Gram - SEAS

2.4 Recent trends ill research 33
non-random change. Traugott (1982) suggested that there are semantic/pragmatic
factors in grammaticalization that lead to unidirectionalities of change, specifically
tendencies leading from concrete meanings to more abstract ones, and in particular
to ones grounded in the speaker's assessment of connections between propositions.
Concurrently work went forward in cognitive linguistics, drawing attention nol
only to semantics but also to (largely synchronic) metaphors. Sweetser's book From
Etymology to Pragmatics (1990) suggested ways in which relationships among
polysemies of modals (especial ly may) and connectives (especially but and if>
might be conceptualized metaphorically. In 1991, Heine, Claudi, and Hiinnemeyer
published Grammaticalization: a Conceptual Framework (199Ia). The data are
primarily African, but the focus is on pragmatic and cognitive factors that motivate
grammaticalization, and the meaning changes that forms may undergo as
they grammaticalize. For example, the authors regard "metaphorical abstraction"
as one of the means by which we organize the world around us. Various relatively
abstract concepts such as time, cause, manner, personal quality, and relationship
need to be expressed; more concrete linguistic "vehicles" are pressed into service
to express them. Thus, time concepts are typically expressed in terms of more
readily apprehensible space concepts (a "long" time, a "short" time, etc.), mental
activities like thinking are expressed in terms of physical activities (to think
"hard", etc.), and so on. Those metaphorical abstractions that lead to the emergence
of new structures, e.g., adverbials or prepositions, are among the main kinds
of cognitive processes that lead to grammaticalization according to Heine, Claudi,
and Hiinnemeyer (1991a: 41-5).
As mentioned at the end of Section 2.3, Bybee's large-scale project on morphology,
primarily verbal, has been a prominent and highly influential source of
ideas and data. She and her collaborators crucially see grammaticalization as both
semantic and formal in nature. Among impl ications for cross-linguistic work on
grammaticalization is the claim that· grammatical morphemes or "grams" can be
studied not only as language-specific phenomena, but also as "gram-types" that are
substantive universal categories analogous to "voiceless dental stop" in phonetics
(Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994: 149). 4 They tend to be polysemous in similar
ways across languages, and to undergo similar paths of development as a result of
human discourse and interaction: "they reflect the metaphorical processes that are
based on human cognitive make-up, and they reflect the inferences that humans
commonly make when they communicate" (p. 302).
A two-volume collection of papers arising out of a 1988 conference organized
by Givan, and edited by Traugott and Heine under the title Approaches to Grammaticalization
(1991), addresses a wide spectrum of themes, many of which are
still of current concern to a wide range of linguists working from the perspective