To get information on me, you may use my own website. Most of it is in German. But if you browse through it or use the search function offered on its main menu, you will discover many pages written in English, in addition to pages written in other languages. Looking through these pages, you will see that I am a linguist who strives to combine structural and functional approaches to language, who describes and compares languages and who does this in a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. I am, thus, a general linguist, not a cognitive scientist.

This lecture series introduces the basic concepts of grammaticalization theory and the methods to determine and measure grammaticalization, by means of analyzed examples from diverse languages.

Many of the data and examples are drawn from Indo-European languages. This not only corresponds to my own specialization. It is also due to the fact that appropriate historical data, going back some thousands of years, are not available for many languages. In particular, Chinese does have a written history of some thousands of years. However, first the writing system hides some important changes affecting linguistic signs. As a result, processes of grammaticalization are harder to detect. Second, less linguistic research on grammaticalization in Chinese has been executed, so there are less analyzed data available. This lecture series also aims at contributing to change this research situation for the better.1

Other Non-Indo-European languages which provide data include Yucatec Maya (Mayan, Mexico) and Cabecar (Chibchan, Costa Rica). These are languages on which I have done fieldwork and which are very different from each other and from the other languages used for illustration.

The examples are provided with an interlinear gloss which follows the standards published in Lehmann 2004 and on my website on glossing. The latter incorporates and updates the Leipzig Glossing Rules.

While many diverse cases of grammaticalization from different languages are presented, they differ with respect to the evidence adduced. In principle, whenever there exist data apt to provide historical evidence of some phenomenon, these should be used. I do this in some cases, especially for some languages with whose history I am familiar. In other cases, I use made-up examples. Such examples can prove nothing; they only serve to illustrate a descriptive claim which might be too abstract without an example. The case studies of the former kind may serve, to some extent, as models of how one would describe a certain case of grammaticalization in a language with sufficient documented history.

The lecture series follows the special website on grammaticalization, where everything else is to be found. In the past half century, more has been published on grammaticalization than I have been able to take into account. The text of this lecture series is heavily based on my own work on grammaticalization, which is listed in the bibliography.

During the two weeks of the lecture series, this website will be modified on a daily basis. To make sure that your browser shows you the most recent version, you may have to reload the page.

There will be ten lectures, distributed over Monday through Friday of these two weeks. Each lecture comprises two hours. These will be structured as follows:

  1. 45 minutes lecture
  2. 15 minutes questions and discussion
  3. 45 minutes lecture
  4. 15 minutes questions and discussion.

For any questions or comments on the topics of these lectures, please feel free to use any of the following options:

  1. interrupt me during the presentation
  2. send your message by the chat function of Zoom
  3. use the break after each half of the lecture
  4. write me at christian.lehmann☯uni-erfurt.de (replacing the ☯ symbol).

Option #1 is highly advised if the lecture presupposes knowledge of something you don't know; for instance, if it uses a term with an unknown meaning. In such cases, the best solution is to interrupt me and ask for an explanation because otherwise much of what follows in the lecture will remain unintelligible.

1 It is no coincidence that by far the most hits turned up by a web search engine in a search for ‘Chinese etymology’ do not deal at all with etymology but with the historical development of Chinese writing. There is also a page which rightfully complains about this.