Grammaticalization

This is the first general introduction to grammaticalization, the processes whereby ordinary lexical items, such as nouns and verbs, change over time into grammatical elements such as case markers, sentence connectives and auxiliaries, and whereby grammatical elements in general come into being and decay. The authors synthesize work from several areas of linguistics, including historical linguistics, discourse analysis and pragmatics. Data are drawn from many languages, including Ewe, Finnish, French, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, and especially English.