• Corpus ID: 15486837

Grammaticalization and the Life-Cycles of Constructions

@inproceedings{Dahl1998GrammaticalizationAT,
  title={Grammaticalization and the Life-Cycles of Constructions},
  author={{\"O}sten Dahl},
  year={1998}
}

• Östen Dahl
• Published 1998
• Linguistics

Grammaticalization is commonly seen as "a process which turns lexemes into grammatical formatives and makes grammatical formatives still more grammatical". In this paper, it is argued that grammaticalization has to be treated in the wider perspective of the life cycles of grammatical constructions. The notion of an "inflationary process" is invoked in order to explain what goes on in grammaticalization. It is argued that the degree of independence of an element of a linguistic expression reflects its informational value and that one of the main components of grammaticalization is rhetorical devaluation, by which a construction comes to be used with a lower informational impact. 1. Grammaticalization as an integrated part of the study of the life cycles of constructions After having undergone a period of what Christian Lehmann (1982) has aptly called “amnesia”, the study of grammaticalization has recently witnessed an upsurge of interest among linguists. Although it was extensively studied as a phenomenon already in the 19 th century (most often under the heading of “agglutination theory”), grammaticalization as a term is usually ascribed to Meillet (1912), whose definition is often quoted in the PRGLILFDWLRQ JLYHQ E\ .XU\áRZLF] ZKHUH LW LV VDLG WR EH 3D SURFHVV ZKLFK WXUQV lexemes into grammatical formatives and makes grammatical formatives still more grammatical”. This approach focuses on the fate of individual items such as words and morphemes. In this paper, I shall by contrast try to take a wider view, in which grammaticalization in the traditional sense is seen as an integrated part of the study of the life cycles of grammatical constructions or patterns. More specifically: what is