Usage-based approaches to language have gained increasing attention in the last two decades. The importance of change and variation has always been recognized in this framework, but has never received central attention. It is the main aim of this book to fill this gap. Once we recognize that usage… read more
The word class cardinal numeral is quite specific in that, compared with other parts-of-speech categories, it constitutes both a considerably small and a semantically coherent class. There is moreover a class-internal morphosyntactic system which is not shared by any other word class that is… read more
In this contribution I assess some mainstream approaches to functional changes of grammatical expressions with a focus on two concepts – ‘(secondary) grammaticalization’ and ‘exaptation’. As to the former, I argue that the most influential definition of ‘grammaticalization’ by Kuryłowicz’s (1965)… read more
Depending of the type of results we wish to achieve, different methods need to be employed in reconstructing proto-languages. In the first part of this paper I shall discuss the Comparative Method and elaborate why, I believe, this method is in principle not suitable for syntactic reconstruction.… read more
This paper investigates the grammaticalization of cardinal numerals and numeral systems from a crosslinguistic perspective. The grammaticalization cline postulated here starts with a referential expression denoting a body part to a cardinal numeral and leads on to a functional affix which occurs in… read more
