Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

10 Sections
6:00–16:30 Sand, Andrea (Universität Hannover)
Angloversals? Shared Morpho-Syntactic Features in Contact Varieties of
English
Anything goes, but within limits
Bakker, Dik / Hekking, Ewald
University of Amsterdam / Universidad de Querétaro
D.Bakker@uva.nl
In studies on language contact, two positions are taken with respect to what and what cannot
be borrowed. In the more traditional literature, such as Moravcik (1978), it is assumed that
borrowing is heavily constrained by typological aspects of the source language (SL) and the
target language (TL) involved in a process of borrowing. In more recent work, notably
Thomason (2001), which is based on a large amount of empirical data from contact research
in the literature, the general perspective sketched is that anything can be borrowed between
any pair of languages. The only real pattern is the order and relative proportions in which
lexical and grammatical material may be borrowed by the TL in the course of its gradual
change under the pressure of the SL. This is expressed on a 5-point borrowing scale running
from limited borrowing to fundamental change and language loss. Typological aspects of the
languages involved seem to play a relatively modest role.
In our paper we will take the position that both views hold to some extent, and that they
should be unified in some way or other. We will support our position with observations from
three combined case studies in language contact, as reported in Bakker et al (forthc). For that
exercise we selected three typologically different languages from Latin America, Otomí
(Mexico), Quechua (Ecuador) and Guaraní (Paraguay). All three are in more or less
equivalent contact with the same (official) language, Spanish in the sense that there is a high
level of bilingualism in all language communities involved. For each of them we collected
spoken data from a wide variety of speakers, stemming from different age groups, educational
backgrounds, dialectal areas, etcetera. In the three resulting corpora, which range from 80,000
to 120,000 tokens, we located the Spanish borrowings and coded these for both part of speech
in the SL and their syntactic function in the utterance of the TL. We analyzed the data with
the support of a computer programme which was developed precisely for this purpose.
Comparison of the results for the three languages shows that there are vast differences
between the patterns of borrowing between them but across dialects, which might arguably be
explained only on the basis of fundamental typological differences between the TL involved.
They also make it unlikely that there would be a universal type of borrowing scale phrased
mainly in terms of parts of speech of the SL.
After discussing our observations on these three instances of linguistic borrowing and
comparing the results, we will conclude our presentation with a tentative proposal for an
adapted borrowing scale, on which speakers, source and target language play a role.
References
Bakker, D., J. Gómez-Rendón & E. Hekking (forthc). ‘Spanish meets Guaraní, Otomí and
Quichua: a multilingual confrontation’ . In Th. Stolz et al (eds) Romanization.
Moravcik, E. (1978). ‘Universals of Language Contact’. In Joseph Greenberg: Universals of
Language. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 95-122.
Thomason, S.G. (2001). Language Contact. An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.