Historical Outlines From Sound to Text by Brinton Laurel J. Bergs Alexander

Author:Brinton, Laurel J.,Bergs, Alexander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2017-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

6Differences between lexical and grammatical changes

While there are similarities with respect to metaphor and metonymy between changes affecting lexical and grammatical (or grammaticalizing) expressions, there are also differences. Most notably, lexical semantic change concerns contentful change, whereas the development of grammatical expressions (see Section 2) is associated with “bleaching” or loss of contentful, lexical meaning: “[a]s grammatical morphemes develop, they lose specific features of meaning and thus are applicable in a wider range of environments” (Bybee 2007: 975). As Peters’s (1994) examples of boosters deriving from qualititative adverbs illustrates, grammaticalization may result in such collocations as terribly happy, or more recently pretty ugly. Bleaching is not found exclusively in grammaticalization. Occasionally lexical items may also lose in substantive content, e.g. OE þing ‘law court, assembly’ by metonymy > ‘thing, matter of concern’. But grammaticalization does not only involve loss of lexical meaning. There is enrichment of grammatical meaning as the original abstract implicature is semanticized, thus terribly lost the lexical meaning of ‘terror’, but gained abstract scalar meaning placing its complement high on the scale; pretty lost the lexical meaning ‘good-looking’, but gained scalar meaning, serving to place its complement above the median on a scale of intensity.

Other respects in which semantic change associated with grammaticalization differs from that associated with lexical items is that it is more frequently replicated, and usually cross-linguistically attested. Subjectification occurs in lexical change (see Section 3 above) but it is particularly closely associated with grammaticalization because grammatical markers serve to indicate the speaker’s perspective on who does what to whom (case), how the situation is related to speech time (deictic tense) or to the temporality of a reference point other than speech time (relative tense), whether the situation is perspectivized as continuing and open-ended or not (aspect), whether the situation is relativized to the speaker’s beliefs (modality, mood), and how utterances are connected to each other (connectives, discourse markers), among other things (Traugott 2010).

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