Lexicalization, a process of language change, has been conceptualized in a variety of ways. Broadly defined as the adoption of concepts into the lexicon, it has been viewed by syntacticians as the reverse process of grammaticalization, by morphologists as a routine process of word-formation, and by semanticists as the development of concrete meanings. In this up-to-date survey, Laurel Brinton and Elizabeth Traugott examine the various conceptualizations of lexicalization that have been presented in the literature. In light of contemporary work on grammaticalization, they then propose a new, unified model of lexicalization and grammaticalization. Their approach is illustrated with a variety of case studies from the history of English, including present participles, multi-word verbs, adverbs, and discourse markers, as well as some examples from other Indo-European languages. The first review of the various approaches to lexicalization, this book will be invaluable to students and scholars of historical linguistics and language change.

This collective volume focuses on the latest developments in the study of grammaticalization and related processes of change such as degrammaticalization, constructionalization, lexicalization, and petrification. It addresses topical issues relating to the motivations, sources, defining features, and outcomes of these changes. New theoretical reflections are offered on the pragmatic motivation of grammaticalization paths, process-oriented differences between grammaticalization, lexicalization and degrammaticalization, the question of gradualness and pace of grammaticalization, and deictics as a distinct source of grammaticalization. The articles describe various constructional and distributional changes affecting deictics, determiners, reflexives, clitics, nouns, affixes, adverbs and (auxiliary) verbs, mainly in the Germanic and Romance languages. The volume will be of great interest to historical linguists working on grammaticalization and related changes, and to all linguists working on the interface between morphosyntax, semantics, pragmatics and discourse.

Experts from psycholinguistics and English historical linguistics address core factors in language change.

In the study of word formation, the focus has often been on generating the form. In this book, the semantic aspect of the formation of new words is central. It is viewed from the perspectives of word formation rules and of lexicalization. An extensive introduction gives a historical overview of the study of the semantics of word formation and lexicalization, explaining how the different theoretical frameworks used in the contributions relate to each other. Each chapter then concentrates on a specific question about a theoretical concept or a word formation process in a particular language and adopts a theoretical framework that is appropriate to the study of this question. From general theoretical concepts of productivity and lexicalization, the focus moves to terminology, compounding, and derivation. Theoretical frameworks discussed include Jackendoff's Conceptual Structure, Langacker's Cognitive Grammar, Lieber's lexical semantic approach to word formation, Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon, Beard's Lexeme-Morpheme-Base Morphology, The onomasiological approach to terminology and word formation.

The status of grammaticalization has been the subject of many controversial discussions. The contributions to What makes Grammaticalization? approach the prevalent phenomenon from the angle of language structure and focus on the interrelation between the levels of phonology, pragmatics (inference), discourse and the lexicon and some of them try to integrate the areal perspective. A wealth of data from Slavonic languages as well as from languages of other genetic and areal affiliation is discussed. The book is of interest to linguists specializing in grammaticalization, lexicalization and morphological typology, to language typologists as well as to functional, historical and cognitive linguists.

This book is the result of a joint project on lexical and semantic typology which gathered together field linguists, semanticists, cognitivists, typologists, and an NLP specialist. These cross-linguistic studies concern semantic shifts at large, both synchronic and diachronic: the outcome of polysemy, heterosemy, or semantic change at the lexical level. The first part presents a comprehensive state of the art of a domain typologists have long been reluctant to deal with. Part two focuses on theoretical and methodological approaches: cognition, construction grammar, graph theory, semantic maps, and data bases. These studies deal with universals and variation across languages, illustrated with numerous examples from different semantic domains and different languages. Part three is dedicated to detailed empirical studies of a large sample of languages in a limited set of semantic fields. It reveals possible universals of semantic association, as well as areal and cultural tendencies.

There is a continual growth of interest among linguists of all-theoretical denominations in grammaticalization, a concept central to many linguistic (change) theories. However, the discussion of grammaticalization processes has often suffered from a shortage of concrete empirical studies from one of the best-documented languages in the world, English. Pathways of Change contains discussion of new data and provides theoretical lead articles based on these data that will help sharpen the theoretical aspects involved, such as the definition and the logical connection of the component processes of grammaticalization. The volume is concentrated around a number of themes that are important or controversial in grammaticalization studies, such as the principle of unidirectionality, the relation between lexicalization and grammaticalization — and connected with these two factors the possibility of degrammaticalization — the way iconicity interweaves with grammaticalization processes, and with the phenomenon of grammaticalization on a synchronic or discourse level, also often termed subjectifization.

English historical linguistics is a subfield of linguistics which has developed theories and methods for exploring the history of the English language. This Handbook provides an account of state-of-the-art research on this history. It offers an in-depth survey of materials, methods, and language-theoretical models used to study the long diachrony of English. The frameworks covered include corpus linguistics, historical sociolinguistics, historical pragmatics and manuscript studies, among others. The chapters, by leading experts, examine the interplay of language theory and empirical data throughout, critically assessing the work in the field. Of particular importance are the diverse data sources which have become increasingly available in electronic form, allowing the discipline to develop in new directions. The Handbook offers access to the rich and many-faceted spectrum of work in English historical linguistics, past and present, and will be useful for researchers and students interested in hands-on research on the history of English.

This book provides an in depth analysis of the different ways in which bilingual speakers switch from one language to another in the course of conversation. This phenomenon, known as code-mixing or code-switching, takes many forms. Pieter Muysken adopts a comparative approach to distinguish between the different types of code-mixing, drawing on a wealth of data from bilingual settings throughout the world. His study identifies three fundamental and distinct patterns of mixing - 'insertion', 'alternation' and 'congruent lexicalization' - and sets out to discover whether the choice of a particular mixing strategy depends on the contrasting grammatical properties of the languages involved, the degree of bilingual competence of the speaker or various social factors. The book synthesizes a vast array of recent research in a rapidly growing field of study which has much to reveal about the structure and function of language.

This specially commissioned volume considers the processes involved in language change and the issues of how they can be modelled and studied. The way languages change offers an insight into the nature of language itself, its internal organisation, and how it is acquired and used. Accordingly, the phenomenon of language change has been approached from a variety of perspectives by linguists of many different orientations. This book, originally published in 2003, brings together an international team of leading figures from different areas of linguistics to re-examine some of the central issues in this field and also to discuss new proposals. The volume is arranged into sections, including grammaticalisation, the typological perspective, the social context of language change and contact-based explanations. It seeks to cover the subject as a whole, bearing in mind its relevance for the general analysis of language, and will appeal to a broad international readership.