The evolution of grammar : tense, aspect, and modality in the languages of the world
Joan L. Bybee (Author), Revere D. Perkins (Author), William Pagliuca (Author)
"Joan Bybee and her colleagues present a new theory of the evolution of grammar that links structure and meaning in a way that directly challenges most contemporary versions of generative grammar. This study focuses on the use of grammatical markers of tense, aspect, and modality and identifies a universal set of grammatical categories. The authors demonstrate that the semantic content of these categories evolves gradually and that this process of evolution is strikingly similar across unrelated languages. Previous scholarship has tended to focus on formal universals, but this study provides evidence that similar semantic and functional categories of tense, aspect, and modality occur in unrelated languages. Through a survey of seventy-six languages in twenty-five different phyla, the authors show that the same paths of change occur universally and that movement along these paths is in one direction only. The data also demonstrate that form and meaning co-vary, such that increased grammaticization of meaning is accompanied by increased grammaticization of form. The analysis reveals that lexical substance evolves into grammatical substance through various mechanisms of change, such as metaphorical extension and the conventionalization of implicature. Grammaticization is always accompanied by an increase in frequency of the grammatical marker, providing clear evidence that language use is a major factor in language change. In fact, the authors conclude, language use is the primary determinant of grammatical categories and thus of synchronic language states."--Back cover
Print Book, English, 1994
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994