The Evolution of Grammar

Joan Bybee and her colleagues present a new theory of the evolution of grammar that links structure and meaning in a way that directly challenges most contemporary versions of generative grammar. This study focuses on the use and meaning of grammatical markers of tense, aspect and modality and identifies a universal set of grammatical categories. The authors demonstrate that th...

Joan Bybee and her colleagues present a new theory of the evolution of grammar that links structure and meaning in a way that directly challenges most contemporary versions of generative grammar. This study focuses on the use and meaning of grammatical markers of tense, aspect and modality and identifies a universal set of grammatical categories. The authors demonstrate that the semantic content of these categories evolves gradually and that this process of evolution is strikingly similar across unrelated languages. Through a survey of 76 languages in 25 different phyla, the authors show that the same paths of change occur universally and that movement along these paths is in one direction only. This analysis reveals that lexical substance evolves into grammatical substance through various mechanisms of change, such as metaphorical extension and the conventionalization of implicature. Grammaticization is always accompanied by an increase in frequency of the grammatical marker, providing clear evidence that language use is a major factor in the evolution of synchronic language states.

琼·拜比，1976年获美国加州洛杉矶大学博士学位，著有《形态：形式与意义的关系研究》（1985）、《音系与语言使用》（2001）、《语言、使用和认知》（2010）和《语言演变》（2015）。

里维尔·珀金斯，1980年获纽约州立大学布法罗分校博士学位，著有《直指、语法和文化》（1992），在语言取样及语言与文化的关系方面著有多篇论文。

威廉·帕柳卡，1982年获纽约州立大学布法罗分校博士学位，在语音演变方面著有多篇论文，主编《语法化的视角》（1994）。