Grammaticalization is a process which shifts linguistic constructions down the hierarchy of complexity levels and changes lexical items into grammatical formatives and mere structural markers. This is the observable direction of the grammaticalization paths hitherto brought up in the literature. In the decades in which grammaticalization research has been done, two issues have been hotly disputed:
- Are there processes running in the opposite direction, or is grammaticalization unidirectional in this sense?
- What is the methodological status of the – assumed – unidirectionality of grammaticalization? Is it a defining feature of grammaticalization or just an inductive empirical generalization?
Since these issues have provoked much research and have engaged many linguists, grammaticalization research has acquired a certain weight in several fields of linguistics, including general, comparative, descriptive and historical linguistics. This has left some critics losing sleep. An entire issue of the journal Language Sciences (23/2, 2001) was devoted to the endeavour of knocking down grammaticalization research and denying it the status of serious research. The general tenor was that those facts that grammaticalization researchers had succeeded in describing adequately could be sufficiently or better accounted for by theories that had existed for long. To back this argument, a number of putative cases of diachronic change were adduced which go in the opposite direction of grammaticalization.
The following pages are devoted to these issues. Lehmann 2004[T] is a publication on them.
References
Fischer, Olga & Norde, Muriel & Perridon, Harry (eds.) 2004, Up and Down the Cline. The Nature of Grammaticalization. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins (Typological Studies in Language, 59).
Haspelmath, Martin 1999, "Why is grammaticalization irreversible?" Linguistics 37:1043-1068.
Haspelmath, Martin 2004, "On directionality in language change with particular reference to grammaticalization." Fischer et al. (eds.) 2004:17-44.
Ramat, Paolo 2001, "Degrammaticalization or recategorization?" Schaner-Wolles, Chris & Rennison, John & Neubarth, Friedrich (eds.), Naturally! Linguistic studies in honour of Wolfgang Ulrich Dressler presented on the occasion of his 60thbirthday. Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier; 393-401.