Abstract
Grammaticalization, the historical emergence of new items with grammatical function from earlier lexical items, is generally considered to be a unidirectional process. Much recent interest has, however, focused on degrammaticalization changes that run counter to this general direction. This article considers three cases of degrammaticalization from Bulgarian and Welsh, involving shifts from pronoun to noun, and from preposition to verb. These cases exhibit a common set of properties, such as the central role played by syntactic reanalysis and pragmatic inferencing, that justify viewing them as examples of a new type of degrammaticalization. Degrammaticalization via syntactic reanalysis appears to be cross-linguistically rare, because it is constrained by two factors: the requirement that the item undergoing degrammaticalization should have become grammatically or semantically isolated; and the requirement that it should match a possible morphological pattern for the lexical category that it is to join.
© Walter de Gruyter
