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What is lateral grammaticalization (LangUE).pdf (86.81 kB)

What is 'lateral' grammaticalization?

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-08-03, 18:41 authored by Keith TseKeith Tse
Simpson and Wu (2002) and Wu’s (2004) ‘lateral grammaticalization’ is a Minimalist analysis of Chinese de, which has been re-analysed from a determiner (D) to a verbal suffix (T). Roberts and Roussou (2003) and van Gelderen (2011) deal with grammaticalization within Minimalism, though neither take ‘lateral grammaticalization’ into account (Vincent and Borjars (2010:293)). A comparison between these accounts reveals that Roberts and Roussou’s (2003) and van Gelderen’s (2011) ‘feature economy’ also accounts for the cross-linguistic distribution of ‘lateral grammaticalization’, which is the main theoretical thrust of their accounts (Roberts and Roussou (2003:2-7), van Gelderen (2011:4-17)). However, the lack of ‘upward feature analysis’ (Roberts and Roussou (2003:200)) in ‘lateral grammaticalization’ sets it formally apart from grammaticalization, and this ties in empirically with the lack of ‘phonological weakening’, ‘univerbation’ and ‘semantic bleaching’ in ‘lateral grammaticalization’ when these are the diagnostic traits of grammaticalization (Campbell (2001), Roberts and Roussou (2003:224-232)). All this entails some significant revisions to Minimalism as a model for grammaticalization and ‘lateral grammaticalization’, the former of which involves an upward shift of features while the latter involves a re-analysis of features from pragmatics.

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