Reviewed by Carolin Patzelt, University of Bochum

This book is a collection of twelve papers selected from over 120 talks delivered at the Third International Conference New Reflections on Grammaticalization held in Santiago de Compostela in July 2005.

The volume comprises an impressive range of topics related to grammaticalization theory, particularly to new tendencies in the field. Acentral topic of this volume is the need for a broader notion of grammaticalization, as discussed in the contributions by Zygmunt Frajzyngier and Walter Bisang. Frajzyngier argues that an expanded agenda of grammaticalization should include such coding means as phonological devices and semantic/pragmatic functional domains. Within this expanded model of grammaticalization, the paper raises basic theoretical questions, e.g. regarding the motivations for grammaticalization. Bisang emphasizes the need to integrate the areal perspective in grammaticalization, since the standard approaches to grammaticalization cannot fully account for grammaticalization processes occurring in languages of East and mainland Southeast Asia, as he shows by analyzing three case studies. The contributions by Kaoru Horie, Michael Noonan, Seongha Rhee, Andrew Simpson, and Foong Ha Yap and Stephen Matthews also deal with areality with respect to nominalization in East Asian languages, which has attracted much attention in recent years.

Another central topic is the relationship between grammaticalization and language contact. Contrary to Paul Hopper and Elizabeth Traugott (Grammaticalization 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), who attribute grammaticalization processes to universal tendencies and internally motivated changes, several papers in this volume argue that there are universal properties of grammaticalization that  can be traced back to historical contact between languages. Anna Giacalone-Ramat argues that language contact was involved in the genesis of four well-known linguistic changes that occurred in the European linguistic area: the development of periphrastic have-perfects in Romance, Germanic, and other European languages, the extension of the definite article area in Europe, the renewal of the relative pronoun paradigm in European languages, and the development of reflexive markers for passive and impersonal constructions. Tania Kuteva shows that language contact does not always lead to simplification but can also be responsible for elaborateness or redundancy of marking. Livio Gaeta demonstrates that grammaticalization can often explain the way in which language mismatches are produced and constrained. In his article, he focuses on content and complexity mismatches and argues that they result from the expansion of grammaticalization processes.

Finally, the articles by Philippe Bourdin and Ferdinand von Mengden offer crosslinguistic evidence for two interesting grammaticalization clines: while Bourdin analyzes cases of the grammaticalization of motion verbs meaning come and go into markers of textual coherence and clause linkage, von Mengden focuses on the grammaticalization of cardinal numerals and numeral systems. In summation, the articles collected in this volume embody the current state of research in grammaticalization and open new directions for future research in the field.