Abstract Many grammaticalization pathways recur across languages. A prominent explanation for this is that the properties of lexical items determine their developmental pathways. However, it is unclear why these pathways do not always occur. In this article, we ask why English did not undergo a cross-linguistically common grammaticalization pathway, finish > anterior. We operationalize this question by testing a theory proposed on results regarding a language that did undergo this change, Spanish, on corpus and experimental data. While English finish constructions are associated with some of the distributional properties of Early Spanish finish, speakers do not show evidence of conventionally associating finish constructions with a particular type of inference crucial for the grammaticalization of the Spanish anterior. We propose that the non-conventionality of this inference blocks the grammaticalization of finish constructions in English, demonstrating that some of the black box of language change currently attributed to chance can be explored empirically.

中文翻译：

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为什么语法化路径不总是重复出现？

摘要 许多语法化途径在不同语言中重复出现。对此的一个突出解释是词汇项目的属性决定了它们的发展途径。然而，尚不清楚为什么这些途径并不总是发生。在这篇文章中，我们问为什么英语没有经历一个跨语言共同的语法化路径，finish > anterior。我们通过在语料库和实验数据上测试一个关于确实经历了这种变化的语言（西班牙语）的结果提出的理论来操作这个问题。虽然英语完成结构与早期西班牙完成的一些分布特性有关，但说话者并没有显示出传统上将完成结构与对西班牙前部语法化至关重要的特定类型的推理相关联的证据。