Grammaticalization in Fanakalo: simplification, complexification, and acceleration

Linguistic change not only affects the lexicon and the phonology of words, it also operates on the grammar of a language. In this context, grammaticalization is concerned with the development of lexical items into markers of grammatical categories or, more generally, with the development of markers used for procedural cueing of abstract relationships out of linguistic items with concrete referential meaning. A well-known example is the English verb go in its function of a future marker, as in She is going to visit her friend. Phenomena like these are very frequent across the world’s languages and across many different domains of grammatical categories. In the last 50 years, research on grammaticalization has come up with a plethora of (a) generalizations, (b) models of how grammaticalization works, and (c) methodological refinements. On (a): Processes of grammaticalization develop gradually, step by step, and the sequence of the individual stages follows certain clines as they have been generalized from cross-linguistic comparison (unidirectionality). Even though there are counterexamples that go against the directionality of various clines, their number seems smaller than assumed in the late 1990s. On (b): Models or scenarios of grammaticalization integrate various factors. Depending on the theoretical background, grammaticalization and its results are motivated either by the competing motivations of economy vs. iconicity/explicitness in functional typology or by a change from movement to merger in the minimalist program. Pragmatic inference is of central importance for initiating processes of grammaticalization (and maybe also at later stages), and it activates mechanisms like reanalysis and analogy, whose status is controversial in the literature. Finally, grammaticalization does not only work within individual languages/varieties, it also operates across languages. In situations of contact, the existence of a certain grammatical category may induce grammaticalization in another language. On (c): Even though it is hard to measure degrees of grammaticalization in terms of absolute and exact figures, it is possible to determine relative degrees of grammaticalization in terms of the autonomy of linguistic signs. Moreover, more recent research has come up with criteria for distinguishing grammaticalization and lexicalization (defined as the loss of productivity, transparency, and/or compositionality of former productive, transparent, and compositional structures). In spite of these findings, there are still quite a number of questions that need further research. Two questions to be discussed address basic issues concerning the overall properties of grammaticalization. (1) What is the relation between constructions and grammaticalization? In the more traditional view, constructions are seen as the syntactic framework within which linguistic items are grammaticalized. In more recent approaches based on construction grammar, constructions are defined as combinations of form and meaning. Thus, grammaticalization can be seen in the light of constructionalization, i.e., the creation of new combinations of form and meaning. Even though constructionalization covers many apects of grammaticalization, it does not exhaustively cover the domain of grammaticalization. (2) Is grammaticalization cross-linguistically homogeneous, or is there a certain range of variation? There is evidence from East and mainland Southeast Asia that there is cross-linguistic variation to some extent.

This study considers the position of clitics in verbal phrases with infinitives and gerunds, in which the speaker can choose to place the clitic in pre- or post-verbal position. The analysis is based on seventy-two one-hour tape-recorded conversations with speakers from Houston and the state of Michoacán, México. General results indicate a process of grammaticalization that appears as a strong tendency to place the clitic in front of the verbal phrase. A more in-depth analysis offers evidence that shows the role played by the contact situation with English; some characteristics of the verbal phrases studied seem to be sensitive to the contact situation. Reflexive verb constructions show a clear reduction of clitic climbing in groups of bilingual speakers. Although there is a strong tendency toward clitic climbing in most of the verbal phrases examined, some resistance, varying by generation, is observed with auxiliaries like empezar/comenzar con, saber, tratar de and venir a + infinitive. On the other hand, all bilingual speakers, regardless of generation, seem to follow the same general tendency of monolingual Spanish speakers to prefer clitic climbing in verbal phrases with gerunds, with incremental differences in verbal phrases like ir a, deber, querer, tener que, acabar de, and volver a + infinitive.

Lengthening of the penultimate syllable in a word, phrase, or utterance is common across Bantu languages, especially in Eastern and Southern Bantu languages. Despite the prevalence of the general phenomenon, there is significant cross-linguistic diversity in how PUL is instantiated. The aim of this paper is to describe the PUL patterns and variation in isiNdebele, a Nguni language spoken in South Africa. IsiNdebele is closely related to Zulu and frequently spoken in situations of intense contact with Zulu, but its realisation of penultimate lengthening nevertheless shows important differences from what has been reported for Zulu and other Nguni languages. In addition, penultimate lengthening in isiNdebele shows significant internal variation, both across speakers and across utterances produced by the same speaker. This variation has implications for both phonological and syntactic analyses of this language: Many studies of phonological phrasing in other Nguni languages use penultimate length as the main phonetic cue for phrase boundaries, but a strict correlation between PUL and phrasing cannot be confirmed for isiNdebele. Lengthening also depends on factors such as speech rate, emphasis, and careful vs. casual speech.

This paper discusses a number of developments within Standard Average European, which prove that the universal properties of grammaticalization processes can be reconciled with the specificity of situations of language contact. The four changes examined in the article are the development of periphrastic ‘have’-perfects, the extension of the definite article area, the renewal of the relative pronoun paradigm and the development of reflexive markers towards passive and impersonal constructions. The selected case studies illustrate how language contact may play a role in the initial stage of a given grammaticalization process or may reinforce and accelerate grammaticalization. The paper also shows that canonical grammaticalization and contact-induced grammaticalization develop along similar lines and that contactinduced grammaticalization should be distinguished from cases of mere calquing or transfer of grammatical forms.

This special issue of the International Journal of Bilingualism represents an important contribution to the field of code-switching (CS) not only because it is a joint collaboration between scholars based at the University of Ghana and New York University, but also because it presents new CS data sets. The contributions in this exciting volume constitute a particularly welcome addition to the still growing but already extensive body of literature on CS, for various reasons. Firstly, it brings a new group of scholars into the discursive arena. Secondly, very interesting new data sets are made available, stepping in some cases outside the mould of non-European matrix language/ European embedded language, such as the papers on Kabiye and Logba interacting with Ewe. Thirdly, a broad range of methodological approaches is presented, with techniques ranging from media studies to fine-grained phonological analysis.The language pairs that we learn about in this volume are spoken in Togo (Kabiye-Ewe) in Ghana (Akan-English, Ewe-English, Logba-Ewe) and by Ghanaians in Italy (English-Akan). The structural and sociopragmatic accounts of these data, for the most part, confirm current explanatory models such as Myers-Scotton's (1993a, 2002) matrix language frame (MLF) model, Muysken's (2000) three-way typology of CS patterns involving alternation, congruent lexicalization and insertion, as well as Gumperz (1982:83) we-they codes and Auer's (1984, 1995) language negotia- tion sequences based on conversation-analytic exchange structures.The present commentary reflects on sociolinguistic, pragmatic and structural/psycholinguis- tic issues relevant to the West African context and the specific CS data analysed in this volume. There is wide recognition in the field that the social, historical, political and economic context of language contact is crucial for understanding the way CS gets used and hence the pragmatic, conversational and structural shape of the data. This consensus is expressed by Bullock and Toribio (2009, p. 14), who point out that there are three major strands in the study of CS: the structural, the psycholinguistic and the sociopragmatic 'although, in principle, a full account of CS cannot be achieved without the integration of findings from each of these strands ...'. Each explanatory paradigm (sociopragmatic, structural and psycholinguistic) responds to concrete research interests and each involves quite different epistemologies about what counts as the relevant research questions, but also one must take into account different ontological considera- tions regarding what counts as reliable data. In the case of this commentary, we seek to bring together ideas that will help to make some of the links between sociopragmatic and structural CS in West Africa.Given our separate areas of expertise, the three authors have decided to elaborate separate but interrelated sets of commentaries. Melissa Moyer begins with insights brought out in the papers about the sociolinguistic and sociopolitical context of CS in Ghana and Togo. Peter Auer focuses on aspects of pragmatics and conversational structure and, finally, Pieter Muysken comments more specifically on ideas regarding grammatical processing and language typology.Some sociolinguistic insightsA sociolinguistic account of CS in West Africa must start by taking into account the sociopolitical conditions of contact between European colonizers and the various majority and minority ethnic groups that have existed historically and that have shaped language contact and the CS pairs that are discussed in the present volume. Each one of the articles gives contextual information on the situation of language contact. Dorvlo, in his contribution, provides a rich background account of language contact as relevant to speakers of Logba, an endangered language from the Na branch of Ghana-Togo Mountain (GTM) languages. (The classification of the 14 GTM languages, formerly called the Togo Remnant languages, remains unresolved. …

Este trabajo propone que la situación de contacto entre el español y la lengua vasca ha activado (o acelerado) una innovación lingüística, en concreto, la ampliación de los valores de y así. El español europeo utiliza esta partícula con significado de imprecisión y con valor discursivo de atenuación del contenido proposicional. No obstante, y como resultado del contacto con la lengua vasca en la que es posible la expresión de contenidos de modalidad epistémica, los hablantes bilingües habrían trasladado parte de estos contenidos a la variedad de contacto, lo que habría ampliado tanto el significado (distancia respecto a lo enunciado), como el valor discursivo (atenuador de la fuerza ilocutiva de un enunciado) de esta partícula. Esta ampliación, junto con los procesos formales experimentados, constituye un ejemplo de gramaticalización inducida por contacto donde son fundamentales las motivaciones pragmáticas y conversacionales de los hablantes.

This article focuses on syntactic phonemena observed in situations of language contact in the French-speaking world, where French finds itself in (usually unfavorable) competition with English. A number of cases are examined where a superficial analysis might conceivably point to a change caused by transfer from English: more specifically, in the verb system (auxiliaries, the subjunctive), the use of clitic pronouns, adjective position (preposed or postposed), certain infinitival constructions, prepositions (including preposition stranding), the use of relative pronouns and que-deletion, the particle back and the marker comme. Our conclusions draw on theories of linguistic contact and change, both with respect to French and, more broadly, the study of language.

Icelanders were the subjects of Danish kings for more than five centuries. This article focuses on Icelandic-Danish language contact towards the end of this period, i.e. in the 19th century when Icelandic is assumed to have been heavily influenced by Danish. This assumption is, however, based primarily on metalinguistic evidence and random examples rather than on empirical research. The purpose of the present article is to question this, seeking to evaluate the impact of Danish on Icelandic vo-cabulary based on investigations of 19th century texts. In the spirit of historical socio-linguistics, we examine a variety of published and unpublished texts, and refer both to the external sociohistorical situation and language use as it appears in our texts.In the 19th century, the Danish kingdom was losing territories and changing from a multiethnic and plurilingual empire, into a national state with Danish as the national language. Together with the prevailing 19th century ideology of nationalism in Europe, the changes within the state promoted ideas of national independence for Iceland, and the Icelandic language became a central symbol of nationhood. At the same time, direct contact between Icelandic and Danish, formerly quite limited and mostly confined to a small group of high officials, increased. Travels between the two countries became easier and more frequent, a growing number of Danes sett led in Iceland (and vice versa), and bilingualism became more common among the general Icelandic public. The political struggle for national independence, as well as the growing presence of Danish in Iceland, is reflected in the language discourse of the 19th century, where the impact of Danish was a constant concern. It was seen as a serious threat to Icelandic, most prominent in the speech in Reykjavik, the fastest growing urban centre. This article presents the results of two investigations of lexical borrowings, based on recently compiled corpora of 19th century Icelandic texts: a corpus of printed newspapers and periodicals, and a corpus of unpublished and handwritten private lett ers. The first study included words in both corpora, that contained one of four borrowed affixes, an-, be-, -heit and -era, which were commonly featured in contemporary (negative) comments on foreign influence. The results show that such words were, in fact, rare in the texts, and that their number, relative to the total number of running words, decreased in the course of the century, especially in the newspapers. The second investigation was directed at recent borrowings (including one-word code-switches) in a subcorpus of newspapers from the last quarter of the 19th century. The results show a very moderate number of tokens relative to the total number of running words in the texts as a whole (0.37%). We do, however, see a clear increase between 1875 and 1900, as well as a higher proportion of lexical borrowings in the Reykjavik newspapers than in those published elsewhere. Furthermore, the words in question were particularly prominent in advertisements compared to the rest of the text. The main conclusion of the article is that both the contact situation and the amount and character of the borrowed words found in the texts, place 19th century Icelandic on step 1 of Thomason and Kaufman’s borrowing scale, and that the over-all results show much less influence from Danish than contemporary metalinguistic comments indicated.

Recent psycholinguistic studies have revealed an important distinction in narrative discourse between bounded and unbounded language use. Bounded language use is typical of Germanic languages other than English and involves the holistic presentation of situations, with clauses construed as self-contained units attaining a point of completion. Unbounded language use, in turn, groups events into larger complexes of roughly simultaneous events, each event of which is still open when the next one begins. This contrast between English and the other Germanic languages has been accounted for by the claim that English began its history as a bounded language, but shifted to unbounded following the decline, from the fifteenth century onwards, of the Verb-second (V2) constraint on word order. According to this hypothesis, the loss of V2 made possible the grammaticalization of the be progressive, a device that encourages unboundedness. The present article expands on this line of research and examines seven constructions which developed at around the same time and which together are taking English in the direction of unbounded construal; it is argued that the drift in English from a bounded to an unbounded system may have been instigated by the contact situation between Old English speakers and Old Norse speakers in the Danelaw area.

Foundations of hospitality performance measurement research: A co-citation approach

For good reasons, linguists are highly skeptical when it comes to predicting linguistic change. As has been argued in Heine (2003: 598–599), based on observations on some regularities of grammatical change made within the framework of grammaticalization theory, however, it seems possible to propose at least some probabilistic predictions on what is a possible grammatical change and what is not. In the present article it is argued that this also applies to grammatical change that takes place in situations of language contact. As more recent research has demonstrated (Heine & Kuteva 2003, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2010, Heine forthcoming), contact-induced grammatical change is essentially subject to the same principles of grammaticalization as grammatical change not induced by contact. The data analyzed in this article concern case marking in Slavic languages, more specifically expressions for comitative and instrumental participants.

Peruvian Amazonian Spanish (PAS) is a linguistic variety formed under intense, long-standing contact with Quechua, indigenous Western Amazonian languages and, to a lesser degree, Portuguese. PAS displays distinctive phonological, lexical, morphosyntactic and pragmatic characteristics which differentiate it from other Spanish dialects (Escobar, 1978; Ramírez, 2003; Marticorena, 2010). This article provides a synchronic account of the PAS expression ya vuelta, based mainly on the analysis of naturalistic oral data gathered in three different locations of the Loreto Region: Iquitos, Jeberos and Lagunas. We claim that ya vuelta is a discourse marker (DM), that is, a linguistic expression that operates beyond the sentence level and realizes discourse-pragmatic functions (Schiffrin, 1987, 2003; Fraser, 1988, 1990; Company, 2006; among others). Moreover, most of these functions fall under the umbrella of mirativity, a notion associated with the encoding of surprise, unpreparedness on the part of the speaker and similar states (DeLancey, 1997, 2001, 2012; Aikhenvald, 2012; Peterson, 2013). It has been suggested that the PAS expression ya vuelta arose in a situation of intense contact between Spanish and Quechua (Marticorena, 2010, p. 95). To our knowledge, the present article is the first work devoted to the study of a discourse marker in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish.

Grammatical replication has been described in this book as an essentially uniform process, being shaped by universal processes of grammaticalization. However, this description ignores the fact that this process is constrained by a number of additional factors generally characterizing situations of language contact. In the present chapter we will deal with these factors, and we will adopt a wider perspective with a view to defining the environment in which replication takes place and to pointing out constraints characterizing the process. To this end, we deal in section 6.1 with equivalence – a notion that is widely held to be a major outcome of contact-induced language change, and we will show that this notion is more complex than has hitherto been assumed. In section 6.2 we will discuss a wide range of factors that have been said to constrain or enhance replication, and section 6.3 will be concerned with the question of how the transfer of forms or form–meaning units interacts with replication, and what the role of written discourse is in this process. Another possible limit of grammatical replication is the subject of section 6.4, which is devoted to the question of how replication relates to situations of language obsolescence. Finally, the distinction between internal and external constraints will be looked into in section 6.5, where we will relate contact-related change to language change not affected by language contact. On equivalence Equivalence is a central notion in most works on language contact.

The present article aims to summarize and classify existing research entrepreneurs' well-being through a bibliometric literature review. Its main objectives are: to identify the different theoretical perspectives and research strands that characterize and define literature on entrepreneurs' well-being and highlight the connections between them; as well to look for emerging trends and gaps in its literature by comparing the most recent works with those that represent the field's core. The document is based on bibliometric data: it uses citation techniques to select, analyze, and interpret citation patterns within the literature on entrepreneurs' well-being. The paper identifies six main groups, as well as several specific research flows and common themes that represent academic publications on entrepreneurs' well-being. The research strands on the topic are grouped into six different theoretical perspectives grounded in entrepreneurship related to: culture, education, innovation, sustainable development and small business; psychological well-being; social entrepreneurship and economic development; women and employment; and self-employment; life satisfaction and economic growth, and business administration. Data from the most recent publications were used to verify whether original topics and themes are reflected in contemporary debate and in which fashion. Limitations related to search engines, such as missing keywords were accounted by utilizing three different database as well as expanding keyword number. From a practical perspective, this research is expected to contribute on theory construction, management decision making, and teaching. This study describes the growing development of the literature on entrepreneurs' well-being, and the underlying structure of the different streams of research therein.

This article discusses (verbal) relative clauses in the Bantu languages spoken in South Africa. The first part of the article offers a comparison of the relative clause formation strategies in Sotho, Tsonga, Nguni and Venda. An interesting difference between these language groups concerns the syntactic position and the agreement properties of the relative marker. Whereas the relative markers in Sotho, Tsonga and Venda are clause-initial elements, which express agreement with the head noun, the relative markers in the Nguni languages are relative concords, which are prefixed to the verb and agree with the subject of the relative clause. The second part of the article addresses this difference and shows that there is a historical relation between these two types of relative constructions. It is argued that earlier forms of Nguni employed relative markers similar to those used in present-day Sotho and Tsonga. In Nguni, these relative markers underwent a grammaticalisation process which turned them into relative concords. A detailed analysis of the syntactic conditions for, and the properties of, this grammaticalisation process leads to a hypothesis about the reasons why relative concords have developed in Nguni, but not (to the same extent) in Tsonga, Sotho and Venda.