3 - Grammaticalization

Summary

Summarizing some of his findings on language contact in the Balkans, Victor Friedman observes that

the structural convergences called Balkanisms, among which grammaticalized status can be counted, must have begun as discourse-bound variations that resulted in part from communicative needs and desires of multilingual speakers and in part from competing grammatical systems. Balkanisms began as variation when speakers of different languages attempted to communicate more effectively and mediated between the languages of their interlocutors and the structures of their native languages. The place of any given Balkanism in the systems of the various languages can be described in terms of a continuum from pragmatically conditioned variation to grammaticalization, which in turn suggests that discourse functions are not merely subject to borrowing but actually serve as entry points for the development of structural change.

(Friedman 2003: 110)

Discourse-bound, pragmatically conditioned variation was discussed in chapter 2 in terms of use patterns. The present chapter highlights the second phase of the process leading to fixed grammatical templates: It is concerned with the emergence of new functional categories and constructions (see also Heine & Kuteva 2003).

The mechanism

As the preceding chapter may have shown, the transfer of grammatical information from one language to another without involving any linguistic forms is perhaps more widespread than has previously been thought. In its initial stages, replication tends to involve pieces of discourse that acquire higher text frequency, are extended to new contexts, and gradually come to be associated with new grammatical functions.