Thoughts on grammaticalization
Christian Lehmann
Cite as
Lehmann, Christian .
2015.
Thoughts on grammaticalization
: .
(Classics in Linguistics
1).
Berlin:
Language Science Press.
@book{classics1,
author = {Lehmann, Christian },
title = {Thoughts on grammaticalization: },
year = {2015},
series = {classics},
number = {1},
address = {Berlin},
publisher = {Language Science Press}
}
About this book
"Thoughts on grammaticalization" was first published in a working-paper
version in 1982 and became very influential immediately, even though it
was properly published only in 1995. Despite its modest title, the book
can be read as an advanced introduction to grammaticalization, though
its conception is very original. The present edition contains a number
of corrections of the 1995 edition. After a short review of the history
of research, the work introduces and delimits the concepts related to
grammaticalization. It then provides extensive exemplification of
grammaticalization phenomena in diverse languages, ordered by
grammatical domains such as the verbal, pronominal and nominal sphere
and clause level relations. The final chapter presents a theory of
grammaticalization which is based on the autonomy of the linguistic sign
with respect to the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes. This is the basis
of the structural parameters that constitute grammaticalization. They
are operationalized to the point of rendering degrees of
grammaticalization measurable.
About Christian Lehmann
Christian Lehmann is Emeritus Professor of General and Comparative
Linguistics at the University of Erfurt, Germany. He has done research
in descriptive linguistics, mainly on Latin and Yucatec Maya, on the
diachrony and typology of various fields of grammar, and on linguistic
methodology. His publications include monographs on the Relative clause
(1984) and Possession in Yucatec Maya (1998). He has edited a volume on
Participation (2005) and co-edited the volume on Morphology in the
series Handbooks of Linguistics and Communications Science (2000/2004)
and a two-volume set of Hooc?k teaching materials (2010). His website
http://www.christianlehmann.eu offers, among
other things, a linguistic bibliographical database with more than
20,000 entries accessible by a system of descriptors.
Chapters
