Linguistic changes often follow a cyclical path whereby the original formal expressions are worn down and first reinforced and later replaced by new ones. In how far such ‘micro-cycles’ conspire to engender ‘macro-cyclical’ developments in a language, and whether this can be measured quantitatively, is an under-researched question so far. Based on the fine-grained annotation of degrees of grammaticality in a new corpus to be built as part of the project, we develop novel quantitative metrics linking such micro-changes to macro-cyclical developments, focussing on the often-neglected transition between stages. The hypothesis the project aims to test is that micro-cyclical changes lead to a macro-cyclical change, quantifiable as a.o. a rise in the morpheme-to-word and function-to-morpheme ratio. The system of annotation, informed by formal analysis, along with the corpus developed for this project may eventually be scaled for use in other projects.