Contact Varieties Research Articles

Lusophone, Galician, and Hispanic Linguistics: Bridging Frames and Traditions ed. by Gabriel Rei-Doval, and Fernando Tejedo-Herrero

Reviewed by: Lusophone, Galician, and Hispanic Linguistics: Bridging Frames and Traditions ed. by Gabriel Rei-Doval, and Fernando Tejedo-Herrero André Zampaulo Rei-Doval, Gabriel, and Fernando Tejedo-Herrero, editors. Lusophone, Galician, and Hispanic Linguistics: Bridging Frames and Traditions. Routledge, 2019. Pp. 282. ISBN 978-1-138-22369-1. Based on the premise that 21st-century linguistics is inherently an interdisciplinary field and, as such, aims at bringing together contributions from both scientific and humanistic traditions, Lusophone, Galician, and Hispanic Linguistics: Bridging Frames and Traditions represents a [End Page 636] carefully edited collection of fourteen articles cohesively organized into three sections, namely, historiography and epistemology, linguistic analyses, and language and society, all of which are dedicated to issues in the study of Portuguese, Galician, and Spanish. By providing readers with new approaches and data, the editors and the nineteen prominent authors who pen the individual chapters not only offer depth and breadth in their contributions, but also promote a collaborative dialogue among the different linguistic traditions of these three Ibero-Romance languages. In the introduction, the editors provide an overview of how and why the methods and aims of the linguistic study of Portuguese, Galician, and Spanish have differed through the years and, thus, appropriately contextualize the rationale for the interdisciplinary character of the volume. The first section is dedicated to historiographical and epistemological issues, as well as to the ideologies behind the emergence of standard varieties and their presence in different linguistic domains. Francisco Moreno-Fernández provides the first essay, "Hispanic Linguistics: Epistemological Labels, Contents, and Borders," which explores the trends and shifts in the understanding and linguistic use of such labels as hispánico and lusófono. Next, Dante Lucchesi's "Sociolinguistic History of Brazil" offers an account of the origins of Brazilian Portuguese as a contact variety, its reflection on Brazilian society, and the linguistic polarization that emerged vis-à-vis European Portuguese. The third, fourth, and fifth chapters all highlight issues in Galician linguistics. While translation to and from Galician and Portuguese is the focus of Henrique Monteagudo's "Galician and the Portuguese-speaking World from the Perspective of Translation," the standardization process of Galician and the shaping of its linguistic tradition take center stage, respectively, in Ernesto González-Seoane and Gabriel Rei-Doval's "Language Standardization and Purism: A Historiographical Approach to Galician Grammar and Lexicography in the 19th Century" and Rosario Álvarez's "Galician Linguistics: Between Hispanic Philological Tradition and Visibility in the Luso-Brazilian Sphere." Both of these chapters offer detailed and much-needed syntheses of how scholarship on Galician has evolved through the years as related to its Hispanic and Lusophone counterparts. The five articles featured in the second section of the book present original analyses of specific issues related to Spanish and Portuguese. First, Mary Johnson and Scott Schwenter's "NEG-NADA: Discourse-pragmatic Licensing of Non-canonical Negation in Two Related Languages" illustrates pragmatically driven differences found in the use of nada to express negation in Brazilian Portuguese and Argentinian Spanish. While variation in speakers' interpretations of semantic extensions through metaphors receives a thorough explanation in Ana M. Anderson's "Wheat and Pimples: Toward a Prototypical, Individualized Approach to Understanding Metaphor," morphological change is expertly illustrated in Jonah Conner's analysis of three Greek prefixes in his essay "Debonding of Three Hellenisms in Spanish: Macro-, mega-, and (p)seudo-." The two remaining chapters in this section are also concerned with matters of language change and bring forth not only new data, but also original approaches. Andrés Enrique-Arias' "Testing Contact-induced Change in the Spanish of Mallorca: Insights from a Historical Perspective" focuses on three variables, namely, the use of the preposition en to indicate movement, the preference for synthetic future forms over periphrastic ones, and the use of the verb pedir with the value of preguntar. This paper adds to a growing number of studies demonstrating that language contact does not necessarily lead to change and that many present-day linguistic features actually result from the retention of historical phenomena. Finally, the diverging evolutionary pathways of Latin sequences formed by nasal consonant + unstressed vowel + /r/ are accounted for and illustrated under the precepts of grammaticalization in Kenneth...

Can you tell by their English if they can speak Welsh? Accent perception in a language contact situation

Aims: The purpose of this research was to gain a better understanding of accent perception in language contact situations in which monolingual speakers of a contact variety and bilinguals live in the same community. Design: We investigated the English accents of monolinguals and bilinguals from the same area in South-West Wales, and listeners’ perceptions thereof, in three inter-related studies. Data: In Study 1, an accent perception experiment, participants from four different listener groups were asked to differentiate English monolinguals and Welsh–English bilinguals on the basis of short English speech samples. In Study 2, the same participants’ views about differences between the accentual features of monolinguals and bilinguals were examined in individual structured interviews. Finally, in Study 3, the speech samples from the accent perception experiment were analysed phonetically based on the accentual features mentioned in Study 2. Findings: Study 1 revealed that monolinguals and bilinguals can be identified above chance based on their English accent, but performance was unexceptional. Identification was better with greater accent familiarity, but unrelated to the listener’s ability to speak Welsh. Study 2 revealed the specific segmental and suprasegmental features that the listeners considered indicative of monolingual and bilingual speakers’ English accents, while Study 3 showed that only some of the listeners’ views are consistent with the production data from Study 1. Originality: This paper is the first to examine whether monolinguals and bilinguals from a bilingual area with historical language contact can be identified on the basis of their majority language accent, and on what grounds these identifications are made. Implications: This research shows that settings in which minority-language features originate from both historical language contact and individual bilingualism yield subtle accentual differences in the majority language between monolinguals and bilinguals to which even listeners from the same accent background may not be responsive.

Grammatical features of a moribund coalminers’ language in a Belgian cité

AbstractThis article investigates grammatical features ofCité Duits, a moribund in-group coalminers’ language spoken in the town of Eisden in Belgian Limburg. Based on audio data from eight multilingual speakers collected through a method of sociolinguistic interviews in 2015, I show that certain features are a fusion of Belgian Dutch, German and the Maaslands dialect spoken in this area, in addition to ‘well-known’ and ‘new’ features. Since grammatical properties of this contact variety have hardly been researched yet, this contribution aims at filling this gap by providing a first analysis of selected morphosyntactic features including negation, bare NPs, non-inverted V3s and participle formation. Building on Aboh’s hybridity approach to the emergence of grammar (2017), I suggest that Cité Duits displays a recombination of linguistic features that have become part of a stable system over the decades. The basic idea is that speakers are capable of weaving together abstract properties of different varieties present in the input. Research on this mining language is therefore an extraordinary opportunity to investigate language and dialect contact, largely because of its recent emergence and direct information about the first generation of speakers and their social ties.

Katanga Swahili and Heerlen Dutch: A sociohistorical and linguistic comparison of contact varieties in mining regions

AbstractThis article compares sociolinguistic and structural outcomes of language contact processes in two mining areas on two different continents, namely the Katanga region in the southeast of what is now the DR Congo, Africa and Heerlen as centre of the former Eastern Mine District in the southeastern province of Limburg in the Netherlands, Europe. Several similarities between these two regions make this comparison interesting. Both in Katanga and Heerlen, the natural copper and coal resources were located in border regions that were peripheral to central seats of government. In both regions, the exploitation of these resources, the growth of mining industries and rapid urbanization, began in the same period, the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Despite being located on different continents – Africa and Europe – similar social conditions of language contact were responsible for the genesis of the language varieties underground and above ground. The language contact situations in Limburg and Katanga both resulted in structural innovation of Dutch and Swahili respectively. The most interesting innovation we identify in both cases can be characterized as the regularization of grammatical properties, and the expansion of aspect marking.

On the relevance of voice quality in contact varieties

AbstractThis paper focuses on the role of voice quality variation in the system of a contact language, Afro-Yungueño Spanish, a restructured variety of Spanish spoken in the Bolivian Yungas valleys. Based on case studies of naturally occurring conversation between multiple speakers, we show that certain non-modal phonation types, in this case falsetto and breathy voice, are used to index expressiveness, intensification, or emphasis. We argue that these practices have discursive meaning that could otherwise also be encoded by means of grammatical and lexical resources, and that they are an integral part of the linguistic system of this variety. We claim that these practices may have resulted from the specific socio-historical context in which this variety evolved. This suggests that voice quality and ecological factors should not be underestimated in order to reach a more complete picture of how meaning is conveyed in apparently simplified contact languages.

Pragmatic Mood Variation in Bilingual and Monolingual Yucatec Spanish

While linguists (e.g. Michnowicz 2009, 2012; Solomon 1996, 1999; Klee 2009) have described some of the unique features of Yucatec Spanish related to the lexicon , the phonetic system, and syntactic structure, but no work has focused on pragmatics in this variety. The current study utilizes semantic/pragmatic interviews to investigate four cases of pragmatic mood alternation: Suspended Assertion, Reportative Distance, Individualized Reference, and Reactional Assertions. The results examined suggest important differences between monolingual and bilingual speaker reaction to pragmatic triggers. The bilingual Yucatec Maya/Spanish speakers’ perception of pragmatic change in mood varies between the four groups of pragmatic effects; the bilingual speakers were sensitive to Reactional Assertions and Reportative Distance but not sensitive to changes in Suspended Assertion or Individualized Reference. This demonstrates a difference in pragmatic sensitivity to mood selection between bilingual and monolingual speakers of this contact variety. Specifically, bilingual speakers select mood that patterns with monolingual speakers when it is syntactically motivated, but their mood selection differs in areas where this selection pragmatically motivated.

This is not the Case of the Indirect Object: Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Factors in Double Object Marking Constructions in a Contact Variety of Spanish from Eastern North Carolina

This article presents the results of a sociolinguistic study focusing on the expression of double object marking constructions (DbOM) in the contact variety of Spanish spoken in Pitt County, North Carolina. For the purposes of this article, DbOM constructions are defined as those utterances in which an accusative or dative clitic co-occurs with a coreferential overt nominal phrase. The data resulting from study participant interviews were analyzed to contrast the availability and variation of DbOM constructions with respect to sociolinguistic and linguistic factors. Confirming the initial hypothesis stemming from the absence of any type of argument doubling in English, the study’s results reveal that extent of daily English use in Pitt County is a significant factor in the expression of DbOM constructions. Moreover, and in agreement with the third proposed hypothesis, the case assigned to the doubled argument as well as the type of predicate, rather than the contrast between direct and indirect objects, are significant factors in the type of object doubling observed.

Valency and Transitivity in a Contact Variety: The Evidence from Cameroon Pidgin English

We explore valency and transitivity patterns in Cameroon Pidgin English (cpe) from a language contact perspective, with particular focus on (a) lexical and (b) constructional phenomena. With respect to (a), many verbs of English origin surface in cpe with additional senses and valency properties to those they display in the lexifier, illustrating the drive towards polysemy in a language with a relatively small lexicon. We also describe category change, whereby English non-verbal expressions (typically adjectives) emerge as verbs in cpe. In terms of (b), verbs undergo valency changes as a consequence of participation in productive serial verb constructions. These constructions are built around a small set of high-frequency verbs, some of which also occur in the light verb construction, which represents another strategy for the creation of complex predicates. We review the evidence for constructional substrate influence. The data under discussion are drawn from two small corpora of spoken cpe.

Planning Improves Vocal Fluency and the Appearance of Concern When Communicating Emotional Support

Emotional support is often conveyed to people with cancer; however, not all support messages are effective, leading some potential supporters to fear appearing incompetent when communicating support. Additionally, nonverbal behaviors, such as vocal fluency, pitch variety, eye contact, and conveying concern, have previously been associated with support recipients’ outcomes and perceptions of speaker competence. This experiment determines whether these nonverbal behaviors can be increased through message planning. Participants were randomly assigned to either a planning condition or a distraction task condition before recording emotional support messages for a friend hypothetically diagnosed with cancer. Results showed that planners spoke with significantly more vocal fluency and conveyed significantly more nonverbal concern than nonplanners. Planners also used more eye contact and pitch variety than nonplanners, but these differences were not statistically significant. Results suggest that planning may improve some nonverbal aspects of communicating support, which may in turn improve perceptions of supporters’ competence.

Settler colonialism speaks

AbstractIn this article I explore a particular set of contact varieties that emerged in Namibia, a former German colony. Historical evidence comes from the genre of autobiographic narratives that were written by German settler women. These texts provide – ideologically filtered – descriptions of domestic life in the colony and contain observations about everyday communication practices. In interpreting the data I draw on the idea of ‘jargon’ as developed within creolistics as well as onChabani Manganyi’s (1970)comments on the ‘master-servant communication complex’, and BeatrizLorente’s (2017)work on ‘scripts of servitude’. I suggest that to interpret the historical record is a complex hermeneutic endeavour: on the one hand, the examples given are likely to tell us ‘something’ about communication in the colony; on the other hand, the very description of communicative interactions is rooted in what I call a ‘script of supremacy’, which is quite unlike the ‘atonement politics’ (McIntosh 2014) of postcolonial language learning.

Alternations in contact and non-contact varieties

AbstractThe Multifactorial Prediction and Deviation Analysis (MuPDAR) method (Gries & Deshors 2014) represents an influential methodological advance in studying variation in contexts where linguistic choices in a “peripheral” variety (learner language, New Englishes) are studied in relation to the “central” variety. In this article we demonstrate how the method may be extended to study how varieties produced in settings of language contact (including translation) differ from non-contact varieties, particularly with respect to the degree of lexicogrammatical explicitness. We use the method to determine how (dis)similar the factors governingthat-omission are in two different types of contact varieties, namely South African translated (trans-SAE) and South African non-translated English (SAE), in relation to British (GBE) English. The results show that the choices made in the contact varieties can be predicted to a reasonable extent, although South African translators and South African non-translators have a higher and lower inclination respectively to use explicitthatcompared to GBE non-translators. Based on the findings, we re-evaluate the explanations proposed for the increased explicitness of translated language through the frame of language contact, outlining the advantages of multifactorial methods over the frequency-based methods favoured in earlier studies.

The role of educational factors in the development of lexical splits

AbstractWhile variationist literature on sound change has mostly focused on chain shifts and mergers, much less is written about splits (Labov, 1994,2010). Previous literature shows that the acquisition of splits is unlikely unless motivated by social factors (Labov, 1994). The current study presents an apparent time analysis on the development of two phonemic splits, the initial /s/-/ʂ/ contrast and the initial /ɻ/-/l/ contrast, in Xiamen Mandarin, a contact variety ofPutonghua, the official language in China. Statistical results showed similar patterns for both variables: younger speakers and female speakers are leading the change; the distinction between two phonemes are more distinct in wordlist than in the sociolinguistic interview. By examining the sociolinguistic situation in Xiamen, the paper discusses two potential factors that have led to these sound changes: the regional campaign for Putonghua and the emphasis ofPinyin, a phonetically-based orthography, in the education system.

The challenges and benefits of annotating oral bilingual corpora

AbstractThis article describes efforts to collect, process, and automatically annotate a corpus of Spanish as spoken in Texas. It elaborates the protocols for the development of the corpus and the procedures for automatic annotation, illustrating the common pitfalls to language identification in bilingual corpora and potential methods for circumventing them. The benefits of a comparative corpus approach to contact varieties is illustrated by a case study of a putative verbal calque from the Spanish in Texas data. It is demonstrated that the relative frequency of the verb is much higher than in its source Mexican variety and that the verb selects different complements in Texas than it does in other varieties. The article concludes with a discussion of how computational tools might be fruitfully exploited to resolve long-standing debates about language variation in contact settings.

Prosodic rhythm, cultural background, and interaction in adolescent urban vernaculars in Paris: case studies and comparisons

ABSTRACTThis article presents the results of a corpus study of prosodic rhythm in the urban vernaculars of 24 female and male adolescents featured in the MPF corpus (Gardner-Chloros et al., 2014). Using canonical rhythm metrics, among them the normalized Pairwise Variability Index (nPVI), we show that there is no clear effect of gender and only a small effect of cultural background on the variability of adjacent vocalic and consonantal duration intervals, typically correlated with more or less syllable-timed rhythm. However, female and male teens with multicultural background who clearly dominated their conversational exchanges with their peers and also used multiple phonetic features attributed to adolescent urban-vernaculars in French tended to show more variability in interval durations, pointing to more stress-timed rhythm. We discuss these findings in comparison with other urban contact varieties in Europe and North America. We speculate that rather than the leveling of phonological contrasts, as in London English, or societal pressures to conform to monolingual norms, as in French spoken in minority contexts in Ontario, Canada, rhythm-type differences in the present corpus are tied to speakers’ allophonic repertoires and best thought of as elements of interactional styles.

Register variation in written contact varieties of English

AbstractPrevious research suggests there are register differences between native and non-native varieties of English, as well as translated English. This article reports on a multidimensional (MD) analysis of register variation in the published written registers of 16 varieties of English, and tests expectations for register variation in contact varieties evident from existing research. The study finds that the effects ofvarietyandregisterare largely independent of each other, indicating that overall, registers pattern in similar ways across varieties.registeris the strongest factor accounting for variance in the data, butvarietyalso contributes significantly to variation. Non-native varieties before phase four in the Dynamic Model (Schneider 2007) and translations draw more extensively on markers of formality than non-native varieties at phase four and native varieties. Contact varieties display fewer involvement features than native varieties. Persuasive strategies and reported speech are variable across varieties, suggesting local stylistic and cultural differences.

Singaporean internet chit chat compared to informal spoken language*

AbstractThis paper compares data from a Singaporean chit chat forum to informal spoken data. We first perform a qualitative analysis of text samples in a framework of indexicality. Then we present quantitative findings for two (sets of) features each of the contact variety Singlish (particles, thekena-passive) and spoken English in general (discourse markers, contractions). For the former some similarities are observed but we also find that the forum contributors tend to be creative and innovative in their choice of particles. In this connection we argue that they index specific subgroup identities and further point out that Singlish is a rather flexible set of resources. Our findings differ from those of previous research on Jamaican Creole as used in an internet forum, thus showing that the use of contact varieties in computer-mediated communication can take different forms. The general features of spoken English are used comparatively less in the forum data, indicating that using Singlish features in writing is not tantamount to writing down spoken language. Moreover, we draw attention to features of computer-mediated communication in in the chit chat forum data. Finally we discuss implications in terms of the Dynamic Model of the evolution of Postcolonial Englishes (Schneider 2007).

Dialect Contact and the Acadian French Subjunctive: A Cross-Varietal Study

This study investigates mood choice for five Acadian French communities in Atlantic Canada which have intertwined settlement histories but which differ in terms of type and degree of dialect contact. The two communities with least contact with supralocal French preserve the highly salient imperfect subjunctive, moribund or absent from most other present-day spoken French varieties. While four communities exhibit high selection rates for the present subjunctive, in line with variationist analyses of other French varieties, one community has surprisingly low rates of such usage, along with absence of the imperfect subjunctive. This dichotomy is explained by the local prestige of the smaller of two founder groups for the community, settlers from Haute-Bretagne, France, a dialect area for which the historical record reveals low levels of subjunctive forms. The results highlight the importance not only of demographic factors but also of local identity construction in the formation of new contact varieties.

Language contact in the Philippines

Abstract This article narrates the sociohistory of the Philippines through the lens of a Sinitic minority group – the Chinese Filipinos. It provides a systematic account of the history, language policies, and educational policies in six major eras, beginning from the precolonial period until the Fifth Republic (960 – present). Concurrently, it presents a diachronic narrative on the different linguistic varieties utilized by the ethnic minority, such as English, Hokkien, Tagalog, and Philippine Hybrid Hokkien (PHH). Following an exposition on how these varieties were introduced to the ecology is a discussion focused on contact that highlights potential theories as to how Philippine contact varieties like PHH emerged. How this account contributes to the overall language ecology forms the conclusion. Overall, this article delineates the socio-historical sources that intrinsically play a significant role in the (re)description of Philippine contact varieties. In its breadth, this article goes beyond providing second-hand information, and presents ideas that can be crucial for understanding how Philippine contact languages work.

Reo Rapa: A Polynesian Contact Language

Old Rapa, the indigenous Eastern Polynesian language of the island of Rapa Iti, is no longer spoken regularly in any cultural domains and has been replaced in most institutional domains by Tahitian. The remaining speakers are elders who maintain it only through linguistic memory, where elements of the language are remembered and can be elicited but they are not actively used in regular conversation. Reo Rapa, a contact language that fuses Tahitian and Old Rapa, which has developed from the prolonged and dominant influence of the Tahitian language in Rapa Iti since the mid nineteenth century, has replaced the indigenous Old Rapa language at home and between most people in regular social interaction. This article analyzes Reo Rapa through an examination of its genesis and its structure. This article furthermore defines Reo Rapa as a unique contact variety, a shift-break language: a language that resulted from stalled shift due to a collective anti-convergence sentiment in the speech community. This article further discusses a variety of Reo Rapa speech, New Rapa, which presents important questions for the natural-ness of language change and the visibility of actuation.

Future directions in the field: A look at Afro-Hispanic prosody

This paper provides an analysis of Chocó Spanish (CS) neutral declarative intonation. Results show that this Afro-Colombian dialect, in line with other black vernaculars spoken in Latin America and other cases of Spanish in contact, presents a reduced inventory of pitch accents when compared to other varieties of Spanish. Specifically, L+H* (i.e., peak alignment within the stressed syllable) predominates in both prenuclear and nuclear phrase positions, which deviates quite significantly from common Spanish trends, where there is often a distinction between nuclear L+H*/L* and prenuclear L+>H* (i.e., peak displacement to a post-tonic syllable). Conversely, at the intermediate and intonational phrase levels (ip and IP, respectively), CS appears to reflect other native (non-contact) varieties of Spanish, showing H- ip boundaries to indicate the continuation of a thought and L% IP boundaries to signal the conclusion of an idea. Our findings are further compared with results from other contact varieties to show that certain aspects of CS intonation may be conceived as the byproduct of the transmission of second language (L2) intonational features to following generations of first language (L1) speakers.