The role of ambiguity in second language change: the case of Mozambican African Portuguese

Abstract

In this article, my point of departure is that language change is driven by acquisition, and I argue that the triggers for establishing the properties of language-specific grammars differ according to whether first language (L1) or second language (L2) acquisition is involved. The reason for this is that in L2 acquisition evidence about the target grammar may be ambiguous in ways which do not occur in L1 acquisition. To illustrate the argument, I present two case studies of Mozambican African Portuguese, a nonnative variety of Portuguese acquired during childhood by L1 speakers of Bantu languages. These case studies show that strings generated by the grammar of European Portuguese may trigger ‘wrong/new’ parameter values which, although nonexistent in the original grammatical system, are perfectly legitimate from the point of view of the speakers’ L1 grammars. In both cases, although the new parameter settings (NPSs) are not convergent with the target grammar, resetting is blocked because the new parameter values successfully analyse the input. The nonresetting of the ‘wrong/new’ parameter values in the direction of the target European norm can be attributed to the social context of language acquisition, where the original European model is considerably diluted, and the surface effects they set off appear to be denser since the L2 speakers are in the majority.