Many examples on the present website are ones of renewal. A detailed case study of the renewal of the perfect tense in the history of Portuguese is provided in a separate section. Another example is the replacement of adpositions and of subordinative conjunctions in the history of many languages. Instead of earlier ere, contemporary English uses before as a conjunction and preposition. The Romance languages have causal clauses just like Latin had. However, none of them has preserved the Latin conjunction quod ‘because’ (or any of its synonyms, for that matter). Instead, many of them have coined causal conjunctions on the basis of syntactic constructions. In French, ‘because’ is parce que, literally ‘by that [demonstrative] that [subordinator]’ (Meillet 1915). Another example from French is the renewal of subject-verb agreement.

The dative relator has been renewed twice in the history of Portuguese. In Classical Latin, it was a value of the case declension paradigm coded by a suffix ().

In all Romance languages and starting in the first centuries AC, case declension on nouns was abolished and the new case relators were prepositions. The Latin allative preposition ad ‘to’ was recruited to code the dative function. It does so to this day in European Portuguese ().

This preposition was reduced to a from start and merged into one word with the following definite article. In Brazilian Portuguese, it started, in the 20th century, being replaced by another preposition with more concrete function, viz. para ‘for’. This is originally a benefactive case relator, but is increasingly being used to mark the indirect object ().

The grammatical function, viz. marking the indirect object of a trivalent verb, is the same in all three cases. Thus, while the expressions are different, this is idle at the level of syntax.

Renewal of a grammatical construction resembles onomasiological replacement in the lexicon, like when we say differently abled instead of handicapped or cool instead of great. The new expression or construction schema are fashionable at the beginning and may, over time, oust their predecessors. However, the meaning conveyed or the grammatical function fulfilled remain essentially the same. In this perspective, renewal is conservative, as opposed to innovation. It is change just for the sake of change, but does not enrich the system. In a typological perspective, renewal has two faces: it presupposes that the overall conditions in the language system have remained the same; but it also strengthens the system.

If a grammatical construction or formative S₁ is renewed by a construction or formative S₂, in the initial phase of the process S₁ and S₂ exist side by side in the language. One of the reasons why S₂ eventually replaces S₁ is that it is more explicit, richer in meaning and heavier in phonological form: it appears more successful in fulfilling its function than S₁. For instance, Latin comparavi ‘I have bought’ is replaced by habeo comparatum (id.). Thus, a more grammaticalized form is followed, in the diachrony, by a less grammaticalized form. Such cases have seemed to some as a process which runs counter to the general (reductive) direction of grammaticalization and would therefore count as cases of degrammaticalization (s. Lehmann 2004, § 4.1 for discussion). This is a confusion resulting from ignorance of the role of identity in diachronic linguistics. For S₁ and S₂ to be in a relation of grammaticalization or degrammaticalization presupposes that S₁ is diachronically identical to S₂. In cases of replacement and renewal, this is by definition not the case: neither of the dative markers in and is diachronically identical with its predecessor.

Reference

Meillet, Antoine 1915, “Le renouvellement des conjonctions.” Annuaire de l'École Pratique des Hautes Études, section historique et philologique 1915/6: 1-28. Reprint: Meillet 1921:159-174.