (13) Indo-European sg. Nom. hrind-izcow-coll (‘cattle’) In turn, affixes forming feminines had mostly abstract meaning, while those forming masculines had individualizing meaning.9 In the course of time, the originally meaningful derivational affixes lost semantic value and became purely morphological stem suffixes indicating only the inflectional class of the noun. Through this development they lost their original semantic value of ‘collective’ or ‘abstract.’ Therefore, the first step in the development of the stem suffixes exhibits a decrease in semantic content, known as semantic bleaching, and, thus, represents a clear case of grammaticalization conforming to the standard definition. The development can be modelled as in Figure 2. high semantic value

no semantic value -ir, -a, -i, -o, -on as derivational affixes

-er, -e, -en as stem suffixes

Figure 2. Grammaticalization of the stem suffixes . See Weber (2001), who shows that gender is a +/– particularizing perspectivization of the entity referred to by the noun.

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 Heide Wegener

The entire evolution of the German linking elements consists of two stages: (i) the originally functional derivational affixes become purely morphological stem suffixes in moribund inflectional classes; (ii) with the phonological reduction of all unaccented full vowels to schwa and the simultaneous decline of inflection classes in Old High German, the class markers become junk (Lass 1990: 82), which “can be dumped entirely; [. . .] can be kept as marginal garbage or nonfunctional/nonexpressive residue (suppletion, ‘irregularity’); [. . .] can be kept [. . .] and be used for something else, perhaps just as systematic.” The latter phenomenon is known as morphological exaptation. This continued development of grammatical functions can best be qualified as an instantiation of secondary grammaticalization (cf. Traugott 2001: 3) or regrammaticalization (cf. Greenberg 1991: 303 with reference to the German -er plural). At the time of reanalysis the stem suffixes are semantically empty and have lost their function as class markers. The secondary development involves semantic strengthening for the plural suffixes, which increased in semantic value,10 but not for the linking elements. Therefore, the reanalysis of stem suffixes as linking elements continues the grammaticalization process (cf. Figure 3), providing the items with only phonotactic and prosodic functions (explained in Section 5.1 below). In other words, by the second step the non-functional suffixes develop other functions and are now leading a second life in these new functions. high semantic value

-ir, -a, -i, -o, -on as derivational affixes

no semantic value

no semantic value

-er, -e, -en

-er-, -e-, -en-

as stem suffixes

as linking elements

Figure 3. Regrammaticalization

The development of the German linking elements can be subsumed without difficulty into the concept of grammaticalization if we apply the wider definition of grammaticalization given by Traugott (2001: 1): “Grammaticalization is the change whereby lexical items and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions or grammatical items develop new grammatical functions.” As can be seen, the relevant difference from the standard definition given above is the word new instead of more. . Therefore, the development of the stem suffixes into plural markers can even be considered as a case of degrammaticalization. In this connection, see the description and discussion in Wegener (2005b).

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The regrammaticalization of linking elements in German 

Also, the grammaticalization of the linking elements out of stem suffixes appears to be a typical development if one takes into account that it is easier and less costly to recruit given material than to create new morphs out of lexemes over the course of the processes of semantic bleaching and phonological attrition. Reanalysis of existing morphs, indeed, is not at all exceptional (for other possibilities of reanalysis, see Haspelmath 1995). The non-functional units were not only available, but also in the right place, occupying the slot between the two constituents.11 Thus, the stem suffixes occupying the juncture, i.e. the position between the two constituents of a noun + noun compound,12 were the ideal morphs to be transformed into linking elements.

. The function of the linking elements Linking elements do not meet grammatical functions, their only function being that of improving the production and/or the processing of compounds. Given that syllabic and non-syllabic linking elements have different and complementary functions, they are described separately in what follows. . The syllabic linking elements The syllabic linking elements have both prosodic and phonotactic functions. With respect to prosody, their main function is to create a trochaic word form in the left constituent and to prevent a stress clash of two adjacent syllables with main stress, as illustrated in (14). (14) Present-day German Frau + Stimme: *’Frau’stimme vs. ’Frau-en-’stimme (‘woman’s voice’) Kind + Geld: *’Kind’geld vs. ’Kind-er-’geld (‘child benefit’) With respect to phonotactics, they improve the articulation of compounds by breaking up consonant clusters in the coda of the left constituent, as shown in (15). (15) Present-day German Geist + Fahrer: *Geistfahrer vs. Geis.ter.fah.rer (lit. ‘ghost driver’) Kind + Star: *Kind.star vs. Kin.der.star (‘child star’) Ein-Kind + Trend: *Ein-Kind-Trend vs. Ein.Kin.der.Trend (‘trend to one child’) . In the case of the plural markers, the stem suffixes occupied the slot directly following the stem. This is the preferred position for the number marker, which “almost always comes between the noun base and the expression of case” (Greenberg’s universal 39; cf. also Bybee 1985: 34). . In the case of derivatives, the position occupied by the stem suffixes was that between the stem and the derivational suffix.

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The main function of the syllabic linking elements is, hence, to provide the left constituent with a better, usually trochaic form, one which is easier to articulate (Fuhrhop 1998: 194; cf. also Krott et al. 2002 for Dutch). The general preference in German for trochaic forms explains the variation between the items in (11d) above, ’kind-ge’mäß, ’kind-ge’recht, but ’kind-er-’freundlich. As can be seen, only the latter compound needs a schwa syllable after the left constituent in order to form a trochee, while in the former two compounds the prefix ge- of the right constituent already provides the necessary schwa. In such cases, a linking element contributing a second schwa syllable would be prosodically inadequate (*kindergemäß). Prosodic requirements can also explain seemingly illogical formations such as Ein-Kinder-Trend (lit. ‘one-children-trend’), on the one hand, and Dreikönigstag (‘Epiphany,’ lit. ‘three-king-day’), on the other. The monosyllabic singular Kind needs a schwa syllable as left constituent in order to form a trochee. By contrast, the bisyllabic trochaic ’König excludes a schwa syllable for the same reasons, though semantically the plural Könige is required. However, at the same time -s- is necessary to guarantee the processing of the compound as [[Dreikönigs]tag] instead of *[Drei[Königtag]] (‘three kings’ day,’ not ‘three days of king’). It is clear, however, that only vowel initial syllabic linking elements can break up consonant clusters, prevent stress clashes and improve the prosodic structure of the left constituent by making it trochaic. The stem suffixes, which were all vowel initial syllables, fulfilled these requirements. . The function of the non-syllabic linking element -sBy contrast, the non-syllabic linking element -s- does not improve the word structure of compounds, but actually worsens it, since it makes the syllable heavier. Therefore, the question arises as to why German uses a linking element which leads to a worsening of the word structure. In fact, the functions of -s- are completely different from those of the syllabic linking elements discussed above. Its presence is not motivated by prosody or improvement of articulation. Rather, it contributes to an improvement in the processing of complex compounds, and as such, its distribution differs from that of the syllabic linking elements: -s- generally occurs in compounds whose left constituent is already a complex noun, either a derivative (cf. Section 5.2.1) or a compound itself (cf. Section 5.2.2), but is not excluded from simplex compounds (cf. Section 5.2.3), where it retains another function, that of separating the two constituents.

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.. Derivatives as left constituents: The opening function The linking element -s- occurs obligatorily on left constituents which are derivatives ending in the suffixes -ling, -heit/-keit, -ung, -schaft or -tum, such as those in (16) below. (16) Present-day German *Lehrlingheim vs. Lehrlingsheim ‘apprentices’ home’ *Zeitungleser vs. Zeitungsleser ‘newspaper reader’ *Freiheitkämpfer vs. Freiheitskämpfer ‘freedom fighter’ *Gerechtigkeitsinn vs. Gerechtigkeitssinn ‘sense of justice’ *Mannschaftgeist vs. Mannschaftsgeist ‘team spirit’ *Altertumforscher vs. Altertumsforscher lit. ‘antiquity researcher,’ ‘archaeologist’ As these examples show, the addition of the linking element -s- to suffixes ending in one or even two consonants has the opposite effect to that of syllabic linking elements: it makes the coda of the left constituent harder to articulate. So, why does German use this interfix? Aronoff and Fuhrhop (2002) point out that these left constituents end in closing suffixes which “prevent further suffixation by word-forming suffixes” (2002: 455) and further word formation processes, and that it is the function of the linking element “to reopen closed stems again for further morphological processes” (2002: 464). At the same time, -s- indicates to the reader/hearer that he has not yet reached the end of the word, but, rather, is processing another constituent of a compound. .. Compounds as left constituents: The structuring function The linking element -s- is much more likely to appear in complex compounds whose left constituent is already a compound, consisting of two or even three nouns. Compare the well-known examples in (17) below. (17) Present-day German Werkzeug ‘tool’ – Handwerk-s-zeug ‘work tool’ vs. *Hand-Werkzeug ‘hand tool’ Nachtzeit ‘night time’ – Weihnacht-s-zeit ‘Christmas time’ (lit. ‘holy night time’) Hofmauer ‘yard wall’ – Friedhof -s-mauer ‘graveyard wall’ vs. *FriedHofmauer Zeitreise ‘time trip’ – Hochzeit-s-reise ‘wedding trip’ vs. *Hoch-Zeitreise Whereas the simple compounds in the left have no linking element, the complex compounds in the right all contain -s-. Its presence is motivated here by the need to structure the complex compound (Fuhrhop 1998: 191), that is, to indicate whether

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it has the reading [[AB]+C] or [A+[BC]]. In complex compounds, even vowel final nouns which normally exclude a linking -s- allow it to appear: (18) Present-day German Autoverkäufer ‘car seller’ – Plastikauto-s-verkäufer ‘plastic cars’ seller’ A [[Plastikautos]verkäufer] is somebody who sells plastic cars, while a [Plastik[autoverkäufer]] would be a car seller made of plastic; similarly, a [[Spielzeugautos]vertreter] represents toy cars, whereas a [Spielzeug[autovertreter]] would be a car representative which is a toy. In preceding the rightmost constituent, the -sidentifies the head of the compound. We can conclude, then, that -s- marks the morphological structure in complex compounds. .. Simplex nouns as left constituents: The separating function As mentioned above, the non-syllabic -s- does not improve the syllable structure of the left constituent, but actually worsens it, presenting a burden on its coda. If -s- appears in simplex compounds, it can neither meet a structuring function nor open a closed stem, since there is no closing suffix. The question arises why German uses a linking element which makes the coda harder to articulate even in simplex compounds. Given that all simplex left constituents with the linking -s- are strong nouns, the presence of -s- could be taken as an idiosyncratic relic of the genitive case suffix from which it originates (see Section 2.1 above). Furthermore, it could depend completely on the frequency of the compound, on its lexicalization or on dialectal and stylistic factors. Its distribution should, then, be arbitrary. However, it can be shown that the distribution of the linking -s- is not fully arbitrary even in simplex compounds. As Wegener (2006: 201) notes, its presence seems to be phonologically conditioned: “[t]he greater the consonantal strength of the left constituent’s final segment, the higher the likeliness of a linking -s-”. In order to confirm this hypothesis, all the strong masculines and neuters found in a reverse dictionary were investigated and classified according to their final segment. Findings for nouns ending in plosives, sonorants and full vowels are given in Table 2. These data show that the presence of linking -s- really depends on the consonantal strength of the coda of the left constituent: cf. Bootsfahrt ‘boat trip’ vs. *Autosfahrt ‘car trip,’ Ortstemperatur ‘local temperature’ vs. *Raumstemperatur ‘room temperature.’ This distribution suggests a functional motivation for the linking -s- even on simplex nouns: compounds may become opaque by phonological instead of morphological syllabication and are then no longer perceived as compounds (junc-herr > Jun.ker ‘young nobleman,’ arm-uoti > Ar.mut ‘poverty,’ Heb-amme > He.bamme ‘midwife’). This process can be explained by the Contact Law (Vennemann 1988), whereby the greater the consonantal strength of the

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Table 2. Occurrence of -s- in relation to the final segment of the left constituent Final segment

Proportion of -s-

Examples

-p/-b -t/-d -k/-g -n -m -l -V

20 % 17.6 % 15.1 % 4.7 % 2.4 % 1.8 % 0%

Kalbsbraten ‘roast veal,’ Stabschef ‘chief of staff ’ Ortstarif ‘local rates,’ Hemdsärmel ‘shirtsleeve’ Glückskind ‘lucky person,’ Kriegsende ‘end of war’ Schweinsbraten ‘roast pork’ Lammsgeduld ‘patience of a lamb’ Heilslehre ‘doctrine of salvation’ Kniegelenk ‘knee joint,’ Taxistand ‘taxi rank’

coda segment of the left constituent, the higher the risk of onset maximization in the right constituent and, as a consequence, of the false syllabication of the compound. Clearly, the function of the linking -s- is to separate the two constituents by preventing (i) the fusion of the left constituent’s final consonant with the onset of the right one in those cases in which both are equal in consonantal strength (cf. (19) below) and (ii) the shift of the left constituent’s coda consonant to the onset of the right one (onset maximization) in those cases where the former has greater consonantal strength than the latter, as in (20). (19) Present-day German *Kalbbraten vs. Kalb-s-braten (‘roast veal’) *Orttarif vs. Ort-s-tarif (‘local rates’) (20) Present-day German *Amtarzt vs. Amt-s-arzt (‘public health officer’) *Ortangabe vs. Ort-s-angabe (‘name of place’) *Kalbleber vs. Kalb-s-leber (‘calf ’s liver’) Therefore, the linking -s- appears to be a means against loss of transparency by phonological instead of morphological syllabication; it is a separating element, a sort of acoustic hyphen, which protects the compound against opacification. This separating function is relevant only under certain phonological conditions, as predicted by the Contact Law. Thus, for example, there is no risk of resyllabication and opacification for left constituents ending in a full vowel, since a vowel cannot be shifted to the right constituent and, therefore, there is no need for a separating element. This explains the lack of the linking element -s- in vowelfinal nouns (see Table 2 above) even when bearing plural meaning, as in (21) below, so that we have Kuckuckspaar ‘pair of cuckoos’ (cf. (12d) above), but not *Uhuspaar ‘pair of eagle owls.’ (21) Present-day German *Uh.upaar/*Uhu-s-paar/Uhu.paar *Aut.obahn/*Auto-s-bahn/Auto.bahn (lit. ‘cars’ way,’ ‘high way’)



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 Heide Wegener

The foregoing discussion has shown that, formally, the syllabic and the nonsyllabic linking elements have opposing effects. Functionally, however, they complement each other. The syllabic linking elements improve the form of left constituents by making them trochaic and easier to articulate. The non-syllabic -s-, in turn, improves the form of the whole compound by separating its constituents. Therefore, whereas the syllabic linking elements are useful from the point of view of production, the non-syllabic -s- is useful from the point of view of perception.

. Results and discussion: Implications for linguistic theory and for acquisition theory The analysis here has shown that linking elements in German are independent of the homophonous plural suffixes, since they have been grammaticalized in a separate pathway from stem suffixes. Their homophony with plural suffixes is explained by the fact that the latter evolved from the same source, though this happened even later in the history of German. The double grammaticalization of stem suffixes into linking elements, on the one hand, and plural suffixes, on the other, can be considered a case of exaptation or regrammaticalization, i.e. reanalysis of material which had become non-functional. These findings solve the problem of the contradictory examples containing a formally plural noun without plural meaning as left constituent. In addition, it has been shown that a diachronic analysis in terms of grammaticalization can shed new light on current debates in linguistic theory and acquisition theory. The grammaticalization pathway from stem suffixes to linking elements contradicts the assumption of generative morphology, which confuses plural suffixes with linking elements. Wiese (1996: 138) claims, citing examples like Hühn-er-ei (‘hen’s egg’) and *Auto-s-bahn (cf. (21) above), that in German, as in English, the s-plural was generally excluded from lexical compounds, “though plurals with the other forms can appear inside them.” The reason for this distribution is assumed to lie in the Level Ordering of the lexicon. As shown in Section 3.1 above, the “plurals with the other forms,” the linking elements, are not plurals but stem suffixes. Further assumptions about language acquisition are also called into question. Starting from a “continuity hypothesis,” Clahsen et al. (1996) claim that syntactic and morphological principles, such as the Level Ordering, are innately given. The fact that the children of their experiments used only the syllabic linking elements inside compounds but did not respond (in an elicitation test) with forms such as *Babysfresser was taken as evidence for the conjecture “that the ordering constraint on compounding and inflection is innate” (1996: 137). Yet, since these linking elements are basically stem suffixes, not plurals, they cannot be explained by the

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The regrammaticalization of linking elements in German 

assumed Level Ordering of the lexicon, and neither can the innateness of this principle be thus proven. The evolution of linking elements from stem suffixes and the functional explanation of their distribution put forth in the present paper question the existence of a feeding relationship between inflection and compounding as well as the innateness of morphological knowledge. A further result of the current paper is that linking elements are functionally motivated even in simplex compounds. Not only do the syllabic linking elements increase the prosodic well-formedness of the left constituents and the non-syllabic -s- improve the processing of complex compounds, but, in acting as an acoustic hyphen, the latter also protects the structure of simplex compounds against false syllabication and opacification. This structure-preserving function explains the asymmetric distribution found during an analysis of the totality of strong masculine and neuter nouns, possible left constituents of present-day compounds. The likeliness of a linking -s- was shown to depend on the consonantal strength of the noun’s final segment, so that the linking element is excluded from vowel final nouns. All in all, the grammaticalization of linking elements out of stem suffixes and their functionally motivated distribution offer a more natural explanation for the problematic examples without resorting to more speculative assumptions.

Abbreviations coll collective dat dative gen genitive

le linking element pl plural sg singular

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Wegener, Heide. 2005b. De-/Regrammatikalisierung der deutschen Pluralmarker. In Torsten Leuschner & Tanja Mortelmans (eds.), Grammatikalisierung im Deutschen, 85–103. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Wegener, Heide. 2006. Statistical evidence for the role of phonology in the distribution and motivation of the linking element -s- in German. In Pre-proceedings of the International Conference on Linguistic Evidence, Empirical, Theoretical and Computational Perspectives, 201–203. Tübingen. Wegera, Klaus-Peter. 1987. Flexion der Substantive. Heidelberg: Winter. Wiese, Richard. 1996. The phonology of German. Oxford: Clarendon. Wurzel, Wolfgang U. 1980. Ways of morphologizing phonological rules. In Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Historical morphology, 443–462. The Hague: Mouton.

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Author index

A Abraham, Werner , ,  Akimoto, Minoji , , , –, –, ,  Algeo, John , , ,  Allerton, David J. –, , ,  Andersen, Henning –,  Andersson, Peter ,  Apresjan, Jurij D.  Aronoff, Mark  Arzápalo Marín, Ramón  Autenrieth, Tanja , –,  B Baker, Carl Leroy  Banti, Giorgio  Baron, Irène  Barrenechea, Ana María  Barz, Irmhild ,  Bauer, Brigitte  Beal, Joan , , –, , ,  Bearth, Thomas – Becerra Bascuñán, Silvia , ,  Becker, Thomas – Benincà, Paola ,  Bergs, Alexander –, –,  Berretta, Monica  Beths, Frank  Bhat, D. N. Shankara  Biber, Douglas  Bierwisch, Manfred – Birkmann, Thomas ,  Boas, Franz ,  Bolinger, Dwight – Booij, Geert  Börjars, Kersti –, ,  Borst, Eugen  Bradley, Henry  Brinton, Laurel J. –, , , –, , –, , – Brown, Penelope , , ,  Brugman, Claudia  Bublitz, Wolfram 

Buechel, Eugene ,  Burkhardt, Armin – Burnley, David  Burzio, Luigi  Buscha, Joachim  Butt, Miriam ,  Bybee, Joan L. –, –, , , ,  C Campbell, Alistair  Campbell, Lyle , , , , , ,  Cantrall, William R.  Cattell, Ray ,  Chaburgaev, Georgij A. –, –, – Chomsky, Noam –,  Clahsen, Harald ,  Claridge, Claudia , –, –, , – Coates, Jennifer  Company Company, Concepción , , – Corbett, Greville G.  Cornillie, Bert –,  Corominas, Joan , , ,  Coronel, Juan – Cortelazzo, Manlio , , – Cresti, Emanuela  D Dasher, Richard B. –, , –,  Davies, Mark  Deloria, Ella , , –, –, , –, – Demske, Ulrike –,  Denison, David  Detges, Ulrich ,  Diewald, Gabriele –, –, –, , , , ,  Dixon, Robert M. W.  Dowty, David R.  Dressler, Wolfgang U.  Du Bois, John W.  Dufter, Andreas , 

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 Theoretical and Empirical Issues in Grammaticalization

E Eckardt, Regine  Edmondson, Jerold A.  Enrique-Arias, Andrés  Everaert, Martin  F Fabre, Antoine  Farr, James M.  Fernández Soriano, Olga ,  Fernández-Ordóñez, Inés  Ferraresi, Gisella –, –, ,  Fiengo, Robert  Fillmore, Charles  Fischer, Kerstin  Fischer, Olga , , ,  Fleischer, Wolfgang ,  Foolen, Ad  Franck, Dorothea  Franco, Jon  Franz, Wilhelm  Fraser, Bruce ,  Fruyt, Michèle  Fuhrhop, Nanna , , – Fuss, Eric  G García-Miguel, José María  Gast, Volker , ,  Geuder, Wilhelm ,  Giacalone Ramat, Anna – Giannakidou, Anastasia  Givón, Talmy ,  Gómez Torrego, Leonardo , ,  Gorškova, Klavdija V. ,  Greenberg, Joseph H. , , – Gregory, Michelle , ,  Grimm, Jacob ,  Grimshaw, Jane  Güldemann, Tom ,  Gutiérrez-Rexach, Javier  H Hackstein, Olav ,  Hagège, Claude ,  Haiman, John ,  Hall, Christopher  Harris, Alice C.  Haspelmath, Martin –, , –, –, , , –, , ,  Hawkins, John  Heger, Klaus 

Heine, Bernd , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  Helbig, Gerhard –,  Hellan, Lars  Hengeveld, Kees  Hentschel, Elke , – Hernanz, María Luisa , , – Herring, Susan C.  Herslund, Michael  Higginbotham, James  Hiltunen, Risto , ,  Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. , ,  Hoeksema, Jack –, , –,  Hofmann, Johan B. , , ,  Hole, Daniel ,  Hollebrandse, Bart  Hopper, Paul J. , –, , , , , , , , , ,  Huddleston, Rodney ,  Hyman, Larry M.  I Ickler, Theodor  Idiatov, Dmitry , –, ,  Ifantidou, Elly  Iglesias-Rábade, Luis , –,  Ingersoll, Sheila Most  J Jakobson, Roman  Janda, Richard D. , ,  Jayez, Jacques  Jespersen, Otto ,  Joseph, Brian D. , , , , ,  Jurafsky, Daniel , ,  K Keller, Rudi , , – Kennedy, Christopher  Klausenburger, Jurgen –, –, ,  Klein, Henny  Kliffer, Michael D.  Koch, Peter , – König, Ekkehard –, –, –, , , –, ,  Koontz-Garboden, Andrew  Kortmann, Bernd ,  Krivonosov, Aleksej  Krott, Andrea ,  Kubrjakova, Elena S.  Kuryłowicz, Jerzy ,  Kytö, Merja , –, , 

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Author index 

L Lambrecht, Knud –, –, ,  LaPolla, Randy  Lass, Roger , , , , ,  Lehmann, Christian , , , , , , , , –, , –, –, , , –,  Leiss, Elisabeth  Leuschner, Torsten , ,  Levinson, Stephen C.  Libben, Gary  Live, Anna H.  Llorente Maldonado de Guevara, Antonio  Löbner, Sebastian – Löfstedt, Einar  López Meirama, Belén – López-Couso, María José  Lorenz, Gunter  Lyons, John , , 

M Malkiel, Yakob  Marchello-Nizia, Christiane  Marcos Marín, Francisco  Matsumoto, Meiko , –,  Matthews, Peter  McNally, Louise  Meibauer, Jörg  Meillet, Antoine –, – Mel’ˇcuk, Igor A.  Melis, Chantal  Mester, Armin  Miltschinsky, Margarete  Mitchell, Bruce  Molnár, Anna  Mondéjar, José  Moneglia, Massimo  Montrul, Silvina A.  Moralejo-Gárate, Teresa , –, – Mossé, Ferdinand  Moyne, John A.  Müller-Bardey, Thomas  Mustanoja, Tauno F.  Myhill, John 

N Newmeyer, Frederick J. , , ,  Nickel, Gerhard  Norde, Muriel  Nørgård-Sørensen, Jens , ,  Nuyts, Jan , , , –, –

O Oesterreicher, Wulf ,  Olbertz, Hella , –,  Olsson, Yngve  Orecchia, Teresa  P Palmer, Frank  Pascual, José Antonio , , ,  Paul, Hermann , –, ,  Peters, Hans – Plank, Frans  Plungian, Vladimir A. , –, , –, , – Popovici, Vasile  Porroche Ballesteros, Margarita  Prince, Ellen ,  Prokopova, T. I. ,  Pullum, Geoffrey K. ,  Pustet, Regina , –, ,  Q Quirk, Randolph , , , , , ,  R Radtke, Edgar  Ramat, Paolo ,  Reichmann, Oskar  Renský, Miroslav ,  Ricca, Davide  Riiho, Timo  Rini, Joel  Rissanen, Matti , ,  Roberts, Ian , –, , – Rodríguez Espiñeira, María José – Rohdenburg, Günter –, , – Rosén, Hannah –,  Rosenbach, Anette ,  Rouquier, Magali – Roussou, Anna , –, , – S Safir, Ken  Salkoff, Maurice  Sankoff, Gillian ,  Sapir, Edward  Saxon, Leslie  Schaffner, Emil , , –,  Schendel, Herbert  Schiffrin, Deborah  Schildt, Joachim 

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 Theoretical and Empirical Issues in Grammaticalization Schlüter, Julia  Schourup, Laurence C.  Schwegler, Armin –,  Schwenter, Scott ,  Seiler, Hansjakob ,  Seoane, Elena  Seppänen, Aimo –,  Shibatani, Masayoshi  Siemund, Peter  Silva-Corvalán, Carmen , ,  Simon, Horst J.  Smith, Carlota S. ,  Spevak, Olga  Stark, Elisabeth ,  Stein, Gabriele –, , –,  Stempel, Wolf-Dieter  Stier, Rudolph  Stoffel, Cornelis  Strang, Barbara M. H.  Suñer, Margarita  Swan, Toril  Szantyr, Anton –, ,  T Tabor, Whitney , , , ,  Taeymans, Martine  Tanabe, Harumi , , – Ten Cate, Abraham P.  Thiele, C. G. G.  Thurmair, Maria  Torrego, Esther , , ,  Torrens, Vincenç  Tottie, Gunnel  Touranier, Christian , ,  Tovena, Lucia M.  Traugott, Elizabeth Closs –, , , , , , –, –, , , , –, , , , –,

–, , –, , , –, , , , , , , ,  Trudgill, Peter  V Van den Nest, Daan  Van der Auwera, Johan –,  Van der Wouden, Ton – Van Gelderen, Elly ,  Van Marle, Jaap ,  Van Os, Charles  Vandeweghe, Willy  Vennemann, Theo  Verhagen, Arie  Vezzosi, Letizia –, , – Vincent, Nigel  Visser, Frederikus Th. , – W Waltereit, Richard , , ,  Weber, Doris  Wegener, Heide –, , , , , , ,  Wegera, Klaus-Peter ,  Wessén, Elias  Wexler, Kenneth  Wiegand, Nancy  Wierzbicka, Anna  Wiese, Richard ,  Wischer, Ilse , , – Wurzel, Wolfgang U. – Z Zaliznjak, Andrej A. , , – Ziegeler, Debra  Zribi-Hertz, Anne ,  Zwarts, Frans , , –

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Language index

D Dutch , –, –

E English –, , , , , –, , –, , , –, , , –, –, –, , , , , –, ,  American English –, – British English , , – Early Modern English , –, –, – Late Modern English , , , , – Middle English –, –, , , –, ,  Old English –, , –, , , –

F French –, , –, , – Modern French  Old French –

G German , –, –, –, , –, , , , –, –, – Early New High German , –, –, –, –, , , ,  Middle High German , – Modern German –, , –, – New High German , –, –, – Old High German , –, , –, – Germanic languages , – Greek Ancient Greek , –

H Hittite –

I Icelandic Old Icelandic –,  Italian , , –, –, , , , –, , ,  Italoromance ,  Old Italian –, 

L Lakota , – Latin , , , –, , , –, , –, –, ,  Classical Latin , ,  Early Classical Latin  Early Latin  Late Latin ,  Old Latin –

P Proto-Germanic –,  Proto-Indo-European , 

R Romance –, –, – Rumanian – Russian , , – Early Old Russian ,  Modern Russian –, – Old Russian , –

S Sardinian – Spanish –, –, –, –, , –, – Classical Spanish , , –, –,  Contemporary Spanish , ,  Medieval Spanish –

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 Theoretical and Empirical Issues in Grammaticalization Modern Spanish –, , –, ,  Old Spanish –,  Surselvan – Swedish , –, ,  Early New Swedish  Middle Swedish , – Modern Swedish ,  Old Swedish , –

T Tura , –

Y Yucatec Maya Colonial Yucatec Maya , – Modern Yucatec Maya –

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Subject index

A actualization –, –, –,  adaptation ,  adjective , , , , , , – attributive  emphatic  possessive – adnominal modifier , – adposition , –, , – adverb(ial) , , , , , , –, , –, –, –, , , –,  adverbial conjunction , –, , –, – adverbial inclusive/exclusive use  adverbial intensifier see intensifier adverbial quantifier see quantifier of degree – of focus ,  sentence adverb(ial) , ,  adversative  affirmative  affix –, , –, –, –, , , , –, , ,  affix formation , ,  case marking affix , –,  derivational affix see derivation ambiguity , ,  analogy , ,  anaphoric connection  anaphoric pronoun see pronoun anaphoric relation  antigrammaticalization –, –, –,  branching antigrammaticalization ,  antimorphologization –, –, –, – aorist –,  aorist auxiliary  appurtenance , ,  arbitrariness , – aspect , – aspectual function , –,  grammatical  imperfective  lexical , –

perfect –, , , –, –,  progressive  focussed progressive , , –,  assertion , , –, , ,  attribute ,  adjectival attribute , ,  attributive , , –, – attributive adjective see adjective attributive intensifier see intensifier attributive position –,  attrition – morphophonemic  phonological  augmentative  auxiliary see verb B basins of attraction , , , ,  bleaching (semantic) , , , , , , , , , , , , –,  bonding , , –,  bonding cline ,  morphological bonding , , , ,  semantic-pragmatic bonding  C cleft-sentence –, – focus cleft-sentence ,  presentational cleft-sentence –,  cline of grammaticality  clitic , – clitic pronoun see pronoun clitic-doubling , , –, –,  cliticization , ,  coalescence –, –,  cohesion ,  collective – collocation , , , , –, –, – collocational frequency ,  complement , , , , –, –, , – adjectival complement , , 

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 Theoretical and Empirical Issues in Grammaticalization complementation  clausal complementation , ,  complementizer , –,  Complexity Principle , , –, ,  composite predicate –, –, – compositionality , –,  compounding , –, –, , – concessive , , , , , , – concessive-conditional , , ,  concessivity , –, ,  subordinator , –, , – conditional –, –, , ,  conditionality , – construction  counterfactual  sentence  subordinator ,  conjunctionalization ,  contextual features , –, , – conventionalization , – copula see verb critical context , –, , –, –, , , –,  D dative strengthening  decategorialization , , , , , – definiteness ,  degrammaticalization –, –, , , –, –, , –, , , , – delocative  demodalization , , , ,  demorphologization  depronominalization  derivation ,  derivational affix , , –,  derivational meaning see meaning desemanticization ,  desyntacticization  deverbal noun , –, –, –, ,  diptych correlative – inverted  discourse frequency , , , , ,  discourse marker/particle , , , –, ,  disjunct  double particle construction  E emphasis , ,  endophoric  epistemological , 

erosion  exaptation , ,  existential see verb expansion host-class expansion ,  semantic-pragmatic expansion  experiencer , , –, – extension  functional extension  syntactic extension  F fixation –, , ,  focalization  focus , , , –, –, , – contrastive , ,  focus cleft-sentence see cleft-sentence marker  particle , ,  focussing function , –, ,  fossilization , , , , , , – functional-semantic development  fusion see coalescence future see tense G gender – generalization  semantic generalization  genitive –, –, , , –, – case , –, , , ,  form  objective  subjective ,  suffix , –,  gradience , –, , ,  grammatical category –,  grammatical explicitness  grammaticalization passim grammaticalization cline –, , –, , , –, ,  complete grammaticalization , , , – grammaticalization continuum  definition of grammaticalization –, , –, , – incipient grammaticalization , –,  grammaticalization path , , –, , , , ,  grammaticalization wave , ,  grammeme –,  plural 

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Subject index 

H heterosemes  horror aequi Principle , , ,  hybrid , , –, – postposition-suffix hybrid –,  hypostasis  hypotaxis , , –, –,  I identity function –, – idiomatization –, , , – imperfective see aspect impersonal construction  implicature conversational ,  indefinite article , , ,  indefinite location  indefinite pronoun see pronoun indexical-grammatical function  indicative see mood inference , – infinitive , –, –, , – infinitive construction , – inflection –, , –, , , –, – inflectional suffix ,  information structure , – institutionalization ,  intensifier –, , , , –, – adnominal , , ,  adverbial – attributive , , , – prenominal  intensionality  interfix , , , , –,  interpropositional  interrogative interrogative pronoun see pronoun pronominal – intersubjectification –, –, – invisible hand , , –, – isolating context , –, , –, –,  iterative connection  L language acquisition – layering , , – left-branching syntax  left-dislocation –, –, ,  left-dislocated topic ,  Level Ordering – lexicalization –, –, –, –, , –, , ,  linking element –, –

locative absolutive  loss of compositionality , , ,  M markedness , –, –, –, ,  meaning derivational  grammatical , , –, –,  lexical , ,  mesoclisis –,  metonymy ,  modality counterfactual  deontic , , , – epistemic –, , –, , , , –, –, –, ,  evidential –, –, , –, – irrealis  marker – modal auxiliary see verb modal context –, – modal particle –, –, ,  modalization ,  necessity , , , ,  objective – participant-internal –,  possibility –, , , , ,  external –,  root – subjective –, –, , ,  monovalent predicate ,  mood indicative , –,  subjunctive , , , –, –,  mood system – morphological particle – morphologization –, , , –,  morphosyntactic freedom ,  N negation , , , ,  double negation  negative polarity items –,  non-assertion  non-factivity  non-randomness , –, – O object direct , – indirect , –, – double pronominal  marking , –, , –, 

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 Theoretical and Empirical Issues in Grammaticalization obligatoriness , , –,  obsolescence  P paradigmaticity  paradigmaticization  parameter change , –, – parataxis , –, ,  parenthetical construction  participle –, – resultative  particle cluster –, – passivization inner passive , – outer passive , , –,  past see tense perfect see aspect personal pronoun see pronoun person/number marking , – phonological binding ,  plural suffix –, –, ,  polysemy , – possession – possessive adjective see adjective possessive context ,  possessive pronoun see pronoun pragmatic scope  pragmaticalization  present see tense presentational cleft sentence see cleft-sentence preterite-present see verb presupposition accommodation for presupposition  pragmatic presupposition , ,  Principle of the Separation of Reference and Role  procedural form  procedural meaning  productivity , , ,  pattern productivity ,  token productivity  progressive see aspect pronoun anaphoric  clitic , , ,  indefinite , , –, , , ,  interrogative – personal –, , , – possessive –, –, , –, – reflexive , ,  relative –, ,  strong –

Q quantifier adverbial , ,  free choice , –, , , , ,  indeterminate  R raising construction  randomness –, – reanalysis , , , , , , –, –, , , , –,  semantic ,  recipient , ,  reduction , –, , , , –,  phonetic reduction , , , , , , , , , , –,  scope reduction  semantic reduction –,  redundancy  reflexive anaphor – marker ,  reflexive pronoun see pronoun structure  regrammaticalization – regularization – relational structure , , , , ,  relative clause free-relative clause  postposed – preposed – restrictive , – relative pronoun see pronoun renovation –, – reparadigmatization  resegmentation see reanalysis resultative ,  revealing expression , – right-branching  routinization , , ,  S scalar particle , , ,  semantic connection  semantic strengthening  semantic-pragmatic subordination ,  semiotic status  serial verb construction  source lexeme , –, – specialization , –, , – semantic , , ,  speech-situation evocation – speaker stance , , 

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Subject index 

stem suffix – stretched verb construction ,  stylistic variation ,  subcategorization  subjectification –, , –, –, , , ,  subjectivity-intersubjectivity cline – subjunctive see mood subordinating conjunction see subordinator subordinator –, – syntactic bondedness  syntactic change –,  syntactic scope –,  syntactic synonymy  synthesis/analysis cycle , –, –, 

T temporal particle  tense future , , –,  future auxiliary see verb immediate future – past –,  present , , –, –, – tense system  thematic role , ,  topic –, – topic marker  Topic Accessibility Scale – transfer argument transfer  metaphorical transfer  metonymic transfer  transposition –

U unidirectionality –, , –, , , , , –, –, , , , , , , – univerbation , – V valence-decreasing –,  variability ,  paradigmatic  syntagmatic  verb auxiliary , ,  function  future ,  modal , , , , ,  copula  existential ,  impersonal ,  lexical –, , , , ,  light –, –, –, –, – of appearance ,  of cognition , , ,  of location  performative  pre-modal – preterite-present ,  raising  verb focus ,  verb-focus construction – volition  W weakening –,  Z zero modification 

Typological Studies in Language A complete list of titles in this series can be found on the publishers’ website, www.benjamins.com 80 Laury, Ritva (ed.): Crosslinguistic Studies of Clause Combining. The multifunctionality of conjunctions. xiv, 246 pp. + index. Expected August 2008 79 Abraham, Werner and Elisabeth Leiss (eds.): Modality–Aspect Interfaces. Implications and typological solutions. 2008. xxiv, 422 pp. 78 Harrison, K. David, David S. Rood and Arienne Dwyer (eds.): Lessons from Documented Endangered Languages. v, 366 pp. + index. Expected August 2008 77 Seoane, Elena and María José López-Couso (eds.): Theoretical and Empirical Issues in Grammaticalization. In collaboration with Teresa Fanego. 2008. x, 367 pp. 76 López-Couso, María José and Elena Seoane (eds.): Rethinking Grammaticalization. New perspectives. In collaboration with Teresa Fanego. 2008. x, 355 pp. 75 Frajzyngier, Zygmunt and Erin Shay (eds.): Interaction of Morphology and Syntax. Case studies in Afroasiatic. 2008. v, 234 pp. 74 Kurzon, Dennis and Silvia Adler (eds.): Adpositions. Pragmatic, semantic and syntactic perspectives. 2008. viii, 307 pp. 73 Ansaldo, Umberto, Stephen Matthews and Lisa Lim (eds.): Deconstructing Creole. 2007. xii, 292 pp. 72 Næss, Åshild: Prototypical Transitivity. 2007. x, 240 pp. 71 Nedjalkov, Vladimir P. (ed.): Reciprocal Constructions. With the assistance of Emma Š. Geniušienė and Zlatka Guentchéva. 2007. xxiii, 2219 pp. (5 vols.). 70 Zúñiga, Fernando: Deixis and Alignment. Inverse systems in indigenous languages of the Americas. 2006. xii, 309 pp. 69 Aranovich, Raúl (ed.): Split Auxiliary Systems. A cross-linguistic perspective. 2007. vii, 277 pp. 68 Abraham, Werner and Larisa Leisiö (eds.): Passivization and Typology. Form and function. 2006. x, 553 pp. 67 Veselinova, Ljuba N.: Suppletion in Verb Paradigms. Bits and pieces of the puzzle. 2006. xviii, 236 pp. 66 Hickmann, Maya and Stéphane Robert (eds.): Space in Languages. Linguistic Systems and Cognitive Categories. 2006. x, 362 pp. 65 Tsunoda, Tasaku and Taro Kageyama (eds.): Voice and Grammatical Relations. In Honor of Masayoshi Shibatani. 2006. xviii, 342 pp. 64 Voeltz, F. K. Erhard (ed.): Studies in African Linguistic Typology. 2006. xiv, 426 pp. 63 Filimonova, Elena (ed.): Clusivity. Typology and case studies of the inclusive–exclusive distinction. 2005. xii, 436 pp. 62 Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth and Cecilia E. Ford (eds.): Sound Patterns in Interaction. Crosslinguistic studies from conversation. 2004. viii, 406 pp. 61 Bhaskararao, Peri and Karumuri Venkata Subbarao (eds.): Non-nominative Subjects. Volume 2. 2004. xii, 319 pp. 60 Bhaskararao, Peri and Karumuri Venkata Subbarao (eds.): Non-nominative Subjects. Volume 1. 2004. xii, 325 pp. 59 Fischer, Olga, Muriel Norde and Harry Perridon (eds.): Up and down the Cline – The Nature of Grammaticalization. 2004. viii, 406 pp. 58 Haspelmath, Martin (ed.): Coordinating Constructions. 2004. xcv, 578 pp. 57 Mattissen, Johanna: Dependent-Head Synthesis in Nivkh. A contribution to a typology of polysynthesis. 2003. x, 350 pp. 56 Shay, Erin and Uwe Seibert (eds.): Motion, Direction and Location in Languages. In honor of Zygmunt Frajzyngier. 2003. xvi, 305 pp. 55 Frajzyngier, Zygmunt and Erin Shay: Explaining Language Structure through Systems Interaction. 2003. xviii, 309 pp. 54 Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. and R.M.W. Dixon (eds.): Studies in Evidentiality. 2003. xiv, 349 pp. 53 Givón, T. and Bertram F. Malle (eds.): The Evolution of Language out of Pre-language. 2002. x, 394 pp. 52 Güldemann, Tom and Manfred von Roncador (eds.): Reported Discourse. A meeting ground for different linguistic domains. 2002. xii, 425 pp.

51 Newman, John (ed.): The Linguistics of Sitting, Standing and Lying. 2002. xii, 409 pp. 50 Feigenbaum, Susanne and Dennis Kurzon (eds.): Prepositions in their Syntactic, Semantic and Pragmatic Context. 2002. vi, 304 pp. 49 Wischer, Ilse and Gabriele Diewald (eds.): New Reflections on Grammaticalization. 2002. xiv, 437 pp. 48 Shibatani, Masayoshi (ed.): The Grammar of Causation and Interpersonal Manipulation. 2002. xviii, 551 pp. 47 Baron, Irène, Michael Herslund and Finn Sørensen (eds.): Dimensions of Possession. 2001. vi, 337 pp. 46 Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y., R.M.W. Dixon and Masayuki Onishi (eds.): Non-canonical Marking of Subjects and Objects. 2001. xii, 364 pp. 45 Bybee, Joan and Paul J. Hopper (eds.): Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure. 2001. vii, 492 pp. 44 Voeltz, F. K. Erhard and Christa Kilian-Hatz (eds.): Ideophones. 2001. x, 436 pp. 43 Gildea, Spike (ed.): Reconstructing Grammar. Comparative Linguistics and Grammaticalization. 2000. xiv, 269 pp. 42 Diessel, Holger: Demonstratives. Form, function and grammaticalization. 1999. xii, 205 pp. 41 Frajzyngier, Zygmunt and Traci S. Walker-Curl (eds.): Reciprocals. Forms and functions. Volume 2. 2000. xii, 201 pp. 40 Frajzyngier, Zygmunt and Traci S. Walker-Curl (eds.): Reflexives. Forms and functions. Volume 1. 2000. xiv, 286 pp. 39 Payne, Doris L. and Immanuel Barshi (eds.): External Possession. 1999. ix, 573 pp. 38 Siewierska, Anna and Jae Jung Song (eds.): Case, Typology and Grammar. In honor of Barry J. Blake. 1998. 395 pp. 37 Giacalone-Ramat, Anna and Paul J. Hopper (eds.): The Limits of Grammaticalization. 1998. vi, 307 pp. 36 Newman, John (ed.): The Linguistics of Giving. 1998. xv, 373 pp. 35 Givón, T. (ed.): Grammatical Relations. A functionalist perspective. 1997. viii, 350 pp. 34 Givón, T. (ed.): Conversation. Cognitive, communicative and social perspectives. 1997. viii, 302 pp. 33 Fox, Barbara A. (ed.): Studies in Anaphora. 1996. xii, 518 pp. 32 Bybee, Joan and Suzanne Fleischman (eds.): Modality in Grammar and Discourse. 1995. viii, 575 pp. 31 Gernsbacher, Morton Ann and T. Givón (eds.): Coherence in Spontaneous Text. 1995. x, 267 pp. 30 Downing, Pamela A. and Michael Noonan (eds.): Word Order in Discourse. 1995. x, 595 pp. 29 Kahrel, Peter (PJK) and René van den Berg (eds.): Typological Studies in Negation. 1994. x, 385 pp. 28 Givón, T. (ed.): Voice and Inversion. 1994. viii, 402 pp. 27 Fox, Barbara A. and Paul J. Hopper (eds.): Voice: Form and Function. 1994. xiii, 377 pp. 26 Lord, Carol: Historical Change in Serial Verb Constructions. 1993. x, 273 pp. 25 Svorou, Soteria: The Grammar of Space. 1994. xiv, 290 pp. 24 Perkins, Revere D.: Deixis, Grammar, and Culture. 1992. x, 245 pp. 23 Kemmer, Suzanne: The Middle Voice. 1993. xii, 300 pp. 22 Payne, Doris L. (ed.): Pragmatics of Word Order Flexibility. 1992. viii, 320 pp. 21 Downing, Pamela A., Susan D. Lima and Michael Noonan (eds.): The Linguistics of Literacy. 1992. xx, 334 pp. 20 Croft, William, Suzanne Kemmer and Keith Denning (eds.): Studies in Typology and Diachrony. Papers presented to Joseph H. Greenberg on his 75th birthday. 1990. xxxiv, 243 pp. 19:2 Closs Traugott, Elizabeth and Bernd Heine (eds.): Approaches to Grammaticalization. Volume II. Types of grammatical markers. 1991. xii, 558 pp. 19:1 Closs Traugott, Elizabeth and Bernd Heine (eds.): Approaches to Grammaticalization. Volume I. Theoretical and methodological issues. 1991. xii, 360 pp. 18 Haiman, John and Sandra A. Thompson (eds.): Clause Combining in Grammar and Discourse. 1988. xiii, 428 pp. 17 Hammond, Michael, Edith A. Moravcsik and Jessica Wirth (eds.): Studies in Syntactic Typology. 1988. xiv, 380 pp. 16 Shibatani, Masayoshi (ed.): Passive and Voice. 1988. xi, 706 pp.

15 Austin, Peter (ed.): Complex Sentence Constructions in Australian Languages. 1988. vii, 289 pp. 14 Hinds, John, Shoichi Iwasaki and Senko K. Maynard (eds.): Perspectives on Topicalization. The case of Japanese WA. 1987. xi, 307 pp. 13 Never published. 12 Nedjalkov, Vladimir P. (ed.): Typology of Resultative Constructions. Translated from the original Russian edition (1983). Translation edited by Bernard Comrie. 1988. xx, 573 pp. 11 Tomlin, Russell S.: Coherence and Grounding in Discourse. Outcome of a Symposium, Eugene, Oregon, June 1984. 1987. viii, 512 pp. 10 Ransom, Evelyn N.: Complementation: its Meaning and Forms. 1986. xii, 226 pp. 9 Bybee, Joan: Morphology. A Study of the Relation between Meaning and Form. 1985. xii, 235 pp. 8 Slobin, Dan I. and Karl Zimmer (eds.): Studies in Turkish Linguistics. 1986. vi, 294 pp. 7 Craig, Colette G. (ed.): Noun Classes and Categorization. Proceedings of a symposium on categorization and noun classification, Eugene, Oregon, October 1983. 1986. vii, 481 pp. 6 Haiman, John (ed.): Iconicity in Syntax. Proceedings of a symposium on iconicity in syntax, Stanford, June 24–26, 1983. 1985. vi, 402 pp. 5 Rutherford, William E. (ed.): Language Universals and Second Language Acquisition. 1984. ix, 264 pp. 4 Chisholm, William, Louis T. Milic and John A.C. Greppin (eds.): Interrogativity. A colloquium on the grammar, typology and pragmatics of questions in seven diverse languages, Cleveland, Ohio, October 5th 1981-May 3rd 1982. 1984. v, 302 pp. 3 Givón, T.: Topic Continuity in Discourse. A quantitative cross-language study. 1983. vi, 492 pp. 2 Haiman, John and Pamela Munro (eds.): Switch Reference and Universal Grammar. Proceedings of a symposium on switch reference and universal grammar, Winnipeg, May 1981. 1983. xv, 337 pp. 1 Hopper, Paul J. (ed.): Tense-Aspect. Between semantics & pragmatics. 1982. x, 350 pp.