Gram - SEAS

26 2 The histOlY of gramm atica liz at ion
and Watkins (1964) who worked outside the dominant theoretical paradigm. But
their work, unfortunately, was read almost exclusively by other Indo-Europeanists.
Significantly, Meillet's student Benveniste, in an article "Mutations of linguistic
categories" written in 1968, found it necessary to repeat much of what Meillet had
said in 1912 concerning the grammaticalization of auxiliary verbs out of lexical
verbs such as 'have, hold.' Benveniste coined a new word, "auxiliation," to refer
to this process. Even though he used several of the very same examples which had
been proposed by Meillet (e.g., the Modern Greek tha future fr.om an earlier tile/a
ina), at no point in the paper did he explicitly refer to Meillet's work or use the
term "grammatic(al)ization" or its equivalent.
That such an influential linguist as Benveniste could appear to be starting afresh
in the study of the origins of grammatical categories indicates the extent to which
MeilIet's insights had become submerged by twentieth-century structuralism. We
have seen that grammaticalization presents a challenge to approaches to language
which assume discrete categories embedded in fixed, stable systems. It is therefore
not surprising that grammaticalization again appears as a major theme of general
(as opposed to specifically Indo-European) linguistics in the context of the questioning
of autonomous syntactic theory which occurred in the I 970s. During this
decade the growing interest in pragmatics and typology focused attention on the
predictable changes in language types. Linguists thereby (largely unconsciously)
revived the same line of investigation that had been dropped earlier in the century,
a line which went back at least to Humboldt. An early paper by Givan perhaps began
this revival (Hopper 1996: 220-2). Entitled "Historical syntax and synchronic
morphology: an archeologist's field trip," it announced the slogan "Today's morphology
is yesterday's syntax" (Givan 1971: 413), and showed with evidence
from a number of African languages how verb forms that are now stems with
affixes could be traced back to earlier collocations of pronouns and independent
verbs.
If one of the main tenets of twentieth-century structuralism, especially as developed
in the United States, was homogeneity, another was the arbitrariness of
language, that is, its alleged independence fi·om external factors such as the nature
of things in the world (the referents of language). Saussure had drawn attention to
the arbitrariness of the sign, for example, to the total independence of a word such
as dog of the animal it names. But he also stressed the fact that arbitrariness is limited
by associations and "relative motivations." These include word compounding
as in twenty-five, derivational affixation as in French pommier 'apple-tree' (pol1ll1le
'apple' + -ier), cerisier 'cherry-tree' (cerise 'cherry' + -ier), and inflectional paradigms
such as Latin dominus, domini, domino 'master-NOM, master-GEN, master­
DAT.' Indeed, he regarded grammar, the set of structural rules, as setting limits on
the arbitrariness and the chaotic nature of language (1986 [1922]: 130).