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Explaining grammaticalization (the standard way)

Article in Linguistics · January 2000

DOI: 10.1515/ling.2000.006

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 Explaining grammaticalization
(the standard way)1

BART GEURTS

Since nobody knows how to draw the line between lexical expressions and
grammatical devices, it is natural to suppose that, in some sense, the tran-
sition from lexicon to grammar is a gradual one. There is a continuum, it
seems, bounded by purely lexical items on one end and purely grammatical
items on the other, with many expressions lying somewhere between these
opposites. This, at any rate, is the view that underlies the notion of gram-
maticalization, which by definition is a process of language change in which
an expression moves away from the lexical pole and toward the grammati-
cal pole. This type of change is quite common, but it turns out that shifts in
the opposite direction, away from the grammatical pole and toward the
lexical pole, are practically nonexistent. The asymmetry between grammati-
calization and degrammaticalization is the topic of the following remarks.
There is a more or less standard view of grammaticalization, which has
recently been challenged, in this journal, by Haspelmath (1999). The pur-
pose of this note is twofold: I want to show how Haspelmath’s criticism can
be met and discuss some of the problems his own proposal runs into.
One of the best-known instances of grammaticalization is ‘‘Jespersen’s
cycle’’:
The history of negative expressions in various languages makes us witness the
following curious fluctuation: the original negative adverb is first weakened, then
found insufficient and therefore strengthened, generally through some additional
word, and this in its turn may be felt as the negative proper and may then in course
of time be subject to the same development as the original word (Jespersen 1917: 4).

This process is exemplified by the history of French predicate negation (see

e.g. Horn 1989; Hock 1991). Initially, negation in French was expressed by
the particle ne (itself the product of a grammaticalization process), which
preceded the verb:
(1) Il ne {vais/va}.
he NEG go
‘He doesn’t go.’

Linguistics 38–4 (2000), 781–788 0024–3949/00/0038–0781

© Walter de Gruyter
782 B. Geurts

In the context of motion verbs ne was optionally reinforced by the substan-

tive pas ‘step’ (in other contexts similar reinforcers were available):
(2) Il ne {vait/va} pas.
he NEG go step
‘He doesn’t go a step.’
In due course, pas shed its connotation of movement and was reanalyzed
as being party to a discontinuous negative construction:
(3) Il ne va pas.
he NEG go NEG
‘He doesn’t go.’
Finally, in present-day colloquial French, pas has come to be seen as the
fulcrum of negation, and ne has been demoted to an optional element:
(4) Il va pas.
he go NEG
‘He doesn’t go.’
This development illustrates several features characteristic of grammatical-
ization phenomena. It all starts when a content word is employed for
achieving a special effect in certain contexts, usually because a standardly
available form is felt to lack in expressiveness. As the new usage catches
on, it gradually becomes a standard form of expression itself, which may
eventually replace the original one, and in the process the content word
becomes increasingly fixed within its new syntactic frame and therefore
less salient, while its semantic content becomes markedly less concrete. In
brief, grammaticalization is a process of phonetic reduction, syntactic
rigidification, and semantic abstraction.
It is often said, as I nearly did at the beginning, that in the course of
grammaticalization content words turn into function words, but this is a
misleading way of putting things, for two reasons. First, since there is no
sharp divide between content words and function words, this formulation
misrepresents a gradual transition as an abrupt one. Second, as illustrated
by the history of French negation and emphasized by Hopper and Traugott
(1993), grammaticalization is seldom a local process and often affects
entire constructions. It isn’t exactly wrong to say that French pas has
turned from an ordinary noun into a negation particle, but it bears empha-
sizing that this statement merely summarizes a protracted and ramified
course of events.
As it turns out, grammaticalization is an irreversible process. Although
it is not logically impossible that a particle should gradually free itself
from its syntactic environment, acquire an increasingly concrete meaning,
 Explaining grammaticalization 783

and finally emerge as an ordinary noun, this kind of thing rarely happens
in practice. This discrepancy calls for an explanation: why is degrammati-
calization so rare, while grammaticalization is quite common? There is a
more or less standard answer to this question, which goes back at least as
far as von der Gabelentz (1891) and sees grammaticalization as resulting
from the interaction between two opposite forces: effectiveness and effi-
ciency (also known as clarity vs. economy, force of diversification vs. force
of unification, hearer’s economy vs. speaker’s economy, Q-principle vs.
I-principle, and so on; this is a terminological free-for-all, apparently).
On the one hand, speakers seek to make themselves understood and
therefore strive for maximally effective messages, but on the other hand,
there is a general tendency not to expend more energy than is strictly
necessary and therefore to prefer economical forms to more elaborate
ones. Grammaticalization begins when a form a that may be efficient but
is felt to lack in effectiveness is replaced with a periphrastic, and therefore
less economical, locution b calculated to enhance effectiveness. Then b gets
the upper hand and wears down due to the general drive toward efficiency
of expression, until it is weakened to the point where it has to be replaced
by some c.
This is the standard view of grammaticalization, which has recently been
challenged by Haspelmath (1999). Referring to the opposing forces of
effectiveness and efficiency (‘‘clarity’’ and ‘‘economy,’’ in his terminology),
Haspelmath asks himself and his readers,
The real problem is to explain why the conflicting tendencies do not cancel each
other out, leading to stasis rather than change — why doesn’t erosion stop at the
point where it would threaten intelligibility? Or alternatively, why doesn’t the
tug-of-war between the two counteracting forces lead only to a back-and-forth
movement? (Haspelmath 1999: 1052)

Haspelmath’s position is that these problems cannot be solved within the

standard framework, which therefore calls for rather drastic revision. I
disagree, because I think it is fairly obvious how Haspelmath’s questions
can be answered without going beyond the conceptual resources of the
received view.
To begin with, whenever we speak of language change, of which gram-
maticalization is a special case, we refer to an emergent phenomenon.
Language, in this connection, is a social entity; individual speakers don’t
count except insofar as they cluster around statistically significant means.
To illustrate the importance of this point, consider the distinction between
content words and function words. Grammaticalization studies perforce
view this distinction as a continuum, because justice must be done to the
observation that a content word may gradually turn into a function word.
784 B. Geurts

There is no reason to expect, however, that this continuum is reflected as

such in any single speaker at any time, and in fact studies in language
processing and acquisition and linguistic disorders yield abundant evidence
converging on the conclusion that, for individual speakers, the content/
functional distinction is a dichotomous one (see Cann 2000 for a recent
summary). There is nothing paradoxical about this, of course, as long as
it is kept in mind that the word language is polysemous and means entirely
different things depending on whether it is applied to individual speakers
or linguistic communities.
Effectiveness and efficiency are forces that act not upon public languages
but upon individual speakers, in two ways. First, it is individual speakers
who, in the utterances they produce, have to strike a balance between
maximum effect and minimum effort. Second, the same forces constrain
the development of speakers’ idiolects, which must find an equilibrium
between optimal discriminability (every meaning its own word) and excess-
ive economy (the same word for all senses).
Speakers do not resort to periphrastic locutions because an expression
as such has suddenly become ineffective, but because it isn’t sufficiently
effective for certain specific purposes. For example, it is a familiar observa-
tion that negative elements are usually not focused upon. In many if not
most contexts, the focus in (5) will not be on the negation but rather on
the main verb or the object, and this is what has enabled the negative
element to accrete on the finite verb in the first place: if not had always
been the main focus, it wouldn’t have lost its independent status.
(5) I haven’t read Pride and Prejudice.
A linguistic form may start to erode as long as it serves well enough for
most purposes, but once erosion has begun it may cease to be sufficiently
effective for some purposes, and the need for an alternative form of
expression arises. But as soon as an alternative has been found, it will
start to compete with the older form, because efficiency doesn’t like gram-
mars in which the same or closely related functions are performed by
different devices, and in many cases the older form will duly disappear.
This answers Haspelmath’s first question: if it serves efficiency in suffi-
ciently many contexts without compromising effectiveness, a linguistic form
may erode to such a degree that it no longer achieves optimal effectiveness
in all contexts. However (and this is Haspelmath’s second question), why
should a community of speakers that has reached this point invariably
‘‘decide’’ to introduce a new form instead of returning to an older, that
is, less reduced, version of the existing one? More briefly, why should there
be reduction followed by wholesale replacement rather than oscillation
between forms? Givón (1975) suggests that it is because reduced forms
 Explaining grammaticalization 785

are  while expanded forms are not, and he is taken to task
for this by Haspelmath (1999: 1050) on the grounds that

[...] the accuracy of predictability is generally quite low. Although we can exclude
certain changes, there is no way to predict, say, whether a [p] will be reduced to a
[w] or a [b], or whether going to will be reduced to [gAne] or [gone]. Similarly, the
degree of predictability in lexical-semantic change is very low, and yet words change
their meanings all the time. Thus, why shouldn’t the preposition on become a noun
**owan ‘top’ or ‘head’ for instance?

Although Haspelmath’s point is well taken, I nonetheless believe that

Givón’s suggestion is on the right track. It is just that the notion of
predictability invoked by Givón is a bit too stringent. There is a distinct
asymmetry between reduction and expansion, which is just that there are
far more alternatives one way than the other. It may be impossible to
forecast whether a [p] will be reduced to a [w] or a [b], but there aren’t
many more options besides these, which is why a [w] or [b] is easily
recognized as a reduced [p]. Now, how many ways are there of expanding
a [p]? If the question makes sense at all, the answer must surely be,
indefinitely many. Similarly, on would easily be identified as a reduced
form of owan (had it existed), because there aren’t that many ways of
reducing owan, but it would be a lot more difficult to identify owan as an
expanded form of on, since the number of alternative expansions is vast.
It is perhaps significant that Haspelmath (1999: 1052) criticizes the
pervasive use, in studies on language change, of such terms as ‘‘erosion,’’
‘‘wear,’’ etc., on the grounds that ‘‘[w]ords are not material objects, but
they exist in our minds as a specific neural patterning [...],’’ and concepts
like erosion simply don’t apply to such patterns, according to Haspelmath.
However, even if sense can be made of the idea that the languages are
constellations of brain patterns, this is not the kind of notion that is
relevant to understanding language change, as I pointed out earlier on,
since grammaticalization processes affect  languages.
The upshot of the foregoing remarks is that there is no reason to give
up the standard line on grammaticalization. This is my main point, but to
round out these remarks I propose to have a brief look at Haspelmath’s
alternative picture. That is to say, what Haspelmath defends is really an
extension of the standard framework: he proposes, in effect, that the
conceptual apparatus of the received account be incorporated in a rather
more elaborate machinery of ‘‘ecological conditions’’ and ‘‘maxims of
action,’’ which he borrows from Keller (1994). I will not review this system
in detail but will focus on two maxims that are crucial to Haspelmath’s
account of grammaticalization. In addition to effectiveness and efficiency
(dubbed by Haspelmath ‘‘clarity’’ and ‘‘economy,’’ respectively),
786 B. Geurts

Haspelmath introduces maxims of ‘‘conformity’’ and ‘‘extravagance,’’

which are equally important to his account, although he lays more empha-
sis on the extravagance maxim:

4. Conformity: talk like the others talk.

5. Extravagance: talk in such a way that you are noticed (Haspelmath 1999: 1055).

Incidentally, I deplore Haspelmath’s use of the term ‘‘maxim,’’ because

it provokes associations with Grice’s theory of pragmatics, and, more
generally, because it implies that the roots of grammaticalization lie in
deliberate acts of individual speakers. Both implications are inappropriate,
in my view. I don’t think it is plausible to hold that, for instance, phonetic
reduction is a consequence of individual speakers’ conscious decisions, and
therefore I fail to see how it could ever be derivable from maxims for
action, properly understood. So as far as I am concerned, all subsequent
tokens of the term maxim are enclosed in invisible scare quotes.
I regard Haspelmath’s conformity maxim as a harmless addition to the
standard framework; it may even be argued to be derivable from the
effectiveness maxim (although such an argument would require a more
precise definition of the maxims). The extravagance maxim is less innocu-
ous, in my view, because unlike the other maxims it is entirely unrelated
to what I take to be the principal function of language, that is to say,
communication. As Haspelmath puts it, ‘‘the speakers’ goal is not just
being understood at the lowest possible cost, but rather being socially
successful with their speech’’ (1999: 1056). Being extravagant, in
Haspelmath’s sense, is rather like wearing a conspicuous though tasteful
tie or walking in an especially elegant manner.
According to Haspelmath, the process of grammaticalization is set in
motion by a speaker who chooses to follow the extravagance maxim, that
is, one who wants to be noticed, and who does so by using an existing
word in a novel way, for example by saying by means of a hammer instead
of with a hammer. This innovation catches on and spreads through the
linguistic community, until eventually by means of has acquired the status
of a complex preposition. This, in a nutshell, is Haspelmath’s view on
grammaticalization.
There are several reasons for doubting that this view is correct. To begin
with, note that the maxims of extravagance and conformity are contradic-
tories: a speaker who abides by one flouts the other. Which raises the
question how a speaker decides that he should follow one rather than the
other; Haspelmath has nothing to say about this. Furthermore, it remains
unclear why a newly introduced form of words should be adopted by
other speakers. Haspelmath maintains that such speakers follow the maxim
 Explaining grammaticalization 787

of conformity as well as the maxim of extravagance. He doesn’t explain

in detail what this is supposed to mean, but what he seems to have in
mind is that his maxims are to be thought of as schematic. On this
construal, the definite noun phrase in the conformity maxim does not
necessarily refer to the speaker’s audience but may alternatively refer to a
third party, and the maxim of extravagance is similarly dependent on the
context: what is extravagant according to some tastes may be routine to
others. However, if this is how Haspelmath’s maxims are to be understood,
they are empty as long as it isn’t explained how they are ‘‘instantiated’’
on any given occasion. In brief, as they stand Haspelmath’s maxims do
not yield any univocal predictions.
Another concern is that the beginning of a grammaticalization process
rarely strikes one as being extravagant in any sense. For example, the first
step in the history of the French ne ... pas construction, when the substan-
tive pas began to accompany negated motion verbs, does not seem like a
particularly daring innovation to me. To be sure, Haspelmath is careful to
water down the pretheoretical notion of extravagance by urging that it
must ‘‘be interpreted very loosely’’ and ‘‘in a generalized sense’’ (1999:
1057), but even so I wonder if the first use of (2) in lieu of (1) will have
contributed anything to the speaker’s social status. And  instances of
grammaticalization are like this: there may have been cases in which the
process was initiated by a surprising linguistic innovation, but such cases
are few and far between.
Yet another way of expressing my reservations about Haspelmath’s
extravagance maxim is by way of the following thought experiment.
Consider an imaginary community of speakers who, without exception,
 feel the need to be socially successful; as far as their linguistic
intercourse is concerned, they just want to attain their communicative
goals, and that is it. If Haspelmath were correct, grammaticalization should
not occur in such a speech community, or at any rate there should be
considerably less of it than in real life. It seems to me that either way such
a view of grammaticalization leads to counterintuitive results.
I suspect that what has led Haspelmath to introduce his maxim of
extravagance is an unduly narrow conception of the familiar maxim of
effectiveness (or clarity, as he calls it). It is tempting to assume that, say,
an assertion is maximally effective if it is accurate and complete. This is
not quite correct, however. Suppose that we wanted to be informed about,
for instance, the geographical distribution of flower shops in Berlin. This
information may be found in a telephone directory, which, let us suppose,
is accurate as well as complete. But it is evident that a judiciously decorated
map will be a great deal more effective (and clearer as well ), despite
the fact that it is bound to be  accurate. This example shows that
 788 B. Geurts

maximizing effectiveness is not just a matter of listing all relevant informa-

tion but is just as much a matter of selection and emphasis. Once this
point is appreciated, it will also be clear that there simply is no point in
introducing a maxim of extravagance in addition to the maxim of
effectiveness.
The process of grammaticalization begins at some point where available
linguistic resources are judged to lack effectiveness for certain purposes.
New resources are then introduced, which occasionally may be said to be
somewhat extravagant, in a suitably bland sense of ‘‘extravagant,’’ but
more often than not deviate only slightly from standard expressions. This
is the received view of grammaticalization, and it seems to me the proper
view, as well.

Received 3 May 2000 Humboldt University, Berlin

Revised version received University of Nijmegen
27 June 2000

Note

1. I am grateful to an anonymous reader for Linguistics for her or his comments on the
first version of this paper. Correspondence address: Department of Philosophy,
University of Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9103, NL-6500 HD Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
E-mail: [email protected].

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Word Order Change, C. N. Li (ed.), 47–112. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Haspelmath, Martin (1999). Why is grammaticalization irreversible? Linguistics 37(6),
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Hock, H. H. (1991). Principles of Historical Linguistics, 2nd ed. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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