Persistence (Linguistics) (Paperback)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Persistence in linguistics refers to one of the five principles by which you can detect grammaticalisation while it is taking place. The other four are: layering, divergence, specialisation, and de-categorialisation."The principle of persistence relates the meaning and function of a grammatical form to its history as a lexical morpheme. This relationship is often completely opaque by the stage of morphologisation, but during intermediate stages it may be expected that a form will be polysemous, and that one or more of its meaning will reflect a dominant earlier meaning." (Hopper 1991: 28) In other words, grammaticalisation can be a 'diachronic' explanatory parameter for certain otherwise hard-to-explain 'synchronic' (semantic and distributional) properties of grammatical signs. The lexical roots of a grammaticalised feature may remain visible in its grammatical function and may influence its grammatical distribution.