Functional categories, morphosyntactic change, grammaticalization

The articles in this special issue are all broadly concerned with various aspects of the rise of grammatical items and functional categories and represent a variety of theoretical approaches to the analysis of the nature of such items. They arise out of a workshop held at the XIIIth International Conference on Historical Linguistics at Düsseldorf in August, 1997, titled “Functional Categories and Morphosyntactic Change.” The term “functional categories” should be understood in a broad sense, comprising in general those linguistic categories that convey grammatical rather than lexical information (tense, mood, case, certain types of prepositions, and so on), as well as the more specific theoretical approach in which such categories are each assigned separate status as structurally represented phrases: current versions of the principles-and-parameters approach spearheaded by Chomsky.