Cross-linguistic variation in grammaticalization processes and areal patterns of grammaticalization

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The development of grammatical markers and grammatical structures through time is the object of research on grammaticalization and has become an important field of linguistics. In spite of this, the number of typological studies that systematically compare processes of grammaticalization across the languages of the world is relatively small. Moreover, most approaches take it for granted that these processes and their results have the same properties cross-linguistically. The present project starts out from the three hypotheses that (i) grammaticalization takes place within a certain range of cross-linguistic variation (w.r.t. the parameters in Lehmann 1995, the relevance of pragmatics and the role of reanalysis), (ii) that this variation follows areal patterns and (iii) that the predictive power of grammaticalization theories will improve if constructional details are taken into account. To check these hypotheses, it will cooperate with about 30 leading experts in diachronic linguistics of different language families and areas across the world. The results will be made accessible to the linguistic community by an edited volume and a database. The volume will include a chapter by each of the experts that follows a general questionnaire/checklist and an introductory chapter that presents systematic generalizations concerning the hypotheses. The database will be published online as a contribution to the CLLD (Cross-Linguistic Linked Data) series (Haspelmath et al.).