The Linguistic Cycle : Language Change and the Language Faculty

Elly van Gelderen provides examples of linguistic cycles from a number of languages and language families, along with an account of the linguistic cycle in terms of minimalist economy principles.

A cycle involves grammaticalization from lexical to functional category followed by renewal.

Some well-known cycles involve negatives, where full negative phrases are reanalyzed as words and affixes and are then renewed by full phrases again.

Verbal agreement is another example: full pronouns are reanalyzed as agreement markers and are renewed again.

Each chapter provides data on a separate cycle from a myriad of languages.

Van Gelderen argues that the cross-linguistic similarities can be seen as Economy Principles present in the initial cognitive system or Universal Grammar.

She further claims that some of the cycles can be used to classify a language as analytic or synthetic, and she provides insight into the shape of the earliest human language and how it evolved.