Sociolinguistic typology: social determinants of linguistic complexity Peter Trudgill University of Agder © 2 For William Labov 3 Contents Acknowledgements Preface Prologue: Social correlates of linguistic structures Chapter 1. Sociolinguistic typology and the speed of change Chapter 2. Complexification, simplification, and two types of contact Chapter 3. Isolation and complexification Chapter 4. Mechanisms of complexification Chapter 5. Contact and isolation in phonology Chapter 6. Mature phenomena and societies of intimates Epilogue: On the future of linguistic complexity Bibliography 4 Acknowledgements The first reference in print to this book is as “Trudgill (forthcoming)”, in my 1986 book Dialects in Contact. It has, in other words, been a very long time coming. In the course of the decades that it has required for the book to finally appear, very many people indeed have been of assistance to me in its writing, in various ways. I know I have not been as diligent as I should have been in keeping a record of their kindnesses, and the following list is therefore incomplete. I apologise. But I thank all the people I have inadvertently left off the list, and all those who are on it, very warmly indeed for their help, and for sharing different parts of this enterprise with me. It goes without saying that they are not to blame for any of the many things which I am sure will be shown to be wrong with the book, but here I am saying it anyway: Sasha Aikhenvald, Anders Ahlqvist, Enam Al-Wer, Henning Andersen, Lars-Gunnar Andersson, Amalia Arvaniti, Wiesław Awedyk, C.-J. Bailey, Laurie Bauer, Winifred Bauer, Allan Bell, Raphael Berthele, Kurt Braunmüller, David Britain, Keith Brown, Neil Brummage, Kate Burridge, Andy Butcher, Lyle Campbell, Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, Jack Chambers, Magdalena Charzynska-Wójcik, Sandra Clarke, Michael Clyne, Donna Christian, Bernard Comrie, Grev Corbett, Bill Croft, Anne Cutler, Östen Dahl, Alice Davison, Rik De Busser, Gunther De Vogelaer, Bob Dixon, Yvonne Dröschel, Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Jan Terje Faarlund, Małgorzata Fabiszak, Ralph Fasold, Janet Fletcher, Paul Fletcher, John Foulks, Alexander L. Francis, Mike Garman, David Gil, Elizabeth Gordon, Stephane Goyette, George Grace, Patrick Griffiths, Walter Haas, Liliane Haegeman, Eric Hamp, Jean Hannah, Ray Harlow, John Harris, Martin Harris, Martin Haspelmath, Jack Hawkins, Roger Hawkins, Junko Hibiya, Raymond Hickey, Jarich Hoekstra, Ernst Håkon Jahr, Mark Janse, Adam Jaworski, Brian Joseph, Peter Kenyon, Marcin Kilarsky, Paul Kiparsky, Jussi Klemola, Miklós Kontra, 5 Andrew Koontz-Garboden, Bernd Kortmann, William Labov, Stephen Laker, Randy LaPolla, Christian Lehmann, Gillian Lewis, Ken Lodge, John Lyons, Brian MacWhinney, John McWhorter, Brit Mæhlum, Didier Maillat, Jim Milroy, Lesley Milroy, Marianne Mithun, Magdalena Murawska, Daniel Nettle, Terttu Nevalainen, Michael Noonan, Thomas O’Rahilly, Robert Orr, Michael Osborne, Frank Palmer, Andreas Papapavlou, Andy Pawley, Magdalena Perdek, Lukas Pietsch, Mark Post, Dennis Preston, Andrew Radford, Mechthild Reh, Geoffrey Sampson, Klára Sándor, Nathalie Schilling- Estes, Daniel Schreier, Wolfgang Schulze, Peter Siemund, Kaius Sinnemäki, J.C. Smith, Tonya Stebbins, Jackson Sun, Sali Tagliamonte, Sally Thomason, Arne Torp, Milton Tynch, Jacques Van Keymeulen, Wim Vandenbussche, Johan Van der Auwera, Theo Vennemann, Nikos Vergis, Susanne Wagner, Alastair Walker, Søren Wichmann, David Willis, Don Winford, Ilse Wischer, Walt Wolfram, and Laura Wright. And of all the many people just listed, I would like to single out for very special thanks my wife Jean Hannah for her tolerance, guidance, support, advice and enormously helpful constructive criticism, which I have actually acted on really rather often. I am especially grateful to the following people, already mentioned above, who have also read the entire book in earlier versions, and supplied me with extremely helpful comments, corrections, examples, counter-examples, references – and suggestions for improvement, for which there was certainly a great need: Sasha Aikhenvald, Laurie Bauer, David Britain, Andrew Carstairs- McCarthy, Östen Dahl, Bob Dixon, Jan Terje Faarlund, Jean Hannah, Marcin Kilarsky, Lesley Milroy, Søren Wichmann, Ilse Wischer, and an anonymous reviewer for OUP. Very special thanks also go to John Davey of Oxford University Press, described by Bob Dixon as “linguistics editor sans pareil”, a sentiment with which I heartily concur, not only for his help with and enthusiasm for this book, but also for his magnificent work in promoting linguistics generally. 6 This book was worked on and written while I was employed in Switzerland, first as Professor of English Linguistics at the Université de Lausanne; and then as Professor of English Linguistics at the Université de Fribourg/Universität Freiburg Schweiz; while I was affiliated to the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia; as well as to the University of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway; and to the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. I have also been able to work on the book while enjoying visiting professorships at the Ohio State University, Albert-Ludwigs- Universität Freiburg, the University of Vienna, and the University of Hamburg. University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway 7 Preface This book is about sociolinguistic typology. By sociolinguistic typology I mean a form of linguistic typology which is sociolinguistically informed, asks sociolinguistic questions, and tries to supply sociolinguistic answers. My book is based on the assumption that the nature of the human language faculty is the same the world over, and has been so ever since humans became human. Here, however, I consider the possibility that, because of the influence social structure can have on language structure, this common faculty of the human mind may nevertheless produce different types of language in different places and at different moments in human history. The book is speculative – if you read it, you will see that I have awarded myself the luxury of wondering about things. They are things I have been wondering about for quite a while – my first essay on this topic, containing in embryonic form a number of the ideas presented here, appeared in Trudgill (1983) as “Language contact and language change: on the rise of the creoloid”, but was actually written in 1977, and was first presented in public at the International Conference of Historical Linguistics at Stanford University in March, 1979, where it aroused both opposition and support – I recall discussions with Henning Andersen, C.J. Bailey, Sally Thomason, Marianne Mithun, and other participants (see Traugott 1980). What I have been wondering about is the extent to which different types of human society produce different types of language and, if this is the case, what this might mean for the future typology of human languages. As I wrote for my 1979 presentation, “I want to suggest that the present is in some important respects obviously very different from 8 the past, and that these differences may have linguistic consequences” (1983: 102) – a point to which I shall return, especially in Chapter 6. My 1979 presentation was followed by other work by linguists tackling similar issues, such as Bailey (1982), Andersen (1988), Thurston (1989), Grace (1990), Ross (1997), Nettle (1999), Nettle and Romaine (2000), McWhorter (2007), Wray and Grace (2007), Sinnemäki (2009), and Lupyan and Dale (2010). But of course my paper was by no means the first occasion when scholars had wondered about the relationship between linguistic and social structure. It fell into a long tradition that included Madvig (1857), Schlegel (1846), Jespersen (1894), Gabelentz, (1901), Sapir (1912), Jakobson (1929), Whorf (1956), and Hymes (1974). My legendarily sceptical friend and colleague Lyle Campbell is not impressed by this kind of work by these scholars. Campbell and Poser (2008: 358) find that the approach has little or no merit; and they tell us that their problem is that, whatever generalisation workers in this tradition propose, “there are many counterexamples” (2008: 359). As far as my own proposals are concerned, I am certainly aware that it is in their very nature that there should be counterexamples. I am dealing with likelihoods, and formulating tendencies rather than strict rules of correlation. That is, I am using the word determinant, as it appears in the subtitle to this book, in the relatively weak sense in which it means, as the Oxford English Dictionary has it, “a conditioning factor”. I hope, though, that I have made some progress, as compared to earlier work, on the topic of what the social determinants of linguistic structure might be. I have done this by isolating not just one but a number of different social parameters which, when taken in combination, shed much more light than was previously the case on the sociolinguistic factors which influence linguistic typology, particularly in terms of linguistic complexity and simplicity. In this book I consider structurally 9 different types of community from the point of view of the roles of, principally, the following social factors: community size, social networks, social stability, contact with other communities, and shared information. I also, crucially, investigate the issue of how and why there should be links between linguistic and social structure; and I do this by proposing and examining a number of linguistic mechanisms which permit the social