Outcomes Of Language Contact Research Articles

What's in a grammar? Modeling dominance and optimization in contact

Muysken's article is a timely call for us to seek deeper regularities in the bewildering diversity of language contact outcomes. His model provocatively suggests that most such outcomes can be subsumed under four speaker optimization strategies. I consider two aspects of the proposal here: the formalization in Optimality Theory (OT) and the reduction of contact outcomes to four basic strategies.

Linguistic Archaeology, Kinship Terms, and Language Contact in Suriname

As a relatively young linguistic area, Suriname offers great possibilities for understanding the processes that produce complex outcomes of language contact. In this article, directionality, mechanisms, and relative chronology of contact-induced changes are reconstructed by examining synchronic variation and diachronic changes in the semantics of kinship terminology for a sample of Surinamese languages.

Modeling the outcome of language contact in the speech of German-Spanish and Catalan-Spanish bilingual children

AbstractThis article focuses on phonological aspects of bilingualism and includes two approaches: internal linguistic and sociolinguistic. The former approach is based on internal variables (markedness, frequency, complexity, uniformity), and the latter on external variables (age, school, family language, language of the peer-group). The article comprises two parts. First, we analyze spontaneous data produced by German-Spanish bilingual children and try to model the contact-language situation of that group characterized by family bilingualism and societal monolingualism. The external variables are relatively homogeneous for those children, as they receive Spanish from the mother and German from the father, and from the broad German-speaking community in Hamburg. These cases of individual bilingualism mainly receive the impact of internal variables, which can be weighed against one another. This leads to the following hierarchy of variables from those having more to less impact: frequency > markedness > uniformity > language of the environment. Second, we analyze and compare the elicited speech of Catalan-Spanish bilingual children in two districts of Barcelona, which differ in the degree of Spanish dominance. Here, the emphasis is on external factors. School and the peer-group seem to play the most important role, as they have more predictive power than the language spoken at home.

Inherited similarity and contact-induced change in Mayan Languages

Similarity has been cited, generally anecdotally, as a significant factor shaping the outcomes of language contact. A detailed investigation of long-term contact among more than a dozen related Lowland Mayan languages has yielded specific examples of contact-induced language changes that, I argue, were facilitated by the systematic similarities shared by these languages because of genetic relatedness. Three factors that seem to have been particularly relevant in the Mayan case are 1) the high degree of overlap in linguistic structure, which would have allowed significant interlingual conflation, the collapsing of language boundaries at points of similarity between the languages, 2) the paradigmatic interchangeability of particular elements of related languages without the need for adaptation or accommodation, which facilitated the borrowing of various kinds of linguistic material, particularly bound morphemes, that in other contexts have been found to be highly resistant to borrowing, and 3) contact-induced drift, parallel secondary developments in more than one language that were triggered by contact-induced innovations but subsequently proceeded along similar paths of change after contact because of the preexisting structural similarities that the languages shared as a result of their common inheritance. I argue that these processes of change are much less likely, if not impossible, in situations of contact between unrelated languages, and suggest specific ways in which contact between genetically related languages can be qualitatively different from contact between unrelated languages.

(Un)articulated definiteness. Nominal determination in Sorbian: Moving from an articleless language to a language with articles?

Abstract Slavonic languages in general do not use articles to indicate (in)definiteness. The development of an article in some of them is the result of language contact. In the case of Sorbian the influence of German led to the use of the demonstrative pronoun ‘this’ and the numeral ‘one’ to indicate definiteness and indefiniteness, respectively. Originally the German system was copied almost without changes, but eventually specific rules developed, subject to phonotactic constraints and restricting the use of the article mainly to intratextual and pragmatic definiteness. The use of the article depended on the kind of text and language (spoken language, Bible translation and original texts, translations from German). Grammatical purism managed to eliminate the use of the article in today’s written variants as well as in most official uses of spoken Sorbian almost completely. In colloquial language and in the dialects, however, the article is very much alive but its use differs considerably from German. There are also differences between Upper and Lower Sorbian, the latter being closer to German usage.

Creolization and admixture

Proponents of a ‘feature pool’ approach to creolization (e.g. Mufwene 2001, Aboh & Ansaldo 2006) have claimed that the emergence of the new grammar is driven by the syntax-discourse prominence, markedness, and frequency of available features, with typological similarity or dissimilarity of the languages involved playing a crucial role in the competition and selection process. This paper takes a closer look at the predictions of a feature pool-based approach to creolization and tests whether these predictions are borne out by the facts. Three case studies from the Surinamese creoles and Sri Lanka Malay show that the feature pool approach suffers from a number of conceptual, theoretical, and empirical problems. The typology alone of the languages involved in the contact is not a good predictor for the outcome of language contact. The feature pool approach neglects processing constraints: one can only select from what one can process. ‘Creolization’, as in the case of the emergence of the Surinamese Creoles, is not ‘exceptional’, but happens in contact situations in which second language acquisition plays a significant role. The processing restrictions inherent in second language acquisition play an important role in shaping the structural outcome. ’Admixture’, as in the case of Sri Lanka Malay, is not ‘exceptional’ either, but happens in different situations and shows different processes at work. And these processes allow structural outcomes that are very different from those found under the conditions of second language acquisition.

Another Frisianism in Coastal Dutch:Traam, Treem, Triem‘Crossbeam’

The dialect geography and etymology of Dutch, Frisian, and GermantrVm(e)‘crossbeam’ suggest that western Dutchtriemcontinues West Germanic+‑ǣ-, which underwent vowel raising to /i./ as in Frisian. Thus, Dutchtraambesidetriembelongs to an established group of Standard Dutch words showing /a./ next to /i./ from West Germanic+‑ǣ-, such asschraalvs.schriel. It is argued that the survival of words in /i./ in the coastal dialects of Dutch fits into recent theories that Standard Dutch is the result of language contact between medieval Frisian and Franconian.*

Introduction. The linguistic consequences of globalization: the Nordic laboratory

As is well-known from the literature on language contact (e.g. Weinreich 1953; Thomason and Kaufman 1988) the factors and forces that are in play in close and longstanding contact between (speakers of ) two languages are both linguistic and social in nature, and involve both quantitative and qualitative relationships. Indeed, the outcome of language contact is a question of numbers and frequencies in terms of use and users, of sameness vs. difference in terms of linguistic structure, of dominance vs. subordination in terms of socio-historical contexts, etc. The history of the Nordic communities is rich in illustrative examples of such relationships, with Denmark and Sweden as the stronger communities, opposing each other “in the middle” of the Nordic area, all while dominating “the periphery” — westwards in the case of Denmark and Danish with a long history in Norway, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland — eastwards in the case of Sweden and Swedish with a long history in Finland. And we may add the linguistic and socio-historical complexities that relate the Sami people in the far north to the southern majority populations of Norway, Sweden and Finland. Superposed on these intra-Nordic relationships, so to speak, “foreign” cultures and languages — most importantly Latin, German and French — have reached the Nordic area as a whole throughout its history, leaving a similar imprint, with variations, on its languages. The complex linguistic and socio-historical relationships hinted at here are among the most thoroughly studied and documented in the world (Bandle et al. 2002–2005). Against this background, it seems to us that the Nordic area makes up a well-suited “laboratory” for research into the contexts and consequences of today’s globalization and the general advance of English. This is a main consideration behind a large contrastive project which has been running since 2001 in seven Nordic communities, including (from west to east): Iceland, The Faroe Islands, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Swedish-speaking Finland, and Finnish-speaking Finland. (The Greenlandic and Sami AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR

Pronominal borrowing among the Maya

A central concern in the study of language contact phenomena is the question of what linguistic features are more or less likely to be borrowed, and why. Pronominal borrowing, at least the direct borrowing of the phonological forms, is often ranked among the least common outcomes of language contact. This paper presents an extended case study of contact-induced changes in the system of person markers in several Mayan languages over nearly two thousand years of intense linguistic contact. The contact phenomena discussed appear to include the direct borrowing of pronominal ‘matter’, as well as the diffusion of structural and semantic ‘patterns’ that have led to a high degree of convergence in the overall system of pronominal reference in these languages. Possible social and linguistic motivations for the unusual contact-induced changes are considered.

The role of language contact in semantic change:Serandestar– a response to Geeslin and Guijarro-Fuentes

The role of language contact in linguistic change remains a polemic issue in the field of contact linguistics. Many researchers (Weinreich, 1953; Lefebvre, 1985; Prince, 1988; Silva-Corvalán, 1994; King, 2000; Sankoff, 2002; Labov, 2007) believe that there are limits on the types of linguistic patterns that can be transmitted across languages, while others (Thomason and Kaufman, 1988, p. 14) deem that “any linguistic feature can be transferred from any language to any other language”. Regardless of the differences of opinion on this issue, there is widespread recognition that the social context, including such features as the size and characteristics of the bilingual groups, the attitudes toward the languages spoken, and the intensity and duration of language contact, play an important role in determining the linguistic outcomes of language contact.

Social and Linguistic Factors as Predictors of Contact-Induced Change

AbstractTwo claims made by Thomason & Kaufman (1988) have elicited 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 opposite directions in a language contact situation, the social factors will be the primary determinants of the linguistic outcome. Both claims have frequently been challenged in recent years, for instance by Gillian Sankoff, Ruth King, and Carol Myers-Scotton. To some extent the challenges are based on a misunderstanding of our arguments; most seriously, some critics argue that we dismiss linguistic predictors as entirely irrelevant to an analysis of contact-induced change. Since we discussed linguistic as well as social predictors of contactinduced change, it isn't true that, as King 2002 puts it, we claimed that 'linguistic factors… play no role' in determining the outcome of language contact (and Sankoff 2001 has a similar statement). In part, however, the objections to our position are based on genuine theoretical and/or empirical disagreements between Thomason & Kaufman and their critics. This paper explores these disagreements in an effort to arrive at a better understanding of the relative importance of social and linguistic predictors in language contact situations. My main conclusions are these: although critics have made impressive contributions toward specifying linguistic predictors, there is still no good reason to abandon the Thomason & Kaufman position (mainly because it was much less extreme than some readers have assumed); and 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.

French‐Algonquian interaction in Canada: A Michif case study

This paper discusses the language contact situation between Algonquian languages and French in Canada. Michif, a French‐Plains Cree mixed language, is used as a case study for linguistic results of language contact. The paper describes the phonological, morphological, and syntactic conflict sites between the grammars of Plains Cree and French, as an example of heritage language interactions with French in areas of similar language contact. The usefulness of such examination is two‐fold. First, the particular conflict sites should assist speech‐language pathologists in their speech and language assessment and intervention with Indigenous children in similar language contact situations. Secondly, the methodology followed should provide direction for future research in speech‐language pathology concerning this and other language contact situations.

Language contact in Amazonia, and: Dynamics of language contact: English and immigrant languages (review)

Reviewed by: Language contact in Amazonia by Alexandra Aikhenvald, and: Dynamics of language contact: English and immigrant languages by Michael Clyne Donald Winford Language contact in Amazonia. By Alexandra Aikhenvald. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. 398. ISBN 019925785X. $180 (Hb). Dynamics of language contact: English and immigrant languages. By Michael Clyne. (Cambridge approaches to language contact.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. 298. ISBN 0521786487. $34.99. The field of contact linguistics has grown tremendously within the last five decades, since Uriel Weinreich (1953) made the first attempt to classify different types of contact-induced change and the processes underlying them. But the study of language contact goes much further back in time, to late nineteenth-century studies of dialect contact and the formation of pidgins and creoles (Müller 1875, Paul 1886, Schmidt 1872, Schuchardt 1882). Other lines of research on language-contact phenomena included work on the dynamics of language maintenance and shift in immigrant and other multilingual communities, the linguistic and social characteristics of code-switching, and the nature of bilinguals’ linguistic competence and cognition. These studies laid the foundation for current investigations of a broad range of language-contact phenomena, spanning several subdisciplines, each of which has its own theoretical framework and has spawned a vast literature of its own. The field now embraces bilingualism, code-switching, pidgin and creole languages, bilingual mixed languages, language shift, and language attrition and death. The very diversity of the phenomena and of the frameworks that have been used to explain them has made it very difficult to integrate all approaches into a coherent and comprehensive model of contact-induced change. For the most part, the different fields of inquiry proceed more or less independently of one another. As Clyne notes, ‘language contact is a multidimensional, multidisciplinary field … involving interrelationships between the structural, linguistic, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic’ (1). Yet little progress has been made toward integrating all of these approaches. This led van Coetsem to observe: ‘Contact linguistics still lacks an adequate conceptual basis on which a synthesis can be built that is theoretically well-founded’ (2000:39). The components of such a unified framework include the accurate description and classification of contact-induced changes, the constraints and principles governing such changes, the role of the social context in determining the outcomes of language contact, the role of psycholinguistic factors, and so on. Moreover, there are practical problems involved in distinguishing changes due to contact from those due to internal causation, and the need to distinguish similarities that are due to genetic inheritance, chance, or parallel development. The two books that are the subject of this review provide ample testimony both to the diversity of contact phenomena and to the problem of incorporating such diversity into a coherent descriptive framework. Each, in its own way, offers insight into the more general principles and factors that shape the outcomes of language contact. I first present a brief overview of each book and the kinds of contact phenomena they deal with and then evaluate their contributions to the field of contact linguistics by examining a number of themes and issues that are central to the field. 1. Dynamics of language contact Michael Clyne’s book takes an in-depth look at the contact between various immigrant languages and English in Australia, exploring [End Page 401] ways in which mutual influence among them has led to various kinds of contact phenomena, including changes in the immigrant languages. The focus of this study is the linguistic behavior of plurilingual (bi- and trilingual) speakers, the patterns of code-switching and code mixture they display, and the varying degrees of convergence with English among the immigrant languages. These languages belong to various families, and include German and Dutch, Italian and Spanish, Hungarian and Croatian, and Chinese and Vietnamese. Looking at these languages allows C to document how varying degrees of typological distance between English and the other languages make for differences in the outcomes of the contact. The comparison of data from bilingual as well as trilingual speakers also provides insight into the different effects that knowledge of two as opposed to one language other than English can have on plurilingual behavior. The study...

Language Contact and Deliberate Change

AbstractThis paper explores the process of "negotiation", whereby speakers of two or more languages converge on a partially or entirely shared linguistic system. This process is surely unconscious in many or most instances, but sometimes speakers are aware of what they are doing as they "negotiate" the linguistic outcome of language contact. I provide evidence for the latter assertion, and discuss the difficulties inherent in any attempt to generalize about conscious vs. unconscious negotiation. I also contrast the process of negotiation with some other views of linguistic convergence. Finally, summarizing previous results, I argue that the existence of deliberate contact-induced (and other) linguistic change vitiates all efforts to achieve a deterministic predictive theory of contact-induced language change.

Een Model Voor Taalcontact

In a number of domains of language contact studies important progress has been made, including Creole studies, code switching and code mixing, second language acquisition, linguistic borrowing, and language areas. Less attention has been paid to the conceptual links between these fields. These links will be the focus of the present paper, which approaches this issue from the perspective of speaker optimization strategies. Four alternative strategies are proposed: optimize the structural coherence of the LI, optimize possible matching between LI and L2 patterns, optimize universal principles of language processing, optimize the structural coherence of the L2. It will be argued that these strategies can be invoked to explain outcomes of language contact, and that different outcomes correspond to different rankings of these strategies by bilingual speakers and the community they belong to.

Bimodaal Codewisselen

In this article, the authors combine the insights from two linguistic sub disciplines: language contact and sign language linguistics. After a short introduction about some possible outcomes of language contact the choice for code switching and an analysis along the lines of Myers-Scottons Matrix Language model is made. First, the characteristics of bimodal language contact are discussed, and then the dataset is presented: a bimodal corpus by a deaf mother and her hearing son Jonas at the ages of approximately 3;0 and 6;0. Analyses show that a large part of the utterances is code blended, this means simultaneously signed and spoken. Even after a closer reanalysis it turns out to be difficult in many instances to decide what the matrix language is, although in many instances it is NGT.

Contact-induced changes

Traditionally, contact-induced changes in languages have been classified into two broad categories: those due to ‘borrowing’ and those due to ‘interference’ by an L1 or other primary language on an L2 in the course of second language acquisition (SLA). Other terms used for ‘interference’ include ‘substratum influence’ and ‘transfer.’ Inconsistencies in the use of these terms pose a problem for the classification and analysis of the outcomes of contact-induced change. Moreover, labels like these, unfortunately, have been used to refer both to the outcomes of language contact and to the processes that lead to such results. This imprecision in the use of key terms poses serious problems for our understanding of what is actually involved in the two types of crosslinguistic influence. Moreover, it has led to inaccuracy in our assignment of changes to one or the other category. The aim of this paper is to reassess the conventional wisdom on the distinction between borrowing and ‘interference,’ and to clarify the vehicles of change as well as the outcomes characteristic of each. My approach is based on Van Coetsem's (1988) distinction between two transfer types – borrowing under RL agentivity, and imposition under SL agentivity, with their shared but differently implemented processes of imitation and adaptation. Crucially, this approach recognizes that the same agents may employ either kind of agentivity, and hence different transfer types, in the same contact situation. It is the failure to recognize this that has sometimes led to inaccuracy in accounts of the nature and origins of contact-induced changes, as well as to conflicting classifications of the outcomes of contact. The present paper proposes a more rigorous and consistent classification, based on the kinds of agentivity involved.

Contact-induced linguistic innovations on the continuum of language use: The case of French in Ontario

In this paper we present a methodological approach that can be used to determine the likelihood that innovations observed in a minority language are the result of language contact. We then use this methodological approach to frame a discussion of data concerning eight innovations that can be attributed to transfer from the majority language (English) to the French of Francophones residing in the province of Ontario in Canada. This discussion shows, notably, how systemic and extra-systemic factors play a role in the emergence of these innovations. We also demonstrate that there are interesting differences in the extent to which these innovations are used across speaker groups and communities, and we argue that such differences suggest that there are thresholds of language contact associated with the emergence, or lack thereof, of particular transfer-induced innovations.

Dame un hamburger plain con ketchup y papitas

English/Spanish contact in Puerto Rico.ONE OUTCOME of language contact is lexical borrowing. Borrowing in Puerto Rico (for political, economic, and social reasons) is evident in the influence English has had on Spanish, especially in lexical terms. This paper explores the impact of American English on the lexicon of Puerto Rican Spanish, specifically on vocabulary relating to food. Data were collected through participant observation in selected fast food restaurants from different regions in P.R. An analysis of the corpus provides the basis for five categories useful in understanding the influence of English on Spanish in this domain. The study indicates that English borrowings have had a tremendous influence on the Puerto Rican lexicon, and predicts that, even though Spanish will continue to be the dominant Puerto Rican language, it will continue to change under the influence of English.

Spanish/English Speech Practices: Bringing Chaos to Order

This paper presents a linguistic analysis of Spanish-English bilingual speech for scholars and practitioners of bilingualism. More specifically, the study surveys several outcomes of language contact, among these, inter-lingual transference, codeswitching, and convergence, as evidenced in the speech practices of heritage Spanish speakers in the United States. The emergent assessment is linguistically informed, thereby illuminating our understanding of bilingual speech forms, and encourages perspectives and pedagogies that validate bilingual speech practices.