What is "grammaticalization"

n. The process of grammaticalize.

In historical linguistics and language change, grammaticalization (also known as grammatization or grammaticization) is a process of language change by which words representing objects and actions (i.e. nouns and verbs) transform to become grammatical markers ( affixes, prepositions, etc.). Grammaticalization is a powerful aspect of language, as it creates new function words by a process other than deriving them from existing bound, inflectional constructions (i.e., by instead deriving them from content words). An example is the historical evolution of Old English willan ('to want', 'to wish') to the Modern English auxiliary verb will, which can express intention or simply futurity. Some concepts are gramaticalized in most languages, such as tense, negation, or number, while others, such as evidentiality are rare.

For an understanding of this process, a distinction needs to be made between lexical items, or content words, which carry specific lexical meaning, and grammatical items, or function words, with little or no lexical meaning, which serve to express grammatical relationships between the different words within an utterance. Grammaticalization has been defined as "the change whereby lexical items and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions, and, once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions". Simply said, grammaticalization is the process in which a lexical word or a word cluster loses some or all of its lexical meaning and starts to fulfil a more grammatical function. Where grammaticalization takes place, nouns and verbs which carry certain lexical meaning develop over time into grammatical items such as auxiliaries, case markers, inflections and sentence connectives.

A well-known example of grammaticalization is that of the process in which the lexical cluster let us, for example in the sentence "let us eat", is reduced to a single word let's as in the sentence "let's you and me fight". The phrase has in many cases lost its lexical meaning of "allow us" and has changed into an auxiliary to introduce a suggestion, the pronoun 'us' reduced first to a suffix and then to an unanalyzed phoneme.