Notice
"The development of English evidential markers: A case of grammaticalization or constructionalization?", Eric Melac, Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry
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Descriptif
This paper aims to discuss the competing frameworks of grammaticalization and Diachronic Construction Grammar (henceforth DCxG) by examining which framework would better account for the development of English evidentials. Grammaticalization has been a major field of studies for several decades, but has been challenged by new approaches, such as DCxG (Noël 2007, Traugott & Trousdale 2013, Gildea & Barðdal 2022). English is often presented as a language lacking grammatical evidentials (Aikhenvald 2004: 7–11), but this has been refuted, or at least qualified, by several authors (Aijmer 2009, López-Couso & Méndez-Naya 2014, Mélac 2022). Many markers encoding the speaker’s information sources show signs of grammaticalization, such as must, look like, or I guess.
I argue that DCxG adds useful descriptive tools to detail the development of evidentials in English, but that it should not replace grammaticalization theory. First, DCxG tends to minimize the differences between grammar and lexicon. However, only a few notions, such as evidentiality, may be rendered by (semi-)grammatical tools, while all semantic domains may be expressed by lexical elements.. Markers encoding evidentiality such as I guess or look like are partially grammatical, while words referring to art or anatomy cannot be. DCxG also underestimates the special characteristics of the movement towards the grammatical end of the lexicon-grammar continuum. The processes that are involved in the grammaticalization of English evidentials are, however, mainly unidirectional, such as the decategorialization of inferential must, while other types of change are multidirectional. Finally, DCxG may be relevant for the micro-description of the evolution of individual forms, but the grammaticalization framework is better adapted when considering large semantic domains and cross-linguistic data. The revelation of evidential paradigms in typologically diverse languages have allowed scholars to investigate this phenomenon in English, and document many symptoms of the grammaticalization of evidentiality that had not been considered so far.
References
Aijmer, Karin. 2009. Seem and evidentiality. Functions of Language 16 (1): 63–88.
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gildea, Spike and Jóhanna Barðdal. 2022. From grammaticalization to Diachronic Construction Grammar: A natural evolution of the paradigm. Studies in Language. 47 (4): 743–788.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs and Graeme Trousdale. 2013. Constructionalization and Constructional Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
López-Couso, María José and Belén Méndez-Naya. 2014. From clause to pragmatic marker: A study of the development of like-parentheticals in American English. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 15 (1): 36–61.
Mélac, Eric. 2022. The grammaticalization of evidentiality in English." English Language & Linguistics 26(2), 331-359.
Noël, Dirk. 2007. Diachronic construction grammar and grammaticalization theory." Functions of language 14 (2): 177–202.
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