Programm 80. StuTS

Grammaticalization research is a necessarily intersectional field of inquiry for multiple reasons. Firstly, tracking the development of a grammatical category requires the fusion of synchronic and diachronic approaches into cohesive accounts (Weinreich et al., 1968). Secondly, patterns of grammaticalization are conditioned by the grammar of a given language, resulting in typological differences between languages with regards to how their respective grammars may develop over time (Bybee et al., 1994). Thirdly, cases of grammatical change have been linked to the interplay of (morpho-)syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors (Comrie, 1976; Bybee et al., 1994). Theories of grammaticalization that seek to adequately explain patterns of grammatical change should thus be able to describe: (i) the properties which make grammatical categories susceptible to change in the first place, (ii) the factors which trigger and maintain dynamics of change, and (iii) the precise mechanisms driving those dynamics (Weinreich et al., 1968).

The proposal in Deo (2015) attempts to provide a comprehensive theory of grammaticalization paths on the example of unidirectional cyclic change observed for imperfective and progressive aspectual markers across multiple languages. In order to do so, it analyzes the relation between imperfective and progressive aspect in formalist, functional, and game-theoretic terms. The core idea is that the imperfective and the progressive share a semantic core but differ in their domains of quantification, which triggers multiple conversational implicatures and leads to morphologically overt progressive markers emerging alongside imperfective forms, becoming increasingly grammaticalized, and eventually generalizing to encompass the entire imperfective domain. Deo (2015) additionally conceptualizes the different stages of this cycle as distinct grammars and provides a quasi-typological classification of various languages and their historic varieties in terms of their position on the cycle. Although Deo's (2015) proposal thus offers a cohesive account of various mechanisms of aspectual change, the full extent of its crosslinguistic applicability remains to be determined. Our work aims to test the limitations of the proposal on the data from Dutch and Russian, two Indo-European languages with different systems of grammatical aspect.

Dutch provides an example of an emerging progressive system largely consistent with Deo's (2015) framework. Its aspectual system reflects the semantic distinction between imperfective and progressive aspect, the formal asymmetry between an unmarked imperfective and more complex progressive constructions, and gradual semantic bleaching. However, Dutch exhibits several partially overlapping constructions at different stages of grammaticalization (Lemmens, 2005). While aan het V is relatively grammaticalized and widely distributed, posture-verb constructions such as zitten te V and bezig zijn met V retain varying degrees of lexical meaning and communicative specialization (Lemmens, 2005; Flecken, 2011). Their coexistence suggests that grammaticalization does not always involve competition between an imperfective and a single progressive marker, but rather may exhibit gradual shifts in communicative competition as lexical distinctions diminish through semantic bleaching.

Data from Russian, by contrast, challenges the implication of universal applicability within Deo's (2015) proposal. The formal semantic distinction between the imperfective and the progressive remains applicable. However, Russian is shown to historically lack an overt progressive marker (Wiemer & Seržant, 2017), putting the validity of its placement on the progressive-imperfective cycle into question. Instead, evidence of overt markers of genericity/iterativity (Biskup, 2024), alongside the historical development of the secondary imperfective suffix -iva-/-yva- (Silina, 1982; Wiemer & Seržant, 2017), raises questions about the role of generic meaning in aspectual grammaticalization. This suggests that an alternative analysis of the Russian imperfective system as defined by an opposition between the generic and the imperfective is potentially more informative, and gives more credence to the notion of the generic-imperfective cycle, briefly considered but ultimately dismissed by Deo (2015) on the grounds of insufficient evidence.

Taken together, the two case studies suggest that the general theoretical framework proposed in Deo (2015) may have broader crosslinguistic applicability than the specific grammaticalization trajectory it uses as an example. Data from Dutch both illustrates and discusses the explanatory potential of the progressive-imperfective cycle, whereas evidence from Russian suggests that the progressive-imperfective cycle may represent only one possible developmental pathway rather than a universal trajectory.

References

Biskup, P. (2024). On imperfective suffixes in Russian. Russian Linguistics, 48(1), 14.

Bybee, J., Perkins, R. & Pagliuca, W. (1994). The evolution of grammar: Tense, aspect, and modality in the languages of the world. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago.

Comrie, B. (1976). Aspect: An introduction to the study of verbal aspect and related problems. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Deo, A. (2015). The semantic and pragmatic underpinnings of grammaticalization paths: The progressive to imperfective shift. Semantics and Pragmatics, 8.

Flecken, M. (2011). What native speaker judgments tell us about the grammaticalization of a progressive aspectual marker in Dutch. Linguistics, 49(3).

Lemmens, M. (2005). Aspectual posture verb constructions in Dutch. Journal of Germanic Linguistics, 17(3).

Silina, V. B. (1982). Istorija kategorii glagol’nogo vida [The history of the category of verbal aspect]. In R. I. Avanesov & V. V. Ivanov (Eds.), Istoričeskaja grammatika russkogo jazyka. Morfologija. Glagol [The historical grammar of Russian. Morphology. The verb] (pp. 158–279). Nauka.

Weinreich, U., Labov, W. & Herzog, M. (1968). Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In W. P. Lehmann & Y. Malkeil (Eds.), Directions for Historical Linguistics: A Symposium (pp. 95–188). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Wiemer, B., & Seržant, I. A. (2017). Diachrony and typology of Slavic aspect: What does morphology tell us? In W. Bisang & A. Malchukov (Eds.), Unity and diversity in grammaticalization scenarios (pp. 239–307). Language Science Press.