Case study: SPACE-TO-POSSESSION

The next stage in the grammaticalisation process involves an already grammaticalised form acquiring further grammatical senses or functions. Moving further along the source domain hierarchy in (7), the evolution of possession markers from spatial terms (SPACE-TO-POSSESSION) represents this stage of grammaticalisation. Heine (1997) also argues that, in the case of POSSESSION, grammaticalisation cannot be fully characterised in terms of the evolution of a single morpheme or word, but involves the whole possessive construction.

This is because the syntax of possessive constructions often shows proper ties that are distinct from canonical syntactic patterns within the language. Heine argues that this is because possessive constructions are structured in terms of event schemas (these are similar to Goldberg’s verb-argument constructions, which are motivated by the scene encoding hypothesis, as we discussed in Chapter 20). The structure of the relevant schema is reflected in the syntax of the construction. Consider the following examples (Heine 1997: 92–5).

Heine (1997) classifies these examples in terms of various event schemas. For example, he describes (12a) and (12b) in terms of the location schema, (12c) in terms of the companion schema and (12d) in terms of the goal schema. What these examples all share in common, however, is that they rely upon agrammatical unit that relates to SPACE in order to express POSSESSION. While example (12a) relies upon an adessive case morpheme (expressing adjacency) to express POSSESSION, (12b) relies upon a locative preposition. Both examples express POSSESSION in terms of location in SPACE. Example (12c) relies upon an associative preposition and expresses POSSESSION in terms of proximity or contiguity in SPACE. Finally, example (12d) relies upon a preposition that encodes motion towards a goal in order to express POSSESSION.

 In summary, Heine et al. (1991) develop a theory of grammaticalisation that relies predominantly upon the idea of metaphorical extension along a continuum from more concrete to more abstract domains. The unidirectionality of grammaticalisation is explained in terms of this metaphorical extension, which provides the macrostructure of grammaticalisation. According to this model, discourse goals giving rise to context-induced reinterpretation are also inextricably linked with grammaticalisation and provide the microstructure of the process.

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