Robert M.

Kim KOR 631

Grammaticalization in situations of extreme language contact

8.1 Introduction -Most of work on grammaticalization that we have discussed so far was conducted within the framework of a relatively monogenetic view of change which idealized homogeneity of language and of transmission. However, in fact most actual situations involved contact, at the minimum with speakers of other dialects, whether social, regional, or stylistic. -This chapter will focus on whether such contact situations raise special issues regarding grammaticalization. -Some of the topics that will be ignored will be situations of contact that entail only in partial external influence on subparts of a linguistic system - such as 'borrowing' - extensive incorporation of foreign elements in only one or two areas of the language, typically lexicon, independent words or morphemes, with minimal influence elsewhere. -e.g. as in English give(Scandinavian/Swedish ge), table(French tableau), tubular(Latin tubulatus). -Other areas of contact situation that will be ignored in this chapter will be of the language admixture across a wide area. One such case would be Balkan and of the Dravidian languages. -Instead, we will look at pidgins and creoles, languages that shows extensive influence/intertwining of two or more languages on each other. Pidgins and creoles are especially important for historical linguistics due to its relatively recent origin(three or four centuries at most) and also because it shows rapid change in pre-literate/non-literate situations. 8.2 Basic characteristics of pidgin and creoles -pidgin: is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the country in which they reside (but where there is no common language between the groups). -Fundamentally, a pidgin is a simplified means of linguistic communication, as it is constructed impromptu, or by convention, between individuals or groups of people. A pidgin is not the native language of any speech community, but is instead learned as a second language. A pidgin may be built from words, sounds, or body language from multiple other languages and cultures. -Pidgins allow people or a group of people to communicate with each other without having any similarities in language and does not have any rules, as long as both parties are able to understand each other. -Pidgins usually have low prestige with respect to other languages as language used by dominant group or class of users were called 'suuperstrate language' and that of socially subordinate group is often called 'substrate language.' (e.g. English vs. West African Pidgin English, Hawaiian Pidgin English, Hawaiian Creole English, Tok Pisin(of Papua New Guinea)). -Pidgins can be changed and do not follow a specific order, but not all simplified or "broken" forms of a language are pidgins. Each pidgin has its own norms of usage which must be learned for proficiency in the pidgin. 8.2.1 Some characteristics of pidgins Read Example (1) on page 215, "Grammaticalization" i) a lexicon comprised largely of the two major categories N and V (e.g., sik used for both 'be sick,' and for 'disease') ii) lack of word-formation rules() in the lexicon iii) periphrasis() (e.g. haus sik = hospital, gras bilong pisin(grass of bird) = feather) iv) temporal, aspectual, and modal expressions expressed by adverbs or particles (no consistent means of expressing tense,

aspect, or modality) v) absence of inflection and allomorphy(, ) vi) absence of clefting, topicalization, etc., largely resulting from absence of fixed word order vii) absence of embedding viii) absence of stylistic variants As pidgins stabilize and are extended to new uses, they acquire more extensive morphology, most especially predicate markers(PM) which link the predicate to the subject. Extended and stabilized form of pidgin language - which addresses expressivity and to hearer's need for claricy - can be found in Example (2) - a West African Pidgin English 8.2.2 Some characteristics of creoles -Creole is believed to arise when a pidgin, developed by adults for use as a second language, becomes the native and primary language of their children a process known as nativization. -Many of the creoles known today arose in the last 500 years, as a result of the worldwide expansion in European maritime power and trade in the Age of Discovery, which led to extensive European colonial empires and an intense slave trade. The specific sense of the term was coined in the 16th and 17th century, during the great expansion in European maritime power and trade that led to the establishment of European colonies in other continents. -The English term creole comes from French crole, which is cognate with the Spanish term criollo and Portuguese crioulo, all descending from the verb criar ("to breed" or "to raise"), ultimately from Latin creare ("to produce, create"). -Creole characteristics i) Aricles: a distinction is made between definite referential (3a), indefinite referential (3b), and indefinite non-referential (3c). Example (3) a. Mi bai di buk - I bought the book(that you already know about). b. Mi bai wan buk - I bought a (particular) book. c. Mi bai buk - I bought a book (or books), (Even the speaker does not know or remembers specifically which book[s]). ii) Tense-modality-aspect(TMA) systems: periphrastic expressions are widely found. Bickerton(1984) argued that they are typically sequences of the anterior tense, irrealis modality and non-punctual aspect markers. e.g. Guyanese Creole bin[+anterior] - go[+irrealis] - stei[+non-punctual] V, such as 'would have been V-ing.' - see Example (4) However, Plag(1994) and Winford(2000) argues that TMA systems in creoles can only be fully understood if they are analyzed in terms of universal cross-linguistic categories and in terms of their discourse functions in narrative and other discourse genres, rather than in terms of overly simplified form above. iii) A distinction is made between realized(-irrealis) complementation as in Example (5a) and unrealized(+irrealis) complementation as in (5b). See Example (5) - al, pu al iv) Multiple negation: in negative sentences, typically non-definite subjects, non-definite verb phrase constituents and the verb must all be negated. See Example (6) v) Clause dependency, especially relativization. See Example (7) vi) Focusing by leftward movement. Enikain laengwij ai no kaen spik gud - (any-kind language I not can speak well, 'there's no kind of language that I can speak well). Example (9) -Like pidgins, creoles show a considerable range of elaboration, specifically from varieties furthest from the standard - known as basilects - to varieties close to the standard creole - known as acrolects. 8.3 Implications of pidgins and creoles for language change

This section will discuss the role of child vs. adult language acquisition and of simplification and elaboration in creoles which are central for language change in general, and therefore are crucial in understanding assumptions behind claims about grammaticalization in pidgins and creoles. 8.3.1 Child versus adult language acquisition -Speakers of the pidgin lost access to their native languages in circumstances of traumatic disconnection from their native countries and communities, such as occurred in the context of the slave trade, when they had only fleeting access to the linguistic repertoires of superstrate language speakers. Bickerton(1975, 1984) Their children therefore grew up in the absence of viable native language models thus rapidly develops creoles which show similar structural properties throughout the world. Since these children had no access to native languages and developed with exceptional rapidity, creoles provide privileged evidence for a "bioprogram" or innate human-specific neurological disposition that permits children who have no extensive consistent language input to create a new language out of the bits and pieces of degenerate input they encounter. -early characterization of bioprogram includes i)specific/non-specific, ii)state/process, iii)punctual/non-punctual, iv)causative/non-causative. -later version of bioprogram had syntactic characteristics of a limited simple clause which assigns only subject and object without any other case markers, thus no prepositions. Other properties include zero copula, bus serial verbs of the type illustrated in Example (10) also found. Example (10a) Dei gon get naif pok you - they go get knife poke you, they will stab you with a knife. -One underlying assumption in support of bioprogram is that especially in Hawai'i during the 19th century where many mutually unintelligible languages were spoken, and where there was 'no pre-existing language in common' out of which the creole could arise. -S. Roberts(1998, 2000) argues that the crucial variable in the development of Hawaiian English Creole is whether speakers are locally born or foreign born - locally born groups were actively contributed extensively to innovation, while the latter did not. Also it was not 1st generation children, but 2nd generation locally born child who contributed most(and most rapidly) to the deleopment of the creole. In other words, there is no evidence even in Hawai'i for catastrophic, discontinuous change between pidgin and creole, and also English creole innovations may have developed among older children, in school settings, rather than at very early age, as well as among young adults. -Creoles are the result of adults expanding the pidgin that structural innovations can be made by adults, a position that is coming to be increasingly widely accepted. 8.3.2 Simplifications and elaboration -Bickerton's hypothesis: Children develop creoles out of rudimentary pidgins and structural simplification or optimization is the natural and indeed expected result of child language acquisition - "pidgin simplification" and "creole elaboration". However because creole is always more complex than the pidgin, this hypothesis pose fundamental issues. -Regarding the emergence of a pidgin is that a restricted system is innovated based on the lexicon of the lexifier language, and some principles, probably universal, of minimal grammatical organization - which is abductive process. It suggests that adults can simplify their linguistic systems, and so calls into question the assumption that only small children can achieve this. - The process of the creolization is a significantly more extensive process of expansion and complexification. It appears often to be initiated by older children or adults, and therefore likewise challenges the assumption that only small children can do this. 8.4 Specific implications of pidgins and creoles for grammaticalization -Different approaches in pidgin/creole grammaticalization are discussed as who innovates, and how discontinuous the innovation is from the structures available in the languages that contribute to the language mix.

-1)If creole genesis represents radical discontinuity from the donor languages , then the assumption will be that grammaticalization takes place extensively(and uniquely) in the creoles, independently of developments in the donor languages; or if assumed that 2)the lexifier is the major donor, then its grammaticalization should be directly of the cognate form or construction in the lexifier, usually after creolization. -If neither, then the locus of grammaticalization can be pushed back to the various donor languages, and a relatively continuous development can be posited from the donor to the creoles. -Another argument is that stable pidgins and creoles have the grammar of the subordinate languages and the lexicon of the lexifier language. Especially Eastern Oceanic Austronesian languages took similar form of English language. Keesing argues that "from 1840's onward, the Islanders took the lexical resources of English and nautical jargon and progressively hammered them into grammatical designs common, at an abstract level to their native languages." In other words, an Eastern Oceanic Austronesian form is translated into a semantically roughly equivalent form of English, but may serve the grammatical purposes of their own form. - as laik(like) -> about to; klostu(close to) -> almost, nearly, be about to as in Tok pisin(in Papua New Guinea). -Formulas equivalence includes serial constructions, predicate markers, and object markers. Eastern Oceanic languages typically use deictics meaning 'hither' and 'thither' in serial constructions translatable into such English lexical items as 'bring,' 'take,' and 'ask.' They also use object markers. Some of the examples are illustrated in (18) and (19). -At the time of writing of text, opinions appear to be shifting away from Bickertons' claim that pidgins and creoles have unique linguistic properties of bioprogram that is different from UG. Instead, evidence is growing that creolization "can be regarded as s special kind of contact-induced language change, occurring under very special social circumstances" -As a result opinion is also shifting away from assumptions of discontinuity between 'fully formed' lexifier language and 'simplified' languages like pidgin and creoles - that study of these languages also challenges the assumption that grammaticalization occurs in situations of relatively continuous transmission from one speaker to another, and one community to another. -Thus the importance of recognizing multiple as well as single sources of input to grammaticalization is stressed.