UM Macao Humanities Forum discusses grammaticalisation of languages

The Faculty of Arts and Humanities (FAH) of the University of Macau (UM) held the Macao Humanities Forum, featuring a lecture titled ‘Unidirectionality of Grammaticalization and Scope’ by Heiko Narrog, professor at Tohoku University, Japan. The lecture was well-attended by students and faculty, as well as online participants.

Joaquim Kuong, assistant dean of FAH, said in his speech that languages around the world have evolved over the years in terms of phonology, semantics, morphology, and syntax, with grammaticalisation being one of the most important phenomena. Yang Wenjiang, head of the Department of Japanese, then introduced Prof Narrog’s academic career. Prof Narrog holds PhD degrees from the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, and the University of Tokyo, Japan, and has been a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Japan. His research interests include linguistic typology, modality, grammatical change (especially grammaticalisation), and semantic maps. His publications include several monographs and co-authored handbooks published by Oxford University Press, and over 200 high-quality journal articles, book chapters, and book reviews.

In the lecture, Prof Narrog first used examples such as the lexical verb ‘go’ in English becoming a future tense marker, verbs becoming non-lexical modal auxiliaries, and the numeral for ‘one’ in many languages becoming an indefinite article like ‘a’, to explain the concept of grammaticalisation, the process where a word evolves from a content word into a grammatical or discourse marker. It is widely accepted and well documented that in the process of grammaticalisation, grammatical or discourse markers generally do not revert to content words. This irreversible characteristic is described in academia as the ‘unidirectionality of grammaticalisation’. From a discourse-oriented perspective, as lexical entries develop towards grammatical categories, they become increasingly speaker-oriented, hearer-oriented, and text-oriented, for which the superordinate label ‘discourse-oriented’ is used. The grammaticalised items also move up the hierarchy of syntactic categories, often expressing themselves in a movement towards the peripheral position of a clause. Such a movement involves an expansion of scope. Prof Narrog pointed out that in the process of grammaticalisation, the transformation of the function of a word class and the expansion of its scope are inherently directional.

During the Q&A session, UM students and faculty engaged in in-depth discussions with Prof Narrog on language evolution. Xu Jie, dean of FAH, presented Prof Narrog with a souvenir for his insightful presentation.

This was the second lecture of the Macao Humanities Forum for the 2024/2025 academic year. Each year, the forum invites prominent scholars in different fields of the humanities to share their latest research findings with students and faculty members in Macao. Previous lectures of the forum have covered a wide range of topics, including literature, linguistics, history, translation, and arts.

To read the news on UM’s official website, please visit the following link:
https://www.um.edu.mo/news-and-press-releases/presss-release/detail/59730/