The development of English evidentials: A case of grammaticalization or constructionalization?
Résumé
This paper aims to discuss the competing frameworks of grammaticalization and Diachronic Construction Grammar (henceforth DCxG) by examining which framework would better account for the development of English evidentials. Grammaticalization has been a major field of studies for several decades, but has been challenged by new approaches, such as DCxG (Noël 2007, Traugott & Trousdale 2013, Gildea & Barðdal 2022). English is often presented as a language lacking grammatical evidentials (Aikhenvald 2004: 7–11), but this has been refuted, or at least qualified, by several authors (Aijmer 2009, López-Couso & Méndez-Naya 2014, Mélac 2022). Many markers encoding the speaker’s information sources show signs of grammaticalization, such as must, look like, or I guess. I argue that DCxG adds useful descriptive tools to detail the development of evidentials in English, but that it should not replace grammaticalization theory. First, DCxG tends to minimize the differences between grammar and lexicon. However, only a few notions, such as evidentiality, may be rendered by (semi-)grammatical tools, while lexical elements can denote all semantic domains. Markers encoding evidentiality such as I guess or look like are partially grammatical, while words referring to art or anatomy cannot be. DCxG also underestimates the special characteristics of the movement towards the grammatical end of the lexicon-grammar continuum. The processes that are involved in the grammaticalization of English evidentials are, however, mainly unidirectional, such as the decategorialization of inferential must, while other types of change are multidirectional. Finally, DCxG may be relevant for the micro-description of the evolution of individual forms, but the grammaticalization framework is better adapted when considering large semantic domains and cross-linguistic data. The revelation of evidential paradigms in typologically diverse languages have allowed scholars to investigate this phenomenon in English, and document many symptoms of the grammaticalization of evidentiality that had not be considered so far.
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