6 - Grammaticalisation

Summary

In the previous four chapters I have tried to evaluate the status of functional categories from a number of perspectives: typology and language description, morpho-phonology and the lexicon, semantics and pragmatics, and generative syntax. I now turn to functional categories in historical linguistics.

An important area within historical linguistics is the study of grammaticalisation processes. Grammaticalisation is the recruitment, across time, of lexical elements for grammatical purposes. Meillet (1912) was one of the first to draw attention to the phenomenon of grammaticalisation, which he defines as ‘l'attribution d'un caractère grammatical à un mot jadis autonome’ [attributing a grammatical status to a word that was autonomous before]. This definition still stands, although it is now extended to include grammaticalisation of dependent morphemes rather than words.

An example of the type of phenomena involved in grammaticalisation is the Tense Modality Aspect (TMA) system of Pichi, the English lexicon pidgin/creole of Malabo studied by Yakpo (in prep.). Pichi distinguishes a core from a non-core TMA-system, represented schematically in Tables 6.1 and 6.2. The core system in Table 6.1 is more of an integral part, in other words more grammaticalised, than the non-core system in Table 6.2.

In both tables, the Pichi particles or auxiliaries are derived from (mostly English) words with a different status and syntactic function.