On Isomorphism and Formulas of Equivalence in Language Contact*

Breaking Down the Barriers, 755-784 2013-1-050-036-000366-1

Bernd Heine Universität zu Köln

A survey of a number of documented cases of intense language contact suggests that looking for ways of establishing formulas of equivalence between the structures of languages in contact provides one of the motivations of people aiming at communicating successfully in bilingual situations. Equivalence manifests itself in corresponding structures of different languages (or dialects) that are conceived of and/or treated as being the same. The paper is concerned with problems that people experience when trying to adjust the structure of one language to that of another language.

Key words: contact-induced change, formula of equivalence, isomorphism, language contact, replica language, translational equivalence

Alain Peyraube’s academic work is centrally concerned with the dynamics of language use and language change, and the present paper is devoted to one aspect of those dynamics, namely contact-induced language change. A survey of a number of documented cases of language contact suggests that looking for ways of establishing formulas of equivalence between the structures of the languages in contact provides one of the motivations of people aiming at communicating successfully in bilingual situations.

1. On equivalence

In an article on language contact involving Irish and English, Bliss observes:

“It is a striking fact that there is an almost complete correspondence between the uses of the dependent ending -(e)ann in early Modern Irish and the uses of the auxiliary do in English: every use of the auxiliary do in English requires the use of the dependent form in early Modern Irish [...]”. (Bliss 1972:78-79)

* I wish to express my gratitude to a number of colleagues for their cooperation when I was working on this paper, in particular to Walter Breu, Claudine Chamoreau, Hilary Chappell, Tania Kuteva, and Regina Martinez Casas.

Bernd Heine

The question that one may wish to ask is what induced early Modern Irish speakers to establish a connection between an Irish suffix and a verbal auxiliary in English? The literature on language contact abounds with similar examples, where speakers relate structurally contrasting elements of two languages in contact to one another. Flores Farfán (2004:91-92) found in his analysis of language contact between Nahuatl and Spanish in Mexico that under heavy influence of Spanish, speakers of Nahuatl extended the use of their future marker -s to function as an equivalent of the Spanish infinitive, and other studies on languages in contact show that speakers tend to treat infinitive markers in one language as being equivalent to markers of nominalization in another language (see Heine & Kuteva 2005: Ch. 6). Equivalence is a central notion of both contact linguistics and translation theory (see below). It manifests itself in corresponding structures of different languages (or dialects) that are conceived of and/or described as being the same; for example, when speakers regularly identify nouns in language R (the replica language) with nouns in language M (the model language)1 then they establish what─following Keesing (1991) ─we will call a formula of equivalence between two languages in contact. Establishing equivalence is a process that can be of two kinds: it may simply mean that speakers select a given entity Rx of the replica language to correspond to an entity Mx of the model language, but it may also concern a more complex process whereby speakers modify, that is, change, existing material of the replica language to achieve equivalence with the model language. What is called here ‘equivalence’ has been described in a number of different ways in the literature and referred to variously with terms such as “connection”, “correspondence”, “isogrammatism”,