Functional changes and (meta-)linguistic evolution

This is a pre-publication version. Please quote only from the published text:

Ferdinand von Mengden. 2016. Functional Shifts and (Meta-)Linguistic Evolution. In Exaptation and Language Change. Ed. Muriel Norde & Freek Van de Velde. Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 336. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. 121-62.

Ferdinand von Mengden Freie Universität Berlin

Functional changes and (meta-)linguistic evolution*

“Every time a scientist hears an idea and passes it on to somebody else, he

is likely to change it somewhat.” Dawkins 1976 [1989]: 194.

Abstract: In this contribution I assess some mainstream approaches to functional changes of grammatical expressions with a focus on two concepts — ‘(secondary) grammaticalization’ and ‘exaptation’. As to the former, I argue that the most influential definition of ‘grammaticalization’ by Kuryłowicz’s (1965) results from a terminological accident rather than from a systematic observation or analysis of linguistic changes. The consequence is that various heterogeneous properties are nowadays associated with one and the same concept. Generally, ‘grammaticalization’ as well as other functional changes discussed in the literature are defined by the status of an expression before and after a change, not by the process itself. On this basis, I will argue that ‘exaptation’ is a concept distinct from other mainstream notions of language change, provided that the context of ‘evolution’ as a principle of variation and change, out of which ‘exaptation’ was brought into linguistics, is taken seriously.

1. Linguistic metalanguage

Roger Lass, who introduced ‘exaptation’ to linguistics, presents a discussion about terminology in scientific disciplines (Lass 1997: 41-42). Once a technical term is established, Lass explains, it begins to live a life on its own, independent of the original intention behind it. A technical term can be enriched by additional meanings and connotations, in principle every time it is used, just as it happens with expressions for every-day concepts. This is irrespective of whether a term was first introduced with the intention to promote a new concept, or whether it was just coined in passing. Lass’s description is reminiscent of Dawkins’s (1976 [1989]) account of evolutionary processes outside of biological evolution. Units of content (‘memes’) are replicated through discourse and thus, just like genes in biological evolution, slightly altered every time they are referred to.

In this article, I look at this process from two angles. One is the evolution of linguistic forms through replication in usage as has been described for instance in Croft (2000). This will play a role towards the end of this article (particularly in Section 6). The other is evolution of scientific thinking, particularly the evolution of linguistic concepts in metalinguistic discourse. Each of the notional extension

* I am indebted to a number of friends and colleagues who discussed earlier versions of this

paper with me. Many of their comments contributed to this text and, should readers appreciate the text, this will be owed also to the valuable feedbacks and questions I received from them. Next to the anonymous reviewers, whose assessment helped a great deal to improve this text and rid it of some major flaws, I would like to also extend my cordial thanks to Tine Breban, Martin Konvička, Anneliese Kuhle, Muriel Norde, and Freek Van de Velde. Needless to say that all remaining shortcomings are entirely my own.

Functional changes and (meta-)linguistic evolution

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that Lass speaks about involves a risk for our heuristic procedures, as it deprives a concept of some aspect, however small, of its original idea. Once the conceptualization of an existing technical or scientific notion is extended, any claim that was made previously about this concept will lose some part of its validity and therefore needs to be carefully reconsidered. This constitutes a severe problem, particularly as most terminological extensions are subtle and usually go unnoticed.

Parts of this article will be about terminology living a life on its own. I will assess various concepts of functional shifts, by which I mean changes on the content side of grammatical expressions. Exaptation is one such a functional shift. I think that a discussion about the notion ‘exaptation’ might profit from a general assessment of the contexts in which our notions for these kinds of changes have been created and developed. The reason why I spend the first part of this article discussing ‘(secondary) grammaticalization’ is that I think this is a very good example of a well-established linguistic concept whose existence is not primarily based on observation, but on the paths it took in the evolution of its metalinguistic usage. On this basis, I will then discuss ‘exaptation’ in the second part of this chapter.

I will begin with a sketch of why I believe that in the history of the study of ‘grammaticalization’ misunderstandings (or misconceptions) arose, were carried on and became entrenched. Section 2 will deal with ‘grammaticalization’, first in general, then in Section 2.4, I will focus on what has been termed “secondary grammaticalization”. In particular, I will argue that the idea of “secondary grammaticalization” has emerged from a terminological accident, not as a result of observation. As a result of this discussion I will question the complexity of the present concept of ‘grammaticalization’ and claim that the notion of ‘secondary grammaticalization’ should be discarded althogether (Sections 3 and 4).

On this basis I will show in Section 5, that approaches to ‘grammaticalization’ share a main characteristic with ‘exaptation’ and with other concepts that refer to functional shifts. This shared characteristic is that these concepts are all defined by the status of input and/or output of the process. This approach to defining “types of change”, I will argue, ignores the more crucial question, namely how linguistic forms change their functions. I will employ the concept of ‘exaptation’ to propose at least a direction which might provide promising insights into the how- and why-questions of language change (Section 6).

The discussion will necessarily have to be selective. For reasons of space, but also for the sake of a concise illustration of my points, I cannot take into consideration all aspects in the history of grammaticalization and exaptation studies. Particularly in the first part, I will have to restrict myself to only a few examples of studies in which the notion ‘grammaticalization’ was, deliberately or not, developed further. I nevertheless hope that the following discussion will be considered a sufficiently fair and representative sketch of the terminological (and thus, notional) problems that I wish to discuss.

Ferdinand von Mengden

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Part I: Secondary Grammaticalization

2. How ‘grammaticalization’ came to be what it is

2.1 From lexical to grammatical — Antoine Meillet

It is well known that the term grammaticalization originates in an article written by Antoine Meillet a little more than a century ago. Meillet (1912: 285) defines grammaticalization as “le passage d’un mot autonome au rôle d’élément grammatical” and, a few lines further down, as “l’attribution du caractère grammatical à un mot jadis autonome.” Both wordings constitute quite a straightforward definition. The main claim that Meillet wanted to make in those days was that ‘analogical levelling’ and ‘grammaticalization’ are the two mechanisms that shape grammatical expressions. Basically, we would still today associate what his definition describes with ‘grammaticalization’.

In the fifty years after Meillet’s article, the term grammaticalization was hardly ever mentioned — one reason was certainly the marginalization of language change as an object of linguistic study extending far into the second half of the previous century. Lehmann (1995 [1982]: 6) mentions a few examples of references from the middle of the twentieth century, in all of which the term grammaticalization is used pretty much in accordance with Meillet’s definition from 1912. These are Tauli (1958: 8), Hoenigswald (1963: 44) and, slightly more liberally, Žirmunskij (1966 [1961]: 83).

2.2 From grammatical to more grammatical — Jerzy Kuryłowicz

In 1964 Jerzy Kuryłowicz uses the term grammaticalization in quite a different sense. Kuryłowicz discusses the relation between inflection and derivation. In this context, he employs the term grammaticalization as follows (Kuryłowicz 1964: 36):

The essential changes of the system are due to the shifts between the inflectional and the derivational categories. The change of an inflectional category into a derivative is called lexicalization of the respective morpheme. The opposite change (derivative > inflectional) is called grammaticalization.

If we compare Kuryłowicz’s statement with Meillet’s definition of ‘grammaticalization’, it is obvious that Kuryłowicz employs the term for something entirely different — and quite independently of Meillet. In the relevant section he discusses the relation of inflection and derivation. Kuryłowicz’s main point in this passage is a distinction between inflectional values that acquire a derivational function and derivational values becoming inflectional. Because a derivational morpheme produces a new lexeme, he calls it “lexicalization”, and, in


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order to coin a convenient antonym, he calls the development towards inflection “grammaticalization”.1

The following observation seems to have gone completely unnoticed by any student of grammaticalization since the 1980s. However, I think it is absolutely crucial for our understanding of the way we nowadays conceptualize ‘grammaticalization’: When writing the above definition, Kuryłowicz does not seem to have been aware of the previous use of the term ‘grammaticalization’ based on Meillet’s 1912 article. If he had been aware of it, he seems to not have troubled about it considerably. Otherwise he probably would have commented on the ambiguity he was creating or, more likely, he would have coined a different term. Kuryłowicz discusses examples of derivational and inflectional domains that have corresponding functions, for instance aspect vs. aktionsart, participle vs. verbal adjective, infinitive vs. verbal noun, plural vs. collective, and a few others, arguing that an inflectional morpheme is productive over a larger number of members of a class than a derivational morpheme (Kuryłowicz 1964: 96). None of these points matches with any of the current ideas of ‘grammaticalization’ (see the discussion in Gaeta, this volume).

A year later, as if he now had become aware that the term grammaticalization had already been used in a sense quite unrelated to his use, Kuryłowicz combines — in a way that seems to me pretty far-fetched — Meillet’s and his own idea of ‘grammaticalization’ as if they were one and the same thing (Kuryłowicz 1965: 69).

Grammaticalization consists in the increase of the range of a morpheme advancing from a lexical to a grammatical or from less grammatical to a more grammatical status, e.g. from a derivative formant to an inflectional one.

It is important to note that the context of this quotation is a very general overview article in which Kuryłowicz discusses the emergence of grammatical categories, that is, not of morphological forms, as Meillet had done, nor of an increase or decrease in paradigmatic scope, as he does in his earlier 1964 article. In this 1965 text, Kuryłowicz describes various different aspects of language change, such as the emergence of both morphological values and morphological categories, word classes, syntactic categories, syllable types, morpheme types, the emergence of analytically expressed grammatical values such as the English ‘present perfect’ and ‘future’, metaphorical semantic shifts from concrete to abstract in adverbs and prepositions, and, finally, nominalizations of nouns and adjectives. It reads like an overview article of language change, a state-of-the-art description with no intention to make any novel claim or to promote any new idea. The article does not contain any references, which is another indicator that Kuryłowicz did not intend to propose any revision, refinement or reassessment of a previous linguistic discourse. And if we consider how differently he deals with the notion 1 Kuryłowicz’s use of the dichotomy ‘lexicalization’ and ‘grammaticalization’ also differs

considerably from that of Žirmunskij (1966 [1961]: 83), who was the first to contrast ‘grammaticalization’ with ‘lexicalization’ in the original Russian text from 1961, which appeared in English translation in 1966.


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‘grammaticalization’ in those two texts from 1964 and 1965, we will find a lot which suggests that Kuryłowicz’s 1965 definition of ‘grammaticalization’ came about rather accidentally and, in any case, not as a deliberate proposal about a relevant concept in the study of language change.

If we look at Kuryłowicz’s double definition of ‘grammaticalization’ in isolation from its context, we will see that it contains (at least) two implicit claims:

1. Both the change from a lexical to a grammatical and the change from a grammatical to a more grammatical status of a morpheme are in principle the same phenomenon (otherwise they did not deserve to be labelled in the same way).

2. There is a significant and measurable hierarchy between a ‘more grammatical status’ and a ‘less grammatical status’ of a grammatical morpheme.

Kuryłowicz neither develops any of these implications systematically, nor does he substantiate either of these implicit claims. And, as I have indicated, it is uncertain whether he ever had the intention to promote either of them. Whatever Kuryłowicz exactly had on his agenda, these implications may in fact just be unintended by-products of his wording, meta-linguistic ‘spandrels’ resulting from the contexts in which he uses the expression grammaticalization. And yet, Kuryłowicz’s 1965 definition is the one that has become enshrined in later grammaticalization studies and that has formed the unshakeable basis of grammaticalization studies ever since the 1980s — in spite of its dubious genesis and of its almost random combination of two aspects of language change,.

I wish to argue that the first claim should be rejected (see Section 3) and, furthermore, that the second claim may or may not be true, but, if it is true, it is, at best a marginal aspect for the study of language change, which neither deserves nor requires a central status in our taxonomy of changes in grammatical elements (see Section 4.2). In the next sections I would first like to demonstrate how in the subsequent discourse about ‘grammaticalization’ the implications underlying to Kuryłowicz’s statement were given a posteriori justification.

2.3 Subsequent thoughts about grammaticalization — Christian Lehmann

In the 1980s, the most influential instigator of the newly emerging interest in grammaticalization was Christian Lehmann, who published his Thoughts on Grammaticalization in 1982. In spite of the fact that it was not published and advertized by a professional publisher, this text quickly became quite widespread. This is most of all a sign of the quality of Lehmann’s treatise as well as of its benefit for the study of language change. But it also shows the demand that there was in those days for a general and comprehensive account of grammaticalization.2

2 The original text is a typescript in a series of grey texts, published by the University of

Cologne, called “Akup – Arbeiten des Kölner Universalien-Projekts”. Encouraged by the


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It is interesting to see how Lehmann introduces and delineates the concept ‘grammaticalization’. What he explains in the early parts of his text conforms very neatly to Meillet’s idea of ‘grammaticalization’ as outlined above in Section 2.1 (Lehmann 1995 [1982]: 9).

The derivational pattern which the word grammaticalization belongs to suggests that it means a process in which something becomes or is made grammatical (cf. legalization). […] In the above explication of grammaticalization, grammatical signifies that which belongs to, is part of, the grammar, as opposed to, e.g., what belongs to the lexicon, to stylistics or discourse.

Lehmann (1995 [1982]: 9; highlight original) then adds another aspect, which, in the context of our discussion is of crucial importance.

Secondly, in addition to the above explication, grammaticalization must mean a process in which something becomes or is made more grammatical (cf. the quotation from Kuryłowicz [i.e., Kuryłowicz (1965: 69) as quoted above in Section 2.2; FvM]).3

One of the puzzling things (to me) in this quote is the use of the modal must. Does Lehmann think it necessarily follows from Kuryłowicz (1965: 69) that grammaticalization, in addition to the acquisition of a grammatical function, also means that “something becomes or is made more grammatical”? Or does Lehmann conjecture about a possible additional meaning of grammaticalization because Kuryłowicz had suggested it? In any case, Lehmann cements the idea that

success of the text, Lehmann published it in 1995 with a professional publisher. To the best of my knowledge, the 1995 version of Lehmann’s text is, in spite of its being labelled “revised edition”, in principle identical with the 1982 version. References to the Thoughts as “Lehmann 1995” therefore actually represent the state of the art of 1982. In the following I will give references to the 1995 version of Lehmann’s text, because it is the most widespread one, not without pointing out that it represents the knowledge and the status of the discussion about grammaticalization of the year 1982. In addition to these two versions, Lehmann published his Thoughts for a third time in 2002, again in a grey series by the University of Erfurt (“ASSIDUE – Arbeitspapiere des Seminars für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Erfurt”), as far as I am aware, again without significant deviations from the original 1982 version. The existence of these different versions is a clear indicator that Lehmann himself has always considered his text as preliminary. — A day after I sent out the proofs of this article to the editors, I became aware of a new version of Lehmann's Thoughts (Lehmann 2015 [1982]). I could not check the text in detail, but it seems that again only minor corrections were made and that the new version is not a revised edition in the genuine sense. However, the text contains an “Epilogue to the third edition” (Lehmann 2015 [1982]: 189-195), in which a few more recent issues of grammaticalization studies are briefly addressed, though none of the difficulties discussed here.

3 Lehmann’s (1995 [1982]: 7) reference to page “52” in Kuryłowicz is misleading. Lehmann correctly refers to the year 1965 as the publication date of Kuryłowicz’s text, but he draws on the reprint of the article in Kuryłowicz (1975). In this 1975 reprint, the relevant quote actually appears on page 52, in the original from 1965, however, it is on page 69.


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‘grammaticalization’ also refers to the process in which a grammatical item becomes more grammatical — and thus that it refers to two different things.

Unlike some of his successors Lehmann seems to be aware that this extension of the term — and the consequence that actually two different phenomena are subsumed under one label — is problematic. The following passage shows that Lehmann (1995 [1982]: 10) does not seem to be entirely at ease with it:

A more serious question is whether the term ‘grammaticalization’ is not unduly stretched if we apply it to such a large range of phenomena. On the one hand, I intend to follow Žirmunskij [1966 (1961): 83; FvM] in subsuming the formation of analytic constructions under grammaticalization. On the other hand, the process does not stop at the level of inflectional morphology. The English pronoun him, after having been grammaticalized to a verb-suffixal object marker -im in Tok Pisin, has further evolved into an invariable transitive verb marker. Such linear extensions of grammaticalization processes into derivational morphology are not at all rare. On the one hand, since such extensions continue the same pattern, they should be called by the same name. On the other hand, it does not seem correct to say that the suffix -im, in its change from an object marker to a transitive marker, becomes more grammatical.

Right away, Lehmann mentions the difficulty of “unduly stretch[ing]” a concept (see Section 1). He motivates the expansion in that he says that the processes described by Kuryłowicz’s addition often follow Meillet’s ‘grammaticalization’ — thus providing an a posteriori justification for Kuryłowicz’s extension of ‘grammaticalization’. Formally, this step is in principle a progress. Any justification for a claim, even if provided in retrospect, is better than a claim without justification. Lehmann’s justification for Kuryłowicz’s expansion is the observation that further developments can be frequently observed (“not at all rare”, “continue the same pattern”) in expressions after they have undergone Meillet-grammaticalization, i.e., after a once autonomous lexical item has acquired a grammatical function. In spite of the advantage of an a posteriori justification, I will show further below in Section 3 that I find this reasoning problematic and will reject this step. At this point of the discussion, I would like to sketch how the concept of ‘grammaticalization’ subtly grows more and more heterogeneous.

But before moving on, let us briefly consider another point. The Tok Pisin object marker -im becoming a marker of transitivity, which Lehmann mentions as example, may well represent the acquisition of an additional grammatical function by an already grammaticalized morpheme, but there is nothing that indicates that this shift results in a “more grammatical” function — which Lehmann admits. It certainly does not represent a case of a derivational morpheme becoming an inflectional morpheme — thus it does not represent an instance of Kuryłowicz’s extension of ‘grammaticalization’. Nor is it more grammatical according to the parameter approach that Lehmann develops later in the same text (1995 [1982]: 121-178). In short, while critically discussing whether Kuryłowicz’s conceptual


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expansion is methodologically justified, Lehmann further expands the concept of ‘grammaticalization’ beyond the Kuryłowicz notion in that his example invites (successfully) to take more or less any shift in function that can be observed in grammatical elements to be labelled ‘grammaticalization’. Moreover, the question whether a marker of transitivity is more, less or equally grammatical than an object marker does not reveal anything relevant about the variable of the two functions or about the change from one function to the other.

In the end, although raising some doubts, Lehmann follows Kuryłowicz in creating a notional link between two processes of language change which, as Lehmann himself admits, may well be considered distinct, as.

2.4 More about ‘more grammatical’ — “Secondary grammaticalization”

Rewarding though Lehmann’s 1982 text was for the study of grammatical change, it promoted the belief in Kuryłowicz’s combination of two phenomena. Of course, there has been an awareness of the fact that Meillet-grammaticalization and Kuryłowicz’s extension are different. Elizabeth Traugott (2002: 26-27), for instance, while referring to Kuryłowicz, distinguishes between the functional change of a morpheme from a lexical to a grammatical morpheme and the possibly subsequent events on the formal side, such as the increase in morphosyntactic bondedness or phonetic attrition.4 Traugott (2002: 27) writes:

The other aspect […] is the development of morphophonemic “texture” associated with the categories in question; here the issue is the degree of morphological bonding/fusion, phonetic erosion, bleaching, etc. (see especially Bybee, Pagliuca, and Perkins 1991; Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994). With respect to such changes, it does make sense to talk about shifts to a more grammatical status, although it would be more accurate to say that “expressions of functional categories become more bonded over time”. Thus auxiliaries can undergo reduction (will > ‘ll, would > ‘d, have > ‘ve). This kind of change I call “secondary grammaticalization”. It is presumably what Kuryłowicz [1965: 69] had in mind. The crucial difference between this definition and the others is the “e.g.” This part is presumably usually left off because of the difficulty of determining exactly what role derivation has in grammaticalization.

In saying that it would be more appropriate to speak of an increase in bondedness rather than of a process towards a ‘more grammatical’ status, Traugott tries to specify the distinction between Meillet-grammaticalization and changes in what she calls “morphophonemic texture” — that is (according to my interpretation of her examples) phonetic reduction, cliticization and univerbation. Thus, Traugott, too, tries to establish a plausible a posteriori explanation of Kuryłowicz’s

4 Here and in the following, I say formal change in order to refer to a change in shape. This may

refer to the shape of one single expression or of a specific collocation or construction. I use functional change as the change in the content of an expression. This includes both meaning in the sense of lexical semantics and in the sense of a grammatical value encoded by an expression.


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extension of ‘grammaticalization’. However, in by-passing Kuryłowicz’s reference to inflection and derivation, she achieves this at the cost of stretching the concept of ‘grammaticalization’ in yet a different direction. In my reading of both Kuryłowicz and Traugott, it seems not unlikely that what Traugott has in mind is quite distinct from “what Kuryłowicz had in mind.”

At a first glance, there is a clear advantage in what Traugott tries to do. First, she saves the (in the meantime deeply entrenched) Kuryłowiczian notion of grammaticalization by retaining the notional unity of the processes in a plausible way. At the same time she promotes a notional distinction between the two processes, which could help to keep them apart. Accordingly, she calls Meillet-grammaticalization “primary grammaticalization” (Traugott 2002: 26-27) and the extension “secondary grammaticalization”.

A rather unfortunate side effect (or a meta-linguistic ‘spandrel’, if you wish) of Traugott’s approach results form her combining possible formal consequences like phonetic reduction, cliticization and univerbation into the notion of ‘grammaticalization’ — in addition to, but not instead of those functional shifts that had already been established as parts of ‘grammaticalization’. With this, elements which were seen as diagnostics of grammaticalization by Lehmann (1995 [1982]) are now included into the definition of ‘grammaticalization’. Phonetic reduction is what Lehmann (1995 [1982]: 126-132, § 4.2.1) describes as ‘phonological attrition’, that is, the process that leads to an increase in his parameter ‘integrity’. Cliticization is part of what Lehmann (1995 [1982]: 148, § 4.3.2) terms ‘coalescence’ as the process leading to more ‘bondedness’. ‘Univerbation’ is also discussed by Lehmann (1995 [1982]: 151-152, § 4.3.2) in the context of ‘coalescence’ although he does not explicitly include it into this parameter. The crucial point is that a set of processes is now included into (the second part) of grammaticalization, which by earlier authors (Lehmann) has been employed to test whether a particular instance of language change is a case of grammaticalization or not. In other words, Traugott’s proposal conflicts with Lehmann’s concept, in which the same features are seen as diagnostic parameters and hence must necessarily remain outside a definition.5

Traugott briefly mentions “bleaching” under the “development of morphophonemic ‘texture’” in the above quote. One would, of course, associate ‘semantic bleaching’ with this term, but this would clearly lead to a blunt contradiction as ‘semantic bleaching’ cannot possibly be regarded as a “morphophonemic” development. I therefore prefer to interpret Traugott such that she does not include functional/semantic changes in her concept of “secondary grammaticalization”; see the discussion in Breban (2014: 471-472). Yet, the combination of morpho-phonemic and bleaching is in any case unfortunate and may well invite to interpretations different from mine. For instance, Norde (2009: 47; see also Norde 2009: 21 & 127) writes:

We have seen that there are two subtypes of grammaticalization, termed ‘primary grammaticalization’ (lexeme > grammatical word) and ‘secondary

5 To be fair, already Meillet (1912) amply discusses changes in form, particularly cases of

erosion, but he does not build them into any definition. See below Section 4.


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grammaticalization’ (bonding, usually accompanied by further semantic and phonological reduction). These types may form a chain of events, but need not do so. There is nothing deterministic about primary grammaticalization in the sense that it should be followed by secondary grammaticalization.

So, while it is not entirely clear whether or not this was intended by Traugott (2002), later authors (e.g., Norde 2009) explicitly add semantic/functional changes to what is referred to as “secondary grammaticalization”. This makes perfect sense from the point of view of Kuryłowicz’s wording (“grammatical status”), but if Traugott’s “morphophonemic texture” is equally taken to be a defining feature of “secondary grammaticalization” this interpretation renders the concept of ‘(secondary) grammaticalization’ even more heterogeneous. Not only because it would be enriched by yet another component, but most of all because the component parts would operate on different levels — content and form. While “secondary grammaticalization” as ‘phonetic reduction’, ‘cliticization’, and ‘univerbation’ would be a relatively concise concept of related phenomena that concern the size and the complexity of an expression, “secondary grammaticalization” according to the interpretation proposed, among others, by Norde, additionally comprises semantic changes.6

To sum up, under the more specific label secondary grammaticalization alone we have considerably different interpretations of Kuryłowicz’s extension of ‘grammaticalization’. As I have indicated in the beginning, I have only picked out a small choice of interpretations of ‘(secondary) grammaticalization’. However patchy it may be, the discussion may suffice to show how heterogeneous the 6 The understanding of ‘(secondary) grammaticalization’ becomes further complicated if we

consider that the term was first used by Givón (1991: 305). Traugott does not refer to Givón’s use of the term, so that one would have to assume that she was not aware of it. This is also suggested by the fact that Traugott’s ‘secondary grammaticalization’ refers to something completely different than Givón’s ‘secondary grammaticalization’ does. Givón (1991) discusses changes in subordination types in Biblical Hebrew from a typological perspective. Both Givón’s scarce use of the term grammaticalization – only once more (1991: 305), otherwise Givón speaks occasionally of “syntacticization” or “grammatical evolution” – and the context suggest that Givón develops a very specific idea of ‘grammaticalization’ in this text, which is different from most other views on it. Only in the short concluding section (Givón 1991: 305) does he specify that “[t]he rise of great many morpho-syntactic patterns can only be understood as a process of secondary grammaticalization.” Without reference to any language-specific instances, he then lists several kinds of functional (!) shifts like perfect or perfective markers becoming past tense markers, perfect or durative markers becoming present markers, irrealis markers becoming future markers. He does not refer to any previous concept or discussion of ‘grammaticalization’. In this very passage (Givón 1991: 305) there is a broad reference to the entire text of Kuryłowicz (1964). The context suggests that Givón intends to refer to the sections in which Kuryłowicz deals with the Indo-European cases, and especially with the genitive (i.e., Kuryłowicz 1964: 183-189), but not to Kuryłowicz’s (1964: 36) quote about ‘grammaticalization’, which we discussed above (Section 2.2). There is, however, a written version of a paper held by Elizabeth Traugott at the University of Freiburg in October 2001, in which she does refer to Givón (1991); see Traugott (2001: 3). Given that a regularly printed publication requires a much longer period between the writing process and the publication date, I would still consider it most plausible that Traugott did not adopt or borrow the term from Givón, but coined it independently. — I owe thanks to Tine Breban and Martin Konvička for providing crucial support in the attempt to identify the original intention behind the notion ‘secondary grammaticalization’.


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various circulating interpretations of “secondary grammaticalization” are. More aspects about ‘secondary grammaticalization’ that I could not include into this discussion, but that may also have relevance are provided by Breban (2014) who also shows that there are several different conceptualizations of “secondary grammaticalization”; see also Breban (2015). Since “secondary grammaticalization” is conceived of as a subpart of ‘grammaticalization’, ‘grammaticalization’ as a consequence, with each interpretational extension, has itself become widened and internally inconsistent.

In the next section, I will briefly assess the link between the two parts of grammaticalization.

3. How grammaticalization and grammaticalization (do not) connect with each other

In Section 2.2, we said that one of the implicit claims that can be derived from Kuryłowicz’s definition of ‘grammaticalization’ is the idea that the change of a lexical expression acquiring a grammatical status is (part of) the same phenomenon as the change of a grammatical element becoming more grammatical. Let us recall Lehmann’s concern that the notion of ‘grammaticalization’ might be “unduly stretched” (Lehmann 1995 [1982]: 10; see above, Section 2.3). Lehmann provides the example of the Tok Pisin transitive marker -im that develops out of an object marker. Lehmann argues that

[s]uch linear extensions of grammaticalization processes into derivational morphology are not at all rare. [… S]ince such extensions continue the same pattern, they should be called by the same name.

Lehmann is not explicit about whether the latter of the two processes necessarily continues the other, that is, whether there is a necessary connection between the two. There is in any case wide agreement in the literature on grammaticalization that this is not the case. A lexical expression that acquires a grammatical function does not automatically develop further into something ‘more grammatical’ (however defined or measured). And an expression that becomes ‘more grammatical’ is not necessarily the result of a Meillet-grammaticalization (but see below, note vii). Norde (2009: 21; emphasis added), while being more explicit about the non-necessity of this sequence than Lehmann, in principle agrees with him:

Since ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ stages may form part of the same chain I see no reason to consider only the former as ‘grammaticalization’, as suggested by Detges and Waltereit [2002: 188; FvM].

The question is this: can we reasonably say that, if there is a possibility for one step to follow another, both steps must be conceptualized as one? In other words, if observation b often follows observation a, is it then appropriate to categorize both, observation a and b, under the same concept? ‘Follow’, in this context,


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refers to a (possible) chronological sequence of events. It is not ‘follow from’ in the sense of a causality; see Breban (2014: 480).

In fact, in order to become ‘more grammatical’ a linguistic expression needs to be on the grammar side of the lexicon-to-grammar-continuum already. Since Meillet-grammaticalization is one of the prominent ways for a grammatical marker to come into being, it is not too surprising that in many cases in which a grammatical item changes in form and/or function it undergoes Meillet-grammaticalization beforehand. This observation, however, does not create any necessary chronological or causal link between these two steps. As Norde (2009: 47) correctly observes, there is nothing deterministic about the connection between Meillet-grammaticalization and other changes that grammatical items may undergo. In my view, this observation alone suffices to reject their conceptualization as one and the same phenomenon. A mere intuitive (rather than statistically verified) frequency of the concatenation of two phenomena is, in any case not sufficient for postulating conceptual unity. There are lots of very trivial events in our every-day observation where one event often follows the other. A car crash often follows (from) speeding (both causally and temporally), but not every instance of speeding causes/precedes a car crash and not every car crash is caused/preceded by speeding. Now, would we want to call a car crash ‘secondary speeding’?7 We may therefore say that Kuryłowicz’s definition of ‘grammaticalization’ “unduly” subsumes two different phenomena of language change under one and the same name — at least two, probably more, if we take into consideration that “secondary grammaticalization” itself has been conceptualized in various ways.

I therefore not only reject the reasoning that the two processes can or should be subsumed under the same notion, I argue that we would actually have to come to the opposite conclusion. It would in fact be much more revealing for the study of language change, if we conceptualize the two processes as totally distinct. Whatever connection there may be between Meillet-grammaticalization and any follow-up process of whatever kind, we will be in a much better position to identify this connection if we do not treat them by definition as two parts of one and the same concept.

The choice to consider the two processes as one seems random, if we take a look into the history of grammaticalization studies. It is possible that it results from a terminological accident (Kuryłowicz 1964 vs. 1965; see Section 2.2), or, one might also say, from a complex instance of meta-linguistic ‘bricolage’. This alone would not be a sufficient reason to reject the unity of the two. But the then emerging definitions that have been proposed also leave too much space to conceptualize grammaticalization in different directions at the same time. Most 7 Breban (2015: 169) argues that “there are, to my knowledge, no case studies of secondary

grammaticalization that have a grammatical, but not grammaticalized, item as input. What hence seems to emerge from this paper is that grammaticalization either has a lexical input (primary grammaticalization) or a grammaticalized input (secondary grammaticalization).” Irrespective of the fact that it is impossible to prove that some grammatical form is not the result of a grammaticalization process, it still does not follow that “secondary grammaticalization” is a necessary consequence of Meillet-grammaticalization. Breban’s conclusion then boils down to defining the starting point and the endpoint of two etymologically related forms (see the discussion below in Part II).


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importantly, I believe there is no sufficient heuristic benefit from Kuryłowicz’s extension of ‘grammaticalization’, that is, from assuming a unity of Meillet-grammaticalization and what has been termed “secondary grammaticalization”. In fact, a good part of the controversies that there have been about what grammaticalization actually is (for instance, about its alleged ‘unidirectionality’, about its relation to subjectification, its relation to the emergence of discourse markers, and others) have been controversial only because ‘grammaticalization’ has become a patchwork of various different observations about both emergence and change of grammatical forms; see von Mengden & Simon (2015).

In sum, the idea of ‘secondary grammaticalization’ and its notional unity with Meillet-grammaticalization is a product of the various turns and notional interpretations in a metalinguistic discourse. It is not based on independent, a priori empirical observation of linguistic changes and should therefore be discarded.

4. Formal and functional changes

4.1 Keeping apart the insoluble

Why has it been so attractive to assume the unity of the two parts of Kuryłowicz’s definition? The reason cannot be the mere chronological sequence. I think the main reason for this is that both Meillet-grammaticalization and “secondary grammaticalization” are often accompanied by those erosive changes which are part of (some of) Lehmann’s parameters (see Section 2.3) and which already play a prominent role in Meillet’s (1912) description of grammaticalization. It is, in principle, the same set of changes of “morphophonemic texture” that Traugott (2002) sees as definitory of “secondary grammaticalization”: phonetic reduction, cliticization and univerbation. In the following, I will argue that these kinds of changes are not necessary features of (any possible part of) ‘grammaticalization’. For the sake of convenience, I will refer to those changes that bring about reduction of form and/or coalescence (such as ‘phonetic reduction’, ‘cliticization’, and ‘univerbation’) as erosive changes. I am aware that this is to some degree a simplification, but I do not think this will affect my point considerably.

A large share of Meillet’s (1912) discussion deals with the relationship between the habituation of linguistic expressions through frequency in usage on the one hand and the reduction and coalescence (“dégradation progressive”; Meillet 1912: 393) of forms on the other hand. Like Lehmann (1995 [1982]: 126-132) does later, already Meillet subsumes both the observation that concrete meaning becomes abstract and that forms can erode as in principle the same phenomenon. Lehmann (1995 [1982]: 122-123) justifies this:

The content and the expression of a sign are insolubly associated with each other. There is a far-reaching isomorphism between them which concerns not only properties of their constitution but also the quantitative aspect of their composition. There tends to be a correspondence between the size, or complexity, of the significans and that of the significatum. This isomorphism is maintained in all the linguistic operations and processes


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which may affect the sign; whatever may affect the content will have its consequences for the expression, and vice versa.”

I am sceptical whether the “isomorphism” between form and function is really “maintained in all the linguistic operations and processes which may affect the sign”. It is, of course, not implausible to assume that change in form and change in function are capable of mutually influencing each other. But as such this is an assumption, not an empirically substantiated statement. The presupposed interaction between form and function therefore needs to be assessed and described in detail prior to building it axiomatically into a diagnostic tool for, or a definition of a type of language change.

The problem is in some respect similar to the one discussed in the previous Section. Only because “there tends to be a correspondence” between form and function, one cannot say that the two are “insolubly associated with each other”. In fact, if we wish to understand how and under which circumstances formal and functional changes mutually trigger/reinforce (or block/inhibit) each other, we first need to keep them apart in our terminological framework. That is, if we define basic notions of linguistic description as including both formal and functional changes, we deprive ourselves of the possibilities to assess this interaction in detail. Therefore, if we define a type of linguistic change like ‘grammaticalization’ as comprising indistinguishably both levels, form and function, ‘grammaticalization’ will lose much of its heuristic potential.8

Let us recall Norde’s reference to Detges & Waltereit (2002) (Section 3). Detges & Waltereit (2002: 188) claim that in studying grammaticalization, we need to keep apart the functional changes from the morphosyntactic changes:

[… I]t would seem necessary to distinguish between grammaticalization proper, which is a purely functional type of change, and the processes of formal adaptation accompanying or following it. Grammaticalization is a process whereby a lexical item assumes a grammatical function or whereby an already grammatical item takes on a more grammatical function.

Thus, Detges and Waltereit consider ‘grammaticalization’ in essence as a shift in function and they say that possible morphosyntactic consequences of such functional changes are something else. Irrespective of whether one agrees with the preference of functional changes over formal changes, the advantage is in any case that the concept of ‘grammaticalization’ as proposed by Detges and Waltereit is obviously sharpened, because it is reduced to a set of changes that are easier to

8 Croft (2000: 156) writes: “Grammaticalization can be divided into three types of largely

unidirectional processes, phonological, morphosyntactic and functional […]. These three processes tend to be diachronically synchronized, that is, elements in grammaticalizing constructions tend to undergo all three processes to a greater or lesser extent.” — One just needs to wait long enough and one will see all of them – phonological, morphosyntactic and functional change – in the millenia-long history of any one etymon. But that these levels are “synchronized” should be taken at best as a stark oversimplification of the (valid) assumption that some change on one of these levels may have an influence on one of the others.


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include into a concisely defined notion.9 Cf. also Andersen’s (2006: 231-232, 2008: 14-16) claim to keep the different levels of observation apart and see Section 5 below.

If we agree to separate functional change from formal change in our conceptualization of ‘grammaticalization’, why should we prefer functional changes, as, for instance Detges & Waltereit and Andersen suggest? I do not think that it is controversial to say that none of the erosive (i.e., formal) changes is a necessary part of grammaticalization. There are instances of grammaticalization that do not show significant traces of reduction or coalescence. There is no formal or morphosyntactic diagnostic which, for instance, the English conjunction while shows in comparison with its lexical origin, the noun while. And yet, nobody would deny that a conjunction is a grammatical expression and that, since it derived from a noun, the emergence of the conjunction while is a clear case of Meillet-grammaticalization.10 The same holds for the preposition during which emerges from a verbal form. An example of a bound grammatical morpheme that is not significantly eroded is the Italian/Spanish suffix -mente ‘ADV’ (see Gaeta, this volume).11 Moreover, even in cases in which expressions do undergo erosive changes after they have become grammaticalized (in Meillet’s sense), the formal change cannot be taken as an indicator of a ‘more grammaticalized’ status. Askedal (2008: 47) rightly points out — in contradistinction to Traugott (2002) (see Section 2.4) — that was in she was dancing is no less grammatical than the cliticized /-z/ in she’s dancing. Nor is it plausible to ascribe a less grammatical status to the auxiliary have than to its cliticized (and formally reduced) equivalent /-v/. Cf. the discussions in Joseph (2004: 53) and Joseph (2011: 194-198). See also the descriptions and categorizations of coalescence in Haspelmath (2011): in none of the examples the reduced forms shows a different grammatical status than

9 At the same time, Detges & Waltereit retain Kuryłowicz’s expansion. Thereby, they implicitly

prefer the second part of Kuryłowicz’s ‘grammaticalization’ over Traugott’s idea of “secondary grammaticalization”, characterized by erosive changes (see Section 2.4). Detges & Waltereit (2002: 188) define ‘grammaticalization’ pretty much the way Kuryłowicz (1965: 69) does (see above Section 2.2), that is as “a process whereby a lexical item assumes a grammatical function or whereby an already grammatical item takes on a more grammatical function.” The only difference to Kuryłowicz is that they replace the term status by function. In short, Detges & Waltereit say that morphosyntactic changes are not part of grammaticalization. Now, considering our discussion in Section 3, once we accept that erosive changes are not an integral part of the concept ‘grammaticalization’ – as I am arguing here – I see no reason left why we should retain the notional unity of Meillet-grammaticalization with any possible extension of any kind.

10 One could rightly object here that while is not derived from the noun alone, but from the Old English construction þa hwile þe ‘at the time that’ and that the grammaticalization process therefore does involve coalescence. This would however only shift the input status from the noun to a phrase or construction. According to this interpretation, while would then show univerbation of the several, once independent units. But then, multi-morphemic grammatical forms like for instance complex prepositions (in the light of, on top of) would constitute grammaticalization without coalescence. These expression exert the same type of grammatical functions as older, mono-morphemic prepositions like in, through etc. Their grammatical status is therefore the same, in spite of the fact that they have not (yet?) undergone coalescence.

11 Joseph (2011: 198) points out that in Old Spanish forms like miente, mientre even undergo (temporary) augmentation.


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the more complex counterparts. Finally, see the development from Latin homo ‘man’ to the French impersonal pronoun on, which then develops further into the (homophonous) first person plural pronoun on (see Winter-Froemel 2014: 527-542). Kuryłowiczian terminology would take both as grammaticalization, even though completely different things take place between step one and step two. Does the second step really have anything to do with the first? Moreover, if we compare the two steps, erosive changes took place in the context of Meillet-grammaticlaization, but not, as suggested in the Traugottian framework, during the second step; see Joseph (2014) for a related discussion.

As far as I know, it has never been disputed that erosive changes often, but not necessarily accompany ‘grammaticalization’ changes. At the same time, the same set of erosive changes can also be observed for changes within lexical expressions. Both phonetic reduction and univerbation do occur in the history of nouns and verbs without that the lexical status of the reduced or merged expression would be in question — an important aspect which Meillet (1912) obviously takes into consideration. The canonical examples in English are the nouns daisy (from Old English dæges eage ‘day.GEN eye’) or husband (from Old English hus bonda ‘manager of the house(hold)’). Even the lexical equivalents of grammaticalized forms can occur in a reduced form as for instance in I’ve a horse outside (The Rubberbandits). A nice counterexample to Traugott’s (2002: 27; see the quote above in § 2.4) case in point is Shakespeare’s line I’ll no more on’t (‘I do not want any more of this’; William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark 3.1.145-146; see Greenblatt et al. 1997: 335), in which Traugott’s “secondary grammaticalization” (from will to =ll) precedes her “primary grammaticalization” (from the lexical verb ‘want’ to the auxiliary encoding ‘future’).

Erosive changes are therefore independent of grammaticalization. Both because they can occur outside ‘grammaticalization’ and because not all cases of ‘grammaticalization’ show erosive changes, they cannot serve as a diagnostic nor can they be taken as a defining feature of ‘grammaticalization’ or of any assumed part of it. Moreover, the crucial questions about the relation between ‘grammaticalization’ and ‘erosion’ — why grammaticalized forms are presumably much more often eroded than their lexical equivalents — cannot be tackled as long as we take erosion as a diagnostic or, worse, as a defining feature of ‘grammaticalization’, because then the connection between grammaticalization and form-reduction would be theoretically presupposed as necessary and any co-occurrence of the two would thus be trivial; see Andersen (2006: 232).12

12 The examples discussed in this section also show that definitions of grammaticalization, in

which ‘grammaticalization’ is reduced entirely to formal coalescence (e.g., Haspelmath 2004: 26: “A grammaticalization is a diachronic change by which the parts of a constructional schema come to have stronger internal dependencies”) may refer to a relevant aspect of language change, but they isolate ‘grammaticalization’ entirely from what it originally was. While the linguistic phenomena, to which such a definition refers, are worth studying, attempts to label them ‘grammaticalization’ should be rejected.


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4.2 Declining the cline

These considerations have further consequences. Let us recall the discussion of the implications following from Kuryłowicz’s expansion of grammaticalization (Section 2.2). The second claim implied by Kuryłowicz’s definition of grammaticalization is that there is a significant and measurable hierarchy between a ‘more grammatical status’ and a ‘less grammatical status’ of a morpheme.

The most common way to deal with this hierarchy is to refer to the ‘grammaticalization clines’. The idea of such a cline originates in a scale that Lehmann presents in his Thoughts (1995 [1982]: 13). Lehmann’s scale is motivated typologically: the basis is constituted by language types in the sense of analytical, agglutinating and inflecting languages. The idea that languages travel through a cycle of language types from generally loose structures to tight structures and back was very prominent in linguistic typology in the 1970s. In his scale, Lehmann transfers this idea from the development of languages to the development of individual linguistic expressions. The parallel is indeed striking and it is of course plausible to consider it. Yet, when it comes to the development of individual forms, all that Lehmann’s scale (as well as most later “clines”) refers to is a typology of possible morphosyntactic structures (collocations, constructions) from looser to tighter. The analogy between typology and language-specific morphology ascribes a less grammatical function to an analytic marker of, say, the tense value ‘past’ than to an inflectional marker encoding exactly the same value. If we consistently identify the degree of grammatical(ized)ness by the degree of cohesion of morphosyntactic structures and think this to the end, we would actually have to say that an analytic language has a less developed grammar (or a less grammatical grammar) than a synthetic language. In other words, we would be back at the language typology of the early nineteenth century, when analytic languages were seen as less developed; see Askedal (2008: 47).

The ‘cline’ model that is nowadays most frequently referred to is a simplified version of Lehmann’s scale in Hopper & Traugott’s textbook on grammaticalization (2003: 7) or variants thereof. In this, however, the levels of form and function are again taken as one. In other words, Hopper & Traugott’s cline displays two different dimensions, form and function, in a one-dimensional visualization: a clearly semantic categorization (“content item”) operates on the same level as formal/morphosyntactic features (“clitic”, “inflectional affix”). Not only for this reason, this and similar clines have been criticized in the literature; see, for example, Andersen (2008: 15), Askedal (2008: 46).13 In other words, if, as we argued in the previous Section, formal changes are not necessary concomitants of (any assumed aspect of) ‘grammaticalization’, it will be difficult to maintain the hierarchy between the predicates ‘less grammatical’ and ‘more grammatical’ merely on grounds that relate to the form or to the tightness of a structure.

13 In defence of Hopper & Traugott one must add that they themselves express crucial caveats

when discussing their “cline”: they stress that it is a “metaphor” that describes tendencies and similarities and, perhaps even more important, they point out that “the precise cluster points on the cline […] are to a certain extent arbitrary.” (Hopper & Traugott 2003: 6) As far as I can see this warning has not received the same amount of attention as has the cline itself.


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These difficulties do not apply in the same way to Meillet-grammaticalization, which has a better accessible hierarchy built into its definition. While by no means uncomplicated to define, I think there is some intuitive understanding of the difference between a ‘lexical’ and a ‘grammatical’ character (Meillet), status (Kuryłowicz) or function (Detges & Waltereit) of an expression. Beyond intuition, there have been approaches to clarifying the ‘grammar’/‘lexicon’ distinction on the content level. Diewald (2010) suggests that, whereas lexical elements ‘refer’, grammatical elements ‘relate’, that is, establish relations either between the speaker and the linguistic sign or among the signs themselves. The notion of ‘paradigmaticity’, which already is part of Lehmann’s (1982 [1995]) model is of central relevance here. In this respect, there is also some overlap with the approach presented in Nørgård-Sørensen/Heltoft/-Schøsler (2011), who say that it is basically the paradigmatic organization of a linguistic sign that constitutes its grammatical character compared to lexical expressions. Finally, a concise, but very useful approach (which seems to me compatible with the two aforementioned ones) about what makes the difference between lexicon and grammar can be found in Traugott & Trousdale (2013: 12-13). Based on earlier works (see the references there) they distinguish between ‘contentful’ (or referential) and ‘procedural’ in the sense of “signal[ling] linguistic relations, perspectives and deictic orientation” (2013: 12). All these authors see the lexicon-grammar distinction on the content level, not on the level of any formal or syntagmatic properties. While I cannot go into details here, it suffices to say that I see no insuperable difficulties in establishing a hierarchy between a ‘lexical’ and a ‘grammatical’ character of an expression and, as a consequence, in employing diagnostics for Meillet-grammaticalization.

This is different for “secondary grammaticalization”. Neither Lehmann’s scale, nor any “cline” can make a prediction for an individual instance of language change that affects an already grammatical(ized) expression. Expressions which become ‘more grammatical’ can be located anywhere on such a scale. As indicated above, grammatical expressions can just as well be free morphemes. And yet, as Askedal (2008: 47) and others have pointed out, a mere increase in morphosyntactic bondedness changes the cohesive behaviour of an expression, but not necessarily its status on a less grammatical to more grammatical scale (see above). The consequence is that, whatever hierarchy among grammatical elements of different kinds there may be, it is (at present) difficult to operationalize and attempts to operationalize it have been too heterogeneous and/or have been preconceived by what Kuryłowicz’s definition of ‘grammaticalization’ insinuates.

Much more importantly, such a hierarchy among grammatical(ized) elements is not crucial for our understanding of changes of grammatical forms and constructions. Some grammatical elements may or may not be “more grammatical” than others, this does not, in any case, provide any essential insight into grammatical change — recall Lehmann’s example of Tok Pisin -im. In other words, even if we will be able to measure the degree of being more grammatical in a satisfactory way, I think, this will still not provide a relevant factor for our understanding of how they change.

This leads to another problem inherent in any concept of ‘grammaticalization’ — however narrowly or widely defined it may be. The idea


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of ‘grammaticalization’ makes a statement about the input character of a change and the endpoint of a change. Joseph (2004: 61; this volume) points out that ‘grammaticalization’ is traditionally defined by referring to the result of a change — the grammatical character of a linguistic expression and that this does not say anything about which processes are at work when language change takes place. I would like to extend this criticism, in that even defining a starting point and an endpoint of “a change”14, is a random decision (see below Section 7). It is usually determined either by a present-day standard form (which is notoriously treated as if it were an end-point) or by the fact that some form-function pairing is fairly easy to categorize, which usually means that a given development has reached a stage in which some form-function relation matches with canonical, discoursively pre-established linguistic categorizations.

Part II: Exaptation

5. Functional changes and their names

Three claims emerge from the discussion up to this point. One is that there is no significant relation between ‘grammaticalization’ in the narrow sense of Meillet’s definition and those changes which were later added to the concept by Kuryłowicz, and which, again later, were labelled “secondary grammaticalization” by Traugott and others. In addition, there has never been any agreement on what “secondary grammaticalization” exactly comprises (see Breban 2014, 2015). The second claim is that in our taxonomy of those types of language change that produce or affect grammatical expressions we need to distinguish between the way the meaning or function of an expression can change and the way an expression can change its form or its morphosyntactic cohesion with other expressions. Finally I claimed that the hierarchy between ‘less grammatical’ and ‘more grammatical’ is not of central importance for an analysis of changes of grammatical expressions of whatever kind. It does not mean that this hierarchy does not exist, but that an understanding of linguistic changes does not profit from a mere categorizing of input and output character of a development, let alone from the problematic distinction between ‘more grammatical’ and ‘less grammatical’.

If the hierarchy of the grammatical status of an expression is not of central importance, the question of how and under what circumstances do grammatical expressions change their functions will appear more in the foreground. Moreover, once the hierarchy between input and output status is given less relevance, we will find that there already exist several closely related concepts in linguistic taxonomy all of which cover functional shifts of grammatical expressions — one of them being ‘exaptation’. In the following I would like to briefly assess the relationship among these different labels or concepts.

14 On the difficulties with the countability of ‘grammaticalization’ see Joseph (2014). Joseph’s

discussion may well apply to other “types” of language change.


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It is, for instance, not a new idea to establish a relation between ‘exaptation’ and “secondary grammaticalization”. Nigel Vincent (1995: 438), for instance, compares the two concepts as follows:

Changes catalogued under the rubric of exaptation, by contrast [to grammaticalization; FvM], involve the assignment of new morphosyntactic functions to elements which are already centrally part of the grammar, and typically part of the paradigmatic core of the morphological system. Such changes are different too from the later stages of grammaticalization, in which the development is from less centrally to more centrally grammatical, in that they [i.e., exaptation; FvM] involve shifts between non-adjacent areas of morphological meaning or function. They involve, to coin a term, the ‘re-grammaticalization’ of a particular morphological marker rather than its continuation down the grammaticalization path on which it was historically embarked.

According to Vincent, the main difference between ‘exaptation’ and “later stages of grammaticalization” is a hierarchy between functions that are “less centrally” and functions that are “more centrally grammatical” — on the assumption that there is a “continuation down the grammaticalization path.” Obviously, this kind of reasoning is based on Kuryłowicz’s categorization. As follows from our discussion in Section 4, the question whether this is an upgrading or a downgrading is, if at all objectively measurable, marginal. This, in turn, means that ‘exaptation’ and ‘secondary grammaticalization’ share a crucial property — the acquisition of a new function by some expression or structural pattern. In other words, ‘exaptation’ and what Vincent refers to as “the later stages of grammaticalization” cover predominantly very similar sets of changes. As do other labels for functional shifts.

Vincent’s (1995: 438) coinage ‘regrammaticalization’ echoes Campbell’s (1991: 294) and Greenberg’s (1991: 309) uses of the term and it anticipates (or motivates?) Andersen’s (2006: 233) ‘regrammation’. The motivation for Campbell’s (1991: 294) use of the term ‘regrammaticalization’ (only once in his text) is simply the fact that grammatical items do not only emerge from lexical items, but that grammatical expressions themselves can be the source of new grammatical markers. Greenberg mentions the term regrammaticalization only twice in his text in the same volume (Greenberg 1991: 309). Neither of the two authors genuinely proposes a new concept. Both seem to simply use “re-grammaticalization” as a transparent ad-hoc expression to refer to processes in which a linguistic form ‘grammaticalizes once again’. Greenberg’s (1991: 301) definition of ‘regrammaticalization’ as the “reinterpretation in a new function” merely states that a (grammatical) form may acquire a new function. Nevertheless, most references to these two articles often imply that some distinct linguistic concept had been proposed, sometimes one that requires the loss of the previous function prior to the acquisition of a new one (e.g., Heine, Claudi & Hünemeyer 1991: 4; Traugott & Trousdale 2013: 129) sometimes simply as a shift in function without specific requirements (e.g., Allen 1995: 5; Giacalone Ramat 1998: 111). The only true claim that I can make out in both Campbell’s


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and Grennberg’s articles is that grammatical(ized) forms can change their functions irrespective of some difference in grammatical status.

Andersen’s categorization is born out of a concern related to the one expressed above in the previous Section. Andersen (2006: 231) writes:

In current studies of grammatical change there is often a failure to distinguish between different levels of observation that are equally legitimate and may be equally productive of insight, but are unlikely to be so unless they are kept distinct.

Andersen, too, proposes a terminological distinction between changes on different levels of observation (2006: 233, 2008: 23-31). Among the functional shifts, he calls a change from a non-grammatical source expression to a grammatical expression grammation — a definition which, although not exactly matching it, I take to be sufficiently close to Meillet-grammaticalization. And he defines regrammation as “a change by which a grammatical expression through reanalysis is ascribed different grammatical content” (Andersen 2006: 232-233; see also Andersen 2008: 21).15 Not only does Andersen’s ‘regrammation’ not include a hierarchy between ‘more grammatical’ and ‘less grammatical’, Andersen (2008: 21-22) also includes both changes from inflectional to derivational and from derivational to inflectional into his notion of ‘regrammation’, thereby emancipating the taxonomy of grammatical change from the Kuryłowiczian tradition.

The point is that there is a handful of linguistic terms that all predominantly describe the change of the function of a grammatical element — either without references to a status hierarchy or being motivated by the very fact that input and output status are more or less on an equal level. Other labels of the same kind are ‘functional renewal’, ‘hypoanalysis’, and ‘functional shift/conversion’. These labels or concepts basically, while as such perfectly making sense, all refer to the same observation, that is, to the fact that grammatical elements can and do acquire new functions without significantly changing the degree of their grammatical status. For instance, Briniton & Stein’s (1995: 34) ‘functional renewal’ is distinct from any other instance of change in function only in that it refers to syntactic constructions rather than mono-morphemic expressions. Croft (2000: § 5.3, 126-130) introduces the term ‘hypoanalysis’. He defines it as the reanalysis of a property of the context of an expression or construction as an inherent property of it. The expression thus gains a new meaning or function (Croft 2000: 126-127). Norde (2001: 234-235) discusses the notion ‘lateral conversion’. She follows Giacalone Ramat & Hopper (1998: 5), who, however, use the term only once in a non-technical sense, contrasting the status difference between source and target of a grammaticalization process with the lack of such a difference in canonical conversion processes. Norde then, defines ‘lateral conversion’ accordingly as 15 Next to ‘regrammation’ and ‘grammation’, Andersen (2006: 233) also introduces

‘degrammation’ (more to less grammatical). Although certainly worth discussing in this context, I will largely ignore those upgrading changes discussed under the labels ‘degrammation’ and/or ‘degrammaticalization’ entirely. I think these notions bear their own set of difficulties, an assessment of which would be to a large extent a story of its own.


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“changes from one category to another on the same level of grammaticality” and postulates this as a “type of change” (2001: 234). Joseph (2005) speaks of “lateral shifts” and defines them similarly. In contrast to Giacalone Ramat & Hopper, however, he describes ‘lateral shifts’ as something that affects exclusively grammatical elements (Joseph 2005: 1b). Yet, Joseph describes lateral shifts as distinct from ‘exaptation’ in that the former does not require the source element to be ‘junk’ or ‘marginal’ (Joseph 2005: 3a).

In any case, the main point of all of these authors is basically to draw the attention to the fact that grammatical elements can change their functions without necessarily losing or gaining in grammatical status. The motivation for postulating the labels ‘lateral conversion’ and ‘lateral shift’ is therefore the mere observation that some grammatical changes are not cases of grammaticalization — in other words that beginning and endpoint of an observed change can well be about equal in status on the lexicon to grammar hierarchy. All these are valid descriptions and well-motivated labels. Two things, however, are noteworthy. One is that most of these labels have been proposed primarily as a contrast to the status difference of input and output in “secondary grammaticalization”. The other point is that, more often than not, (valid) descriptions are subtly turned into something like a “type of change”. There is however nothing in the distinctive properties of any of these concepts, that would provide us with insights about how languages change or about how linguistic expressions change. The main observation behind all these discussions is simply that grammatical elements can change their functions and that this change does not need to result in a relevant difference in the grammatical status of an expression before and after the change. Joseph’s (2004: 61) criticism that ‘grammaticalization’ is merely a statement about what results from a change, in principle applies to all these concepts of functional shifts discussed here (cf. Joseph, this volume for ‘exaptation’).

That there is a considerable overlap of these concepts of functional shifts, has been acknowledged many times in the literature and it has even been confirmed by some of the authors who proposed them. Croft (2000: 127, 2006a: 121, 2006b: 83) for instance explicitly says that his ‘hypoanalysis’ is the same as Lass’s ‘exaptation’ and Greenberg’s ‘regrammaticalization’. He also says that regrammaticalization and exaptation are the same and that both require the loss of the previous meaning before regrammaticalization/exaptation (Croft 2003: 260). Wegener (2008: 346) categorizes the development of linking elements in German compounds first as ‘exaptation’ and then adds that “[t]his continued development of grammatical functions can best be qualified as an instantiation of secondary grammaticalization […] or regrammaticalization […]” (italics original). Hopper & Traugott (2003: 174), Heine (2003: 176, n. 14), and Traugott & Trousdale (2013: 129) all link ‘regrammaticalization’ with ‘exaptation’. Brinton & Stein (1995: 34) explicitly say that “[f]unctional renewal […] is linguistic exaptation of (surface) syntactic forms and processes” — in other words, ‘functional renewal’ is for syntactic constructions what ‘exaptation’ is for simple expressions.

The differences between all these ideas lies in a few details, which often depend on the context or the perspective in which the respective concept was described. ‘Lateral shift’ and ‘lateral conversion’ were meant to simply point out


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that there are changes without change in grammatical status. This was intended as a response to the widely held misunderstanding that grammatical change in general, not just grammaticalization in Meillet’s sense, is unidirectional. This is also the case for ‘regrammaticalization’ and ‘regrammation’, although here the coinages are more motivated to form a terminological parallelism with grammaticlaization/grammation (and also with degrammaticalization/-degrammation). ‘Functional renewal’ is motivated by the observation that changes in grammatical expressions need not be restricted to single expressions, but can also affect syntactic constructions. Probably the least motivated proposal is Croft’s ‘hypoanalysis’, as Croft does not explain, why, in spite of the synonymy with ‘exaptation’/‘regrammaticalization’, a different term is required.

In sum, the details distinguishing these labels from each other say more about the context of the meta-linguistic discourse in which they have been proposed than about language change. What remains as linguistic details in all these descriptions is the hierarchy discussion: most authors want to make a statement about the status of the input element and the status of the output element. This, however, does not say anything about the change itself.16

6. How to motivate ‘exaptation’

After having analyzed how our concepts and our taxonomy for functional shifts are motivated and have evolved, we are now in the position to take a closer look at exaptation. To what extent does ‘exaptation’ as a linguistic concept have more to offer than the functional shifts discussed in the previous section? I see two aspects on different levels that characterize ‘exaptation’ as distinct from other functional changes. One is the prerequisite that ‘exaptation’ requires ‘junk’ or the fact that the expression at the beginning of a development is “only marginally related” (Lass 1990: 80) with the output function. This is again a statement about the character of input and output of the expression, albeit one which emerges independently of the directionality discussion of the 1990s and 2000s. The other aspect that makes ‘exaptation’ distinct is the parallel with biological Evolution, which Lass (1988, 1990) wishes to point out when introducing ‘exaptation’ to linguistics. Lass deliberately adopts a notion from a different discipline. It is this point in which ‘exaptation’ is more distinct than any of the other notions. Such a terminological decision may either be merely metaphorical — in that it is based on analogies that are of no significance for the target domain (linguistics, in our case). Or it may be meaningful in that by employing a term from a different discipline one wants to point out that there are two different real world phenomena (or two different objects of scientific investigation) sharing a common property or principle. In the following two subsections, I will briefly assess these two distinct characteristics of ‘exaptation’ in turn — the (assumed) marginal

16 Croft goes a little bit beyond this with his statement about the cognitive reanalysis of his

‘hypoanalysis’: “the listener reanalyzes a contextual semantic/functional property as an inherent property of the syntactic unit” (Croft 2000: 126). Without any reference to psycholinguistic evidence, however, this claim seems to simply transplant the linguist’s analysis into the speaker’s (or, for that matter, the listener’s) mind.


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character of the input expression (Section 6.1) and the (potential) parallel with evolutionary biology (Section 6.2) — and then try to reconcile the two aspects (Section 6.3).

6.1 Junk as input

When Roger Lass (1990: 80) introduces the concept of ‘exaptation’ he defines it as “the opportunistic co-optation of a feature whose origin is unrelated or only marginally related to its later use.” The feature that makes linguistic ‘exaptation’ distinct therefore, seems to be the non- (or almost non-)relatedness of source and result of the process. The idea of “unrelated or marginally related” bears a degree of vagueness. It is extremely difficult to draw a sharp line between ‘related’ and ‘unrelated’ functions. For example, the Genitive case of Indo-European languages can encode a wide variety of different functions. It can encode ‘origin’, ‘ownership’, ‘unalienable relation’, ‘part-whole relationship (partitive)’, and others. It is certainly possible to draw a semantic or structural map that comprises all functions encoded by the Genitive; see, for instance, Van de Velde (2014). It will be rather easy to intuitively accept the relatedness of these functions. If, however, we pick two functions that are on remote positions on this map, say ‘origin’ and ‘partitive’, and compare them in isolation, would we still consider them ‘related’?

In comparison with the genitive example, it would perhaps be easier, again on an intuitive basis, to refute the relatedness of ‘comitative’, ‘instrumental’ and ‘manner’. These are potential functions that can be encoded in considerably different ways in a language. In English we use a conjunction (and), a preposition (by) and an adverbial marker (-ly) respectively. And yet, in English all three functions can be expressed by one and the same preposition, as shown in (1).

(1) a I’m going to New York with John. b I opened the door with a key. c Bill is swimming with ease.

One might argue that this is exactly a case of one expression co-opting additional functions that are unrelated to the original one (whichever may be the original in this example). But then, the English example is by no means a cross-linguistically uncommon coincidence. There are, in fact, many genetically unrelated languages all employing one and the same marker to encode exactly these three functions. So, while these three functions may seem semantically unrelated, could we say they are “typologically related”, in the mere sense that they tend to cluster across languages in spite of their semantic distance? I have no answer to this question, but I raised it in order to show that, while some functions are certainly more related to each other than others, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible to draw a convincing line between related functions and unrelated functions.17

17 The editors of this volume remark at this point that drawing boundaries is always notoriously

difficult in linguistics. I’m happy to take their point. Of course, in the same way as conceptual boundaries are a matter of degree, it is ultimately also a matter of degree, whether the


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In these examples, I have taken ‘function’ in the sense of ‘meaning of one paradigmatic value’. We may however conceive of ‘function’ in a broader way and allow for several aspects (‘origin’, ‘partitive’, etc.) of one function (‘genitive’). We would then have to see ‘exaptation’ as the acquisition of a new grammatical value, which means that it acquires a new position in a paradigm which was hitherto unoccupied or which was occupied by some other expression. In this case, the preposition with or a Genitive marker would be considered as encoding one function, which is internally polysemous (‘source’, ‘origin’, ‘ownership’, ‘partitive’, etc.). This however would only shift the question of the relatedness of two notions onto a different level of abstraction. The question of whether two functions in this broader sense are related would be equally fiddly. In fact, Lass’s (1990: 80) modification (“or only marginally related”) seems to be a tribute to this difficulty. In the earlier, lesser known version of Lass’s proposal (Lass 1988: 34), input and output feature are still simply defined as “unrelated”.

More important however is this: from all we know about language change, it is difficult to explain how the use of a specific expression in a new function can come about if there is absolutely nothing that bridges the old and the new function — if only in a specific communicative situation. In other words, it is not implausible to assume that there will always be some link between old and new function, even if there certainly may be cases in which this link will be invisible to the linguist’s bare eye. In the same way, it is by no means clear what exactly counts as a new function and whether a case of exaptation needs to fill a previously non-existing paradigmatic value in a system (see Simon 2010: 49-51). Lass’s (1997: 319) attempt to shift the focus from the junk-input to the novelty of the output, therefore does not fully solve the problem. Ultimately, the cross-linguistic diversity of linguistic systems will force us to retain a certain level of (non-random) flexibility in these types of questions. Or, as Joseph (this volume) expresses it: “functionality is always to be judged relative to the particular models involved and innovations created.” But, of course, in order to be meaningful, ‘exaptation’ will have to be more than a mere reinforcement or intensification of an existing function (see Simon 2010: 48).

Linguistic ‘junk’ in the strict sense turns out to be a very difficult idea to deal with, if alone because of the impossibility to prove the non-existence of something. We will never be able to determine with certainty whether an existing expression or construction used to be genuinely functionless. I therefore agree in principle with Meul & Vermandere (this volume) in that exaptation, like all the other concepts discussed above, are varying descriptions of the ‘refunctionalization’ of an expression. And even if there should be agreement at some point on whether ‘junk’, ‘marginally relatedness’ of input and output function or ‘functional novelty’ will characterize ‘exaptation’ in contrast with the other concepts, ‘exaptation’ would still be a mere statement about the relation between starting point and result of the described change.

introduction of a category distinction is beneficial or not. This does not solve the problem however. While I concede that what I have presented as if it were an either/or-question is in fact a matter of degree, the problem of how to define the distinction between ‘unrelated’, ‘marginally related’ and ‘related’ functions remains.


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6.2 Exaptation and language evolution

The second aspect that makes ‘exaptation’ distinct from the other refunctionalization concepts is articulated in the subtitle of Lass’s original exaptation paper. As is well known, Lass (1988, 1990) bases his concept of linguistic ‘exaptation’ on that of biological ‘exaptation’, more precisely on the proposal for a new term in evolutionary biology by Gould & Vrba (1982). The relationship between Lass’s proposal and Gould & Vrba’s paper has been discussed frequently and therefore does not need to be explained here (see the introduction and various other texts in this volume). The point that I would like to focus on is the following: Lass’s proposal to transfer a concept from evolutionary biology to linguistics does not only entail the claim that ‘exaptation’ might be useful for the study of language. It also, and perhaps more importantly, entails the claim that there is an essential parallel between the process and structures that underlie the emergence of life forms and those underlying the emergence of linguistic forms. This parallel is the principle of Evolution.

Superficially this may sound like another instance of the old tendency to submit the study of language to the study of natural phenomena. Some may take this as the most natural thing to do, but all attempts to consider ‘language’ a biological entity from August Schleicher to Noam Chomsky have rightly met severe criticism and scepticism. I agree therefore with De Cuypere (2005: 13; italics added) that “the application of biological metaphors in linguistics [… is] problematic.”

Yet, I think that Lass’s proposal is neither a metaphorical transfer from biology to language nor a (yet another) biologization of human language. Lass himself (1990: 95-97) explains this quite clearly. The theory of Evolution formulates a principle which, albeit originally proposed by Darwin (1859) in order to describe emergence, change and variation in life forms, need not and should not be reduced to biology or to natural phenomena. Evolution is a principle which describes and explains emergence, change and variation of individual entities within several domains of our world. Only one of them is the domain of natural life forms. Next to biology, this generalized model of Evolution can be applied to various cultural phenomena — sartorial fashion, art, customs, and many others, among which Dawkins (1976 [1989]: 189-201) prominently lists scientific discourse — as well as to human language. Croft, too, points out that applying the principle of Evolution to language is not a mere analogy between biology and language, but an overarching principle that applies to both, life forms and language — among other domains. In this context, Croft (2000: 11) quotes Lass (1990: 96), who points out that

rather than extending a notion from biology to linguistics, I am suggesting that the two domains (and others as well, probably, like the evolution of art styles or political institutions or sartorial fashion) have certain behaviours in common by virtue of evolving.

Lass (1990: 96, 1997: 316) refers to these types of phenomena as ‘historically evolving systems’; see also Lass (1988: 52). There are several other terms


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referring to what is in principle the same concept. Historically evolving systems constitute that set of phenomena which Keller (1994: 57-67) comprises under both ‘natural phenomena’ and, as Keller calls them, ‘phenomena of the third kind’. By the latter, he means any type of system that evolves as a result of deliberate human actions, but without any active, purposeful design. So, while speakers may (or may not) deliberately shape an utterance they wish to express, it is the sum of all these actions of expressing utterances which unintentionally creates linguistic structures. Keller contrasts historically evolving systems with ‘artefacts’, which are both man-made and shaped according to (human) design. The common features between these social phenomena and natural phenomena is that both can be perceived as patterns, structures or systems, without that the general shape of any of these systems was the target of any of the individual processes shaping it. In language this is the individual utterance, the expression of which is not guided by any intention to shape a more general systematic pattern, the linguistic system, i.e., grammar and lexicon. In the emergence of life forms, for instance, the immediate result of cell division as well as of the reproduction of more complex life forms is only the replication of an individual. But the sum of all these replications creates a system on a much more general level — the numerous kinds of species and their endogenous and exogenous interdependencies.

In sum, the idea is to categorize human language as a specific type of phenomenon which is characterized as a dynamic system whose structures are subject to variation and to constant re-negotiation by the interlocutors. This idea has been proposed from different perspectives and in different kinds of accounts employing varying labels such as ‘Emergent Grammar’ (Hopper 1987), as ‘Invisible-Hand-Theory’ (Keller 1990, 1994), as ‘historically evolving systems’ (Lass 1997) or in Croft’s (2000) “evolutionary approach”. In spite of the many differences among these proposals, they all have in common that the underlying conceptualization of ‘human language’ is compatible with the general principles of Evolution. In the following, I will refer to this set of phenomena as either ‘historically evolving systems’ — employing Lass’s term — or as ‘emergent systems’ indiscriminately.

The general principle that operates on historically evolving systems can be roughly characterized as consisting of the following three main features:

variation (no individual form is identical),

selection (some individual forms are successfully copied, others aren’t) — and

heredity (features of individuals are passed on to their copies).

As far as I know, the most detailed proposal of how the principle of Evolution can be applied to human language and to the emergence of its structures has been provided by Croft (2000). According to Croft, for instance, utterances are the main type of replicators in human language. An utterance in this sense is any “particular, actual occurrence of the product of human behavior in communicative


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interaction (i.e., a string of sounds)” (Croft 2000: 26). In the same way, he proposes analogous forms and processes between human language and other historically evolving systems, which have been mentioned in post-Darwin formulations of the theory of Evolution (e.g., Hull 1988, Dawkins 1976 [1989], among others). For a detailed account see Croft (2000: 9-41). Partly adopting Croft’s categorization, one could transfer those main features of the principle of Evolution to human language as follows:

variation (no individual utterance is identical to a previous instance of the same utterance),

conventionalization (some variants are passed on successfully and become conventionalized, others aren’t)18 — and

transmission / etymology (features are passed on across speech events, across communities and across generations).

Exaptation as a descriptive concept in the study of language change, then, entails that language changes under evolutionary principles. It does not entail that linguistic forms are natural objects, nor that language is a natural phenomenon.

One may or may not accept this conceptualization of human language. Although I have no difficulty admitting that I am convinced this is a promising direction to take for the study of language change and thus also for linguistics in general, I wish to make a point on ‘exaptation’ and not (primarily) propose any general theoretical stance on language. My point of departure at the beginning of this Section was that it is a distinctive feature of Lass’s proposal about ‘exaptation’ that changes of grammatical forms can be accounted for by such an evolutionary approach. It is therefore not a mere metaphor to borrow the notion ‘exaptation’ from a discourse about biological Evolution. I would like to argue that, while technically being only one of many labels for an etymologically defined (input and output character) refunctionalization of grammatical forms, the concept of ‘exaptation’ makes more sense if language change is seen in this kind of evolutionary approach. ‘Exaptation’ thus significantly differs from the other types of non-hierarchical refunctionalizations (Section 5) in that it entails this view on language.

One might argue that, whether or not Lass originally had this idea in mind (“exaptation in language evolution”), one does not need to adhere to an evolutionary approach to language to accept the idea that marginal material can be employed for the emergence of a new functions in a grammatical expression. This is certainly true. But then exaptation is probably an unfortunate term, as this term does exactly this — it implicates an evolutionary approach to language. Whether or not one likes the idea of language as an Emergent System, it is the terminological choice for exaptation rather than for, say, regrammaticalization or 18 Croft (2000: 39) characterizes this aspect as cognitive entrenchment and propagation of a

feature. I will ignore the cognitive aspects here and focus on the aspect of social conventions.


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lateral shift which bridges the study of language change with the principle of Evolution. Conversely, if such a trans-disciplinary connection proves to be useful, then ‘exaptation’ will have a considerable advantage over the other labels that refer to functional shifts.

6.3 Spandrel as input

“[…I]f languages were ‘perfect’ systems, they’d have no room for play, and hence no freedom for change”, Lass (1997: 317) writes when specifying his (revised) idea of linguistic ‘junk’. In Emergent Systems, new forms materialize as variants of existing forms, and new functions develop out of habitualizations of context-specific modes of usage. With respect to language this means that the new material (expressions, constructions) emerges as variants of existing expressions and that new functions emerge on the basis of already existing material that is refunctionalized.

Irrespective of whether there is such a thing as a perfect system (or, for that matter, of what it would mean for a system to be ‘perfect’), one of the underlying ideas of the general principles of Evolution is that Emergent Systems (whether social structures, life on earth, strands of art, or human language) do not need to be perfect in order to work well. That languages are not perfect systems does not only follow from the idea of language as an emergent phenomenon, it is also a necessary precondition for the principle of Evolution to be at work. In other words, it is a prerequisite for the principle of Evolution as a model for language change. Because evolutionary change is never goal-directed, the structures that result from it (‘Emergent Grammar’) are never perfectly designed structures. And because languages are not perfect systems, they do have plenty of material for play.

This line of thinking bears the potential, on the one hand, to identify the kind of linguistic material, that Lass (1988, 1990, 1997: 316-324) has labelled ‘junk’, on the other hand also to release us from the need to slavishly distinguish between empty and non-empty material (see the difficulties discussed in Section 6.1). In other words, it is perhaps the evolutionary context out of which the linguistic concept of ‘exaptation’ was borrowed which might open the door for a slightly refined approach to the question of the ‘type of material’ that is needed in order to categorize a functional shift as ‘exaptation’ in a meaningful way. Joseph (this volume) points out that material may or may not be functionless, what matters is that there is (always) material available for refunctionalization. I think this is correct. A classification of the material that is involved in a process of change alone does not sufficiently explain what is going on. But this does not mean that asking for the precise material (linguistic form) to which a new function can be assigned does not provide anything to our understanding of the nature of the underlying processes.

Gould & Lewontin (1979) introduce the idea to evolutionary biology that material emerges as a side-effect of some process and that this material then can be employed for a specific purpose. They refer to this type of material as a ‘spandrel’ and Gould later defines a ‘spandrel’ as “a structure of predictable size and shape that then becomes available for later and secondary utility” (Gould 1997: 10751b; see also Gould & Lewontin 1979: 593). De Cuypere (2005: 15) has


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already suggested that employing the notion ‘spandrel’ for linguistic ‘exaptation’ might be a promising way to go; see also Dennett (1995: 267-282), to whom both Gould (1997) and De Cuypere (2005) refer. The concept of a ‘spandrel’ might perhaps be closer to what we will be able to find as an equivalent in language than ‘junk’. A ‘spandrel’ emerges as a by-product of something and is then available for use. For example, the feathers of the proto-bird — the canonical example of ‘exaptation’ in biological Evolution — have never been functionless. But the fact that the thermoregulatory function of feathers has influenced the shape and the constitution of the upper limbs of proto-birds has nothing to do with the fact that the composition of the upper limbs was, by accident, capable of creating or reinforcing the capacity to float in the air.

To give a linguistic example: one could argue that the use of umlaut patterns to encode plural in High German varieties are a case of a (re-)functionalization of spandrel material. Umlaut vowels did not come into being in order to encode grammatical functions. The umlauted vowels in Germanic originally emerge as an assimilatory process, in which the vowel of the root syllable becomes palatalized if the following syllable has a high palatal vowel. So, what happens at first is a facilitation of articulation in that individual speakers anticipate the palatal position of the following vowel when pronouncing the originally velar root vowel. This anticipation gives the velar vowel a slightly more palatal colour. By short-cutting the tongue movement from one syllable to the next the articulatory effort is reduced — at first only in an individual utterance. From subtle variations of the pronunciations of the same types of expressions, speakers who copy the utterances increasingly prefer the more palatalized colour until gradually a structural pattern emerges with pairs of corresponding vowels — a velar and a palatalized one in each pair (/a/ ~ /E/; /o/ ~ /ø, E/; /u/ ~ /y, i/). In other words, a process ultimately motivated by articulatory economy in individual utterances creates a supra-individual structural pattern consisting of pairs of vowels, which then becomes available for use as a grammatical marker.19 The distinction between ‘effect’ and ‘function’ (see Meul/Vermandere, this volume) is therefore a matter of interpretation. The paradigmatically structured umlaut patterns do not serve the purpose of ease of articulation — only the palatalization in the individual utterance does. These however may well serve a phonetic or articulatory function, but grammatically they are functionless. In any case, the supra-individual patterns are an effect, a by-product of the behaviour of individuals. And this by-product — let’s call it a ‘spandrel’ — then is available for encoding a grammatical value. The extent to which this opportunity is actually taken varies. Yiddish has expanded this patterns on many nouns, in which the original trigger of the umlaut, the palatal vowel in the post-radical position, has never existed (shuch – shich ‘shoe’ – ‘shoes’; tag – teg ‘day’ – ‘days’; see Sapir 1921: 204). So has Standard German, though not as extensively as Yiddish. Other Germanic languages have levelled out

19 The i-umlaut (or i-mutation) affected all North and West Germanic languages around 600 CE.

For the details of this sound change see the numerous descriptions in the textbooks on the histories of the respective languages. – The traditional classification of such a process as a ‘sound change’, too, describes a change merely by defining some starting point and some endpoint. There is nothing wrong about this, but it would be interesting to include a more usage-based perspective into the study of historical sound changes.


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most of these patterns and not employed them systematically; in English, Swedish, Dutch etc. they only exist as idiosyncratic forms (e.g., man – men, long – length).

The idea is that the permanent and unintended production of variation in linguistic usage is the best, perhaps the only way of accounting for the emergence of linguistic material that is likely to be exapted. This, in turn, requires a perspective on language (change) which is neither teleological nor in the literal sense functional, but which is compatible, as Zeige (2011: 170) points out, with more recent, post-Darwinian concepts of Evolution as a general principle.

The difference between the ‘junk’ metaphor and the ‘spandrel’ metaphor is that the former, strictly, requires the non-existence of a function, an assumption which is, on logical grounds, ultimately impossible to falsify. The latter, focuses on the fact that some material is there, that this material may not be important and may perhaps have emerged accidentally or as a necessary side-effect, but that this material is, due to its mere presence, available to be made useful. In this context, Lass uses the term bricolage. He mentions it already in his original exaptation-text (1988: 35, 1990: 80), but he later (1997: 316) refers explicitly to Levi-Strauss (1962); see also Gaeta (this volume). Levi-Strauss (1962: 26-33) employs the term bricolage for similar types of processes in other domains. In particular, he compares lines of mythical thinking across cultures and uses the concept of ‘bricolage’ to explain the way we draw on present material with its existing relations, but always available for re-use (recontextualization) in new relations: “Chaque élément représente un ensemble de relations, à la fois concrètes et virtuelles; ce sont des opérateurs, mais utilisables en vue d’opérations quelconques au sein d’un type” (Lévi-Strauss 1962: 27). It is in this sense that Lass, in his revised discussion on ‘exaptation’, conceives of “the typical signature of exaptation [as] the combination of bricolage and conceptual innovation” (Lass 1997: 324; emphasis original).

In biology the term ‘tinkering’ is often used to describe the property of evolutionary processes to constantly employ existing material for adjusting existing structures and thus enabling them to serve new purposes. Philosophers of science have drawn this analogy long ago. Jacob (1977: 1164a) writes, with reference to Levi-Strauss (1962), that

none of the materials at the tinkerer’s disposal has a precise and definite function. Each can be used in a number of different ways. In contrast with the engineer’s tools, those of the tinkerer cannot be defined by a project. What these objects have in common is “it might well be of some use.” For what? That depends on the opportunities.20

In the case of the umlaut patterns, it was a plural marker. But it could just as well have been the comparison of adjectives or word formation processes.

Only a little later in the same passage, Jacob speaks of ‘evolution’ metaphorically as an agent, just as “the tinkerer” in the quotation obviously refers

20 See also Lass (1997: 313, n. 25) who cites a related passage from a different text by François

Jacob.


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to a principle rather than to a deliberately acting agent. This distinction is crucial, because the notion of ‘bricolage’ or ‘tinkering’ represents the same idea that Keller (1994) promotes, who calls his metaphorical agent ‘Invisible Hand’. Keller’s Invisible Hand is just as agentless as Jacob’s ‘tinkerer’.

Superficially, in replacing the idea of ‘junk’ with that of a ‘spandrel’, we do nothing but reinterpret what is in principle the same idea about the input character of a linguistic form in an ‘exaptation’ process. This step will, however, enable us to embed the concept ‘exaptation’ into a model of change that allows for those trans-disciplinary analogues which the term exaptation already implies.

It is thus not the definition of ‘exaptation’ that tells us something about how and why something changes. Rather than by definition, it is by virtue of the evolutionary context in which the concept was proposed, that ‘exaptation’ has an advantage over other concepts of refunctionalizatons. To define what A and what B are like does not tell us anything about how it is possible that A becomes B. It is Evolution as a general principle of change and variation that provides us with the clues on how existing material (linguistic or other) can be re-used for other, new purposes. The variability resulting from the imperfect replication allows the (linguistic) material to be gradually transferred into and conventionalized in a different structural or functional use, i.e., to be recontextualized. This process does not require any real innovation, only variant instances of what already exists, and yet the sequence of variant replications will result in a function or a structure different from and independent of the original one. In this abstract sense, evolutionary ‘bricolage’ or ‘tinkering’ takes place in natural phenomena, in human language, but also in other domains of non-linguistic behaviour or in cultural Evolution.21

7. Conclusion

In the first part I outlined the process of the evolution of (some aspects of) the present-day concepts of ‘grammaticalization’ and particularly of ‘secondary grammaticalization’. An independent result of this discussion was a substantial critique of Kuryłowicz’s concept of ‘grammaticalization’ and of the resulting idea of ‘secondary grammaticalization’. I demonstrated why the traditional and still common Kuryłowiczian terminological tradition of and around ‘grammaticalization’ is in my view most unfortunate and why I think this terminological framework is in desperate need of a general revision. However,

21 There have been, to my knowledge, only very few attempts to observe these patterns of variant

replication and recontextualization in several domains at the same time. Kuhle (2014), for instance, draws interesting parallels between patterns of variation in tool use across chimpanzee populations and patterns of cross-linguistic variation – employing the example of different source expressions for reciprocal markers. She argues that this ability to recontextualize existing patterns of tool use goes back to the same underlying capacities which are also responsible for linguistic variation. The linguistic phenomenon she draws on is the cross-linguistic variation of reciprocal markers in several Australian and Papuan languages – owed to language-specific refunctionalizations of different source expressions (e.g., reflexive markers, comitative expressions). I believe that these interdisciplinary parallels are very likely to be meaningful and not just terminological analogies.


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one important aim of the discussion was to show how linguistic terminology is often motivated by rather random turns in the academic discourse about an idea. I used this as a basis on which to explore potential advantages and disadvantages of a lingusitic concept ‘exaptation’.

Both ‘grammaticalization’ and ‘exaptation’ — as well as the lateral functional shifts discussed in Section 5 (and as well as conversion on the lexical level) — are defined as etymological relations, that is, as statements about the input and output function of some historical continuation of a linguistic expression. Each of these linguistic concepts is — as Meul & Vermandere (this volume) describe it for ‘exaptation’ — “at best a hypothesis on a feature’s current functionality, rather than an explanation of a feature’s emergence”. Defining a pattern of an etymological lineage is by no means wrong. In fact, this approach has a descriptive value and a good description always provides a necessary basis for a deeper understanding of the causes and mechanisms that are at work in language change. More than anything else in the linguistics of the past one hundred years, it was the research and discourse (and dispute) about ‘grammaticalization’ that resulted in the fact that we questioned and revised a number of deeply entrenched tenets that linguistic structuralism once brought forth. We would not discuss the role of frequency, the role of constructions, the role of implicatures, the gradualness of linguistic categories, the relation between change and variation, and other questions the way we do today if it were not for the intensive discourse on grammaticalization since the 1980s. However, this etymological approach to categorizing “types of changes” may constitute a heuristic tool for explaining processes, but as such it does not explain anything. Genuine explanations of linguistic processes, then, depend on the way we generally view human language. For instance, the view of ‘grammar’ as an ultimately organic entity which is part of the human brain will both require and allow for totally different explanations (e.g., parameter settings during first language acquisition) than the view of grammar as socially embedded structures emerging from interaction in language use. The primary subject of dispute then can only be about the plausibility of the presuppositions about the phenomenon ‘human language’. Theory-internal lines of argumentation of course also need to be solid, but are a secondary matter.

The term exaptation, as I have argued, lest it is a random terminological borrowing from biology, implies a model on language change which sees linguistic structures as emerging from individual imperfect replications in usage. In Emergent Systems there is, strictly, never any starting point and never any endpoint. What we see as such (i.e., a ‘synchronic stage’) is always more or less randomly defined, a snapshot of history one could say. One advantage of this view is that it allows us to see parallels between the evolution of linguistic structures and structures in other historically evolving systems. This does not provide ‘exaptation’ with an explanatory value, but it bears a rich explanatory potential for human language.


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