Deflexion

Abstract

Deflexion is the loss of inflectional categories. While phonological change has been traditionally assumed to be the main cause of deflexion as affixes ‘wear away’, more recent work has pointed to the importance of language contact as another important factor in the simplification of inflectional systems. This entry gives an overview of what is known about how deflexion proceeds and presents some examples of the effects on other parts of the grammar of a language that have been treated as arising from deflexion. The role that deflexion has played in producing inflectional systems that typologists have identified as being rare is explored. In historical studies within traditional grammar, the inflection found in some stages of languages undergoing deflexion is treated as confused, but some case studies have indicated that the differences with respect to an earlier stage of the language reflect a reorganization of inflectional systems rather than confusion. A large portion of the entry is devoted to the idea that the loss of grammatical categories serves as a trigger for various syntactic changes, such as fixed word order resulting from the loss of case in English and pro‐drop becoming no longer possible in languages when they lose verbal inflectional categories. Closer scrutiny of the stages of the languages where links between deflexion and syntactic change have been proposed show that any such links are not simple, and additional detailed case studies of individual languages are needed to understand the exact nature of such links. The entry ends by looking at the role deflexion has played in the ongoing debate about the unidirectionality of grammaticalization.