Grammaticalization

Grammaticalization is a diachronic process by which grammatical items arise from constructions with lexical items.

Example

The Romance synthetic future (e.g. Spanish cantará 'will sing') was grammaticalized from a periphrastic construction consisiting of infinitive + 'have' (Latin cantare habet > cantar ha > cantará).

Synonyms

• grammaticization (used especially by Joan Bybee and her colleagues)
• agglutination (this term was used for grammaticalization in the 19th century)

Quotations

• "Grammaticalization consists in the increase of the range of a morpheme advancing from a lexical to a grammatical or from a less grammatical to a more grammatical status, e.g. from a derivative formant to an inflectional one." (Kurylowicz 1965 [1975]: 52)

Origins

The term was apparently first used by Meillet (1912).

References

• Kurylowicz, Jerzy. (1965) "The evolution of grammatical categories". Diogenes 51:55-71. (Reprinted in: Esquisses linguistiques II. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 38-54, 1975)
• Meillet, Antoine. (1921 [1912]) "L'évolution des formes grammaticales". In: Linguistique historique et linguistique générale (ed. Édouard Champion). Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 130-148.