Grammaticalization: how to destroy a language?
Have you ever
asked yourself how to destroy a language?
Well, Language
Omega has asked because he has just conquered the country of Language Alpha and
he wants to rule its people. He has very good counsellors: Christian Lehmann
who wrote a fundamental work in the field: Thoughts on Grammaticalization, and
Heine and Reh who wrote another important book: Grammaticalization and
Reanalysis in African Languages.
First of all,
the counsellors suggested not destroying
the language but deforming it. ‘Where the process of language deformation or
let’s say, change begins, you can conquer the people of that language because
they become more accepting of other changes that you want to impose on them.
One of the most powerful elements of language change is grammaticalization. It’s
a painful process because words which represent objects and actions, have to
leave their grammatical categories and enter a new grammatical category to
become grammatical markers like affixes, prepositions, etc. Sometimes a lexical
word or cluster completely loses its lexical meaning, sometimes retains it and
has both lexical meaning and grammatical function. A good example for
grammaticalization is the English ‘will’, which status as a verb also became
auxiliary.’
The counsellors
described how to do grammaticalization. There are four processes to obtain
efficiency:
‘’First, Semantic
bleaching, or desemanticization. It’s a process when a lexical item loses its
semantic content. For example, take the word ‘very’ which means ‘true’ from
Latin and use it for emphasis.
Second, Morphological
reduction or decategorialization. It is a process whereby something that is
clearly marked (either by morphology or by function) as a member of one
grammatical category shifts to be more marked or functioning as a member of
another category. Take a preposition ‘off’ and use it as a verb. For example:
‘Off the pigs’.
Third, Phonetic
erosion. It means, one expression after undergoing grammaticalization, loses
phonetic substance. For example, take the expression ‘going to’ and throw some
phonetic segments out. You’ll get ‘gonna’. The only thing you are doing is
following the principle of least effort. People are lazy, they will like this
new rule.
Fourth, Obligatorification.
Lehmann suggested to reduce "the freedom of the language user with regard
to the paradigm as a whole". It is a process when the use of a linguistic
element becomes obligatory in use. For example, the French "ne...pas"
started as a way to emphasize the negative, but became obligatory. The counsellors
warned Language Omega. ‘Use the process of Obligatorification carefully because
there are some rebels like the linguist Bybee who fights for the independent
status of Obligatorification from grammaticalization
and putting it in a wider category: language change.
The counsellors added
an important note:
‘To rule a
language, you need to know his past so that you will gain insight into how he
will develop in the future. Grammaticalization can be used for these aims too
as it plays an important role in the reconstruction of older states of a
language.’
What examples do
you have in your language for grammaticalization?