Grammaticalization and 'lateral' grammaticalization, formalism and functionalism, in Minimalism

This paper proposes a unified formal (Minimalist) analysis of grammaticalization, as proposed by Roberts and Roussou (2003) and van Gelderen (2004, 2011)), and 'lateral' grammaticalization, a phenomenon discovered by Simpson and Wu (2002), which sheds new insights not only on the mechanisms that underlie grammaticalization but also the interface effects of grammaticalization, the architecture of human language and the relationship between formalism and functionalism in language change.