In the last few years several papers have appeared on the synchrony and diachrony of the ‘comparative modal’ (had/‘d) better, inspired by Denison and Cort (2010), which pays particular attention to the rise of ‘bare’ better, as in You better go. Van der Auwera et al. (2013) provide extensive statistical analysis of British and American usage of ‘d better and its variants.

Introduction

Lexicalization is often discussed in isolation from grammaticalization, especially in studies of word formation. However, it has increasingly been the case that it has entered into grammaticalization studies. One area in which the linking of lexicalization and grammaticalization is especially apparent is in work on fusion, including what has been called freezing, univerbation, or bonding, depending on the type of item that undergoes boundary loss. Fusion of syntagmatically free items into fixed phrases and sometimes further reduction by coalescence is typical both of certain types of lexicalization (cf. gate-crasher, blackbird [pronounced with syllabic r]) and of grammaticalization (cf. Eng. within, Fr. chanterai). For this reason, the same data are sometimes argued to be instances of lexicalization or grammaticalization or both. A few examples are discussed in Section 3.1. When fusion is conceptualized in the larger context of discussions of unidirectionality – a theoretical construct that has emerged most prominently in work on grammaticalization – parallels between lexicalization and grammaticalization readily emerge (3.2). These parallels concern loss of compositionality, both fusion of originally separable morphemes on the dimension of form and idiomaticization on the dimension of meaning; many examples have been cited in Chapter 2. Unidirectionality encompasses other changes in the grammaticalization literature as well, most especially “less to more grammatical” status of form–meaning pairs. Where changes have been identified that do not conform to unidirectionality, they are often considered to be lexicalizations that are the opposite, reverse, or “mirror images” of grammaticalization (see 3.3), and hence a kind of degrammaticalization (3.3.1).

Purpose of the present study

is something we might well say to a visitor from abroad, and not think twice about whether holiday and today or the -ing of celebrating and of fascinating function differently from the point of view of our knowledge of language. However, linguists, grammarians, and others who study and think about language, how it is structured, how we come to know it, and how it changes concern themselves with just such questions. In the introduction to the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, Matthews says: “Everyone will agree that linguistics is concerned with the lexical and grammatical categories of individual languages” (1997:vi), and this is what our example in (1) is about: holiday, celebrate, and fascinating are usually regarded as “lexical,” members of large, “open” classes of forms that are relatively infrequently used and express relatively concrete meaning, while we, are, and a are regarded as “grammatical,” members of smaller, relatively “closed” classes of forms that are very frequently used and express relatively abstract meaning. Moreover, today is not clearly a lexical or a grammatical form, having partially concrete and partially abstract meaning, and belonging to a rather large set of adverbs. Finally, the -ing of celebrating and the -ing of fascinating, although seen as originating in the same grammatical form, are generally understood as having developed differently over time, the former remaining grammatical and the latter becoming lexical.

Introduction

This chapter will provide a summary of the book (6.1) followed by a discussion of questions which have emerged from the work and which require further study (6.2), including:

Summary

The foregoing study has been an examination of the process of diachronic lexicalization, most especially in light of contemporary work on diachronic grammaticalization, where it has been common to label phenomena which run counter to the expected directionality of grammaticalization as either “lexicalization” or “degrammaticalization.” To a lesser extent, this study has also examined lexicalization in the context of work in morphology, where lexicalization is often equated with routine processes of word formation. Most of the examples have been from English.

The current state of work in lexicalization suggests a number of conflicting interpretations that deserve attention:

In the 1990s as historical studies of grammaticalization proliferated and questions arose about the relationship between it and lexicalization, we independently sought to understand better to what extent efforts to maximize the distinctions between the two were justified. At the International Conference on English Historical Linguistics in Santiago de Compostela, September 2000, we discovered that we had somewhat similar concerns and similar ideas, most especially that we were both embracing the realization that what we had polarized (see Hopper and Traugott 1993, 2003; Traugott 1994; Brinton 2002, and, to a lesser extent, Traugott 2005) were in fact very similar in certain respects. Having taken criticisms in Cowie (1995) to heart, Traugott was also concerned about the status of derivation in grammaticalization and lexicalization. Meanwhile, it became clear that many others were making similar efforts to account for the similarities as well as differences between the two processes (e.g., Lehmann 1989, 2002; Ramat 1992, 2001; Wischer 2000; Heine 2003b). The diversity of points of view on the two topics has been a matter of frustration to some, but we view it as an inevitable step in the development of relatively new subfields of linguistics, much as has occurred in the study of syntax or morphology.

Consistent with the aims of this series, Cambridge Research Surveys in Linguistics, our purpose in this book is to bring together a variety of scholarly debates concerning the relationship between lexicalization and grammaticalization in language change, with focus on the former.