Grammaticalization is commonly viewed as a gradual phenomenon and can be thought of as a cline. The cline-based view of grammaticalization is described by Hopper and Traugott (2003: 7) as follows:
content item > grammatical word > clitic > inflectional affix
On the left end of the cline are content (lexical) items, which mostly denote objects/entities (nouns), actions (verbs) and qualities (adjectives, adverbs). Grammaticalized items, on the other hand, are at the other end of the cline and include function words, clitics and inflectional affixes. In this dissertation, the focus is mostly on content words and grammatical words
(primary grammaticalization), since they are more similar to each other and therefore more easily comparable. Clitics and inflectional affixes are bound morphemes and belong therefore to a category that is quite different from content and grammatical words. Constraining the study this way makes it possible to address the earlier criticism that primary grammaticalization might be a different phenomenon from secondary grammaticalization.
Note that these changes are considered as gradual in the sense that they involve small incremental steps where developing items gain new functions and start displaying the characteristics of grammaticalization discussed in section 2.2. For instance, semantic bleaching does not happen in a single discrete step, but rather through repeated new uses of a grammaticalizing item. However, Traugott and Trousdale (2010: 20) maintain that the steps themselves, when considered individually, can be viewed as a type of discrete (or “abrupt”) change. Reanalysis is often mentioned as one of the mechanisms by which grammaticalization is made possible. Reanalysis is the fact that speakers can interpret the structure and/or the meaning (including the syntactic category) of a given item differently from its original ones.
For instance, the auxiliary use of the verb need is often described as a marginal modal (Palmer 2013: 3, Krug 2000: 199-203), which means that it is a particular case in Present-Day English. For example, it can be used to express lack of obligation such as he need not go there. It can also be cliticized as in he needn’t go there. Therefore, speakers could analyse this verb as a regular modal and use it accordingly by producing an utterance such as he need go there. Regardless whether or not such a novel utterance might be considered ungrammatical from a prescriptive point of view, it illustrates the idea of an abrupt change because the verb is used in an unexpected or unusual way (see also the notion of extravagance in section 2.4). However, the gradual aspect comes when considering auxiliary uses of need in general, and thus whether it can be used similarly in other utterances. Forming questions is also a current possible use of need, with questions such as Need we worry about this. One could view this situation as need having gained new grammatical function and additional modal-like features. The major point is that each separate novel use is an abrupt change, while the overall change is a gradual one. In addition, the spread of this type of change is also gradual as individuals are unlikely to adopt the novel use simultaneously.
The grammaticalization cline can be understood synchronically and diachronically. A synchronic interpretation of the cline means that, at a given point, some elements are more grammaticalized than others. For instance, the grammatical element the can be considered as more grammaticalized than the lexical element cat. The word cat refers to a concrete entity in
the real world, whereas the is a determiner and therefore fulfils a grammatical function, namely to indicate that the noun that it precedes is definite. These two examples are obvious cases because they belong to different morphosyntactic categories, but since grammaticalization is conceived as a cline, this also means that the elements within the same category can have different degrees of grammaticalization. Thus, some grammatical elements might be regarded as more prototypical examples of their category (Taylor 2003: 215-220). In addition, it signals that the category boundaries are fuzzy, because the grammatical elements that are less grammaticalized will be closer to some of the lexical elements in terms of degree of grammaticalization. The notion of degree of grammaticalization in synchrony is referred to as “gradience” in Traugott and Trousdale (2010). Chapter 5 will try to highlight empirical, quantitative ways of measuring gradience and give empirical support to the idea that the is more grammaticalized than cat.
A diachronic interpretation of the cline is that a content item can develop, over time, into a grammatical word, which can then further develop into a clitic or an inflectional affix. The diachronic perspective is probably the one that has received the most attention in linguistic research. As noted above, this type of change happens in a succession of small, incremental steps. This phenomenon is called “gradualness” in Traugott and Trousdale (2010). Chapter 6 will use the measure developed in chapter 5 in a number of diachronic case studies in order to try to capture those small incremental steps.
A relevant question is to what extent the gradience and gradualness of grammaticalization can be investigated by similar means. As shown above, they are different phenomena, where gradience is mainly concerned with grammaticalization as an outcome and gradualness is concerned with grammaticalization as a process. While these two phenomena are strongly linked, it remains to be determined whether they can be investigated using the same methods. For instance, persistence has been discussed previously (section 2.2.2) as one of the characteristics of grammaticalization, where grammaticalized elements tend to retain some of the semantic features of their lexical sources. However, there are cases where these features are lost, sometimes due to the emergence of a new competing element from the same source (Dahl 2000: 10-11). In this situation, the outcome of grammaticalization has different features from the ones that were involved in its development. Therefore, the distinction between gradience and gradualness is relevant when considering the results of the synchronic approach proposed in chapter 5, and those of the diachronic approach proposed in chapter 6.