Michael Noonan

William Pagliuca

Ram Prasad Bhulanja

Jag Man Chhantyal

Volumes in the Trends in Linguistics. Documentation series focus on the presentation of linguistic data. The series addresses the sustained interest in linguistic descriptions, dictionaries, grammars and editions of under-described and hitherto undocumented languages. All world-regions and time periods are represented.

Chantyal Dictionary and Texts

This is the second of two volumes deriving from papers presented at the Nineteenth Annual UWM linguistics Symposium held in Milwaukee in 1990. It focuses on the evolution of grammatical form and meaning from lexical material, which has reinvigorated historical analysis and theory and led to advances in the understanding of the relation between diachrony and universals. The richness and potential of some of the leading approaches to grammaticalization are here illustrated in thirteen selected papers.

Perspectives on Grammaticalization

Joan Bybee

Professor of Linguistics Joan Bybee

Revere Perkins

Joan Bybee and her colleagues present a new theory of the evolution of grammar that links structure and meaning in a way that directly challenges most contemporary versions of generative grammar. This study focuses on the use and meaning of grammatical markers of tense, aspect, and modality and identifies a universal set of grammatical categories. The authors demonstrate that the semantic content of these categories evolves gradually and that this process of evolution is strikingly similar across unrelated languages. Through a survey of seventy-six languages in twenty-five different phyla, the authors show that the same paths of change occur universally and that movement along these paths is in one direction only. This analysis reveals that lexical substance evolves into grammatical substance through various mechanisms of change, such as metaphorical extension and the conventionalization of implicature. Grammaticization is always accompanied by an increase in frequency of the grammatical marker, providing clear evidence that language use is a major factor in the evolution of synchronic language states. The Evolution of Grammar has important implications for the development of language and for the study of cognitive processes in general.

William Pagliuca

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