Form change
As Table 21.1 illustrates, a common pattern in grammaticalisation is one in which free morphemes become bound or fused together. In other words, agrammaticalised unit undergoes a tighter integration of morphophonological form. This is known as coalescence, which is a process whereby two words become one. For example, Modern English derivational affixes -hood, -dom and-ly evolved from nouns meaning ‘condition’, ‘state, realm’ and ‘body, like ness’, respectively. Consider the following examples from Hopper and Traugott (1993: 41):
The process of coalescence is accompanied by reduction or loss: a process whereby a morpheme or sound segment is either shortened or lost altogether. This process is illustrated by the English (be) going to construction, which has undergone syllabic reduction (from trisyllabic to disyllabic) and has also undergone coalescence, resulting in a fused form gonna. Observe that the form associated with the FUTURE meaning has undergone reduction while the form associated with the ALLATIVE (motion) meaning has not. This is illustrated by the acceptability of gonna with a FUTURE meaning (3a), but not with an ALLATIVE meaning (3b) (compare I’m going to the fish and chip shop).
Moving from morphophonological form to morphosyntactic form, grammaticalised units display rigidification of morpheme/word order (Croft 2003: 257). For example, consider the position of the French clitic pronoun l’ (a grammaticalised unit) with the position of its full NP counterpart le livre in example (4).
As French evolved from its ancestor Latin, the relatively free Latin word order (which tended towards a default SOV pattern in transitive clauses) became rigidified along two parameters in French: an SOV pattern became fixed in the case of (clitic) object pronouns (4a), while an SVO pattern became fixed in the case of free nominals (4b).
In Croft’s (2003: 259) terms, grammaticalised units also undergo paradigmaticisation, whereby they move from membership of an open class to membership of a closed class, and obligatorification, whereby an optional element in a construction becomes obligatory. The latter process is illustrated by the French negation particle pas. This open-class word means ‘footstep’, and was originally introduced into the French negative construction ne V as an emphatic object of verbs of movement (5a). Over time, this element was reanalysed as an optional negation particle in negated verb of movement constructions: ne V-movement (pas). The negation particle was then extended to occur optionally in all negated verb constructions: ne V (pas), and then obliga torily: ne V pas (5b). Finally, in spoken French, the element pas retained its obligatory status (in the absence of another negative morpheme like rien ‘any thing’ or jamais ‘(n)ever’), while the earlier negation particle ne became optional, giving rise to the construction (ne) V pas. In some current spoken varieties, ne has now been lost altogether, resulting in the construction V pas (5c). This path of change is schematically represented in (5d). The example in (5) is based on Hopper and Traugott (1993: 58).
The disappearance of the negation particle ne in varieties of modern spoken French illustrates the final stage in the life-cycle of a grammatical morpheme: grammatical loss.
