The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

26 The syntax of early Englishsystem of future verb endings, such as French chanter-ai, chanter-as, chantera,chanter-ons, chanter-ez, chanter-ont, which developed out of Latin constructionswith an infinitive followed by a form of habere ‘have’ (this is described indetail in Benveniste 1968). What all such cases have in common is that somefull lexical item develops into a grammatical function word or morpheme. Thisis particularly clearly the case in the Romance future tense marker, where themarker becomes a bound morpheme. This entails that the lexical item in questionloses a good deal of its lexical meaning, a phenomenon that we also sawabove in the history of the English modals. A second characteristic is that thechange is very often a gradual one, spanning across a long period of time. Afurther characteristic is that such changes seem to be ‘unidirectional’: it isoften thought that once a process of grammaticalization sets in, it leadsinexorably to its completion.The second way in which the term ‘grammaticalization’ is often employedis to refer to a particular approach to the study of language. Indeed, it seemsreasonable to characterize this appoach as ‘grammaticalization theory’.Grammaticalization theorists take the phenomenon of grammaticalization aspart and parcel of language, and are primarily interested in the cognitivemechanisms that drive grammaticalization. They tend to stress the long-term,diachronic aspects of this type of change; indeed they speak of diachronicprocesses, and emphasize that language is a changing object in time. Thisapproach is not readily compatible with the one adopted in this book. Ourapproach is essentially synchronic, with the emphasis being on the grammarof the speaker/learner. Since learners build up their grammars afresh, they donot take account of ‘processes’ that started long before their lifetime; theyproceed on the basis of the language spoken around them. Long-term processeslike grammaticalization therefore pose an intriguing problem for a synchronicapproach such as ours, and this is why we devote a separate chapterto it. We will be primarily interested in the evidence available to the learner ateach stage in a series of synchronies, at the same time confronting the questionof why it is that such change nevertheless tends to be unidirectional acrossthe generations. Part of the answer must be that UG preferences of the sortadvanced by Clark and Roberts drive grammaticalization. We will discuss thisin detail in chapter 9, and illustrate with several case studies.1.4 Methodology and the role of dataIn this section we turn to the status of data in historical languageresearch. Historical data require a consideration that is different in many ways