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The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World

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The Evolution of Grammar focuses on two issues: first, is it possible to discover diachronic relationships between various meanings of verbal morphology; and second, is there a relationship between the type of expression (auxiliary, particle, affix, or internal stem change)and the age of the grammatical morpheme(gram)? The answer appears to be yes in both cases. The authors use a large and diverse typological study, and a number of similarities occur. Completive and Resultative morphemes are frequently the source of Anteriors, Perfectives, and Pasts. New paraphrastic progressives take over a portion of the semantic space once occupied by an older present tense. Agent oriented modalities expand into the territory of speaker oriented and epistemic modalities and eventually are used in a subjunctive manner. Verbs of desire, volition, and movement become sources of future tense markers.

This book is an interesting journey for historical linguists, typologists, semanticists who would like more depth of analysis, and syntaticians who are struggling with the nature of little "v" and differences in complementizers.

This text, along with Harris & Campbell's Historical syntax in cross-linguistic perspective and Hopper and Traugott's Grammaticalization, is central to the Typological-Functional research documentation into diachronic language change. Broadly cross-linguistic and solid in its empirical grounding, this text will be of great utility to any researcher in the field.

This is an excellent reference resource for anyone interested in the evolution of tense, modality, and aspect.