SOME ISSUES IN THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE CONTACT*
Donald Winford Ohio State University
1. Introduction
The earliest conceptions of the field of Contact Linguistics envisioned it as a multi-disciplinary area of study, encompassing a broad range of language contact phenomena and issues, linguistic, sociolinguistic, sociological and psycholinguistic. The field of study developed out of several lines of research dating back to the 19th century. Among its foundations was work on dialect contact and the formation of pidgins and creoles, as conducted by researchers such as Schuchardt, Hesseling, and others. Other lines of research concerned with contact phenomena included work on the linguistic and social aspects of code-switching, contact-induced language change, the dynamics of language maintenance and shift in immigrant and other multilingual communities, and the nature of bilinguals’ linguistic competence and cognition. All of these diverse lines of enquiry have become part of the general study of languages in contact, but we are still far from integrating them into a coherent and comprehensive theoretical/methodological framework. Some time ago, Appel & Muysken (1987: 7) claimed that “bilingualism or language contact in itself is not a scientific discipline.” More recently, Van Coetsem (2000: 39-40) pointed out that “Contact linguistics still lacks an adequate conceptual basis on which a synthesis can be built that is theoretically well- founded.” One of the factors that appear to contribute to the apparent disunity in the field is the territoriality adopted by scholars in various disciplines. Researchers in “Bilingualism,” Code- switching”, “Creole Linguistics”, Historical Linguistics” and so on, seem to want to preserve the boundaries and distinctiveness of their own area of interest. In general, researchers tend to define the field in terms of their particular concerns, or in opposition to other areas of study that investigate language contact. For Myers-Scotton (2002: 5), for example, “Contact Linguistics belongs with theoretical studies of grammar; it can contribute to, and challenge, theories of syntax and morphology as well as phonology.” Despite this heavily linguistic bias, she still includes within the field a wide range of contact phenomena, including borrowing, morphosyntactic change, language attrition, pidgin and creole formation, and Interlanguage, that is, “the grammar(s) of learners of a second language” (ibid.). Yet, most interestingly, she distinguishes Contact Linguistics from
*I wish to express my gratitude for the useful comments made by a reviewer of this paper. I alone am responsible for any errors or omissions.
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Bilingualism, which she defines as “a much broader topic that typically includes language contact and may include contact linguistics.” Bilingualism, in her view, is concerned with such questions as the social factors involved in how people become bilingual; childhood acquisition of two languages; bilinguals and their cognition; and language policy toward bilinguals. Thus, on the one hand, she sees bilingualism as akin to sociolinguistics and the sociology of language, and, on the other, to psycholinguistics. This kind of partitioning of the field is also seen among those who study bilingualism. For instance, in his excellent study of the interaction of sociopragmatic and psycholinguistic factors in bilingual language production, Walters (2005: 4) acknowledges that he must ignore several areas of research on contact phenomena, including structural (linguistic) approaches to second language acquisition (e.g, Epstein & al. 1996); bilingual code-switching (Poplack 1980) and, curiously, Contact Linguistics (Winford 2003). Of course, limiting one’s study in this way is often necessary and understandable, given the scope and complexity of contact phenomena. Nevertheless, whether intentionally or not, it encourages an atomistic view of the various areas of study, rather than the kind of comprehensive and integrated approach that the field needs. In fact, all of the phenomena listed above by Myers-Scotton and Walters fall under the scope of Contact Linguistics in the broad sense of the term. Whatever the approach may be, we are all concerned, ultimately, with the same problem – how to analyze and account for language contact phenomena. Hence we should be devoting our efforts to achieving consensus and unity in the field. We might begin by agreeing on the range of phenomena that we are all interested in. There is growing agreement that these include: bilingual code-switching and mixture; second language acquisition; borrowing and convergence between languages; and language attrition or obsolescence. Bilingual mixture has traditionally been seen as the province of “Bilingualism”, yet to distinguish this field from “Contact Linguistics”, as Walters does, is an odd thing to do, since they are concerned with the same issues. With regard to second language acquisition, contact linguists are particularly interested in the formation of “indigenized” varieties of languages, such as Hiberno English or Singapore English, and the second language varieties of dominant languages used by immigrants in Europe, the Americas and elsewhere. Borrowing, substratum influence, and convergence have traditionally been the concern of historical linguistics, but their products are now being increasingly examined within the framework of contact linguistics. Language attrition and death has recently emerged as a major area of study in its own right, but the phenomena it deals with are similar in many ways to those found in cases of language shift and convergence. Each of these types of contact has been instrumental in various types of contact-induced change, and in the creation of “new” contact languages such as bilingual mixed (intertwined) languages, pidgins, and creoles. The huge task facing Contact Linguistics is to integrate all of these phenomena and the various disciplinary approaches to them, into a coherent framework. The elements of such a framework include, among other things, a consistent terminology for dealing with the phenomena in question, a common set of criteria for classifying various outcomes of language contact, and a theory that includes all aspects of language contact, whether linguistic, sociolinguistic, or psycholinguistic. I do not pretend to have such a framework to offer here, nor to be able to show how such integration of approaches can be accomplished. It would be a gigantic, and (given our current knowledge) near impossible task to cover all of the issues that are relevant to a comprehensive theory of contact-induced change. Hence, I limit my attention to linguistic approaches to contact phenomena and the kinds of progress they have made. I also briefly discuss ways in which linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to contact phenomena might inform each other.
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2. Problems of definition and classification I suggest that there are two broad problems that linguistic approaches have failed to adequate address, with the result that we still lack a coherent theoretical framework of our own. One has to do with matters of definition and classification; the other involves questions of the processes and principles underlying contact-induced change. Obviously, there is much more to the problem than just these questions, for instance, the role of sociolinguistic factors in shaping the outcomes of contact. But I confine my attention here just to issues concerning definition, classification and process, all of which are in fact closely related. In this connection, I argue that the linguistic model of contact-induced change proposed by Van Coetsem (1988, 2000) offers the best approach to understanding such issues. I also focus particularly on recent research that suggests how psycholinguistic models of language production can shed light on processes of contact-induced change, and perhaps contribute toward the integrated theory we seek. 2.1 Definition and classification At this point, we are still far from consensus on even the definition of a contact language, and what criteria we should use for their classification. As Markey (1982: 170) notes: “All languages are contact languages. For purposes of contact-linguistic classification, we need another notion than ‘mixing’ or ‘intertwining’”. No contact linguist would disagree with Markey’s observation. Usually, however, we focus our attention on a subset of the outcomes of language contact, paying particular attention to salient cases such as bilingual mixed languages, pidgins, and creoles. I follow the latter tradition here, but this does not deny the fact that the processes of change found in these “prototypical” cases are simply extreme manifestations of what is found in every case of language contact. The framework I discuss later, that of Van Coetsem (1988, 2000) is in fact sufficiently broad to account for most of the phenomena associated with cross-linguistic influence, but I apply it here only to the more limited set of “contact languages.” For the most part, we still define the class of contact languages in terms of what we know of their history, rather than in terms of the structural or typological features that they all share, or the linguistic processes that brought them into existence. There is continuing disagreement over the classification of contact phenomena, inconsistency and variance in the terminology used to describe them, and lack of consensus concerning the linguistic processes involved in their creation. Whether one examines code-switching, bilingual mixed languages, pidgins or creoles, one confronts a variety of competing definitions and classifications. For instance, there is still no agreement on what constitutes code-switching as opposed to borrowing, as opposed to code-alternation, etc. This led Clyne (2003:72) to conclude that “the term ‘code-switching’ has now become so polysemous and unclear that it is necessary to find more precise terms to map out the boundaries and interfaces.” Similarly, debate continues as to what constitutes bilingual mixed languages, or as they have alternatively been called, ‘intertwined’ or ‘split’ languages. Here, as in other cases of contact, the tendency has been to identify a prototype, and then try to classify similar outcomes in terms of how well they match that prototype. Traditionally, the bilingual mixed language (BML) prototype is roughly described as combining the grammar of one language with the lexicon of another, as exemplified by Media Lengua. But, as Matras (2003: 152-167) demonstrates, many languages assigned to this category do not adhere to the prototype, a fact that is due to various factors, including the nature and degree of bilingualism among the creators of such languages, the functions and scope of use of the language, the social processes that lead to their formation, and the typological distance between the contributing languages. Fine-grained classifications of contact languages, whether based on linguistic (structural) or sociolinguistic grounds, are of course useful, but they are not an end in themselves. What we need to ask is how the particular configuration of linguistic inputs and social contexts produced the
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Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 10:23:38AM via free access Some issues in the study of language contact 25 particular outcome it did. Hence, as Clyne (2003: 7) has rightly argued, ‘taxonomies and components of models need to be kept open-minded, as combinations of factors can change the influence of any individual factor.” Recognition of this fact has led to drastic revision of definitions and taxonomies in the field of pidgin and creole linguistics. Scholars now acknowledge that both of these labels have been applied too loosely to a broad variety of contact languages. In the case of pidgins, a clear distinction can be made between highly reduced and marginal languages such as Russenorsk, Delaware Pidgin, Eskimo Pidgin and others, and so-called ‘extended pidgins’ such as Tok Pisin and Bislama, which are as structurally complex as creoles or any other language. Creoles, for their part, are now recognized as constituting a diverse assortment of contact varieties, ranging from languages like Bajan, which preserves many features of the SW English dialects on which it is based, and at the other extreme, the Surinamese creoles, which preserve far more West African than English features. It is now accepted that the common thread connecting these outcomes to each other, and indeed to other contact languages such as Hiberno English and Singapore Colloquial English, is that they were created via the process of natural second language acquisition. What distinguishes them, once more, is the peculiar interplay of linguistic inputs and social factors that shaped their formation in the first place. We could cite several other examples of similar weaknesses in traditional classifications of contact languages. In general, it is clear that no single definition is adequate to describe any category of contact languages, or their structural characteristics. We clearly need a framework that would be flexible enough to recognize these facts. I discuss such a framework in the next section. 2.2 Frameworks and processes of contact-induced change Since the publication of Weinreich’s (1953) classic and pioneering work in the field, frameworks for investigating contact-induced change have become increasingly sophisticated. Weinreich’s distinction between borrowing and interference as the two basic types of cross-linguistic influence was further expanded and refined by Thomason & Kaufman (1988), with reference to a wide variety of contact situations. More recently, other scholars have found weaknesses in these classic frameworks and attempted to further refine the distinction between the two basic mechanisms of contact-induced change. The fact is that the traditional frameworks did not make explicit enough the distinction between the two mechanisms. Moreover, the terminology they used to describe the types of change was variable and inconsistent. For instance, different scholars have used terms like ‘interference’ and ‘transfer’ to refer to any type of cross-linguistic influence, including borrowing. Other scholars restricted the former terms to the effects of an L1 or primary language on an L2 or secondary language, especially in the context of second language acquisition. Andersen (1983: 7) discusses the “long and confusing history” of these terms. Moreover, many of the terms used to describe cross linguistic influence were used in various senses, to refer either to the outcomes of contact, or to the putative linguistic processes of change involved. Such vagueness and inconsistency has posed a serious problem for the classification and analysis of contact phenomena. The most promising attempt to address these problems, in my view, is the framework formulated by Van Coetsem (1988, 2000). With regard to classification of contact phenomena, Van Coetsem (2000: 101-103) suggests that we use criteria such as: a. The types or patterns of transfer, eg. borrowing vs imposition (see below) b. Motivation of speaker for using the language (communication, self-identification, etc) c. Nativeness d. Reduction. I focus my attention here on the first of these criteria.
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Van Coetsem’s major contribution was to further refine the traditional distinction between borrowing and ‘interference’ by defining these types of cross-linguistic influence more precisely, and above all, by distinguishing the kinds of agentivity they involve. Van Coetsem’s framework distinguishes between two types of cross-linguistic influence, or what he calls ‘transfer types”, namely, borrowing and imposition.1 The latter is largely equivalent to terms like ‘interference via shift’, ‘transfer’ ‘indirect diffusion’, and ‘substratum influence’ that appear in the literature. Borrowing and imposition, in this framework, are not seen as ‘mechanisms’ or ‘processes’, but rather as vehicles of contact-induced change. In both cases, there is a source language (SL) and a recipient language (RL). These terms serve as alternatives to various other terms that have been used in the literature, such as ‘donor language’, ‘substrate’, ‘replica language’ and the like. The direction of transfer of linguistic features is always from the source language to the RL, and the agent of transfer can be either the recipient language or the source language speaker. In the former case, we have borrowing (RL agentivity), in the latter, imposition (SL agentivity). Also highly relevant to the distinction between borrowing and imposition is the notion of language dominance. As Van Coetsem (2000: 84) explains, difference in linguistic dominance is the main criterion for distinguishing between recipient language and source language agentivity. In the former case, the recipient language is the dominant language of the speaker, while in the latter case, the source language is the dominant language. When we speak of dominance here, we are referring to linguistic dominance, that is, the fact that the speaker is more proficient in one of the languages in contact. This must be distinguished from social dominance, which refers to the political or social status of one of the languages. The socially dominant language may or may not be the linguistically dominant language of the speaker. Of course, dominance relationships may change over time, both in the individual speaker. And such shifts in dominance may result in different outcomes, or lead to attrition of the previously dominant language. These considerations require us to distinguish the agents of change from the kinds of agentivity they employ in introducing changes to an RL. The fact is that the same agent can employ either type of agentivity, and hence both transfer types, in the same contact situation. This is particularly true of highly proficient bilinguals, though not restricted to them alone. Differences between recipient language and source language agentivity are also related to what Van Coetsem (1988: 25) calls the ‘stability gradient’ of language. This refers to the fact that certain components of a language, such as phonology, morphology and syntax, tend to be more stable and hence resistant to change, while others, such as vocabulary, are less stable and thus more amenable to change. This is partly why borrowing tends to be mostly lexical, and to have little if any effect on the recipient language grammar. On the other hand, in imposition, where the source language grammar is more stable and resistant to change, grammatical features can be transferred more readily, leading to significant structural change in the speaker’s version of the RL. There may well be differences in degree of stability within different aspects of the grammar, which may lead to different potential for transfer. Thus certain function morphemes tend to be transferred more readily than others, and word order, for instance, seems to be transferred more readily than, say, embedding strategies. 2.3 Implications of van Coetsem’s framework Van Coetsem argued that language contact studies should focus on the transmission mechanism, which is an individual phenomenon, and not just on the diffusion of change, which is a social phenomenon. The former has to do with the (psycho)linguistic processes of change that reside in individual minds, while the latter has to do with processes of diffusion, leveling and focusing
1 Van Coetsem (2000: 66) acknowledges that the term “imposition” had previously been used in a similar sense by scholars like Gass (1983: 70); Milroy (1983: 190) and Trudgill (1983: 205).
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(conventionalization) within speech communities, which are sociolinguistically motivated. I believe this emphasis on the cognitive processes involved in the creation of contact languages is equally as important as the traditional concern with socio-historical and sociolinguistic aspects of contact. It allows for new links to be made between purely structural and sociolinguistic approaches to contact, and psycholinguistic models of bilingual speech production. Van Coetsem’s approach represented a shift in focus away from taxonomies based on ‘prototypical’ cases, to classifications based on the actual mechanisms involved in contact-induced change, as well as the constraints on their operation. Moreover, Van Coetsem reaffirmed the distinction between the results of such change, and the processes or ‘mechanisms’ underlying them. This remedied a serious weakness in previous approaches, where terms like ‘borrowing’, ‘transfer’ and the like had long been used (and still are) to refer both to the outcomes of contact, and the mechanisms that produce them. This problem was recognized quite early by Haugen, who noted that “borrowing as defined here is strictly a process and not a state, yet most of the terms used in discussing it are ordinarily descriptive of its results rather than of the process itself” (1950: 213). The same problem existed in the case of “transfer.” Thus Hammarberg (1997: 162) comments on the different ways in which the term has been used and interpreted by SLA researchers, that is:
(a) at the level of strategy, with regard to the learner’s plan of action to solve a particular problem; (b) at the level of execution, with regard to the event or process of carrying out the strategy; and (c) at the level of solution, with regard to the product (as manifested in the learner’s L2 performance) of the applied strategy.
Recognition of the primacy of ‘process’ over ‘result’ leads in effect to more meaningful classifications and analyses of the outcomes of contact-induced change. 2.4 Structural and psycholinguistic processes of language contact
No one would deny that one of the biggest problems facing Contact Linguistics today is how to determine and analyze the processes or ‘mechanisms’ by which contact-induced change arises. With regard to borrowing, Haugen introduced a distinction between ‘importation’ and ‘substitution’ – the latter referring to the recipient language speakers’ tendency to “substitute some of the habits of their own language for those in the source language” (1953:383). Van Coetsem, for his part, makes a distinction between ‘imitation’ and ‘adaptation’, which for him come into play not just in borrowing, but also in imposition. The difference is that, in borrowing, imitation occurs before adaptation, while the reverse obtains in imposition. In borrowing, imitation yields an innovation in the recipient language which is only an approximation to the source language item, which is then adapted to conform to the rules of the RL, whose structure remains largely unaffected. In imposition, on the other hand, adaptation of recipient language (L2) material to the source language (L1) is the primary mechanism, and usually yields a marked change in the speaker’s version of the RL. Terms like ‘imitation’ and ‘adaptation’ are, of course, only metaphors for the true (psycho- )linguistic processes underlying contact-induced change, which remain problematic to observe and analyze. But they point in the right direction, and they remind us that we must pay heed to both the linguistic and psycholinguistic processes involved in contact-induced change. Much of the recent literature has been concerned with the attempt to arrive at a more precise characterization of these underlying mechanisms. On the one hand, linguists have been attempting to formulate theoretical frameworks for describing the structural operations involved. On the other, psycholinguists continue to focus on the language production process itself. Lately, there has been a growing rapport between the two lines of approach, which bodes well for progress toward a more integrated theory of Contact Linguistics.
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2.5 Linguistic approaches to contact phenomena Within Linguistics, scholars have addressed various kinds of contact phenomena, including code- switching, bilingual mixed languages, and processes of pidgin and creole formation. More recently, traditionally distinct fields such as “natural” second language acquisition and the emergence of ‘indiginized’ varieties of an L2, have been seen as part of the broader area of contact linguistics. Following van Coetsem’s framework, these phenomena can be divided into two broad categories: those that arise via mechanisms of borrowing, and those that arise via imposition. I am not claiming, of course, that these are the only mechanisms involved in contact-induced change. Processes of simplification and internal developments, among others, also play a crucial role. But here I confine my attention to borrowing and imposition, which I would argue constitute the only ways in which languages directly influence each other. Lexical borrowing, “classic” code-switching (CS), and some bilingual mixed languages fall into the first category. Cases of pidgin and creole formation, as well as second language acquisition, fall into the second category. There is yet a third category of contact phenomena that cannot be so neatly characterized, since they involve simultaneous operation of the two transfer types. Some bilingual mixed languages, for example, as well as many cases of structural convergence, clearly fall into this category. I discuss each category in turn, and assess the attempts that have been made to characterize the linguistic processes involved in each case. 2.6 Cases of recipient language (RL) agentivity There has been a great deal of debate and uncertainty as to what constitutes borrowing, and what kinds of phenomena may be borrowed. To a large extent, the confusion results from different conceptions of borrowing that are not always clearly motivated. Given the sense in which I use ‘borrowing here, following Van Coetsem, it becomes a more straightforward task to distinguish the manifestations of this transfer type from other contact phenomena. It seems clear that most cases of lexical borrowing fall into this category, though it is also possible for vocabulary to be transferred via imposition. Recall that the key criteria for borrowing include recipient language agentivity, and preservation of the recipient language structure. The kinds of ‘classic’ code-switching that Myers- Scotton (1993) and others have described clearly conform to these criteria. Myers-Scotton (1993, 2002) proposed her Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model to account for such types of code- switching, as illustrated in the following example of French/Arabic switching (Arabic in italics): (1) j’ai vu un ancien tilmid djali ‘I saw an old student of mine.’ (Bentahila & Davies (1983: 319) Myers-Scotton demonstrated that, in these types of bilingual speech, one language, the recipient language in our terms, acts as the matrix language, that is, provides the morphosyntactic frame for the bilingual utterance, and that the features transferred from the ‘embedded’ language, the source language in our terms, included primarily content items, and more rarely, free function items such as articles. This of course corresponds exactly to the workings of recipient language agentivity. Clearly, the linguistically dominant language in these kinds of bilingual mixture is the matrix language. Bentahila & Davies (1992) in fact argue this point with regard to the kinds of (classic) code-switching produced by Arabic/Dutch bilinguals for whom Arabic is the dominant language. The same can be argued with respect to bilingual mixed languages like Media Lengua, Anglo- Romani, Ma’a or Inner Mbugu, and others, as Winford (2005) has argued. Such languages conform closely to the putative ‘prototype’ of a BML mentioned earlier, which involves “a split between the source language of the ‘grammar’ and that of the lexicon, with variation within the class of function words” (Matras 2003: 151). In Media Lengua, for example, Quechua supplies the vast majority of the grammatical apparatus, while Spanish provides the (phonetic shapes of) lexical items, as well as some function words such as prepositions, conjunctions and personal pronouns. Such cases of
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Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 10:23:38AM via free access Some issues in the study of language contact 29 massive incorporation of source language lexical items into a maintained recipient language structural frame represent extreme manifestations of borrowing transfer under recipient language agentivity. The principles and constraints proposed by the MLF model of classic code switching seem to go a long way toward explaining these blends of recipient language grammar and source language lexicon. The more important principles include the Matrix Language Principle (that only one language supplies the morphosyntactic frame); the related Asymmetry Principle (that classic code switching is characterized by an asymmetrical participation of the languages involved); and the Morpheme Sorting Principle (that mostly content morphemes and a few ‘system’ morphemes can be incorporated into the ML from the source language). Myers-Scotton would later refer to such system morphemes as “early system morphemes”, including determiners, plurals and derivational affixes, which pattern with content morphemes in conveying conceptual information. This would explain, for example, the fact that Spanish-derived nouns in Media Lengua bring along with them Spanish-derived definite and indefinite articles. 2.7 Cases involving complementarity of the transfer types
The MLF model was limited in so far as the constraints it proposed were somewhat post-hoc, and not motivated by any particular theoretical framework. It was also limited in that it accounted only for the kinds of classic codeswitching described above (including prototypical BMLs). The model therefore could not be applied to many other kinds of bilingual speech that did not conform to its constraints. Salient cases of such contact phenomena are cases of code-switching in which the ML contains a blend of structural apparatus from both languages as well as certain BMLs that draw on grammatical elements or structures from both languages to make up their grammar. Among the latter are languages like Mednyj (Copper Island) Aleut, Michif, etc. As Matras (2003: 152) points out, in Michif the division is not between grammar and lexicon, but roughly between (French- derived) Noun Phrase and (Cree-derived) Verb Phrase. On the other hand, Mednyj Aleut employs finite verb inflection and various grammatical features from Russian, with nominal and nominalized bound morphology and other grammatical features from Aleut. Cases like these defy traditional constraints on what structural or functional features can be incorporated into the morpho-syntactic frame of the mixed language. But that does not mean they refute the basic distinction between recipient language and source language agentivity that lies at the heart of the distinction between borrowing and imposition. In fact, they represent cases where the two transfer types act in concert to produce a new synthesis of structural and lexical elements. Van Coetsem (2000: 36) notes that situations like these involve complementary co-agentivity, that is co-occurrence of both recipient language and source language agentivity. In such cases, speakers with high degrees of proficiency in both languages can choose to manipulate their resources in ways not possible for other kinds of bilingual speech. Van Coetsem (2000: 84) refers to the transfer type in such situations as “neutralization’, suggesting that constraints on transfer are neutralized.2 But it is noteworthy that, even in these extreme cases, speakers still rely on one of the languages for the core of the grammar. Matras (2003: 155) refers to this language as the INFL-language, that is, the language in which the predication is anchored and processed. So, in a sense, these contact languages do conform to the idea that one of the contributing languages is more dominant in the production of the bilingual mixture. This does not necessarily mean, however, that we can characterize the incorporation of structural elements from the less dominant language as an instance of borrowing transfer in the strict sense. When bilinguals implement both recipient language and source language agentivity in
2 Note that this idea of the neutralization of constraints is consistent with the widespread view that the creation of BMLs is in many respects a conscious and deliberate strategy (Matras & Bakker 2003: 13).
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Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 10:23:38AM via free access 30 Donald Winford concert, it is practically impossible to distinguish the effects of borrowing from those of imposition.3 There are many other contact languages that are characterized by significant mixture of structural elements from the contributing languages, which are not traditionally included within the class of BMLs. They include Ngandi, an Aboriginal language of Northern Australia, which has incorporated structural elements from Ritharngu (Heath 1981), Asia Minor Greek, whose grammar was heavily influenced by that of Turkish, and several descendants of Oceanic languages in Papua New Guinea, whose structure changed drastically under the influence of the indigenous languages that were originally spoken there (Thurston 1987, 1994). I think there is good reason for distinguishing languages of this type from BMLs proper, since they, unlike the latter, tend to arise in cases of asymmetrical bilingualism. This means that many of the features adopted by the recipient language (Greek, Ngandi, etc) from the source language (Turkish, Ritharngu, etc.) are primarily due to the effects of imposition (Winford 2005). 2.8 Agentivity and dominance-relations in the creation of BMLs
Myers-Scotton’s (2003) classification of BMLs (her ‘split languages’) in fact says little about types of process and agentivity. She identifies three types of BML, one of which, Type C, need not concern us here, since Myers-Scotton (2003: 92) herself acknowledges that it is least clearly defined. In Type A, she claims, “the actual surface-level late system morphemes come from the less dominant language in one or more constituent types, and function as they would in that language” (2003: 92). She cites Ma’a – a language in which practically all the morphosyntactic frame is Bantu, as one example of this type. This is curious, since it implies that Bantu was the ‘less dominant’ language in this case of contact – a claim that is not true either in the social or linguistic sense. It is clear that it was Bantu-dominant bilinguals who created Ma’a, inserting Cushitic content morphemes and some functional elements into a Bantu morphosyntactic frame, in ways similar to the creation of Media Lengua. In other words, Ma’a is a clear case of recipient language agentivity. Myers-Scotton also includes Mednyj Aleut in her Type A, claiming that the dominant language in this case was Aleut. But the dominance relations between Aleut and Russian appear to be far more complex than she suggests. On the one hand, Aleut supplies most of the lexicon, a variety of function words (object personal pronouns, indefinite pronouns, copula, etc.), noun inflection, NP word order, some subordination patterns and some aspects of verb morphology, among other things (Golovko 1994). But on the other hand, Russian supplies most of the syntactic structure, including word order, most clause combining elements (co-ordinators, subordinators, etc.), negation, and TMA marking (Golovko 1996: 73). This led Matras (2003: 165) to conclude that Russian was the “INFL language” in this case, that is, the base into which lexifier language [Aleut –DW] material is incorporated. Still, the pervasiveness of Aleut structural elements in Mednyj Aleut makes if difficult to claim that this was simply a case of recipient language agentivity. Rather, the evidence suggests that this was a case in which recipient language and source language agentivity operated in concert, with Russian playing the primary role in the language production process, particularly at the level of the Formulator. Myers-Scotton’s second category of BMLs, Type B, includes cases in which “the less dominant” language supplies abstract grammatical structure underlying surface-level late system morphemes in one or more constituent types of the dominant language (2003: 92). According to her, languages of
3 Van Coetsem (2000: 91-97) cites Media Lengua, along with Michif and Mednyj Aleut as results of “neutralization”. But the greater incorporation of structural features in the two latter languages seems to distinguish them clearly from cases like Media Lengua and Ma’a, where it is mostly lexicon that is incorporated into the dominant language. See Van Coetsem (2000: 251-261) for further discussion of his view of these BMLs.
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Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 10:23:38AM via free access Some issues in the study of language contact 31 this type contain no surface-level late system morphemes from the more dominant language. One example she cites is Ganjou Chinese – the variety of Chinese spoken by speakers of Mongolian and other languages in Qinghai Province. Such languages, particularly Minhe Munguor, have had a profound influence on the syntax, morphology and phonology of Ganjou Chinese. In this case, Myers-Scotton claims, Chinese is the dominant language, while Munguor is the “outside” language (2003: 95). But once more, in failing to make a distinction between social and linguistic dominance, Myers-Scotton seems to misrepresent the nature of the creation of Ganjou Chinese. Since this is a situation involving language shift from Mongolian (and other languages) to Chinese, it seems quite probable that the speakers who created Ganjou Chinese were linguistically dominant in Mongolian, etc., and that imposition played a significant role in creating their L2 version of Chinese. This would explain the use of Mongolian morpho-syntactic patterns in Ganjou Chinese – a typical product of imposition under source language agentivity in cases of natural second language acquisition. I will argue later that the same type of agentivity is involved in the creation of contact languages such as creoles and ‘indigenized’ varieties of European languages. In sum, then, while Myers-Scotton’s language production-based model is a promising attempt to characterize BMLs, her actual classification and her account of their creation are misleading, since they are based on misunderstanding of (a) the nature of the dominance relationships among the input languages, and (b) the kinds of agentivity involved in the creation process. If we take criteria such as these as our starting point, we could argue that there are indeed three types of BMLs, as follows: Type A: Most content morphemes and some function items are incorporated from a source language into a recipient language under recipient language agentivity. In such cases, the recipient language is activated as the linguistically dominant language in the production process, and supplies practically all of the morpho-syntactic frame. Languages like Media Lengua and Ma’a fall into this category.
Type B: Most content morphemes come from one of the languages, but there is a more intricate mixing of structural features from both languages. However, the outcome still preserves, essentially, the core morphosyntax (INFL-structure) of one language, which presumably is activated as the more dominant language in the production process. While this is similar in some respects to cases of recipient language agentivity, it would appear that source language agentivity also played a significant role. Languages like Michif and Mednyj Aleut fall into this category.
Type C: Outcomes in which speakers of an ancestral language have shifted or are shifting to a socially dominant language. In such cases, the ancestral language is the linguistically dominant language, and this leads to imposition from this language on the other. These cases involve primarily source language agentivity. Languages like Ganjou Chinese fall into this category.
2.9 Convergence and imposition.
Myers-Scotton and others characterize the kinds of mixture found in bilingual mixed languages (BMLs) as cases of “convergence” and argues that her approach can explain not only these cases, but also other contact languages as well. Myers-Scotton (2003: 86) claims that convergence is the process or mechanism underlying not only ‘split’ (bilingual mixed) languages, but also the outcomes of attrition, language shift, and creole formation. But there is a caveat concerning the kinds of convergence that can take place, and the nature of the processes and types of agentivity that lead to them. It seems clear that “convergence” can come about in different ways, hence it is potentially misleading to think of it as a unified process common
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Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 10:23:38AM via free access 32 Donald Winford to a broad range of contact phenomena. In fact, “convergence” is one of those terms that are so poorly defined and “polysemous”, that its usefulness in describing contact phenomena has been seriously compromised. It seems safer to think of convergence as simply a cover term for various ways in which languages become more similar to each other. For Myers-Scotton (2003: 85), convergence is both a result and a process. As a result, it refers to “a linguistic configuration with all surface morphemes from one language, but with only part of its abstract lexical structure from that language, and the rest from another” (2003: 85). As a process, she describes it as “largely a one-way phenomenon … [that] involves the grammar and lexicon of a source language, generally one that has more socioeconomic prestige, impinging on another language” (2002: 172). This in fact is reminiscent of imposition, with certain differences. On the one hand, it is true that imposition is largely a one-way process that involves transfer of structural and other features from a source language to an RL. But it is not always or even typically the case that the source language is the socially dominant or more prestigious language.4 In some situations, the two do coincide. But in others, the linguistically dominant language is the socially subordinate language – a scenario that is true of most cases of natural second language acquisition, including creole formation. In still other situations, changing dominance relationships at the level of individual language proficiency lead to growing imposition from a language being shifted to, on the language that was once linguistically dominant (the ancestral language). This appears to apply to cases such as Turkish-influenced Greek in Asia Minor (Dawkins 1916, Janse 2005), English-influenced Spanish in Los Angeles (Silva- Corvalán 1994, 1998) and English-influenced French in Prince Edward Island, Canada (King 2000). (See Winford 2005 for further discussion.) Despite differences in the contact situations, all of these involve imposition under source language agentivity. We therefore have to distinguish the kinds of convergence that take place in different contact languages by examining more closely the underlying processes. 3. Combining linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to language contact So far, there have been few attempts to develop a theoretical model that would account for all the kinds of structural convergence that we have discussed so far. One promising attempt is that of Myers-Scotton & Blake (2000a, 2000b, 2001). Acknowledging that the original MLF model of code-switching could not account for cases involving structural convergence, they proposed two additional models, the 4M model and the Abstract Level Model, to explain such cases. These models recognize a significant difference between ‘classic’ CS, and ‘composite’ CS, which Myers- Scotton (2002: 105) described as a phenomenon with morphemes from two languages within a bilingual CP, and with the abstract morphosyntactic frame derived from more than one language. The 4-M model refined the earlier distinction between content and system morphemes by proposing that there were three types of system morphemes, divided into two categories, ‘early’ and ‘late’ system morphemes. Among the former are items like articles, possessive adjectives, plural number and others, while the latter consist of elements that combine content morphemes with one another into larger constituents or syntactic structures. They include “bridge’ morphemes such as possessive –s and of, which expand their heads into phrasal constituents such as NPs, PPs, etc, and ‘outsider’ morphemes, which create structures such as IPs and full CPs, and express grammatical relations such as agreement, case, and so on. Cases of structural convergence such as BMLs are viewed as products of the mixture of some elements of abstract grammatical structure from one language with those of the other, to create a composite matrix language frame. Such abstract structure is expressed, in part, by late system morphemes.
4 Myers-Scotton (2003: 75) states more explicitly that “in convergence, the more sociolinguistically dominant language contributes structure to another language.”
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The crucial innovation in the 4-M model is that it is based on psycholinguistic models of language production such as those of Levelt (1989) and others who distinguish three stages of the language production process, as follows (See Levelt (1989: 9) for a more detailed representation.)
The Conceptual level: The messages the speaker intends to convey.
(the Conceptualizer)
The Functional level Lemmas (abstract entries in a speaker’s mental lexicon) are
(the Formulator): accessed. Lemmas activate morpho-syntactic procedures (e.g.
argument structure and morphological realization patterns)
The Positional level: Phonological representations and surface structure are realized.
The hypothesis concerning bilingual language mixture which underlies the 4-M model is expressed by Myers-Scotton (2002: 17) as follows: The different types of morpheme under the 4-M model are differently accessed in the abstract levels of the production process. Specifically, content morphemes and early system morphemes are accessed at the level of the mental lexicon, but late system morphemes do not become salient until the level of the Formulator.
The 4-M model provides a useful way of distinguishing, and to some extent, explaining the various types of bilingual mixture that we have discussed so far. In the first place, it provides some rationale for the kinds of mixture and particularly for the incorporation of both content and early system morphemes in both ‘classic’ codeswitching and in prototypical BMLs. In the second place, the model suggests a way to account for the more pervasive mixture of grammatical elements (late system morphemes) from both input languages, which we find in non-prototypical BMLs such as Michif, Mednyj Aleut and others. But to understand this further, we need to understand certain other aspects of the language production process. In this connection, Myers-Scotton & Jake (2000) proposed their Abstract Level Model, which suggests further ways of accounting for different types of structural convergence from the perspective of language production models. The model focuses on the way in which lemmas are accessed and activate morpho-syntactic procedures at the functional level of the Formulator. Lemmas are that part of a lexical entry (the other being its phonological shape or lexeme) which contains information about the semantic, morphological, syntactic and other properties of the lexical item. In monolingual language production, accessing a lemma activates the (morpho-) syntactic procedures associated with the lexical item in question. In bilingual language production, differences may arise in the way (different aspects of) lemmas are accessed and associated with source language and recipient language lexemes, creating new combinations of elements of one language with those of another. The Abstract Level Model is based on the premise that all lemmas in the mental lexicon include three levels of abstract lexical structure, namely: - Lexical conceptual structure (semantics and pragmatics)
- Predicate-argument structure (how thematic roles are realized in phrase structure)
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- Morphological realization patterns (surface morphological elements and their order
Myers-Scotton (2002: 99) suggests that, in certain kinds of bilingual speech, the 3 levels of a lemma in one language can be split and recombined with levels in the lemma of another language, leading to creation of a new morphosyntactic frame (or composite ML) of the sort we find in non- prototypical BMLs. Whereas the 4-M model seems more concerned with the transfer of actual structural elements in composite CS, the Abstract Level Model addresses bilingual speech phenomena such as the mixing of structural patterns, or the expression of abstract structural features from one language by means of surface forms from another. Though the Abstract Level Model has been applied primarily to cases of composite code switching of the kind found in certain bilingual mixed languages, it has the potential to shed light on other contact phenomena. One weakness of the model, as pointed out earlier, is its failure to differentiate the two primary transfer types, borrowing and imposition, and their associated types of agentivity. Perhaps because of this, it has paid little attention to contact phenomena that involve imposition, that is, source language agentivity. Among these are the kinds of contact-induced change associated with creole formation, and the emergence of ‘indigenized’ varieties of European and other languages. The types of convergence that gave rise to these outcomes are quite different from those involved in the creation of bilingual mixed languages. The former involve transfer of abstract structural patterns, while the latter involve transfer of mostly surface system morphemes and the like. Hence different psycholinguistic mechanisms appear to operate in each case. Let us now examine the role of such mechanisms in creole formation. 4. Creole formation and imposition.
Creolists too have struggled to agree on a framework within which creole formation can be explained. Researchers have attempted to explain this phenomenon by appealing to various notions such as “transfer”, “relexification”, “substratum influence”, and “convergence.” I will argue that all of these labels refer to the same underlying process, imposition under source language agentivity. Research on “transfer” in cases of tutored second language acquisition is broad in scope, and well documented (see, e.g. Ellis 1994). Hence I will pay little attention to it here, focusing instead on how the notion has been extended to cases of “natural” SLA. Such cases include indigenized varieties of English and other languages, such as Hiberno-English, Singapore Colloquial English, etc. It is now also generally recognized that creoles were the result of processes of natural SLA, albeit in unusual social circumstances. There is a rich literature documenting the ways in which the creators of creoles, both in the Pacific and Atlantic areas, transferred structural and lexical patterns from their native languages to the new contact languages they were creating. For instance, Siegel (1999), Keesing (1988), and others have demonstrated the strong influence of Oceanic languages on the grammar of Melanesian Pidgin varieties. Siegel (2000) has further shown that immigrant languages such as Chinese and Portuguese exerted significant influence on the grammar of Hawai’i Creole English. Similar evidence has been presented for the pervasive influence of West African languages, particularly those of the Gbe family, on the structure of the Surinamese creoles (Bruyn 1994, Essegby 2005, Migge 1998, 2003), and on the structure of Haitian Creole (Lefebvre 1998). In terms of van Coetsem’s model, all of these contact languages resulted mostly from imposition under source language agentivity. Other contact languages whose creation seems to have involved massive imposition include Sri Lanka Portuguese and Sri Lanka Malay (Smith 1979a, b); the Austronesian-based contact languages of NW New Britain in Papua New Guinea (Thurston 1987); Asia Minor Greek (Winford 2005: 402-409); and others. The structural features of these contact languages and their sources in the various substrate languages have been described in some detail. But the “transfer” model has simply documented
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Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 10:23:38AM via free access Some issues in the study of language contact 35 these correspondences without attempting to explain the psycholinguistic processes involved in these types of language creation.5 The models that come closest to such an attempt are the Abstract Level Model of Myers-Scotton and the “relexification” model of Lefebvre and Lumsden (1994). I would argue that these two models are quite compatible with each other. Lefebvre & Lumsden (1994), Lefebvre (1998), and others have argued that the process central to creole formation is “relexification”, which they describe as a process in which the creators of a creole retain their L1 lexical entries more or less intact, while replacing their phonetic shapes with those of superstrate lexical entries. This is based on Muysken’s (1981: 61) characterization of relexification as “the process of vocabulary substitution in which the only information adopted from the TL in the lexical entry is the phonological representation.” Muysken argued that BMLs like Media Lengua arose in this way. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that the type of “relexification” described by Muysken is different in kind and motivation from the type that Lefebvre describes for creole formation.6 In Media Lengua, for example, all of the information in the Quechua lexical entry, including morphology, morphosyntactic properties and (for verbs) subcategorization, are retained intact. Only the lexeme associated with that lexical entry changes. Winford (2006) characterizes this process as “relexemization” (compare Lefebvre’s “relabeling”). This process is clearly an instance of borrowing under recipient language agentivity, in which the incorporated lexeme is fully adapted to the morphology and morpho-syntax of the linguistically dominant language, in this case Quechua. By contrast, in creole formation, the morphology and certain morpho-syntactic properties of the substrate lexical entry are not transferred to the new creole lexical entry. Only some abstract semantic and morpho-syntactic features are retained. The result is that the lemma associated with the creole lexical entry is not a total replica of that associated with the substrate lexical entry. The explanation for this is that the reconstitution of lexical entries in creole formation is a case of imposition under source language agentivity. In this, it matches other cases of transfer in SLA, in which only some aspects of L1 structure are incorporated into the emerging interlanguage. The kind of “relexification” or lexical manipulation found in creole formation seems amenable to treatment in terms of Myers-Scotton’s Abstract Level Model, since it involves the splitting and recombination of the different levels of abstract lexical structure associated with the respective lexical entries of the input languages. Here, as in some cases of SLA, the lexical entries of the contact variety are shaped primarily in terms of the lexical information supplied by the substrate(s), as the linguistically dominant language(s). This is in keeping with Myers-Scotton’s view that persons creating a creole could easily access superstrate content morphemes, particularly when they matched the semantics of their L1 lexical items. But they could not access the grammatical frame of the superstrate, hence they “had to fall back on their L1s for the morpho-syntactic frame” (2002: 278). Obviously, much more work has to be done if we are to fully understand the mechanisms of restructuring due to imposition. But it seems clear that we can learn much from current research on SLA that also appeals to psycholinguistic models of language production. A noteworthy example of this is the work of Pienemann (1999), which illustrates how the nature of the language production
5 The transfer model does attempt to identify certain principles or constraints that regulate the kinds of transfer that can take place. These include “availability” constraints (which determine what substrate features become available for transfer), and “reinforcement principles”, including frequency, which operate to determine “which of the transferred features will actually be retained in the creole” (2000: 83). I would argue that such principles are post-hoc in nature, based on the empirical observation of correspondences between creole and substrate structure. Hence they do not explain the psycholinguistic processes that underlie transfer in the first place. 6 Van Coetsem (2000: 178) himself fails to recognize the distinction between these two types of lexical manipulation. He refers to relexification as ‘rapid replacement of vocabulary’, and cites examples such as creole formation and BMLs like Media Lengua as instances of such “relexification”.
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Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 10:23:38AM via free access 36 Donald Winford and grammatical processing of language learners differs fundamentally from that of fully proficient speakers. It is well known that, in the earlier stages of SLA, learners acquire L2 lexical items without acquiring all of the morphological and syntactic properties associated with them. Hence, at this stage, the learner cannot appeal to knowledge of the lemmas associated with the L2 lexical items in trying to produce syntactic structures in the L2 (Pienemann 1999: 76). Much of the language learning process consists in trying to build and reconstitute L2 lemmas based on the available input. When that input is rich and readily accessible, the learner can progress more rapidly toward that goal, eventually re-creating L2 lemmas with high degrees of accuracy. When the input is poor and less accessible, as in most cases of creole formation, learners rely more on their L1 knowledge to aid in the reconstruction of lexical entries. In other words, the stage is ripe for processes of imposition. Appealing to language production models can potentially provide insight into the workings of this mechanism, by elucidating the ways in which learners reconstitute the lemmas associated with L2 items. 5. Conclusion This paper had three main goals. First, I have tried to show how clarification of the terminology and classifications we apply to contact languages can lead to better understanding of the types of contact languages, and the kinds of process that produce them. Secondly, I have argued that van Coetsem’s framework offers a sound basis on which to achieve a more uniform terminology and classification. Third, I tried to show that this model clarifies the distinction between the two major mechanisms by which languages directly influence each other, borrowing via recipient language agentivity, and imposition via source language agentivity. Failure to distinguish these two mechanisms accurately has negative implications for our understanding of the processes by which various contact languages are created. Moreover, Van Coetsem’s distinction between borrowing and imposition in terms of types of agentivity is consistent with what we know about language production in bilinguals. In other words, the differences in transfer type identified by Van Coetsem correspond to differences in the language production processes underlying the two broad categories of contact- induced change. In the case of recipient language agentivity, one language is activated as the dominant one, thus providing the morphosyntactic frame for the bilingual mixture. This happens in classic code-switching, and in the formation of bilingual mixed languages such as Media Lengua. In the case of source language agentivity, when knowledge of the recipient language is limited, the bilingual appeals to knowledge of his dominant language and activates its morpho-syntactic procedures, that is, argument structure and morphological realization patterns, to help create the grammatical frame of the contact variety. This happens in natural second language learning, including the creation of “indigenized” varieties such as Singapore Colloquial English, and creoles. In still other cases of bilingual production, fluent bilinguals can activate the procedures associated with each language at will, giving rise to the kinds of mixture found in bilingual mixed languages like Michif and Mednyj Aleut. In short, integrating linguistic analyses of contact phenomena with psycholinguistic models of language production promises to shed further light on the processes that underlie contact-induced change, and how they lead to various outcomes. Such integration will go a long way toward achieving the kind of theoretical model that Van Coetsem saw as lacking in the field of Contact Linguistics.
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