Grammaticalization vs. Reanalysis: a Semantic- Pragmatic Account of Functional Change in Grammar

Most current theorizing conceives of grammaticalization (and reanalysis) in purely structural-descriptive terms, according to Lehmann's (1995) parameters. But these leave fundamental questions unanswered: what do speakers/hearers actually do when they grammaticalize/reanalyze a linguistic item? We will show reanalysis to be essentially a hearer-based procedure. Listeners aim at understanding what speakers say. Grammaticalization, on the other hand, is a speaker-based phenomenon: Speakers invent expressive discourse techniques in order to pay tribute to basic communicative needs such as to tell the truth, to be relevant; as a consequence of routinization, these techniques will lose their salience and their relics end up by becoming part of the grammar. Like any type of change, grammaticalization is ratified by reanalyses on the part of listeners. In a trivial sense, lexical elements are reanalyzed as grammatical ones. Only in this sense are reanalysis and grammaticalization inseparable twins.

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