Journal of Language Contact Evolution of languages, contact and discourse
THEMA series, Number 2, 2008
Language Contact and the Dynamics of Language / Theory and Implications
"Es gibt keine völlig ungemischte Sprache" (Hugo Schuchardt)
edited / édité by / par Robert Nicolaï & Bernard Comrie J L C - Electronic Revue
Journal of Language Contact (JLC) Evolution of languages, contact and discourse http://www.jlc-journal.org/ Electronic Revue Editors Alexandra Aikhenvald (La Trobe, Melbourne, Australia) & Robert Nicolaï (Nice & Institut universitaire de France) Associate Editors Rainer Voßen (Frankfurt, Germany), Petr Zima (Prague, Czech Republic) Managing Editor Henning Schreiber (Frankfurt, Germany) JLC publishes two series: The THEMA series is a yearly publication which focuses on a specific topic. Each issue has an Editor who makes decisions in agreement with the Editors of JLC. Proposals for contributions should be submitted by email to
[email protected] (email subject : "Contribution.JLC.Thema") The VARIA series considers proposals for contributions which are concerned with the aims of JLC as long as they have not been already studied in an issue of the Thema series. Proposals for contributions should be submitted by email to
[email protected] or
[email protected] (email subject : "Contribution.JLC.Varia") Information for Authors: Papers may be either in English or in French. Please refer to www.jlc-journal.org/ for detailed.
ISSN : 1955-2629 May 2008
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Editorial Board Peter Bakker (Aarhus, Denmark), Claire Blanche-Benveniste (Paris, France), Klaus Beyer (Berlin, Germany), Raymond Boyd (Paris, France), Matthias Brenzinger (Köln, Germany), Cécile Canut (Montpellier, France), Elisabetta Carpitelli (Grenoble, France), Tucker Childs (Portland, USA), Bernard Comrie (Leipzig, Germany), Denis Creissels (Lyon, France), Norbert Cyffer (Wien, Austria), Robert Dixon (Melbourne, Australia), Zygmunt Frajzyngier (Boulder USA), Françoise Gadet (Paris, France), Jeffrey Heath (Michigan, USA), Bernd Heine (Köln, Germany), Tomáš Hoskovec (Brno, Czech Republic), Dymitr Ibriszimow (Bayreuth, Germany), Caroline Juillard (Paris, France), Maarten Kossmann (Leiden, The Netherlands), Isabelle Léglise (Tours, France), Georges Lüdi (Basel, Switzerland), Yaron Matras (Manchester, United Kingdom), Martine Mazaudon (Paris, France), Carol MyersScotton (South Carolina, USA), Catherine Miller (Aix-en-Provence, France), Marianne Mithun (Santa Barbara, USA), Yves Moniño (Paris, France), Annie Montaut (Paris, France), Maarten Mous (Leiden,The Netherlands), Salikoko Mufwene (Chicago, USA), Pieter Muysken (Nijmegen, The Netherlands), Carol Myers-Scotton (Michigan, USA), J.V. Neustupný (Melbourne, Australia), Derek Nurse (Newfoundland, Canada), Bernard Py (Neuchâtel, Switzerland), Mechthild Reh (Hamburg, Germany), Patrick Renaud (Paris, France), Malcolm Ross (Canberra, Australia), William Samarin (Toronto, Canada), Norval Smith (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Andrée Tabouret-Keller (Strasbourg, France), Sarah G. Thomason (Michigan, USA), Martine Vanhove (Paris, France), Marie-Christine Varol (Poitiers, France), Donald Winford (Ohio, USA), Ekkehard Wolff (Leipzig, Germany), Ghil`ad Zuckermann (Cambridge, United Kingdom).
Purpose The fact of language “contact” and its impact on the dynamics of language are recognized today. Questions relating to this topic no longer derive from marginal studies nor from the treatment of “special cases": whether the issue is to understand the evolution of languages, their structural and material transformations, or simply to take account of their ordinary use, language contact is omnipresent. We would like JLC to focus on the study of language contact, language use and language change in accordance with a view of language contact whereby both empirical data (the precise description of languages and how they are used) and the resulting theoretical elaborations (hence the statement and analysis of new problems) become the primary engines for advancing our understanding of the nature of language. And this will involve associating linguistic, anthropological, historical, and cognitive factors. We believe such an approach could make a major new contribution to understanding language change at a time when there is a notable increase of interest and activity in this field. JLC should provide a forum for discussion of general perspectives and should accept contributions of any orientation on the principle that reasoned argumentation will enrich our understanding of language contact.
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Journal of Language Contact. Evolution of languages, contact and discourse
Informations
Online access and downloading is free: www.jlc-journal.org/ Notes for Contributors, JLC-style-sheet: www.jlc-journal.org/
Book-reviews, reports and announcements. Announcements, book-reviews, review-articles and reports from Conferences/Projects are welcome for every VARIA or THEMA issue of JLC.
Books for reviews and reports are to be sent directly to: Robert Nicolaï UFR LASH, 98, Bd Edouard Herriot BP 3209 06204 Nice CEDEX3, France Although maximum efforts will be devoted to publish reviews on publications received, there can be no guarantee that all books received will, in fact, be reviewed. However, all books and reports sent to the Editor will be listed in the Recent publications received section of the next VARIA or THEMA issue of JLC.
Directeur de la publication / Publisher : Robert Nicolaï : Institut universitaire de France et Université de Nice Chaire « Dynamique du langage et contact des langues » http://www.unice.fr/ChaireIUF-Nicolai - Webmaster : Henning Schreiber Institut für Afrikanische Sprachwissenschaften Frankfurt, Germany.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS JLC general informations
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Robert Nicolaï & Bernard Comrie Andrée Tabouret-Keller
Presentation Langues en contact : l’expression contact comme révélatrice de la dynamique des langues. Persistance et intérêt de la métaphore
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Theoretical Reflexions, Modelings and Syntheses Carol Myers- Scotton
Language Contact: Why Outsider System Morphemes Resist Transfer
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Sarah G. Thomason
Social and Linguistic Factors as Predictors of Contact-Induced Change
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Bernd Heine & Tania Kuteva
Constraints on Contact-Induced Linguistic Change
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Claire Lefebvre
Relabelling: A Major Process in Language Contact
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Mauro Tosco
What to Do when You are Unhappy with Language Areas but You do not Want to Quit
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Donald Winford
Processes of Creole Formation and Related Contact-Induced Language Change
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Empirical Approaches, Applications and Developments Malcolm Ross
A History of Metatypy in the Bel Languages
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Anthony P. Grant
Contact-Induced Change and the Openness of ‘Closed’ Morphological Systems: Some Cases from Native America
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Patrick McConvell
Mixed Languages as Outcomes of Code-Switching: Recent Examples from Australia and Their Implications
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Carmen Silva-Corvalán
The Limits of Convergence in Language Contact
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William J. Samarin
Convergence and the Retention of Marked Consonants in Sango: the Creation and Appropriation of a Pidgin
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Françoise Gadet
Variation, Contact and Convergence in French Spoken Outside France
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Katja Ploog
Subversion of Language Structure in Heterogeneous Speech Communities: the Work of Discourse and the Part of Contact
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Zygmunt Frajzyngier
Language-Internal versus Contact-Induced Change: The Split Coding of Person and Number: A Stefan Elders Question
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& Mari C. Jones
& Erin Shay
Frontier Research Nicholas J. Enfield
Transmission Biases in Linguistic Epidemiology
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Robert Nicolaï
How languages Change and How They Adapt: Some Challenges for the Future / Dynamique du langage et élaboration des langues : quelques défis à relever
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Abstracts
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Authors
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OPENING
This volume presents a detailed overview of some of the work and points of view presented at the Symposium Language Contact and the Dynamics of Language: Theory and Implications held from the 10th to the 13th of May in Leipzig and jointly organized by the Chair of Dynamique du langage et contact des langues of the Institut Universitaire de France and the Department of Linguistics of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. The aim was to create an event at a time when questions concerning language contact, evolution and dynamics have reached the centre of Linguistic debate and when this effervescence is illustrated by the development of models, the emergence of new descriptive concepts, the intersection of new relevant facets, at the same time as debates on the place to give to linguistic, anthropological and psycho-cognitive dimensions open new horizons. All these underline a necessity for reflection. Given the diversity of relevant facets and approaches, proposing a thematic organization was not easy. Indeed, as much as we wanted to introduce minimum organization, we did not want to introduce a pre-categorization which might have prejudged the importance of certain orientations or approaches. As a result, after a text by Andrée Tabouret-Keller which we maintained in the opening “Languages in contact: the expression ‘contact’ as revealing language dynamics. Persistence and interest of the metaphor”, we opted for a presentation in three sections. The first part entitled « Theoretical Reflexions, Modelings and Syntheses », comprises texts that propose, develop or raise questions on approaches and modelings, or that offer synthesis. Thus, Carol Myers-Scotton focuses on codeswitching, suggesting that the morpheme type that comes from only one of the participating languages in codeswitching also resists transfer or replication across languages in other contact phenomena. Her paper suggests that its role in structuring clauses across languages in general, along with hypotheses about how different morpheme types become available in language production, offers explanations regarding what can happen in language contact. Coming back to two claims (Thomason & Kaufman 1988) which had generated particularly strong reactions from specialists in language contact (first, that there are no absolute linguistic constraints on the kinds or numbers of features that can be transferred from one language to another; and second, that when social factors and linguistic factors might be expected to push in Journal of language contact – THEMA 2 (2008) www. jlc-journal.org
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opposite directions in a language contact situation, the social factors will be the primary determinants of the linguistic outcome), Sarah G. Thomason concludes that although critics have made impressive contributions toward specifying linguistic predictors, there is still no good reason to abandon the Thomason & Kaufman position; and that much more work needs to be done to make even rough predictions about the relative impact of particular social and linguistic factors and their interactions, in particular contact situations. As for Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva, basing themselves on their previous works they argue that Sarah G. Thomason’s position might be in need of reconsideration, in that there are in fact some constraints on contact-induced linguistic change (e.g. Constraints on grammatical replication), thus lending further support to the generalizations on language contact proposed there. At another level, that of mental operations sub-jacent to processes implemented in language contact, Claire Lefebvre looks at contact phenomena from the viewpoint of the relabelling, a mental operation that consists in assigning a lexical entry of a given language, L1, a new label taken from another language, L2. Her aim is threefold: first, to assess the extent of relabelling across language contact situations; second, to assess the extent of relabelling across lexicons; and third, to assess the possibility of relabelling in cases of agglutinative languages. Her approach highlights the importance of the process of relabelling in a variety of language contact situations. Mauro Tosco deals with the concept of linguistic area and problems caused by its introduction. After an excursus on its origins, he suggests that the concept of “area” is in principle more interesting in linguistics than in social sciences due to the availability in linguistics of two other unrelated and powerful tools: genetic classification and typology. It is in the light of these other tools that language areas will have to be judged—as what lies beyond the range of both genetic and typological linguistics. It is suggested that ideally, in order for a linguistic area to be “proven”: its members will have to be as genetically diverse as possible; and it will not be possible to account for the area-defining features on the basis of typological tendencies and regularities. Moreover, language areas described in terms of similar traits should not be overlapping, and attention will have to be paid in keeping language-external facts (such as historical contact and cultural similarities) at bay and not letting them guide our search for language areas. This first part is concluded by Donald Winford’s text which explores the relationship between creole formation and other outcomes of contact induced change. He argues that in many respects the comparisons that earlier scholars made between the two have a sound basis in terms of the processes of change that produced such outcomes. He focuses his attention only on those aspects of creole formation that result from the kind of cross-linguistic influence that has been referred to variously as ‘substratum influence.’ He argues that such influence is part of a more general type of contact-induced change that is brought about by imposition (van Coetsem), a transfer type that manifests itself in a wide variety of contact situations not traditionally treated as involving the creation of creoles. He discusses two linguistic models that have been proposed for the description and analysis of such phenomena in creole formation, namely, Lefebvre’s (1998) Relexification model, and Myers-Scotton’s (2002) Abstract Level Structure model. He further argues that these models are compatible with the view of imposition, and shed some light on the mechanisms underlying this transfer type, and shows how they produce the kinds of contact phenomena found in creole formation, as well as in cases of language attrition. Further, he argues that these mechanisms are essentially psycholinguistic in nature, and can best be understood in the context of psycholinguistic models of bilingual speech production.
The second part entitled « Empirical Approaches, Applications and Developments », enriches Journal of language contact – THEMA 2 (2008) www. jlc-journal.org
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the debate with several case studies. Malcolm Ross, after having introduced the question of metatypy, illustrates it with a history of metatypy in the Bel languages, here used to reconstruct the history of certain Takia grammatical features in order to confirm or refute earlier inferences about their history. The investigation shows that, as expected, metatypy is a gradual process. It also confirms that the innovation of clausechaining was a normal piece of grammaticisation, but one that was triggered by speakers’ bilingualism in a clause-chaining language or languages. The investigation has yielded an unexpected spin-off by showing that metatypy was an ongoing process during the development of the Bel languages. Anthony P. Grant examines the effects of contact-induced language change on the nominal and verbal inflectional morphology of several Native American languages, most of which have also replaced large amounts of their basic vocabulary with loans from other languages. It shows that although there are few if any limitations on the kinds of concepts which may be expressed by borrowed items. Borrowing as a source of morphological renewal is an infrequently-employed process in these languages, and even those languages which have borrowed heavily have not always borrowed the same types of morphemes from other languages. Patrick McConvell takes up the debate about whether mixed languages arise from codeswitching. His paper presents one clear example of this kind of genesis, Gurindji Kriol, and other probable examples, from recent language contact in Australia between traditional Australian languages and English-based pidgins/creoles. He modifies here his original ‘Centre of Gravity’ hypothesis and outlines a research program aiming to detect where this kind of language-mixing forms part of the history of other languages by looking at the current pattern of composition of elements from different language sources. Carmen Silva-Corvalán discusses the contact situation between English and Spanish in the United States, a situation characterized by both maintenance of the minority language and shift to English. Of relevance to understanding the linguistic phenomena that develop in this situation of societal bilingualism is the fact that the minority language is constantly being revitalized by interaction with large groups of immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries. Her article identifies some of the linguistic changes that affect the minority language at different points in the proficiency continuum or different stages of attrition, and argues that in this particular contact situation convergence toward English is constrained by the structure of the minority language undergoing change. William J. Samarin deals with the question of Sango, which challenges allegations that the sound inventories of pidgins are small and that in language contact sound change often leads to loss or assimilation in phonemic distinctions. In fact, Sango has retained almost the whole phonological system of Ngbandi, on which it is based. And this is explained not by substratal influence but by similar systems of several West African and especially central Bantu languages spoken by the workers and soldiers who were brought to the Ubangi River basin by Belgian colonizers, beginning in 1887 and very soon after by the French, and who, with the indigenous population, very quickly created a new language that was soon appropriated by the Ngbandis, thereby preserving at least this part of their own language. For their part, Françoise Gadet and Mari C. Jones emphasize syntactic phonemena observed in situations of language contact in the French-speaking world, where French finds itself in (usually unfavorable) competition with English. Their conclusions draw on theories of linguistic contact and change, both with respect to French and, more broadly, the study of language. In a distributional-functional perspective close to Hopper's emergent grammar, Katja Ploog claims that change is an ongoing process that can be observed in everyday discourse. She argues using oral data from Ivory Coast, where the contact between French and Mande languages has Journal of language contact – THEMA 2 (2008) www. jlc-journal.org
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generated highly heterogeneous discursive traditions. Finally, Zygmunt Frajzyngier and Erin Shay propose to contribute to the methodology for determining whether a given characteristic of a language is a product of language contact or of language-internal grammaticalization. They have taken as a test problem a formal structure that is relatively rare across languages but that occurs in a few geographically proximate languages belonging to different families. The presence of a typologically rare phenomenon in neighboring but unrelated languages raises the question of whether the structure may be a product of cross-linguistic contact. Since every linguistic phenomenon must have been grammaticalized in some language at some point, they must consider first whether there are language-internal prerequisites for such grammaticalization. For each language of the study, they show that the split coding of person and number may represent a product of language-internal development. Hence, the presence of the phenomenon in a language that does not have the language-internal prerequisites can then be safely considered to be a product of language contact. The third part entitled « Frontier Research », is shorter and comprises only two texts. The first one is Nicholas J. Enfield’s for whom there is growing interest in approaching research on language contact and change through an epidemiological, population-based model which takes 'linguistic items' or their equivalent as a key unit of analysis. His paper explores a number of elements of such a model, with particular attention to a set of biases which may act as conduits or filters for the transmission of linguistic items in populations. These include a number of such biases introduced in recent models of cultural transmission: a threshold bias, a sociometric bias, a model bias, a conformity bias, and a frequency bias. A further bias is of particular relevance to language, but is argued to be equally important for models of cultural transmission in general. This is a context bias, which takes into account the kind of structural context which a given item or variant presupposes for its function. The presence or absence of a relevant structural context will determine the likelihood that the item will be transmitted, and if so to what degree of faithfulness. These biases may help toward characterizing an anatomy of cultural epidemiology which makes explicit the relation between individual cognition, social processes, and population-level structure. Finally, with the last text, and putting himself on the fringes of the question of language contact, Robert Nicolaï treats the emergence of ‘metaphorical modelings’ from a methodological and epistemological point of view because they show important changes in our perception of language dynamics, and because each time the export of a model is envisaged, a crucial question of knowing what exactly is modelised in the transfer is raised. This leads him to speculate on certain fundamental and necessary aspects in the elaboration of the linguistics and its dynamics (variability of languages, semiotization of forms), but also on the place of ‘actors’ who are both speakers and descriptors of languages in their communication process. From there, he proposes to redefine the anthropo-linguistic space in which language dynamics develop. Of course it is evident that certain aspects of the question of language contact are not dealt with here. However, the reflection undertaken, which will be continued and developed, enables underlining some major orientations in the field, and some constants are clear. Thus: The notion of ‘language contact’, a priori straightforward, is without doubt, illusory: it is not languages that are in contact but people who speak them. The notion of ‘language’ apprehended as a structure, as a functional communication tool and/or as symbolic representation, is no longer used without discussion, to refer to any entity whose unity and homogeneity are straightforward: heterogeneity, variability and the diversity of language and linguistic forms are taken into account. Journal of language contact – THEMA 2 (2008) www. jlc-journal.org
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Models of language evolution and those which take into account their dynamics are diversified: the multiplicity of relevant facets in the explication process is recognized and theorizations, even when they give priority to a particular relevant facet, do not necessarily exclude from the explication the dimensions which they do not maintain. These orientations and constants are present in the background of each of the contributions to this volume.
Robert Nicolaï & Bernard Comrie
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