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Reviewed by:
  • Gradience, gradualness and grammaticalization
  • Tine Breban
Gradience, gradualness and grammaticalization. Ed. by Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Graeme Trousdale . (Typological studies in language 90.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010. Pp. ix, 306. ISBN 9789027206718. $149 (Hb).

A few years ago, Bas Aarts's theory of synchronic gradience in grammatical categories (Aarts 2004, 2007a) was the source of an inspiring debate on the status of grammatical categories as linguistic primitives and the application of a distributional analysis of morphosyntactic features as a means to identify categories (Aarts 2007b, Croft 2007). This book is a further discussion of the validity of Aarts's proposal in confrontation with the diachronic study of language. It explores the possible relationships between synchronic gradience and diachronic gradualness (especially stepwise decategorialization and category shift) as observed in grammaticalization. The book has a secondary, methodological aim: to compare the answers of formal and functional approaches to language change to this issue.

The volume originates in a workshop convened by the editors, Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Graeme Trousdale, at New Reflections on Grammaticalization 4 (University of Leuven, July 2008). The editors have taken it far beyond the typical collection of papers, however. They have streamlined the papers by putting forward three focused research questions (see below), by stimulating the participants to integrate ideas from and comment upon each other's papers, and, most interestingly, by inviting additional linguists to complete the spectrum of issues dealt with (Walter Bisang) or to write commentaries on sets of papers (Elly van Gelderen, Lene Schøsler, and Nigel Vincent and Kersti Börjars). These theory-oriented commentaries nicely complement some of the in-depth data studies that were part of the original workshop and enhance the cohesion, scope, and resonance of this volume. Overall, the volume evidences what it preaches: the future of grammaticalization research lies in going back and forth between empirical data and theory. The individual papers are of very high quality. They are all well researched and clearly written; and every one of them makes innovative contributions to ongoing research on language change.

The volume comprises a preface from the editors and eleven papers. In the preface, the editors set out the aim of the volume 'to fill some of the gaps in discussions of gradience, gradualness and grammaticalization from a variety of viewpoints, both functional and formal' (1) and to formulate three concrete research questions (2): (i) How are we to understand the intersection between synchronic gradience and grammaticalization?; (ii) What insights does grammaticalization offer for assessing the validity of Aarts's claims regarding synchronic gradience, specifically that there is a significant difference between subsective and intersective gradience?; and (iii) What does the intersection between grammaticalization and synchronic gradience tell us about the hypothesis of structural gradualness, and about whether work on grammaticalization needs reanalysis and analogy/extension, or some other mechanism?

The first paper, by ELIZABETH CLOSS TRAUGOTT and GRAEME TROUSDALE, 'Gradience, gradualness and grammaticalization: How do they intersect?' (19-44), serves two purposes. On the one hand, Traugott and Trousdale provide very useful, clear, and comprehensive overviews of the existing discussions on gradience and gradualness as well as on reanalysis and analogy as mechanisms of language change. On the other hand, they formulate their own answers to each of the three research questions. Most importantly, they propose to restrict the term GRADIENCE to synchrony and GRADUALNESS to diachrony. They further distinguish between the roles of analogy and reanalysis as mechanisms and underlying motivations of change by means of the terms analogization and reanalysis (mechanisms) versus analogical thinking and parsing (motivations). They argue that gradualness in linguistic change is in fact a succession of discrete micro-steps, rather than indeterminacy or continuity. Each of these steps is the result of reanalysis that can, but need not, be motivated by analogical thinking.

In the paper 'Grammaticalization, the clausal hierarchy and semantic bleaching' (45-73), IAN ROBERTS shows how Traugott and Trousdale's analysis of micro-steps can be operationalized in a minimalist framework. His central claim is that gradualness and gradience are mere effects resulting [End Page 662] from the coarseness of traditional categories. More fine-grained analyses, such as...

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