Concept
Grammaticalization
Related concepts (19)
Specialization (linguistics)
In linguistics, the term specialization (as defined by Paul Hopper), refers to one of the five principles by which grammaticalization can be detected while it is taking place. The other four principles are: layering, divergence, persistence, and de-categorialization. Specialization refers to the narrowing of choices that characterizes an emergent grammatical construction. The lexical meaning of a grammaticalizing feature decreases in scope, so that in time the feature conveys a generalized grammatical meaning.
Persistence (linguistics)
Persistence in linguistics refers to one of the five principles by which grammaticalisation can be detected while it is taking place. The other four are: layering, divergence, specialisation, and de-categorialisation. "When a form undergoes grammaticalization from a lexical to a grammatical function, as long as it is grammatically viable some traces of its original lexical meanings tend to adhere to it, and details of its lexical history may be reflected in constraints on its grammatical distribution.
De-categorialization
De-categorialization (or de-categorialisation) in linguistics refers to one of the five principles by which grammaticalization can be detected while it is taking place (according to Paul Hopper). The other four are layering, divergence, specialization, and persistence. De-categorialization can be described as the loss of morphosyntactic properties.
Language change
Language change is variation over time in a language's features. It is studied in several subfields of linguistics: historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and evolutionary linguistics. Traditional theories of historical linguistics identify three main types of change: systematic change in the pronunciation of phonemes, or sound change; borrowing, in which features of a language or dialect are altered as a result of influence from another language or dialect; and analogical change, in which the shape or grammatical behavior of a word is altered to more closely resemble that of another word.
Linguistic universal
A linguistic universal is a pattern that occurs systematically across natural languages, potentially true for all of them. For example, All languages have nouns and verbs, or If a language is spoken, it has consonants and vowels. Research in this area of linguistics is closely tied to the study of linguistic typology, and intends to reveal generalizations across languages, likely tied to cognition, perception, or other abilities of the mind.
Reduplication
In linguistics, reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The classic observation on the semantics of reduplication is Edward Sapir's: "generally employed, with self-evident symbolism, to indicate such concepts as distribution, plurality, repetition, customary activity, increase of size, added intensity, continuance." Reduplication is used in inflections to convey a grammatical function, such as plurality, intensification, etc.
Linguistic typology
Linguistic typology (or language typology) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the common properties of the world's languages. Its subdisciplines include, but are not limited to phonological typology, which deals with sound features; syntactic typology, which deals with word order and form; lexical typology, which deals with language vocabulary; and theoretical typology, which aims to explain the universal tendencies.
Linguistic description
In the study of language, description or descriptive linguistics is the work of objectively analyzing and describing how language is actually used (or how it was used in the past) by a speech community. All academic research in linguistics is descriptive; like all other scientific disciplines, it seeks to describe reality, without the bias of preconceived ideas about how it ought to be. Modern descriptive linguistics is based on a structural approach to language, as exemplified in the work of Leonard Bloomfield and others.
Marker (linguistics)
In linguistics, a marker is a free or bound morpheme that indicates the grammatical function of the marked word, phrase, or sentence. Most characteristically, markers occur as clitics or inflectional affixes. In analytic languages and agglutinative languages, markers are generally easily distinguished. In fusional languages and polysynthetic languages, this is often not the case. For example, in Latin, a highly fusional language, the word amō ("I love") is marked by suffix -ō for indicative mood, active voice, first person, singular, present tense.