Motivations underlying grammaticalization

We will now turn to grammaticalization theory with a view to reconstructing possible motivations underlying grammatical change. More specifically, the question we wish to look into is the following: What induces people to design new forms of grammatical expression? The literature on grammaticalization is rich with hypotheses that have been volunteered to answer this question. Looking at a wider range of processes of grammatical change, it would seem that it is in particular the catalogue of motivations proposed in (4) that can be reconstructed. These motivations are by no means mutually exclusive; as we will see below, more than one of them can be involved in a given instance of grammatical change and it remains frequently unclear what the relative contribution of each of them is in the rise of new functional categories.

(4) Motivations for grammaticalization

a. To express abstract concepts.

b. To express complex concepts.

c. To be social.

d. To be ‘‘extravagant’’.

e. To speak like people using other languages do.

We will now look at each of these motivations in turn.

To express abstract concepts One strategy for finding expressions for abstract concepts consists of extending the use of forms for concrete (e.g. physically defined) entities to denote abstract concepts. For example, terms for body parts (e.g. English front, back, head) are a constant source of grammaticalization for expressions of spatial orientation, as in the case of the English prepositions in front of, in back of, ahead of, and these may further develop into temporal markers (ahead of time). In a similar fashion, verbs serving the expression of physical actions, such as English go, keep, or use are grammaticalized to fairly abstract markers for tense and aspect, as in He’s going to come, He keeps complaining, or He used to wear ties (see “The present approach”) while we will not expect a tense or aspect marker to develop into a verb denoting physically defined actions.

A survey of the data that have become available suggests that this is the primary motivation of grammaticalization—on a rough estimate, it accounts for more than half of all instances of the processes that have become known.

To express complex concepts In a similar fashion, forms for less complex concepts tend to be used to also express concepts that are more complex in content. For example, demonstrative pronouns, such as English this or that, typically refer to concrete concepts such as a person or an object, for example This is an apple. But in many languages, including English, they have been grammaticalized to refer also to complex contents, such as propositional information, for example This (= what you say) is not true. Another example is provided by the grammaticalization from adposition to conjunction: Adpositions, such as the English prepositions after, before, for, etc., first served as heads of noun phrases (e.g. after dinner) before their use can be extended to express more complex, propositional contents, that is to introduce subordinate clauses (e.g. After he had mailed the letter). Furthermore, cognitive, speech-act, and various other verbs tend to grammaticalize their complements from noun phrases (e.g. I know that person) to clauses (e.g. I know that he did not tell the truth.

Expressing complex concepts is a motivation that Pinker and Jackendoff view as being decisive for language genesis: These authors claim that ‘‘the language faculty evolved in the human lineage for the communication of complex propositions’’ (Pinker and Jackendoff 2005: 204). In fact, this motivation is fairly common, second only to (8a), accounting for a considerable portion of cases of grammaticalization.

To be social That social interaction, and social bonding, was a major function of early language has been claimed in particular by Dunbar (1998, 2004). In fact, another motivation that can be reconstructed on the basis of findings on grammatical change, even if it appears to be less common than either (8a) or (8b), is to look for linguistic expressions that are taken to be most appropriate in a given context of social interaction, for example to act in accordance with social norms or to impose social norms on others. Obviously, this motivation is reflected most of all in dialogue situations, where speakers and hearers search for suitable forms for addressing one another.

A few examples may illustrate this point. One goal that surfaces from cases of grammaticalization concerns the expression of social distance. Well known examples are provided by deferential noun phrases in some Romance languages that were grammaticalized to personal pronouns for ‘you’: Spanish Vuestra Merced and Portuguese Vossa Mercê, both meaning ‘Your Grace’, or Italian La Vostra Signoria ‘Your Lordship’ turned into second person pronouns (Spanish Usted, Portuguese Você, Italian Lei; see Head 1978: 185 V.). Another goal concerns the avoidance of direct reference, where the speaker uses concepts from other domains of experience for addressing the hearer or to refer to himself (Heine 2002b). Perhaps the most common strategy to introduce what is felt to be socially appropriate forms of address is pluralization, whereby the use of second- or third person plural pronouns is extended to second-person singular address. Paradigm examples are found in highly stratified societies; thus, the last emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Sellasie, spoke of himself as əɲɲa ‘we’ and expected to be addressed in the plural (Zelealem Leyew, p.c.), and a similar situation obtained in the late Roman empire, where the emperor spoke of himself as nos ‘we’ and he was addressed by means of the plural pronoun vos (you.PL), which thereby acquired a new, additional meaning, namely that of denoting a singular referent. In medieval Europe, generally, the nobility used the second-person singular form to the common people but received the plural form. Later on, this distinction was extended from social rank to social relation, leading to a situation whereby in many western European languages there arose a grammatical distinction between two forms of second-person singular reference.

The creation of such new forms of address and pronouns is not commonly considered to be a case of grammaticalization; still, it is in accordance with two major parameters of grammaticalization: Extension has the effect that existing forms are extended to new contexts, for example plural pronouns are used in contexts involving singular referents; desemanticization means that in these new contexts part of the old meaning (e.g. plural reference or spatial deixis) is bleached out. It is not unusual for erosion to be involved as well, in that the new category may lose in phonetic substance, as has happened perhaps most dramatically in the case of address forms such as Spanish Vuestra Merced, being reduced to Usted ‘you’.

Motivation (4c) is clearly less common than the preceding two motivations, and it differs from them in being a more peripheral strategy of grammaticalization, in that it does not lead to the rise of more abstract meanings, nor does it always involve decategorialization. But in the same way as the other motivations, its application involves unidirectionality, leading from plural to singular forms, from third-person to second-person reference, from spatial to personal deixis, etc., that is, hardly ever in the opposite direction.

To be ‘‘extravagant’’ Extravagance, that is, ‘‘to talk in such a way that you are noticed’’ (Haspelmath 1999a) is the factor that Haspelmath considers to be not only the main motivation underlying grammaticalization but also the one that he holds responsible for the unidirectionality principle of grammatical development.¹ This factor has been pointed out by a number of other authors, usually referring to it as ‘‘expressivity’’, or as the expressive function of language. Hurford (2003: 46) draws attention to the human capacity for social manipulation: When a human speaks, she or he does so with some estimation of how her hearers will react. This is an important factor in grammaticalization: Speakers constantly propose novel, and sometimes ‘‘ungrammatical’’ expressions. Most of these novel uses will not be accepted, that is, re-used by the hearer, and will fall into oblivion. But in some rare cases, such novel uses may be accepted and thereby turn into new grammatical use patterns or even into new functional categories.

Haspelmath’s reason for proposing what he calls the maxim of extravagance is the following:

The crucial point is that speakers not only want to be clear or ‘‘expressive’’, sometimes they also want their utterance to be imaginative and vivid—they want to be little ‘‘extravagant poets’’ in order to be noticed, at least occasionally. (Haspelmath 1999a: 1057)

Compelling evidence that extravagance is instrumental in triggering certain kinds of language change is provided by the development of intensifiers, especially intensifiers on adjectives expressing the notion ‘very’.² Intensifiers are coming and going at all times, and they arise via a canonical process of grammaticalization; we will return to this process in “Who were the creators of early language?”. While this example is a fairly uncontroversial manifestation of extravagance, in many other cases it is hard to separate it from other motivations since it tends to be involved in many processes which also involve (4a) or (4b). Depending on whether one adopts a broad or a narrow definition of this notion, extravagance will either be seen as a more general motivation, as Haspelmath sees it, or as a more specific one, as we suggest in this work.

To speak like people using other languages do In much of the work on grammatical change there is an implicit or explicit assumption to the effect that grammaticalization is a language-internal process while contact induced change is externally motivated. As is suggested by more recent observations (Heine and Kuteva 2003, 2005, 2006), this assumption is in need of revision. It would seem, in fact, that one further motivation of grammaticalization consists of creating new usage patterns and functional categories by replicating categories from other languages. Replication means, as a rule, that speakers use parameters of grammaticalization to design new grammatical structures in language A on the model of language B, with which they are in contact, and in doing so they draw on linguistic forms available in language A. For example, in the earlier history of the Basque language there was no indefinite article, while the surrounding Romance languages Spanish, French, and Gascon had indefinite articles. As a result of centuries of close contact with these Romance languages, speakers of Basque grammaticalized their numeral for ‘one’, bat, to an indefinite article. This was by no means an isolated case of contact-induced grammaticalization; as Haase (1992) demonstrates, it was only one out of a large number of instances of grammatical replication that Basque speakers introduced on the model of their dominant Romance neighbor languages, and it is also not the only case where a European language grammaticalized its numeral for ‘one’ to an indefinite article as a result of language contact; see Heine and Kuteva (2006) for more examples.

Contact-induced grammaticalization is a young Weld of study and at the present stage of research it is hard to assess generally what its contribution to grammatical change is. Since it follows the same principles as grammaticalization that does not involve language contact, many instances of it can simultaneously be interpreted with reference to the other motivations mentioned above. For example, numerals for ‘one’ are fairly concrete referential entities whereas specific reference, which tends to be the main function of indefinite articles, is a more abstract concept. Accordingly, when Basque speakers grammaticalized bat from numeral to indefinite article on the model of Romance languages, they did so also in accordance with motivation (4a). Since our concern is with language as it arose for the first time, language contact is not an issue that we need to be concerned with here.

Other possible motivations In addition, a number of other factors have been proposed. One of them is structural simplification, in that grammaticalization is argued to simplify syntactic structure by changing the nature and/or number of movement operations (Roberts and Roussou 2003; van Gelderen 2004). That such a motivation exists can in fact be maintained if one subscribes to linguistic theories based on assumptions of parsimony or economy of linguistic description, where movement or other syntactic operations are proposed to be central components of linguistic analysis. If one does not adhere to such theories then there does not appear to be any need to assume a motivation of this kind; on the contrary, one could argue that the creation of new functional categories can make syntactic structure more complex rather than simplifying it. We may illustrate this with the following example. One common strategy for designing new functional categories is by means of periphrastic constructions. The German present tense expresses both present and future, for example Er kommt morgen (he comes tomorrow) ‘He’ll come tomorrow’. Nevertheless, German speakers have developed a new future tense category by means of the verb werden ‘become’ plus the infinitival main verb, for example Er wird morgen kommen (he becomes tomorrow to.come) ‘He’ll come tomorrow’. Rather than simplifying the grammar of German, this new tense made it more complex: Instead of the simple verb-medial (SVO) syntax of the present tense, it requires a more complex verb-final (SOV) syntax, where the main verb is separated from the tense auxiliary by object and/or adverbial constituents. In a similar fashion, introducing the locative preposition in front of in English involved a fairly complex process, whereby the morphosyntax of a possessive construction was required to express a simple spatial concept.

And much the same applies to another factor that has been proposed, according to which grammaticalization makes language production easier. Newmeyer (1998a: 276) argues that lexical categories require more production effort than functional categories, hence a change from the former to the latter is far more common than vice versa, and he concludes: ‘‘All other things being equal, a child confronted with the option of reanalyzing a verb as an auxiliary or reanalyzing an auxiliary as a verb will choose the former.’’ While this may be so, Newmeyer’s hypothesis does not account for the fact mentioned above, namely that the introduction of new functional categories frequently involves fairly complex grammatical constructions. It is hardly plausible to argue that German speakers created the periphrastic future category to make the production effort easier, especially since there was no really pressing need to create such a category: The expression of future was—and still is—very well taken care of by the existing present tense; in fact, in spoken German the periphrastic future is hardly used. And much the same applies to the creation of the English preposition in front of: Drawing on an adverbial phrase which acts as the head of a possessive construction would seem to require quite some production effort for the simple purpose of expressing a schematic grammatical function.

The list of motivations distinguished above is by no means exhaustive, it is confined to factors that surface most commonly, or for which there is appropriate crosslinguistic evidence. One may mention that there are additional motivations, such as euphemism, or playful language use (see also Heine 2003). What this discussion suggests is that grammaticalization cannot easily be reduced to one particular motivation; rather, there seems to be a cluster of different goals contributing to it.

¹ Haspelmath (1999: 1058) proposes the following scale of grammatical development: extravagance > increased frequency > routinization > obligatoriness > rule.

² An alternative label proposed is degree adverb. The term ‘‘intensifier’’ has been used in a wide range of different functions; more recently, it has come to be widely used for what is traditionally called ‘‘emphatic reflexive’’.

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Cognitive versus generative models

Who were the creators of early language?

Functions of early language Discussion

Cognition or communication?

Functions of early language

Word order

From non-language to language

Grammatical evolution Layers

Early language

On the rise of recursion Conclusions

Generative approaches to grammar

Loss of recursion