Much of the debate in the 1980s on the role of metaphor and metonymy in semantic change took place within the context of the study of grammaticaliza- tion (also known as “grammaticization”). As originally conceptualized by Meillet (1958 [1912]), grammaticalization is typically the development of lexemes into grammatical items; Meillet also suggested that change from relatively free to rel- atively fixed word order is an instance of grammaticalization. In either case, the change is conceived as unidirectional, from A to B, not vice versa. A more recent view has been that it is a shift from discourse> syntax > morphology (Giv´on 1979; see also Lehmann 1995 [1982]). Giv´on’s formulation was a major catalyst for work on change taking discourse processes into account, an approach that had been briefly touched on in Stern’s book with respect to semantic change, but which had not been pursued. Subsequent work on grammaticalization has suggested that it is more properly conceived as the change whereby lexical material in highly con- strained pragmatic and morphosyntactic contexts is assigned functional category status, and where the lexical meaning of an item is assigned constructional meaning (van Kemenade 1999: 1006, Traugott, Forthcoming).
15From a different perspective, K¨ovecses and Radden (1998) suggest that metaphors like ANGER IS HEAT may arise experientially out of conceptual metonymies; see also K¨ovecses (2000), Radden (2000).
Although most early work focused on structural properties of grammaticalization, (e.g. Lehmann 1995 [1982], Heine and Reh 1984), attention to lexical or discourse origins naturally also led to exploration of semantic change, both onomasiologi- cal (e.g. what terms would give rise to prepositions, complementizers, aspect or agreement markers), and semasiological (e.g. what semantic path did Lat. cantare
habeo “sing: INF have: 1SG” traverse as it grammaticalized to Fr. chanterai?). The
literature on these questions is substantial and growing rapidly. Representative ex- amples of work in which semantic change is of considerable importance include Fleischman (1982), Heine, Claudi, and H¨unnemeyer (1991), Hopper and Traugott (1993), Svorou (1993), Dasher (1995), Sun (1996), Haspelmath (1997), and Ohori (1998); a lexicon of grammaticalization is provided by Heine et al. (1993). Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca’s (1994) study is a major investigation of grammaticaliza- tion based on materials from a cross-linguistic sample of seventy-six language groups. Most specifically, the authors are concerned with asking whether there are any regularities or commonalities across languages in the meanings expressed by closed-class grammatical morphemes such as affixes, stem changes, reduplication, auxiliaries, particles, or complex constructions like be going to in the target domains of tense, aspect, and modality (Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994: 2–3). The answer is a dramatic “yes.” Since most sources are reference grammars, little discourse data is provided, but text-based studies of particular languages confirm the more general hypotheses concerning sources for the target “grams” (grammatical morphemes).
In the course of this book we will be discussing some data that involves gram- maticalization, specifically the development of the modal must (chapter 3) and the development of adverbials like pray (chapter 6). We outline two examples of gram- maticalization here: the development of the future be going to in English, and the development of the modal particle as in Modern Greek.
The history of be going to is well-known (see P´erez 1990; also Bybee and Pagliuca 1987, Hopper and Traugott 1993: 80–86, Tabor 1994a) but we revisit it here because it gives direct insights into the question of analysis in terms of metaphor vs. invited inference. Verbs meaning GO and COME have long been used as a prime example of SPACE> TIME. From the perspective of large-scale onomasiological changes, it is a cross-linguistically widely attested prototype example of semantic change. Often the shift from GO/COME> FUTURE has been treated as an example of metaphor (e.g. Traugott 1978, Bybee and Pagliuca 1987, Heine, Claudi, and H¨unnemeyer 1991). But cross-linguistic study at a more fine-grained level of analysis shows that bare GO and COME actually never become FUTURE. Bybee, Pagliuca, and Perkins argue that the change occurs only in highly specific contexts: “along with movement as a component of meaning, the source of such futures includes an imperfective (or progressive) component and an allative component” (1991: 30). This is a constraint that is readily understandable in terms of inferences arising out of language use:
motion toward something takes time (i.e. is imperfective), and one will arrive there only at some time later than the motion starts. It is not clear how such a constraint could be placed on a metaphor, and indeed Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca explicitly question the usefulness of a metaphorical approach to the change and propose an analysis that draws on pragmatic intentions and inferences:
The temporal meaning that comes to dominate the semantics of the construction is already present as an inference from the spatial meaning. When one moves along a path toward a goal in space, one also moves in time. The major change that takes place is the loss of spatial meaning. Here. . . the function of expressing intention comes into play. When a speaker announces that s/he is going somewhere to do something, s/he is also announcing the intention to do that thing. Thus intention is part of the meaning from the beginning, and the only change necessary is the generalization to contexts in which an intention is expressed, but the subject is not moving spatially to fulfill that intention.
(Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994: 268) Note that while the semantics of space may be lost or at least recede into the background (a phenomenon commonly known as “bleaching”), this change involves pragmatic strengthening of the temporal implicature (Traugott 1988). The ultimate semanticization of temporality involves the development of a new polysemy which is as rich as the earlier one although more abstract (Sweetser 1988) and also more subjective (Traugott 1988, Langacker 1990).
As a motion verb, go occurs very frequently in ME texts. The form going is used almost exclusively as a nominal gerund, with imperfective/durative meaning (Per´ez 1990).16The first plausible example of be going to in a temporal rather than motion
sense known to us is the much-cited example in (18):
(18) thys unhappy sowle by the vyctoryse pompys of her enmyes this unhappy soul by the victorious displays of her enemies
was goyng to be broughte into helle for the synne and
was going to be brought into hell for the sin and onleful lustys of her body.
unlawful lusts of her body
“this unhappy soul was going to be brought into hell in the victorious procession of her enemies because of the unlawful lusts of her body”
(c. 1482 Monk of Evesham, p. 43) Here the context is not only imperfective. The passive demotes the agentivity of the subject. A modern interpretation suggests strongly that a temporal, not a motion reading is called for, since we do not expect souls to have physical properties. On 16The progressive construction with -ing emerged only late in ME.
this reading, temporality would be a salient GIIN, or possibly even an instance of a newly semanticized “immanent future.” However, it is quite possible that the motion verb is to be taken literally, since in this sermon a vision is narrated in which the soul is represented as a very physical entity, tormented in the stomach with darts. On this reading, temporality is only an IIN in (18). Unambiguous examples of the temporal do not occur until the later sixteenth century. An example from the seventeenth century is:
(19) Witwoud: Gad, I have forgot what I was going to say to you.
(1699 Congreve, Way of the World, I, p. 331) (18) and (19) suggest that in its early stages the change is primarily abstraction (spa- tial> temporal). Later, in the nineteenth century, we find examples with inanimate subjects (“raising” constructions), at first relatively objective in the sense that any- body could anticipate rain from accessible evidence (20a), later in more subjective senses (20b) based in SP/W’s reasoning processes:
(20) a. Do you think it’s going to rain?
(1865 Carroll, chapter 4, p. 146) b. There is going to be a shooting and somebody is going to get hurt.
(1894 Doyle, 568) By the beginning of the twentieth century we find incontrovertible written evidence that temporal be going to has been fixed as a unit (“univerbated”), because we begin to find instances of be gonna. The form is used only in texts deliberately signaled as colloquial (note in (21) the use of me and Jeanne, put the skids under):
(21) Me and Jeanne is gonna have a flat over in Brooklyn as soon as we put the skids under the Kaiser.
(1918 Whitwer [OED]) Characteristics associated with grammaticalization are:
(i) a specific construction (in this case imperfective aspect, and direct collocation between be going and the purpose clause),
(ii) bleaching (of the semantics of motion),
(iii) pragmatic strengthening (of the GIIN from the imperfective motion construction followed by a purpose clause), subjectification, and ulti- mate semanticization as a polysemy (of the motion construction), (iv) reanalysis (of open class event structure material as closed class tem-
poral material),
(v) fixing of the construction (including univerbation of going to), (vi) phonological attrition (of the univerbated part of the construction).
Characteristics (i)–(iii) are typical of lexical, independently of grammatical, change. The case of be going to is an example of grammaticalization because characteristics (iv)–(vi) are closely associated with (i)–(iii).
We balance this very familiar example with a less familiar but partially similar one: the development of a highly polysemous modal particle as in Modern Greek. It serves as a hortative “let’s,” expressing wish (“may it be that”), irrealis, condition- ality, and concession (Nikiforidou 1996). According to Nikiforidou, as originates at the time of Koin´e in ´aphes “allow!,” the imperative of the verb aphiemi “send away, let go of, let, leave, allow,” as in:
(22) adelph`e, ´aphes exb´alo t`o k´arphos. brother let-IMP-2SG pull-out-SUBJUNCT-1SG the nail “Brother, let me pull out the nail.”
(before 300 AC, Matthew 27: 46 [Nikiforidou 1996: 602]) By the sixth or seventh centuries AC it begins to appear as as, no longer as a verb with inflections but as a preverbal particle in a paradigm with na “irrealis” and tha “future”:
(23) elth´e oun pr`os emas ka`ı as come-IMP-2SG therefore to us and “as” lalesomen t`a pr`os eir´enen. talk-SUBJUNCT-1PL the towards peace “Come therefore to us and let’s talk about peace.”
(9th century, Theophanis, Chronographia 387 2 [ibid: p. 605]) Rather than the original meaning of permission we now find suggestion, and later wish:
(24) as g´enetai par`a sou.
“as” be-do-PFV-NONPAST-3SG by you “May it be done by you.”
(mid 13th century, Sfrandzis Georgios, Small Chron. [ibid. p. 609]) Later meanings include a conditional and a concessive which Nikiforidou interprets as functioning like Sweetser’s kind of “speech act” modal (see 2.3.1), “whether the content of the as clause is true or not does not matter. What matters is that for the purposes of the conversation the speaker will accept it as true while she insists on asserting the content of the main clause” (1996: 612):
(25) as chion´ısi em´ıs tha p´ame
“as” snow-PFV-NP-3SG we FUT go:PFV:NONPAST:1PL “We will go, even if it snows”
We again find the same six kinds of characteristics as were outlined for be going to; together they show that this is a case of grammaticalization.
Semantically the two sets of changes outlined here are instances of generalization: in both cases the original lexical meaning is extended to other meanings. But it was not generalization that made grammaticalization a focal point of interest for researchers in semantic change. What has been a catalyst is the substantial cross- linguistic evidence from studies of grammaticalization for the regularity of such shifts as SPACE> TIME, permission to exhortation, described world to speech world, less to more subjective, not vice versa; crucial too has been the focus of grammaticalization research on discourse contexts for change.
The examples of grammaticalization given here illustrate a strong overarching hypothesis associated with much work on grammaticalization: that of unidirection- ality in all the correlated shifts. As a testable hypothesis unidirectionality has been questioned, most especially in the domain of morphosyntax (see Janda 1995 and the references therein, Newmeyer 1998: chapter 5, Lightfoot 1999: 220–225, Lass 2000, among others). One line of argument is that there are ontological difficul- ties with notions such as grammaticalization “clines,” “paths,” or “trajectories” like Giv´on’s discourse> syntax > morphology > morphophonemics > zero (Giv´on 1979: 209). Are such clines assumed to exist? If so where? Are they explanatory linguistic principles or outcomes of non-linguistic factors?
In our view such paths are schemas for observed regularities across time. The categories on the paths (e.g. clitic, affix, or TEMPORAL, CONCESSIVE) do not shift; individual forms come to be associated over time with these onomasiological categories in a predictable, unidirectional way. In other words, the path represents the probable new polysemies of a form if it changes meaning. As models of change constructed by linguists, paths or clines are part of the metalanguage of change. They are metaphors and are therefore necessarily expressed in concrete terms, but that does not mean that they exist as concrete paths or conduits for change. The structural path that a form or construction undergoing grammaticalization takes is motivated by speakers’ tendency to seek signal simplicity (hence the tendency for clitics to be reduced and fixed as affixes), just as the path that the meaning of that form or construction takes is constrained by speakers’ tendency to recruit referential meanings to less referential functions of language (hence the tendency for concrete spatial terms to be recruited to the function of case or of aspect). The paths are explanatory to the extent that they predict frequently attested directions of change, whether at the semantic level from TEMPORAL > CONCESSIVE or at the morphosyntactic one from clitic to affix. Falsifiers would be frequently attested examples of shifts from CONCESSIVE> TEMPORAL or from affix to clitic. Speakers innovatively use old forms and constructions with new meanings, subject to semantic and pragmatic constraints. If these innovations spread to other
speakers the resources available for the category at that point on the path are renewed (Meillet 1958 [1915–16] called this “renouvellement”). The recruitment of these new forms or constructions into extant conceptual categories is motivated by speak- ers’ tendency to seek maximal communicative effect (informativeness, rhetorical strategizing, etc.).17In other words, grammaticalization is motivated by the dyadic
communicative situation.
One argument against unidirectionality in grammaticalization has been that pat- terns of shifts from more lexical to more grammatical material or from less mor- phologically bound to more morphologically bound are not without exception. An example of the strong position on this point is: “I take any example of upgrading as sufficient to refute unidirectionality” (Newmeyer 1998: 263). One of the exam- ples of upgrading that Newmeyer cites (quoting Nevis 1986) is the upgrading of a Finno-Permic abessive case affix *-pta to a clitic postposition taga in Northern Saame (Lappish). As indicated in chapter 1, we are concerned with tendencies, not absolutes. Language is a product of human beings. Grammaticalization, like se- manticization, involves the interaction of linguistic structure and language use. One would not expect absolute 100 percent regularity from strategic interaction, subject as it always is to human intervention. Under such a view, a small number of falsifiers of a hypothesis does not discredit the hypothesis, but a large number, say a quarter of the instances would certainly do so. To date the number of counterexamples to semantic unidirectionality in grammaticalization remains small.
What is particularly striking for our purposes in this book is that many of the counterexamples to grammaticalization that have been cited show no semantic shift (e.g. the cliticization of *-pta), or show regular semantic shift of the sort described in this book. In other words, even if structural unidirectionality is violated, semantic unidirectionality is not. For example, one of the first papers to discuss a counterex- ample to the posited structural directionality of grammaticalization, in this case less to more bonded morphology, Yo Matsumoto (1988) showed that an earlier Jp. clause-final postfix -ga “although” came to be a clause-initial conjunction meaning “however” (affix to clitic). Nevertheless, despite structural upgrading, the semantic and pragmatic shift is toward greater subjectification.
As the study of grammaticalization progressed it rapidly became clear that the se- mantic changes observable in grammaticalization are a subtype of regular changes in the lexicon. What is different is that in grammaticalization semantic changes af- fect only certain Ls (those with relatively general meaning) and correlate with other changes such as morphosyntactic decategorialization. How true this is can be seen from the study of cross-linguistic tendencies in the development of the semantics
17See Langacker (1977) for an early formulation of the competing motivations in grammatical- ization (he refers to “reanalysis” rather than grammaticalization).
of the diminutive as presented in Jurafsky (1996). Despite saying that “the diminu- tive function (. . . defined as any morphological device that means at least ‘small’) is among the grammatical primitives” (ibid. p. 534), Jurafsky does not frame his discussion in terms of grammaticalization. Rather, he builds on and develops a diachronic dimension to Lakoff ’s (1987) semantic proposal that many metaphors are organized in complex ways which can be thought of as a radial category with core members linked to extensions represented by a network of nodes. Jurafsky argues that at the core of the diminutive is the notion of CHILD. The shift from CHILD> SMALL, as exemplified by the diminutives vi, -dzai, -pil in Ewe, Can- tonese, Nahuatl respectively (Jurafsky 1996: 562), is presumably metonymic (and also a case of grammaticalization). Jurafsky regards many extensions as metaphor- ical, e.g. from diminutive to female gender specification (contrast Gm. Junge “male youth,” M¨ad-chen “female youth,” with a diminutive), or to derogatory, marginal- ized status (contrast Cantonese nui25 “woman” with mo25nui35, where mo25 is a derogatory diminutive). An alternative view might be that these are metonymic to social perspectives, and to the opposition he himself sets up (the female of the species is smaller, less powerful than the male). Be that as it may, Jurafsky sees in the radial category of diminutives evidence for the mechanisms of metaphorization, metonymic inferencing, generalization,18and a special type of metaphorical gener-
alization which he calls “lambda-abstraction-specification”: “[l]ambda-abstracting takes one predicate in a form and replaces it with a variable. The resulting expres- sion is now a second-order predicate, since its domain includes a variable which ranges over predicates” (Jurafsky 1996: 555).
Jurafsky suggests that lambda-abstraction allows for a single generalization over a number of second order meanings that diminutives develop into, for example picking out individuated forms in a partitive frame, e.g., Yiddish der samd “sand,”
dos zemdl “grain of sand” (Jurafsky 1996: 555), or serving as a hedge, e.g., Jp. chotto as in:
(26) Taroo wa chotto iji ga warui. Taroo TOP DIM character SUBJ bad (nasty) “Taroo is somewhat/kinda nasty.”
(Yoshiko Matsumoto 1985: 145) At the same time as allowing a single generalization over a variety of shifts to second order predicate status, it also captures an essential feature of semantic changes: only certain aspects of a source lexeme or concept are inherited in the target domain. Which aspects are selected can be accounted for in part in terms of prototype theories
18It is not clear why this should be regarded as a separate mechanism, rather than as the result of metaphorical and metonymic processes.
affection pets
sympathy intimacy PRAGMATICS
PROPOSITIONS ARE OBJECTS hedges SOCIAL GROUPS ARE FAMILIES
CATEGORY CENTRALITY IS SIZE imitation related–to G,M G exactness small type–of partitive SEMANTICS approximation GENDER IS SIZE L L L, M contempt
child small female M M M M M I I I I member
Figure 2.6. Proposed universal structure for the semantics of the diminutive (Jurafsky 1996: 542).
of salience. If the source terms refer to concrete physical entities, size and location may be salient, e.g. what is salient about eyes is not that they comes in pairs (in humans) but rather that they are central to the face and attention-getting (Brown and Witkowski 1983 [see 2.2.3]); what is salient about legs is again not that they come in pairs, but they are the basis on which one stands (the foot of the hill is the