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Article published In:
Diachronica
Vol. 35:2 (2018) ► pp.238–276
Articles / Aufsätze

When grammaticalization does not occur

Prosody-syntax mismatches in Indo-Aryan

| Universität zu Köln | ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australian National University
| Universität zu Köln

Recent decades have seen a surge of interest in grammaticalization. In this paper, however, we are not concerned with reaching a better understanding of the nature of grammaticalization phenomena or their triggering factors, but we ask under what circumstances grammaticalization does not take place, even if it would have seemed likely to – a topic that has scarcely been addressed in the literature. Based on a comparative investigation of the historical development of a class of Indo-European spatial adverbs, we argue that mismatches between layers of linguistic structure present one type of situation in which grammaticalization may be blocked. For grammaticalization to occur, the outer semantic-syntactic boundaries of the potentially grammaticalizing construction must be matched by prosodic boundaries. If prosodic chunking is shifted in relation to semantic-syntactic chunking, grammaticalization may be prevented.

Keywords: grammaticalization, prosodic phrasing, Indo-Aryan, Indo-European, local particles, adverbs, adpositions
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The importance of being a single processing unit
  • 3.Local particles in Indo-Aryan
    • 3.1Local particles and adpositions
    • 3.2The history of the local particles in Indo-Aryan
      • 3.2.1Rigveda
      • 3.2.2Vedic prose
      • 3.2.3Classical Sanskrit and Pali
      • 3.2.4New Indo-Aryan
    • 3.3Local particles in other Indo-European branches
  • 4.Prosody and the non-grammaticalization of the local particles
    • 4.1Vedic Sanskrit prosody
    • 4.2Prosody-syntax mismatches
    • 4.3The non-grammaticalization of the Old Indo-Aryan local particles
  • 5.How prosodic chunking may prevent (further) grammaticalization
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations in glosses
  • References
Published online: 12 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.17013.rei
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