Article Notes: Romaine, Suzanne

Boring Bibliographical stuff:
The Grammaticalization of the Proximative in Tok Pisin
By Suzanne Romaine
Language, Vol 75, No 2 (Jun 1999), pp 322-346

Notes on terms:
Grammaticalization refers to the process by which a word moves from having one specific (usually concrete) meaning and slowly over time picks up an abstracted sense, usually one that becomes almost technical in nature. Examples of this would be the pas in the French negation ne V pas. Orginially from the root for "foot", it was used for the sense of "it doesn't go". Overtime, that became obfuscated and now it's simply part of the negation in French.
Proximative is the grammatical form that is used to mark an action that is about to take place. In "the wind is about to blow", "is about to" is forming the English proximative, however it is not a fully grammaticalized morpheme. (English lacks a proximative marker, rather has contructions like "is about to".)

Article reaction:

There are two major proximative markers in Tok Pisin: laik ("like") and klostu ("close to"). Both of these seem to be used today, however laik is a newer gramatical term. Klostu has history back to the 19th century, however its grammaticalization slowed or stopped when laik began to be used in the early 20th century.

The two terms are from different kinds of words. Laik expresses desire as it root did, "like". While it began in this fashion, as it become more of technical term used to show proximate actions, it by necessity lost some of the implied desire. One cannot say "the wind likes to die down", however since the statement Win i laik dai is used to say "The wind is about to die down", laik has clearly lost the volition that it had previously implied. This happens often in other languages as words become grammaticized. The Hebrew pәne (lit: "face") is used as "surface", usually of things not necessarily being anthropormorphized. (See Gen 1 where God is hovering on the surface of the waters, since it is assumed that water does not have a face as a person would.)

The other proximative seems to have begun the process earlier but then developed in tandem with laik. Klostu also is used in conjuction with laik when the latter alone might confuse the audience. Em i laik dai could be either "he/she/it is about to die" or "he/she wants to die". However, klostu em i laik dai takes away that ambiguity, making it clear that the subject does not necessarily want to die. This is not to say that klostu has to be used with laik. Klosto em dai would convey the same meaning. While laik syntaxtically falls into the verbal slot, making the verb it is acting as a proximate for into its object, klostu can be placed either preverbally (em klostu dai) or external to the phrase it is modifying (klostu em dai).

Klostu, as a locative, also did not need to shed its sense of volition during its grammaticalization process. Rather it merely moved from a spacial proximate ("The tree is close to the river") to a temporal ("The tree is close to falling"). Later, it even shed the temporal and began modifying quality or other aspects.