Morphology and Contact-Induced Language Change (original) (raw)
Related papers
The present volume consists of twelve chapters, along with an introduction by the editors, and its general focus is the relationship between language contact and language change in morphological and syntactic constructions. Its orientation is broadly functional-typological rather than formal, though, on the whole, specific theoretical stances are backgrounded in favor of an emphasis on presentation of the descriptive facts. While the chapters are not of even quality, the collection would seem to a represent a good snapshot of the current state of functionally-oriented work in this area.
Case studies of contact-induced morphological change in Germanic
"Most research on language contact is limited to phonology and syntax (Schrijver forthc.), whereas its effects on morphology have been neglected by most scholars. However, some studies on language contact (Weinreich 1953, Thomason/Kaufman 1988, Heine/Kuteva 2005, Gardani 2008) have emphasized that it did affect the domain of morphology as well. I will present two case studies of contact-induced morphological change in the Germanic (Gmc.) languages to demonstrate both the explanatory power and problems of contact-induced explanations. One of the most debated problems of historical English studies is the rise of the 3rd sg s-ending in the English verb. It can be traced back to Old English, more specifically to the Northumbrian ending as, es. This ending stands in contradiction to what is usually reconstructed and expected in a Gmc. language in the 3rd person sg, i.e. a dental ending. As will be shown, the s-ending has been analogically transferred from the 2nd sg-ending of the Northumbrian verb on the model of Old Norse, where the 2nd and 3rd sg endings had the same form. The second case study is concerned with the reduction of the PIE verbal tense/aspect system to a simple non-past/past opposition in Proto-Gmc. In PIE, there was a complex tense/aspect-system, including different categories like aorist, perfect, present. In Proto-Gmc. however, only two tenses are left and aspect has completely disappeared. Traditional approaches have posited internal language change as the force behind these changes, whereas alternative hypotheses have proposed external influence, i.e. language contact. Thus, the Gmc. verbal system is characterized by diachronic processes that are often observed in language contact situations, specifically in situations of second language acquisition (Thomason/Kaufman 1988: 74-75; van Coetsem 2000: 182; Mailhammer 2007: 197). However, it is unlikely, both on linguistic and archaeological grounds, that the language that influenced Gmc. was Punic (Mailhammer 2010; Vennemann 1998 and elsewhere). It is much more likely that Germanic was influenced by Baltic-Finnic languages, which belong to a language family with a simple two-tense system. References: van Coetsem, Frans. 2000. A General and Unified Theory of the Transmission Process in Language Contact. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter. Gardani, Francesco. 2008. Borrowing of inflectional morphemes in language contact, Wien: Lange. Heine, Bernd & Kuteva, Tania. 2005. Language Contact and Grammatical Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mailhammer, Robert. 2007. The Germanic Strong Verbs. Foundations and Development of a new System [Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs 183]. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Mailhammer, Robert. 2010. Die etymologische Forschung und Lehre auf dem Gebiet des Germanischen. Studia Etymologica Cracoviensia 15, 37-65. Schrijver, Peter. forthcoming. Language Contact and the Origin of Europe's Languages. Routledge Chapman & Hall. Thomason, Sarah Grey & Kaufman, Terrence. 1988. Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weinreich, Uriel. 1953. Languages in Contact, 6th. edition [Reprint]. The Hague/Paris: Mouton. Vennemann, Theo. 1998. Germania Semitica: +plōg/+pleg-, +furh-/+farh-, +folk/+flokk, +felh-/+folg. Deutsche Grammatik – Thema in Variationen: Festschrift für Hans-Werner-Eroms zum 60. Geburtstag. Donhauser, Karin & Eichinger, Ludwig M. (eds.), 245–261."
Contact-induced grammatical change: Towards an explicit account
Diachronica, 2012
Language contact plays a key part among the factors leading to change in grammars, and yet the study of syntactic change, especially in the generative or innatist tradition, has tended to neglect the role of contact in this process. At the same time, work on contact-induced change remains largely descriptive, with theoretical discussion restricted mostly to the putative limits on borrowing. This article aims at moving beyond these restrictions by outlining a psycholinguistically-based account of some of the ways in which contact leads to change. This account takes Van Coetsem's (1988, 2000) distinction between recipient-language and source-language agentivity as its starting point, building on this insight in the light of work on language acquisition and first language attrition, and showing how these principles can be integrated into a unified acquisitionist model of syntactic change in general. The model is then applied to case studies of contact-induced syntactic change in Yiddish and Berber.
Language change and morphological processes
Yearbook of the Poznan Linguistic Meeting
Morphological change is not a result of mechanical, predictable processes, but of the behavior of language users. Speakers reinterpret opaque data in order to assign a more transparent structure to them. Subsequently successful reinterpretation may form the basis of new derivations. The moment such a derivative word formation process becomes productive a language change has taken place. In addition, this paper shows how language change obscures the distinction between separate morphological processes such as compounding and derivation and thus between morphological categories. Moreover, the data under discussion show that there is not a preferred natural direction of language change. Most of the examples are taken from English and Dutch, but also a few French, Frisian, German and Afrikaans data are discussed.
Explaining the emergence order of contact-induced language change phenomena in language maintenance
Philologia Estonica Tallinnensis, 2020
1 According to generalizations made by Thomason and Kaufman (1988), contact-induced language change in language maintenance starts from the lexicon, then progresses to semantics, phonology, non-core mor-phosyntax and may result in a profound restructuring. To date no explanations for this particular order have been suggested. The article "translates" the borrowing scale into the metalanguage of the code-copying framework (Johanson 1992), which views contact-induced language change in lexicon, meaning and structure within the same terminological framework. This terminology enables the view that the cognitive mechanism is the same (copying), only that different types of meaning (specific vs. abstract) produce different types of copies. Specific or expressive items yield global copying, while more abstract meaning (grammatical) yields selective copying. Apparently, processing, entrenchment and convention-alization of more abstract meaning require more time than in the case of specific or expressive meaning. This explains why structural changes (selective copies) appear later.
Mechanisms of change in areal diffusion: new morphology and language contact
Journal of Linguistics, 2003
Borrowing, or diffusion, of grammatical categories in language contact is not a unitary process. In the linguistic area of the Vaupés in northwest Amazonia, several different mechanisms help create new contact-induced morphology. Languages which are in continuous contact belong to the genetically unrelated East-Tucanoan and Arawak families. There is a strong cultural inhibition against borrowing forms of any sort (grammatical or lexical). Language contact in the multilingual Vaupés linguistic area has resulted in the development of similar – though far from identical – grammatical structures. In Tariana, an Arawak language spoken in the area, reanalysis and reinterpretation of existing categories takes place when diffusion involves restructuring a pre-existing category for which there is a slot in the structure, such as case. A new grammatical category with no pre-existing slots may evolve via grammaticalization of a free morpheme – this is how aspect and aktionsart marking was deve...
Non-morphological sources and triggers of morphological change (WBCDL091)
to appear in the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Diachronic Linguistics (ed. by Adam Ledgeway, Edith Aldridge, Anne Breitbarth, Katalin É. Kiss, Joseph Salmons & Alexandra Simonenko)
The interaction of morphology with the other components of grammar – phonology, syntax and semantics – through history often gives rise to morphological changes. At the phonology-morphology interface we discuss consonant alternations and vowel deletion in Russian (Slavic) that led to lexically-conditioned allomorphy and/or emergence of patterns of non-concatenative morphology, similarly to the history of German Umlaut. At the syntax-morphology interface we present a detailed study of the changes affecting spatial case suffixes and postpositions in Hungarian (Uralic); we also mention diachronic morphosyntactic changes from Romance and Mayan languages that yielded new TAM markers. These changes all involved a reanalysis of a syntactic structure into a morphological one. At the semantics-morphology interface, we discuss various changes in English that were semantically motivated. These include backformation patterns that were originally motivated by folk etymology and new patterns of derivational morphology that arose with the help of a metonymical shift.