The chapters in this volume present a state of the art of grammaticalization research in the 2010s. They are concerned with the application of new models, such as constructionalization, the ongoing debate about the status and modelling of the development of discourse markers, and reveal a renewed interest in the typological application of grammaticalization and in the cognitive motivations for unidirectionality. The contributors consider data from a wide range of languages, including several that have not or marginally been looked at in terms of grammaticalization: Chinese, Dutch, (varieties of) English, French, German, Japanese, Maltese, Old Saxon, Spanish, and languages of the South Caucasian and Zhuang Tai-Kadai families. The chapters range from theoretical discussions to fine-grained analyses of new historical and comparative language data. This volume will be of interest to linguists studying morphosyntactic changes in a range of languages, and in particular to those interested in models for grammatical change.

This collective volume focuses on the latest developments in the study of grammaticalization and related processes of change such as degrammaticalization, constructionalization, lexicalization, and petrification. It addresses topical issues relating to the motivations, sources, defining features, and outcomes of these changes. New theoretical reflections are offered on the pragmatic motivation of grammaticalization paths, process-oriented differences between grammaticalization, lexicalization and degrammaticalization, the question of gradualness and pace of grammaticalization, and deictics as a distinct source of grammaticalization. The articles describe various constructional and distributional changes affecting deictics, determiners, reflexives, clitics, nouns, affixes, adverbs and (auxiliary) verbs, mainly in the Germanic and Romance languages. The volume will be of great interest to historical linguists working on grammaticalization and related changes, and to all linguists working on the interface between morphosyntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse.

This collective volume focuses on the latest developments in the study of grammaticalization and related processes of change such as degrammaticalization, constructionalization, lexicalization, and petrification. It addresses topical issues relating to the motivations, sources, defining features, and outcomes of these changes. New theoretical reflections are offered on the pragmatic motivation of grammaticalization paths, process-oriented differences between grammaticalization, lexicalization and degrammaticalization, the question of gradualness and pace of grammaticalization, and deictics as a distinct source of grammaticalization. The articles describe various constructional and distributional changes affecting deictics, determiners, reflexives, clitics, nouns, affixes, adverbs and (auxiliary) verbs, mainly in the Germanic and Romance languages. The volume will be of great interest to historical linguists working on grammaticalization and related changes, and to all linguists working on the interface between morphosyntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse.

The contributions in this volume cover a wide range of theoretical and methodological issues and raise a number of new questions that indicate the future direction of grammaticalization studies. The volume focuses on issues such as grammaticalization and lexicalization; the unidirectionality hypothesis; the issue of the relevance of contexts for grammaticalization; the description of grammaticalization paths. Much of the current work concentrates on such categories, as discourse markers, honorifics or classifiers, which have not previously been central to works on grammaticalization. Other studies take a new perspective on known grammaticalization paths by applying concepts adopted from other linguistic fields, such as prototype theory, morphocentricity, or by discussing their findings from a comparative or typological angle, presenting data from a large number of languages, often based on extensive empirical investigations of written and spoken text corpora.

The status of grammaticalization has been the subject of many controversial discussions. The contributions to What makes Grammaticalization? approach the prevalent phenomenon from the angle of language structure and focus on the interrelation between the levels of phonology, pragmatics (inference), discourse and the lexicon and some of them try to integrate the areal perspective. A wealth of data from Slavonic languages as well as from languages of other genetic and areal affiliation is discussed. The book is of interest to linguists specializing in grammaticalization, lexicalization and morphological typology, to language typologists as well as to functional, historical and cognitive linguists.

There is a continual growth of interest among linguists of all-theoretical denominations in grammaticalization, a concept central to many linguistic (change) theories. However, the discussion of grammaticalization processes has often suffered from a shortage of concrete empirical studies from one of the best-documented languages in the world, English. Pathways of Change contains discussion of new data and provides theoretical lead articles based on these data that will help sharpen the theoretical aspects involved, such as the definition and the logical connection of the component processes of grammaticalization. The volume is concentrated around a number of themes that are important or controversial in grammaticalization studies, such as the principle of unidirectionality, the relation between lexicalization and grammaticalization — and connected with these two factors the possibility of degrammaticalization — the way iconicity interweaves with grammaticalization processes, and with the phenomenon of grammaticalization on a synchronic or discourse level, also often termed subjectifization.

The earliest use of the term “grammaticalization” was to refer to the process whereby lexical words of a language (such as English keep in “he keeps bees”) become grammatical forms (such as the auxiliary in “he keeps looking at me”). Changes of this kind, which involve semantic fading and a downshift from a major to a minor category, have generally been agreed to come under the heading of grammaticalization. But other changes that equally contribute to new grammatical forms do not involve this kind of fading. In recent years, a debate has arisen over how to constrain the term theoretically. Is grammaticalization to be distinguished from “lexicalization”, the creation and fixing of new words out of older patterns of compounding? If so, how is the line to be drawn between a form that is grammatical and one that is lexical? Should the term “grammaticalization” be extended to the study of the origins of grammatical constructions in general? If so, it will have to include broader issues such as word order change and the reanalysis of phrases. What principles govern these processes? Is grammaticalization a unidirectional event, or can change occur in the reverse direction? The authors of the papers in this volume approach these important questions from a variety of data types, including historical texts, creoles, and a typologically broad sample of modern and ancient languages.