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▪ Abstract  Grammaticalization—the transformation of lexical items and phrases into grammatical forms—has been the focus of considerable study. Two chief directions can be identified. The first involves etymology and the taxonomy of possible changes in language, in which semantic and cognitive accounts of words and categories of words are considered to explain the changes. The second involves the discourse contexts within which grammaticalization occurs. Some researchers have questioned the standard idea of a stable synchronic a priori grammar in which linguistic structure is distinct from discourse, and have sought to replace this with the idea of "emergent grammar" in which repetitions of various kinds in discourse lead to perpetual structuration.

Linguistics, a discipline that aims to grasp essential features of language, has adopted methods and assumptions that require a suppression of the temporality of speech and exclusive attention to its atemporal dimension. In doing so, it has lost sight of a crucial aspect of the notion of structure in language; that it is distributed over time and across persons. In this paper some of the consequences of this suppression for the theory and practice of linguistics are noted, and some alternatives indicated. These alternatives bring linguistics closer to the epistemes of poststructuralism and postmodernism.