Recent Changes in the Notion of Grammaticalization and the Rise of Alternative Concepts

This paper deals with the “modern” notion of grammaticalization as it has been developed in the 1980s. It is since the programmatic study by Christian Lehmann that the research on grammaticalization has received increasing interest and resulted in a large body of work. However, for the last two or three decades the interest in research on grammaticalization seems to be rather fading. Even more, the concept of grammaticalization is being gradually ousted by alternative notions such as constructionalization and constructional change. I will focus on the relevant paradigmatic changes which have occurred within the framework of grammaticalization research dating from the 1980s. At least two significant shifts occurred during this time, mainly due to the steadily increasing amount of extensive empirical studies on grammaticalization and due to the shift of interest from formal to functional aspects of diachronic processes. First, a shift occurred from the loss aspect towards the rearrangement aspect. Second, the conceptualization of the locus of change has been widened from single elements to constructions. With respect to the latter aspect, the growing interest in constructionist approaches to language structure has decisively influenced this shift of perspective. In light of these recent changes, the ultimate question will be whether the concept of grammaticalization as it has been originally introduced is still needed or whether it would be better to abandon it altogether and to use instead other concepts proposed in the most recent literature.