Publisher |
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS |
Publication Year |
2009 |
ISBN-13 |
9780199207930 |
ISBN-10 |
0199207933 |
Binding |
Paperback |
Number of Pages |
290 Pages |
Language |
(English) |
Weight (grms) |
447 |
Grammaticalization is a well-attested process of linguistic change in which a lexical item becomes a function word, which may be further reduced to a clitic or affix. Proponents of the universality of grammaticalization have usually argued that it is unidirectional and have thus found it a useful tool in linguistic reconstruction. In this book Prof Norde shows that change is reversible on all levels: semantic, morphological, syntactic, and phonological. As a consequence, the alleged unidirectionality of grammaticalization is not a reliable reconstructional tool, even if degrammaticalization is a rare phenomenon
Muriel Norde
Muriel Norde is Professor of Scandinavian Languages and Literature at the University of Groningen. She was previously a research fellow at the University of Amsterdam. Her 1997 University of Amsterdam PhD was awarded for a study of the history of the Swedish genitive. She has published extensively on grammaticalization and related phenomena, including articles in Nordic Journal of Linguistics and Language Sciences. She is also the co-editor, with Olga Fischer and Harry Perridon, of Up and Down the Cline: the Nature of Grammaticalization (Benjamins, 2004).
Muriel Norde
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS