The Progressive in Modern English: A Corpus-Based Study of Grammaticalization and Related Changes
This book constitutes the first full-length diachronic treatment of the English progressive from Old English to Present-day English, focusing on the crucial phase of its grammaticalization between the 17th and 20th centuries.
This book explores the key mechanisms underlying semantic change. Meaning changes work, the author shows, through modes of reanalysis undertaken by speakers and listeners, and are particularly evident in processes of grammaticalization in which lexical items lose autonomous meaning. Regine Eckardt's approach is derived from formal semantic theory and developed in the context of several in-depth case studies. Her book will interest scholars and advanced students of historical and comparative linguistics and formal semantics.
Subjectification, Intersubjectification and Grammaticalization (Topics in English Linguistics)
This volume aims to arrive at a fine-grained and grammar-based understanding of the notions of (inter-)subjectivity and (inter-)subjectification in their application to grammaticalization research.
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
This book is a companion to Rethinking grammaticalization: New perspectives, also edited by María José López-Couso and Elena Seoane (TSL 76). The two volumes together offer a representative sample of the papers presented at the New Reflections onGrammaticalization 3 conference, held in Santiago de Compostela in 2005, and investigate the most relevant topics pertaining to rammaticalization studies today. The title of the present volume, Theoretical and empirical issues in grammaticalization, highlights the broad-ranging nature of the contributions it comprises and the fact that they all combine theoretical, empirical and/or methodological questions.
