Expanding the Definiton of Gram

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, University of Hamburg (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Grammaticalisation, language: English, abstract: This paper's main aim is to present a short overview over the discussion of the last decades. It will follow the arguments & cases of both schools of thought and then try to find out if their arguments aren't that different from each other to begin with. It then will trace phenomena within the field of Grammaticalization which do, in one or the other way, defy the general thesis of unidirectionality and then see if those phenomena simply need to be separated from the system or if there do exist possibilities to integrate them in a fuller set of features which may be used to rejuvenate the definition of Grammaticalization.