The Hypothesis of Unidirectionality

Hopper, P. J., & Traugott, E. C. (2003). The Hypothesis of Unidirectionality. Grammaticalization.

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Review or monograph

Year

2003

DOI

10.1017/cbo9781139165525

ISBN

9780521804219

DOI registrant

Cambridge University Press

Link

https://www.cambridge.org/core_title/gb/201683

Cited from

biology_ecology, linguistics_semiotics

Cited by

5 citations across 5 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Emergent Formalization (Language)
  • The signature rests on six italicized role-phrases capturing the internal mechanics:

    This sourceThe unidirectional cline (lexical to grammatical) with semantic bleaching and decategorialization — supports the cline, unidirectionality, and going-to/gonna trajectory claims.

    Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract

    The 2003 abstract backs grammaticalization's lexical-to-grammatical direction and the book's attention to unidirectionality, but says nothing about a three-stage future cline or a phonetic-reduction timeline.

    “This is a general introduction to grammaticalization, the change whereby lexical terms and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions, and, once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions.”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

• Exaptation
  • Linguistics: Grammaticalization, in which a content word is co-opted into a grammatical function marker — English "going to" (motion verb) becoming a future-tense auxiliary — is a canonical linguistic exaptation, and Hopper and Traugott (2003) trace how lexical material is repeatedly recruited to grammatical service across unrelated languages.

    This sourceDocuments grammaticalization—the recurrent recruitment of lexical material to grammatical functions across unrelated languages—as a systematic, largely unidirectional shift coupling phonetic reduction with semantic bleaching.

    Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract

    The book's own abstract establishes grammaticalization — lexical terms coming to serve grammatical functions across many languages — but says nothing of 'going to' or of exaptation.

    “This is a general introduction to grammaticalization, the change whereby lexical terms and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions, and, once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions. The authors synthesize work from several areas of linguistics, including historical linguistics, discourse analysis, and pragmatics. Data are drawn from many languages …”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

• Synchronic vs. Diachronic Analysis
  • and Hopper-Traugott 2003 Grammaticalization

    Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract

    The publisher's abstract frames the book as an introduction to grammaticalization, the diachronic change by which lexical forms become grammatical, which supports the diachronic frame but not the claim's 'only through' clause.

    “This is a general introduction to grammaticalization, the change whereby lexical terms and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical functions, and, once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions.”

    Read by an automated reader; not a human review. How support was checked

Domain-specific

• Semantic Shift
  • Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.
• Unidirectionality Hypothesis
  • Grammaticalization can stop, coexist with its source, split into several functions, or be replaced by another construction.

Verification

Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.

Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 3 of 5 citations: 3 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.

Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.

See how references were verified.

Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 1 other way.

• https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139165525 ×2

Registry ID ref:da3d290c938d · see in the full table