This paper takes questions regarding gradience and gradualness to be questions concerning the nature of grammatical categories. A notion of grammatical category is pursued which is not gradient, but rather more “traditional” in the sense that category membership is an instance of standard set membership. In order to deal with some of the empirical difficulties, both synchronic and diachronic, in consistently assigning category membership across all lexical formatives, a fine-grained and elaborate system of categories, following on from Cinque’s (1999) influential work on the clausal hierarchy, is adopted. In the context of this approach, Roberts & Roussou’s (2003) formal approach to grammaticalization, which relies on the central idea that grammaticalization is always upward and leftward in the syntactic structure, is shown to makes some interesting and seemingly correct predictions.
2019. La polarité de un tant soit peu. Journal of French Language Studies 29:03 ► pp. 373 ff.
Westergaard, Marit
2017. Gradience and Gradualness vs Abruptness. In The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Syntax, ► pp. 446 ff.
Willis, David
2017. Degrammaticalization. In The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Syntax, ► pp. 28 ff.
Wittenberg, Eva & Andreas Trotzke
2021. A Psycholinguistic Investigation into Diminutive Strategies in the East Franconian NP: Little Schnitzels Stay Big, but Little Crooks Become Nicer. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 33:4 ► pp. 405 ff.
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