Some Observations on What Grammaticalization Is and Is Not

The notion of ‘grammaticalization’ — the embedding of once non- (or less-) grammatical phenomena into the grammar of a language — has enjoyed broad acceptance over the past 30 years as a new paradigm for describing and accounting for linguistic change. Despite its appeal, my contention is that there are some issues with ‘grammaticalization’ as it is conventionally described and discussed in the literature. My goal here is to explore what some of those problems are and to focus on what grammaticalization has to offer as a methodology for studying language change. Drawing on case studies from the history of English and the history of Greek, I reach a characterization of how much of grammatical change can legitimately be called “grammaticalization” and how much is something else. In this way, I work to achieve a sense of what grammaticalization is and what it is not.