The importance of paradigmatic analyses: From one lexical input into multiple grammatical paradigms

I take as my starting point that when lexical entities grammaticalize, they enter preexisting paradigms. Therefore, grammatical paradigms are important for the understanding of the reanalyses leading to grammaticalization. In the line of Henning Andersen’s thinking I propose to conceive of grammar as composed of sets of paradigms (Nørgård-Sørensen et al. 2011). The term paradigm is used not in the narrow sense of inflectional paradigm, nor entirely in the line of the “classical” grammaticalization approach of Lehmann (1985), but in the more general sense of a selectional set, composed of marked or unmarked members (Andersen 2008: 19). The lexical input that I use to illustrate my point is the French verb voir ‘to see’, in order to show the pathway of a multifunctional lexical item into grammar, i.e. into a number of individual paradigms. My approach combines synchronic and diachronic investigations on electronic corpora. Each paradigm presents the actual synchronic status of diachronic grammaticalization processes. By distinguishing the different contexts (labelled domains) in which the given forms appear, and state which semantic fields they cover (labelled frames), I can generate synchronic paradigms of which the grammatical entities are members. I aim to demonstrate that synchronic paradigms provide a precise and relatively simple presentation of what otherwise would seem utterly diverse usages of a lexical entity