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As DeLancey (2001) points out, a grammaticalization process entails changes at every level of language. Notably, although all changes outlined below typically occur in grammaticalization processes, independently of one another, they are not essential for grammaticalization to take place (Bybee, Perkins & Pagliuca 1994).

At the semantic and pragmatic level, a grammaticalization process involves changes such as semantic bleaching, semantic specialization through metaphor, reanalysis through pragmatic inference, lexicalization – the process by which originally independent lexemes become parts of new lexical items (cf. Section 2.2.5), and “referent conflation”. A referent conflation is a semantic change in which two conceptually distinct referents are reanalyzed as one. For example, in the development of an adposition from a relational noun, e.g. atop + noun from *on the top of + noun, one can see the conflation of two referents into one (top + noun > noun) (DeLancey 2001).

In the layers of syntax and morphology, changes such as reanalysis and alterations in constituent structure also can occur. In addition, as noted earlier (Section 2.2.2), grammaticalization often involves obligatorification (Lehmann 1995[1982]). However, some scholars, such as Heine & Kuteva (2007: 34), point out that, though obligatorification seems to be important, it is not necessary for grammaticalization to take place, and that it also occurs in language changes different from grammaticalization. Heine et al. (1991) and Heine & Kuteva (2007: 40–41) also speak of decategorialization in grammaticalization processes. Through decategorialization, a linguistic expression is likely to lose morphological and syntactic properties that were characteristic of its initial category but which are not central for the new grammatical function. For example, in English a number of gerund forms, such as barring, concerning, and considering, came to acquire prepositional functions. This development led such forms to lose a number of properties normally associated with the morphological category of verbs: e.g. the possibility of taking auxiliaries, and of being inflected for tense and aspect.

At the phonological level, morphemes can undergo phonetic erosion or cliticization (Heine & Kuteva 2007: 42ff.). In Himmelmann’s (2004) view, such changes result in a set of expansions (cf. Section 2.2.2): host-class expansion, in which expressions are generalized to more collocational contexts, syntactic expansion, in which expressions come to acquire new syntactic functions, and semantic-pragmatic expansion.