Thoughts on grammaticalization

As far as I can see, it was Antoine We will return to him in a moment. The concept itself, however, and the ideas behind it, are considerably older. The idea that grammatical formatives evolve from lexemes, that affixes come from free forms, was already expounded by the French philosopher tienne Bonnot de Condillac. In his work Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines (1746), he explained the personal endings of the verb through agglutination of personal pronouns and maintained that verbal tense came from the coalescence of a temporal adverb with the stem. Again, John Horne Tooke, in his etymological work or the diversions of Purley (vol. I: 1786, vol. II: 1805), claimed that prepositions derive from…