his performance'. Examples that are not confined to a specific lexical item are less common. One is the English genitive -'s, which, in Old English, was a suffix but, in Modern English, is a clitic. As Jespersen (1894) put it, Traugott cites a counterexample from function to content word proposed by Kate Burridge (1998): the development in Pennsylvania German of the auxiliary of the preterite subjunctive modal 'would' (from 'wanted') into a full verb 'to wish, to desire'. In comparison to various instances of grammaticalization, there are relatively few counterexamples to the unidirectionality hypothesis, and they often seem to require special circumstances to occur. One is found in the development of Irish Gaelic with the origin of the first-person-plural pronoun (a function word) from the inflectional suffix -mid (as in 'we are') because of a reanalysis based on the verb-pronoun order of the other persons of the verb. Another well-known example is the degrammaticalization of the North Saami abessive ('without') case suffix -haga to the postposition 'without' and further to a preposition and a free-standing adverb. Moreover, the morphologically analogous derivational suffix -naga 'stained with' (e.g., 'stained with coffee', 'stained with oil') – itself based on the essive case marker *-na – has degrammaticalized into an independent noun 'stain'. Views on grammaticalization Linguists have come up with different interpretation of the term 'grammaticalization', and there are many alternatives to the definition given in the introduction. The following will be a non-exhaustive list of authors who have written about the subject with their individual approaches to the nature of the term 'grammaticalization'. Antoine Meillet (1912): "" ("While the analogy can renew the detail of the forms, but often leaves untouched the overall plan of the grammatical system, the 'grammaticalization' of certain words creates new forms, introduces categories for which there was no linguistical expression, and transforms the whole of the system.") Jerzy Kurylowicz (1965): His "classical" definition is probably the one most often referred to: "Grammaticalization consists in the increase of the range of a morpheme advancing from a lexical to a grammatical or from a less grammatical to a more grammatical status, e.g. from a derivative formant to an inflectional one". Since then, the study of grammaticalization has become broader, and linguists have extended the term into various directions. Christian Lehmann (1982): Writer of Thoughts on Grammaticalization and New Reflections on Grammaticalization and Lexicalization, wrote that "Grammaticalization is a process