Semantic Change in Grammaticalization

Generally speaking,grammaticalization is the abstraction of lexical items or constructions which have developed into the minimal grammatical units in a certain context.As a universal linguistic phenomenon,grammaticalization has attracted the attention of eastern and western scholars for a long time.However,it hadn't become a hot topic in the study of language until the beginning of the 1970s.It is widely agreed that a typical grammaticalization involves change at various levels,such as,phonemic,semantic/ pragmatic and morphosyntactic levels.In this paper we tend to study grammaticalization from the functional perspective and take semantic/functional change involved in it as our focus in order to deepen our understanding of grammaticalization phenomena.

Generally speaking,grammaticalization is the abstraction of lexical items or constructions which have developed into the minimal grammatical units in a certain context. As a universal linguistic phenomenon, grammaticalization has attracted the attention of eastern and western scholars for a long time. However, it hadn＂ t become a hot topic in the study of language until the beginning of the 1970s. It is widely agreed that a typical grammaticalization involves change at various levels, such as, phonemic, semantic/pragmatic and morphosyntactic levels. In this paper we tend to study grammaticalization from the functional perspective and take semantic/functional change involved in it as our focus in order to deepen our understanding of grammaticalization nhenomena.