Gram - SEAS

5. 2 Generalization 103
(Gillieron 1902- 10). In England OE l(Etan 'prevent' and lettan 'permit' merged
in ME as let. The first was replaced by fo rbid and prevent, and the potential
problems of ambiguity between opposite meanings were avoided (Anttila 1989
[1972]: 182).
The majority of examples of avoidance of homonymic clash are lexical, and
even in the lexical domain they are infrequent. In PDE the noun sanction is used in
two meanings: 'permission' and 'penalty', and the verb rent is used in the senses
'rent out to' and 'rent from', with little sign of one member of the pair being
ousted by the other. In acronyms such potential ambiguities are even more likely
to be tolerated, cf. PC 'personal computer', 'police constable', 'politically correct.'
Syntactic as well as other contextual clues tend to allow for disambiguation.
Avoidance of homonymic clash is even more infrequent in the grammatical domain.
If it does occur, it does so almost exclusively in connection with relatively
independent morphemes. For example, it has been suggested that the idiosyncratic
development of the Old Spanish prepositions faza 'toward' « Latin facie
ad 'with one's face to') and (f)ata 'until' « Arabic hatta 'until') into Middle
Spanish (h)acia andfasta respectively may be attributed to "the powerful urge to
differentiate homonyms despite semantic similarity" (Malkiel 1979: I). Similarly,
the borrowing in Middle English of the Northern English feminine pronoun form
she and of the Scandinavian plural pronoun they have been attributed in part to
the merger in ME of OE he 'masc.sg.pro.,' heo 'fem.sg.pro.,' hie 'pl.pro.' (For
a detailed study, including possible evidence for regulation of a new homonymic
clash that developed between thai 'they' and the less frequent thai 'though,' see
Samuels 1972.) However, as we have seen, grammatical items are characteristically
polysemous, and so avoidance of homonymic clash would not be expected
to have any systematic effect on the development of grammatical markers, especially
in their later stages. This is particularly true of inflections. We need only
think of the English -s inflections: nominal plural, third-person-singular verbal
markel} or the -d intlections: past tense, past participle. Indeed, it is difficult to
predict what grammatical properties will or will not be distinguished in any one
language. Although English contrasts he. she. it, Chinese does not. Although OE
contrasted past singular and past plural forms of the verb (e.g., he rad 'he rode,' hie
ridofl 'they rode'), PDE does not except in the verb be, where we find she was/they
were.
In sum, as grammaticalization progresses, meanings expand their range through
the development of various polysemies. Depending on one's analysis, these polysemies
may be regarded as quite fine-grained. It is only collectively that they
may seem like weakening of meaning. The important claim should not be that
bleaching follows from generalization, but rather that meaning changes leading to
narrowing of meaning will typically not occur in grammaticalization.