Gram - SEAS

5.4 Some pIVcesses participating in Llllidirectionality I 19
only one of the many contexts in which the lexical form may appear, when the form
undergoes grammaticalization, it behaves just like any other autonomous form in
its other, lexical, contexts, and is subject to semantic and phonological changes
and perhaps even to becoming obsolete.
Consider, for example, the English indefinite article alan. In DE this word was
ClIl. Its vowel was long, the same as the vowel in the word for 'stone,' stall. It meant
'one, a certain,' and was not used in the general non-specific sense that we might
use it in today, as in I caught afish, but was chiefly used to "present" new items,
as in There was once a prince o/ Tuscany.
The normal phonetic development of this word in PDE would have been [own],
rhyming with 'stone.' While in Scottish English the two words continue to have
the same vowel ([eynJ. [steyn]), in most other dialects a phonological development
peculiar to this word occurred yielding the PDE full form [wAn]. The c1iticized
form of this same word became de-stressed, and formed a single accentual unit with
the following noun or constituent of the noun phrase (adjective, etc.), resulting in
its POE form and distribution: the vowel [a], and retention of the [n] when followed
by a vowel. The divergent histories of the stressed and unstressed forms can be
seen in alternations such as the following:
(14) Would you like a Mai Tai? - Yes, I'd love aile.
We turn now to a more detailed example of divergence, from Malay. Nouns
in certain discourse contexts in Malay must be preceded by a classifier (Hopper
I 986b). Classifiers occur in many languages in association with number words;
they are comparable to the word 'head' in 'ten head of cattle' (see Schachter 1985:
39-40). The following examples are from a Malay narrative text known as the
Hikayat Abdullah (CL stands for (nominal) classifier):
(15) Ada-Iah kami lihat tiga orallg budak-budak kena hukum.
happen we see three CL boy-PL get punishment
'We happened to see three CL boys being punished.' (Hopper I 986b: 64)
(16) Maka pada suatu pagi kelihatan-Iah sa-buah kapal rendah
and on one morning was: seen-PARTICLE a:CL ship low
'Then one morning a CL low ship was sighted.' (Hopper 1986b: 77)
( 17) Mati-Iah tiga ekor tikus.
dead-PARTICLE three CL rat
'Three CL rats were killed.' (Hopper I 986b: 144)
The italicized words orang, buah, and ekor are classifiers. In Malay they indicate
that the noun which is classified is new and relatively important to the discourse.
They are not interchangeable: orang is used before human nouns, buah before
objects of a bulky size, and ekor before nouns which denote animals of any kind.
There is in addition a more general classificatory word suatu (also found as satu),
used before singular objects (in the sense of 'things') and competing with buah: