Complexity Development and Simplification in Systemic Typology: Types of Changes in the Internal Determinant

Abstract

The article deals with a developmental cline of the ego-et-nunc communicative scope in Slavic versus Germanic and Romance. The author posits a two pathway grammaticalization for the Indo-European ego-et-nunc communicative scope progressing along the axis of syntheticity and the axis of analyticity respectively. The prospective perspective (aspect) is typical of Slavic while the retrospective perspective is observed in the analytic Western European languages. Each of the two grammaticalization pathways is characterized by four possible changes as determined by particular configurations of the societal factors (synthetic complexification, synthetic simplification, analytic simplification, analytic complexification). The author places the systematic typology of Mel'nikov in a wider context of areal-typological and genealogical research. 1 The here-and-now is initially encoded, to use Fleischman's (1983) terminology, as an "aspect of retrospection" for the present perfect tense with the "resultative meaning" tending to get regrammatized as preterite (see Drinka 2017: 58-72), and an "aspect of prospection" for the