The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

292 The syntax of early EnglishThus, their proposal cuts up the process of grammaticalization into a series ofreanalyses, thereby loosening the links in the chain of grammaticalization,which is usually seen as unsegmentable.9.2.4 Grammaticalization and grammar changeAfter this brief presentation of the basic notions that play a role ingrammaticalization theory, we will lay out explicitly our own approach for thischapter. In this book, the focus is on grammar change in the history ofEnglish, and we believe that the locus of grammar change is, to an importantextent, part of the language acquisition process of each new speaker/learner.The language acquisition process and communication between speakers areby their very nature synchronic, and we therefore cannot see that there is roomfor a separate and ‘independent’ process of grammaticalization, since thiswould imply that speakers and language learners recognize a master plan oflong-term change in progress. We will therefore attempt to identify sequencesof synchronic steps in the case studies we discuss. After all, even in those casesof grammaticalization that seem to be unidirectional and gradual, we shouldbe able to account for the fact that there is apparently sufficient synchronic evidencefor the speaker/language learner to acquire the grammar producing it.In this sense, the fact that this synchronic stage is part of a long-term changeis something that the linguist discovers post hoc, with the benefit of hindsight.It would be of considerable interest to look for ‘grammaticalization processes’that were aborted, or reversed along the way. The similarities in known casesof grammaticalization may have led to an overemphasis on a common core,leading to the idea that grammaticalization is an explanatory parameter initself. We believe that it is the subprocesses that explain the change, and agreewith linguists such as Lightfoot (1979, 1991) and Joseph (1992) thatdiachronic processes cannot exist because diachronic grammars do not exist.Each speaker constructs her own grammar on the basis of data surroundingher, and on the basis of her general cognitive abilities or strategies. Ourapproach to grammaticalization is more in line with that of Harris andCampbell (1995), who, as we have seen, subdivide the process into series ofreanalyses.In the case studies we present in the next section, we will, by concentratingon the synchronic steps in the grammaticalization process, come to questionthe necessity of the notions of graduality, unidirectionality and semantic triggering.We will argue that at each stage, the language learner simply constructsthe optimal grammar fitting the full set of facts, whether these are syntacticand morphological or semantic and pragmatic.