The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

Language change and grammar change 25We do not wish to deny that the language environment may change as aresult of lexical diffusion, and thus a grammatical reanalysis may be triggeredby surface similarities. Indeed, this is illustrated by the case histories in chapter7, involving the so-called ECM constructions, and in chapter 8 on ‘easy-toplease’constructions. Not all syntactic changes will necessarily have deepcauses. But a path of change such as that of the impersonals can only beaccounted for if we view them against the background of the grammaticalstructures which constrain them. It is therefore sometimes necessary to allowfor some idealization with respect to the raw data.Some linguists go as far as to say that most change proceeds by lexical diffusion,e.g. Aitchison (1991: 95–8). While there are plausible cases of lexicaldiffusion in the syntax, like those referred to above, this cannot be right. Thereare many syntactic constructions which are not tied to particular lexical elements,usually involving clause-level syntax. An example of this is the phenomenonof Verb-Second, which is discussed in detail in chapter 4; anotherexample is the case of have to discussed in chapter 9. It is extremely unlikelythat such constructions are influenced by lexical elements inside the clause.1.3.3 GrammaticalizationThe term ‘grammaticalization’ seems to have been coined by Meillet(1912), who defines grammaticalization as the attribution of grammaticalcharacter to an erstwhile autonomous word. The best-known and most widelydiscussed example of grammaticalization in the history of English is thesequence of changes through which modal verbs like can, may, will, shall, mustwere transformed from a set of verbs that were somewhat special main verbsto the finite auxiliaries that they are in present-day English. The main developmentswere discussed above in section 1.2.1.1. The result of this sequence ofchanges was that the modal verbs became grammatical function words,markers of mood: using Meillet’s definition, we could say that they weregrammaticalized from main verbs to modality markers.There are two ways in which the term ‘grammaticalization’ can be understood.The first of these is the one originally intended by Meillet: it refers toan empirical phenomenon that is widely attested in language change, and itcovers cases such as the development of the English modals. Some more casesof grammaticalization in the history of English are described in Rissanen,Kytö and Heikkonen (1997), and in chapter 9 of this book. Particularly wellknowncases in the history of the Romance languages are: the development ofdeterminers like French le, la from the Latin demonstrative pronoun ille (see,for instance, Vincent 1997 and references cited there); the development of the