What is 'contact-induced grammaticalization'? Evidence from Mayan and Mixe- Zoquean languages (original) (raw)

It has long been known that not only formal elements of language (e.g. phonemes, allophones, phonological rules) and form meaning-pairings or 'Saussurean signs' (morphemes, constructions) can be 'transferred' from one language to another as a consequence of language contact, but also aspects of semantic organization or conceptualization (e.g. Weinreich 1953, Thomason & Kaufman 1988). For instance, conventionalized metaphors with the status of a lexeme can be borrowed ('loan translations' or 'calques'), new values for existing grammatical categories can be imported from a contact language (e.g. by adding a dual to an originally twofold number system), and even complete linguistic subsystems such as definiteness or aspect marking may be newly created through language contact. The latter two types of processes, often also called 'grammatical calquing' (Ross 1999), 'structural borrowing' (Winford 2003), 'pattern transfer' or 'indirect (morphosyntactic) diffusion' (Heath 1978, Aikhenvald 2002), have received some attention in recent work by Bernd Heine and Tanya Kuteva under the heading 'grammatical replication' (e.g. Heine & Kuteva 2003, 2005). As an example of 'grammatical replication', Heine & Kuteva (2003, 2005) mention the use of wh-pronouns as relativizers, which is a typical feature of European languages (cf. Haspelmath 1998), and which has extended its territory not only to the more 'peripheral' languages of the European sprachbund (cf. van der Auwera 1998), but also to non-European languages that have been in contact with European ones (e.g. Tariana/North Arawak under the influence of Portuguese; cf. Aikhenvald 2002: 183, Heine & Kuteva 2005: 3). Such processes of 'grammatical replication' are so pervasive and have been reported on so extensively that we will take their existence for granted. For more examples and information, the reader is referred to the work by Aikenvald (2002), Heine & Kuteva (2003, 2005) (as well as further references cited there) and several contributions to this volume. While the result of grammatical calquing-convergence at some level of grammatical organization-is usually fairly obvious and easily describable, the process itself is much more poorly understood. In general, it seems to be clear that there is an element of 'interlingual identification' involved (Weinreich 1953: 7-8, 32; cf. also Heine & Kuteva 2003: 531), in so far as two markers from different languages are equated in terms of their semantic or distributional properties. This 'act of identification' may lead to a process which has been called 'polysemy copying' by Heine & Kuteva (2003, 2005), and which can roughly be described like this: at a first stage, a marker of one language and a marker of some contact language have overlapping functions, or one of the markers is more specific than the other. Using the semantic map model, these two situations can be represented as in (1), where the 'conceptual nodes' n 1-n 6 stand for specific meanings or functions in a semantic map framework, and the rounded rectangles indicate the range of functions associated with two markers from different languages: