Grammaticalization from a Typological Perspective

This volume explores the way in which grammaticalization processes - whereby lexical words eventually become markers of grammatical categories - converge and differ across various types of language. While grammaticalization at its core is a unidirectional phenomenon, in which the same pathways of change are replicated across languages, certain language types and language areas have distinct preferences with respect to what they grammaticalize and how. Previous work has principally addressed this question with specific reference to languages of Southeast and East Asia that do not seem to grammaticalize paradigms of categories in the same manner as Indo-European languages, or form extensive grammaticalization chains. This volume takes a broader approach and proceeds systematically area by area: specialists in the field address the processes of grammaticalization in languages of Africa, Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and the Americas, and in creole languages. The studies reveal a number of unique pathways of grammaticalization in each language area, as well as identifying the universal shared features of the phenomenon.

Heiko Narrog is Professor at Tohoku University. He received a PhD in Japanese Studies from the Ruhr University Bochum in 1997, and a PhD in Language Studies from Tokyo University in 2002. He is the author of Modality in Japanese and the Layered Structure of the Clause (Benjamins, 2009), and Modality, Subjectivity, and Semantic Change: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective (OUP, 2012) as well as numerous articles in linguistic typology, semantics and language change, and Japanese linguistics.

Bernd Heine is Emeritus Professor at the Institute of African Studies, University of Cologne. He has held visiting professorships at universities across the world, including Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, La Trobe University, the University of Cape Town, Dartmouth College, and Universidade Federal Fluminense. His many publications include The Changing Languages of Europe (OUP, 2006) and The Genesis of Grammar: A Reconstruction (OUP, 2007), both with Tania Kuteva.

Bernd Heine and Heiko Narrog are co-editors of the OUP volumes The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis (2010; second edition 2015) and The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization (2010).