Grammaticalization

Grammaticalization (also known as grammatization or grammaticization) is a linguistic process in which words change from representing objects or actions to serving grammatical functions. Grammaticalization can involve content words, such as nouns and verbs, developing into new function words that express grammatical relationships among other words in a sentence. This may happen rather than speakers deriving such new function words from (for example) existing bound, inflectional constructions. For example, the Old English verb willan 'to want', 'to wish' has become the Modern English auxiliary verb will, which expresses intention or simply futurity. Some concepts are often grammaticalized; others, such as evidentiality, less frequently.^[1]

In explaining this process, linguistics distinguishes between two types of linguistic items:

• lexical items or content words, which carry specific lexical meaning
• grammatical items or function words, which serve mainly to express grammatical relationships between the different words in an utterance

Some linguists define grammaticalization in terms of the change whereby lexical items and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions, and how grammatical items develop new grammatical functions.^[2] Where grammaticalization takes place, nouns and verbs which carry certain lexical meaning develop over time into grammatical items such as auxiliaries, case markers, inflections, and sentence connectives.

A well-known example of grammaticalization is that of the process in which the lexical cluster let us, for example in "let us eat", is reduced to let's as in "let's you and me fight". Here, the phrase has lost its lexical meaning of "allow us" and has become an auxiliary introducing a suggestion, the pronoun 'us' reduced first to a suffix and then to an unanalyzed phoneme.

In other areas of linguistics, the term grammaticalization has taken on a much broader meaning. These other senses of the term are discussed below.