MAGRAM

Grammaticalization is seen as a cross-linguistically homogeneous phenomenon. Our project starts out from the idea that there is a certain degree of areal and cross-phylogenetic variation in two domains as stated in the following hypotheses:

(i) Grammaticalization paths of the type [SOURCE → TARGET] show areal/genetic variation in terms of the sources that undergo grammaticalization as well as in therms of target concepts.

(ii) There are differences in the covariation of meaning and form, i.e., the coevolution of meaning and form shows differences between semantic change and different form-related parameters and it is likely that there also are some areal differences.

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MAGRAM is the acronym of the MAinz GRAMmaticalization project, a project founded by the German Research Foundation at the Johannes-Gutenberg Universität Mainz under lead of Prof. Dr. Walter Bisang and apl. Prof. Dr. Andrej Malchukov.
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MAGRAM basically confirmed hypotheses (i) and (ii). Details can be found in our Publications, particularly in our handbook with the title Grammaticalization Scenarios: Areal Patterns and Cross-Linguistic Variation (to appear in Mouton de Gruyter). The handbook contains a position paper by the research group, 25 contributions by experts with expertise both in a single language family and in the theory of grammaticalization (Christian Lehmann, Marianne Mithun, Martin Haspelmath among others), and the Questionnaire used by the team.
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Moreover, we are currently preparing an online accesible Databank, which will consist of all the grammaticalization paths collected in the project, and aims not only at allowing access to the (revised) database of the publications, but also encourage more quantitative research on grammaticalizaton paths.

As part of the project also a conference on the said topic took place, which was held in 2015 in Mainz (s. Conference). A collection of the resulting papers has already been published and is accessible online.

For more information on the methods and the workflow of the MAGRAM project, Methodology.

To get in touch with the project, see Contact.