Formal Evidence in Grammaticalization Research

“This volume contains both extensive examination of data and insightful interpretation of grammaticalization. All ten contributions are also clearly organized and rigorously edited. It is a valuable contribution to the empirical study of grammaticalization and a must-read for anyone interested in language change and historical linguistics.”

“Formal Evidence in Grammaticalization Research provides recent research -- including corpus-based approaches in most of its chapters -- of the processes of delexicalization and grammaticalization, taking into consideration a large range of data, from the morphology, semantics, and syntax of various languages, and interpreting the usage-based, pragmatic factors that underly the identified linguistic changes. The strict and systematic typological perspective in the analyses presented in the chapters is of vital importance. The book should be a must to be read by all those researchers and students who are interested in studying language change at various levels of linguistic representation, both diachronically and synchronically. The book offers itself as an invaluable source for researchers of linguistic pragmatics via a rich body of pragmatically relevant analyses that are carried out with an emphasis on the interaction and interfacing of the pragmatic component of linguistic description with other modules of the functional operation of language.”