Erosion

Erosion means that as a result of undergoing grammaticalization, a linguistic expression loses phonetic substance. As we observed above, this parameter is usually the last to apply in grammaticalization processes, and it is not a requirement for grammaticalization to happen. For ex ample, the Germanverb haben ‘to have, possess’ has been grammaticalized to a perfect aspect (and also a past tense) marker. But in spite of its history of nearly one millennium as a tense–aspect auxiliary it has not undergone erosion, being phonetically indistinguishable from the lexical verb; and much the same applies to its Latin equivalent habēre ‘to hold, possess’, which has also given rise to a tense–aspect auxiliary in the Romance languages, but its form as a verb of possession and as an auxiliary for example in French is the same¹(Vincent 1995: 437).

Erosion can be of two kinds: First, it may involve entire morphological units. Thus, when the Old English phrase þa hwile þe ‘that time that’, or any of its variants,² was grammaticalized to the temporal and concessive subordinator while in Modern English, this meant that morphological segments were lost, and much the same happened in the case of its Old High German counterpart al di wila daz ‘all the time that’, which was grammaticalized to the causal subordinator weil ‘because’ in Present-Day German, which is also characterized by loss of morphological elements. We will refer to such cases as morphological erosion (see Heine and Reh 1984). More commonly, however, change is restricted to phonetic erosion, that is, to phonetic properties, in particular the ones listed in (17), or any combination thereof.

(17) Kinds of phonetic erosion

a. Loss of phonetic segments, including loss of full syllables.

b. Loss of suprasegmental properties, such as stress, tone, or into nation.

c. Loss of phonetic autonomy and adaptation to adjacent phonetic units.

d. Phonetic simplification.

The development in English from because to colloquial English coz is an instance of (17a): It entailed both loss of phonetic segments and reduction from a disyllabic to a monosyllabic unit. Since the eroded form coz does not occur in all varieties of English, there is reason to assume that erosion was a process that took place subsequent to desemanticization and decategorialization. The grammaticalization of the English adjective full to the derivational suffix-ful illustrates (17b), in that it entailed a loss of the ability to be stressed. (17c) can be illustrated with the following example. In the West African language Maninka, a locative construction [X be at Y], illustrated in (18a), has been grammaticalized to a progressive aspect (18b), as has happened in many other languages (Heine 1993; Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994; Kuteva 2001). The result is that the copula ye̒ (PM) and the locative postposition na̒ ‘at’ have been reinterpreted as a discontinuous progressive marker. Another result of this process is that na̒ has lost its phonetic autonomy: While it is invariable as a postposition, as a progressive marker it no longer is: It assimilates to the preceding verb, taking the form na when the verb ends in a nasal but la elsewhere, and it has lost its high tone, adopting the tone of the preceding verb.

A paradigm case of (17d) concerns phonetically complex sound units that in the process of grammaticalization lose phonetic properties. For example, many West and central African languages have labial-velar consonants, such as kp and gb, which are phonetically more complex than the corresponding labial (p, b) or velar (k, g) consonants. Accordingly, in the Ewe language of Ghana and Togo, gb was ‘‘simplified’’ to a corresponding velar g in some words that underwent grammaticalization, for example when the noun gbe̒ ‘location, direction’ gave rise to an ingressive aspect marker-ge̒, or the verb gbɔ ‘to return’ to the repetitive aspect prefix-ga (Heine 1993: 107).

In quite a number of cases, both morphological and phonetic erosion tend to be involved. For example, the grammaticalization of the phrase by the side of to the preposition beside in Modern English, or of by cause of to because (of) appear to have involved both morphological and phonetic erosion. Similarly, the development of the Latin phrase (in) casa ‘in the house (of)’ via Old French (en) chies ‘at’ to the Modern French locative preposition chez ‘at’ involved loss of both morphological and phonological substance.

In accordance with the definition provided above, we are using erosion as a technical term of grammaticalization theory, which needs to be distinguished from ‘‘phonetic reduction,’’ for the following reasons: First, phonetic reduction does not necessarily involve grammaticalization; for example, the English copula verb ’s in She’s a teacher is a phonetically reduced version of is, but this is not due to grammaticalization. And second, erosion also differs from phonetic reduction in that it includes a loss of morphological elements, as we just saw.

¹ This does not apply to the development of Latin habēre as a future tense auxiliary, which has been affected by all parameters of grammaticalization, including erosion, in almost all of the Western Romance languages (Portuguese being an exception; anonymous referee).

² Such variants being ðe hwile ðe, þa hwile þe, þa hwile þa, þa hwila þe, a hwile ðæ, ðe hwile ðæt, etc.

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أسماك أعماق البحر تكشف نظاما بصريا يتجاوز "المألوف"

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المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

Grammatical morphemes and agreement

Constructional schemas

Composite structure

Prototypical stems and affixes

Semantic autonomy and dependence

Discussion

Decategorialization

Desemanticization

Extension

Phonological autonomy and dependence

Word structure

The prototypical grammatical construction