Auxiliation

This book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the inner mechanisms of grammatical language change, and human communication in general. While we can observe the formal 'symptoms' of change of linguistic expressions, we cannot 'peep' into the minds of the discourse participants during the communicative act and find out what is going on there. This methodological difficulty, however, has not prevented the author from asking the question: how does grammaticalization take place in everyday linguistic communication?