Last update:
9 February 2010
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Grammaticalization as Economy
2004. xvi, 320 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Hardbound
– In stock
978 90 272 2795 9 / EUR 115.00 978 1 58811 552 2 / USD 173.00
e-Book
– Available from e-book platforms
This book provides much detail on the changes involving the grammaticalization of personal and relative pronouns, topicalized nominals, complementizers, adverbs, prepositions, modals, perception verbs, and aspectual markers. It accounts for these changes in terms of two structural economy principles. Head Preference expresses that single words, i.e. heads, are used to build structures rather than full phrases, and Late Merge states that waiting as late as possible to merge, i.e. be added to the structure, is preferred over movement. The book also discusses grammar-external processes (e.g. prescriptivist rules) that inhibit change, and innovations that replenish the grammaticalized element. Most of the changes involve the (extended) CP and IP: as elements grammaticalize clause boundaries disappear. Cross-linguistic differences exist as to whether the CP, IP, and VP are all present and split and this is formulated as the Layer Principle. Changes involving the CP are typically brought about by Head Preference, whereas those involving the IP and VP by Late Merge.
Table of contents
“This is a most admirable piece of scholarship [...]. Van Gelderen's book may usher in a new era of interest in grammaticalization from a formal perspective. Functional research on grammaticalization would definitely profit from this as well.”
Heiko Narrog, Tohoku University, on Linguist List 16-1218, 2005
“Grammaticalization as Economy makes a large number of testable proposals and can therefore be expected to seed many research projects, and to give further depth to formal syntacticians' engagement with grammaticalization and uniderectionality.”
“The book makes a clear theoretical claim. As such, it is an important contribution to the study of grammaticalisation in particular and of diachronic syntax in general. It will also be of great interest to anyone concerned with language change and syntactic theory.”
“The Rise of Agreement is a substantial contribution to recent literature (e.g. Roberts & Roussou, van Gelderen 2004) that attempts to bridge the divide between formal and functional accounts of grammaticalization phenomena. The empirical scope of the book is wide, covering Bavarian, Rhaeto-Romance, Uto-Aztecan, Mongolian, and other languages. Fuß proposes a novel theoretical model of the creation of new agreement morphology. The book will be of interest to both historical morpho-syntacticians, as well as syntacticians interested in the structure of agreement.”
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Linguistics