Gram - SEAS

174 6 Clause-internal 17lorphological changes
The end product of grammaticalization is thus phonology in the very liteml
sense of phonological segments. Phonogenesis plays the vital role of ensuring that
the attrition which occurs in the natural course of change is compensated for by
accretion. De-morphologization in its end stages is therefore not reducible to loss.
but rather invol ves a kind of "phonological strengthening." There is an interesting
parallel here to the pragmatic strengthening that we saw always accompanies
semantic loss in earlier stages of grammatical ization (see Section 4.5).
Sometimes de-morphologization resulti ng in phonologization will not be com­
plete. but will result in the emergence of a new grammatical form. Th is is what
has for the most part been analyzed recently as "exaptation" (or, in Greenberg's
terms "regrammaticalization") (see Section 5.7).
6.6 Conclusion
In this chapter we have illustrated a variety of changes that involve various
degrees of fusion over time, as well as of pattern reorganization and structumtion.
As we have seen in other chapters, there is a constant tension between changes that
pertain to the now of speech (syntagmatically) and those that pertain to the choices
in any one position (paradigmatically). How these develop is best understood in
terms of discourse strategies.