RE ANALYSIS VS. METAPHOR?WHAT GRAMMATICAL ISATION CAN TELL US ABOUT LANGUAGE EVOLUTION

摘要

We argue that studying grammatical isation is useful to evolutionary linguists, if we abstract away from linguistic description to the underlying cognitive mechanisms. We set out a unifiedapproach to grammatical isation that allows us to identify these mechanisms, and argue that theycould indeed be sufficient for the initial emergence of linguistic signal-meaning associations.