From nominal to clausal morphosyntax

Complexity via expansion

Bernd Heine | Universität zu Köln

The study of the rise of syntactic complexity, in particular of clause subordination and recursive language structures has more recently become the topic of intense discussion. The present paper builds on the reconstruction of grammatical evolution as proposed in Heine and Kuteva (2007) to present a scenario of how new forms of clause subordination may arise. Taking examples from attested cases of grammatical development as well as using evidence that has become available on grammaticalization in African languages, it is argued that there are two major pathways leading to the emergence of clause subordination: either via the integration of coordinate clauses or via the expansion of existing clauses. The concern of this paper is exclusively with the latter pathway.

Published online: 22 April 2009
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.85.02fro

Cited by

Cited by 8 other publications

Chamoreau, Claudine & Zarina Estrada-Fernández

2016. In Finiteness and Nominalization [Typological Studies in Language, 113], ► pp. 1 ff.

Herce, Borja

2017. The diachrony of Spanish haber/hacer + time. Journal of Historical Linguistics 7:3 ► pp. 276 ff.

Kastner, Itamar, Irit Meir, Wendy Sandler & Svetlana Dachkovsky

2014. The emergence of embedded structure: insights from Kafr Qasem Sign Language. Frontiers in Psychology 5

Kuteva, Tania, Bernd Heine, Bo Hong, Haiping Long, Heiko Narrog & Seongha Rhee

2019. In World Lexicon of Grammaticalization,

Lee, Wei-Wei & Mathias Jenny

2022. Syntactic change in Palaungic. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 45:1 ► pp. 22 ff.

Narrog, Heiko & Bernd Heine

2017. In The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Syntax, ► pp. 7 ff.

Rose, Françoise

2016. In Finiteness and Nominalization [Typological Studies in Language, 113], ► pp. 345 ff.

Álvarez González, Albert

2019. In Nominalization in Languages of the Americas [Typological Studies in Language, 124], ► pp. 301 ff.

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