The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

is accompanied by a reduction in or loss of phonetic substance, loss of syntacticindependence and loss of lexical (referential) meaning. In formal termsthe reduction is described by Hopper and Traugott (1993: 7) as follows:content item grammatical word clitic inflectional affix (zero)A well-known illustration of this process is adverb formation in Romance languages,e.g. in French or Italian (cf. Hopper and Traugott 1993: 130–1). Wecan roughly distinguish the following stages,(1) i. (Latin) humile mente: ‘with a humble mind’ii. a. (Old French) humble(-)ment: ‘in a humble(-)way’b. lentement: ‘in a slow-way’c. humble e doucement: ‘in a humble and gentle-way’iii. humblement: ‘humbly’humblement et doucement: ‘humbly and gently’At stage (i) the Latin feminine noun mens (ablative mente) could be used withadjectives to indicate the state of mind in which something was done. At a nextstage, the phrase acquired a more general meaning (iia), and mente came to beused also with adjectives not restricted to a psychological sense (iib). However,mente retained some of its independence in that in a conjoined adjectivalphrase the morpheme did not need to be repeated (iic). Finally during stage(iii), the noun developed into an inflectional morpheme, the only remnant ofthe original construction being the feminine 〈e〉 ending after the adjectivalstem, which now serves mainly as a kind of epenthetic vowel to ease pronunciation.An illustration of a still ongoing grammaticalization process can be givenfrom English (cf. Hopper and Traugott 1993: 2–3).(2) a. I am going (to Haarlem) to visit my auntb. I am going to marry (tomorrow)c. I am going to like itd. It is going to raine. I am going to go there for suref. I’m gonna goGrammaticalization and grammar change 287In the first example go is used as a concrete directional verb (i.e. the verb is fullylexical) and the infinitive has a purposive function (syntactically it is anadjunct). In contexts where finite verb and infinitive are adjacent, the directionalityof the verb could change from a locative into a temporal one, expressingfuturity, as in (2b). The meaning of each particular case depends quite heavilyon context; e.g., the addition of tomorrow in (2b) makes a purely temporalinterpretation much more likely. Once this non-directional sense has developed,the verb go also begins to be found with infinitives which are incompatiblewith a purposive meaning as in (2c), and from there it may spread to other