PERSON climbing up a tree (and other adventures in sign language grammaticalization)
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Just like spoken languages, sign languages (SLs) are subject to diachronic changes due to external (e.g. language contact and standardization) and internal factors (e.g. ease of production/perception); see e.g. Battison (1978), Schermer (2003), Frishberg (1975). Here we focus on one type of internal change, grammaticalization, whereby grammatical morphemes (free elements or bound affixes) develop from lexical elements. Typically, the lexical element undergoing grammaticalization loses its lexical meaning (desemanticization) as well as its categorical and argument-taking properties (decategorization), and it may be phonologically reduced (phonological erosion) (Heine & Kuteva 2002a). Recent studies on grammaticalization in SLs have shown that, for the most part, the attested grammaticalization pathways are modality-independent (see Pfau & Steinbach (2006, 2011) and Janzen (2012) for overviews). To date, studies on SL grammaticalization have either been descriptive – presenting and comparing phenomena from various SLs – or were embedded in functional-cognitive theories of language (e.g. Janzen 1999; Wilcox et al. 2010). In contrast, we are going to explore how selected grammaticalization phenomena can be accounted for within generative theories of syntactic change. Again, this endeavour is guided by the question whether the same structural processes and changes can account for the data under consideration.