Lexical Retention in Contact Grammaticalisation: Already In Southeast Asian Englishes

Abstract

Amongst the problems of contact grammaticalisation research in past studies has been, first, the problem of searching for diachronic evidence in relatively ‘new’ language situations, something which was advocated by Bruyn (2009), amongst others as essential to contact grammaticalisation research. Because of the absence of stage-by-stage diachronic evidence for contact grammaticalisation, many cases of ordinary contact-induced grammaticalisation may at first appear as simply calques (polysemy-copying in Heine & Kuteva 2005). The present study reveals the presence of lexical persistence in the age-graded distribution of the perfective marker already in Singaporean and Malaysian English, and demonstrates that even ordinary contact-induced grammaticalisation may be gradual if it is mediated by constraints from the lexifier source material. The study also questions the hypothesis of Total Systemic Transfer of the Chinese perfective aspectual system in Singapore English (Bao, 2001; 2005; 2015), and suggests an extended function for the Lexifier Filter in contact.