The pragmatics of subjectification and grammaticalization

What is it about?

This article argues that domain-general pragmatic mechanisms are ultimately responsible for the ways in which grammatical items develop out of lexical items over the course of language evolution.

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Why is it important?

This article shows, on the basis of actually documented changes in a language, that grammatical structure develops out of usage patterns: the ways in which listeners use inference to understand utterances. It addresses a central question of the problem: why do languages change the way they change, and not otherwise?