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13. Morphologization from Syntax : The Handbook of Historical Linguistics : Blackwell Reference Online
12/11/2007 03:36 PM
13. Morphologization from Syntax
BRIAN D. JOSEPH
Subject
Linguistics
»
Historical Linguistics
Key-Topics
morphology
,
syntax
DOI:
10.1111/b.9781405127479.2004.00015.x
It is clear that the set of changes effected by speakers in their languages include those that are often
labelled “grammaticalization,” “grammaticization,” or even “grammatization.” This notion is variously
defined,
1
but especially in recent years, almost always in such a way as to refer to something that, first of
all, morphemes do, as opposed to (referring to) what is done by speakers, and that, second, echoes the
characterization of Kurylowicz (1965: 52): “an increase of the range of a morpheme advancing from a lexical
to a grammatical or from a less grammatical to a more grammatical status.” Indeed, several other chapters in
this volume - those by Bybee, Fortson, Harrison, Heine, Hock, Mithun, Rankin, and Traugott, to be exact -
are concerned, to one degree or another, with grammaticalization.
As Heine's chapter points out, the notion of “grammaticalization” has been extended by many practitioners
to cover other sorts of change than strictly the movement of an item along a scale (“cline”) of increasing
grammatical status (from content word > grammatical word > clitic > inflectional affix, cf. Hopper and
Traugott 1993: 7), and thus Kuryłowicz's definition is probably too narrow. McMahon (1994a: 160), for
instance, notes that grammaticalization encompasses essentially all types of language change, since
“grammaticalization is not only a syntactic change, but a global change affecting also the morphology,
phonology and semantics.”
2
Still, Kurylowicz's definition is generally accepted as a basic characterization of
grammaticalization, and it is so endorsed by Heine (this volume).
In the present chapter, by contrast, a rather different angle on the emergence of grammatical elements and
related phenomena is taken. In particular, the focus here is on what can be called “morphologization,” in a
particular sense - a set of developments by which some element or elements in a language that are not a
matter of morphology at one stage come to reside in a morphological component - or at least to become
morphological in type
3
- at a later stage.
4
For example, within Romance linguistics
5
it is generally agreed
that the French adverb-forming suffix
-ment
, as in
clairement
‘clearly’ (cf.
clair
‘clear/MASC.SG’), is a reflex
of the ablative case of the Latin feminine noun
ment
- ‘mind’ (nominative singular
mens
) as used in adjective
+ noun phrasal combinations serving as adverbials, for example,
clarã mente
‘with a clear mind’ (where
clarã
is an ablative singular feminine form agreeing with the noun it is modifying); a reanalysis and/or shift
in phrasal status to word-level status seems to have occurred, resulting in monolectal forms in French such
as
clairement
.
6
Thus what was once in Latin a matter of syntax, that is, a combination of free words forming
a noun phrase that was case marked so as to function adverbially, became in French a matter of
morphology, that is, the output or result of word-formation processes that yield a derived word. But this
case is also a stock example of grammaticalization (see Hopper and Traugott 1993: 130–1), so some
differentiation between grammaticalization and morphologization is needed in order to show their
distinctness (as in Gaeta 1998, for instance).
Thus, the goal of this chapter is to discuss various aspects of morphologization, especially in comparison
with the by-now more familiar notion of grammaticalization, and to present an extended case study
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with the by-now more familiar notion of grammaticalization, and to present an extended case study
examining one example in some detail. The case in point is the change in Medieval and Modern Greek by
which earlier speakers’ use of a periphrastic (i.e., multi-word and thus syntactic) future-marking formation,
consisting of the verb
thélõ
and a complement verb, yielded to later speakers’ use of a monolectal future in
the modern language -one with an apparently prefixal marker [θa-] attached to an inflected verb form.
Meillet (1912) wrote about this case as a paradigm example of grammaticalization, and it has been
mentioned elsewhere in the grammaticalization literature, as well (e.g., Hopper and Traugott 1993: 24;
McMahon 1994a: 167).
7
1 Scope and Motivation for Two Types of Morphologization
There are two directions for morphologization: either something that is syntactic at one stage can turn into
morphology (the major focus of this chapter), or something that is a matter of phonology at one stage can
become morphological (as discussed by Janda, this volume). These directions could be characterized as
morphologization from above and morphologization from below, respectively, reflecting the customary view
of the components of grammar as hierarchically arranged from the level of sound “up to” the level of
sentence structure, though nothing crucial hinges on this characterization.
Elsewhere, in Joseph and Janda (1988), these two types of morphologization have been referred to as
desyntacticizing
and
dephonologizing
, respectively. Although they can be given these different labels, they
are actually quite similar, having the same outcome, that is, morphology, and the same motivation.
In particular, both reflect a preference on the part of speakers for what Joseph and Janda refer to as
“localized” solutions to the problem of how to account for a given phenomenon in language, for example,
marking for some category or a particular combination of elements. “Localized” solutions range over small
sets of data rather than being widely applicable, and are general only in a very local sense, covering perhaps
just a few forms. Reduplication in Sanskrit provides examples of such local generalizations, since the
patterns of reduplication found, for instance, in the perfect tense formations, including (where V = a vowel
that usually copies the root vocalism) V-, VV-, CV-, and occasionally even CVV-, as well as the highly
specific
ãn
-, tend to cluster around particular root types, such as V- with roots that begin with
v-, ãn
- with
certain vowel-initial roots, CV- with alteration of the root-initial consonant with a handful of roots, CV- as
the default case, and so on. Significantly, also, local generalizations tend to result from, and show
fragmentation of, once quite general phenomena - perfect tense reduplication in Proto-Indo-European, for
instance, was almost exclusively
8
CV - and thus they suggest that speakers focus on the analysis of just a
restricted set of data at a time, and therefore come up with quite particularized analyses.
9
That is to say,
speakers view language through a relatively small “window” at any given time, and thus the size of their
focal area is relatively small.
10
This access to only limited data at a given time translates into solutions that
are cast in terms of highly particular properties of stems, affixes, and the like, and which are usually best
accommodated in the morphology, since phonological solutions are usually to be interpreted quite generally,
referring as they do to properties of sound only; thus local generalizations, being defined often in terms of
idiosyncrasies and sometimes extending only over a few forms, are usually morphological in nature, as well
as quite concrete, in that they are based on surface representations and categories that are overtly marked
rather than on abstract properties of phonological form.
In that way, Joseph and Janda claimed, speakers opt for morphological accounts over phonological or
syntactic ones whenever the analysis of a given phenomenon offers any ambiguity as to the extent of its
generality. It was further argued there that grammars should therefore be viewed as being “morphocentric,”
or more accurately, “morpholexicocentric” (see below), with a greater role for the morphological component,
in order to explain this preference speakers give to morphological accounts.
It must be realized that the lexicon is taken here to be connected closely with the morphological component,
and thus is part of what is to be considered “the morphology” of a language. The lexicon, after all, is where
(at least root) morphemes are found and where (at least) idiosyncratic information about morphemes
resides.
11
Thus references to “morphological” phenomena here include “morpholexical” information as well.
Morphology, after all, is concerned with form and the relation of form to meaning in most traditional
views,
12
so any aspect of language that is concerned with form, as the lexicon must necessarily be, is fair
game for being subsumed under - or at least tightly allied with - morphology. Moreover, in many
frameworks, even elements with internal syntax are listed in the lexicon, for example, adjective-noun
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frameworks, even elements with internal syntax are listed in the lexicon, for example, adjective-noun
combinations with specialized meanings such as
Cold War
,
13
a move that is in keeping with the expanded
view of the role of morphology and the morphological/morpholexical component in language implicit in the
notion of “morphocentricity.”
14
The scope of morphology can thus be quite large, and consequently there is a wide range of phenomena
that can be said to show morphologization, that is, movement into the morphology, assuming of course that
one can devise a heuristic for determining when the boundaries have been crossed (see below, section 3).
2 Morphologization and Grammaticalization Distinguished
As noted at the beginning of this chapter, there is some overlap between the notion of morphologization as
developed here (drawing on Joseph and Janda 1988) and that of grammaticalization, discussed in this volume
and elsewhere. Yet, there are significant differences of approach, method, and substance between the two
that provide a rationale for taking a morphologization viewpoint on various changes and not simply treating
them as instances of grammaticalization.
15
For one thing, there are phenomena in language which are (already) clearly grammatical in their function but
which nonetheless undergo changes in the direction of greater involvement in the morphological component.
For instance, the changes to be discussed concerning the Greek future started with a grammatical usage of
the verb
thélõ
, which meant ‘want’ as an ordinary lexical verb, in a periphrasis indicating futurity; as
becomes clear below, these changes were such that the realization of the marking for futurity passed from
being a matter of syntax (i.e., word combination) to being a matter of morphology (i.e., word formation).
Thus, there is clearly morphologization in this example by the definition given above, but is there
grammaticalization? There might be, but only if grammaticalization is taken to involve movement along a
“cline” by which expression via morphology, for example with an affix, is “more grammatical” than
expression via syntax (cf. Kurylowicz's definition, given above). However, such a cline is completely
stipulative, for there are free words that have grammatical functions, such as English
of
or French
de
,
various complementizers such as English
that
and
whether
or French
à
, pronouns, etc., as well as affixes
that have no grammatical function at all, such as the empty
-al
that (descriptively speaking) can be added
for some English speakers to
syntactic
to form
syntactical
(note that both are adjectives and that they are
synonymous) or the equally empty
-y
that (again from a descriptive standpoint) some English speakers add
to
competence
to give
competency
, and so on. Thus there is no necessary correlation between an item's
place on the cline and its degree of grammatical involvement. Grammaticalization theorists recognize this
issue to some extent; Lehmann (1985: 306), for instance, gives six criteria - attrition, condensation,
paradigmaticization, coalescence, obligatorification, and fixation
16
- and claims that an item lines up at
equivalent points with regard to each one as it “grammaticalizes.” However, each of these properties is in
principle independent of the others, so that demanding a grouping of all of them involves a stipulation that
one needs to have all six, and in equal measures, to have movement along the grammaticalization cline.
Similarly, as noted in section 1, there are two directions of development that can lead to morphologization,
and desyntacticizing morphologization can readily be linked to dephonologizing morphologization via their
common outcome (morphology) and common motivation (localized generalization by speakers). When viewed
from within a grammaticalization framework, however, it is not at all obvious why
morphological/morpholexical determination for a given phenomenon, as opposed to determination via
regular and general phonological conditions, should be considered to be more grammatical and thus should
have anything to do with or anything in common with, for instance, the movement from syntactically
determined to morphologically/morpholexically determined. For example, marking noun plurals via an affix
that happens to have a regular, exceptionless, phonological effect on a root, such that it would be accounted
for by a purely phonological rule, does not seem
a priori
to be less grammatical in any meaningful sense
than marking plural via an affix that alters the vocalism of a root in ways that vary from one lexical item or
lexical class to another and thus requires a morpholexically particularistic account;
17
nonetheless,
grammaticalization “theory” wants to link such a change in the nature of the concomitant phonological
effects with the change from phrasal to affixal expression of adverbials or futures or the like as being the
same type of change.
18
Such a linkage is straightforward when viewed from the perspective of
morphologization, since in both cases there is greater involvement of the morphology, but not necessarily so
at all from a grammaticalization perspective.
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at all from a grammaticalization perspective.
Moreover, as noted above, grammaticalization proponents recently have been claiming an ever broader
domain of applicability for this notion, whereas such is not the case with morphologization. Yet there are
changes in language and grammar that do not involve any of the typical characteristics of
grammaticalization. Regular sound change, for instance, under the Neogrammarian view (see Hale, this
volume), is purely phonetically conditioned and almost by definition has no grammatical involvement at all.
Also, a change such as the polarization in word order by which speakers of English have come to
differentiate the perfect
I have written the letter
from the resultative
I have the letter written
, moving
away from earlier English variability in ordering for both types,
19
seems not to involve any cluster of the
characteristics said to be typical of grammaticalization.
20
Admittedly, these changes do not involve
morphologization either, but the concept of morphologization makes no claims about such changes, whereas
grammaticalization, in some instantiations at least, does.
Similarly, there are changes in the direction of greater morpholexical involvement that do not involve
grammar, and thus can be accommodated within the concept of morphologization but not
grammaticalization. Relevant here are the sorts of reductions seen, for instance, in German
heute
‘today’
from a presumed instrumental phrase
hiu tagu*
in Old High German, or
heuer
‘this year’ from the OHG
instrumental phrase
hiu jaru
. It is not clear that anything relevant to grammaticalization has taken place, for
this combination of sounds is as grammatical (or not, as the case may be) before the phrase was reduced as
it is afterwards. Yet, as Hopper and Traugott (1993: 23) note regarding
heute
, “there surely is a difference in
Modern German between
heute
and
an diesem Tage
‘on this day’ that needs to be characterized in some
way”; grammaticalization really does not provide a way, yet morphologization is exactly what is involved
here.
In fact, the only way that
hiu tagu > heute
might be said to be relevant to grammaticalization is under the
interpretation Hopper (1994) makes concerning what he calls “phonogenesis,” defined by him as “the
process whereby new syntagmatic phonological segments are created out of old morphemes” (p. 31). He
explicitly refers to phonogenesis as “an advanced stage of
grammaticalization”
(ibid.), noting that there is
generally “phonological reduction that accompanies grammaticalization” (ibid., and see the reference above
in section 2 to Lehmann's “attrition” and “coalescence”). While there is no denying that such developments
occur - and indeed, Hopper presents a large number of well-known and not-so-well-known cases, mostly
from English, by way of illustrating the phenomenon, such as the
-nd
of
friend
and
fiend
reflecting an old
present particpial ending now lacking in any obvious meaning - the terminology and definition seem
particularly inappropriate and the linkage with grammaticalization is at best fortuitous.
For one thing, there is nothing grammatical about such material; if anything, what
-nd
has undergone might
be termed “degrammaticalization,” at least by the usual definitions of grammaticalization, for there is a
movement out of being, in some sense, a grammatical formative. Admittedly, this criticism may involve
taking the terminology of grammaticalization too much at face value, but given generally accepted
formulations of grammaticalization, an extension of the notion is needed if “phonogenesis” is to be
subsumed under the same rubric as the development of the French adverbial marker
-ment
. Furthermore,
calling the accretion of material onto a word “phonogenesis” implies that the material added, the element
that was once a morpheme in Hopper's formulation,
21
had no phonic value when it was a morpheme.
However, whether
-nd
was a recognizable participial suffix or a meaningless string at the end of
friend
and
fiend
, it still contained a sequence of sounds; the morphemic or non-morphemic status of that sequence
does not affect the extent to which this element adds “phonological bulk” (in Hopper's words, p. 29) to a
stem it attaches to. Thus there may be “phono-accretion,” but the sounds were already there and thus had
already undergone “genesis” at the time they constituted a morpheme; the real difference lies in the
morphological status of the sequences in question, that is, phrasal versus word status, or
compound/polymorphemic word versus monomorphemic word status. Such a difference can be readily
characterized in terms of morphologization, but not grammaticalization, and moreover, focusing on
morphological status allows such cases to be linked rather directly with the emergence of the French
adverbial suffix and similar examples in ways that grammaticalization theory can only do by stipulation and
extension of the basic notion.
22
Finally, there are methodological differences between the ways in which morphologization has been studied
and the ways in which grammaticalization has been studied. In particular, grammaticalization has now been
built into an elaborate theoretical framework, so-called “grammaticalization theory,” with a cognitive basis
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built into an elaborate theoretical framework, so-called “grammaticalization theory,” with a cognitive basis
and a stake in the putative principle of unidirectionality, by which, it is claimed, changes are always in the
direction of greater grammatical status and not, for instance, in the direction of affix to clitic or free word,
that is, in the opposite direction on the cline of grammaticalization. The existence of such “counter-
grammaticalizations,” described in the literature for several years and recently discussed and summed up,
with extensive literature, in Janda (2001), are particularly troublesome for grammaticalization proponents,
23
but pose no threat for the concept of morphologization, as discussed below in section 5.
Also, grammaticalization studies tend to ignore the somewhat more formal question of where in the
grammar a particular phenomenon is to be located, as if it is always self-evident what the answer to this
question is. Some studies do provide a basis for making a decision, for example Hopper and Traugott (1993:
4–6) regarding the distinction between clitics versus affixes, etc., but many do not, nor do all that recognize
criteria apply them in all cases.
Thus grammaticalization and morphologization indeed offer distinct perspectives on, and represent distinct
ways of viewing, changes that involve grammatical machinery and morphological/morpholexical material.
24
3 How to Tell
As suggested earlier, talking about morphologization implies that there is a way to tell whether some
phenomenon is “in the morphology” or, as is relevant for desyntacticization, “in the syntax” instead. The
most useful heuristics are those enumerated in Zwicky and Pullum (1983) and Zwicky (1985a).
They distinguish among affix, clitic, and word as types of morphological elements, drawing important
distinctions between affix and non-affix and between word and non-word. “Clitics,” then, are elements that
are neither canonical affixes nor canonical words.
25
They further identify a number of traits that are
characteristic of affixes and characteristic of words. For the most part, affixes, as morphological elements,
show various types of idiosyncrasy - they are selective as to what they attach to, they can provoke irregular
effects on the stems they occur with, their ordering is generally fixed, they tend to be prosodically
dependent, they are not subject to syntactic rules (e.g., deletions) unless the whole word they are part of is
affected,
26
and the like - while words, as syntactic elements, show a greater degree of generality, being
unselective in their combinatory possibilities, allowing reordering in response to stylistic factors, having
prosodic independence, showing a one-to-one mapping with semantic rules that give syntactic units
semantic compositionality, etc.
There are other criteria that can be helpful. For example, in the case of the Oscan locative, agreement seems
to solve the issue of what sort of analysis is warranted. Oscan innovated a locative by the agglutination of a
postposition
en
onto a noun, for example
húrtín
‘in the garden’ (Buck 1928: 114), yet what shows that this
is indeed a morphological marker of a case, as opposed to a combination of free words in a noun phrase
that undergo some phonological adjustment, is the fact that the
-ín
ending occurs on adjectives in
agreement with a locative noun marked in the same way. Thus, this new locative participates in adjective
agreement just like other cases, a feature which shows that the appearance of the
-ín
is not from a
synchronic merging of a free word onto a stem; if it were a syntactically generated postpositional word, one
would not expect it to occur both on the adjective and on the noun, unless, due to the principle of
compositionality, there were a corresponding semantic contribution from both occurrences.
Still unresolved, admittedly, is the issue of whether compounds are syntax or morphology. The case of
Romance adverbial
mente
, once again, is instructive. Unlike French, where
-ment
seems to be an affix (note
that it is bound and provokes an idiosyncratic selection of the adjective stem it is added to
27
), Spanish
adverbial
mente
, in certain registers at least, can apply distributively over both adjectives in a conjoined
phrase (apparently contrary to the lexical integrity principle - see n. 26), for example
rapida y claramente
‘rapidly and clearly’ (not: ‘*rapid and clearly’) and
-mente
adverbs can have two accents (thus
rápidaménte
).
Moreover,
mente
survives in Spanish as a free noun meaning ‘mind,’ though it is not at all clear that there is
a synchronic connection between
mente
‘mind’ and the adverbial formative. These facts suggest an analysis
whereby
-mente
adverbs in modern Spanish are compounds, perhaps containing
-mente
as a bound root. If
that is the case, then the developments with
-mente
in Spanish would not represent a case of
morphologization, unless compounds are taken to be a matter of morphology (word formation) rather than
of syntax.
28
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zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl hannaeva.xlx.pl
12/11/2007 03:36 PM
13. Morphologization from Syntax
BRIAN D. JOSEPH
Subject
Linguistics
»
Historical Linguistics
Key-Topics
morphology
,
syntax
DOI:
10.1111/b.9781405127479.2004.00015.x
It is clear that the set of changes effected by speakers in their languages include those that are often
labelled “grammaticalization,” “grammaticization,” or even “grammatization.” This notion is variously
defined,
1
but especially in recent years, almost always in such a way as to refer to something that, first of
all, morphemes do, as opposed to (referring to) what is done by speakers, and that, second, echoes the
characterization of Kurylowicz (1965: 52): “an increase of the range of a morpheme advancing from a lexical
to a grammatical or from a less grammatical to a more grammatical status.” Indeed, several other chapters in
this volume - those by Bybee, Fortson, Harrison, Heine, Hock, Mithun, Rankin, and Traugott, to be exact -
are concerned, to one degree or another, with grammaticalization.
As Heine's chapter points out, the notion of “grammaticalization” has been extended by many practitioners
to cover other sorts of change than strictly the movement of an item along a scale (“cline”) of increasing
grammatical status (from content word > grammatical word > clitic > inflectional affix, cf. Hopper and
Traugott 1993: 7), and thus Kuryłowicz's definition is probably too narrow. McMahon (1994a: 160), for
instance, notes that grammaticalization encompasses essentially all types of language change, since
“grammaticalization is not only a syntactic change, but a global change affecting also the morphology,
phonology and semantics.”
2
Still, Kurylowicz's definition is generally accepted as a basic characterization of
grammaticalization, and it is so endorsed by Heine (this volume).
In the present chapter, by contrast, a rather different angle on the emergence of grammatical elements and
related phenomena is taken. In particular, the focus here is on what can be called “morphologization,” in a
particular sense - a set of developments by which some element or elements in a language that are not a
matter of morphology at one stage come to reside in a morphological component - or at least to become
morphological in type
3
- at a later stage.
4
For example, within Romance linguistics
5
it is generally agreed
that the French adverb-forming suffix
-ment
, as in
clairement
‘clearly’ (cf.
clair
‘clear/MASC.SG’), is a reflex
of the ablative case of the Latin feminine noun
ment
- ‘mind’ (nominative singular
mens
) as used in adjective
+ noun phrasal combinations serving as adverbials, for example,
clarã mente
‘with a clear mind’ (where
clarã
is an ablative singular feminine form agreeing with the noun it is modifying); a reanalysis and/or shift
in phrasal status to word-level status seems to have occurred, resulting in monolectal forms in French such
as
clairement
.
6
Thus what was once in Latin a matter of syntax, that is, a combination of free words forming
a noun phrase that was case marked so as to function adverbially, became in French a matter of
morphology, that is, the output or result of word-formation processes that yield a derived word. But this
case is also a stock example of grammaticalization (see Hopper and Traugott 1993: 130–1), so some
differentiation between grammaticalization and morphologization is needed in order to show their
distinctness (as in Gaeta 1998, for instance).
Thus, the goal of this chapter is to discuss various aspects of morphologization, especially in comparison
with the by-now more familiar notion of grammaticalization, and to present an extended case study
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with the by-now more familiar notion of grammaticalization, and to present an extended case study
examining one example in some detail. The case in point is the change in Medieval and Modern Greek by
which earlier speakers’ use of a periphrastic (i.e., multi-word and thus syntactic) future-marking formation,
consisting of the verb
thélõ
and a complement verb, yielded to later speakers’ use of a monolectal future in
the modern language -one with an apparently prefixal marker [θa-] attached to an inflected verb form.
Meillet (1912) wrote about this case as a paradigm example of grammaticalization, and it has been
mentioned elsewhere in the grammaticalization literature, as well (e.g., Hopper and Traugott 1993: 24;
McMahon 1994a: 167).
7
1 Scope and Motivation for Two Types of Morphologization
There are two directions for morphologization: either something that is syntactic at one stage can turn into
morphology (the major focus of this chapter), or something that is a matter of phonology at one stage can
become morphological (as discussed by Janda, this volume). These directions could be characterized as
morphologization from above and morphologization from below, respectively, reflecting the customary view
of the components of grammar as hierarchically arranged from the level of sound “up to” the level of
sentence structure, though nothing crucial hinges on this characterization.
Elsewhere, in Joseph and Janda (1988), these two types of morphologization have been referred to as
desyntacticizing
and
dephonologizing
, respectively. Although they can be given these different labels, they
are actually quite similar, having the same outcome, that is, morphology, and the same motivation.
In particular, both reflect a preference on the part of speakers for what Joseph and Janda refer to as
“localized” solutions to the problem of how to account for a given phenomenon in language, for example,
marking for some category or a particular combination of elements. “Localized” solutions range over small
sets of data rather than being widely applicable, and are general only in a very local sense, covering perhaps
just a few forms. Reduplication in Sanskrit provides examples of such local generalizations, since the
patterns of reduplication found, for instance, in the perfect tense formations, including (where V = a vowel
that usually copies the root vocalism) V-, VV-, CV-, and occasionally even CVV-, as well as the highly
specific
ãn
-, tend to cluster around particular root types, such as V- with roots that begin with
v-, ãn
- with
certain vowel-initial roots, CV- with alteration of the root-initial consonant with a handful of roots, CV- as
the default case, and so on. Significantly, also, local generalizations tend to result from, and show
fragmentation of, once quite general phenomena - perfect tense reduplication in Proto-Indo-European, for
instance, was almost exclusively
8
CV - and thus they suggest that speakers focus on the analysis of just a
restricted set of data at a time, and therefore come up with quite particularized analyses.
9
That is to say,
speakers view language through a relatively small “window” at any given time, and thus the size of their
focal area is relatively small.
10
This access to only limited data at a given time translates into solutions that
are cast in terms of highly particular properties of stems, affixes, and the like, and which are usually best
accommodated in the morphology, since phonological solutions are usually to be interpreted quite generally,
referring as they do to properties of sound only; thus local generalizations, being defined often in terms of
idiosyncrasies and sometimes extending only over a few forms, are usually morphological in nature, as well
as quite concrete, in that they are based on surface representations and categories that are overtly marked
rather than on abstract properties of phonological form.
In that way, Joseph and Janda claimed, speakers opt for morphological accounts over phonological or
syntactic ones whenever the analysis of a given phenomenon offers any ambiguity as to the extent of its
generality. It was further argued there that grammars should therefore be viewed as being “morphocentric,”
or more accurately, “morpholexicocentric” (see below), with a greater role for the morphological component,
in order to explain this preference speakers give to morphological accounts.
It must be realized that the lexicon is taken here to be connected closely with the morphological component,
and thus is part of what is to be considered “the morphology” of a language. The lexicon, after all, is where
(at least root) morphemes are found and where (at least) idiosyncratic information about morphemes
resides.
11
Thus references to “morphological” phenomena here include “morpholexical” information as well.
Morphology, after all, is concerned with form and the relation of form to meaning in most traditional
views,
12
so any aspect of language that is concerned with form, as the lexicon must necessarily be, is fair
game for being subsumed under - or at least tightly allied with - morphology. Moreover, in many
frameworks, even elements with internal syntax are listed in the lexicon, for example, adjective-noun
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frameworks, even elements with internal syntax are listed in the lexicon, for example, adjective-noun
combinations with specialized meanings such as
Cold War
,
13
a move that is in keeping with the expanded
view of the role of morphology and the morphological/morpholexical component in language implicit in the
notion of “morphocentricity.”
14
The scope of morphology can thus be quite large, and consequently there is a wide range of phenomena
that can be said to show morphologization, that is, movement into the morphology, assuming of course that
one can devise a heuristic for determining when the boundaries have been crossed (see below, section 3).
2 Morphologization and Grammaticalization Distinguished
As noted at the beginning of this chapter, there is some overlap between the notion of morphologization as
developed here (drawing on Joseph and Janda 1988) and that of grammaticalization, discussed in this volume
and elsewhere. Yet, there are significant differences of approach, method, and substance between the two
that provide a rationale for taking a morphologization viewpoint on various changes and not simply treating
them as instances of grammaticalization.
15
For one thing, there are phenomena in language which are (already) clearly grammatical in their function but
which nonetheless undergo changes in the direction of greater involvement in the morphological component.
For instance, the changes to be discussed concerning the Greek future started with a grammatical usage of
the verb
thélõ
, which meant ‘want’ as an ordinary lexical verb, in a periphrasis indicating futurity; as
becomes clear below, these changes were such that the realization of the marking for futurity passed from
being a matter of syntax (i.e., word combination) to being a matter of morphology (i.e., word formation).
Thus, there is clearly morphologization in this example by the definition given above, but is there
grammaticalization? There might be, but only if grammaticalization is taken to involve movement along a
“cline” by which expression via morphology, for example with an affix, is “more grammatical” than
expression via syntax (cf. Kurylowicz's definition, given above). However, such a cline is completely
stipulative, for there are free words that have grammatical functions, such as English
of
or French
de
,
various complementizers such as English
that
and
whether
or French
à
, pronouns, etc., as well as affixes
that have no grammatical function at all, such as the empty
-al
that (descriptively speaking) can be added
for some English speakers to
syntactic
to form
syntactical
(note that both are adjectives and that they are
synonymous) or the equally empty
-y
that (again from a descriptive standpoint) some English speakers add
to
competence
to give
competency
, and so on. Thus there is no necessary correlation between an item's
place on the cline and its degree of grammatical involvement. Grammaticalization theorists recognize this
issue to some extent; Lehmann (1985: 306), for instance, gives six criteria - attrition, condensation,
paradigmaticization, coalescence, obligatorification, and fixation
16
- and claims that an item lines up at
equivalent points with regard to each one as it “grammaticalizes.” However, each of these properties is in
principle independent of the others, so that demanding a grouping of all of them involves a stipulation that
one needs to have all six, and in equal measures, to have movement along the grammaticalization cline.
Similarly, as noted in section 1, there are two directions of development that can lead to morphologization,
and desyntacticizing morphologization can readily be linked to dephonologizing morphologization via their
common outcome (morphology) and common motivation (localized generalization by speakers). When viewed
from within a grammaticalization framework, however, it is not at all obvious why
morphological/morpholexical determination for a given phenomenon, as opposed to determination via
regular and general phonological conditions, should be considered to be more grammatical and thus should
have anything to do with or anything in common with, for instance, the movement from syntactically
determined to morphologically/morpholexically determined. For example, marking noun plurals via an affix
that happens to have a regular, exceptionless, phonological effect on a root, such that it would be accounted
for by a purely phonological rule, does not seem
a priori
to be less grammatical in any meaningful sense
than marking plural via an affix that alters the vocalism of a root in ways that vary from one lexical item or
lexical class to another and thus requires a morpholexically particularistic account;
17
nonetheless,
grammaticalization “theory” wants to link such a change in the nature of the concomitant phonological
effects with the change from phrasal to affixal expression of adverbials or futures or the like as being the
same type of change.
18
Such a linkage is straightforward when viewed from the perspective of
morphologization, since in both cases there is greater involvement of the morphology, but not necessarily so
at all from a grammaticalization perspective.
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at all from a grammaticalization perspective.
Moreover, as noted above, grammaticalization proponents recently have been claiming an ever broader
domain of applicability for this notion, whereas such is not the case with morphologization. Yet there are
changes in language and grammar that do not involve any of the typical characteristics of
grammaticalization. Regular sound change, for instance, under the Neogrammarian view (see Hale, this
volume), is purely phonetically conditioned and almost by definition has no grammatical involvement at all.
Also, a change such as the polarization in word order by which speakers of English have come to
differentiate the perfect
I have written the letter
from the resultative
I have the letter written
, moving
away from earlier English variability in ordering for both types,
19
seems not to involve any cluster of the
characteristics said to be typical of grammaticalization.
20
Admittedly, these changes do not involve
morphologization either, but the concept of morphologization makes no claims about such changes, whereas
grammaticalization, in some instantiations at least, does.
Similarly, there are changes in the direction of greater morpholexical involvement that do not involve
grammar, and thus can be accommodated within the concept of morphologization but not
grammaticalization. Relevant here are the sorts of reductions seen, for instance, in German
heute
‘today’
from a presumed instrumental phrase
hiu tagu*
in Old High German, or
heuer
‘this year’ from the OHG
instrumental phrase
hiu jaru
. It is not clear that anything relevant to grammaticalization has taken place, for
this combination of sounds is as grammatical (or not, as the case may be) before the phrase was reduced as
it is afterwards. Yet, as Hopper and Traugott (1993: 23) note regarding
heute
, “there surely is a difference in
Modern German between
heute
and
an diesem Tage
‘on this day’ that needs to be characterized in some
way”; grammaticalization really does not provide a way, yet morphologization is exactly what is involved
here.
In fact, the only way that
hiu tagu > heute
might be said to be relevant to grammaticalization is under the
interpretation Hopper (1994) makes concerning what he calls “phonogenesis,” defined by him as “the
process whereby new syntagmatic phonological segments are created out of old morphemes” (p. 31). He
explicitly refers to phonogenesis as “an advanced stage of
grammaticalization”
(ibid.), noting that there is
generally “phonological reduction that accompanies grammaticalization” (ibid., and see the reference above
in section 2 to Lehmann's “attrition” and “coalescence”). While there is no denying that such developments
occur - and indeed, Hopper presents a large number of well-known and not-so-well-known cases, mostly
from English, by way of illustrating the phenomenon, such as the
-nd
of
friend
and
fiend
reflecting an old
present particpial ending now lacking in any obvious meaning - the terminology and definition seem
particularly inappropriate and the linkage with grammaticalization is at best fortuitous.
For one thing, there is nothing grammatical about such material; if anything, what
-nd
has undergone might
be termed “degrammaticalization,” at least by the usual definitions of grammaticalization, for there is a
movement out of being, in some sense, a grammatical formative. Admittedly, this criticism may involve
taking the terminology of grammaticalization too much at face value, but given generally accepted
formulations of grammaticalization, an extension of the notion is needed if “phonogenesis” is to be
subsumed under the same rubric as the development of the French adverbial marker
-ment
. Furthermore,
calling the accretion of material onto a word “phonogenesis” implies that the material added, the element
that was once a morpheme in Hopper's formulation,
21
had no phonic value when it was a morpheme.
However, whether
-nd
was a recognizable participial suffix or a meaningless string at the end of
friend
and
fiend
, it still contained a sequence of sounds; the morphemic or non-morphemic status of that sequence
does not affect the extent to which this element adds “phonological bulk” (in Hopper's words, p. 29) to a
stem it attaches to. Thus there may be “phono-accretion,” but the sounds were already there and thus had
already undergone “genesis” at the time they constituted a morpheme; the real difference lies in the
morphological status of the sequences in question, that is, phrasal versus word status, or
compound/polymorphemic word versus monomorphemic word status. Such a difference can be readily
characterized in terms of morphologization, but not grammaticalization, and moreover, focusing on
morphological status allows such cases to be linked rather directly with the emergence of the French
adverbial suffix and similar examples in ways that grammaticalization theory can only do by stipulation and
extension of the basic notion.
22
Finally, there are methodological differences between the ways in which morphologization has been studied
and the ways in which grammaticalization has been studied. In particular, grammaticalization has now been
built into an elaborate theoretical framework, so-called “grammaticalization theory,” with a cognitive basis
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built into an elaborate theoretical framework, so-called “grammaticalization theory,” with a cognitive basis
and a stake in the putative principle of unidirectionality, by which, it is claimed, changes are always in the
direction of greater grammatical status and not, for instance, in the direction of affix to clitic or free word,
that is, in the opposite direction on the cline of grammaticalization. The existence of such “counter-
grammaticalizations,” described in the literature for several years and recently discussed and summed up,
with extensive literature, in Janda (2001), are particularly troublesome for grammaticalization proponents,
23
but pose no threat for the concept of morphologization, as discussed below in section 5.
Also, grammaticalization studies tend to ignore the somewhat more formal question of where in the
grammar a particular phenomenon is to be located, as if it is always self-evident what the answer to this
question is. Some studies do provide a basis for making a decision, for example Hopper and Traugott (1993:
4–6) regarding the distinction between clitics versus affixes, etc., but many do not, nor do all that recognize
criteria apply them in all cases.
Thus grammaticalization and morphologization indeed offer distinct perspectives on, and represent distinct
ways of viewing, changes that involve grammatical machinery and morphological/morpholexical material.
24
3 How to Tell
As suggested earlier, talking about morphologization implies that there is a way to tell whether some
phenomenon is “in the morphology” or, as is relevant for desyntacticization, “in the syntax” instead. The
most useful heuristics are those enumerated in Zwicky and Pullum (1983) and Zwicky (1985a).
They distinguish among affix, clitic, and word as types of morphological elements, drawing important
distinctions between affix and non-affix and between word and non-word. “Clitics,” then, are elements that
are neither canonical affixes nor canonical words.
25
They further identify a number of traits that are
characteristic of affixes and characteristic of words. For the most part, affixes, as morphological elements,
show various types of idiosyncrasy - they are selective as to what they attach to, they can provoke irregular
effects on the stems they occur with, their ordering is generally fixed, they tend to be prosodically
dependent, they are not subject to syntactic rules (e.g., deletions) unless the whole word they are part of is
affected,
26
and the like - while words, as syntactic elements, show a greater degree of generality, being
unselective in their combinatory possibilities, allowing reordering in response to stylistic factors, having
prosodic independence, showing a one-to-one mapping with semantic rules that give syntactic units
semantic compositionality, etc.
There are other criteria that can be helpful. For example, in the case of the Oscan locative, agreement seems
to solve the issue of what sort of analysis is warranted. Oscan innovated a locative by the agglutination of a
postposition
en
onto a noun, for example
húrtín
‘in the garden’ (Buck 1928: 114), yet what shows that this
is indeed a morphological marker of a case, as opposed to a combination of free words in a noun phrase
that undergo some phonological adjustment, is the fact that the
-ín
ending occurs on adjectives in
agreement with a locative noun marked in the same way. Thus, this new locative participates in adjective
agreement just like other cases, a feature which shows that the appearance of the
-ín
is not from a
synchronic merging of a free word onto a stem; if it were a syntactically generated postpositional word, one
would not expect it to occur both on the adjective and on the noun, unless, due to the principle of
compositionality, there were a corresponding semantic contribution from both occurrences.
Still unresolved, admittedly, is the issue of whether compounds are syntax or morphology. The case of
Romance adverbial
mente
, once again, is instructive. Unlike French, where
-ment
seems to be an affix (note
that it is bound and provokes an idiosyncratic selection of the adjective stem it is added to
27
), Spanish
adverbial
mente
, in certain registers at least, can apply distributively over both adjectives in a conjoined
phrase (apparently contrary to the lexical integrity principle - see n. 26), for example
rapida y claramente
‘rapidly and clearly’ (not: ‘*rapid and clearly’) and
-mente
adverbs can have two accents (thus
rápidaménte
).
Moreover,
mente
survives in Spanish as a free noun meaning ‘mind,’ though it is not at all clear that there is
a synchronic connection between
mente
‘mind’ and the adverbial formative. These facts suggest an analysis
whereby
-mente
adverbs in modern Spanish are compounds, perhaps containing
-mente
as a bound root. If
that is the case, then the developments with
-mente
in Spanish would not represent a case of
morphologization, unless compounds are taken to be a matter of morphology (word formation) rather than
of syntax.
28
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