When grammaticalization does not occur

Abstract

Recent decades have seen a surge of interest in grammaticalization. In this paper, however, we are not concerned with reaching a better understanding of the nature of grammaticalization phenomena or their triggering factors, but we ask under what circumstances grammaticalization does not take place, even if it would have seemed likely to – a topic that has scarcely been addressed in the literature. Based on a comparative investigation of the historical development of a class of Indo-European spatial adverbs, we argue that mismatches between layers of linguistic structure present one type of situation in which grammaticalization may be blocked. For grammaticalization to occur, the outer semantic-syntactic boundaries of the potentially grammaticalizing construction must be matched by prosodic boundaries. If prosodic chunking is shifted in relation to semantic-syntactic chunking, grammaticalization may be prevented.