2 - On replicating use patterns

Summary

Ever since the term grammaticalization was used for the first time in 1912 and even earlier, since the time of the neo-grammarians, grammatical change has been studied from the perspective of “competence” rather than “performance,” or even better, of structure or langue rather than of parole. What has been achieved within the framework of grammaticalization theory is the establishment of a whole pool of cross-linguistically attestable developments. But when it comes to the question of what is the selective mechanism for a particular development to happen in a particular language, the study of grammaticalization has not moved much from where it started over one hundred years ago. More and more linguists have come to realize in recent years that what needs to be done is to show how actual language use feeds into language structure.

The model we propose in this chapter is meant to meet precisely this need. Grammatical replication resulting from language contact is discussed in terms of two descriptive notions, referred to respectively as use patterns and grammatical (or functional) categories. The former, to be discussed in section 2.1, relate to the way linguistic discourses are organized, while grammatical categories, the subject of chapter 3, are described in terms of canonical labels used in grammatical descriptions: they concern stable, conventionalized form–meaning units serving the expression of grammatical functions. By using these contrasting notions for analyzing grammatical replication we aim at capturing two different manifestations of the process concerned.