Читать книгу Multiple Preverbs in Ancient Indo-European Languages - Chiara Zanchi - Страница 23

Gradualness is a concept that affects linguistic change in general and grammaticalization in particular, and as such it is spread throughout diachronic stages. Gradualness can be understood as a two-fold concept. First, it describes how a linguistic change propagates among new groups of speakers, different situational contexts, and various stages of language. Second, it concerns the structural propagation of change: “gradualness refers to the fact that most change involves (a series of) micro-changes” (Traugott & Trousdale 2010: 23). Each step in this process represents an intermediate construction type in structural terms (Croft 2001: 313). In fact, by virtue of gradualness, more than one intermediate step in change may coexist in the same individual or community of speakers (cf. Section 2.2.3.3).

In contrast with Traugott & Trousdale (2010), who regard grammaticalization as a sequence of discrete changes, no matter how small these are, DeLancey (2001) conceives of the whole grammaticalization as a continuum: the distinguishing of a number of discrete processes only results from linguists’ idealization. Such processes need not be laid out in a strict serial order. However, some of them are likely to trigger other successive processes by providing them with the necessary conditions for development.

In this work the stages of grammaticalization are described mainly using DeLancey’s model (2001). First, the essential precondition for grammaticalization is a productive syntactic construction: a lexeme or some lexemes must frequently occur in certain constructions owing to some semantic or pragmatic motivations. By virtue of their frequency, such constructions undergo conventionalization, or in DeLancey’s terms “undergo a functional specialization” (e.g. the face of NP, finish VP, and so on). In what one may call usage-based models of language, frequency is invoked as one of the main forces, or even as the main force, driving grammaticalization, or even linguistic change in general (cf. e.g. Bybee & Hopper 2001; Bybee 2011).

At a later stage, such a construction undergoes semantic bleaching (as defined above), and consequently acquires the possibility of being used in a wider range of contexts. Notably, such a construction also occurs in contexts conflicting with its original and more specific meaning. For example, when the noun front becomes a part of the adposition in front of, it loses the portion of its meaning that directly refers to the human body (Heine & Kuteva 2007: 40).

The next stage involves decategorialization (or recategorialization; cf. Heine et. al. 1991; Heine & Kuteva 2007; Section 2.2.3): the construction loses (some of) the morphosyntactic behaviors characteristic of its original category. For example, as discussed in Chapter 3, as soon as Indo-European local adverbs start developing into preverbs and/or into adpositions, they lose the typical syntactic freedom of adverbs. Such categorial reassessment can have two results. The developed form can enter one of the existing morphosyntactic categories of the language. Alternatively, the form comes to show behaviors that differentiate it from all the other items of the language. In this latter case, the said form gives rise to a new morphosyntactic category. This is the case of Proto-Indo-European local adverbs undergoing functional bifurcation into preverbs and adpositions.

Finally, two other (non-obligatory) stages of grammaticalization are cliticization and morphologization. In these, the grammaticalized form loses its independency, both at the phonological and syntactic levels. For example, the grammaticalization path of Indo-European local adverbs includes the following loss of independency: local adverbs first develop into clitic preverbs, and subsequently into prefixes that cannot be displaced from their hosting verbs (cf. Chapter 3).