Björn Wiemer

What makes Grammaticalization?: A Look from its Fringes and its Components

The status of grammaticalization has been the subject of many controversial discussions. The contributions to What makes Grammaticalization approach the prevalent phenomenon from the angle of language structure and focus on the interrelation between the levels of phonology, pragmatics (inference), discourse and the lexicon and some of them try to integrate the areal perspective. A wealth of data from Slavonic languages as well as from languages of other genetic and areal affiliation is discussed. The book is of interest to linguists specializing in grammaticalization, lexicalization and morphological typology, to language typologists as well as to functional, historical and cognitive linguists.

Contemporary Approaches to Baltic Linguistics

Baltic languages have only marginally featured in the discourse of theoretical linguistics and linguistic typology. The book aims to reconnect Baltic linguistics and the current agenda of the theoretical and typological study of language. The book is intended for a broad linguistic audience, including typologists and theoretical linguists.

The database of evidential markers in European languages. A bird’s eye view of the conception of the database (the template and problems hidden beneath it)

Abstract This introduction not only browses through the contributions of the whole issue, but also attempts to set the stage for a cross-linguistically unified study of evidentiality markers to be registered in a database. This endeavor has so far been restricted to European languages. We assume evidentiality to be a conceptual domain and, on this basis, want to account for diverse units irrespective of their morphological format and status in the particular language’s grammar. Evidential markers are claimed to be locatable on a lexicon – grammar cline, ranging from distinct lexical units (accessed holistically) to grammatical morphology (having been the subject of traditional descriptions in typology). We highlight different theoretical prerequisites necessary to build a template, pinpoint some shortcomings in recent theorizing and stress the necessity of a neat distinction between an onomasiological and a semasiological perspective: the former ought to delineate the functional values belonging to evidentiality, also examining systematic affinities to neighboring domains, while the latter perspective asks for the structural and distributional parameters of distinct linguistic units that fulfill the basic conceptual requirements and accounts for overlaps with values from contiguous domains. Beside the aims of the database, its present structure is explained and justified. The template designed as an entry for each single unit is illustrated with a pertinent unit from Polish (including an appendix).

Grammatical replication and borrowability in language contact

The volume presents new insights into two basic theoretical issues hotly debated in recent work on grammaticalization and language contact: grammatical replication and grammatical borrowability. The key issues are: How can grammatical replication be distinguished from other, superficially similar processes of contact-induced linguistic change, and under what conditions does it take place? Are there grammatical morphemes or constructions that are more easily borrowed than others, and how can language contact account for areal biases in the borrowing (vs. calquing) of grammatical formatives? The book is a major contribution to the ongoing theoretical discussion concerning the relationship between grammaticalization and language contact on a broad empirical basis.

Grammatische Kategorien und Grammatikalisierung in der Forschung der Sowjetunion und Polens: Beitrag zu einem bislang nicht aufgearbeiteten wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen Kapitel

This article critically reviews the main trends in the research discussion in linguistic, in particular grammatical categories, which took place in Soviet Russia and Poland mainly in the 50s through the early 80s and has repercussions until recent times in Russian and Polish morphological and syntactic theory as well as in lexicology. Some historical background is given concerning the conceptual root of the relevant debates in the post-war period. The main threads of research reviewed here are compared to mainstream work on grammaticalisation, which became popular in Western linguistics starting in the 70s and has been producing a host of litterature and research in the rise of grammatical forms and oppositions. This research, however, has basically concentrated only on morphological and phonological changes of autosemantic (referential) morphemes (or words) gradually becoming elements dependent on other words or within larger, but holistic syntagmatic units. I call this the morpheme-based approach. Besides this, we should distinguish two other approaches : construction-based and category-based ones. These three points of view are not mutually exclusive to each other, but rather complement each other.

Manifestations of areal convergence in rural Belarusian spoken in the Baltic-Slavic contact zone

This article combines methods and insights from dialect geography, areal and contact linguistics. It focuses on a specific, yet heavily understudied mixed dialect of Belarusian spoken in the entire Slavic-Baltic contact region. It turns out that on practically all levels (from phonetics to syntax), the variation of features encountered in this dialect is, from all varieties of that region, the most representative for convergence phenomena characteristic of East Slavic, Polish and/or Baltic varieties in contact with each other. This convergence is so far-reaching that, for instance, it seems impossible to distinguish the rural Belarusian vernacular from regional varieties of Polish on the basis of structural properties alone, despite the fact that these varieties are clearly perceived as different by both native speakers and field linguists. Simultaneously, features of the Belarusian dialect – and, thus, of the whole contact region which it most accurately reflects – should be judged under the perspective of larger areal clines (in particular, within the eastern part of the Circum Baltic Area); this view is pursued on the basis of Wiemer (2004) and more recent insights into the areal distribution of structural features crossing family boundaries. Such areal continua, in turn, intersect with inner-Slavic dialect continua and phenomena occurring in various locally restricted “pockets” scattered around in Slavic. On the background of this, we approach answers to the problem of determining the influence of contact (with Baltic and/or Finnic) over “genetic heritage” and the question of which features are more “immune” against influence from genealogically less close contact varieties.