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Constraints on Contact-Induced Linguistic Change1 CONSTRAINTS ON CONTACT-INDUCED LINGUISTIC CHANGE1 Bernd Heine & Tania Kuteva Universität zu Köln & Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf 1. The default position One of the main achievements of Thomason & Kaufman’s (1988) seminal work on language contact was that they proposed a strong generalization: As far as the strictly linguistic possibilities go, any linguistic feature can be transferred from any language to any other language; and implicational universals that depend solely on linguistic properties are similarly invalid. (Thomason & Kaufman 1988:14) This generalization has been reiterated ever since by Thomason in later publications; thus, Harris & Campbell (1995:149) observe that “virtually anything can (ultimately) be borrowed”, and Curnow (2001:434) concludes that we may never be able to develop universal constraints on borrowability on the basis of the data available (see also Campbell 1993: 104). In a recent document, Thomason provides an overview of the present situation of research on contact-induced linguistic change, concluding, first, that “no one has successfully proposed absolute linguistic constraints on contact-induced change”, second, that “there are no absolute constraints on the kinds or numbers of features that can be transferred from one language to another” and, third, that “theories that claim, or assume, the existence of absolute linguistic constraints on such changes” must be rejected (2007).2 Note that the term “constraint” is taken by Thomason (2008:42) in a fairly rigid sense, meaning that ”it cannot happen”, rather than what she portrays as “the much more 1 We wish to thank Sally Thomason and Johannes Helmbrecht for valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. Part of the work leading to the paper was carried out during the first author’s stays at various research institutions, to which we are deeply indebted, in particular the Institute for Advanced Study, LaTrobe University and the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, Melbourne and its directors Bob Dixon and Sasha Aikhenvald, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) and its Rector Wim Blockmans, and to Peter Siemund and Lukas Pietsch and the Sonderforschungsbereich Mehrsprachigkeit (SFB 538) of the University of Hamburg. 2 This is largely, though not entirely, a repetition of what Thomason had said earlier, namely that “[…] there are no linguistic constraints on interference: any linguistic feature can be transferred to any language […], and any change can occur as an indirect result of language contact […], all the specific constraints on contact-induced change that have been proposed have been counterexemplified” (Thomason 2001b: 85). Journal of language contact – THEMA 2 (2008) www. jlc-journal.org Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 04:22:18PM via free access 58 Bernd Heine & Tania Kuteva flexible “constrain t” of the sort popularized in Optimality Theory”. But the no-linguistic-constraint hypothesis has not gone unchallenged. For example, Oksaar (1972:492) concludes that there are “no clear cases that would permit the generalization of statements that grammatical paradigms, bound morphemes, word order etc. can be subject to interference”. In particular, it has been argued that there is at least one domain of language structure that is immune to transfer (or convergence), namely “core syntax” (Sanchez 2004; Montrul 2004; Silva-Corvalán 2007; see Dogruöz & Backus 2007:7). Still, there is evidence that even “core syntax” is vulnerable to language contact: Given enough time, new modes of core syntactic organization can evolve in situations of intense language contact—however “core syntax” may be defined (see Heine & Kuteva 2005; 2006 for examples). We therefore concur with Thomason (2008:43) that the hypothesis is best taken to be the default position and that “the burden of proof”, as she puts it, is now with those refuting this hypothesis. In the present paper we hope to refute it, arguing that there are some factors that have not been taken into account by Thomason & Kaufman (1988) or any of the more recent works by Thomason. It would seem that there are in fact constraints on contact-induced linguistic change, and that these factors can be accounted for in a principled way. Our concern will be exclusively with grammatical replication, more precisely with contact-induced grammaticalization, which both concern the transfer of meanings and structures rather than of form-meaning pairings or of phonetic substance (see Heine & Kuteva 2005, chapters 2 and 3), although we do not wish to exclude the possibility that there are similar constraints in other domains of contact-induced linguistic transfer. We will say that contact-induced linguistic change has taken place when a group of speakers regularly shows a linguistic behavior that differs from that of earlier generations of speakers, and where this behavior can be demonstrated to have been influenced in some way by language contact3. This definition is deliberately general; thus, a “group of speakers” may include an entire speech community, the speakers of a dialect, or any smaller social unit, such as a family or a peer group. Similarly, “linguistic behavior” can relate to anything from a phonetic feature to the syntax of clause structure or the organization of discourses, and “generations of speakers” can involve in extreme cases dozens of generations or only one generation. What is important is that that behavior is regular (rather than idiosyncratic) and is shared by all speakers of the relevant group. One has to be aware, however, that contact-induced linguistic change is a fairly complex process. The little evidence that is available suggests that at the beginning of the process as a sociolinguistic phenomenon there typically is spontaneous replication in bilingual interaction, where some individual speaker—consciously or unconsciously—propagates a novel feature in the replica language that has been influenced by some other language (the model language). Spontaneous replication is highly idiosyncractic and the vast majority of instances of it will have no effect on the language concerned, they may involve e.g. features of the speaker’s L1 that are carried over into his L2 or the other way round, being judged as what is commonly referred to as a “speech error” or the result of imperfect learning. But some instances may catch on: Being taken up and used regularly by other speakers, they may become part of the speech habits of a group of speakers (early adopters), and they may spread to other groups of speakers—in exceptional cases even to the entire speech community. Still, this process does not necessarily lead to what we refer to as 3 According to Thomason (2007:9), “contact is a source of linguistic change if it is less likely that a given change would have occurred outside a specific contact situation”. This proposal is not entirely satisfactory; as we will see in this paper, there are a number of changes that are crosslinguistically likely to occur outside a specific contact situation, yet that can also be instances of contact-induced linguistic change (see the changes discussed below, such as demonstrative > definite article, ‘go to’ > future tense, etc.). Journal of language contact – THEMA 2 (2008) www. jlc-journal.org Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 04:22:18PM via free access Constraints on Contact-Induced Linguistic Change 59 linguistic change: Such innovations may remain restricted to some specific period of time, being abandoned either by the very speakers who introduced them or by the next generation of speakers. It is only if an innovation acquires some stability across time that linguistic change (including grammatical replication) has taken place. Most stages that make up this process are still poorly documented, and in the present paper we will be satisfied with comparing the initial stage with the final stages of this process; more specifically, we will deal with cases that are fairly uncontroversial instances of contact-induced linguistic change. To this end, an outline of the model used here is presented in section 2, and in section 3, evidence is adduced in support of our hypothesis that linguistic change in situations of language contact is subject to at least one significant constraint. In section 4 we will look into the question of what other constraints there are in language contact, and in the final section 5 some conclusions are drawn on what the findings presented in the paper mean with reference to what we know about language contact. 2. Grammatical replication In the model used here, grammatical replication is part of a network of types of linguistic transfer, which can summarily be represented as in figure 1. Figure 1. Main types of contact-induced linguistic transfer. Contact-induced linguistic transfer Replication Borrowing Grammatical replication Lexical replication Contact-induced grammaticalization Restructuring Loss Rearrangement Grammatical replication, widely referred to as “structural borrowing” or “grammatical calquing”, is a process whereby speakers of a language, called the replica language, create a new grammatical structure on the model of some structure of another language, called the model language.4 It concerns meanings and the structures associated with them, but not forms—that is, phonetic substance is not involved. Like other cases of replication, grammatical replication contrasts with borrowing, which—in our terminology—involves phonetic substance, that is, either sounds or form-meaning units such as morphemes, words, or larger entities. Both replication and borrowing are manifestations of contact-induced transfer or code-copying (Johanson 1992; 2002a; 2002b). The paper will deal with contact-induced grammatical replication as a product, for which there is 4 We are using the phrase “a language” as a shorthand for “speakers of a language”; it goes without saying that languages cannot do such things. Journal of language contact – THEMA 2 (2008) www. jlc-journal.org Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 04:22:18PM via free access 60 Bernd Heine & Tania Kuteva some crosslinguistic evidence, and we will have little to say about the process leading to this product since it is still largely ill-understood.
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