Gram - SEAS

226 8 Situations of extreme language contact
constructions were primarily paratactic. However, ia became more widely used in
the I 940s and I 950s by adults acquiring a creole.
Another study of grammaticalization in Tok Pisin (Romaine 1999) on the development
of laik 'want/like/desire' « Eng. like) and klostu 'near' « Eng. close
to) into markers for near or "proximative ,,3 time meaning 'almost, nearly, be about
to', tracks evidence for their history in the last hundred years. Romaine gives a
detailed account of the competition between two forms and argues that it supports
Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca's (1994: 12) hypothesis that source meanings determine
the semantic path grams can travel. The older of the two forms, klostu, which
originated in a spatial preposition or adverbial, came to be grammaticalized as part
of the verb phrase, where it can be used with both later and earlier time expressions
as in (16a) and (16b) respectively:
(16) a. 01 tok klostu bai wanem ren pundaun nau.
they talk close FUT which rain fall now
'They said it was about to rain now.'
b. Em tok 01 masalai klostu kilim mi.
he say PL spirit nearly killed me
'He said that the spirits nearly killed him.' (Romaine 1999: 337)
It has largely been replaced by laik in immediate future contexts. Successive stages
of laik reveal development of the meaning 'about to', auxiliation, and phonological
reduction (> lai > la). An early example of enrichment to proximative 'about to'
and loss of volitional meaning is:
(17) Machine he like die.
'The machine is about to die.' (Romaine 1999: 328, citing Downing 1919)
The specialization of laik correlates with its origin in a verb meaning 'want,'
which is fu ture oriented. Laik itself is in competition with bai, but while the latter
expresses more general fu ture, as might be expected from its original semantics
('by and by'), the former expresses exclusively immediate future.
These kinds of analyses envision grammaticalization as arising within a creole
modeled on the lexifier. Although toward the end of their article Sankoff and
Brown note that similar constructions occur in Melanesian languages, and similar
ia markings arose in other Melanesian pidgins, nevertheless, they do not question
the independent origin of the con"structions in each pidgin/creole. Likewise,
Romaine mentions that research needs to be done on the possibility 01" substrate
intluence on the meanings of klostu and laik, but the argument concerning why
and how the competing meanings were kept apart assumes English semantics.
Such approaches have been countered by various versions of a claim that stable
pidgins and creoles have the grammar of the subordinate languages and the lexicon