Grammaticalisation of Valency Patterns? - An investigation into Valency Patterns and Support Verb Constructions, Based on Diachronic Corpora
Lene Schøsler · Forum for Modern Language Studies · 2003
This paper asks whether changes of valency patterns can be considered as cases of grammaticalisation. Grammaticalisation processes are in fact gradual: they imply parallel changes of form and content, which correspond to a gradual fixing, firstly of patterns and constraints on, for example, determiners, support verbs on the one hand, and specialisation of content on the other. Later, further constraints are placed on form and content, until there is eventual nominalisation of the pattern and narrowing of the sense, a development most clearly illustrated by the case of garde.