The pace of grammaticalization and the evolution of prepositional systems: Data from Romance

Abstract

It is generally assumed that grammaticalization is a major process in linguistic change. It is also assumed that grammaticalization does not affect homogeneously all linguistic categories, or even all languages: it has been said, for instance, that some languages are further down most grammaticalization clines than others and, thus, appear to be more grammaticalized than others. In this paper, we illustrate the uneven pace of grammaticalization in Romance by analysing a specific area of language, viz. simple and complex prepositions. Our goal is to establish a list of prepositions which are in actual use in five present-day Romance languages (to wit, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish). In order to do so, we check the validity of existing lists against written and spoken corpora, and evaluate the degree of grammaticalization of each morpheme or construction, on the basis of (mainly) morpho-syntactic criteria. Additionally, and most importantly, a corpus-based approach makes it possible to observe these items' frequency. The result offers a clear picture of the degree of grammaticalization of prepositions in present-day Romance, showing that French seems indeed to be the most grammaticalized Romance language, followed by Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian.

Syntactic and semantic aspects of Romance complementizers

“…This is the case for instance of determiners, with three paradigms in French and only two in almost all other Romance varieties (Carlier 2007): French has a partitive article which is absent or not completely grammaticalized elsewhere (in Lehmann's terms, the degree of grammaticalization is higher in French on account of paradigmaticity, Lehmann 1995: 123). Similar accounts can be given for demonstratives (Marchello-Nizia 2006: 178), auxiliaries and tense, aspect and modality markers (Lamiroy 1999;De Mulder 2001;De Mulder & Lamiroy 2012); this analysis could even be extended to other areas of language, such as conjunctions, prepositions and discourse markers (Fagard 2010;Fagard & Mardale 2012).…”

The Grammaticalization of Catalan anar (‘to go’) + Infinitive for the Expression of Perfective Past: A Diachronic, Corpus-Based Perspective

“…Over the course of the last two decades, grammaticalization processes found in a variety of world languages have received increased scholarly attention-especially from theory-based, qualitative perspectives (Cuenca 2001, Montserrat i Buendia 2004) (Note 4). Research on grammaticalization has traditionally been comprised of caseby-case studies, although in more recent times some studies are found that focus comprehensively on a particular language and-even more recently-comparative analysis across languages (Fagard & Mardale 2012, Iacobini 2012. Along these lines, a significant publication that has paved the path for further, more in-depth research within the field of research in grammaticalization is found in the handbook written by Hopper and Traugott (2003).…”

The position of Piedmontese on the Romance grammaticalization cline

“…For the majority of grammaticalization phenomena, such as word order, the encoding of motion events, adversative connectives, the use of the subjunctive, the evolution of the prepositional system, etc. (see Carlier et al 2012b;Fagard and Mardale 2012;Giacalone Ramat and Mauri 2012;Iacobini 2012;Lahousse and Lamiroy 2012), Romance languages can be situated along a scale, where French is ahead of Italian and Italian is ahead of Spanish. These findings are visualized in (1) (adapted from Lamiroy and De Mulder 2011;Carlier et al 2012a: passim;De Mulder and Lamiroy 2012: 200):…”