Gramatikalizācija un leksikalizācija runas darbības nominācijā
Grammaticalization and Lexicalization in Speech Acts Nomination

Summary/Abstract: In the last decade the processes of grammaticalization and lexicalization have also come into the focus of Latvian linguistics; furthermore, the research results demonstrate that, in this respect, there are found similar regularities across the same word classes in different languages.While examining various cases of grammaticalization in Latvian and contrasting them with the respective recurrent developmental regularities I have tried to provide a theoretical and practical account of the semantic and formal mechanisms that determine both the development of lexical items into grammatical ones and grammatical elements into lexemes. Although both the grammaticalization and lexicalization involve semantic bleaching and erosion a typical result of the lexicalization is individual, while the result of grammaticalization in relation to different semantic classes of lexical units is largely regular.The research results indicate that certain lexical items are subjected to grammaticalization particularly frequently, thus supporting the approach which requires the examination of different semantic classes separately. Combinations of a noun with a verb constitute examples of grammaticalization and lexicalization in Latvian and Russian. Here, the verb has partially or completely lost its lexical meaning and become a functional word. As to its semantic structure, such verbal components are mostly polysemous words. This is expected given that the polysemy of a word can further the distribution of analytic combinations.

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