Niki will be giving a talk on “Accommodation & Grammaticalization: or how syntactic structures become obligatory”, Tuesday 11th, 11am, DSB 1.17, abstract below.

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“Accommodation & Grammaticalization: or how synatic structures become obligatory”

This talk tries to relate the insight that grammaticalisation processes often come to embed lexical items into rigid syntactic structures with accomodation theory. Accomodation theorists like Peter Trudgill claim that linguistic innovations spread normally (if not exclusively) through face-to-face contact, in which speakers come to assimilate their usage to one another for obvious social reasons. Clearly, this raises the question who will assimilate to whom. What I would like to propose in my presentation is that the direction of accomodation may (at least not always) determined by such obvious criteria as the perceived social status or prestige of the participants, or by the perceptibility of differences, but also by the fact that the way in which participants interpret each other’s usage depends on their own linguistic competence. In the case of syntactic obligatorification, speakers for whom a specific structure is optional will perceive the usage of speakers for whom it is obligatory as differening from their own usage merely in quantitative terms and will find it easy to emulate, while speakers for whom a structure is syntactically obligatory will perceive the usage of speakers for whom it is not as deviant and may at the same time be insensitive to the (semantic/pragmatic) criteria that govern their usage of the construction. They will find it difficult to emulate it. This asymmetry with regard to mutual assimilation may contribute to explaining why grammaticalistion processes appear to be mostly unidirectional.

The actual historical development that will be used to exemplify (unfortunately not prove) the argument is the emergence of the syntactic category “definite article” from previous demonstrative pronouns.

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