Reanalysis vs metaphor: what grammaticalisation can tell us about language evolution

Citation

Smith ADM & Höfler S (2008) Reanalysis vs metaphor: what grammaticalisation can tell us about language evolution. In: Smith A, Smith K & Ferrer iCR (eds.) The Evolution of Language. Singapore: World Scientific, pp. 163-70.

Abstract
We argue that studying grammaticalisation is useful to evolutionary linguists, if we abstract away from linguistic description to the underlying cognitive mechanisms. We set out a unified approach to grammaticalisation that allows us to identify these mechanisms, and argue that they could indeed be sufficient for the initial emergence of linguistic signal-meaning associations.