Gram - SEAS

5. 9 Conclusion 139
Too confident a use of assumptions about unidirectionality can lead to wrong
conclusions, even with respect to attested data. For example, as shown in Tabor
and Traugott (1998), in discussing the "grammaticalization scale" of verbal nouns
(gerunds), c. Lehmann cites:
(28) a. John's constantly reading magazines
b. John's constant reading of magazines
c. 'the (constantly) reading magazines
d. the constant reading of magazines (c. Lehmann 1995 [1982]: 62)
and comments "we have two stages of our grammaticalization scale embodied in
the English pos s -ing construction. At the latter stage, the nominalized verb has
assumed all the relevant features of a noun; -ing-nominalizations are even pluralizable"
(c. Lehmann 1995 [1982]: 64). It is actually not clear whether Lehmann
is making a synchronic or diachronic claim here, because he usually uses the term
"scale" for synchronic clines, but the references to "stages" suggests he is here
making a diachronic claim. In any event, the prediction is diachronically incorrect:
types (28b) and (28d) are historically earlier than type (28a).
5.9 Conclusion
The evidence is overwhelming that a vast number of known instances of
the development of grammatical structures involved the development of a lexical
item or phrase through discourse use into a grammatical item, and then into an
even more grammatical item, and that these changes were accompanied by decategorialization
from a major to a minor category. Typologically, changes of this
kind are widespread and show systematic patterning. Counterexamples are sporadic
and only rarely cross-linguistically attested; the rise of c1itic possessive in
English, Swedish, and Norwegian Bokmal is unusual in this regard, but we should
note that the languages are related, and the histories are not identical. Reconstructions
based on an assumption of unidirectional match ("isomorphism") between
cline and direction of change in a specific instance should be framed as testable
hypotheses.