Joan Bybee and her colleagues present a new theory of the evolution
of grammar that links structure and meaning in a way that directly
challenges most contemporary versions of generative grammar. This
study focuses on the use and meaning of grammatical markers of
tense, aspect, and modality and identifies a universal set of
grammatical categories. The authors demonstrate that the semantic
content of these categories evolves gradually and that this process
of evolution is strikingly similar across unrelated languages.
Through a survey of seventy-six languages in twenty-five different
phyla, the authors show that the same paths of change occur
universally and that movement along these paths is in one direction
only. This analysis reveals that lexical substance evolves into
grammatical substance through various mechanisms of change, such as
metaphorical extension and the conventionalization of implicature.
Grammaticization is always accompanied by an increase in frequency
of the grammatical marker, providing clear evidence that language
use is a major factor in the evolution of synchronic language
states.
"The Evolution of Grammar" has important implications for the
development of language and for the study of cognitive processes in
general.
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