23. Contact as a Source of Language Change.pdf

23. Contact as a Source of Language Change : The Handbook of Historical Linguistics : Blackwell Reference Online

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23. Contact as a Source of Language Change

SARAH GREY THOMASON

Subject

Linguistics » Historical Linguistics

Key-Topics

language

DOI:

10.1111/b.9781405127479.2004.00025.x

In a sense, most of what historical linguists study under the designation “language change” is due to

contact. An individual speaker's innovation typically becomes part of the database of historical linguistics

only after other speakers have adopted it - both because the likelihood that any historical linguist will

become aware of one person's innovation is minute and because the innovation may well be ephemeral even

for the single innovator. The changes we investigate therefore tend to be those that have spread throughout

a speech-(sub)community, and the process of spread is a function of contact between speakers.

Nevertheless, the spread of innovations within a speech community has traditionally been considered

separately from the diffusion of features across dialect and especially language boundaries. 1

One reason for this separation is that quite different methodologies for studying these two kinds of contact

have developed (compare, for instance, this chapter and the following one, by Wolfram and Schilling-Estes).

Another reason, which is of course related to the first, is a commonly perceived difference in the nature of

the processes: dialect borrowing (and indeed diffusion of features from any one speaker of a given dialect to

any other speaker of the same dialect) has generally been considered, at least implicitly, to be primarily a

social process, mostly or entirely unconstrained by linguistic factors. The transfer of features from one

language to another, by contrast, has been the subject of numerous proposed linguistic constraints, and

social factors have often been treated as secondary. The intuition underlying this distinction is that two

dialects of the same language, and certainly any two speakers of the same dialect, share most of their

lexicon and grammatical structures, so that a neighbor's innovation will be easy to learn (and adopt) and

unlikely to disrupt the original linguistic system seriously; but separate languages, since they differ in more

fundamental respects than dialects of the same language, would risk undergoing disruptive change if their

speakers adopted features promiscuously from other languages, and in addition such features would be

harder to learn (and thus harder to adopt). There is also a common assumption that speakers of dialects of

the same language are more likely to talk to each other than to speakers of different languages; so social

contact is often assumed as a given in dialectology, whereas it must be established by argument and

evidence to support a claim of change induced by contact with another language.

These intuitions and assumptions are not wholly mistaken, but the differences turn out to be a matter of

degree, not of kind. Dialects of the same language may have particular structure points that are more

different than analogous structures in related or even unrelated languages; in many speech-communities,

contact with other languages is more frequent than contact with geographically distant dialects of the same

language; and so forth. This means (among other things) that both linguistic and social factors must be

considered in any full account of contact-induced change, regardless of whether the contact is between

dialects or separate languages. More generally, both social and linguistic factors must in principle be

considered in any full account of any linguistic change, although in practice we have little or no social

information about the vast majority of changes we know about. For this reason, and also because the

following chapter covers dialectological aspects of the general topic, I will focus here primarily on what has

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following chapter covers dialectological aspects of the general topic, I will focus here primarily on what has

traditionally been studied as contact-induced language change - namely, the linguistic results of contact

between two (or more) languages.

Before turning to particular aspects of the general topic, I should clarify my use of terms. In my view, contact

between languages (or dialects) is a source of linguistic change whenever a change occurs that would have

been unlikely, or at least less likely, to occur outside a specific contact situation. This definition is broad

enough to include both the transfer of linguistic features from one language to another and innovations

which, though not direct interference features, nevertheless have their origin in a particular contact situation.

The most obvious examples in the second category are those changes in a dying language that do not make

the dying language more similar to the dominant language (see section 3 for discussion). I usually use the

terms “(linguistic) interference” and “contact-induced change” interchangeably; but this usage requires a

caveat, because non-convergent simplifying innovations in a dying language are certainly contact-induced,

though they are not interference features. Less obvious but still important examples are innovations that

appear at a late stage of a chain-reaction process in which an initial instance of structural transfer sets off a

series of other changes. In such cases the end result may well be more radical structural change than the

first step, but the ultimate source of the drastic result nevertheless lies in that initial transfer. The late-stage

innovations are therefore still contact-induced changes, but they are not interference features per se.

The notion of feature transfer should also be construed broadly: it includes innovations based on

reinterpretation of source-language features by the speakers who implement the changes as well as the

introduction of features actually present in the source language. All these are interference features in the

receiving language.

A final observation, though not a definition, is also needed to set the stage for the discussions that follow.

On occasion I will refer to the sociolinguistic notion “intensity of contact” as a requirement for certain

degrees and kinds of interference. This is a vague notion, but it is difficult to pin down more precisely in a

way that applies to a wide range of contact situations; among the factors that contribute to greater intensity

of contact are a high level of bilingualism, socioeconomic and/or political pressure on one speaker group in

a two-language contact situation to shift to the other language, length of contact, and relative sizes of

speaker populations. The point I wish to make in connection with intensity of contact is this: great intensity

of contact is a necessary condition for certain kinds of interference, especially structural interference, but it

is by no means a sufficient condition. It is easy to find contact situations in which, despite (for instance)

great pressure on and universal bilingualism among speakers of one language, very little contact-induced

change of any kind has occurred. One such example is Montana Salish (also called Flathead), a Salishan

language spoken in northwestern Montana. Of the several thousand tribal members, fewer than 70 fluent

speakers of the language remain, and all of them have native fluency in English as well as in Montana Salish.

Nevertheless, the English intrusion into Montana Salish is minimal: a few loanwords - some of them dating

back to the nineteenth century, when few if any tribal members spoke English - and no detectable

grammatical influence of any kind. Nor are there any visible signs of language attrition; in particular, all the

elaborate morphological structure of the language is intact. The general conclusion is obvious: as with

internally motivated change, predicting when contact-induced change will occur is at best risky.

In section 1 I discuss various types of linguistic interference: a classification of the changes in terms of their

effects on the receiving system; a fundamental dichotomy between changes in which imperfect learning plays

a role and changes in which it doesn't; and linguistic factors that affect the likelihood that a feature will be

borrowed. Section 2 surveys mechanisms of interference, section 3 concerns the relationship between

linguistic interference and changes that occur in language death, and section 4 compares contact-language

genesis with contact-induced language change. I conclude in section 5 with a brief discussion of

retrospective issues - in particular, how can one “prove” that a particular linguistic change is due to

language contact? - and a summing up of the entire chapter. Throughout this chapter the discussion and

examples will focus on two-language contact situations rather than on multilanguage situations such as

those characteristic of Sprachbund contexts. The reason for this focus is that basic processes and results, as

well as their correlations with social factors, are much easier to isolate in less complex situations (see

section 2 for further discussion of this point).

1 Types of Linguistic Interference

There are of course many possible ways of classifying the results of linguistic interference. In this section I

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will discuss the three classifications that are most generally relevant to understanding the nature of contact-

induced change -differing results in terms of effects on the receiving system, differing types of interference

resulting from different social conditions, and differing types of interference resulting from the influence of

various linguistic factors.

1.1 Systematic effects on the recipient language

First, changes may be categorized according to their general effects on the receiving language's structure:

old features may be lost from the system, new features may be added to the system, or old features may be

replaced by new ones. Not all changes fit neatly into one category or another, since some involve partial loss

with partial replacement and others involve partial addition with partial replacement; but these three

categories cover the basic possibilities. 2

Here are typical examples of the three types. Romansh has lost gender agreement in predicate adjectives

under German influence (Weinreich 1953: 39), and both Kupwar Marathi and Kupwar Urdu have lost gender

agreement in noun modifiers under Kannada influence (Gumperz and Wilson 1971; see Thomason and

Kaufman 1988: 86–7 for discussion). The simplest examples of added features are lexical borrowings where

both form and content are new to the borrowing language, such as English bok choy , but structural features

are also often added via borrowing. For instance, Kupwar Urdu has acquired an inclusive/exclusive “we”

distinction from Marathi (Gumperz and Wilson 1971), and vowel harmony has been introduced into Greek

suffixes in some Asia Minor Greek dialects (Dawkins 1916: 47, 68). An example of replacement is the

appearance, in an Asia Minor Greek dialect of Cappadocia, of the Turkish inflectional suffixes -ik ‘lpl.’ and -

iniz ‘2pl.,’ replacing the corresponding Greek suffixes on Greek verbs (Dawkins 1916: 144).

It is worth noting that these three results are also basic categories in internally motivated linguistic change;

here, as in certain other important respects, the main difference between the two lies in their sources, not in

anything special about the change processes themselves. So, for instance, we find feature loss in cases

where there appears to be no external motivation, as in the loss of the distinction between the dative and

locative cases in some Serbo-Croatian dialects. Internally motivated feature addition includes, among other

things, discourse markers such as like in She's like, “What are you doing here?”

In both internally and externally motivated change, feature replacements are always complex processes,

involving competition between the original form or construction and the innovative feature. For internal

changes this competition is explored in (for instance) Bloomfield's chapter on “Fluctuation in the frequency of

forms” (1933: 392–403) and embodied in Kurylowicz's fourth “law” of analogy (1945–9: 30), according to

which competing forms that arise through analogic split undergo semantic differentiation if they both remain

in the language (with the innovative form taking over the basic function, thus justifying calling it a partial

replacement). Somewhat parallel examples with internal and external sources can be adduced. Compare, for

instance, the partial internal analogic replacements in hanged versus hung (with semantic differentiation)

and dived versus dove (without semantic differentiation) with partial replacements through borrowing, such

as the borrowed/native words animal versus deer (with semantic differentiation) and the competition

between borrowed and native inflectional material in Cappadocian Greek, where Turkish suffixes are not

used on all Greek verbs all the time.

1.2 Interference with and without imperfect learning

The second especially important classification of types of linguistic interference focuses on a robust

correlation between one prominent sociolinguistic variable and divergent sets of linguistic results. The

sociolinguistic variable is the presence versus the absence of full, or at least extensive, fluency in the

recipient language. That is, the crucial factor is whether the people who introduce the interference features

speak the language into which the features are introduced - or, in other words, whether imperfect learning

plays a role in the interference process. When fluent speakers of language A incorporate features into A from

another language, B, the first and most common interference features will be non-basic lexical items,

followed (if contact is sufficiently intense) by structural features and perhaps also basic vocabulary. This

pattern - (non-basic) vocabulary first, structure later if at all - is at the foundation of most of the borrowing

scales that have been proposed in the literature (e.g., Moravcsik 1978: 110 and Comrie 1981: 202ff; see

Thomason and Kaufman 1988 for discussion). By contrast, if people who are not fluent speakers of A

introduce features into A from another language, B, the first interference features (and usually the most

common ones overall) will not be lexical, but rather phonological and syntactic. Morphological features may

also be introduced under this condition; the likelihood that lexical items from B will be incorporated into A

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also be introduced under this condition; the likelihood that lexical items from B will be incorporated into A

depends on other social factors, such as the relative prestige of A and B speakers.

These two types of interference were characterized in Thomason and Kaufman (1988) as borrowing , in which

features are incorporated into A by native (L1) speakers of A, versus shift-induced interference , in which a

group of L2 learners of A carry over features from B (their L1) into A during a process of shift from B to A.

Independently, in the same year, van Coetsem (1988) proposed a nearly identical distinction, labeling the

two types recipient language agentivity (or borrowing ) versus source language agentivity (or imposition ).

These two formulations are adequate for most cases, but not for all: in particular, borrowing may be carried

out by fluent L2 speakers of A; “shift-induced interference” sometimes occurs when no shift takes place at

all - in cases where, as with English in many parts of the world, local varieties of a language arise and

stabilize but remain second languages; and part of an “imposition” process may involve the participation of

A speakers (see below for discussion).

Moreover, the role played by imperfect group learning of a target language (TL) is more complex than the

definition of shift-induced interference allows for. If shifting speakers do not learn the TL perfectly, their

version of the TL (TL 2 ) will differ from the native speakers’ version (TL 1 ) in two ways: first, the learners will

fail to learn some features of the TL, usually features that are hard to learn for reasons of universal

markedness or typological distance from the structure of their L1, or both; and second, they will carry over

features from their L1 into the TL. In the latter case the term “imperfect learning” may be misleading: in

some instances the learners may well know that the particular L1 features do not exist in the TL, but they

may nevertheless introduce them into their TL 2 in order to maintain an L1 distinction that is lacking in the

TL 1 . The learners’ TL 2 may stabilize as a variety exclusive to the shifting group and their descendants; this

happens if there is sufficient social and/or geographic isolation from the main TL 1 community to permit,

encourage, or necessitate maintenance of the TL 2 without linguistic integration. But sometimes TL 2 speakers

become part of the TL 1 speech-community, with linguistic integration. In such a case TL 1 speakers may

borrow features from TL 2 , thus producing an integrated variety, TL 3 ; this process is of course borrowing in

the narrow sense of Thomason and Kaufman (1988), but the interference features are nevertheless those

characteristic of shift-induced interference - both because the innovations (from the perspective of TL 1 ) will

be a subset of the innovations of TL 2 and because TL 1 and TL 2 already share a common lexicon.

For all these reasons, the formulation of the distinction in Thomason and Kaufman (1988) needs two

revisions: the crucial sociolinguistic factor is not whether or not shift takes place, but whether or not there is

imperfect learning by a group of people; 3 and one half of the linguistic prediction must be hedged - in

borrowing, interference always begins with non-basic vocabulary unless languages A and B have mostly or

entirely identical lexicons. Unfortunately, the first revision leaves us with no convenient and fully accurate

term for what has been called shift-induced interference; to avoid proliferating terms I will continue to use

it, in the hope that readers will not find its literal inaccuracy too jarring.

Finally, it must be emphasized that the picture presented in this section takes the simplest case as basic.

Many cases are considerably more complicated. One complication is that the two types of interference often

co-occur in the same contact situation: shift-induced interference may be implemented (in the first instance)

by shifting speakers even while original TL speakers are borrowing features directly from the shifting group's

language (not from TL 2 ). The other obvious complication is that more than two languages may be involved,

with varying mixes of borrowing and shift-induced interference going on at more or less the same time.

These are the cases usually labeled as Sprachbund situations, where a number of languages in a particular

region share a set of features that distinguish them from their respective sister languages in other regions.

Probably the most famous Sprachbund areas are the Balkans (see, e.g., Sandfeld 1930; Schaller 1975; Joseph

1983a) and India (see, e.g., Emeneau 1956), but these are by no means the only examples; among the

others that have been discussed in the literature are Arnhem Land in Australia (Heath 1978), the Pacific

Northwest of North America (e.g., Jacobs 1954; Thompson and Kinkade 1990), and Meso-America (Campbell

et al. 1986).

As a result of such complications - and in particular because even shift-induced interference often includes

lexicon, and contact situations in which group shift is taking place sometimes include simultaneous two-way

interference - the retrospective picture may be difficult or impossible to unravel. Only two safe predictions

can be made. If, for a past contact situation, it can be established that contact-induced change occurred,

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can be made. If, for a past contact situation, it can be established that contact-induced change occurred,

and if phonological and syntactic interference predominate, then imperfect learning must have been a major

factor in the process of interference. In contrast, if mainly or only lexicon has been transferred from B to A,

then imperfect learning is unlikely to have played any significant role in the process. But if sizable amounts

of both lexical and structural interference can be demonstrated, it is likely to be impossible to tell, from the

linguistic evidence alone, whether or not imperfect learning played a role.

1.3 Linguistic factors in linguistic interference

Interference features can easily be found in all linguistic subsystems -phonetics, phonology, morphology,

syntax, lexical semantics, discourse, and even narrative structure - under the appropriate social

circumstances. The appropriate social circumstances include, besides the presence or absence of imperfect

learning, the crucial but hard-to-define factor of intensity of contact: the more intense the contact, the more

kinds of linguistic features can turn up as interference features. The probabilities are not the same for all

subsystems, however; the linguistic factors of universal markedness and typological distance between source

and recipient language are important in predicting what kinds of features will be transferred from one

language to another. This is especially obvious in shift-induced interference because, as noted above, these

factors contribute to the learnability of particular features in particular contact situations: TL 1 features that

are harder to learn are less likely to be learned by shifting speakers, and TL 2 features that are harder to

learn are less likely to be learned and borrowed by original TL speakers.

The usefulness of borrowing scales attests to the relevance of linguistic factors in borrowing (in my narrow

sense) as well, but here the focus shifts from learnability per se to the degree of integratedness into a

linguistic system, as emphasized by Heath (1978) and Comrie (1981), among others. Features that are

deeply embedded in elaborate interlocking structures are in general less likely to be borrowed, because they

are less likely to fit into the recipient language's structures; that is why the lexicon, which for all its structure

is less highly organized than other grammatical subsystems, is borrowed first, and it is why inflectional

morphology tends to be borrowed last. But highly integrated features may be borrowed readily between

systems that are typologically very similar; that is why, in dialect borrowing, even inflectional morphology is

quite easily transferred. Other factors also enter in, though they are harder to specify; for instance, the

significant difference in borrowing probability between basic vocabulary (less often borrowed) and non-basic

vocabulary (more often borrowed) must depend on something other than degree of internal organization.

And when contact is intense enough, there appear to be no absolute linguistic barriers at all to borrowing

(see section 2.7 below for discussion).

2 Mechanisms of Interference 4

If we ask how contact-induced change comes about, we find that the actual processes parallel processes of

internally motivated change to a considerable extent. In both types we must consider the competition

between old and new variants, the role of markedness (or, more generally, ease of learning) in helping or

hindering the spread of an innovation, the effects of analogic leveling and extension, and the role of

speakers’ creativity in producing and stabilizing innovations. I will not emphasize these parallels here, but a

fuller treatment of processes of linguistic change would necessarily explore them.

Mechanisms of contact-induced change fall into four categories. Two of them correlate with the distinction

between borrowing and shift-induced interference: one set of mechanisms comes into play when the

implementers of a change are bilingual in both source and recipient language (sections 2.1–2.3, and in a

sense section 2.6), while the other set comprises second language acquisition strategies (section 2.5). A

third category, “negotiation,” seems to overlap with both of these types (section 2.4), and the fourth category

has to do with more or less conscious and deliberate decisions by speakers to implement language change

(section 2.7).

Before beginning the survey of mechanisms, I should make two background assumptions explicit. First, any

feature that can be code-switched from language A into language B can turn into a permanent interference

feature in B, and the same is true for all the other mechanisms. More generally, any feature that can appear

in a single person's speech at any time - for example, in speech errors caused by fatigue or drunkenness or

mere carelessness - can turn into a permanent change in the entire language; it is ultimately irrelevant

whether the source of the feature is internal or external. In other words, the question of linguistic possibility

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