Acceso usuarios
Ferdinand von Mengden, Horst J. Simon
So. . . what is it then, this grammaticalization? Probably every linguist who is interested in language change will have raised this question at some point. And many of them will also have some answer more or less at hand. The problem is that these answers may all differ in one detail or other. A likely reason for this is the great success (or, for that matter, popularity) that the concept of grammaticalization has enjoyed in historical linguistics to date. Therefore, maybe inevitably, the proliferation of analyses within the domain of grammaticalization studies has also led to a proliferation of terms and notions, not all of them sharply defined. This, in turn, has produced a certain dissatisfaction with the state of the field among many more sceptical (or maybe just more cautious) linguists. Hence, the most important aim of the present collection of articles (which presents a selection of the papers presented at the workshop “Refining Grammaticalization” at Freie Universität Berlin in February 2012) is to try to come to grips with the notion of grammaticalization and related concepts in the light of recent theorizing in historical linguistics.
