Grammaticalization Chains

Recent studies in grammaticalization suggest that the development of grammatical categories is the result of an interaction between cognitive and pragmatic operations, and that this development may lead to the rise of continuous linguistic structures which have been referred to as grammaticalization chains (Heine, Claudi & Hünnemeyer 1991a; Craig 1991; Heine 1991). In the present paper it is argued that grammaticalization chains are linguistic categories having the form of a specific type of family resemblance structure. An example from Charnus, a Maa dialect of the Nilo-Saharan family, is presented to illustrate the nature of grammaticalization chains.