Why do grammatical systems of various languages express different meanings? Given that languages spoken in the same geographical area by people sharing similar social structure, occupations, and religious beliefs differ in the kinds of meaning expressed by the grammatical system, the answer to this question cannot invoke differences in geography, occupation, social and political structure, or religion. The present book aims to answer the main question through language internal analysis. This book offers a methodology to discover meaning in a way that is not based on inferences about reality. T ... More

Why do grammatical systems of various languages express different meanings? Given that languages spoken in the same geographical area by people sharing similar social structure, occupations, and religious beliefs differ in the kinds of meaning expressed by the grammatical system, the answer to this question cannot invoke differences in geography, occupation, social and political structure, or religion. The present book aims to answer the main question through language internal analysis. This book offers a methodology to discover meaning in a way that is not based on inferences about reality. The book also offers a methodology to discover motivations for the emergence of meanings. The grammatical system at any given time constitutes a base from which new meanings emerge. The motivations for the emergence of functions include: the communicative need triggered when the grammatical system inherently produces ambiguities; the principle of functional transparency whereby every function encoded in the grammatical system must be expressed if it is in the scope of the situation described by the proposition; opportunistic emergence of meaning whereby unoccupied formal niches acquire a new function; metonymic emergence whereby a property of an existing function receives a formal means of its own, thus creating a new function; emergence of functions through language contact. Several phenomena, such as benefactive and progressive in English, as well as point of view of the subject and goal orientation in several languages, receive new analyses.