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The unidirectionality of semantic changes in grammaticalization: an experimental approach to the asymmetric priming hypothesis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2016

MARTIN HILPERT  and
DAVID CORREIA SAAVEDRA
MARTIN HILPERT
Affiliation:
Institute of English Studies, Université de Neuchâtel, Espace Louis Agassiz 1, 2000 Neuchâtel, [email protected], [email protected]
DAVID CORREIA SAAVEDRA
Affiliation:
Institute of English Studies, Université de Neuchâtel, Espace Louis Agassiz 1, 2000 Neuchâtel, [email protected], [email protected]
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Abstract

Why is semantic change in grammaticalization typically unidirectional? It is a well-established finding that in grammaticalizing constructions, more concrete meanings tend to evolve into more schematic meanings. Jäger & Rosenbach (2008) appeal to the psychological phenomenon of asymmetric priming in order to explain this tendency. This article aims to evaluate their proposal on the basis of experimental psycholinguistic evidence. Asymmetric priming is a pattern of cognitive association in which one idea strongly evokes another (i.e. paddle strongly evokes water), while that second idea does not evoke the first one with the same force (water only weakly evokes paddle). Asymmetric priming would elegantly explain why semantic change in grammaticalization tends to be unidirectional, as in the case of English be going to, which has evolved out of the lexical verb go. As yet, empirical engagement with Jäger & Rosenbach's hypothesis has been limited. We present experimental evidence from a maze task (Forster et al.2009), in which we test whether asymmetric priming obtains between lexical forms (such as go) and their grammaticalized counterparts (be going to). On the asymmetric priming hypothesis, the former should prime the latter, but not vice versa. Contrary to the hypothesis, we observe a negative priming effect: speakers who have recently been exposed to a lexical element are significantly slower to process its grammaticalized variant. We interpret this observation as a horror aequi phenomenon (Rohdenburg & Mondorf 2003).

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , November 2018 , pp. 357 - 380
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

1The research reported on in this article was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF grant 100015_149176/1). We, the authors, would like to acknowledge the helpful comments that we received from two anonymous reviewers, Bernd Kortmann as our corresponding editor, and Alice Blumenthal-Dramé. We would also like to thank the audiences at the 2016 workshop on mechanisms of grammatical change at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the 2016 SLE conference in Naples, and the 2016 ISLE conference in Poznan. The usual disclaimers apply.

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