chamoreau, léglise (2012) dynamics of contact-induced language change

Dynamics of Contact-Induced Language Change

Language Contact and Bilingualism 2

EditorYaron Matras

De Gruyter Mouton

Dynamics of Contact-InducedLanguage Change

edited byClaudine ChamoreauIsabelle Leglise

De Gruyter Mouton

ISBN 978-3-11-027133-1e-ISBN 978-3-11-027143-0ISSN 2190-698X

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the DeutscheNationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internetat http://dnb.dnb.de.

” 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston

Cover image: Anette Linnea Rasmus/FotoliaTypesetting: RoyalStandard, Hong KongPrinting: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen�� Printed on acid-free paper

Printed in Germany

www.degruyter.com

List of contributors

Alexandra Y. AikhenvaldCairns InstituteJames Cook [email protected]

Carla BrunoDipartimento di Scienze UmaneUniversita per stranieri di [email protected]

Claudine ChamoreauCNRS (SeDyL/CELIA – CEMCA)France and [email protected]

Patience EppsUniversity of Texas at [email protected]

Zarina Estrada FernandezUniversity of [email protected]

Ana Fernandez GarayCONICET – [email protected]

Anthony P. GrantEdge Hill [email protected]

Bernd HeineUniversity of [email protected]

Sibylle KriegelCNRS (Parole et Langage)[email protected]

Isabelle LegliseCNRS (SeDyL/CELIA)[email protected]

Julen ManterolaUniversity of the Basque [email protected]

Yaron MatrasUniversity of [email protected]

Thomas StolzUniversity of [email protected]

Table of contents

List of contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

A multi-model approach to contact-induced language change . . . . . 1

Claudine Chamoreau and Isabelle Leglise

An activity-oriented approach to contact-induced language change . . 17

Yaron Matras

Contact-induced change as an innovation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Claudine Chamoreau

Language contact in language obsolescence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald

The emergence of a marked-nominative system in Tehuelche or

Aonek’o �a� jen: a contact-induced change? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

Ana Fernandez Garay

On polysemy copying and grammaticalization in language contact . . 125

Bernd Heine

The attraction of indefinite articles: on the borrowing of Spanish un

in Chamorro. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167

Thomas Stolz

On form and function in language contact: a case study from the

Amazonian Vaupes region . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195

Patience Epps

The Basque articles -a and bat and recent contact theories. . . . . . . . 231

Julen Manterola

Contact phenomena/code copying in Indian Ocean Creoles:

the post-abolition period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265

Sibylle Kriegel

Grammaticalization of modal auxiliary verbs in Pima Bajo:

an internal or a contact-induced change?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285

Zarina Estrada-Fernandez

Contact, convergence, and conjunctions: a cross-linguistic study of

borrowing correlations among certain kinds of discourse, phasal

adverbial, and dependent clause markers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311

Anthony P. Grant

On a Latin-Greek diachronic convergence: the perfects with Latin

habeo/Greek echo# and a participle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359

Carla Bruno

Author index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377

Language index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 384

Subject index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 390

viii Table of contents

A multi-model approach to contact-inducedlanguage change

Claudine Chamoreau and Isabelle Leglise

This volume deals with some never before described morphosyntactic varia-

tions and changes appearing in settings involving language contact. The

primary purpose of the articles it presents is to identify di¤erent factors in

language change. These changes are not treated as phenomena amenable

to explanation from a single source: they constitute a dynamic domain of

complex, complementary, and correlated processes that have to be treated

with a fine-grained approach.

The development of morphosyntactic structures in a situation of language

contact should not be analyzed through a single lens. Contact-induced

changes are generally defined as dynamic and multiple, involving internal

change as well as historical and sociolinguistic factors. The identification

and consideration of a variety of explanations constitutes a first step; ana-

lyzing their relationships forms a second. Only a multifaceted methodology

enables this fine-grained approach to contact-induced change. A range of

methodologies are proposed in the following chapters, but they generally

have their roots in a typological perspective. The contributors recognize

the precautionary principle: for example, they emphasize the di‰culty of

studying languages that have not been described adequately and for which

diachronic data are not extensive or reliable, and they warn of the dangers

of hypothesizing beyond the evidence and identifying possible tendencies

that can never be confirmed definitively.

Three main perspectives on contact-induced language change are pre-

sented here, corresponding to three possible approaches to discussing the

subject as part of a complex whole. The first explores the role of multilin-

gual speakers in contact-induced language change, especially their sponta-

neous innovations in discourse. The second explores the di¤erences between

ordinary contact-induced change and change in endangered languages. The

third discusses various aspects of the relationship between contact-induced

change and internal change.

The role of speakers and settings

Historical linguists claim that change is unpredictable; even the most com-

mon or frequent change does not inevitably occur in a particular language

or in a particular situation (Faarlund 1990; Lass 1980). This is also true

for contact-induced changes: ‘‘any search for deterministic predictions

of language change is bound to fail, whether the focus is on internally-

motivated change or on contact-induced change’’ (Thomason 2000: 173).

Language changes are thus unpredictable partly because speakers’ attitudes

are unpredictable, but above all because ‘‘there are no linguistic constraints

on interference’’ (Thomason 2001: 85).

Contact-induced change and communicative goals

Social factors are fundamental to the definition of contact phenomena.

Thomason (2001; see also Thomason and Kaufman 1998) has proposed a

typology of interference mechanisms, establishing distinctions between

language shift and language maintenance, language learning and language

creation. It is crucial to take these factors into account, but the correlation

between a specific type of social setting and a structural modification due

to language contact is not always clear. The same e¤ect may be observed

with respect to language shift and language maintenance (see for example

the rise of definite and indefinite articles in various languages, as discussed

by Matras, Stolz, and Manterola, this volume).

Yaron Matras discusses the role of the social prestige of a language,

often defined in terms of political, economic, or public dominance. He gives

evidence to show that asymmetry in the social roles of the languages may

determine the direction of change, but does not necessarily explain the

motivation for structural change. The relationship between social settings

and structural factors in contact-induced change is a crucial question,

which Matras tackles through an integrated approach that links social

context, conversational pressure and communicative intent, and the spe-

cific functional role of the structure or category in question. He examines

the linguistic attitudes of multilingual speakers who make use of a com-

plex repertoire in order to attain their communicative goals.

One of Matras’ objectives is to identify the relationship between spon-

taneous innovations in discourse and the processes of language change

through the propagation and stabilization of these innovations in commu-

nication. His hypothesis is that innovations are not arbitrary but driven by

a communicative purpose, and that contact-induced change is the product

2 Claudine Chamoreau and Isabelle Leglise

of the creativity of speakers who seek new ways to achieve goal-oriented

tasks in communicative interaction. He claims that contact-induced lan-

guage change is the result of speakers’ creativity in exploiting the full

range of options available in their complex linguistic repertoire, and ex-

plores the ways in which lexical insertions may become lexical borrowings

when they become a regular feature of the language in which they are

inserted or when they are used in monolingual contexts. The innovator’s

social potential to influence others is another factor in play here. Matras

thus shows that social and structural factors are involved in facilitating

or constraining the successful propagation of innovations throughout a

speech community.

Contact-induced change as an innovation

Heine (2006) argues that ‘‘speakers recruit material available in R (the

replica language) to create new structures on the model of M (the model

language) and . . . rather than being entirely new, the structures created in

R are built on existing use patterns and constructions that are already

available in R.’’ This creation is understood as a process by which the

speakers of the receiving language look for methods of establishing equi-

valence relations between their language and the source language, generally

appropriating a feature or structure of a source language and adapting it

in their own language. Creative activity is an important part of contact-

induced change, as is well-known and described in many studies in which

informants are portrayed as ‘‘unpredictable speakers’’ (Thomason 2001)

or ‘‘language builders’’ (Hagege 1993).

However, some studies make a distinction between the creation and the

simple addition of a new structure. The former is a well-known activity,

which adopts the model of the source language and may modify it to

adapt its structure to the receiving language. The latter, less attested, is

characterized by the emergence of a structure that is clearly a consequence

of contact, but is not produced on the model of the receiving language nor

on that of the source language.

Claudine Chamoreau describes the structural and typological con-

sequences of the contact between Purepecha (isolate, Mexico) and Spanish

in the domain of comparative constructions. It is clear that Purepecha has

been modified in this domain under the influence of Spanish in three di¤er-

ent ways. Firstly, the Spanish particle type mas . . . que has been borrowed

and replicated. Another particle type may be associated with an original

construction attested in Lengua de Michoacan (a pre-contact replica lan-

A multi-model approach to contact-induced language change 3

guage), the coordinated type with negation (Lit. ‘It is warmer inside the

house and not outside.’). This type is a creation resulting from contact-

induced and internal changes. A third particle type is also accompanied

by a locative phrase, as in Spanish mas . . . de . . . que. However, another

specific construction was created on the model neither of the receiving

language nor of Spanish, the contact language: a construction in which

the Spanish preposition entre is used in order to form a comparison. This

construction is clearly influenced by Spanish, but it displays a use in Pure-

pecha that deviates from the patterns of comparative construction in

Lengua de Michoacan and in Spanish, and from the use of the morpheme

entre in Spanish. The transfer of Spanish entre allows Purepecha to inno-

vate in the expression of the comparison of superiority and in the context

of use of this Spanish preposition.

In the contact linguistics literature, it is rare to find a feature described

as a new structure that diverges from both the languages in contact. In

Purepecha, Chamoreau links this innovation with two factors: an identity

issue, that is, the desire of the speakers of the villages in which this con-

struction is found to distinguish themselves from others on linguistic and

cultural levels, and also a cross-linguistic tendency to connect comparison

with location and to express comparison through a locative type. Chamoreau

claims that innovative activity as a choice seems to be caused both by socio-

linguistic factors and cross-linguistic tendencies.

Contact-induced change and endangered languages

Another topic explored is the di¤erence between ordinary contact-induced

change and that occurring in endangered languages. Many specific linguistic

changes have been cited as markers of obsolescence, in particular reduction

of paradigms, reduction in the use of grammatical categories, and loss of

grammatical categories or of optional mechanisms in morphology or syntax

(for example Dorian 1981; Sasse 1990). However, these same processes are

also attested as contact-induced changes (Thomason 2001). Both language

contact and language obsolescence may promote structural changes, but

specific criteria have not yet been established to distinguish between

changes that can be seen as signs of obsolescence in process and changes

that might occur under language contact or multilingual settings. The view

that contact-induced changes and the consequences of language decay have

to be distinguished is relatively unusual among specialists in the field; it

has often been said that the types of change observable in an obsolescent


language do not di¤er from those occurring in other kinds of contact settings

(Dorian 1981: 151; Romaine 1989: 71).

Campbell and Muntzel (1989: 195) try to draw a distinction between

obsolescent processes and changes that can be attributed to language con-

tact, while acknowledging that it is not always an easy distinction to

make. They use examples from Pipil, but note that ‘‘one might suspect

that these Spanish-influenced structural mutations away from relational

nouns reflect the kind of change that would only take place in Pipil’s mori-

bund state. However, completely parallel changes have taken place in other

completely viable Nahua dialects, Pipil’s sister languages.’’

Other authors, such as Hill (1989: 149) and Tsitsipis (1989: 117), see

rapidity as a feature that distinguishes change during obsolescence from

ordinary processes of change. For example, Hill (1989) provides a careful

study of the frequency of use of relative clauses in Mexicano and Cupeno

(both Uto-Aztecan languages) and the correlation of these frequencies with

the degree of obsolescence of the languages. Dorian (1981: 151) observes

that although the types of linguistic change are the same in obsolescence

and contact settings, the rate of change may be atypical in the case of lan-

guage death. Clairis (1991: 9) claims that it is not the presence of a specific

feature that is to be considered as a symptom of obsolescence but rather

its frequency, compared with the frequency of the feature in healthy lan-

guages. Aikhenvald claims that the di¤erence between language change

in ‘‘healthy’’ and in endangered or obsolescent languages very often re-

sides in the quantity of change (a massive influx of borrowed forms and

patterns as a result of the encroachment of one language on the other),

and also in the speed with which this type of language changes. In other

words, ‘‘an obsolescent language may tend to rapidly become structurally

similar to the dominant one’’ (Aikhenvald, this volume).

In this volume, Alexandra Aikhenvald and Ana Fernandez Garay illus-

trate cases of ‘‘gradual death’’ (Campbell and Muntzel 1989), that is, of

languages no longer actively used nor transmitted to the next generation.

They observe that speakers of an obsolescent language vary in their profi-

ciency, from ‘‘fluent language speakers’’ to ‘‘semi-speakers’’ and ‘‘remem-

berers’’ with very limited competence (see also 1998: 441–469).

Sasse (1990: 51) gives some evidence at a linguistic level in favor of a

distinction between language contact and language obsolescence, relative

to structural changes involving loss of linguistic material. He claims that

‘‘Theoretically, contact-induced loss can easily be distinguished from loss

due to decay, because the former is motivated by the absence of the

respective categories in the contact language, while decay involves loss of


categories not motivated in this way.’’ This distinction is not always easy

to show, since some types of loss and reduction in obsolescence are asso-

ciated with types of loss or reduction that can be attributed to contact.

Aikhenvald (this volume) and Fernandez Garay (this volume and 1998:

441–469) also state that simplification of syntactic structure, reduction

and loss of linguistic material, phonetic fluctuations, and the existence of

optional syntax are all consequences of language obsolescence. Aikhenvald

notes that ‘‘categories absent from the dominant language are particularly

endangered.’’ Both illustrate the consequences of contact-induced change

in contact settings with di¤erent domains. Drawing on synchronic data,

Aikhenvald shows that in Tariana, an Arawak language spoken in the

multilingual Vaupes area in Brazil, obsolescence is accompanied by a rapidly

increasing number of calqued forms and constructions from Tucano, the

dominant language of the area. She claims that ‘‘before passing into extinc-

tion, an obsolescent language may become a ‘carbon copy’ of the dominant

idiom.’’ She explores in particular the domain of personal pronouns, show-

ing that languages that do not have the inclusive versus exclusive opposition

in the first person plural may adopt it, as has happened in the case of two

Arawak languages, Mawayana and Resıgaro, which, like other languages

of this family, do not distinguish an inclusive from an exclusive form.

The speakers of Mawayana introduced the Waiwai (Carib family) first

person plural exclusive pronoun amna and reinterpreted the original first

person plural prefix wa- as inclusive in order to express this opposition.

The speakers of Resıgaro have also adopted this opposition from Bora

(Bora-Witotoan group), borrowing the Boran first person plural exclusive.

In these cases, pronouns seem to have been borrowed to fill a perceived

gap in the pronominal paradigm.

Borrowing a personal pronoun or a category that deals with a pro-

nominal domain, such as the inclusive/exclusive category, is not very

common, although it has been described in certain languages as a result

of di¤usion in a specific situation of contact (Jacobsen 1980; Thomason

and Everett 2005). Thomason and Everett (2005: 307–308) stress the rele-

vance of speakers’ decisions: ‘‘the crucial point in all these cases is that

social factors, not linguistic ones, determine the likelihood of pronominal

borrowing. If speakers want to borrow one pronoun or a whole set of pro-

nouns, they can do so; and sometimes speakers do want to do this. The

borrowed pronouns may change the structure of the pronominal system

significantly, as when a new category of inclusive vs. exclusive ‘we’ is

introduced or lost through borrowing. . . . extensive lexical and structural

borrowing is neither inevitable nor impossible in the most intense contact


situations.’’ The important point is that pronominal borrowing seems

not to be especially unusual under certain social circumstances, such as

intense contact situations. In her contribution, Aikhenvald suggests that

these types of borrowing could be the result of a considerable influx of

non-native elements (loanwords and replication) and drastic restructuring,

which characterize obsolescent languages.

Fernandez Garay argues that the existence of a marked-nominative

system in Tehuelche, which was probably an ergative language (like the

proto-language Proto-Chon), is due to contact with other languages, but

that the variations attested and the speed of the process were probably

due to the situation of obsolescence. Fernandez Garay bases her analysis on

language reconstruction and synchronic data. The process, which involves a

realignment resulting from the reanalysis and/or extension of an adposition,

may be an internal one. Nevertheless, it seems probable that in the case of

Tehuelche, the influence of another language in the area helped to trans-

form an ergative language into a marked-nominative one. The coexistence

of Tehuelche with Mapudungun, a nominative-accusative language, led

the ergative marker or agent marker of the transitive clause to be extended

to the intransitive agent, leading to the transformation of this ergative

system into a marked-nominative one. Fernandez Garay points out that

the long and intensive contact with Mapudungun (over at least four cen-

turies) in Tehuelche, an obsolescent language (almost extinct when it was

described), may have led to important changes and restructuring in its

morphosyntactic structure, showing a loss of a syntactic characteristic.

The rise of a marked-nominative system formed part of this restructuring.

Contact-induced change and internally motivated change

Contact-induced change and principles of grammaticalization

Contact-induced language change has often been related to the presence or

absence of constraints that may explain the borrowing of di¤erent kinds of

structures (Thomason 2001; Winford 2003). Bernd Heine gives an exam-

ple of the constraints of principles of grammaticalization on replication

in Slavic languages, and Thomas Stolz gives an example of borrowing

in Chamorro. They both claim that contact-induced grammaticalization

proceeds along a largely predictable sequence of stages and that the stage

of grammaticalization in the receiving language never seems to reach the

stage of grammaticalization of the source language. They demonstrate


that speakers appear to choose a complex strategy going through the

whole process from numeral to article. The case of the indefinite article

illustrates this position.

Heine examines language contact situations in which grammatical

meanings or structures are involved. Using three examples (articles, posses-

sive perfects, and the auxiliation of ‘‘threaten’’ verbs) from a range of

European languages, he argues that contact-induced grammatical change

is constrained by universal principles of grammaticalization. He explains

that the constraint on contact-induced grammatical replication suggests

that, at least in cases like those discussed in his article, there really is no

polysemy copying and the borrowings are not really complete replicas of

their models. He suggests that what language contact triggers is a gradual

process from a lesser to a greater degree of grammatical structure. In

order to illustrate this process, Heine presents an example from Upper

Sorbian, a Slavic language which, like other Slavic languages (with the

possible exception of Macedonian), is known for the absence of indefinite

articles. Language contact seems to have played some role in the rise of

the indefinite article in Upper Sorbian. This receiving language seems to

have reached the same degree of development as its German model, but

Upper Sorbian displays a number of contexts where the replica category

is less grammaticalized than the source. Heine develops another example

of the rise of the indefinite article in Molisean, probably due to contact

with Italian. It is interesting to note that the two Slavic languages (Upper

Sorbian and Molisean) exhibiting the most intensive contact with lan-

guages that do have indefinite articles are also the ones that have created

corresponding articles.

Stolz looks at the use of the indefinite article in Chamorro in order to

demonstrate the extent to which the Austronesian morpho-syntax of this

language has been a¤ected by the introduction of the indefinite article.

He compares his findings with the evidence drawn from other languages

whose indefinite articles might turn out to be at least partially the product

of language contact with Spanish. The rise of the indefinite article in

Chamorro is a consequence of the contact with Spanish – the indefinite

article morpheme un is directly borrowed from that language – and its

development in the Austronesian language is constrained by universal

principles of grammaticalization (see the five-stage scale of Heine 1997,

and Heine, this volume). As in other cases discussed by Heine (this volume),

the grammaticalization of un has not reached the stage of grammaticaliza-

tion of Spanish un. However, the indefinite article in modern Chamorro

also deviates from the patterns of the Spanish etymological source: the


borrowing, integration, and internal development of the article un has

generated a category that is neither completely Spanish nor purely Austro-

nesian. This is an example of partial copying (Heine and Kuteva 2005).

Stolz demonstrates that there is a preference in language contact situations

for an item to replicate first on a low level of grammaticalization in the

receiving language, no matter how far the item has advanced on the gram-

maticalization scale in the source language, and then to continue the

process according to known principles of grammaticalization.

‘‘Conspiracy’’ between contact-induced phenomena and internal

phenomena

Generally, studies on language change only take into account some of the

types of mechanism and process reflecting grammatical changes – either

internal phenomena or contact-induced phenomena, but not both. Never-

theless, a century ago, Meillet (1982 [1906]: 4, 1982 [1912]: 130–131) argued

that the evolution of grammatical structures would imply the presence of

processes due to internal change (analogy and grammaticalization) as well

as processes related to language contact (borrowing).

Recently, researchers using a variety of approaches have rethought the

distinction between these types of mechanism and have proposed a multi-

causal or multi-factorial perspective (Harris and Campbell 1995: 50; Heine

and Kuteva 2005; Peyraube 2002; Kriegel 2003; Thomason 2007; Matras

2007; Chamoreau, Estrada, and Lastra 2010; Chamoreau and Goury in

press). These studies re-examine multi-causality and the distinction of the

two types of mechanism.

Heine and Kuteva (2003, 2005) have explored what they called contact-

induced grammaticalization, in which language-contact phenomena work

in conspiracy with grammaticalization (2008: 218). If the causes, processes,

and consequences of language change are multiple, their explanation must

be too. This multiplicity reveals both di¤erences and complementarities

between the internal mechanisms and the contact-induced ones. The exami-

nation of relevant data is a first step, the analysis of their di¤erences and

complementarities a second one. The two types of explanation are not

contradictory or mutually exclusive; they interact in a complementary

manner to produce language change. It is also necessary to show that

these two types of change can act and interact in the language processes

and at the outcome level.

Four articles here focus on the relationship between contact-induced

and internal changes in the causes, processes, and outcomes of change.


Patience Epps argues for a multiple causation approach to language evo-

lution, involving a typological understanding of language contact and lan-

guage change and the exploration of the possible interaction between these

two processes. She o¤ers examples from the Vaupes region of northwest

Amazonia, a linguistic area characterized by grammatical di¤usion among

languages from three families (East Tukanoan, Nadahup [Maku], and

Arawak). The Vaupes region can also be considered a ‘‘grammaticaliza-

tion area,’’ that is, a region where several languages have undergone (and

are currently undergoing) similar processes of grammaticalization. The

region is known for its unusual language contact situation, in which resis-

tance to the borrowing of lexical and morphological forms is coupled with

a widespread di¤usion of grammatical structures and categories that has

driven grammaticalization within the recipient languages to generate new

forms from existing (native) material to fulfill new functions. In such a

context, it is unclear what role, if any, is played by cross-linguistic similar-

ities of form either to limit or promote the transfer of grammatical struc-

tures. Epps explores this question through a case study of the etymon ni

in Hup (Nadahup/Maku family) and other Vaupes languages. She points

out that the similarities among the forms and lexical functions of the

ni etymon across the Vaupes languages suggest that contact has played

an important role in shaping the current picture, although precisely what

should be attributed to contact and what to internal change remains un-

clear. Nevertheless, she shows that, unusually for this region, ni is repre-

sented by a similar constellation of forms and functions across these lan-

guages. The case of ni suggests that, in keeping with wider trends of

language contact, even in the exceptional context of the Vaupes, elements

of shared form may precede and even promote structural borrowing.

Julen Manterola explores Basque definite and indefinite articles and the

role of contact in their diachronic evolution. He points out some problems

with the ways Basque data have been used in recent contact theories, in

particular the Heine and Kuteva contact-induced grammaticalization thesis.

He discusses three specific problems. Firstly, the use of only one source does

not take distinctive dialectal data into account; empirical knowledge about

Basque needs to be brought up to date. Secondly, historical data have been

neglected. Thirdly, the function of the ancient plural indefinite article batzu

has never been explored. Manterola emphasizes the importance of knowl-

edge of the history of the language. He argues for the precautionary prin-

ciple in language contact studies, especially when diachronic information

is not available and no clear data have been found to determine whether

a change is contact-induced or internal. He shows that contact e¤ects can


conceal the typical diachronic paths of other e¤ects (for example the role

of the singular/plural marking overt distinction), and points out an inter-

esting direction for further studies, focusing on the time dimension of

language development.

Sibylle Kriegel also argues for the precautionary principle when dia-

chronic data are not available, calling attention to the problem of indeter-

minacy in dating the copying of elements into Creoles. She analyzes an

interesting but neglected case of code copying from languages other than

the base language into Creole. For elements that come from the base lan-

guages it is very often possible to tell whether they date from the period of

creolization or more recently, but the absence of data from the period

of constitution of Creoles and the sparse data on their later evolution do

not allow for a definite answer. Kriegel sheds new light on the notion of

creolization. She demonstrates that two function words of Mauritian and

Seychelles Creole, two closely related French-based Creoles, are instances

of code copying (Johanson 2002), resulting from the di¤erent language

contact situations to which these languages were exposed after the aboli-

tion of slavery in 1835. The use of depi as an ablative marker in Indo-

Mauritian Creole varieties is interpreted as a covert copy from Bhojpuri,

an Indic language which has been in contact with Mauritian Creole since

the migration of indentured laborers from Asia. The use of pourdir as a

complementizer in some varieties of Seychelles Creole is interpreted as

a covert copy from Eastern Bantu languages in contact with Seychelles

Creole in the late nineteenth century.

Zarina Estrada Fernandez demonstrates that, in the absence of dia-

chronic information, internal reconstruction is an important step to be

undertaken in cases where grammatical patterns are involved in language

contact situations. In her analysis she takes into consideration not only

universal principles of grammaticalization but also the historical changes

and typological properties of the language family studied, here the Uto-

Aztecan family. She emphasizes the necessity of distinguishing internal

and contact-induced change when the processes occur within a family,

while recognizing that this is often di‰cult. She traces the emergence of

modal auxiliary verbs in Pima Bajo, one of the Uto-Aztecan languages

of northwestern Mexico, as the result of processes involved in verbal com-

plementation, performing a fine-grained exploration of the di¤erent pos-

sibilities for encoding verbal complements in various languages of this

family. She adopts a cautious approach, concluding with two hypothetical

explanations for the processes in question but not opting for either one: it

is impossible to determine if the development of modal verbs in Pima Bajo


should be explained as the result of a structural replication from Spanish

or as the result of an internal process with di¤erent diachronic pathways.

Anthony P. Grant’s article discusses borrowed mechanisms and impli-

cational hierarchies of grammatical borrowing. He too adopts the pre-

cautionary principle, in situations where no diachronic data are available

or when alternative explanations are possible. Implicational hierarchies

show how likely it is that a structural category will be a¤ected by contact-

induced change (Matras 2007b). Matras (2007b: 32) explains that two types

of generalization may be proposed for the borrowing of grammatical cate-

gories. One is ‘‘the frequency with which a category may be a¤ected by

contact-induced change’’; the other type suggests ‘‘an implicational rela-

tionship between the borrowing of individual categories: the borrowing of

one category is understood to be a pre-condition for the borrowing of

another.’’ Implicational hierarchies show the borrowing tendencies that

take place in language contact.

Grant examines major borrowed mechanisms in processes including

clause-linking, coordination, complementation, conditionality, and causality

in various languages, and discusses the extent to which hierarchies of depen-

dent clause marker borrowing can be established and empirically validated.

He notes that several of the languages are documented in considerable

chronological depth, while others are less well-described varieties of well-

documented languages, a di‰culty for his approach. He explores the pro-

cesses in question in a global cross-linguistic sample of 22 languages from

a wide range of families. In a majority of the languages, the domains of

discourse markers, phrasal adverbs, and coordinating, especially subordi-

nating, conjunctions seem to be amenable to language contact. Grant also

discusses the implicational hierarchy of conjunction borrowing, since con-

junctions are known to be widely borrowed in many of the world’s lan-

guages. In agreement with studies of much linguists, he demonstrates that

general hierarchies of grammatical borrowing have to be seen simply as

tendencies. For example, the implicational hierarchy but > or > and is

a general tendency confirmed in a large number of languages, but Grant

o¤ers counter-examples to the expected pattern: in Livonian and Garifuna,

the form meaning ‘and’ is borrowed while the one meaning ‘or’ is inherited.

Lastly, Carla Bruno’s article focuses on two languages for which dia-

chronic data are available; however, she shows that even in this situation

the precautionary principle should be invoked. Against the background

of the socio-cultural relations between the Roman and Greek worlds, she

proposes a linguistic convergence in Latin and Greek diachrony, that is,

the rise of periphrastic constructions consisting of a so-called ‘‘possessive’’


verb form (Lat. habeo and Gr. echo #) and a past participle. Pre-existing

structural similarities, due to the genetic relationship of the two languages,

may have favored mutual shifts of linguistic features as well as their sub-

sequent integration; Bruno compares the extent to which this periphrasis is

integrated into each system. Languages change only in accordance with

the possibilities given by their system, and Latin and Greek are instances

of this rule.

We have put this volume together with a number of goals in mind.

First, we have aimed at presenting a number of linguistic phenomena

that have not hitherto been described (variations and changes, at a mor-

phosyntactic level, drawn from many diverse languages) and that appear

in language contact settings. This diversity of languages and phenomena

allows us to test, drawing on contact outcomes already described in the

literature, the possibilities and preferences of various languages. Second,

we have sought to include cross-linguistic and cross-dialectal perspectives,

whatever the specificities of the languages and settings involved. Third, we

have tried to show how contemporary approaches and methodologies take

into account di¤erent (social and linguistic) factors in order to explain

contact-induced language change. Multiple causation – a generally accepted

phenomenon in the field – identifies both internally motivated changes

and contact-induced processes, but the role played by each process and

their precise relationship to each other is not always clear. This has led us

to favor a multifaceted methodology and a multi-model approach to

explaining contact-induced language change. Finally, the studies presented

here argue for caution in proposing explanations of contact-induced lan-

guage changes, both in historical situations, since limited linguistic or socio-

historical knowledge is available, and in contemporary situations, where to

date very few social factors have been taken into account (but see Leglise

and Chamoreau, to appear).

References

Campbell, L. and Muntzel, M. 1989. The structural consequences of language

death. In Investigating Obsolescence: Studies in Language Contraction and

Death, N. Dorian (ed.), 181–196. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chamoreau, C., Estrada Fernandez, Z., and Lastra, Y. (eds). 2010. A New Look

at Language Contact in Amerindian Languages. Munich: Lincom Europa.


Chamoreau, C. and Goury, L. (eds). In press. Contact de langues et changement

linguistique. Paris: CNRS Editions.

Clairis, C. 1991. Le processus de disparition des langues. La Linguistique 27.2: 3–

14.

Dorian, N. 1981. Language Death: The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect.

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Faarlund, J. T. 1990. Syntactic Change. Toward a Theory of Historical Syntax.

Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Fernandez Garay, A. 1998. El Tehuelche. Una lengua en vıas de extincion. Valdivia:

Universidad Austral de Chile.

Hagege, C. 1993. The Language Builder. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Harris, A. and Campbell, L. 1995. Historical Syntax in Cross-Linguistic Perspective.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Heine, B. 1997. Cognitive Foundations of Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Heine, B. 2006. Contact-induced word order change without word order change.

In Working papers in Multilingualism. Arbeiten zur Mehrsprachigkeit. 76. Ham-

burg: University of Hamburg.

Heine, B. and Kuteva, T. 2003. On contact-induced grammaticalization. Studies in

Language, 27.3: 529–572.

Heine, B. and Kuteva, T. 2005. Language Contact and Grammatical Change.


Heine, B. and Kuteva, T. 2008. The explanatory value of grammaticalization. In

Linguistic Universals and Language Change, J. Good (ed.), 215–230. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Hill, J. 1989. The social functions of relativization in obsolescent and non-

obsolescent languages. In Investigating Obsolescence: Studies in Language Con-

traction and Death, N. Dorian (ed.), 149–164. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press.

Jacobsen, W. H. 1980. Inclusive/exclusive: A Di¤used Pronominal Category in

Native Western North America. In Papers from the Parasession on Pronouns

and Anaphora, J. Kreiman and A. E. Ojeda (eds), 204–230. Chicago: Univer-

sity of Chicago Press.

Johanson, L. 2002. Contact-induced change in a code-copying framework. In Lan-

guage Change. The Interplay of Internal, External and Extra-Linguistic Factors,

M. C. Jones and E. Esch (eds), 285–313. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Kriegel, S. (ed.). 2003. Grammaticalisation et reanalyse. Approches de la variation

creole et francaise. Paris: CNRS Editions.

Lass, R. 1980. On Explaining Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Leglise, I. and Chamoreau, C. In press. The Interplay of Variation and Change in

Contact Settings – Morphosyntactic Studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.


Matras, Y. 2007. Socio-cultural and typological factors in contact-induced change.

Plenary talk presented at the ‘Language Contact and Morphosyntactic varia-

tion and change’ workshop, Paris, 20–24 September.

Matras, Y. 2007b. The borrowability of structural categories. In Grammatical

Borrowing in Cross-Linguistic Perspective, Y. Matras and J. Sakel (eds), 31–

73. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Meillet, A. 1982 [1906]. Comment les mots changent de sens. In Linguistique

historique et linguistique generale, 230–271. Paris/Geneva: Champion-Slatkine.

Meillet, A. 1982 [1912]. L’evolution des formes grammaticales. In Linguistique

historique et linguistique generale, 131–148. Paris/Geneva: Champion-Slatkine.

Peyraube, A. 2002. L’evolution des structures grammaticales. Langages 146: 46–

58.

Romaine, S. 1989. Bilingualism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Sasse, H.-J. 1990. Theory of Language Death and Language Decay and Contact-

induced Change: Similarities and Di¤erences. Arbeitspapier No. 12. Cologne:

Institut fur Sprachwissenschaft, University of Cologne.

Thomason, S. G. 2000. On the unpredictability of contact e¤ects. Estudios de

Sociolinguıstica 1.1: 173–182.

Thomason, S. G. 2001. Language Contact: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press.

Thomason, S. G. 2007. On internally- and externally- motivated morphosyntactic

change in contact situations (and how to tell which is which). Plenary talk pre-

sented at the ‘Language Contact and Morphosyntactic variation and change’

workshop, Paris, 20–24 September.

Thomason, S. G. and Everett, D. 2005. Pronoun borrowing. Berkeley Linguistics

Society 27: 301–315.

Thomason, S. G. and Kaufman, T. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization, and

Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Tsitsipis, L. 1989. Skewed performance and full performance in language obsoles-

cence: the case of an Albanian variety. In Investigating Obsolescence: Studies

in Language Contraction and Death, N. Dorian (ed.), 117–137. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Winford, D. 2003. An Introduction to Contact Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.


An activity-oriented approach to contact-inducedlanguage change1

Yaron Matras

1. Introduction

Mechanisms of language change have usually been categorized in terms of

either their structural or their societal properties. At the structural level, a

well-established distinction is that between loans or transfers of concrete

phonological shapes (or linguistic matter), and restructuring, replication,

or calques of form-meaning alignments, constructions, or patterns (see

Weinreich 1953; Haugen 1956; Heath 1984; Matras and Sakel 2007).

Drawing on earlier work (Haase 1991; Nau 1995; Matras 1998b), Heine

and Kuteva (2005) point out that pattern-replication or grammatical calques

can often be analyzed as cases of language-internal grammaticalization

triggered or inspired by a model construction in the contact language.

This suggests a two-dimensional process: the first dimension involves the

creative formation of new structures and categories, while the second

involves the motivation to set such creative processes in motion. In much

of the literature on language change, these two dimensions are understood

as ‘‘language-internal’’ and ‘‘language-external’’ respectively.

A further point of interest to structural approaches is the relative likeli-

hood of borrowing of individual structural forms and categories (see for

example Moravcsik 1978; Thomason and Kaufman 1988; van Hout and

Muysken 1994; Field 2002). Particular attention has been given to the

status of bound and unbound morphemes, to inflectional and agglutina-

tive morphology, and to paradigmaticity as factors that may facilitate or

1. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the workshop on ‘‘Languagecontact and morphosyntactic variation and change’’ in Paris, and as seminarpresentations at the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at La TrobeUniversity, Melbourne; Australian National University, Canberra; Universityof Sydney; the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and Charles University, Prague.I am grateful to the participants and audiences for inspiring questions andcomments. For a full discussion of the argument and some of the examplessee also Matras (2009).

constrain borrowing. It has been suggested that ease of formal integration

will contribute to the likelihood of borrowing. More recently, sample-based

surveys have attributed a semantic-pragmatic motivation to borrowability

and have postulated meaningful hierarchies among paradigm values that

are susceptible to borrowing (cf. Matras 1998a, 2007).

Social mechanisms of contact-induced change are often described along

the lines of Thomason’s (2001) typology of interference mechanisms. A

distinction is made between language shift and language maintenance, lan-

guage learning, and deliberate language creation (cf. Thomason and

Kaufman 1988; see also Winford 2003). Social settings seem crucial to

the definition of at least some types of contact phenomena. One example

is pidginization, which is widely understood as being rooted in restricted

communication, drawing selectively on the lexical structures of a super-

strate language or lingua franca in a multiethnic setting.2 The result is

described variably as the use of a superstrate lexicon either with substrate

grammar or with makeshift grammar. Bakker’s (1996, 1997) notion of

‘‘language intertwining’’ also relies on a particular kind of social context,

one in which ethnic identity is being negotiated in a situation of linguistic-

ethnic hybridity. For such situations, Bakker predicts an outcome in the

form of a mixed language that draws its lexicon from one source and its

grammar from another. More generally, it has been suggested that pro-

longed, reciprocal bilingualism, or language ‘‘equilibrium,’’ is likely to lead

to the emergence of pattern-similarities among languages, while diglossia

and dominance are more likely to result in the borrowing of word-forms

(cf. Aikhenvald 2002: 265¤.).

However, it is not always obvious that a direct correlation can be drawn

between the type of social setting and the structural outcomes of contact.

It may be the case that in the lexical domain, items such as place-names,

field-names, and agricultural terms are more likely to be carried over from

a substrate to a superstrate language during language shift, while lexical

transfers from a superstrate language will tend to cover technical innova-

tions and trade vocabulary. Low German in East Friesland, for example,

contains (substrate) Frisian terms connected with agriculture, the sea, dikes,

and drainage, and (superstrate) Dutch vocabulary for trade, commerce, and

engineering (cf. Remmers 1997). But the loss of a definite article is common

both to Russian learners’ varieties of English and to language maintenance

in Romani in contact with (superstrate) Russian, while the emergence of a

new definite article is common both to language maintenance in Sorbian in

2. Some Pidgins, such as Russo-Norsk, apparently involve more or less equalinput from two participating languages.

18 Yaron Matras

contact with (superstrate) German and to convergence – possibly through

language shift, perhaps through a prolonged ‘‘equilibrium’’ – in the con-

text of the Balkan languages Romanian, Bulgarian, and Macedonian.

Two principal factors are often said to motivate contact-induced change:

‘‘gaps’’ in the recipient system, on the structural side, and the overall ‘‘social

prestige’’ of the donor system, on the societal side. ‘‘Gaps’’ are understood

as asymmetries in the structural representation of semantic-pragmatic func-

tions in the two languages in contact. At the structural level, the notion of

‘‘gaps’’ implies that multilingual speakers aim at availing themselves of a

uniform system of form-function mapping across their various languages.

This does not, however, provide a direct explanation for the borrowing of

word-forms to replace forms that had already existed in the language prior

to contact, as in the wholesale replacement of the system of discourse

markers (see Matras 1998a; Salmons 1990). The ‘‘prestige’’ assumption in

turn fails to explain why some structural categories, such as connectors,

are more likely to be borrowed than others, such as personal pronouns. If

a language is generally ‘‘prestigious,’’ why should its prestige be more

easily flagged through connectors than through personal pronouns?

‘‘Prestige’’ is therefore better understood as a license to employ forms

and structures from a language which, as a result of unidirectional bilin-

gualism, is more widely used in the community and which, thanks to in-

stitutional support and its role in the public domain, is subject to tighter

normative control. The language of a monolingual majority that is used

in the public domain and is protected by institutions (such as literacy)

will often be regarded as the ‘‘dominant’’ language. The non-dominant,

smaller, or minority language is less likely to enjoy institutional protection

and literacy. Its speakers are therefore less likely to be aware of norms and

rules and to enforce them; in fact, they are more likely to be multilingual

and tolerant of structural variation. Asymmetry in the social roles of the

languages (that is, in their ‘‘prestige’’) may therefore determine the direc-

tion of change, but it does not necessarily explain the motivation for struc-

tural change. With these considerations in mind, we are left with the

question of how best to explore the link between social reality and the

role of structural factors in contact-induced change.

2. Multilingual conversation as repertoire negotiation

The answer lies, I propose, in understanding the communicative acts that

multilingual speakers engage in, and in examining the value that particular

An activity-oriented approach to contact-induced language change 19

linguistic constructions have in allowing speakers to achieve their communi-

cative goals.

Like any other process of language change, contact-induced change

begins with innovations introduced by an individual speaker as part of

communicative interaction. My assumption is that such innovations are

not arbitrary, but follow goal-oriented tasks. This is based first of all on

a view of language as the practice of communicative interaction and of

grammatical categories as triggers and operators of language processing

tasks involved in communication. According to this approach, the selec-

tion of structures by the speaker is not random, but defined by the linguis-

tic task-schema that the speaker wishes to carry out. This, in turn, is sub-

ordinate to the goal-oriented activity that the speaker pursues by means of

verbal communication, organized at the level of discourse.3

Becoming ‘‘bilingual’’ is an extension of an individual’s contexts of

interaction, as a result of that individual’s repertoire of communicative

structures. Multilingualism from infancy means exposure to a complex

repertoire. This requires gradually sorting out the sets of contexts and con-

textual conditions under which various sets of structures from within this

repertoire are considered appropriate. Thus, even bilinguals from birth do

not acquire two language ‘‘systems’’ natively; rather, they acquire a reper-

toire of linguistic structures and forms, and are left to gradually master the

rules on appropriate, context-bound selection of one form over another as

part of a process of linguistic socialization (see Lanza 1997). Some con-

texts allow greater flexibility of choices – what Grosjean (2001, 2008)

termed the ‘‘bilingual mode.’’ These are the contexts in which bilinguals

can make the most e¤ective use of their full repertoire, exploiting nuances

as well as contrasts between variants of equivalent or near-equivalent

meaning. Other sets of contexts are more exclusive of the selection of

items and groups of items within the repertoire.

The existence of selection rules as part of the bilingual’s communicative

competence triggers a series of associations between a particular subset of

structures and interaction context set A, between another and interaction

context B, and so on. This association is what we identify as our socially

constructed notion of a ‘‘language’’ or a ‘‘language system.’’ It is thanks to

this socially broadcast notion that bilingual children learn, around the age

3. This view of language is inspired by a range of theoretical approaches to com-munication and discourse (e.g. Gumperz 1980; Sacks, Scheglo¤, and Je¤erson1974; Rehbein 1977; Ehlich 2007), as well as to speech production (Green1998).

20 Yaron Matras

of three, that they speak two ‘‘languages’’; until then, their use of word-

forms and constructions is governed by a prolonged process of trial and

error, usually unaccompanied by any explicit analytical labeling or other

overt classification of the elements of their repertoire.

Such an association between structure and set of interaction contexts

does not necessarily exist for each and every element of the linguistic reper-

toire. German-English bilinguals, for example, accept that their repertoire

contains only one single word-form for concepts such as internet, download,

computer (subjected of course to embedding in di¤erent phonological and

morphosyntactic environments). Such category-specific inseparability of the

two linguistic subsets in a bilingual’s repertoire is part of the definition of

‘‘borrowing’’ which I pursue in this paper. The definition can be extended

to those constellations where a structure continues to di¤use, reaching a

monolingual population that has never experienced the need to interact

in a new set of contexts. While this aspect of borrowing – di¤usion to

monolinguals – is a property of some borrowing situations, such as the

German ‘Internet,’ ‘Computer,’ it is not necessarily typical of all.

How does borrowing come about? And how is it linked to other

contact phenomena? Communication in a language contact setting is the

product of the interplay of two primary factors (Figure 1): loyalty to a

set of norms that regulate the context-bound selection of elements from

the repertoire, and a wish to be able to exploit the repertoire in its entirety

irrespective of situational constraints. The balance between these two factors

is determined by a need to remove hurdles that stand in the way of e‰cient

communication.

When loyalty prevails in a strict manner, then ‘‘interference’’ or com-

promises are likely to be minimal. But when the wish to exploit the full

repertoire is given some leeway, then strict context-bound separation of

repertoire components might be compromised. Individual words that are

usually reserved for interaction in context set A might, for example, be

employed (‘‘inserted’’) also in interaction in context set B. Second-language

learners might draw on the phonology of their native language while com-

municating in a second language, bilingual children might employ construc-

tions from one language that are not usually used in the chosen language of

conversation, and adult bilinguals might insert discourse markers from one

language when communicating in another. All this suggests that multilin-

gual speakers do not ‘‘block’’ or ‘‘switch o¤’’ one of their languages when

communicating in another, but that they have the full, complex linguistic

repertoire at their disposal at all times.


Language contact phenomena are seen in the model outlined here as

the outcome of function-driven choices through which speakers license

themselves, while interacting in a context of type B, to select a structure

(word-form, construction, meaning, phonological features, and so on),

despite its association primarily with interaction context set A. When

claiming that choices are function-driven, I am not suggesting that selec-

tion of A-structures in B-contexts is necessarily always conscious, deliberate,

or strategic. Instead, I propose that contact phenomena are arranged on a

continuum, from those that are in fact not at all voluntary, indeed even

counter-strategic in their origin, to those that are conscious and deliberate.

All, however, are functional in the sense that they are the product of

language-processing in goal-oriented communicative interaction. The sus-

ceptibility of certain structural categories to contact-related change is

therefore not accidental, but inherently bound up with the function that

those categories have and the way they support language processing in dis-

course. Contact phenomena are in this respect seen as enabling rather than

interfering with communicative activity.

Figure 1. The interplay of factors in communication in language contact settings

22 Yaron Matras

My principal claim in this article, then, is that innovative strategies

occur in pursuit of specific communicative goals. The challenge that I

take on is to identify the connection between spontaneous innovations in

discourse, through to the emergence of stable variants in communication

in multilingual settings, and on to processes of language change. I will

focus on four principal types of innovation: the insertion of lexical word-

forms and lexical borrowing, replication of patterns or constructions,

fusion of grammatical operators, and playful or ‘‘theatrical’’ mixing. The

compilation of data from a trilingual child, from adult bilingual speech,

from stable multilingual settings, and from cases of contact-induced lan-

guage change will illustrate the close a‰nity between spontaneous innova-

tions and long-term change, and show that all types of innovation strategies

are already available to the very young bilingual in the very early steps of

managing a complex linguistic repertoire in a multilingual setting.

3. From lexical insertions to lexical borrowing

Consider an example from the speech of a trilingual from infancy, whose

home languages are German (with the mother) and Hebrew (with the

father), while English is the language of the environment, including school

(from Matras 2009):

(1) German; age 7:6, when reminded of a past event

Da war ich noch in year onedeic was.1sg I still in

‘I was still in year one then.’

In example (1), the child is using events from school life as points of

reference. The school is an English-speaking environment, key elements

of which are treated as unique referents, or what Backus (1996) calls

‘‘specific’’ entities. Although the child is in principle able to translate or

paraphrase the concept year one, use of the English form amounts to an

activation of the world of associations represented by the original term.

The insertion of the English term thus acts as a discourse device that sup-

ports the transposition of imagery of the original setting into the ongoing

conversation. The uniqueness of the English term as part of the regulated

vocabulary associated with the English-speaking school environment gives

year one the status of institutional terminology, for which translations

are not appreciated as equivalents because they are dissociated from the

original setting.


Institutional terminology is commonly involved in bilingual insertions

in the speech of adults too. There is, in other words, nothing specific to

the child acquisition context that promotes the insertion of institutional

terminology. Consider example (2), from the speech of a (Lovari) Romani-

German bilingual (Matras, fieldwork):

(2) Romani (Lovari)-German bilingual; biographical narration

Aj akana, obwohl kadka meres ke muljas tuke

and now although here die.2sg because died.3sg. 2sg.dat

varekon, hacares, du bist total fertig, tu si te

somebody understand.2sg you are totally devastated 2sg is comp

zas inke te des tu gindo kaj te praxov

go.2sg still comp give.2sg 2sg thought where comp bury.1sg

les, kudka si te zav, Bestattungsinstitut, ehm/ pa/ pa/ pa

3sg.obl here is comp go.1sg funeral home on on on

Meldeamt, eh Geb/ Sterbeurkunde,registration o‰ce bir death certificate

‘And now, although you’re dying here because one of your people

died, you understand, you’re totally devastated, you still have to go

and think about where should I bury him, I have to go there, funeral

home, ehm/ to/ to/ to the registration o‰ce, eh birth/ death certificate.’

The speaker inserts German terminology to describe institutions and institu-

tional activities associated with the burial of a relative in Germany, where

she lives. From a strictly formal perspective one might regard these inser-

tions as gap-fillers, since they have no Romani equivalent. However, it is

precisely the fact that no Romani equivalent is created by speakers that

demands our attention. Speakers could calque or paraphrase or otherwise

create compounds or terms that would allow them to describe the relevant

concepts without having to resort to word-forms that are derived from a

non-Romani interaction context. But in this case, the e¤ect of the associa-

tion evoked precisely with the non-Romani interaction context is purpose-

ful and fills a function. It is a powerful discourse-level tool in emphasizing

the contrast between the intimate feeling of mourning and distress, which

engulfs the individual and her family following the death of a loved one,

and the anonymity of bureaucratic errands carried out in an indi¤erent

and potentially hostile environment. The replication of the original German

terminology is thus not only a matter of convenience, it is also instrumental

to the overall message conveyed by the speaker.

24 Yaron Matras

Lexical insertions of the types illustrated in these two examples appear

to operate precisely on the ambiguity of the context-separation of sub-

components of the speaker’s overall linguistic repertoire. On the one hand,

the insertion of words from a di¤erent ‘‘language’’ appears to defy the

demarcation of sub-components of the speaker’s overall linguistic reper-

toire and so to suggest that the speaker is at liberty to make full use of

the entire repertoire irrespective of any situational or contextual constraints.

On the other hand, it is precisely the association of these particular inser-

tions with another set of interaction settings – that belonging to the public

and institutional domain, outside the home, and so on – that creates a spe-

cial e¤ect in the ongoing discourse, that of authentication and contrast

with the more intimate sphere of the chosen language of the ongoing inter-

action, an e¤ect the speaker exploits for stylistic purposes.

This special e¤ect of lexical insertions may become eroded when a word

becomes a regular part of the language into which it is inserted, or when it

is adopted in monolingual contexts and the contrast of associations with

di¤erent interaction settings is thus lost. Nonetheless, special e¤ects may

arguably still be detected even following the stabilization of loan vocabu-

lary. The diglossic origin of the contrast among the famous English lexical

pairs pig-pork, sheep-mutton, cow-beef, chicken-poultry in peasant (Saxon)

English and aristocratic French is still apparent in their domain specializa-

tion as livestock versus culinary dishes. Likewise, most German speakers

who use English loans in domains such as computer technology, as in

example (3), media, and management are aware of their English origins

and associations with international communication settings:

(3) German: Lexical borrowing

Ich muss es vom Internet downloadenI must it from.DEF internet download

‘I have to download it from the internet.’

The discourse-strategic insertion of lexical items pertaining to institutional

and other cultural or social domain-specific terminology fits nicely, of

course, with the overall picture of lexical borrowing. At the top of the list

of typical lexical borrowings we find terms for institutions, specialized

instruments, culture-specific practices, and innovations. Most of those are

represented by nouns, which appear universally to be the most frequently

borrowed word class. Statistics for Japanese (4) and Romani (5) provide

an example.4

4. See the two sources cited here for details on the corpora and the mode ofcalculation.


(4) Percentage of English loans in Japanese by selected, specialized

semantic domains (from Loveday 1996)

computer (99%) > broadcasting (82%) > journalism, marketing

(75%) > engineering (67%) > flowers (52%) > vegetables

(35%) > animals (24%) > colors (9%)

(5) Percentage of loanwords by semantic domain in Selice Romani

(Elsık 2009):

household, modern world, agriculture (over 90%) > clothing,

warfare (over 80%) > animals, social and political relations, the

physical world (over 70%) > religion and belief, speech and

language, law, technology, food and drink (over 60%) > time,

the body, motion, perception, emotion, cognition, values (over

50%) > spatial relations (over 40%) > quantity, kinship (over 30%)

Examining both the synchronic, discourse-based behavior of bilinguals

and diachronic data on contact-induced language change in an integrated

approach, we are in a position to explain both some structural facts of

lexical borrowing – the predominance of nouns among borrowed word

classes – and the semantic distribution of lexical borrowings: The roots

of lexical borrowings are in bilinguals’ attempts to integrate into an on-

going interaction concepts associated primarily with an environment in

which a di¤erent language is spoken. The need to do so arises in particular

with reference to unique structures of that environment, such as specific

practices or names of specific institutions that are not replicated in the

activity domain or community in which the language of the ongoing inter-

action is spoken. The liberty to draw on such insertions is given in turn

only in those interaction settings where the speaker may resort to the bi-

lingual mode, that is, where the other participants are also bilingual and

where the language of the interaction is not tightly regulated but at least

some flexibility is allowed for. In situations of unidirectional bilingualism,

this limits the opportunities for using insertions to interactions among

members of the bilingual group only. The insertion serves to activate

knowledge of the original set of interaction contexts in which the word is

normally used. As such, it has a strategic e¤ect on the structuring of the

discourse, apart from facilitating the speaker’s access to concepts by licens-

ing the activation of words and terms from the entire repertoire, irrespective

of the interaction context in which they originally appear. In due course,

some bilingual insertions may find their way into a monolingual population,

26 Yaron Matras

carried by a group of innovators whose terms, concepts, or simply stylistic

choices are being adopted by others in the speech community.

4. Replication of patterns / constructions

Convergence of form-function mapping, semantic meaning representation,

constructions, or ‘‘patterns’’ is sometimes regarded as a prolonged process

involving not just gradual dissemination within the speech community but

also gradual evolution or grammaticalization of the construction itself. In

fact, while there is no disputing that a time factor is crucial to the propa-

gation of an innovation throughout the speech community, the emergence

of an innovation may certainly be a spontaneous act.

Consider the following example, from the German-Hebrew bilingual

child. Around the age of four, the child acquires a new construction in

German – the politeness term of address Sie. The German second-person

polite form Sie is identical to the 3pl pronoun sie, and carries the same

3pl agreement marker on the verb. The context in which the child ac-

quires this construction is a game which he plays with his mother, in

which the child is a storekeeper and the mother is a customer coming to

the shop, who addresses the shopkeeper in the polite form when inquir-

ing about certain products (haben Sie X ? ‘do you.polite have X?’). The

child’s acquaintance with the German politeness form is, at this stage,

limited to this particular context. Strictly speaking, he does not acquire a

politeness marker as such, but a construction that is employed in a partic-

ular slot within the predefined pattern of speech activities that character-

izes the game ‘‘shop.’’

By acquiring this new construction, the child has extended his overall

communicative repertoire. In this case, this is a more accurate description

than suggesting that he has learned a new ‘‘structure,’’ since he is already

familiar with the form of the 3pl pronoun and agreement marker, and it is

only this use of the structure to refer to the addressee under strictly-defined

communicative circumstances that is novel to him. When the child is

spending time with his father, a similar game is played in Hebrew. That

is the context of example (6).

(6) a. Hebrew; age 4:1, during role-play as a customer addressing

a grocer:

yes lahem tapuxım?

there.is to.3pl apples

[intended] ‘Do you have apples?’

[expressed] ‘Do they have apples?’


b. German model construction for polite form of address:

haben Sie Apfel?

have.3pl you.polite/3pl apples

‘Do you have apples?’

Note that the ‘‘generic’’ shop-game, from the child’s perspective, is played

with the mother, and that it is in her household (the parents live in two

separate households) that the child has a range of accessories, including a

toy counter and till, to facilitate the game. The shop-game in the father’s

household is thus a ‘‘replica.’’ Having enriched his linguistic-communicative

repertoire as part of mastering the shop-game, the child is eager to repeat

the acquired pattern of activity associated with it. This repetition of the

activity pattern may be regarded as the child’s communicative goal in the

interaction (see Figure 2). It includes the organization of the question

which the child, now playing the role of the customer, puts to the store-

keeper, this time the Hebrew-speaking father. For this particular task

within the overall interaction pattern, the child has recently acquired a

specific task-e¤ective construction. However, Hebrew lacks a politeness

pronoun of the kind found in German; completion of the task or parts of

it in German would be against the rules of compliance with the selection

of context-appropriate (Hebrew) word-forms (and might therefore be

rejected by the interlocutor, or interpreted as an attempt to create a special

conversational e¤ect).

Aware of the constraints on the interaction context in the father’s house-

hold, namely the need to choose overt word-forms that conform with the

context – or ‘‘Hebrew’’ word-forms – the child is keen to comply by

selecting a construction that is contextually appropriate. At the same time,

the child is keen to communicate most e¤ectively and to exploit the func-

tionality of new constructions in his overall linguistic repertoire. The two

seemingly conflicting motivations are reconciled through a creative pro-

cedure. The child picks up a single – albeit ‘‘pivotal’’ – feature of the

German construction, namely the use of the 3pl. He matches this feature

to a counterpart structure in Hebrew, replicating the German construction

by employing a Hebrew possessive construction in the 3pl (Figure 2). The

combination renders the construction both contextually appropriate and

seemingly e¤ective for the communicative task that has been selected.

Its actual e¤ectiveness will of course depend on the ability and willing-

ness of the interlocutor to understand and accept the meaning of the new

construction. Its chances of becoming propagated within the speech com-

munity and so to lead to language change will in turn depend on the inno-

28 Yaron Matras

vator’s potential to influence others, on the degree of normative control on

language that is exercised in the speech community, and of course on the

existence of a community of interlocutors. In the case of the present exam-

ple, the construction may be understood by the interlocutor, but there are

no Hebrew-speaking peers among whom the innovation can be propa-

gated, and parental intervention in the child’s speech is regular and is

likely to prevent even the innovator himself from adopting the construc-

tion on a regular basis. Nevertheless, while the propagation chances will

vary considerably among speech communities, the creative process by

which pattern-replication first appears and the discourse-functional moti-

vation behind it can be regarded as similar in principle.

Constructions are selected as advantageous and worthy of replication

through pivot-matching when they are perceived as particularly task-

e¤ective. We saw this in example (6), where the child’s selection of the

‘‘politeness construction’’ was motivated by a recently acquired rule to use

the ‘‘politeness marker’’ in a particular position of the interaction scheme

of the role-play ‘‘shop.’’ But task-e¤ectiveness can also be associated with

simple task routines where the selection of a particular construction is moti-

vated primarily by the fact that it is the most readily available, or in the

Figure 2. Construction replication through ‘‘pivot-matching’


absence of secure knowledge about an alternative appropriate construction.

Example (7) shows how an adult native speaker of German, whose English

is considered fluent, resorts to pattern-replication to activate German con-

struction patterns while giving a formal interview to British television.

(7) German/English bilingual, in a British television interview:

At the border in England, were by the custom/ They have investigatedthis car very very eh/ eh/ thoroughly and they have removed the panels

from the doors, the panels from the luggage room.

So-called subject-verb inversion following an occupied first constituent

position in the sentence is replicated in English by following the same

word order. It is a specialized word order pattern, applied in German

when a constituent other than the subject is employed to create the per-

spective of the sentence. The speaker is over-di¤erentiating a semantic-

syntactic context here, attempting to select a very specialized construction

for a very specific task. In what follows, verbs appear in the perfect tense

with have auxiliaries, as they would in German in the description of simple

events whose outcome does not necessarily extend into the present.

Finally, the construction of the lexical term luggage room for boot or trunk

is a replication of German Ko¤erraum. Like the child’s pattern replication

in (6), these examples too are spontaneous, triggered by an appreciation of

task-e¤ective constructions for the given communicative tasks, coupled

with (or constrained by) an appreciation of the need to comply with the

selection of word-forms from a particular inventory or sub-component of

the linguistic repertoire, word-forms that would be understood and ac-

cepted by the interlocutor in the ongoing interaction context. Here too,

the potential for these makeshift replica constructions to become propa-

gated and stabilized within a larger speech community is small, indeed

minimal; but one might just imagine the potential in a community con-

sisting to a large degree of second-language learners for whom the target

language becomes the language of choice, in situations of ongoing lan-

guage shift.

There are also numerous observable cases of pattern-replication in

smaller or minority languages, brought about by bilinguals imitating con-

structions from the neighboring dominant language. Here we have, in

other words, not a situation of language learning nor one of language

shift, but one of maintenance of a community language; nor do we have

a linguistic equilibrium, but a case of clear diglossia and dominance. And

yet the outcome is the replication of patterns or constructions, sometimes

30 Yaron Matras

on a massive scale. Domari, for instance, the archaic Indo-Aryan lan-

guage spoken by a tiny ethnic minority in the Old City of Jerusalem, is in

the process of generalizing a new possessive construction, modeled on the

one found in colloquial Palestinian Arabic, its principal contact language.

(8) a. ‘‘Canonical’’ Domari

b�y-im kuri

father-1sg house

b. Palestinian Arabic:

be #t-o la-�abu#-yhouse-3sg.m.poss to-father-1sg

c. New Domari construction:

kury-os b�y-im-ki

house-3sg.poss father-1sg-abl

‘my father’s house’

In this situation, a variant construction has emerged which has now

become stabilized as a regular option, probably even the preferred option,

by most speakers. We can assume that its roots were in a spontaneous

innovation of the type seen in examples (6) and (7). The motivation for

such an innovation will have been the frequency of use of the Arabic con-

struction in interaction outside the Domari-speaking household. The need

for tight control in producing correct Arabic constructions among Arab

interlocutors will have contrasted with the relatively lenient attitude that

speakers of the now moribund Domari have toward their own language,

in which variation, flexibility, and mixture with Arabic are commonplace,

adding yet another factor in the perception of the Arabic-based construc-

tion as more task-e¤ective.

A process of language change that has come to its conclusion can be

found in the dialect of Gulf Arabic spoken in the Iranian province of

Khuzistan, especially in urban communities, where Persian has become

the dominant language of institutions and the public domain (cf. Matras

and Shabibi 2007). Here, the attributive construction involving nominals

(or nominal-possessive construction) has fused with the adjectival attribu-

tive construction, following the Persian model.

(9) a. ‘‘Canonical’’ Arabic

t˙abaqa-t il-mustasfa i�-�a #niyyafloor-constr.f def-hospital def-second.f


b. Persian

taba'a-ye dovom-e bı #maresta #nfloor-attr second-attr hospital

c. Khuzistani Arabic

t˙abaqa-t i�-�a #niyya-t il-bı #maresta #nfloor-constr.f def-second.f-constr.f def-hospital

‘The second floor of the hospital building’

Note that the canonical Arabic construction expresses nominal attribution

by attaching a so-called construct ending (with feminine nouns only) to

the head, and by attaching a definite article to the following possessor

noun. Adjectival attribution is expressed by the postpositioning of the

adjective and its agreement with the head in gender, number, and definite-

ness (a head that is determined through nominal attribution in the posses-

sive construction being considered as definite). In Persian, both types of

attribution are represented by the positioning of an attributive particle

-(y)e between the head and the attribute (whether nominal or adjectival).

Khuzistani adopts the Persian model, and generalizes one single attribu-

tive construction to both nominal and adjectival attributes. Moreover, it

draws on the linear combination of a construct state ending (with feminine

nouns) on the head and the definite article of the following dependent

attribute and equates those with the Persian attributive marker, which in

Persian is arguably the pivotal feature of the attributive construction.

This combination is then transferred to the Khuzistani adjectival construc-

tion as well. The result is a one-to-one or isomorphic correspondence

between the Persian and the Khuzistani Arabic constructions.

Finally, Macedonian Turkish has undergone a series of radical changes

to its overall typology of clause linking, which have given rise to devices

linking finite clauses of the type that is common in the languages of

Europe in general and surrounding languages of the Balkans, Macedonian,

Albanian, and Greek in particular (cf. Matras 2004; Matras and Tufan

2007).

(10) Macedonian Turkish relative clause

adam ne gel-di

man rel come-3sg.past

‘The man who came’

The language has developed postposed, finite relative clauses as well as

a relativizer, modeled on the interrogative ne ‘what,’ much like its Mace-

32 Yaron Matras

donian counterpart sto; and it has done away with Turkish gerundial con-

structions of the type gel-en adam ‘the man who came.’

5. Selection malfunctions

Above it was proposed that bilingual speakers do not ‘‘switch o¤’’ one of

their language ‘‘systems’’ during monolingual conversation, but that the

entire repertoire of linguistic structures remains available to them in each

and every communicative interaction setting. Following Green (1998) and

others we might assume that the production of both lexemes and construc-

tions undergoes a monitoring procedure as part of which those structures

that comply with the constraints on context-appropriateness (structures

that are expected and so are likely to be accepted and understood by the

interlocutor) are selected, while those that are not deemed contextually

appropriate are blocked. Example (11) below shows how this control and

selection mechanism, which is already operational in a multilingual child

as young as two, may occasionally malfunction. As a result, a structure is

produced that is functionally correct in terms of its semantic-pragmatic

value, but contextually inappropriate as it belongs to the ‘‘wrong language.’’

In this example, the child is known to have mastered the production of a

series of di¤erent clause combining structures in both Hebrew and German,

including the contrastive combination with elements equivalent to English

but. But in (11), following a three-week holiday in which German was the

only everyday language of interaction, he produces the German conjunction

aber during an interaction in Hebrew:

(11) Hebrew; age 2:3, first few days in the father’s care after returning

from a three-week holiday in Germany; inspecting the shell of a

snail in the garden:

bayit sel xilazon aber eyn xilazon bifnım

house of snail but is-no snail inside

‘A snail-shell, but there is no snail inside.’

Clearly, whatever di‰culty the child is having in retrieving the correct

Hebrew conjunction is not a¤ecting the semantics of the clause linking

device as such, which is correctly produced drawing on the German equi-

valent, nor is it a¤ecting the retrieval of other Hebrew structures, be they

content words or grammatical items. The absence of any hesitation of

correction indicates that the child is not aware of the ‘‘error’’ in the choice


of word, and indeed the interlocutor in this case does not intervene but

accepts the construction in its entirety; the construction is thus viable

from a communicative viewpoint, at least in this instance.

What is the motivation behind the child’s selective failure, around the

contrastive conjunction, to control and select the appropriate word-form?

Confusion on the basis of the structural similarity between the two con-

junctions – German aber and Hebrew aval – cannot be ruled out entirely,

although the di¤erence in prosody appears to make the distinction between

the two quite salient. More likely, the source of the malfunction can be

attributed to the specific semantic-pragmatic value of the connector. The

function of the contrastive conjunction is to signal a break in the expected

propositional causal chain (Rudolph 1996). It is inserted by the speaker in

anticipation of a disharmony between the expectations of the interlocutor

about the subsequent course of the proposition and the speaker’s own

intentions concerning the exposition of the proposition. Moreover, it con-

stitutes a direct intervention by the speaker with the interlocutor’s ongoing

processing of the proposition. The clash of expectations and the speaker’s

e¤ort to intervene and redirect the listener’s processing course constitute a

tense moment in the interaction, one during which the speaker’s authority

is at stake and a concentrated e¤ort on the part of the speaker is called for

in order to maintain the listener’s confidence and possibly even the floor.

Elsewhere (Matras 1998a, 2000) I have argued that the mental e¤ort that

is required in order to solve this tension comes at the expense of the e¤ort

that is directed toward the smooth and continuous operation of the selec-

tion and inhibition mechanism, which controls the selection of context-

appropriate forms from the multilingual repertoire. There is therefore a

direct correlation between ‘‘high-tension’’ mental processing operations

such as contrast and other argumentative connectors, and the likelihood

of malfunction of the selection and inhibition mechanism, and therefore a

direct correlation between such operations and bilingual speech produc-

tion errors where the functionally correct form is selected, but from the

‘‘wrong language’’ (that is, from the contextually non-appropriate com-

ponent of the linguistic repertoire). When such malfunctions occur, they

tend to be directed towards a language that has recently been activated

on a routine basis and therefore constitutes the default fall-back option

for routine task-management of the relevant processing operation. For

the young bilingual child who has just returned from a three-week stay in

Germany, this ‘‘pragmatically dominant language’’ is German.

Not just children are prone to selection malfunctions of this kind. Con-

sider the following examples, all recorded from bilingual adults in a multi-

34 Yaron Matras

lingual setting, all involving a similar class of operators. In (12), a group

of Hebrew-English bilinguals is speaking Hebrew at a restaurant. They are

approached by the waiter, who takes their order in English. One person

from the group then adds an item to the order, choosing the Hebrew con-

trastive connector instead of English but.

(12) Hebrew/English bilingual at a (Chinese) restaurant in England:

. . . and one Won Ton soup aval/ eh/ the vegetarian one.

but

The hesitation and seeming self-repair that follows indicates that the

speaker has become aware of her production of an incorrect form and,

moreover, that the form that had been produced was indeed not intended.

Selection malfunctions are counter-strategic; they do not serve a goal in

shaping or influencing the message key for any stylistic special e¤ect.

They are nevertheless functional in the sense that they are non-random in

their distribution and direction; in other words, they can be systematically

accounted for and explained through a model of multilingual language

processing and speech production, as attempted above.

The important thing to note here is that malfunctions are not moti-

vated by ‘‘gaps,’’ either in the system itself or necessarily in the speaker’s

command of the system; nor are they motivated by ‘‘prestige,’’ as there is

no prestige gain to the speaker who confronts a Chinese waiter in England

with a Hebrew conjunction, nor to the young child who fails to conform

consistently with the selection constraints that operate in the context of his

interactions with his father. (In the latter case a gap can be excluded when

there is evidence that the child has used the appropriate Hebrew word

or construction on previous occasions.) The fact that malfunctions tend

to defy prestige constraints is perhaps best exemplified by (13), where a

trained diplomat slips into his native language, Arabic, during a formal

television interview.

(13) Saudi Ambassador to the UK during a television interview:

I would beg to say that ya�ni/ the Kingdom is a very big territory.

The slip is the failure to control the production of the Arabic discourse

marker ya�ni, which might be translated as ‘I mean’ or even ‘you see,’

and whose function is to grab the interlocutor’s attention and to make

sure that it continues to be focused on the speaker’s turn and propositional

content. Thus, ya�ni has a somewhat similar tension potential to the

contrastive marker, allowing the speaker to regulate roles in the inter-

action and intervene directly in the hearer-side processing of the ongoing

discourse.


The following examples indicate the volatility in principle of the direc-

tionality of selection malfunctions. Above I referred to the ‘‘pragmatically

dominant language’’ (see Matras 1998a) as the fall-back option for routine

task constructions. In the previous two examples, the lapse in selection

control happens to favor the speakers’ respective native languages. How-

ever, in (14) the speaker is a Polish native speaker residing in Germany.

She is speaking German to two friends she is meeting up with in London,

during her stay there on a three-week language course.

(14) Polish/German bilingual, on ‘‘language holiday’’ in England:

. . . bis auf/ bis auf die Tischdecken, because/ eh weil sie . . .

‘. . . except/ except for the tablecloth, because/ uh because it . . .’

The selection of English because during a portion of German conversation

targets the language toward which the speaker has been directing her

uppermost intellectual attention during the past weeks. Once again, we

are dealing with an argumentative connector, one that is inserted in order

to intervene with and influence the hearer’s course of processing proposi-

tions and deriving conclusions from them, and at the same time a con-

nector that operates at the interactional level, announcing the speaker’s

justification of a preceding statement; thus, because captures the speaker

yet again in a position of potential vulnerability on the interaction plane.

Example (15), from a German/Hebrew bilingual residing in England,

underlines yet again the relevance of the pragmatically dominant language –

the language in which routine tasks have most recently been handled – as

the fall-back option.

(15) German/Hebrew bilingual living in England:

ani xosevet se ze lo knesiya any moreI think.sg.f that this neg church

‘I think that this is no longer a church.’

Here the selection malfunction targets an indefinite expression, which oper-

ates at the level of established presuppositions. At the pragmatic level of

the interaction, indefinites serve to delegate to the listener the task of sup-

plementing relevant information based on shared presuppositions. In the

case of (15), the discontinuity signaled by the speaker through any more

(in a negated phrase) presupposes the availability of information on an

earlier state of a¤airs that is being discontinued. This information is not

made explicit, however, and the hearer is expected to retrieve it from the

context. By explicitly delegating to the listener this procedure of mentally

36 Yaron Matras

supplementing information, the speaker is once again intervening with

hearer-side processing (beyond the mere default routine of supplying infor-

mation to the listener). In so doing, the speaker puts him/herself in a posi-

tion of vulnerability with respect to the listener’s potential discontent. We

therefore find, once again, a link between high-tension constructions, dis-

traction of the mental processing e¤ort, and weakening of the selection

and inhibition mechanism, and as a consequence the selection of a func-

tionally adequate but contextually non-appropriate structure.

Finally, example (16) shows how a speaker of Ladino (Judeo-Spanish)

living in Israel falls back on the pragmatically dominant language – here,

Hebrew, the principal language of interaction outside the home – during a

connectivity construction linking events into a consequential chain.

(16) Judezmo (Ladino)/ Hebrew bilingual:

a. S: Los eh/ mekomiyım, los lokales, eran relasiones midzores

the uh locals the locals were relations better

de los 'rexos ke vinieron de la turkıa.

from the Greeks who came from Turkey

b. Por ke los ke vinieron de Turkıa eran ublixados

because those who came from Turkey were obliged

de tomar lavoros de los eh/ sitadinos/ siudadinos, si.

to take jobs from the uh citizens citizens yes

c. H: Mhm, mhm.

d. S: Az/ eh es/ entonses empeso la/ la kel/ la enemistad

so-then uh so-then began the the that the rivalry

la mas grande.

the most great

a. S: ‘[With] The uh/ locals, the locals, relations were better than

[with] the Greeks who came from Turkey.

b. Because those who came from Turkey were obliged to take

jobs from the uh/ citizens/ citizens, yes.

c. H: Mhm, mhm.

d. S: So then/ uh/ th/ then the/ uh/ the greatest rivalry emerged.’

Note the speaker’s self-repair in segment d., which follows the slip into

Hebrew (both Hebrew az and Ladino entonses have both a temporal-

sequential and a consequential meaning), confirming that the speaker is


not trying to avail himself of the contrast of languages for any stylistic

purposes or other special e¤ect, but that he has genuinely lost control

over the speech production mechanism around the relevant expression.

What is the meaning of self-repairs of this kind? At first glance we

might at the very least dismiss any chances of further repetition, let alone

propagation, of this one-o¤ error, and so any chance of its stabilization as

an integral part of the speaker’s inventory of expressions, forms, and con-

structions potentially selected during conversation in Ladino. However,

Berk-Seligson (1986) in fact documents the exact same Hebrew-derived

feature – az ‘and then,’ ‘and so’ – in the speech of other Israeli Ladino-

speakers. It is quite clear that some selection malfunctions, such as those

represented in examples (12)–(15), are unlikely to become propagated

throughout a speech community and lead to language change even if they

do happen to be repeated by the speaker, or even by another speaker. In

all these settings the potential for a sector within the speech community

to find the innovation advantageous for communication is virtually non-

existent. Nonetheless, this is not to say that the act, or rather event, of

selection malfunction itself cannot lead to language change. Given a

sector of individuals with similar bilingual skills and a similar repertoire,

frequent occurrence of selection malfunctions targeting similar expressions

or even sets of expressions, and lax normative control over performance in

the relevant (recipient) language and tolerance of change, the targets of

selection malfunctions may indeed become stabilized within a speech com-

munity. A prerequisite seems to be the established status of the pragmati-

cally dominant language as a powerful contact language that is both

widely understood and widely accepted. Consider the following example,

from a speaker of Low German, originating in Schleswig-Holstein in

northern Germany, who was recorded in the United States some 30-odd

years after his emigration to that country:5

(17) Low German speaker, 35 years in USA

Dat weer’n Unnericht for sustein Stunnen, but ik hef bloos

that was a lesson for sixteen hours but I have only

acht Stunnen makt, aber dor hef ik uk nix leert.

eight hours made but there have I also nothing learned

‘That was a sixteen-hour class, but I only did eight, but I also

didn’t learn anything there.’

5. I am grateful to Dorte Hansen-Jaax for sharing this material with me.

38 Yaron Matras

Two variants for the connector ‘but’ – Low German aber and English

but – appear in this person’s speech alongside one another; the short

excerpt reproduced here is typical of longer stretches of discourse docu-

mented for the speaker, which show that both variants have become an

established part of his Low German speech. We can attribute this to

repeated selection malfunctions that have gone unrepaired and uncor-

rected, and have finally become an accepted and integral feature of the

speaker’s idiolect. The following example illustrates the adoption into

Lovari Romani of German discourse particles by a speaker who belongs

to the first generation in her family to be raised in Germany.

(18) Lovari Romani, born in Poland, first generation in Germany:

Laki familija sas also kesave sar te phenav, artisturi, n�?her family were part such how comp say.1sg artists part

‘Her family were like such how shall I say, showpeople, right ?’

The speaker in (18) licenses herself to freely integrate German discourse

particles, thereby accepting on a wholesale basis situations in which German

operators of this class slip into her speech in an involuntary and unplanned

manner; in other words, she compromises the selection and inhibition

mechanism entirely for a complete class of functional operators, ridding

herself of the burden to have to engage in suppressing ‘‘wrong language’’

choices in positions of high interactional tension and intense mental e¤ort

to monitor and direct the hearer-side processing of the discourse. In earlier

work (Matras 1998, 2000) I have referred to this process as ‘‘fusion,’’ as a

way of capturing the resulting wholesale, category-specific merger of

forms in one language (here Romani) with those of the contact language

(here German).

Naturally, long-term fusion of this kind presupposes the acceptance by

a relevant sector of the Romani speech community of regular insertions

of German word-forms into Romani discourse. Significantly, although

Romani speakers may be said to operate by default in the bilingual mode

(since bilingualism is the rule, and lexical insertions such as those dis-

cussed in Section 3 are frequent), this acceptance does not amount to a

wholesale license to randomly insert just any German word. Rather, it

applies specifically to the extended class of discourse operators, indefinites,

particles, and connectors – or ‘‘utterance modifiers’’ (see Matras 1998). It

is this kind of scenario that one can postulate as the background for lan-

guage change and the borrowing of an entire class of operators, as is the

case in Domari discussed above. In this language all connectors, most


focus and modal particles, and most indefinites have been borrowed from

the contact language, Palestinian Arabic. The systems of monitoring and

directing the interaction are thus identical or almost identical in the two

languages. For Domari speakers, speaking their native language is there-

fore characterized by employing a particular set of vocabulary items and

inflections, but not by employing a particular system of clause linking or

interaction-level directing. Much like those German-English bilinguals

who have only a single word-form for internet, computer, design, and so

on, Domari bilinguals have but one system of clause linking and utterance

modifying.

(19) Domari: Fusion of clause linking devices

(Arabic-derived forms are italicized):

u # da� iman/ ya�nı #/ kunt ama kury-a-m-e#k walaand always that.is was.1sg I house-obl-loc-pred.f and.not

kil-sami wala aw-ami. wala waddik-ar-m-i mah˙all-ak

exit-1sg and.not come-1sg and.not bring-3sg-1sg-pres place-indef

ya par-ar-m-i wa #s-ı #s kamk-am, u# par-ar-i

or take-3sg-1sg-pres with-3sg work-1sg.subj and take-3sg-pres

ple #-m. u # gistane #-san ka #nu ya�nı # �amilk-ad-m-a

money-1sg and all-3pl was.3pl that.is treat-3pl-1sg-rem

miss gha #y kury-am-a bass ka #nat da #y-osneg good house-obl-loc but was.3sg.f mother-nom.3sg

h˙ayyat-e #-ki gha #y wa #s-ı #m. pandzi rabbik-ed-os-im.

obl-abl good with-1sg she bring.up-perf-nom.3sg-obl.1sg

ya�nı # lamma ka #nat h˙ayya #t far-m-a wila ‘is i

that.is when was.3sg.f hit-1sg-rem or something

ka #nat h˙azzirk-ar-s-a.

was.3sg.f warn-3sg-3sg-rem

‘And I was always/ I mean/ at home, not going out nor coming nor

did she take me anywhere. Or else she used to take me with her to

work, and she used to take my money. And they all used to treat me

badly at home. But Hayyat’s mother was nice to me. She brought

me up. I mean, whenever Hayyat used to beat me or anything she

used to tell her o¤.’

With relatively high frequency, discourse markers are subjected to language

selection errors or malfunctions of the type illustrated above. They are also

40 Yaron Matras

frequently adopted from a contact language into the regular, stable idiolect

of bilingual speakers (see for example Maschler 1994, 1997; Poplack 1980).

They are frequently borrowed by ‘‘smaller’’ or ‘‘weaker’’ languages, that is,

languages whose population tends to be bilingual or was bilingual at some

stage in its history. The source of the forms in such cases is a ‘‘dominant’’

language, a language that was used in the public domain, often supported

by institutions and literacy, and often spoken by a large population of

monolinguals. All this allows us to postulate a direct link between selec-

tion malfunctions, their acceptability and stabilization in certain kinds of

bilingual settings, and long-term language change (again, under certain

sociolinguistic conditions).

As argued already in the opening remarks of this article, I disagree with

the direction of research that simply attributes borrowing of this kind to

‘‘social pressure,’’ ‘‘prestige,’’ or ‘‘social circumstances,’’ without spelling

out the precise link between the social setting, conversational pressure

and communicative intent, and the specific functional role of the structure

or category in question.

Let me therefore summarize the case, again, for an integrated, activity-

based approach to the borrowability of the class of discourse markers and

related structures. Bilingual speakers are under pressure to conform to

monolingual rules on discourse formation, at least in some interaction

settings (though a bilingual mode may well be the default conversational

mode in some communities). This requires them to select those structures,

constructions, word-forms, and so on from within their multilingual lin-

guistic repertoire that are contextually appropriate, and to suppress or

inhibit those that are not (cf. Green 1998; Paradis 2004). While this selec-

tion and inhibition mechanism is a normal and integral part of bilingual

proficiency, it is not immune to occasional malfunctions. Being, essen-

tially, disruptions in the mental processing procedure of language, these

malfunctions are more likely to occur under circumstances of distress,

fatigue, or confusion (such as a recent move from one environment to

another), as well as around interaction management tasks that are partic-

ularly demanding and require increased mental e¤ort on the part of the

speaker. Direct intervention in the listener’s processing of language and

direction of the listener’s participation in the discourse belong to these

demanding tasks. Selection malfunctions around the structures, and word-

forms that trigger the relevant operations, are more likely to occur than

around other structures. This explains the borrowing hierarchies presented

in (20)–(25), which are based on examinations of frequency of borrowing

patterns and the correlation between the borrowing of individual para-

digm values, based on a sample of over 80 dialects of Romani in contact


with various languages (Elsık and Matras 2006), as well as on a cross-

linguistic sample of languages in contact (Matras 2007):

(20) contrast > disjunction > addition (‘but’ > ‘or’ > ‘and’;

‘only’ > ‘too’; concessive > most other subordination markers;

‘except,’ ‘without,’ ‘instead of ’ > most other adpositions)

(21) superlative > comparative

(22) discourse markers (including fillers, tags, interjections) > focus

particles, phasal adverbs > other function words

(23) indefinites > interrogatives > deixis, anaphora

(24) modality > aktionsart > future tense > other tense/aspect

(25) obligation > necessity > possibility > ability > desire

Contrast, and related semantic-pragmatic dimensions such as restriction

(‘only’), exemption (‘except’), concession (‘even if,’ ‘although’), and substi-

tution (‘instead’), are prone to tension and so to selection malfunctions

due to the clash between the speaker’s communicative intentions and the

listener’s expectations (based on shared contextual presuppositions). A

similar contrast between an individual case and a set, and hence between

the speaker’s chosen thematic focus point and an expected, presupposi-

tional context, is conveyed by the superlative. Discourse markers and

related operators participate in the management of interaction roles and

the relations between speaker and listener, in particular by monitoring

and directing the listener’s participation (for example tags, fillers, and

hesitation markers), and are thus instrumental in processing (mental)

clashes between speaker and hearer expectations. Indefinites delegate, as

argued above, extensive processing work to the listener, risking the latter’s

inability or refusal to cooperate and hence a breakdown in the e¤ective-

ness and e‰ciency of the communicative interaction. Modality conveys

the speaker’s relative weak authority to guarantee the truth-value of a

proposition and therefore opens a potential window, yet again, for the

listener’s refusal to cooperate and a communication breakdown. Naturally,

it is not suggested that speakers are in any way aware of these e¤ects of

functions such as indefiniteness and modality on the hearer, or that they

pre-empt potential breakdown in the communication. Rather, the prag-

matically outstanding function of these categories will lead to pressure in

the processing procedure, which in turn may frequently trigger malfunc-

tions. These malfunctions eventually become tolerated, in some speakers’

communities at least, and are no longer subjected to self-repair. At that

42 Yaron Matras

stage, they compete as variants with inherited forms, or they simply enrich

the inventory of forms in these categories.

Note that of the tenses, the most prone to contact-induced change is the

future tense, which due to its project of unverified events is itself close

to modality (cf. Comrie 1989). Finally, the hierarchy of borrowing for

modality categories themselves (25) reveals that the association of events

and actions with external pressures, which are beyond the speaker’s con-

trol, is more likely to trigger borrowing (and the underlying process of dis-

ruptions of the selection mechanism) than those associated with internal

attitudes or aptitude.

The susceptibility of linguistic operations triggering increased tension

and mental e¤ort to be subject to lapses in control over the language selec-

tion mechanism is thus directly reflected in the likelihood that categories

representing these very same linguistic operations will undergo structural

borrowing. How, then, can we connect what is an event a¤ecting the in-

dividual speaker’s performance in discourse (selection malfunction and

bilingual speech production error) with what is by necessity and definition

a social process, namely an alteration to the permanent shape of a com-

munity’s language?

Many, perhaps even most, individual lapses will not lead to language

change; they will either be self-repaired by the speaker, corrected by the

listener, or ignored by the participants. But an e¤ort will be made by the

speaker to avoid them in order to avoid a breakdown in communication

or simply to avoid the embarrassment of apparent ineptness. However,

frequently occurring selection malfunctions may become stabilized in an

individual’s idiolect as they are left uncommented upon and at the same

time understood by a regular audience of interlocutors. Such a situation

may arise in groups of bilinguals whose default conversation mode is bi-

lingual, and where normative intervention in language use is not intense

and flexibility in linguistic choices is tolerated. Normally, such a situation

would tend to point toward a diglossic imbalance in the roles of the two

languages, with one, the source of borrowings or donor language, being

the more dominant and institutionally protected language of a mono-

lingual community and of public life, and the other, the borrowing or

recipient language, being limited to a bilingual minority, typically used in

informal domestic situations and possibly confined to oral use only, and

hence coupled with a low awareness of language structure and low moti-

vation to intervene and consciously shape language use. If the same ex-

pressions become stabilized among a group of individuals in such a com-

munity, then the process of language change will have been set in motion.


6. Language manipulation (deliberate mixing)

In Section 3 I discussed lexical insertions. I mentioned their ambiguous

status: they are quasi-violations of the rules on the selection of context-

appropriate linguistic material, and thus e¤ective triggers of special con-

versational emphasis or specific associations. At the same time they are

understood by the interlocutors, and so are communicatively e¤ective.

They are also sanctioned by the availability of the bilingual mode (Grosjean

2001) as an option for structuring conversation among the group of inter-

locutors. My final section is devoted to an even more daring violation of

the rules on contextual well-formedness (that is, monolingual selection),

one that does not even enjoy the exemption that the bilingual mode is

normally able to provide.

Consider example (26), from the same trilingual (Hebrew-German-

English) child discussed above. The child’s default languages of interac-

tion are German with the mother, Hebrew with the father, and English

outside the home. As we saw earlier, lexical insertions are acceptable in a

bilingual mode within the household, as long as the insertions represent

concepts that trigger specific associations with the English-speaking (or

other, as the case may be) environment. In (26), the child is addressing

the father, but violating the normal pattern of language choice by using

English. On top of that, he further violates even the norms of a hypo-

thetical (reconstructed or imitated) English-speaking interaction setting

by inserting into his utterance in (c.) everyday words from German that

carry no individual special e¤ect of their own; that is, unlike ‘‘normal’’

insertions, they do not represent concepts that are associated specifically

with a German-speaking environment, and so are not intended to evoke

such associations through some kind of original context-bound authenticity:

(26) (Hebrew); age 8:6, calling to his father from the bathroom when

washing his face before going to bed in the evening (insertions in

segment c. from German):

a. Child: Aba!

b. Father: Hmm.

c. Child: Where do I get a Lappen so I can wisch my Gesicht?wash-cloth wipe face

The German insertions are thus not selected individually because of their

content. Rather, their purpose is to have a wholesale ‘‘humorous’’ e¤ect

on the utterance. This e¤ect is brought about precisely by highlighting

44 Yaron Matras

the deviation from the full range of any expected, norm-compliant utter-

ance. To this end, the assembly of the utterance is being manipulated to

deviate from the usual types of either monolingual or bilingual (mixed)

utterances that might occur in interaction between the child and his father.

Such a step requires a high degree of linguistic skill and linguistic aware-

ness. It requires first of all an awareness of the full range of possible, per-

missible mixture types, in order to identify a type that is deviant from

those. Furthermore, it requires the self-confidence of a skilful and com-

petent speaker to experiment with a type of mixed utterance that is seldom

experienced in everyday interaction, and for which there is hardly an exist-

ing model in either parental or peer speech. This in turn requires a subtle

feel for the immediate context and setting, anticipation of the possible and

likely responses on the part of the listener, and a positive assessment of the

chances of the utterance to achieve its intended key e¤ect rather than

result in a communication breakdown.

It is noteworthy that a multilingual child as young as eight is already

equipped potentially with the necessary skills and linguistic confidence

that allows him to manipulate language mixing in this way. Similar patterns

of deliberate mixing for special e¤ect are documented from the speech

of adult bilinguals by Golovko (2003). The following example, from the

Hebrew of Israeli students in Germany, illustrates a structurally rather

subtle approach to language manipulation, once again for the purpose of

humor. It involves the imitation of the German morphophonological rule

on the formation of conditionals (the so-called second subjunctive) through

umlaut – German ich konnte ‘I could,’ wenn ich konnte ‘if I could’ – and its

importation into Hebrew, which lacks not only the phenomenon of umlaut

altogether, but even the resulting rounded phoneme itself. The basis is the

Hebrew past-tense form yaxolti ‘I could’:

(27) Israeli students in Germany; imitation of German subjunctive:

ılu yaxolti

if I-could

Neither of the two preceding examples is likely to lead to language change,

but this is not because of the nature of the communicative task or the struc-

tural strategies being pursued by the bilingual speakers in order to achieve

it. The improbability of language change stems from the restrictions on

potential propagation of the innovative structure to general and regular

use among a sector of the speech community. This in turn has to do

strictly with the number of bilingual interlocutors in the community and


their frequency of interaction, the frequency with which they resort to

overtly marked humorous keys in conversation, and the availability of

other modes, apart from language manipulation, to mark out that humor,

and so the overall degree of utility that the construction may have to its

users, as well as the degree of flexibility for carrying on shaping patterns

of language use free from any restrictive, normative intervention. All this,

which we might attribute to the ‘‘sociolinguistic circumstances’’ of the

speech community or perhaps just a small sector within it, are not, how-

ever, triggers for contact-induced change, nor are they mechanisms for

change. Rather, they are factors that may or may not facilitate or contain

the spread of innovations throughout a population of speakers, and the

consequent emergence of change.

The communities of Jewish cattle-traders in pre-war southwestern

Germany had developed an in-group speech mode, called Lekoudesch,

that was characterized by the insertion of Hebrew-derived word-forms,

largely lexical content words, recruited via the community’s exposure to

the study of Hebrew and Hebrew scriptures, into their regional dialect of

German.6

(28) Lekoudesch:

Der scha¤t de ganze Jomm im Uschpiss, un duat immer harmehe sits the whole day in pub and does always much

schasskenna und meloucht lou.

drinking and works not

‘He sits all day in the pub, and drinks a lot, and doesn’t work.’

The principal goal for which Lekoudesch was employed was as a mode of

humor and entertainment for members of the group of traders, and as a

means of setting them apart from outsiders, including using the language

to camouflage content. The term for the variety itself, Lekoudesch, is a

humorous word-play based on the traditional Ashkenazic term for the

Hebrew language, loshn koudesch meaning ‘‘the sacred language.’’ The

social setting prerequisites for stabilization are thus present in the existence

of a group of interlocutors – not even a speech community in the usual

sense of the term – who find continuous use for a consciously created,

humorous speech mode based on their multilingual competence, through

6. Data from recordings among Jewish survivors as well as non-Jewish farmerswho had learned the variety in their youth while being employed by Jewishcattle-traders.

46 Yaron Matras

which they can set themselves apart from others and thus rea‰rm their

group identity and group a‰liation.

My final example is a case in which this stabilization of language mix-

ing patterns has led to the creation of a stable repertoire that is the prop-

erty of an entire ethnic minority, and thus of a speech community, and is

sometimes even referred to as a ‘‘mixed language,’’ the English-Romani

mixture or Angloromani of English and Welsh Gypsies.

(29) Angloromani:

Ol the obben coz when the raklis jels I’m gonna mor yas.

‘Eat the food coz when the girls go I’m gonna kill you!’

Speakers or rather users of Angloromani have at their disposal a special

inventory of Romani-derived words covering typically anywhere between

150 and 700 distinct word meanings. Some meanings are covered directly

by Romani words that have been preserved, others through compounding

and extensions of inherited Romani base-words. The Romani lexical legacy

dates back to the use of inflected Romani as the everyday community lan-

guage of the Gypsy minority, until the shift to English during the second

half of the nineteenth century left no fluent speakers of Romani in the com-

munity. Holding on to a selection of Romani lexical items thus amounts to

a preservation of an important token of older community heritage.

Functionally speaking, the availability of a form of speech that sets

group members apart from others continues to be an important motiva-

tion for the preservation and cultivation of Romani-derived vocabulary.

As such, Romani words are now inserted in order to obtain a special con-

versational key. While there is no obligation on the speaker to insert any

particular word, or even clusters of words, from Romani, the insertion of

a Romani element will give the entire speech act the flavor of a special

emotive mode that will activate the cultural bond between speaker and

listener, and call on the listener to interpret what has been said in light of

that bond. Romani thus becomes an instrument for intimate comments as

well as for warnings, for threats that are based in empathy, as in (30),

as much as for secretive content that is to be concealed from bystanders

(cf. Matras et al. 2008).

7. Conclusion

I hope to have shown in this article that neither categorizations of contact

phenomena based on formal-structural factors nor those based strictly on

social factors can explain the motivation behind contact-induced language


change. Social factors are involved in facilitating or constraining the suc-

cessful propagation of innovations throughout a speech community. Struc-

tural factors may also play a role in constraining or facilitating change, but

structures are there in the first instance as triggers of language-processing

tasks.

Contact-induced change is the product of the creativity of speakers

seeking new ways to achieve goal-oriented tasks in communicative interac-

tion. Their creativity results in innovations, which in turn may or may not

be replicated by other speakers, or even by the same speaker on subse-

quent occasions, and hence they may or may not lead to language change.

But while not every innovation will lead to change, there is no change that

is not the product of a task-bound, goal-oriented innovation, introduced

into discourse by a creative speaker.

Speakers’ creativity may be arranged on a continuum ranging from those

processes that are non-conscious but nevertheless the product of a func-

tion-driven strategy for coping with task-specific language processing,

through to those that involve a degree of deliberate and conscious defiance

of general rules that normally govern the structuring of communicative

interaction. All four types of creativity discussed here – selection malfunc-

tions, pivot-matching, lexical insertions, and speech manipulation – involve

some form of negotiation of two opposing pressures: the constraints on

selecting only those structures that are considered appropriate and so

acceptable in the ongoing interaction context, and full exploitation of the

speaker’s overall repertoire of linguistic forms and structures, within which

it is impossible to completely deactivate one of the ‘‘language systems.’’ The

conscious negotiation and manipulation of the two poles usually targets

some kind of special conversational e¤ect, whereas less conscious and less

deliberate negotiation is more concerned with ease of the processing load

and relaxation of the constraints on context-appropriate selection.

The more extreme case of non-conscious negotiation, that of selection

malfunctions, represents the speaker’s way of giving in to competing pres-

sures by allowing one – the need to select a functionally e¤ective structure –

non-conscious conscious

selection malfunctions > pattern-replication > lexical insertion > speech manipulation

no special e¤ect special e¤ect

Figure 3. The continuum of contact-induced creativity and innovation

48 Yaron Matras

to triumph over the other – the need to select context-appropriate struc-

tures. The less extreme case, pattern replication, constitutes a compromise,

with a functionally e¤ective construction selected despite the fact that it

fails to satisfy the constraint on context-appropriateness, but adapted

using word-forms that do satisfy context-appropriateness. While we may

continue to regard most formations of this latter type as non-conscious,

some, such as luggage room in example (7), may indeed be semi-conscious

formations, while others still, such as the nativization of loanwords (for

example Turkish okul ‘school,’ from French ecole modified to utilize the

Turkish verb-root oku- ‘to read’), are carefully planned.

At the ‘‘conscious’’ far end of the continuum we find deliberate mixing

that targets the entire speech act, rather than just individual references

within it, and is usually designed to alter its key rather than its content,

thus achieving an e¤ect at the level of the interaction as a whole, rather

than at the propositional level of the message content. The speaker’s goal

in such instances is obviously to exploit the contrast between components

of the multilingual repertoire, so as to direct the key of the interaction and

so the special relations with the interlocutor (or audience of interlocutors).

The milder form of conscious or deliberate mixing involves mere inser-

tions of word-forms that are deemed to capture the contextual nuances

associated with the type of interaction settings for which they are normally

reserved. Here, the goal is to maximize precision of expression, rather than

to influence the key of the utterance itself, although taking the liberty to

insert word-forms from another language will inevitably also signal the

speaker’s reliance on the listener’s solidarity and empathy in accepting

and supporting the choice of mixing as a legitimate speech mode. Indeed,

some insertions, certainly those involving the mere naming of institutions

or procedures, as in example (2), will occur spontaneously and with little

or no planning at all, placing them perhaps at a similar level of semi-

consciousness as some types of pivot-matching.

To sum up, I have argued that contact-induced language change is a

product of the propagation of creative innovations introduced by speakers

as task-e¤ective means to achieve communicative goals. The key to under-

standing the position of individual structures and structural categories in

the process of contact-induced change is to interpret the role of those

structures in triggering linguistic-mental processing operations that sup-

port specific communicative tasks. The role of social and societal aspects

in the process of contact-induced change is, in turn, to act as facilitators

in the propagation of an innovation, allowing it to gain acceptability and

replication and ultimately a useful role among the inventory of structural-

communicative devices that a speech community has at its disposal.


Abbreviations

1 First person

2 Second person

3 Third person

abl Ablative

acc Accusative

attr Attributive

comp Complementizer

constr Construct state

dat Dative

def Definite (article)

deic Deixis

f Feminine

loc Locative

m Masculine

neg Negation

nom Nominative

obl Oblique

part Particle

past Past tense

pl Plural

poss Possessive

pred Predication

pres Present tense

rel Relativizer

rem Remote

sg Singular

subj Subjunctive

References

Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2002. Language Contact in Amazonia. Oxford: Oxford Univer-

sity Press.

Backus, A. 1996. Two in one. Bilingual Speech of Turkish Immigrants in the Nether-

lands. Tilburg: Tilburg University Press.

Bakker, P. 1996. Language intertwining and convergence: typological aspects of

genesis of mixed languages. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 49: 9–20.

Bakker, P. 1997. A Language of our own. The Genesis of Michif – the Mixed Cree-

French Language of the Canadian Metis. New York: Oxford University Press.

Berk-Seligson, S. 1986. Linguistic constraints on intra-sentential code-switching:

a study of Spanish/Hebrew bilingualism. Language in Society 15: 313–348.

50 Yaron Matras

Comrie, B. 1989. On identifying future tenses. In Tempus-Aspekt-Modus, W.

Abraham and T. Jansen (eds), 51–63. Tubingen: Niemeyer.

Ehlich, K. 2007. Sprache und sprachliches Handeln. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Elsık, V. and Matras, Y. 2006. Markedness and Language Change: the Romani

Sample. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Elsık, V. 2009. Loanwords in Selice Romani, an Indo-Aryan language of Slovakia.

In Loanwords in the World’s Languages: A Comparative Handbook, M. Haspel-

math and U. Tadmor (eds), 260–303. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Field, F. W. 2002. Linguistic Borrowing in Bilingual Contexts. Amsterdam: John

Benjamins.

Golovko, E. V. 2003. Language contact and group identity: the role of ‘folk’ lin-

guistic engineering. In The Mixed Language Debate, Y. Matras and P. Bakker

(eds), 177–207. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Green, D. 1998. Mental control of the bilingual lexico-semantic system. Bilingual-

ism: Language and Cognition 1: 67–81.

Grosjean, F. 2001. The bilingual’s language modes. In One Mind, two Languages.

Bilingual Language Processing, J. L. Nicol (ed.), 1–22. Oxford: Blackwell.

Grosjean, F. 2008. Studying Bilinguals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gumperz, J. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Haase, M. 1991. Sprachkontakt und Sprachwandel im Baskenland. Die Einflusse

des Gaskognischen und Franzosischen auf das Baskische. Hamburg: Buske.

Haugen, E. 1953 [1969]. The Norwegian Language in the Americas: A Study in

Bilingual Behavior. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Heath, J. 1984. Language contact and language change. Annual Review of Anthro-

pology 13: 367–384.



Lanza, E. 1997. Language Mixing in Infant Bilingualism. A sociolinguistic Perspec-

tive. Oxford: Clarendon.

Loveday, L. 1996. Language Contact in Japan. A Socio-linguistic History. Oxford:

Clarendon Press.

Maschler, Y. 1994. Metalanguaging and discourse markers in bilingual conversa-

tion. Language in Society 23: 325–366.

Maschler, Y. 1997. Emergent bilingual grammar: the case of contrast. Journal of

Pragmatics 28: 279–313.

Matras, Y. 1998a. Utterance modifiers and universals of grammatical borrowing.

Linguistics 36: 281–331.

Matras, Y. 1998b. Convergent development, grammaticalization, and the problem

of ‘mutual isomorphism’. In Sprache in Raum und Zeit, W. Boeder, C.

Schroeder and K.-H. Wagner (eds), 89–103. Tubingen: Narr.

Matras, Y. 2000. Fusion and the cognitive basis for bilingual discourse markers.

International Journal of Bilingualism. 4.4: 505–528.

Matras, Y. 2004. Layers of convergent syntax in Macedonian Turkish. Mediterra-

nean Language Review 15: 63–86.


Matras, Y. 2007. The borrowability of grammatical categories. In Grammatical

Borrowing in Cross-linguistic Perspective, Y. Matras and J. Sakel (eds), 31–74.

Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Matras, Y. 2009. Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Matras, Y. and Sakel, J. 2007. Investigating the mechanisms of pattern-replication

in language convergence. Studies in Language 31: 829–865.

Matras, Y. and Sakel, J. (eds). 2007a. Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-linguistic

Perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Matras, Y. and Shabibi, M. 2007. Grammatical borrowing in Khuzistani Arabic.

In Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-linguistic Perspective, Y. Matras and J.

Sakel (eds), 137–149. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Matras, Y. and Tufan, S. 2007. Grammatical borrowing in Macedonian Turkish.

In Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-linguistic Perspective, Y. Matras and J.

Sakel (eds), 215–227. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Matras, Y., Gardner, H., Jones, C., and Schulman, V. 2008. Angloromani: a

di¤erent kind of language? Anthropological Linguistics 49.2: 1–44.

Moravcsik, E. 1978. Universals of language contact. In Universals of Human Lan-

guage, J. H. Greenberg (ed.), 94–122. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Nau, N. 1995. Moglichkeiten und Mechanismen kontaktbewegten Sprachwandels –

unter besonderer Berucksichtigung des Finnischen. Munich: Lincom.

Paradis, M. 2004. A neurolinguistic Theory of Bilingualism. Amsterdam: John

Benjamins.

Poplack, S. 1980. Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en espanol.


Rehbein, J. 1977. Komplexes Handeln. Elemente zur Handlungstheorie der Sprache.

Stuttgart: Metzler.

Remmers, A. 1997. Plattdeutsch in Ostfriesland. Die Mundart von Moormerland-

Warsingsfehn. Leer: Sollermann.

Rudolph, E. 1996. Contrast. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Sacks, H., Scheglo¤, E. A., and Je¤erson, G. 1974. A simplest systematics for the

organization of turn-taking in conversation. Language 50: 696–735.

Salmons, J. 1990. Bilingual discourse marking: code switching, borrowing, and

convergence in some German-American dialects. Linguistics 28: 453–480.

Thomason, S. G. and Kaufman, T. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization and


Thomason, S. G. 2001. Language Contact. An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press.

van Hout, R. and Muysken, P. 1994. Modelling lexical borrowability. Language

Variation and Change 6: 39–62.

Weinreich, U. 1953. Languages in Contact. The Hague: Mouton.

Winford, D. 2003. An Introduction to Contact Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.

52 Yaron Matras

Contact-induced change as an innovation1

Claudine Chamoreau

1. Introduction

Generally, in a situation of language contact, the syntactic e¤ects on replica

language (or receiving language) structure seem to be related to features

that have come from one of the languages in contact, frequently the model

language (or source language). For example, Thomason’s typology of mor-

phosyntactic changes in contact situations shows three types of e¤ects on a

receiving language structure: loss of features as a result of language contact;

addition of linguistic features through contact-induced changes; and partial

or total replacement of old native linguistic features by interference features

(2001: 60, 85–91). Heine (2006) indicates that generally in the situation of

language contact, ‘‘speakers recruit material available in R (the replica lan-

guage) to create new structures on the model of M (the model language)

and . . . rather than being entirely new, the structures created in R are built

on existing use patterns and constructions that are already available in R.’’

This paper explores a specific contact-induced change, that is, innovation,

defined as structure that emerges as a consequence of contact between two

languages and that diverges from the patterns of both the model language

and the replica language. In other terms, these new innovated linguistic

features are not created on the model of the model language.

In this paper I investigate the development of new features as con-

sequences of the contact between Purepecha,2 the replica language, and

1. This is a revised version of a paper that was originally presented in September2007 at the Workshop on Language Contact and Morphosyntactic Variationand Change, Paris. I am very grateful to members of this audience who pro-vided relevant comments, in particular Sally Thomason. I also would liketo acknowledge with gratitude the comments of Marianne Mithun, SalomeGutierrez, and Evangelia Adamou on an earlier draft.

2. Purepecha (formerly known as Tarascan) is classified as a language isolatespoken in the state of Michoacan, with approximately 110,000 speakers (Cha-moreau 2009). There are di¤erent ways of spelling the name of this language.In the literature, it is possible to find it as Purepecha, Purepecha, Purhepecha,P’urepecha, P’urhepecha, Phurhepecha, P’orhepecha, Phorhepicha, etc.

Spanish, the model language, with which it has been in contact for nearly

five centuries. According to the types of contact-induced changes described

by Thomason and Kaufman (1988), Purepecha presents a situation of in-

tense contact and the characteristics of a shift situation, since the changes

are mainly in phonology and morphosyntax (Chamoreau 2007, 2010).

I specifically examine the domain of comparative constructions of superi-

ority in Purepecha. In this language, almost all superiority comparative con-

structions clearly show the consequences of contact with Spanish. Certain

constructions, such as example (1a), constitute borrowing or replication of

the less marked construction in the model language, the particle construc-

tion with the degree marker mas ‘more’ and the relator que ‘than’ shown

in example (1b). Another construction, example (1c), formed by the degree

marker sani¼teru, the relator ke, and the preposition de, is created by

adapting the model of the Spanish construction with mas . . . de . . . que,

example (1d).

(1) a. enrike mas §epe-s-ti ke Pedru

Henry more be lazy-aor-ass3 than Peter

‘Henry is lazier than Peter.’ (Cuanajo-Evaristo9: 208)

b. mi padre baila mas rapido que mi madre

pos1 father dance.pres3 more fast than pos1 mother

‘My father dances faster than my mother.’

c. Gervasio saniFteru prontu ni-ra-s-ti ke de ima

Gervasio few¼more quickly go-ft-aor-ass3 than of dem

‘Gervasio went more quickly than him.’

(Lit. ‘Gervasio went more quickly than of him.’)

(Cuanajo-Evaristo9: 102)

d. El es mas feliz de lo que pensaba

3ind be.pres3 more happy of dem than think-past.impf1

‘He is happier than I thought.’

But an original structure has been conceived on the model neither of the

replica language nor of Spanish. This structure employs the preposition

entre for comparison, for example:

(2) Puki mas kokani xano-nka-ti ke entre ima

Puki more quickly arrive-centrip-ass3 than between dem

‘Puki arrives more quickly than him.’

(Lit. ‘Puki arrives more quickly than between him.’)

(San Andres Tzirondaro-nana1: 101)

54 Claudine Chamoreau

In example (2), we recognized the Spanish particle construction with mas . . .

ke, but the presence of entre is original, and impossible in Spanish for a

comparative construction.

The specific innovation studied in this article is not a partial copy (Heine

and Kuteva 2005) but an innovation: speakers attribute to a Spanish

morpheme a new function not attested in either the model language or the

replica language, inventing a new structure. The interesting fact is that on

the one hand contact makes a syntactic innovation possible, while on the

other hand this innovation seems to correspond to cross-linguistically cog-

nitive tendencies (Matras 2007).

This paper is organized into the following sections: Section 2 introduces

some basic typological properties of Purepecha and essential information

on data collection procedures. Section 3 presents comparative constructions

in Spanish, the model language, and Lengua de Michoacan, the pre-contact

replica language.3 Section 4 illustrates the diversity and complexity of com-

parative constructions in Purepecha. Section 5 gives a detailed analysis of

the innovative construction in Purepecha. Section 6 shows the absence of

similar constructions in other Mesoamerican languages. The discussion in

section 7 assigns the phenomenon under scrutiny a place in the catalogue

of contact-induced structural changes.

2. Essential information about Purepecha

2.1. Basic typological properties

Purepecha has nominative-accusative alignment, where the subject of a

transitive verb, like Selia ‘Celia,’ in (4), is encoded like the subject of an

intransitive verb, anima, ‘soul,’ in (3). This is a case-marking language in

which the nominal subject has no overt marker. In an intransitive construc-

tion, as in (3), the single argument anima-it§a ‘the souls’ has no specific

marker. The object is generally marked by the objective case marker -ni.

This morpheme encodes the object of a transitive verb, misitu-ni ‘the cat,’

3. In order to distinguish the pre-contact replica language from the contact replicalanguage, I adopt the traditional name, Lengua de Michoacan, for the former,the language spoken in the sixteenth century, and the current name, Purepecha,for the latter (Marquez Joaquın 2007).

Contact-induced change as an innovation 55

in (4), and both objects of a ditransitive verb, such as inte-ni wantantskwa-ni

and Puki-ni, in (5).4

(3) ya§fi¼k§fi tsfima anima-it§a tsıpi-pa-ntha-§a-tinow¼3pl dem.pl soul-pl be glad-centrif-it-prog-ass3

‘Now these souls are leaving happily. . . .’ (Jaracuaro-animas5: 10)5

(4) xo Selia ata-§-ti imeri misitu-niyes Celia beat-aor-ass3 pos3 cat-obj

‘Yes, Celia beat her cat.’ (Jaracuaro-Alfredo25: 94)

(5) xo Selia a›i-§-ti inte-ni wantantskwa-ni Puki-ni

yes Celia tell-aor-ass3 dem-obj story-obj Puki-obj

‘Yes, Celia told Puki a story.’ (Jaracuaro-Alfredo25: 36)

Purepecha is an agglutinative and synthetic language, and is almost exclu-

sively su‰xing. It has an elaborate derivational verbal system. Although

bare stems exist, there is a very productive derivational system in which a

basic stem can take voice, causative, locative, positional, directional, and

adverbial derivative su‰xes. Inflectional su‰xes follow the stem to mark

aspect, tense, mood, and person (Chamoreau 2009; Monzon 2004; Nava

2004).

Subject and object pronouns are expressed by pronominal enclitics that

are generally attached to the last element of the first immediate constituent

of either the main or the subordinate clause, such as ¼k§fi, in example (3)

or ¼ni and ¼kini in example (6). They can also be attached to the verb.

Oblique complements are marked by postpositions, such as it§oritaximpo in (6).

(6) no¼t§ ka¼ni xi¼thu¼kini xa›oa-ta-s-ki pasari-ni

neg¼well¼1 1ind¼too¼2obj help-caus-aor-int go though-inf

it§orita ximpo

canoe inst

‘Well, have I not also helped you to cross by canoe?’

(Zipiajo-Emelia4: 71)

4. The presence or absence of the object case marker depends on di¤erent hierar-chies: (i) the inherent semantic properties of the referent (human, animate); (ii)properties related to grammatical features (definite, count noun vs. mass noun,generic vs. specific, etc.); and (iii) pragmatic strategies (topic, focus).

5. The examples of Purepecha come from my own fieldwork data. The first namecorresponds to the pueblo, here Jaracuaro; after the hyphen there appears thename of the speaker (real or invented, in accordance with the wish of thespeaker) or the name of the narrative, here animas, and then the reference ofthe recording, here 5: 10.


Purepecha is basically a SV and SVO constituent order language, as illus-

trated by examples (4) and (5). This order, that is, the order that is prag-

matically unmarked, is the basic order in the region of Lake Patzcuaro

(Capistran 2002 and Chamoreau 2009: 55–58). Other orders indicate spe-

cific pragmatic properties. Studies on constituent order in the other regions

do not as yet exist. However, Purepecha shows traits of a SOV language: (i)

tense, aspect, and modal markers following the verb; (ii) postpositions; (iii)

the almost exclusive use of su‰xes; (iv) enclitics; (v) case markers; (vi) main

verbs preceding inflected auxiliaries. SVO and SOV constituent orders are

attested in the sixteenth century, and the former has progressively increased

since then. The change is probably due to areal contact (Smith, personal

communication). Spanish has been the principal contact language for

many centuries; however, prior to the Conquest there were speakers of other

languages in this territory, mostly from Nahuatl (Uto-Aztecan family) and

Otomı (Otopamean family), two languages with verb-initial structure. The

change probably began under the influence of these languages; Spanish,

an SVO language, continued the process, for example by introducing

prepositions (Chamoreau 2007).

2.2. Data collection procedures

This investigation is part of a project6 which aims to document the di¤er-

ent ways of speaking Purepecha. So far, I have studied 60 villages located

in 21 municipalities, accounting for 70 percent of the villages in which

the language is spoken. In each village, I recorded three men and three

women, belonging to three age groups (15–29, 30–49, 50 and older). The

method I adopted was to record five types of data (during approximately

15 hours in each village):

i) Traditional narratives, descriptions of specific situations, spontaneous

speech

ii) Conversations between two or three people from the same village or

from di¤erent villages

6. This research was made possible through financial support from the FrenchCenter for American Indigenous Languages Studies, CELIA (CNRS-INALCO-IRD-Paris VII), the French Center for Mexican and Central American Studies(CEMCA), and the National Institute for Indigenous Languages of Mexico(INALI). Aid from these institutions is greatly appreciated. This researchwould not have been possible without the support of Teresa Ascencio Domın-guez, Puki Lucas Hernandez, Celia Tapia, and all our Purepecha hosts.


iii) 200 sentences (translated from Spanish), designed to cover all relevant

areas of morphosyntax

iv) Sociolinguistic questionnaires (about each village and each speaker)

asked in Purepecha

v) Attitude questionnaires (perceptual dialectology) also asked in Pure-

pecha.

3. Comparative constructions in model and pre-contact replica languages

This paper deals with the e¤ects of language contact in the di¤erent villages

where Purepecha is spoken. We observe these consequences from a syn-

chronic perspective. Nevertheless, in order to understand the di¤erent con-

structions, and to analyze the di¤erence between the impact of contact and

that of internal change, it is relevant to show the diversity of constructions

attested in Spanish, the model language, and in Lengua de Michoacan, the

pre-contact replica language.

3.1. Comparative constructions in Spanish, the model language

Spanish has had and has various types of comparative constructions. I will

present here the most frequent constructions that were used in the six-

teenth century, the time of contact between Lengua de Michoacan and

Spanish. The most frequent and less marked is the particle construction

which has a degree marker mas ‘more’ and a relator, que ‘than’ (Galant

1998; Price 1990; Rojas Nieto 1990a, 1990b). The comparee NP is the sub-

ject and the standard NP is expressed after the quality and appears after

the relator que. In (7), the degree marker comes before the quality with

the be-verb and the adjective. In (8) the position is the same, with quality

expressed by the adverb rapido ‘fast.’ In (9) where quality is expressed by

the verb corre ‘run,’ the degree marker comes after the verb and beside the

comparative marker.

(7) Spanish

Marıa es mas alta que Juan

Mary be.pres3 more tall.fem than John

‘Mary is taller than John.’

(8) Spanish

mi perro corre mas rapido que tu gato

pos1 dog run.pres3 more fast than pos2 cat

‘My dog runs faster than your cat.’


(9) Spanish

mi perro corre mas que tu gato

pos1 dog run.pres3 more than pos2 cat

‘My dog runs more than your cat.’

This particle type is most widespread in Europe: 93 percent of European

languages possess it (Stassen 1985; Heine 1994, 1997).

In Spanish this type coexists with another type, described as a marked

type, in which the de preposition appears, as can be observed in (10).

(10) Spanish (Rojas Nieto 1990b: 226)

es mas grande de lo normal

be.pres3 more tall of dem normal

‘He is taller than the normal one.’

The di¤erence is that the mas . . . que construction appears before all clause

types, whereas the mas . . . de construction shows restriction in use. Rojas

Nieto (1990b) notes that this construction is found before temporal NPs,

relative clauses (11), indefinite clauses, and others, but never before de-

monstratives (12), possessive NPs, or relative clauses introduced by quien

‘whose’ (13).


mandaron mas libro-s de lo-s que pedimos

send.past.3pl more book-pl of dem.masc-pl than ask.for.past.1pl

‘They sent more books than those we asked for.’

(Lit. ‘They sent more books of those than we asked for.’)


*Vino mas gente de estos estudiantes.

*More people came of these students.

(13) *Vino mas gente de quien nos dijeron.

*More people came of who they told us.

This mas . . . de construction shows the cognitive relation between com-

parison and location meaning (Rojas Nieto 1990b; Stassen 1985). The

standard NP is conceptualized in terms of spatial relationships. This type

is very frequent in languages worldwide.

A third comparative construction exists in Spanish, a lexical structure

which is seldom used. It can be classified as belonging to the verbal type

since this construction involves lexical concepts that use the idea of

surpassing as a degree marker, as in (14). The comparee NP is the subject

el duque and the standard NP is the object lo.


(14) Spanish (Rojas Nieto 1990a: 449)

el duque solo lo supera en linaje

the duke only him surpass-pres3sg in lineage

‘Only the duke surpasses him in lineage.’

This type is widespread in languages that are more verb-like, that is, in

which the adjectival category is less developed than in the Indo-European

languages, for example (Bath 1994: 184–209). But in Spanish, this con-

struction is marked and generally used when speakers want to insist on

the meaning of the verb, for example an action verb which carries the

notion of ‘surpass’ as in example (14).

3.2. Comparative constructions in Lengua de Michoacan,

the pre-contact replica language

There are two types of constructions; both have a xats- ‘surpass’ verb

which expresses degree. These constructions correspond to the synthetic

and the derivational morphological characteristics of the language: the

verb is modified by the causative -ta and by a su‰x expressing transfer

-ma. This first construction is a clear verbal type. In (15), the comparee

NP, Pedro is the subject and the standard NP Xwano-ni is the direct

object.

The quality is expressed by a non-finite verb ampake-ni which functions

as an argument of the main verb, forming a complement clause (Noonan

1985). The quality appears after the standard NP which is generally a sign

of OV languages (Andersen 1983: 99–138; Dryer 2007). This is the oppo-

site word order to that found in Spanish (examples 7, 8, 9).

(15) Lengua de Michoacan (Isolate, Gilberti 1987 [1558]: 109)

Pedro hatztamahati Juanoni ambaqueni7

Pedro xats-ta-ma-xa-ti Xwano-ni ampake-ni

Peter put-caus-transf-pres-ass3 John-obj be good-inf

‘Peter is better than John.’

(Lit. ‘Peter surpasses John (in) be(ing) good.’)

The second construction is a mixed type which combines a verbal type and

a coordination type. In (16), the first clause contains the comparee NP, the

7. When an example is quoted, I reproduce the author’s transcription in the firstline.


subject Pedro ‘Peter,’ the verb xats ‘surpass,’ and the object, the non-finite

verb ampake-ni ‘be good’ which functions as an argument of the main

verb, a complement clause. The second clause is introduced by the coordi-

nator ka. The negation no indicates that the standard NP lacks the prop-

erty. The adverb is� ‘like that’ and the negation no operate the semantic

reference with the verb xats ‘surpass.’ In the second clause, there is no

verb. This construction is similar to what Galant describes as stripping

(1998: 242). It refers to a process in which all material is eliminated in the

second clause except a nominal constituent, here the standard NP, Xwanu,

a special adverb is�, and the negative element no. The (lexical) verb is

identical in each clause and the overall structure is parallel.

(16) Lengua de Michoacan (Isolate, Gilberti 1987 [1558]: 109)

Pedro hatztamahati ambaqueni ca noys Juan

Pedro xats-ta-ma-xa-ti ampake-ni ka no is� XwanuPeter put-caus-transf-pres-ass3 be good-inf and neg so John

‘Peter is better than John.’ (Lit. ‘Peter surpasses in being good, and

John (is) not like that.’)

4. Comparative constructions in Purepecha

In Purepecha comparison of superiority is mapped out by means of ten

constructions, which can be grouped into four types: Type A. Particle

type; Type B. Particle type with a locative phrase; Type C. Mixed coordina-

tion and particle type; Type D. Applicative type. The presentation of these

types will follow their frequency as primary and secondary options: only the

first two types, the particle type (type A) and the particle type with a loca-

tive phrase (type B), may be a primary choice. Type A is the primary

choice in almost all the villages except a few north of Lake Patzcuaro

where type B is the primary choice and type A the secondary choice. The

other two types, the mixed coordination and particle type (type C) and the

applicative type (type D), always appear as a secondary choice. In this

study, I sum up the characteristics of these four types, in order to under-

stand the organization of the expression of comparison in Purepecha. In

another article (Chamoreau, under consideration), I propose a detailed

typological analysis of the four types.

Type A. Particle type

Andersen (1983: 118), Stassen (1985: 45, 491), and Heine (1994: 63) stress

that the so-called particle construction is heterogeneous. A typical charac-


teristic of this construction is the presence of a specific comparative

marker that accompanies the standard NP (see also Rivara 1990, 1995). In

Purepecha, it is identical to the Spanish marker ke8 or to the particle that

introduces a complement clause i§ki or to one of its variants (Chamoreau

2009: 259–262). In examples (17) through (20), the particle construction

consists of one clause with complex structure, in which the comparee NP

is encoded as the subject of the predicate, whereas the standard NP, which

has no case marker, appears after the comparative marker. The quality is

generally encoded by a verb, as in (18) and (19), but also by an adverb, as

in (17), or an adjective, as in (20). The order follows the Spanish order

when quality is expressed by an adjective or an adverb (see examples

(7) and (8)). The degree marker may be the Spanish marker mas or the

Purepecha morpheme saniteru, which means ‘more.’ This type presents

four subtypes.

Subtype A1. Particle constructions with the degree marker mas and the

comparative marker ke

The first subtype is a clear grammatical borrowing in which both the

structure and the phonetic substance appear in the replica or recipient lan-

guage. The particle type and the two Spanish morphological elements mas

and ke are borrowed.

(17) ima xu-›a-§-ti mas yontakwa ke t§ i watsfi-tidem come-ft-aor-ass3 more late than pos2 son-kpos2

‘He came later than your son.’ (Jaracuaro-Celia28: 170)

Subtype A2. Particle constructions with the degree marker saniteru and the

comparative marker eska or e§ki

This construction is a grammatical replication (also known as a calque),

that is, it is produced when speakers create a new grammatical structure

8. One possible hypothesis is that ke is borrowed from Spanish because the formand the function are similar to the Spanish particle que. Nevertheless, anotherpossibility is convergence or syncretism between the Spanish ke and a nativePurepecha element. Purepecha also had a relator with the form ki, and a sub-ordinator encoded as ka, attested in the sixteenth century. They now functionin various particles such as i§ka, i§ki, enka, enki, and their variants. Con-vergence or syncretism between the two elements might have been favoredbecause they presented a similar form and functioned in similar contexts.This topic has not yet been studied. Nevertheless, in the comparative construc-tions, we can consider that ke is borrowed for this function, as the entire com-parative construction is borrowed or replicated.


based on a model of another language, using the linguistic resources avail-

able in their own replica language (Heine and Kuteva 2003, 2005). This

type of transfer does not involve phonetic substance of any kind. This is

a grammatical replication in which we recognize the Spanish construc-

tion but the specific morphological elements are taken from the native

language, Purepecha. In (18) the degree marker saniteru is analyzed as

sani ‘few’ and the clitic ¼teru ‘more,’ while the particle e§ ki ‘than,’ orits variant eska, is a complementizer which may introduce a complement

clause (Chamoreau 2009). The degree marker is placed before the quality.

(18) nanaka-et§a sani¼teru tere-kuri-§ in-ti eska¼ni xi

girl-pl few¼more laugh-mid-hab-ass3 than¼1 1ind

‘The girls are laughing more than me.’

(Arantepacua-Esperanza7: 99)


comparative marker ke

In (19), we find a particular situation in which only one grammatical item

is borrowed, namely the marker ke, while the degree marker is the Purepecha

morpheme saniteru. It is thus a mixture of borrowing and grammatical

replication. Logically, two possibilities exist: borrowing the degree marker

mas and using the marker i§ki, or using the degree marker saniteru and

borrowing the marker ke.

In the data, only the second option is found. In (19), we observe the

same order as presented in the examples above; the quality is between the

degree marker and the marker.

(19) i kamisa sani¼teru xuka-para-s-ti ke i§udem shirt few¼more put-shoulder-aor-ass3 than here

anapu-e-s-ti

origin-pred-aor-ass3

‘This shirt is more expensive than the one made here.’

(Ihuatzio-Agustina1: 39)


comparative markers ke and e§ka

In this fourth subtype, the two comparative markers ke and e§ka coexist

in the same construction. This is perhaps additional evidence that ke is

borrowed from Spanish in this context (see footnote 8). This redundancy


may be explained as a ‘Purepechization’ of the subtype A3, that is, the con-

struction with saniteru . . . ke, the unmarked construction. It seems that the

goal of this construction is to give it a more Purepecha-like feel (Chamoreau,

under consideration).

(20) i§u sani¼teru kheri-i-§-ti ke e§ka xiniani

here few¼more big/tall/old-pred-aor-ass3 than than there

‘It’s bigger here than there.’ (Ocumicho-Rutila7: 82)

These four subtypes are clear examples of contact-induced restructuring.

The constituent order is the same as in Spanish. The encoding of both the

degree marker and the comparative marker is borrowed or replicated from

the model language, Spanish.

Purepecha has adopted the unmarked and more frequent Spanish com-

parative construction of superiority with mas . . . que. The particle type has

superseded the verbal type (see 3.2, example (15)). This process shows

clear convergence with Spanish and also indicates that the language has

come to use a new strategy, exploiting morphological categories to express

the degree marker and the comparative particle. The other consequence is

that the quality is no longer expressed by a non-finite verb but by a verb,

an adjective, or an adverb.

Type B. Particle type with locative phrase

The basic construction here is that of the particle type (see Type A above).

The original feature of type B is the presence of a preposition accompany-

ing the standard NP. Two possibilities exist: (i) A source-subtype (B1), in

(21), with the Spanish preposition de ‘from’; the standard NP is marked

as the source of a movement. (2) A static-subtype (B2), in (22), with the

Spanish preposition entre ‘between’; this preposition is a particular illus-

tration of the static locative type.

Subtype B1. Source subtype. Particle type with the degree marker mas as in

example (21a) (or sani¼teru, as in example (21b)) and a locative phrase

(21) a. inte at§a mas kheri-e-s-ti ke de §o anapu yamintu

dem man more old-pred-aor-ass3 than of here origin all

‘This man is older than anyone else here.’

(Lit. ‘This man is older than of all the others from here.’)

(Teremendo-Cleotilde1: 301)


b. Gervasio sani¼teru prontu ni-ra-s-ti ke de ima

Gervasio few¼more quickly go-ft-aor-ass3 than of dem

‘Gervasio went more quickly than him.’

(Lit. ‘Gervasio went more quickly than of him.’)


Subtype B2. Static subtype. Particle type with the degree marker mas and a

locative phrase

(22) i§u mas khe-§-ti ke entre xini

here more be big/tall/old-aor-ass3 than between there

‘It’s bigger here than there.’

(Lit. ‘It’s bigger here than between there.’)

(San Andres Tzirondaro-Valentın4: 71)

The particle type with a locative phrase shows the creation of a new type,

using a process that is not attested in Lengua de Michoacan: the use of

a locative phrase with the particle construction. This construction with

the preposition de is attested in Spanish but the order and the conditions

of use are di¤erent from Purepecha. This construction does not have the

semantic and syntactic restrictions it shows in Spanish (see 3.1), and it

is the dominant type in various villages, while in Spanish it is a marked

construction (see Chamoreau, under consideration). Furthermore, the con-

struction with entre is not found in Spanish to express comparative meaning

(see section 5 for the analysis of this innovative construction).

Type C. Mixed coordination and particle type

This mixed type presents the combination of two constructions. The basic

construction is the coordinated positive-negative polarity in which the com-

paree NP has the property while the standard NP lacks the property. The

basic construction is defined as the complete one, that is, the coordination

construction, a structure similar to the one attested in the sixteenth century

(see example (16)); the particle construction combines with the coordination

one, but presents only some features of this type. In this case, the particle

construction is represented only by the presence of the degree marker.

In example (23), this mixed type is formed by two clauses; the first one

contains the comparee NP kumant§ ikwa›u int§arini, the degree marker

mas (it is also possible to find saniteru), and the quality xo›epekwa xa›asti.The second clause is introduced by the coordinator ka. The negation no

indicates that the standard NP lacks the property. This clause has a strip-

ping structure; the verb is deleted, signifying that it is identical to the verb

in the first clause.


(23) kumant§ ikwa-›u int§arini mas xo›epekwa xa-›a-s-tihouse-loc inside more warm be there-ft-aor-ass3

ka no werakwa

and neg outside

‘It is warmer inside the house than it is outside.’

(Lit. ‘It is warmer inside the house and not outside.’)

(Janitzio-Simon1: 29)

This construction is a clear consequence of the restructuring of the com-

parative construction domain in Purepecha. This mixed type shows interac-

tion between internal evolution and contact-induced change. The former is

shown by the fact that the coordination construction is maintained (see

example (16) in Lengua de Michoacan); the latter is illustrated by the

process in which verbal type is lost in favor of particle constructions.

Type D. Applicative type

This type has only one construction, expressing quality through a synthetic

derivative structure. In (24a), the basic construction, the quality is expressed

by an adjective kheri ‘big/tall/old,’ accompanied by a predicativizer e. In

(24b), kheri is modified by the applicative morpheme ku, which increases

the valence and introduces another argument imeri pirimpani ‘his sister,’

which is the syntactic object, and which has the role of the possessor of

the quality. The subject Petu ‘Peter’ is the comparee NP, while the object

imeri pirimpani ‘his sister’ is the standard NP. The superiority degree is a

consequence of the modification by the applicative morpheme.

(24) a. Petu kheri-e-§-tiPeter big/tall/old-pred-aor-ass3

‘Peter is tall/big/old.’

b. Petu kheri-e-ku-§-ti imeri piri-mpa-ni

Peter old-pred-3appl-aor-ass3 pos3 sister-kpos3-obj

‘Peter is older than his sister.’

(Lit. Peter applies his old age to his sister.’)

(Cucuchucho-Francisco3: 401)

This construction was not described in the grammars of the sixteenth cen-

tury and is now seldom found. It shows the generally agglutinative and

derivative character of the language. It is possible to hypothesize that this

construction existed in Lengua de Michoacan, but then fell into disuse,

until it survived only in a few villages and only with the adjective kheri.


The four types and the di¤erent constructions are summed up in Table 1.

5. An innovative construction in Purepecha

In this section I analyze the constructions in type B, demonstrating that

subtype B1, in examples (25) and (26), is a creation on the model of Spanish,

whereas subtype B2, in example (27), constitutes an innovation.

Subtype B1. Particle type with a degree marker mas/sani¼teru and a

locative phrase with de

(25) ka Enrike mas §epe-h-ti ke de Carlos

and Henry more be lazy-aor-ass3 than of Charles

‘And Henry is lazier than Peter.’

(Lit. ‘And Henry is lazier than of Peter.’)

(San Jeronimo-Adelaida1: 170)

Table 1. Comparison. Types and sub-types

Type A Type B Type C Type D

Particle typeParticle type witha locative

Mixed coordina-tion and particletype

Applicative type

A1 Borrowingmas . . . ke

B1 Sourcelocalization –Borrowingmas . . . ke . . . de

Borrowingmas . . . ka no

Applicative-ku

A2 Replicationsaniteru . . . e§ka

Sourcelocalization –Replicationsaniteru . . . ke . . .de

Replicationsaniteru . . . ka no

A3 Replicationþborrowingsaniteru . . . ke

B2 Staticlocalization –Borrowingmas . . . ke . . .entre

A4 Replicationþborrowing andreplicationsaniteru . . . ke . . .e§ka


(26) pedru sani¼teru prontu xano-nku-ti ke de thu

Peter few¼more quickly arrive-centrip-ass3 than of 2ind

‘Peter arrives more quickly than you.’

(Lit. ‘Peter arrives more quickly than of you.’)


Subtype B2. Particle type with the degree marker mas and a locative

phrase with entre

(27) Pedro mas sesi-e-s-ti ke entre Xwanu

Peter more good-pred-aor-ass3 than between John

‘Peter is better than John.’

(Lit. ‘Peter is better than between John.’)

(San Andres Tzirondaro-Valentın2: 11)

The constructions in type B are contact-induced changes. There can be no

doubt that the four morphemes mas, ke, de, entre are taken from Spanish.

But the two prepositions de and entre are not direct borrowings: although

they are Spanish prepositions, since Purepecha has only postpositions,

they never occur alone with the semantic features which they have in

Spanish. They only appear in code-switching Spanish phrases like de veras

‘really, truly,’ la seis de la manana ‘six in the morning.’ The preposition

entre only occurs in Purepecha in the comparative construction, as in (27).

Purepecha has postpositions and case markers which generally satisfy the

use contexts of the Spanish prepositions de and entre.

5.1. Subtype B1: a creation on the model of Spanish

In Spanish, as in example (28), the de-construction encoded with mas . . .

de . . . que has specific characteristics. First, the order is the degree marker

mas, then the quality temprano, the preposition de, the object pronoun lo,

and the relative clause introduced by the relator que and the verb esperabas.

Second, the use of the demonstrative lo is obligatory; this is an anaphoric

strategy. Third, in this construction in Spanish a verb is obligatory after

the relator (this is a relative clause). Fourth, this construction is marked

and not frequent; this is a pragmatic strategy used to stress specific infor-

mation (Rojas 1990b).

(28) Spanish

El presidente regreso mas temprano de lo que tu

the president return.past3 more early of dem than 2ind

esperabas

expect.past.impf2

‘The president returned earlier than you expected.’


These four characteristics are absent in Purepecha: in subtype B1, the order

is, first, the two markers mas . . . ke, and then the preposition de, which

appears after the comparative marker. There is no demonstrative anaphoric

pronoun, no verb after the comparative marker (this is not a relative

clause as in Spanish), and in many villages north of Lake Patzcuaro, in

the municipality of Quıroga, this construction is the unmarked and domi-

nant one, used in all contexts. We can hypothesize that the speakers have

adopted the Spanish construction, adapting it with a particular strategy:

they have conserved the unity and the order of the mas . . . ke particle type

construction (type A), but have created a new construction, adding the

standard NP in a locative phrase introduced by de.

5.2. Subtype B2

5.2.1. An innovative construction

The subtype B2 strategy is di¤erent from the construction in subtype B1.

Purepecha displays a use of entre which deviates from the patterns of its

Spanish use. No similar construction has been found among the local

Spanish speakers, nor among bilingual Spanish speakers. Purepecha speakers

have apparently innovated the construction with entre, since Spanish has

no comparative construction of superiority with the preposition entre. One

may find a superlative construction as in (29), but the NP with the preposi-

tion entre is not obligatory in a superlative construction; it is merely addi-

tional information.

(29) Spanish

[Entre esto-s nino-s], Juventino es el mas inteligente.

between dem-pl boy-pl Juventino be.pres3 the more intelligent

‘Between these boys, Juventino is the more intelligent.’

In (29), with the NP introduced by entre, the nominal must be plural (or at

least involve two entities), since it indicates a possibility of choice between

various elements. This is not the case in Purepecha (see examples (2), (22),

and (27)). The morpheme entre appears before singular items: a demon-

strative ima, in example (2), an adverb xini in example (22), and a proper

name Xwanu in example (27). The morpheme entre changes in meaning

content (it does not indicate a possibility of choice). The use of entre in

Purepecha has been extended to a new context (absent in Spanish and

original in Purepecha).


There is no correlation with other structures in Purepecha, as entre is

only used in this construction, and there is no comparative construction

in pre-contact replica Lengua de Michoacan with a locative pattern that

might be used as a model.

5.2.2. Sociolinguistic particularities

It is relevant to point out that the construction with mas . . . ke . . . de (sub-

type B1) essentially appears to the north of Lake Patzcuaro, in the eastern

area. More specifically, this construction is attested in the four villages

studied in the municipality of Quıroga and in some villages of the Zacapu

region which are in contact with the villages to the north of the lake.

In the four villages (Santa Fe de la Laguna, Chupıcuaro, San Jeronimo

P’urhenchecuaro, and San Andres Tzirondaro) this is the dominant un-

marked choice, used by all speakers. San Andres Tzirondaro is the only

village that also uses the innovative construction with mas . . . ke . . . entre

(subtype B2). These four villages, along with Azajo, constitute a sub-area

of the eastern area which exhibits great vitality (unlike the rest of the area).

All of these villages include more than 87 percent Purepecha speakers

(except San Jeronimo P’urhenchecuaro, with 50 percent), and the people,

even the young people, speak Purepecha in everyday conversation. This

original sociolinguistic situation, in a region where language diversity is

generally losing ground, is revealed through a strategy by which speakers

try to distinguish themselves from others. This is also mirrored on historical,

social, and cultural levels, especially in the village of Santa Fe de la Laguna,

showing that they explore and use the vitality and creative possibilities

of Purepecha. The B constructions constitute a distinctive characteristic

of this sub-area to the north of Lake Patzcuaro.

5.2.3. A cross-linguistic tendency

I consider the construction of subtype B2 to be an innovation, because the

Purepecha speakers have ‘‘tinkered’’ with the Spanish constructions but

have not created a construction on the model of a specific comparative

Spanish construction. The motivation behind the use of the preposition

entre is perhaps its meaning: it involves location (like the preposition de

in subtype B1), and indicates the cognitive relation between comparison

and location meaning. This leads us to a second complementary explana-

tion: there is a general tendency to connect comparison with location and

to express comparison through the locative type. This is the largest class in

the typology of comparatives, comprising nearly 50 percent of Stassen’s


(1985) and Heine’s (1994) samples. It could thus very easily have developed

in the domain of comparison in Purepecha, since in this language spatial

expressions are highly relevant in various domains (Chamoreau 2009;

Friedrich 1971; Monzon 2004). Furthermore, this construction is in accor-

dance with the relations between location and particle constructions devel-

oped in several languages (Andersen 1983: 168–185; Stassen 1985: 49).

6. Similar constructions in other Mesoamerican languages

Stolz and Stolz claim that ‘‘Hispanicization of comparative constructions

was almost commonplace among the indigenous languages of Mexico,

Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador’’ (2001: 38).

Particle type is attested in all Mesoamerican families (Chamoreau 2008),

generally showing the transfer of the Spanish particle construction as in

Purepecha in type A – for example, borrowing in Totonac in (30) and repli-

cation in Nahuatl de Xaltipan in (31).

(30) Totonac (Totonac-Tepehua, Mexico, Levy 1990: 131)

pa:caps xa-tabique mas ta’:la que ta-pa:lhta:m

wall det-brick more endure than ingr-clay

‘The wall made of bricks is stronger than the one made of clay.’

(31) Nahuatl de Xaltipan

(Uto-Aztecan, Sanchez personal communication)

neh kachi ni-nohnel tein ti-yetok-eh kal-ihtik

1 more 1-small than 1pl-be.there-pl house-loc

‘I am smaller than we [who] are in the house.’

But the transfer of the Spanish comparative construction with mas and

a preposition is not very common. A review of Mesoamerican languages

shows that the presence of this construction in Zoque, in example (32),

is a borrowing of the Spanish construction with mas . . . de respecting the

order of the elements of the model language, as in (10).

(32) Zoque de Chimalapa (Mixe-Zoquean, Knudson 1980: 134)

te ladriyus ne�a mas pfi�m-pa de ka mfiki nas ne�adem brick wall more have-strong of dem clay wall

‘The wall made of bricks is stronger than the one made of clay.’

(Lit. ‘The wall made of bricks is stronger of the one made of clay.’)


It is also possible to find a borrowing of the mas . . . de . . . que construction.

In this case the languages, Zoque in (33) and Otomı in (34), also respect the

order of the elements of the Spanish construction in (11); nevertheless the

constructions in these two languages do not possess restrictions like those

in Spanish. For example, no verb is attested after the comparative marker.

(33) Zoque de Chimalapa (Mixe-Zoquean, Knudson 1980: 135)

te�p mas de k��p�hi ke ��cci�dem more of tall than 1

‘He is taller than I am.’ (Lit. ‘He is taller of than I am.’)

(34) Otomı de Santiago Mexquititlan

(Otopamean, Hekking personal communication)

ar Pedro mas Ø¼ar data di-ge ar Mariya

sg Peter more 3pres.npred¼sg tall of-that sg Mary

‘Peter is taller than Mary.’

(Lit. ‘Peter is more the tall of that Mary.’)9

The constructions found in other Mesoamerican languages have resulted

from the transfer of the Spanish particle construction (see examples (30)

and (31)) and the borrowing of the Spanish construction with mas . . . de

or mas . . . de . . . que that are closer to the model construction than the

Purepecha one (in particular because of the respecting of the order of the

elements). No construction with entre has been found.

7. The strategy of innovation

According to the typology proposed by Thomason (2001), it is clear that

the constructions studied in this article, in particular the type B construc-

tions, represent a replacement of older native linguistic features by inter-

ference processes. This replacement was created on the model of Spanish

constructions in subtype B1 (as defined by Heine and Kuteva), but the

strategy was not the same in the case of subtype B2. Another strategy is

displayed. Something new has been invented. Speakers of Purepecha have

taken the Spanish construction with mas . . . de . . . que as a point of depar-

ture, but the result diverges from it. They have also innovated using entre

di¤erently from its function in Spanish, and the resulting construction in

Purepecha is distinct from the comparative constructions in this language.

9. I thank Enrique Palancar for helping me to analyze this example.


Speakers have transferred elements from the model language and attrib-

uted new functions to them. This is surprising because entre is not a loan

word, and it is only used in this structure in Purepecha. It is di‰cult to

understand the original motivation behind the transfer of entre and its

use in that structure; it may be due to its locative meaning, which may

express a possibility of choice between (at least) two entities.

In short, Purepecha displays a use of comparative constructions with

entre that deviates from the patterns of comparative construction in Spanish

and from the use of entre in Spanish. The transfer of Spanish entre allows

Purepecha to innovate in the expression of the comparison of superiority

and in the context of the use of this Spanish preposition.

Abbreviations

aor Aorist

appl Applicative

ass Assertive

caus Causative

centrif Centrifugal

centrip Centripetal

dem Demonstrative

fem Feminine

ft Formative

impf Imperfect

ind Independent

inf Infinitive

inst Instrumental

int Interrogative

it Iterative

kpos Kinship possessive

loc Locative

masc Masculine

mid Middle

neg Negation

npred Nominal predication

obj Object

past Past

pl Plural

pos Possessive


pred Predicativizer

pres Present

prog Progressive

sg Singular

transf Transfer

* Ungrammatical

References

Andersen, P. 1983. Word Order Typology and Comparative Constructions. Amster-

dam: John Benjamins.

Bath, D. N. S. 1994. The Adjectival Category. Criteria for Di¤erentiation and Iden-

tification. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Capistran, A. 2002. Variaciones de orden de constituyentes en p’orhepecha. Topica-

lizacion y focalizacion. In Del Cora al Maya Yucateco. Estudios linguısticos sobre

algunas lenguas indıgenas mexicanas, P. Levy (ed.), 349–402. Mexico: UNAM.

Census INEGI. 2005. http://www.inegi.gob.mx/est/contenidos/espanol/sistemas/

conteo2005/ iter2005/selentcampo.aspx

Chamoreau, C. 2007. Grammatical borrowing in Purepecha. In Grammatical Borrow-

ing in Cross-linguistic Perspective, Y. Matras and J. Sakel (eds), 465–480. Berlin:

Mouton de Gruyter.

Chamoreau, C. 2008. ‘Contribucion de algunas lenguas de Mesoamerica a la tipolo-

gıa de las construcciones de comparacion de superioridad.’ Talk at X Encuentro

Internacional de Linguıstica en el Noreste. Hermosillo: University of Sonora.

Chamoreau, C. 2009. Hablemos purepecha, Wante juchari anapu. Morelia: Univer-

sidad Intercultural Indıgenas de Michoacan/IIH-UMSNH/IRD/CCC-IFAL/

Grupo Kw’anıskuyarhani de Estudiosos del Pueblo Purepecha.

Chamoreau, C. 2010. Development of analytic constructions in Purepecha. In A

New Look at Language Contact in Amerindian Languages, C. Chamoreau, Z.

Estrada Fernandez, and Y. Lastra (eds). Munich: Lincom. 69–87.

Chamoreau, C. under consideration. The geographical distribution of typologi-

cally diverse comparative constructions of superiority in Purepecha.

Cuzzolin, P. and Lehmann, C. 2004. Comparison and gradation. Nr. 155: 1212–

1220.

Dryer, M. S. 2007. Word Order. In Language Typology and Syntactic Description.

Clause Structure, T. Shopen (ed.), 61–131. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press (second edition revisited).

Friedrich, P. 1971. The Tarascan Su‰xes of Locative Spaces: Meaning and Mor-

photactics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Galant, M. R. 1998. Comparative constructions in Spanish and San Lucas Quiavini

Zapotec. Ph.D. diss. Los Angeles: University of California.


Gilberti, M. 1987 [1558]. Arte de la lengua de Michuacan. Morelia: Fimax.

Heine, B. 1994. Areal influence on grammaticalization. In Language Contact and

Language Conflict, M. Putz (ed.), 55–68. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.


Press.

Heine, B. 2006. Contact-induced word order change without word order change.

In Working papers in Multilingualism. Arbeiten zur Mehrsprachigkeit. 76. Ham-



Language 27.3: 529–572.



Knudson, L. 1980. Zoque de Chimalapa. Mexico: Colegio de Mexico/Centro de

Investigacion para la Integracion Social [Archivo de lenguas indıgenas de

Mexico 6].

Marquez Joaquın, P. 2007. Tarascos o P’urepecha? Voces sobre antiguas y nuevas

discusiones en torno al gentilicio michoacano. Morelia: UMSNH-IIH/El Colegio

de Michoacan, Gobierno del Estado de Michoacan/Universidad Intercultural

Indıgena de Michoacan/Grupo Kw’anıskuyarhani de Estudiosos del Pueblo

Purepecha/Fondo Editorial Morevallado.

Matras, Y. 1998. Utterance modifiers and universals of grammatical borrowing,

Linguistics 36.2: 281–331.

Monzon, C. 2004. Los morfemas espaciales del p’urhepecha. Zamora: El Colegio

de Michoacan.

Nava, F. 2004. La voz media en p’urhepecha. Un estudio de formas y significados.

Ph.D. diss. Mexico: FFL-UNAM.

Noonan, M. 2007. Complementation. Language Typology and Syntactic Descrip-

tion. Complex Constructions, T. Shopen (ed.), 52–150. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Price, S. 1990. Comparative Constructions in Spanish and French Syntax. London:

Routledge.

Rivara, R. 1990. Le Systeme de la comparaison: sur la construction du sens dans les

langues naturelles. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.

Rivara, R. 1995. Pourquoi il n’y a que deux relations de comparaison. Faits de

Langues 5: 19–39.

Rojas Nieto, C. 1990a. Comparacion lexica, comparacion sintagmatica. In Home-

naje a Jorge A. Suarez. Linguıstica indoamericana e hispanica, B. Garza Cuaron

and P. Levy (eds), 447–457. Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico.

Rojas Nieto, C. 1990b. El termino de las construcciones comparativas de desigual-

dad: de o que. In Estudios de Linguıstica de Espana y Mexico, V. Demonte and

B. Garza Cuaron (eds), 225–241. Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico / UNAM.

Stassen, L. 1985. Comparison and Universal Grammar. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.


Stassen, L. 2001. Comparative constructions. In Language Typology and Lan-

guage Universals: an International Handbook. M. Haspelmath, E. Konig, W.

Oesterreicher, and W. Raible (eds), 993–997. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Stassen, L. 2005. Comparative constructions. In The World Atlas of Language

Structures, M. Haspelmath, M. Dryer, D. Gil, and B. Comrie (eds), 490–491.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stolz, C. and Stolz, T. 2001. Hispanicised Comparative Constructions in Indigenous

Languages of Austronesia and the Americas. In Lo propio y lo ajeno en las

lenguas austronesicas y amerindias, K. Zimmerman and T. Stolz (eds), 35–56.

Frankfurt/Madrid: Vervuert/Iberoamericana.

Thomason, S. G. 2001. Language Contact: An Introduction. Washington: George-

town University Press.

Thomason, S. G. and Kaufman, T. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization and



Language contact in language obsolescence

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald

1. Preamble

The di¤erence between language change in ‘‘healthy’’ and in endangered

or obsolescent languages very often lies not in the sorts of change, which

tend to be the same (Campbell and Muntzel 1989). It tends to lie in the

quantity of change and in the speed with which the obsolescent language

changes (see Schmidt 1985: 213; Aikhenvald 2002: 243–264). Language

displacement frequently results in reduction of paradigms, simplification

and loss of the language’s own features, and, ultimately, language shift

and loss. As the obsolescent language is ‘‘retreating, contracting, as it

gradually falls into disuse’’ (Dixon 1991a: 199), we expect it to be flooded

with an influx of patterns and forms from the dominant language.

Contact-induced changes can roughly be divided into three sorts, in

terms of their stability. Following Tsitsipis (1998: 34), it appears useful to

divide changes into completed, ongoing (or continuous), and discontinuous.

Completed changes cover those aspects of the grammatical system of a lan-

guage which do not show any synchronic variation and which go beyond

speakers’ awareness (see the discussion of a Spanish-influenced passive in

Purepecha by Chamoreau 2005). Ongoing or continuous changes are those

in progress; here the degree of influence of the other language depends on

the speaker’s competence and possibly other, sociolinguistic, variables (such

as age or degree of participation in community life). Discontinuous changes

are one-o¤ deviations characteristic of individual speakers. In the situation

of language attrition, these often di¤erentiate fluent speakers from less

proficient ones.

This classification of changes is particularly important for distinguishing

between old and established di¤usional processes – characterized by com-

pleted changes – and new, in-coming continuous changes making their

way into a speech community. In a situation of language obsolescence,

one expects to encounter a multiplicity of sporadic changes which would

be considered to be mistakes by fluent speakers (if they existed). Such

aberrant individual innovations are tantamount to Tsitsipis’ ad hoc or

discontinuous changes. The impact of language shift as seen through

discontinuous changes in the context of displacive language contact is the

topic of this article.

2. The various facets of language obsolescence

An obsolescent language is no longer actively used or transmitted. We dis-

tinguish several kinds of social context in which this occurs.1

Firstly, an obsolescent language is no longer actively spoken by a com-

munity, and is not transmitted to the next generation. Its knowledge is often

confined to a handful of last fluent speakers – as is the case for Ingrian

Finnish in Estonia (Riionheimo 2002), Bare (Aikhenvald 1995), Dyirbal

and Yidiny (Dixon 1991a, b), Mawayana (Carlin 2006), and Resıgaro

(Allin 1975) – or to a handful of not-very-fluent speakers or semi-speakers,

or even rememberers – as in the case of Nivkh, a Paleo-Siberian isolate

(Gruzdeva 2002), or Nyulnyul, an Australian language (McGregor 2002;

see Hill and Hill 1986, Hill 1985, for a definition of the terms). We will

refer to this as ‘‘global’’ language obsolescence.

Alternatively, language obsolescence can a¤ect individuals or groups of

individuals living away from the language community. This is often the

case with speakers of immigrant languages, spoken by groups of varied

size whose major language is the dominant language of the country. These

varieties are sometimes called ‘‘heritage’’ languages. The existing studies

include Heritage Russian (Pereltsvaig 2008, and references there; Kagan

and Dillon 2001), Heritage Italian, Heritage Norwegian, Heritage Swedish,

and Heritage Czech (see Bettoni 1991; Milani 1996; Hjelde 1996; Klintborg

1999; Henzl 1981).

Along similar lines, people who live away from the community where

the language is actively spoken also display signs of obsolescence. Obsoles-

cent speakers of many indigenous languages of Papua New Guinea form

part of urban communities whose dominant language is overwhelmingly

Papua New Guinea English and also Tok Pisin. The domain of their

ancestral language is often limited to token symbolic use in speech formu-

las. And when the speakers attempt to use the language, its make-up is

markedly di¤erent from the way it is spoken by the speech community in

the original area. I have observed this ‘‘individual’’ or ‘‘localized’’ language

obsolescence among Manambu speakers – see Section 3.1 (example (1)).

1. The examples discussed here reflect what Campbell and Muntzel (1989) call‘‘gradual death’’ of a language. We do not consider instances of ‘‘suddendeath’’ or ‘‘radical death’’ of a language, nor of ‘‘bottom-up death.’’

78 Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald

Instances of individual or localized language obsolescence may occur

within a broader context of a ‘‘global’’ obsolescence of a language. Paumarı,

an Arawa language from Southern Amazonia, is gradually falling out of

use, and more rapidly so in the communities on the River Ituxı than on

the River Purus. As a result, speakers from the Ituxı communities display

more signs of language obsolescence (Aikhenvald 2010; Chapman and

Derbyshire 1991).

The interest of individual language obsolescence for a student of lan-

guage change lies in the possibility of comparing the obsolescent or heri-

tage language with the variety still actively spoken in the ‘‘homeland.’’

In the case of ‘‘global’’ obsolescence, we are sometimes fortunate to have

access to a description of a pre-obsolescent variety of a language. For

instance, Krejnovich’s work gives us access to Nivkh as it used to be

before the language stopped being transmitted to the next generation.

Numerous descriptions of Ingrian Finnish allow us to trace the obsoles-

cence of this language as it is currently spoken in Estonia (Riionheimo

2002). The grammar of traditional Paumarı by Chapman and Derbyshire

(1991) allows us to trace the nature of obsolescence in the present-day lan-

guage. The obsolescent Dyirbal (Schmidt 1985; Dixon 1991a) can be con-

trasted and compared with the language described by Dixon (1972) when

it was still fluently spoken. And the Tariana spoken by traditional repre-

sentatives of the older generation (nowadays in their late eighties) can be

contrasted with the speech of younger people who are gradually relinquish-

ing their ancestral language.

A situation of language obsolescence presupposes obsolescent speakers.

Their proficiency in the given language may, of course, vary (some may

be considered barely ‘‘rememberers,’’ others may conserve a degree of

fluency). The di¤erence between obsolescent speakers of obsolescent lan-

guages and obsolescent speakers of languages in active use elsewhere may

be compared to a well-known di¤erence between societal multilingualism

and individual multilingualism. The former is a social phenomenon and is

of prime concern to sociolinguists. The latter reflects personal history and

is of interest to psychologists more than to sociolinguists. However, we do

find that processes of language obsolescence appear to be similar in the

context of ‘‘global’’ and of ‘‘local’’ obsolescence (at the level of the individual

speaker). This suggests the presence of shared mechanisms which could,

and should, be investigated.

A word of caution is in order. Even if we do have access to what can be

considered a ‘‘pre-obsolescent’’ variety, we cannot always be sure that this

variety did not already bear some signs of decay. When R. M. W. Dixon

Language contact in language obsolescence 79

started his fieldwork on Dyirbal in 1963, the language was actively spoken,

in the domestic sphere, by several score people, including children. Over a

quarter of a century, Dixon has seen the language decline ‘‘from a state in

which there was an abundance of speakers . . . to one in which there is just

one good consultant left for each of three dialects, with no one to go to for

a second opinion’’ (Dixon 1991a: 183). But even in the good old days of

the early sixties, older speakers would comment on the fact that ‘‘words

used to be longer’’ in the language as they can recall it spoken in their

childhood by those old people who had passed away. That is, the process

of language contraction may have started long before the linguist came to

the scene, and this ‘‘discourse of nostalgia’’ (Hill 1998) may reflect speakers’

awareness of this. The few older representatives of the Tariana-speaking

community – the late Candido Brito, Americo and Jose Manoel Brito –

can be viewed as keepers of the traditional language. However, by the time

they were born (between 1911 and 1920), Tariana communities were already

a¤ected by Brazilian influence, and their traditional lives were under destruc-

tion. None of the three elders could remember the full version of tradi-

tional rituals and the ritual language. We can safely assume that even their

Tariana, fluent as it is compared to that of the younger generation, has

already su¤ered from a certain amount of loss. We can hypothesize that

this could have been accompanied by a shift to a dominant language.

Sadly, in many cases the obsolescent variety is the only one which is

professionally described. Allin (1975) is based on fieldwork with a handful

of last speakers of Resıgaro, a North Arawak language. Carlin (2006) is

based on her fieldwork with two last speakers of Mawayana, also Arawak.

The same applies to Nyulnyul (McGregor 2002), Araki (Francois 2002),

and quite a few other languages from many parts of the world. In none

of these cases do we have access to a full ‘‘pre-obsolescent’’ variety. Most

likely, we are dealing with ‘‘a mere remnant of what the language must

have been like when many speakers used it as their only means of commu-

nication’’ (Haas 1941).

Linguistic consequences of language obsolescence – ‘‘global,’’ ‘‘individ-

ual,’’ or ‘‘localized’’ – include simplification and reduction of grammar

and lexicon. Categories absent from the dominant language are particu-

larly endangered. So the system of numeral classifiers becomes reduced to

just a few in Korean as it is spoken by young people in Canberra (Lee

1997) whose major language of communication is English. (This is also

known as ‘‘negative borrowing.’’) The obsolescent language often su¤ers

from stylistic reduction and dialect mixing, and also speakers’ insecurity

(see Campbell and Muntzel 1989; Chamoreau 2000; Grenoble and Whaley


1998; Aikhenvald 2002: Chapter 11; Dixon 1991a, b, for Dyirbal and

Yidiny; Helimsky 2007: 218, for Selkup).

The impact of the increasingly dominant language on the receding,

obsolescent language gradually falling into disuse tends to involve a

massive influx of non-native forms. The outcome of this influx may result

in unusual phenomena, which may include occasional borrowed bound

morpheme and mixed paradigms (Section 3). If speakers tend to avoid

imported forms, impending language shift may result in a spread and

expansion of look-alikes and a massive calquing of structures from the

dominant language and accelerated di¤usion of patterns (Section 4).2

Speakers of obsolescent languages vary in their proficiency, from fluent

language users to semi-speakers with limited competence (Dorian 1973:

417, 1977). In some cases, evaluation may be possible using internal or

external clues. But in many cases we have no information about the level

of speakers’ knowledge: if a typologically unusual phenomenon is based

on such uncertain sources, the validity of the phenomenon is cast in doubt.

3. Non-native forms in language obsolescence

An influx of non-native forms is a typical feature of obsolescent speakers.

In Haugen’s (1989: 67) words, ‘‘the adoption of English loans’’ was the

‘‘first great step in the direction of English’’ for immigrant speakers of

Norwegian. The adoption of non-native forms often involves lexical items

and also grammatical forms. Conjunctions and discourse markers, highly

susceptible to borrowing under any circumstances of language contact, are

the ‘‘usual suspects.’’

In Section 3.1, we discuss relevant examples of individual language obso-

lescence in Manambu, comparing a fluent and an obsolescent speaker. We

2. Language contact does not explain all the discontinuous changes in languageobsolescence. For instance, terminal speakers of Arvanitika Albanian in Greecesporadically lose gender and number agreement; their entire system of tense-aspect-mood categories is disintegrating – imperfective past forms are notused at all, and the marking of grammatical person is ‘‘morphologically dis-torted’’ (Tsitsitpis 1998: 44–62). This ‘‘agrammatism’’ cannot be explained by‘‘negative borrowing,’’ that is, loss of categories not present in the dominantlanguage, Greek, since Greek possesses all the categories now lost in the obso-lescent Arvanitika (Sasse 1992b: 69–70). Changes in language obsolescencemay be motivated by language-internal processes (see, for instance, Dixon1991b; also Gruzdeva 2002).


then turn to the obsolescent Bare, a North Arawak language from Vene-

zuela and Brazil, and compare two sources on the language which display

varying degree of obsolescence. In these instances we can argue that

language contact in the situation of obsolescence does not produce any

remarkable results – the e¤ects are the same as may have occurred in

language contact of a non-replacive nature. This is consistent with the

idea that an increase in the quantity and the speed of change is the major

e¤ect of language obsolescence.3

Language shift in the context of language obsolescence may also result

in inclusion of some less likely candidates for borrowing – personal pro-

nouns, both free and bound. In Section 3.2 we look at Mawayana, a

North Arawak language with its last two speakers in Suriname in Trio

and Waiwai-speaking communities, and then turn to Resıgaro, a moribund

North Arawak language in northeastern Peru, which has undergone a

massive impact of Bora and Witotoan.

Can the influx of non-native forms in language obsolescence obscure its

genetic a‰liation? This is the topic of Section 3.3.

3.1. Non-native free forms: following a beaten path

3.1.1. Manambu

Those speakers of Manambu (a Ndu language from the East Sepik area)

who live in urban centers and rarely use the language employ numerous

non-native forms. An obsolescent speaker who had spent much of his life

in an urban town speaking Tok Pisin (the major lingua franca of Papua

New Guinea) produced (1). Later on, a fluent speaker volunteered (2), as

something she would have said. The Tok Pisin forms are in italics. The

form okey comes from English. It is also widely used by speakers of Tok

Pisin. Non-native forms are in bold.

3. I have undertaken extensive fieldwork on Manambu (see, for instance, Aikhen-vald 2008b), Tariana (see, for instance, Aikhenvald 2002) and also Bare (Iworked with the last fluent speaker of the language). For each language,I have recorded a substantial number of texts and natural conversations.ALL the examples in this paper (as in my other work) come from spontaneousdiscourse. In my fieldwork, I avoid elicitation as being methodologicallyflawed (see Aikhenvald 2007, Dixon 2007 for further fundamentals of linguisticfieldwork).


Obsolescent speaker:

(1) asa:y kiya-d�-k aw wuna amay namba tufather die-3sg.m-compl.ds conn Iþlkþf.sg mother number two

du-ak ra:l okeyman-dat marryþ3f.sg.subj OK

ata lukautim-d�-d�wun tasol a taimthen look.after-3sg.m.subj-1sg.m.o but,only that.f.sg time

sikul-�r yi-d�wunschool-all go-1sg.m.subj

‘After my father died, then my mother married a second man, OK,

then he looked after me, only that at that time I went to school.’

Fluent speaker:

(2) asa:y kiya-d�-k aw wuna amay

father die-3sg.m-compl.ds conn Iþlkþf.sg mother

n�k�-d� du-ak ra:l ya:kya

another-sg.m man-dat marryþ3f.sgsubj all.right

ata yakwiya-d�-d�wun aw a s�k�rthen look.after-3sg.m.subj-1sg.m.o conn that.f.sg time

sikul-�r yi-d�wunschool-all go-1sg.m.subj

‘After my father died, then my mother married a second man, all

right, then he looked after me, only that at that time I went to school’

The two versions share one established loan word, sikul ‘school.’ Non-

native forms are not necessarily restricted to lexical items. Example (1)

shows that discourse markers, numerals, and conjunctions are imported

from the dominant language.4 Influx of loan forms is a striking feature of

‘‘globally obsolescent’’ languages. Extensive lexical impact of English has

been observed in the speech of the last speakers of Nyulnyul, an Australian

language (McGregor 2002: 177). Traditional Gooniyandi and Warrwa did

not have coordinating conjunctions: the remaining obsolescent speakers use

English forms nd (from and ) and � (from or). Traditional Nyulnyul did

4. In a situation of obsolescent speakers whose usage is unstable, the boundarybetween loans and code-switches is even harder to draw than in other language-contact situations. This is the reason why I use the term ‘‘import’’ to avoid usingeither ‘‘borrowing’’ or ‘‘code-switch.’’


have a conjunction agal ‘and’; the two remaining fluent speakers use the

English import nd.

Borrowing conjunctions and discourse markers in itself is not a symptom

of impending language death. Hamp (1989) and Johanson (2002) have

shown that allowing a certain number of loan forms by no means endangers

the language; the opposite can be true. Many fluent speakers of Manambu

in the villages use the English discourse marker okey and some occasionally

slip in the Tok Pisin tasol ‘but’ as a replacement for the polysemous aw

‘then, but, or’ (see Aikhenvald 2008b, 2009a). This confirms the general

assumption that language obsolescence tends to enhance the tendencies

present in a ‘‘healthy’’ language.

3.1.2. Bare

A comparison between two di¤erent stages of language obsolescence of the

same language points in a similar direction, that of increased influx of non-

native forms. Lopez Sanz’s (1972) brief grammatical description of Bare, a

North Arawak language from the Upper Rio Negro area in Venezuela, is

based on the analysis of materials (including several texts) collected in the

late 1960s from two remaining fluent speakers of the language from Santa

Rosa de Amanadona (with a total population of ethnic Bare of 140).

There are hardly any loans from Spanish, either lexical or grammatical.

Nowadays, people in Venezuela who identify themselves as Bare in Vene-

zuela speak Spanish; the Bare in Brazil speak Portuguese (some also know

Nheengatu, or Lıngua Geral, a Tupı-Guaranı-based lingua franca of the

area).

In 1991, I worked with the late Candelario da Silva (1921–1992), from

the Tiburi community, near Cucui, Amazonas, Brazil. Candelario’s family

moved in 1912 from Venezuela, fleeing from an uprising. His family main-

tained links with relatives in Venezuela in the communities of Puerto

Ayacucho, San Fernando de Atabapo, and Santa Rosa de Amanadona.

According to Candelario, all the remaining speakers of Bare in the above

mentioned localities in Venezuela were older than himself. He frequently

referred to his elderly aunts in Puerto Ayacucho as authorities to consult

with on words in Bare he himself could not remember. Candelario under-

went traditional male initiation (his account of it is in Aikhenvald 1995:

52–55), and insisted that he had grown up with Bare as his first language.

He was fluent in Bare, his father’s language. His late mother, herself a

speaker of Mandawaka (another extinct North Arawak language of the

area), had always spoken Bare to him. After her death about 30 years

prior to our encounter, he had kept his ancestral language which he used


to talk to himself, especially when he used to get drunk (and this, accord-

ing to Candelario, was not infrequent).5 Candelario was quadrilingual: his

main home language was Nheengatu, and he was equally fluent in Spanish

and Portuguese. His children spoke Portuguese and Nheengatu.

The variety of Bare recorded by Lopez Sanz in Santa Rosa de Amana-

dona has a richer morphology than the language of Candelario. For

instance, it has a variety of aspectual and modal markers (e.g. -phei

‘durative’ and -ya ‘dubitative’), and a marker of reported speech -man

not attested in the corpus collected from Candelario. Verb forms attested

in Lopez Sanz (1972) contain up to five su‰xes, whereas Candelario never

used more than one su‰x on the verb.6 Another major di¤erence between

texts and examples in Lopez Sanz (1972) and the corpus recorded from

Candelario is the abundance of Spanish and Portuguese forms, just as

would be expected in the case of advanced language obsolescence.

Many of these are not lexical forms. Candelario made an e¤ort to

avoid Spanish or Portuguese forms: the few consistent exceptions include

playa ‘sand’ (from Spanish playa ‘beach’) instead of either khaadi ‘sand,

earth’ (Arihini variety) or kadieho (Ihini variety: Natterer 1831), precisa-

‘need, require’ (from Portuguese precisar ‘need’), and gata- ‘spend, waste’

from Portuguese or Spanish gastar ‘spend’).

Spanish subordinating conjunctions occur where speakers of the more

traditional variety recorded by Lopez Sanz (1972) would use a sequencing

clitic -ka. This morpheme in Bare, just like in many other Arawak lan-

guages of the area, has a variety of meanings: it marks adverbial clauses

5. My corpus contains over 150 pages of texts and dialogues, and word-lists. SeeAikhenvald (1995) for a grammatical analysis of the material assembled, anda survey of literature on Bare. At the time of my work with Candelario, andwriting the grammar, I did not have access to Lopez Sanz (1972). Materials inLopez Sanz reflect some language attrition. Traditionally, Bare had two majorvarieties – Arihini (‘‘the ones from here’’) and Ihini (‘‘the ones from there’’: seeAikhenvald 1995). Newly available materials collected by Johann Natterer in1831 demonstrate the existence of lexical di¤erences between the two varieties.In the texts and examples in Lopez Sanz (1972), lexical items from the twovarieties appear in free variation. Such dialect mixture, or, in Dixon’s (1991a)words, dialect merging, is typical of language obsolescence. Candelario knewof the two varieties, but could not tell them apart.

6. Some di¤erences between the variety of Santa Rosa de Amanadona recordedby Lopez Sanz and the language of Candelario may be due to additional dia-lectal or idiolectal variation: these include Santa Rosa de Amanadona heinand Candelario’s hena for declarative negation. Note that I preserve the tran-scription given by Lopez Sanz (1972) for the examples from Santa Rosa deAmanadona.


of most types except purposive, and regularly occurs on conditional, tem-

poral, and complement clauses (see Aikhenvald 2006b for Tariana, and

discussion there). An example of -ka, from Lopez Sanz (1972: 80), is in

(3) (in boldface); note that in a negative construction -ka attaches to the

negation (glosses are supplied by me):

Bare: Santa Rosa de Amanadona

(3) hena-ka i-kasa hein i-nika-waka

neg-seq 3gs-arrive neg 3sg.m-eat-neg

‘If he does not come, he does not eat.’

The polysemous -ka also appears in Candelario’s texts, as shown in the

example below from an autobiographical story (also see Aikhenvald 1995:

48–50). Clauses are in brackets, for ease of reference.

Bare: Candelario da Silva

(4) [nu-mina¸ i ø-maha niku] [a¸ i bi-pa¸ata-ni1sg-master 3sg.m-say 1sgþfor here 2sg-money-poss

kuma¸ehe] [bi-katehesa-ka] [beke badahanaka biku

big 2sg-know-seq fut one.day 2sgþfor

ahaw bi-wakhid’a-ka] [hena-ka bi-katehesa]

with what 2sg-live-seq neg-seq 2sg-know

[phinuka bi-pa¸ata-ni]2sg-throw-decl 2sg-money-poss

‘My master said to me: here is your big money, if you know some-

thing, one day you will have what to live with, if you do not know,

you will throw away your money.’

The sequencing marker is not used to introduce speech reports: as shown

in (4), speech reports are juxtaposed to the verb of speech.

Besides the sequencing -ka, Bare had an adverbial form abeuku ‘when,

as soon as; then’ used both by the two speakers in Santa Rosa de Aman-

dona and by Candelario. If accompanied by the sequencing -ka on the

verb, abeuku is a temporal linker ‘when.’ Example (5) comes from a myth-

ical text recorded by Lopez Sanz (1972: 83):


(5) isınka abeuku ihıwa-ka Puluna-minali. . .

3sg.mþlike when 3sg.mþgo ?-master. . .

‘It was when Pulunaminali (the master of all animals) went (round). . .’


In (6), from an autobiographical story by Candelario, abeuku is also

accompanied by -ka on the verb (in the last clause).


(6) da-ya¸aki nu-maha i-ku me-maha ni-ku

dem-whisky 1sg-say 3sg.m-for 3pl-say 1sg-for

ke nihiwa abeuku i-makhi-ka sa ya¸akithat 1sgþgo when 3sg.m-finish-seq dem whisky

‘Then we drank, we managed to drink all the whisky, I said to him,

they said to me that I shall go when the whisky finishes.’

In the few examples of abeuku without an accompanying sequencing

-ka in the variety of Santa Rosa de Amanadona, the form means ‘then’

(Lopez Sanz 1972: 84):


(7) abeuku humadan

then 3f.sgþleave

‘Then she lets (him) go.’

Unlike the two speakers from Santa Rosa de Amanadona, Candelario

used abeuku as a temporal linker without the accompanying -ka on the

verb. In (8), -ka appears in the preceding clause, so its absence in the third

clause (introduced with abeuku) could be explained as an instance of

ellipsis:


(8) [me-nika kubati ] abeuku idi-ka3pl-eat fish when then/there-seq

abeuku bed’a-waka me-nika matsuka

when nothing 3pl-eat manioc.flour

‘They (dogs) eat fish, when/if it is there, when (there is) nothing, they

eat manioc flour.’

However, in other examples like the one in (9) -ka is simply not used, and

abeuku is the only linker:

(9) bihiwa awehentei abeuku i-makhi

2sgþgo hereþelative when 3sg.m-finish

‘You will go away when it (the drink) finishes.’


Candelario insisted on translating abeuku as ‘when’ (Portuguese quando).

The conjunction occupies the same clause-initial position as quando in

Portuguese (or cuando in Spanish). The apparent obsolescence of the

sequencing -ka in the presence of abeuku may indicate that Candelario

was adopting a Spanish-Portuguese strategy for temporal linking. He

never used this Spanish-Portuguese form himself. He freely used other

Spanish or Spanish-Portuguese conjunctions. Just occasionally, the verb

in a subordinate clause introduced by a conjunction would be accom-

panied by -ka. The temporal mientre ke (from Spanish mientras que)

‘while, whereas’ is accompanied by -ka in (10):

(10) mientre-ke nu-nakuda-ka i-ma¸e-d’a kubati

while-that 1sg-go-seq 3sg.m-steal-inch fish

‘While I was gone, he (the dog) started stealing the fish.’

The causal purke ‘because’ (from Spanish porque) is used on its own in the

penultimate clause of (11). It is accompanied by -ka in the second clause

of (12):

(11) idi me-maha-ka [ke hena me-yehe-waka

then 3pl-say-decl that neg 3pl-can-neg

me-dia-sa-ka nu] [purke hena hnuwina-waka

3pl-drink-caus-seq i because neg 1sgþfall-neg

ya¸aki ahaw] [hena hnuwina-waka]

whisky from neg 1sgþfall-neg

‘Then they said to me that they could not make me drunk, because I

do not fall down from whisky, I do not fall down.’

(12) [damakaru-kua nu-¸ehedi ] [purke nu-¸ehedi nu-yuwahada-ka]

jungle-locþlong 1sg-like because 1sg-like 1sg-walk-seq

[ pero nu-witi hena-hana yada-ka-na]

but 1sg-eye neg-more 3sg.mþsee-decl-perf

‘I enjoy the jungle, because I like to walk, but my eyes do not see

any more.’

The linker ke (from Spanish, Portuguese que) is used to introduce speech

reports, as in (11) and (6). About 60 percent of speech reports in the

corpus contain ke. This same form occurs in the meaning of ‘so that,’ as

in (13).


(13) [bihıwa behewa] [kuhu ke id’ua¸ i beke bı ]

2sgþtake 2sgþfrom he that well fut you

‘Take it (poisoned pillow) from you, so that you will be well.’

Candelario used other Spanish conjunctions, for instance, the coordinator

pero ‘but’ (from Spanish pero ‘but’) shown in (12). None of the Spanish-

Portuguese conjunctions appear in the Santa Rosa de Amanadona variety.

Note that conjunctions occupy the same place as in Spanish. In contrast to

the other documented variety of Bare, and to most other Arawak lan-

guages, Bare spoken by Candelario is losing the sequencing enclitic -ka, a

marker which has no equivalent in either Spanish or Portuguese. This is

an instance of ‘‘negative borrowing.’’ We can thus conclude that the influx

of non-native forms into the speech of the last fluent speaker of Bare is

accompanied by leveling of structures. The obsolescent Bare imports

Spanish and Portuguese forms, and also becomes more similar to the

dominant Spanish and Portuguese in terms of its grammatical structure.

Conjunctions – especially free forms – are among the most borrowable

elements of the language (the interested reader is advise to consult Stolz

and Stolz 1996 with special focus on American Indian languages; Matras

1998, and Aikhenvald 2006a). As stated at the end of §3.1.1, the fact that

Spanish and Portuguese conjunctions have been borrowed into Bare

should not be considered as a special phenomenon in language obsoles-

cence. What is indicative of Bare as an obsolescent language is the high

number of loans from the dominant languages. That is, this contact-

induced change in language obsolescence appears to follow a beaten

path, albeit at an increased rate. we can recall, from §1 of this paper, that

the di¤erence between language change in vital, and in obsolescent lan-

guage, may lie in the ‘quantity of change’. It is indeed the case here.

3.2. Influx of non-native free forms: unusual patterns

We now turn to some rather unusual borrowing patterns in obsolescent

languages. In a number of instances, obsolescent languages borrow per-

sonal pronouns from the dominant language. In the examples available,

pronominal forms which express categories attested in the dominant lan-

guage but absent from the obsolescent one may get borrowed.

3.2.1. Mawayana

Mawayana (Carlin 2006) is a highly endangered North Arawak language

spoken by just two elderly people in a village where Trio and Waiwai,


from the Carib family, are the dominant languages. The two remaining

speakers of Mawayana have little opportunity of using the language, and

are aware that when they go, so will Mawayana.

Just like most other Arawak languages, Mawayana originally had first,

second, and third person, without distinguishing between first person

plural inclusive (I and you) and exclusive (I and a third person, excluding

you). In contrast, Waiwai and Trio have di¤erent forms for first person

inclusive and for first person exclusive. As a result of influence from Waiwai

and Trio as dominant languages with an obligatory distinction between

inclusive and exclusive, the two remaining speakers of Mawayana consis-

tently use the Waiwai pronoun amna to express the concept of first person

plural exclusive (e.g. Waiwai amna krapan ‘our (excl) bow’). The original

first person plural prefix wa- in Mawayana has been reinterpreted as

inclusive.

(14) amna saruuka (14b) wa-saruuka

1þ3pn fishtrap 1pl.poss-fishtrap

‘Our (excl) fishtrap.’ ‘Our (incl) fishtrap.’

The borrowed form comes from Waiwai. However, the behavior of the

verb bears an impact from Trio: in Trio the first person exclusive pronoun

requires a third person prefix on the verb, while in Waiwai the third person

singular prefix is often dropped. Example (15) shows that Mawayana fol-

lows the Trio pattern of person marking:

(15) amna rı-me

1þ3pn 3a-say.pres

‘We (excl) say.’

The first person inclusive is marked with the Mawayana prefix wa- (origi-

nally first person plural):

(16) wa-me

1incl.pl-say.pres

‘We (incl) say.’

Carlin (2006) is the first summary of the grammatical features of the lan-

guage in the light of language contact (and a full grammar is in progress).

The borrowed form amna does not occur in the previous records of the

language, which include longish lists of words and phrases in Howard

(1986), and materials in Farabee (1918: 283–286) and Schomburgk (1848),

all collected when the language was more actively spoken than it is at


present. This suggests that borrowing a pronoun – something not unheard

of, but rather unusual – could be the result of excessive influx of non-

native forms characteristic of Mawayana as an obsolescent language.

3.2.2. Resıgaro

The genetic a‰liation of Resıgaro – a small language spoken in north-

eastern Peru surrounded by speakers of Bora and Witotoan groups –

with the Arawak family was established by Igualada (1940) and Igualada

and Castellvı (1940); also see Loutkotka (1968: 136). The first extensive

materials on the language published by Rivet and de Wavrin (1951), and

based on the data collected by de Wavrin in the early 1930s, provided

ample evidence in the same direction (see Payne 1985 for a summary).

The group itself comprised not more than a thousand people at the

time of Whi¤en’s (1915) travels in the area. The first mention of Resıgaro

(Recıgaro), by Hardenburg (1910), places it among other Witotoan

groups. Tessmann (1930: 583) does not provide linguistic a‰liation, but

states that culturally they are close to the Bora-Witoto, and linguistically

are ‘‘perhaps close to Bora.’’7 At that time, the language was still actively

spoken. Note that there is no evidence of any genetic relationship between

Bora-Witotoan and Arawak languages (see Loukotka 1968; Aschmann

1993).

In his pioneering salvage grammar of Resıgaro, based on fieldwork

with ten remaining speakers whose major language was Bora, Trevor Allin

(1975) came to a di¤erent conclusion. The sheer number of Bora, and also

Witotoan, forms in Resıgaro indicated to him that the languages were

genetically related. He did not deny that Resıgaro belongs to the Arawak

family, but suggested that, given the high percentage of shared forms

between Bora, Witotoan languages, and Resıgaro, the limits of Arawak

should be expanded, and Bora and Witotoan be included.

There is, however, no doubt that the impressive number of Bora and

Witotoan forms in Resıgaro are due to borrowing (see Payne 1985, and

detailed discussion in Aikhenvald 2001). These lexical loans constitute

about 24 percent of the vocabulary, and include just a few verbs and

numerous nouns, covering body parts plus a few other items such as ‘fish’

and ‘hill.’ The most striking is the fact that ‘‘core’’ lexical items, such as

terms for body parts, are shared with Bora or with Witotoan languages.

7. ‘‘Uber die Ressıgaro ist nichts Naheres bekannt. Sie gehoren kulturell sicherzu der Uitoto-Boragruppe und sprachlich vielleicht in die Nahe der Bora.’’


However, the lexical data published by Rivet and de Wavrin (limited as

they are) often do not register a loan.

A prime example is the word for ‘tooth,’ Resıgaro -e�hepe ‘tooth,’

which is similar to Muinane Witoto iıpe, Proto-Witoto an *pe (Aschmann

1993). The reflex of the Proto-Arawak form *nene (Aikhenvald 2001) sur-

vives in Resıgaro -onene ‘front teeth’ (Allin 1975). Rivet and de Wavrin

(1951: 213) give the form wo-ne (1pl-tooth) ‘tooth,’ and no form similar

to Bora or to Witotoan.

The Resıgaro described by Allin uses borrowed numbers ‘one’ and

‘two’ (see Table 1). This is quite remarkable for an Arawak language,

since lower numbers (if they exist at all) generally appear to be rather

resistant to borrowing. And the overwhelming majority of Arawak lan-

guages preserve the reflexes of Proto-Arawak forms (fourth column in

Table 1). Once again, Rivet and de Wavrin (1951) register di¤erent forms,

which are clearly Arawak in origin. The form for ‘two’ shows the e¤ects

of the phonological process *y > tz found in other cognates with Proto-

Arawak.

Does this imply that pre-obsolescent Resıgaro was more Arawak-like

in its lexicon and grammar? In all likelihood, yes.

Bora influence on Resıgaro grammar goes further than free forms (see

Aikhenvald 2001 for a detailed discussion of structural influence of Bora on

Resıgaro, and also the discussion of borrowed classifiers). Borrowed bound

morphemes include one pronoun, number markers, oblique case markers,

and also classifiers. The independent pronouns and cross-referencing prefixes

in Resıgaro (where they are mostly used to mark A/Sa and as possessors

of inalienably possessed nouns) are compared to Bora in Table 2 (Allin

1975: 116–117; Thiesen 1996: 33). Borrowed morphemes are in boldface.

Table 1. Numbers ‘one’ and ‘two’ in Resıgaro, Bora and Arawak

No. Resıgaro(Allin 1975)

Bora Resıgaro(Rivet and deWavrin 1951)

Proto-Arawak

one sa-cl tsa-cl ‘apa #(ha)pene *pa

two migaa- mı�ee/mihaa-cl ‘e(i)tza #m� *yama


Unlike most other Arawak languages but similarly to the Bora-Witotoan

group, Resıgaro has inclusive versus exclusive opposition in first person

non-singular, and also a dual number. The first person plural exclusive

pronoun muu�a was borrowed from Bora, similarly to the way the last

speakers of Mawayana introduced a Waiwai form to cover the same

meaning. In Resıgaro, it was subsequently reanalyzed as consisting of a

Table 2. Pronouns in Resıgaro and in Bora

Resıgaro Bora

Pronouns prefixes PronounsPrefixes(poss)

Prefixes(subj)

1sg no no- oo ta- —

2sg phu, pha p- uu di- —

3sg m tsu, tsa gi- diıbyei-, aadi- —

3sg f tso do- diılle

1incl du m fa-musif-/_hva/_elsewhere

mee

me-

me-

1incl du f fa-mupi

1excl du m muu-musi muu- muhtsi

1excl du f muu-mupi muhp�

2du m ha-musi hu-, i- (impv) a-muhtsi amu� a-

2du f ha-mupi a-muhpi

3du m na-musin-/_hna-

diitye-tsi aathje-

3du f na-mupi diitye-p�

1pl incl fa-�a, fu, fa f/ua- mee me-

1pl excl muu-�a, muu — muuha

2pl ha-�a, hu i- (impv) amuuha amu� a-

3pl na-�a, hna na- diıtye, aatye aathje- —


prefix muu- and a particle -�a, following the analogy of other non-singular

pronouns in the language itself, such as na-�a ‘third person plural’ and

fa-�a ‘first person plural inclusive.’ This shows the linguistic creativity

of the last speakers, captured by Sasse’s (2001) colorful metaphor, the

‘‘Phoenix from the ashes’’ (in the spirit of Dorian 1999, and Dal Negro

2004).

The Resıgaro dual markers feminine -mupi, masculine -musi (also from

Bora: see Table 2) combine with muu- reanalyzed as a bound form. Unlike

other pronouns, the first person plural exclusive has no corresponding

prefix used with nouns and with verbs, which may point towards its later

origin. The Bora forms in Resıgaro are in bold in Table 2.

In their comparatively detailed discussion of personal pronouns, free

and bound, in Resıgaro, Rivet and de Wavrin (1951: 204–206) do not

mention the first person plural exclusive form (the analysis of pronominal

markers occupies about a half of their short grammatical summary: 204–

209). They do not mention the number markers on nouns at all. We can

hypothesize that the introduction of non-native free and bound pronomi-

nal forms by the last speakers of the language is likely to be a result of

contact-induced change in the situation of extreme linguistic stress.

This is not to say that the Resıgaro described by Rivet and de Wavrin

(1951) had no loans from Bora or Witotoan; to the contrary. One example

is Resıgaro tee� ı (Allin 1975), tehe(y)hı (Rivet and de Wavrin 1951)

‘river,’ Bora thee-� i, Proto-Bora-Muinane *tee-� i. The Proto-Arawak form

is *huni ‘water, river.’ A reflex of this form is attested in Resıgaro’s closest

genetic relatives Tariana, Baniwa, and Piapoco as uni ‘water, river.’

Further bound morphemes borrowed from Bora into Resıgaro include

markers of masculine and feminine dual, oblique cases, and numerous

classifiers (see Aikhenvald 2001; Allin 1975; Thiesen 1996). None of these

are mentioned by Rivet and de Wavrin (1951): we may hypothesize that

the influx of borrowed morphemes into the obsolescent language is a

recent phenomenon, but we have no means of definitely proving this.

Borrowing a pronoun, free or bound, is not unheard of, but is quite

unusual (Gardani 2005). Third person plural pronouns they, their, them

in English are considered to be borrowings from a Scandinavian source

(Campbell 1997; Baugh 1957: 120). Miskito, a vibrant Misumalpan lan-

guage, is said to have borrowed first and second person singular pronouns

from Northern Sumu (Campbell 1997, based on Ken Hale, p.c.), also

Misumalpan. Further examples of borrowing individual free pronominal

forms come from Matiso¤ (1990: 113) and Newman (1977, 1979a, b).


Campbell (1994) reports that Alsea, an isolate from Oregon, borrowed a

whole set of Salishan pronominal su‰xes.8 However, the instances such

as Mawayana and Resıgaro should be treated with caution as bona fide

examples of borrowing pronouns. The fact that these borrowings were

documented at a stage when both Mawayana and Resıgaro are used by

just a handful of speakers whose major language is di¤erent alerts us to a

potential e¤ect of a massive influx of non-native forms characteristic of

the last stages of a language’s life. Can a massive influx of borrowed forms

obscure a language’s a‰liation? This takes us to our next section.

3.3. Language obsolescence and language a‰liation

It is well known that teasing apart similarities due to genetic inheritance

from those due to borrowing of varied kinds is one of the hardest prob-

lems in comparative linguistics (cf. the classic controversy between Boas

and Sapir: see Swadesh 1951). Ideally, if two languages descend from the

same ancestor, the forms and their meanings must be easily relatable, via

the application of established rules for phonological change and semantic

change. In reality, the distinction between inherited and di¤used similarities

may be di‰cult to draw, especially in a situation of prolonged and un-

interrupted di¤usion of cultural and linguistic traits across an area; see,

for instance, Dixon (1997; 2002), Dench (2001), and Heath (1978), for

the Australian area, and further examples in Aikhenvald (2006a). Simi-

larities between languages can be suggestive of a genetic relationship,

but not su‰cient to postulate it with full assurance. Murrinh-patha and

Ngan.gitjemerri, two languages spoken in the Daly River region of North-

ern Australia, share just cognate paradigms for portmanteau forms of

inflective simple verbs, but scarcely anything else in grammar and almost

no lexicon (Dixon 2002: 675). The paradigm of free pronouns is the only

fully ‘‘Chadic’’ feature of the Tangale group (Jungraithmayr 1995). Such

examples are bound to remain ‘‘fringe’’ puzzles to comparative linguists.

The case of Resıgaro is rather instructive in this respect. The influx of

Bora and Witotoan forms into this language led Trevor Allin to believe

that the language was related to Bora and to Witotoan (Allin 1975). Payne

8. Another frequently given example of a putative borrowing of part of the pro-nominal paradigm comes from Kambot (or Botin), from the Grass family inNew Guinea (Foley 1986: 210–211). A closer look at the paradigm of Kambotpronouns in the original sources (Laycock and Z’graggen 1975; Pryor 1990)shows that this hypothesis is based on misinterpretation of the data (seeAikhenvald 2009b, for a full analysis).


(1985) undertook a careful reconstruction and comparison with the previ-

ous stage of the language captured by Rivet and de Wavrin (1951), to

prove that the language is not Bora-Witotoan. But what if all we have is

a highly obsolescent stage?

An almost extreme example of influx of non-native forms into a pro-

nominal paradigm and its restructuring comes from Marrku, the tradi-

tional language of Croker Island (Australian area) (Evans et al. 2006;

Evans 2007). Like many Australian languages, Marrku has been on the

decline for many decades. It was reported that by 1939 there were only

five speakers left (Evans et al 2006: 2); by 1991 there were only two semi-

speakers who were then highly proficient in other indigenous languages of

the area (especially Iwaidja). The verb paradigms accessible to Evans (2007)

show a curious picture: while there is strong evidence from body-part pre-

fixes (Evans 2000) in favor of an erstwhile genetic relationship between

Marrku and other Iwaidjan languages, verbal paradigms in Marrku –

collected from obsolescent speakers – contain massive borrowings from

Iwaidja and its relative Ilgar. This massive influx, without any previous

stage of the language to be compared with, makes exact genetic classifica-

tion of Marrku an almost impossible task (Evans 2007).

4. Further outcomes of language contact in language obsolescence

An influx of foreign forms is not a universal outcome of language obsoles-

cence.9 We saw above that an obsolescent language may tend to rapidly

become structurally similar to the dominant one. Almost all the categories

present in Bora are expressed in Resıgaro; Mawayana replicates the Trio

and Waiwai patterns (without necessarily borrowing the forms). Nivkh,

a Paleo-Siberian isolate on the path towards extinction, has undergone

massive restructuring of imperative paradigms under the influence of

Russian (see Gruzdeva 2002). Similar examples abound.

9. Last speakers often avoid consciously using loan forms, even if they were usedin the language. R. M. W. Dixon reports that Dick Moses, one of the very lastfluent speakers of Yidiny, made sure his language was free of English intru-sions. As Dixon (1977: 29) reported, ‘‘Moses has eliminated what were cer-tainly established English loan words’’; ‘‘in place of mudaga ‘motor car’ andbiligan ‘billy can,’ he uses dundalay and gunbu:l which he said were originallythe avoidance style forms for these items.’’ Similar examples of purism havebeen documented for Arizona Tewa (Kroskrity 1993).


Intensive language contact in the situation of language obsolescence

goes together with enhancement of already existing similarities. Forms in

the obsolescent language which are similar to those in the dominant one

tend to become more frequent, and to assume the meanings influenced by

the dominant language.

Ingrian Finnish spoken by a handful of Finns scattered around Estonia

is a case in point. Most speakers are undergoing a rapid shift to Estonian.

The two languages are closely related and structurally similar; as a result,

it is not always possible to distinguish Estonian and Finnish forms. The

most striking foreign form recorded in the language of the few remaining

speakers is the past tense marker -si- employed instead of the Ingrian

Finnish -i- (Riionheimo 2002: 201–202). This past tense marker is highly

productive in Estonian; its appearance in Ingrian Finnish can thus be

explained by the influence of the dominant language. But there is also

a language-internal explanation: there is a subclass of verbs in Ingrian

Finnish which requires -si- past rather than -i- past. Similarity in form of

the Ingrian Finnish and the Estonian past marker is a strong contributing

factor to its increased frequency in the moribund Ingrian Finnish. Other

than that, speakers tend to avoid using Estonian forms.

In a situation of traditional inhibition against borrowed forms, growing

language obsolescence may go hand in hand with expansion of those mor-

phemes that have the same form in the obsolescent and in the dominant

language. Tariana is the only Arawak language spoken in the Vaupes basin

in northwest Amazonia (spanning adjacent areas of Brazil and Colombia).

This used to be a well-established linguistic area, characterized by obliga-

tory multilingualism based on the principle of linguistic exogamy: ‘‘those

who speak the same language as us are our brothers, and we do not marry

our sisters’’ (see Aikhenvald 2002 and references there). Languages spoken

in this area traditionally included the East Tucanoan languages Tucano,

Wanano, Desano, Piratapuya, Tuyuca (and a few others), and the Arawak

language Tariana (now spoken by over 100 speakers in two villages).

Speakers of these participate in the exogamous marriage network which

ensures obligatory multilingualism. Nowadays, Tariana is no longer spoken

by children, and fewer and fewer people use the language even in domestic

settings. The growing obsolescence of Tariana and its rapid replacement

by now dominant Tucano is accompanied by a rapidly increasing number

of calqued forms and constructions from Tucano.

The long-term interaction based on institutionalized societal multi-

lingualism between East Tucanoan languages and Tariana has resulted in

the rampant di¤usion of grammatical and semantic patterns (though not


so much of forms) and calquing of categories. Comparison of Tariana

with closely related Arawak languages (such as Baniwa/Kurripako and

Piapoco) helps identify the di¤used and the inherited features in Tariana.

A striking feature of the Vaupes linguistic area is a strong cultural inhibi-

tion against language mixing, viewed in terms of borrowing forms, or

inserting bits of other languages, in one’s Tariana. This inhibition operates

predominantly in terms of recognizable loan forms. Speakers who use

non-native forms are subject to ridicule which may a¤ect their status in

the community. What often happens in the language of obsolescent speakers

is reinterpreting Tariana morphemes in accordance with the meaning their

look-alikes may have in Tucano.

Consider the Tariana clitic -ya ‘emphatic.’ This clitic is now increas-

ingly used by obsolescent insecure speakers as a marker of immediate

command (17), mirroring the Tucano imperative -ya (18):

(17) Tariana

pi-nha-ya

2sg-eat-impv

‘Eat!’

(18) Tucano

ba’a-ya

play-impv

‘Play!’

The -ya imperative in Tariana is frequently used by younger speakers, and

hardly ever by the few traditional older speakers, who concur that this is

not ‘‘proper Tariana.’’ The morpheme -ya in an imperative construction is

condemned as a token of identifiable language-mixing (see Aikhenvald

2008a, for cognates of the emphatic -ya in other Arawak languages, and

the imperative marker -ya in Tucanoan languages).

Another similar example comes from the increased use of nominaliza-

tions marked with -¸i in Tariana commands. This is an alternative to simple

imperatives, but with a somewhat di¤erent meaning, ‘make sure you do.’

(19) Tariana

pi-nha-¸ i!2sg-eat-nominalization

‘Eat!’ (make sure you eat, lest you go hungry)

This usage is restricted to casual speech by younger people for whom Tucano

is the main language of day-to-day communication. Tucano, just like most


other East Tucanoan languages, has a su‰x -ri used in commands with

an overtone of warning, with the meaning of ‘or else’ (see Ramirez 1997,

Vol. 1: 146–147). The usage of nominalizations as commands in Tariana

has in all likelihood been influenced by the -ri marked imperative in Tucano.

That the form in (19) is a nominalization is corroborated by the transla-

tions given by traditional speakers of Tariana, who themselves avoid using

commands like (19), using an apprehensive construction instead.

Traditional Tariana did not use to have any special morpheme for first

person plural imperative (or hortative). Nowadays, obsolescent speakers

employ a hortative -da/-¸a. Compare Traditional Tariana, in (20a), with

(20b), recorded from an obsolescent speaker:

(20a) Traditional Tariana

wa-i¸a1pl-drink

(20b) Obsolescent Tariana

wa-i¸a-da1pl-drink-hortative

‘Let’s drink!’

Functionally and formally this morpheme is reminiscent of the Tucano

hortative -ra/-da (Ramirez 1997, Vol. I: 145) which is shared with other

Tucanoan languages:

(21) Tucano

sı ’ri-da!

drink-hortative

‘Let’s drink!’

The Tariana hortative is likely to be a recent borrowing from Tucano. Or

it could be the result of a reinterpretation of already existing Tariana mor-

pheme -da/-¸a ‘dubitative’ which is sometimes used to express politeness.

Traditional speakers of Tariana are aware of the similarity between the

Tariana and the Tucano morphemes, and treat the hortative (as in (20b))

as ‘‘incorrect’’ Tariana ‘‘mixed’’ with Tucano. This is typical of Tariana

language attitudes: given the general prohibition on mixing languages viewed

in terms of lexical loans, the hortative is, not surprisingly, a marginal feature

of the language (see Aikhenvald 2002: 213–222 on language awareness in

the Vaupes area).

Or a look-alike can oust another, non-shared morpheme. Tariana has

numerous verbal markers to do with extent and type of action, among


them the enclitic -pita ‘repetitive action: do again.’ This enclitic is being

replaced by the form -ta ‘repetitive’, shared with related languages, but

infrequent in the traditional language. The form -ta is similar to Tucano

taha, often reduced to -ta (Ramirez 1997: 343–4).

These instances of a semantic extension of a native morpheme under

the influence of a look-alike in a contact language (known as grammatical

accommodation: see Aikhenvald 2006a) are symptomatic of language shift

in language obsolescence. This is an alternative to influx of non-native

forms.

Obsolescent Tariana o¤ers curious examples of drastic restructuring.

Tucanoan languages and Tariana are genetically unrelated, and typologically

di¤erent. Like many Arawak languages, Tariana employs prefixes for subject

cross-referencing, while Tucanoan languages are predominantly su‰xing. As

a result of long-term contact, Tariana has developed numerous un-Arawak

features, including cases for core arguments and a complex system of eviden-

tials. (These are instances of completed changes.) Obsolescent Tariana is

developing a system of cross-referencing enclitics, as exemplified by (22b),

mirroring the Tucanoan pattern.

The following example is a typical beginning of a story. It was recorded

from a fluent middle-aged speaker who always tried to speak the tradi-

tional language. The structural parallelism with Tucano is striking, but not

complete. The major di¤erence lies in the person that is marked: Tariana

employs a prefix ( just like any Arawak language would), while Tucano em-

ploys a su‰x (portmanteau with a tense-evidential marker). The relevant

forms are in bold.

(22a) Traditional Tariana

Tariana Payape-se-nuku paita nawiki

Tucano Diporo-pi-re ni’ki masi

long.ago-loc-top.non.a/s oneþcl:human person

Tariana dy-uka-na aı-nuku

3sgnf-arrive-rem.p.vis here-top.non.a/s

Tucano eta-wı a’to-re

arrive-3sgnf.rem.p.vis here-top.non.a/s

‘A long time ago a man arrived here.’

A similar story told by an obsolescent speaker (now in his early thirties)

started in a subtly di¤erent way:


(22b)

Tariana Payape-se-nuku paita nawiki

Tucano Diporo-pi-re ni’ki masi

long.ago-loc-top.non.a/s oneþcl:human person

Tariana dy-uka-na¼diha aı-nuku

3sgnf-arrive-rem.p.vis¼he here-top.non.a/s

Tucano eta-wı a’to-re

arrive-3sgnf.rem.p.vis here-top.non.a/s

‘A long time ago a man arrived here.’

The Tariana in (22b) is structurally closer to Tucano since the speaker

employs an encliticized personal pronoun following the evidential. When

(22b) was uttered, no one commented on the language di¤erence. Speakers

are more aware of non-native forms than they are of non-native patterns.

Nevertheless, when I played (22b) back to a traditional elder, he com-

mented that ¼diha should not have been there.

Instances like (22b) demonstrate that Tariana is becoming almost like

relexified Tucano. But since language change in language obsolescence is

unstable and discontinuous, chances are that this relexified variety will not

live beyond the life-span of the last speakers.

5. What can we conclude?

A study of contact-induced change in the situation of language obsoles-

cence poses specific problems. Basically, the same or similar issues arise

when we investigate the speech behavior of obsolescent speakers of other-

wise well-spoken languages, and processes of change in those languages

which are on their way out.

Independently of whether we are dealing with obsolescent languages or

just with obsolescent speakers, the influx of non-native forms tends to be

pervasive. This is understandable: language obsolescence is typically asso-

ciated with word-retrieval problems, and it is easier to just use an item

from the dominant language.

In other instances of language obsolescence, we encounter instances

of influx of non-native forms beyond lexicon. Mawayana and Resıgaro

have borrowed pronouns, while Resıgaro has also restructured its cross-

referencing system, e¤ectively incorporating a non-native bound form of

a pronoun. This is in addition to borrowing numbers ‘one’ and ‘two,’ and


numerous further bound morphemes. These instances of borrowing mem-

bers of closed classes and even bound forms are typologically unexpected

and unusual. However, a question arises: are these really borrowings, or

are they just instances of nonce forms? That the last speakers’ usage is

unstable and ephemeral is a well-known fact. Typologists and historical

linguists need to be wary of that when they encounter unusual patterns of

borrowed forms in obsolescent languages.

A further, commonly attested, e¤ect of language contact in obsolescence

is the enhancement of forms already shared with the dominant language.

This often concerns frequently used forms and constructions, such as the

expression of commands. In addition, enhanced structural di¤usion may

result in one language becoming like a reflection of the other: the obsoles-

cent Tariana may sound like relexified Tucano. This is an extreme – but

again, often ephemeral – outcome of language shift.

In Johanson’s (2002) words, ‘‘languages do not die of ‘structuritis’ ’’ –

that is, contact-induced change does not result in language extinction.

But the processes of language obsolescence may promote structural changes

amazing in their extent. Before passing into extinction, an obsolescent lan-

guage may become a ‘‘carbon copy’’ of the dominant idiom. This exces-

sive copying is hardly surprising. The dominant language is the one used

on a day-to-day basis by speakers of an obscolescent language, and so the

structures from the dominant language get calqued and transferred into

the language falling into disuse. (More discussion and examples can be

found in Aikhenvald 2002, Grenoble 2000, and classic work by Hill and

Hill 1986, Tsitsipis 1998 and Campbell and Muntzel 1989).

Contact-induced changes in the situation of language obsolescence are

inherently unstable (as was pointed out by Tsitsipis 1998). Ephemeral

as they are, their outcomes may go against generalizations obtained in

‘‘healthy’’ language situations.

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to the late Candelario da Silva, the last speaker of Bare,

to the members of the Brito family who taught me their native Tariana, and

my adopted family at Avatip who taught me their native Manambu. Special

thanks go to R. M. W. Dixon, who provided invaluable comments on this

article. I am also grateful to Claudine Chamoreau for her careful editing.


Abbreviations

a Transitive subject

all Allative

caus Causative

cl Classifier

compl.ds Completed di¤erent subject

conn Connective

dat Dative

decl Declarative

dem Demonstrative

du Dual

exc Exclusive

f Feminine

fut Future

impv Imperative

inc Inclusive

inch Inchoative

lk Linker

loc Locative

m Masculine

neg Negative

nf Nonfeminine

o Object

perf Perfective

pl Plural

pn Pronoun

poss Possessive

rem.p.vis Remote past visual

seq Sequencing

sg Singular

subj Subject

top.non.a/s Topical non-subject.

References

Aikhenvald, A. Y. 1995. Bare. Munich: Lincom Europa.

Aikhenvald, A. Y. 1999. The Arawak language family. In The Amazonian Lan-

guages, R. M. W. Dixon and A. Y. Aikhenvald (eds), 65–105. Cambridge:



Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2001. Areal di¤usion, genetic inheritance and problems of sub-

grouping: a North Arawak case study. In Areal Di¤usion and Genetic Inheritance:

Problems in Comparative Linguistics, A. Y. Aikhenvald and R. M. W. Dixon

(eds), 167–194. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2002. Language Contact in Amazonia. Oxford: Oxford Univer-

sity Press.

Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2003. A grammar of tariana, from north-west Amazonia. Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press.

Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2006a. Grammars in contact: a cross-linguistic perspective.

In Grammars in Contact: a Cross-linguistic Typology, A. Y. Aikhenvald and

R. M. W. Dixon (eds), 1–66. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2006b. Semantics and pragmatics of grammatical relations in

the Vaupes linguistic area. In Grammars in Contact: a Cross-linguistic Typology,

A. Y. Aikhenvald and R. M. W. Dixon (eds), 237–266. Oxford: Oxford Univer-

sity Press.

Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2007. Linguistic fieldwork: setting the scene. Sprachtypologie

und Universalienforschung 60, 1: 1–11.

Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2008a. Multilingual imperatives: the elaboration of a category

in north-west Amazonia. International Journal of American Linguistics 74: 189–

225.

Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2008b. The Manambu Language of the East Sepik, Papua New

Guinea. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2009a. Semantics of clause linking in Manambu. In Semantics

of Clause Linking: A Cross-linguistic Typology, R. M. W. Dixon and A. Y.

Aikhenvald (eds), 118–144. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2009b. Language contact along the Sepik River. Anthropologi-

cal Linguistics 50: 1–66.

Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2010. Gender and noun class in Paumarı in a typological per-

spective. In Linguistics and Archeology in the Americas, E. Carlin and S. van de

Kerke (eds), 236–252. Leiden: Brill.

Aikhenvald, A. Y. and Dixon, R. M. W. (eds). 2001. Areal Di¤usion and Genetic

Inheritance: Problems in Comparative Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Aikhenvald, A. Y. and Dixon, R. M. W. (eds). 2006. Grammars in Contact: a

Cross-Linguistic Typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Allin, T. R. 1975. A Grammar of Resıgaro. PhD dissertation, University of St.

Andrews.

Aschmann, R. P. 1993. Proto-Witotoan. Arlington: Summer Institute of Linguistics

and the University of Texas.

Austin, P. 1986. Structural change in language obsolescence: some Eastern Aus-

tralian examples. Australian Journal of Linguistics 6: 201–230.

Baugh, A. C. 1957. A History of the English Language. New York: Appleton-

Century-Crofts.


Bettoni, C. 1991. Language variety among Italians: Anglicisation, attrition and

attitudes. In Language in Australia, S. Romaine (ed.), 263–269. Cambridge:


Brenziger, M. (ed.). 1992. Language Death. Factual and Theoretical Explorations

with Special Reference to East Africa. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Brenziger, M. and Dimmendaal G. J. 1992. Social context of language death. In

Language Death. Factual and Theoretical Explorations with Special Reference

to East Africa, M. Brenziger (ed.), 1–5. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Campbell, L. 1994. Problems with the pronouns in proposals of remote relation-

ships among native American languages. In Proceedings of the Meeting of the

Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas and the

Hokan-Penutian Workshop, M. Langdon (ed.), 1–20. Berkeley: University of

California Press.

Campbell, L. 1997. Amerindian personal pronouns: A second opinion. Language

73: 339–351.

Campbell, L. and Muntzel, M. 1989. The structural consequences of language

death. In Investigating obsolescence. Studies in Language Contraction and Death,

N. C. Dorian (ed.), 181–196. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Carlin, E. 2006. Feeling the need: the borrowing of Cariban functional categories

into Mawayana (Arawak). In Grammars in Contact: a Cross-linguistic Typology,

A. Y. Aikhenvald and R. M. W. Dixon (eds), 313–332. Oxford: Oxford Uni-

versity Press.

Chamoreau, C. 2000. Chronique d’une mort annoncee. Un exemple de reduction

en phurhepecha. Actes du XXIeme Colloque international de la Societe inter-

nationale de linguistique fonctionnelle (SILF). Iasi (Romania), 26 June–2 July

1996, 127–132.

Chamoreau, C. 2005. Reorganizacion de la voz en purepecha: una vision dinamica.

In Dinamica linguıstica de las lenguas en contacto, C. Chamoreau and Y. Lastra

(eds), 67–86. Sonora: University of Sonora.

Chapman, S. and Derbyshire, D. C. 1991. Paumarı. In Handbook of Amazonian

Languages, vol. 3, D. C. Derbyshire and G. K. Pullum (eds), 151–355. Berlin:

Mouton de Gruyter.

Dal Negro, S. 2004. The Decay of a Language. The Case of a German Dialect in

the Italian Alps. Bern: Peter Lang.

Dench, A. 2001. Descent and di¤usion: the complexity of the Pilbara situation. In

Areal Di¤usion and Genetic Inheritance: Problems in Comparative Linguistics,


versity Press.

Dixon, R. M. W. 1972. The Dyirbal Language of North Queensland. Cambridge:


Dixon, R. M. W. 1977. A Grammar of Yidiny. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.


Dixon, R. M. W. 1991a. A changing language situation: the decline of Dyirbal,

1963–1989. Language in Society 20: 183–200.

Dixon, R. M. W. 199lb. Reassigning underlying forms in Yidiny – a change during

language death. In Language and History, Essays in Honour of Luise A. Hercus,

P. Austin, R. M. W. Dixon, T. Dutton, and I. White (eds), 89–99. Canberra:

Pacific Linguistics.

Dixon, R. M. W. 1997. The Rise and Fall of Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Dixon, R. M. W. 2002. Australian Languages: their Nature and Development.


Dixon, R. M. W. 2007. Field linguistis: a minor manual. Sprachtypologie und Uni-

versalienforschung 60, 1: 12–31.

Dorian, N. C. 1973. Grammatical change in a dying dialect. Language 49: 413–

438.

Dorian, N. C. 1977. The problem of the semi-speakers in language death. Linguistics

191: 23–32.

Dorian, N. C. (ed.). 1989. Investigating Obsolescence. Studies in Language Con-

traction and Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dorian, N. C. 1994. Purism vs. compromise in language revitalisation and lan-

guage revival. Language in Society 23: 479–494.

Dorian, N. C. 1999. The study of language obsolescence: stages, surprises, and

challenges. Languages and Linguistics 3: 99–122.

Dorian, N. C. 2002. Diglossia and the simplification of linguistic space. Interna-

tional Journal of the Sociology of Language 9: 63–70.

Evans, N. 2000. Iwaidjan, a very un-Australian language family. Linguistic Typology

4: 91–112.

Evans, N. 2007. More di¤erent than we thought: reassessing the genetic status of

Marrku. Seminar presented at RCLT.

Evans, N., Malwagag, J. W., and Marrala, K. 2006. Majila Inkawart. Six Stories

in Marrku, the Traditional Language of the Kroker Island, translated into

Iwaidja and English. Jabiru Town Council: Iwaidja Inyman.

Farabee, W. C. 1918. The Central Arawaks. Philadelphia: Anthropological Publi-

cations, The University Museum, University of Pennsylvania.

Foley, W. A. 1986. The Papuan Languages of New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Francois, A. 2002. Araki: a Disappearing Language of Vanuatu. Canberra: Pacific

Linguistics.

Gardani, F. 2005. Borrowing of inflectional morphemes in language contact. MA

thesis, University of Vienna.

Grenoble, L. A. 2000. Morphosyntactic change: the impact of Russian on Evenki.

In Languages in Contact, D. G. Gilbers, J. Nerbonne, and J. Schaeken (eds),

105–120. Amsterdam: Rodopi.


Grenoble, L. A. and Whaley, L. J. 1998. Towards a typology of language endanger-

ment. In Endangered Languages, L. Grenoble and L. J. Whaley (eds), 22–54.


Gruzdeva, E. Y. 2002. The linguistic consequences of Nivkh language attrition.

SKY Journal of Linguistics 15: 85–103.

Haas, M. R. 1941. Tunica (extract from Handbook of American Indian Languages,

vol. IV). New York: J. J. Augustin.

Hamp, E. 1989. On signs of health and death. In Investigating obsolescence. Studies

in Language Contraction and Death, N. C. Dorian (ed.), 197–210. Cambridge:


Hardenburg, W. E. 1910. The Indians of the Putumayo, Upper Amazon. Man 10:

134–8.

Haugen, E. 1989. The rise and fall of an immigrant language: Norwegian in

America. In Investigating Obsolescence. Studies in Language Contraction and

Death, N. C. Dorian (ed.), 61–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Heath, J. 1978. Linguistic di¤usion in Arnhem Land. Canberra: AIAS.

Helimski, E. A. 2007. Fonetika i morfonologia enetskogo jazyka v uslovijakh

jazykovogo sdviga (Phonetics and morphophonology of Enets in language shift).

In Jazykovye izmenenija v uslovijakh jazykovogo sdviga, (Language changes in

language shift), N. B. Vakhtin (ed.), 213–224. St. Peterburg: Nestor.

Henzl, V. M. 1981. Slavic languages in the new environment. In Language in the

USA, C. A. Ferguson and S. B. Heath (eds), 293–321. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Hill, J. H. 1985. The grammar of consciousness and the consciousness of grammar.

American Ethnologist 12: 725–37.

Hill, J. H. 1998. ‘‘Today there is no respect’’: nostalgia, ‘‘respect’’ and oppositional

discourse in Mexicano (Nahuatl) language ideology. In Language Ideologies:

Practice and Theory, B. B. Schie¤elin, K. A. Woolard, and P. V. Kroskrity

(eds), 68–86. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hill, J. H. and Hill, K. C. 1986. Speaking Mexicano. Dynamics of Syncretic Lan-

guage in Central Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Hjelde, A. 1996. The gender of English nouns used in American Norwegian. In

Language Contact across the North Atlantic, P. S. Ureland and I. Clarkson

(eds), 297–312. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.

Howard, C. V. 1986. Mawayana: Formulario dos vocabularios padroes. Rio de

Janeiro: Museu Nacional. Ms.

Igualada, F. de. 1940. Informe sobre el Centro de investigaciones linguısticas y

etnograficas de la Amazonia colombiana (1933–1940). Amazonia colombiana

americanista, organo semestral de materiales y estudios para la americanistica

del CILEAC de Sibundoy. Pasto, t. 1.2–3: 61–91.

Igualada, F. de and Castellvı, M. de. 1940. Clasificacion y estadistica de las

lenguas habladas en el Putumayo (Caqueta) y Amazonas. Amazonia colombiana

americanista, organo semestral de materiales y estudios para la americanistica

del CILEAC de Sibundoy. Pasto, t. 1.2–3: 92–101.


Johanson, L. 2002. Do languages die of structuritis? On the role of code-copying

in language endangerment. Rivista Italiana di Linguistica 14: 249–270.

Jungraithmayr, H. 1995. Was ist am Tangale noch tschadisch/hamitosemitisch? In

Sprachkulturelle und historische Forschungen in Afrika, A. Fleisch and D. Otten

(eds), 197–205. Cologne: Koppe.

Kagan, O. and Dillon, K. 2001. A new perspective on teaching Russian: focus on

the heritage learner. The Slavic and East European Journal 45: 507–518.

Klintborg, S. 1999. The Transience of American Swedish. Lund: Lund University

Press.

Kroskrity, P. V. 1993. Language, History and Identity: Ethnolinguistic Studies of

the Arizona Tewa. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Laycock, D. C. and Z’graggen, J. 1975. The Sepik-Ramu phylum. In New Guinea

Area Languages and Language Study. Volume 1, Papuan languages and the

New Guinea linguistic scene, S. A. Wurm (ed.), 731–764. Canberra: Pacific

Linguistics.

Lee, Y. 1997. Classifiers in Korean. Honors thesis, Australian National University.

Lopez Sanz, R. 1972. El Bare. Estudio Linguıstico. Caracas: Faculty of Economics

and Social Sciences of the Central University of Venezuela.

Loukotka, C. 1968. Classification of South American Indian Languages. Los Angeles:

Latin American Studies Center, UCLA.

Matiso¤, J. A. 1990. On megalo-comparison: a discussion note. Language 66:

106–120.

Matras, Y. 1998. Utterance modifiers and universals of grammatical borrowing.


McGregor, W. 2002. Structural changes in language obsolescence: a Kimberley

(Australia) perspective. SKY Journal of Linguistics 15: 145–186.

Milani, C. 1996. Language contact among North-American people of Italian

origin. In Language Contact across the North Atlantic, P. S. Ureland and I.

Clarkson (eds), 479–501. Linguistische Arbeiten 359. Tubingen: University of

Tubingen.

Natterer, J. 1831. Sprachproben der Indier Bare. Bewohner von Marabitanas vom

Stamm Arihini/Alihini. Nation Arhini. Sprache der Nation Bare – Stamm

ihini. Lists 30–32. ms.

Newman, S. 1977. The Salish independent pronoun system. International Journal

of American Linguistics 45: 207–223.

Newman, S. 1979a. A history of the Salish possessive and subject forms. Inter-

national Journal of American Linguistics 45: 207–23.

Newman, S. 1979b. The Salish object forms. International Journal of American


Payne, D. L. 1985. The genetic classification of Resigaro. International Journal of

American Linguistics 51: 222–231.

Payne, D. L. 1991. A classification of Maipuran (Arawakan) languages based on

shared lexical retentions. In Handbook of Amazonian Languages, vol. 3, D. C.

Derbyshire and G. K. Pullum (eds), 355–499. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.


Pereltsvaig, A. 2008. Aspect in Russian as grammatical rather than lexical notion.

Russian Linguistics 32: 27–42.

Pryor, J. 1990. Deixis and participant tracking in Botin. Language and Linguistics

in Melanesia 21: 1–29.

Ramirez, H. 1997. A fala Tukano dos Yepa-masa. Tomo 1. Gramatica. Manaus:

Inspetoria Salesiana.

Riionheimo, H. 2002. How to borrow a bound morpheme? Evaluating the status

of structural interference in a contact between closely related languages. SKY

Journal of Linguistics 15: 187–218.

Rivet, P. and de Wavrin, R. 1951. Un nouveau dialecte Arawak: le Resigaro.

Journal de la Societe des Americanistes de Paris 40: 203–238.

Sasse, H.-J. 1992a. Theory of language death. In Language Death. Factual and

Theoretical Explorations with Special Reference to East Africa, M. Brenzinger

(ed.), 31–57. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Sasse, H.-J. 1992b. Language decay and contact-induced change: similarities and

di¤erences’. In Language Death. Factual and Theoretical Explorations with Special

Reference to East Africa, M. Brenzinger (ed.), 58–79. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Sasse, H.-J. 2001. A Phoenix from the ashes: linguistic creativity in an obsolescent

speech community. Seminar presented at RCLT.

Schomburgk, R. 1848. Comparative vocabulary of 18 languages and dialects of

Indian tribes inhabiting Guiana. Report of the 18th British Association for the

Advancement of Science, 96–99.

Schmidt, A. 1985. Young People’s Dyirbal. An Example of Language Death from

Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stolz, C. and Stolz, T. 1996. Funktionswortenentlehnung in Mesoamerika. Spanisch-

amerindischer Sprachkontakt (Hispanoindiana II). STUF 49: 86–123.

Swadesh, M. 1951. Di¤usional cumulation and archaic residue as historical

explanations. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 7: 1–21.

Tessmann, G. 1930. Die Indianer Nordost-Perus. Grundlegende Forschungen fur

eine systematische Kulturkunde. Hamburg: Friederichsen, De Gruyter & Co,

M. B. H.

Thiesen, W. 1996. Gramatica del Idioma Bora. Serie Linguıstica Peruana 38. Pucallpa:

Instituto Linguıstico de Verano.

Tsitsipis, L. D. 1998. A Linguistic Anthropology of Praxis and Language Shift.

Arvanıtika (Albanian) and Greek in Contact. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Whi¤en, T. W. 1915. The North-west Amazonas: Notes of some Months Spent

among Cannibal Tribes. London: Constable and Company.


The emergence of a marked-nominative systemin Tehuelche or Aonek’o �a� jen: a contact-inducedchange?

Ana Fernandez Garay

1. Objective

This article explores the variations and changes that can be observed in

the syntactic structure of Aonek’o �a� jen (commonly known as Tehuelche),

a language belonging to the Chon family, when it was documented during

the eighties. The presence of an adposition that marks the subject/agent

of the clause is optional: apparently, the ergative-absolutive system did

not mark the agent in the protolanguage. Instead, the adposition was

incorporated later in the evolution of the language, but the change was

never fully complete. In other words, Tehuelche experienced a change from

an ergative-absolutive system to a marked-nominative system through the

extension of the adposition or the ergative marker of the transitive clause

to the unique participant of the intransitive. In this article we examine

this process and see how it was stimulated by the presence of nominative-

accusative languages in the area.

2. Indigenous groups of Patagonia: historical aspects related to

contact situations

The ethnic groups that have lived in Patagonia can be reduced to three:

the Tehuelche complex, the Fueguinos or Canoeros, and the Mapuches.

Their settlements extend southwards from the Buenos Aires-Mendoza line.

Escalada (1949) argued for the existence of several subgroups of the

Tehuelche people who inhabited the area from the north of Patagonia

southwards to Tierra del Fuego. These subgroups are, on the mainland: the

Guenena kene, who spoke Guenena lajitch, in the north; the Chewache-

kenk, who spoke Teushen, in the midwest; and the Aoni-kenk, who speak

Aoniko-aish, in the south (this group includes the Mecharnue). On Tierra

del Fuego they include the Selknam or Onas, and the Haush or Manek’enk.

This classification was revised by Casamiquela (1965), who believed

that there were only two significant Tehuelche subgroups, the northern

and the southern. These two subgroups, according to Casamiquela, were

separated by the Chubut River (living respectively on the northern and

southern side of this river. The group in the north was further divided

into two groups, one speaking Querandı and the other speaking Gununa

iajech, the language of the Gununa kune; similarly, the southern group

was divided into speakers of Teushen and speakers of Aonek’o �a� jen.Querandı is a language about which little is known to date but which

Casamiquela (1965: 33–45) believed may have been related to Gununa

iajech. Apparently this language was spoken in the Rıo de la Plata region

to the east; to the west, it was spoken in Cordoba, San Luis, and Mendoza.

The language disappeared without trace at the beginning of the twentieth

century.

Gununa iajech, the language of the Gununa kune, was described by

Casamiquela (1983). Traditionally, the settlements of this group extended

from the south of the province of Buenos Aires to the southeast of La

Pampa, and the south of Mendoza, Cordoba, and Santa Fe to the north

of the province of Chubut. They resisted the Mapuches, whom they con-

sidered their enemies, but little by little they were nonetheless influenced

by this group. The Gununa iajech language disappeared in 1960 when its

last speaker passed away.

The southern Tehuelches, who spoke Teushen, lived between the Chubut

River and the Santa Cruz River. Their language disappeared when the

Aoenk’o �a� jen, the language of the Aonek’enk, expanded southwards.

This language was never described, but approximately thirty vocabulary

lists survive, so it can be studied to some extent.

The Aonek’enk, who spoke Aonek’o �a�jen, inhabited the region between

the Santa Cruz River and the Straits of Magellan. Although there are still

a few remaining speakers of Aonek’o �a� jen who can remember the lan-

guage, it is no longer used for intra-group communication.

Within the subgroups Casamiquela also includes the Selknam or Onas

and the Haush or Manek’enk. The first of these inhabited almost all of Isla

Grande in Tierra del Fuego, especially the northwestern side of the island.

Their language died out during the second half of the twentieth century;

what we know of it comes from vocabulary lists. The most thorough lin-

guistic description of this language is that of Najlis (1973). The second

group inhabited the southeastern side of Isla Grande in Tierra del Fuego.

Their language has completely disappeared. Only a few vocabulary lists

are available, drafted around the end of the eighteenth century.

112 Ana Fernandez Garay

All of the languages mentioned belong to the Chon family (Suarez

1988: 79–100), except for Querandı (or rather, the lack of information on

this language makes it impossible to know whether or not it belongs to

this family) and Gununa iajech, which Suarez did not consider a Chon

language (Suarez 1988: 87).

The Tehuelche subgroups were nomads, hunters, and gatherers. Tradi-

tionally, they moved across Patagonia on foot, following the hunting cycles.

The first mention of the Tehuelches appears in Pigafetta, who chronicled

Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage around the world. Based on his account

and this initial contact, the legend of the ‘‘race of giants’’ that so attracted

Europeans was born. The introduction of the horse, an animal brought

to South America by the Spaniards, and the subsequent spreading of

wild horses across the territory of the Pampa, made it even easier for the

Tehuelches to travel across Patagonia.

The indigenous people in Tierra del Fuego, known as ‘‘canoeros

australes’’1 by ethnologists, are divided into three groups: the Yamanas or

Yahganes, the Qawasqar or Alacalufes, and the Chonos. They are mainly

located on the southern islands of the Chilean shoreline and on Tierra del

Fuego. As they are remote from the mainland, we will not include them in

this article.

The Araucanos or Mapuches (mapu ‘land’ and che ‘people’), the name

which they generally use to refer to themselves, are originally from Chile,

specifically from the regions between the Bıo Bıo and Tolten rivers. Re-

searchers are not sure when they began crossing the Andean border and

arriving in the regions of the Pampa and Argentinian Patagonia, although

documents from the seventeenth century mention certain toponyms of

Mapuche origin in Argentinian Patagonia that evidence the presence of

this group in the country. These journeys led to what has been called

the process of ‘‘Araucanization’’ (Nardi 1985: 235–264) of the indigenous

groups of Argentina. In the early nineteenth century, Mapuche tribes from

Chile began inhabiting the plains of the Pampa. The Araucanization,

which lasted between 300 and 400 years, led to cultural interaction

between the Mapuches and the groups living in the Pampa/Patagonia.

The Araucanos were enemies of the Tehuelches (the names of the battles

that took place in the province of Chubut are well-known). Tehuelche

groups were taken prisoner by the Mapuches and as a result they began

speaking the enemy’s language.

1. This group used to live and fish on canoes in the channels of Tierra del Fuegofor extensive periods.

The emergence of a marked-nominative system 113

The increasingly widespread use of Mapudungun (mapu ‘land’ and

dungun ‘speak, language’) as well as interethnic marriages leads to the

hypothesis that this language circulated throughout the mid-southern region

of Argentina as a lingua franca, while Argentinian indigenous languages

like Gununa kune, Teushen, and Aonek’o �a� jen or Tehuelche were also

still spoken. The process of Araucanization intensified during the nine-

teenth century, wiping out some of the languages and cultures of the

groups established in the north and north-central areas of Argentinian

Patagonia. The only language that has survived to the present day is

Aonek’o �a� jen. We should bear in mind the constant nomadism of the

Tehuelche groups, which led them to make contact with the di¤erent ethnic

groups that inhabited the area in order to trade and exchange their prod-

ucts. This nomadism is documented by Musters (1964), who traveled

across Patagonia in 1860 from Punta Arenas in the south of Chile to

Carmen de Patagones in the northeast of this extensive region.

3. Theoretical aspects

It is now well established that after a long and intensive period of contact,

elements from the syntactic level can be transferred between languages

(Harris and Campbell 1995: 149; Thomason 2001: 85; Heine and Kuteva

2005; Matras and Sakel 2007; Matras 2009). There have also been theo-

retical developments in the study of linguistic areas. Thomason defines a

linguistic area as a geographical region containing a group of three or

more languages that share a certain structural feature as a result of contact

between the languages. The common feature cannot be an ‘‘accidental’’

result or inherited from a common ancestor (Thomason 2001: 99). With

extreme caution, a Patagonian linguistic area can be posited, although

some languages of the region (Teushen, Gununa kune) have been only

minimally described or not described at all, making it di‰cult to reach

definitive conclusions. During the process of Araucanization, before these

Tehuelche languages were replaced by Mapudungun, they may have ini-

tially undergone changes that brought them closer to this language and

later to Spanish. The only language in the area that survived the contact

with Mapudungun was Aonek’o �a� jen, although the influence of this lan-

guage can be seen not only at the lexical level but at the morphological

and syntactic level as well (see Fernandez Garay 2006: 153–155).

Another aspect to consider is the extinction of languages, since the phe-

nomena of obsolescence that this process involves must also be taken into


account – that is to say, the reduction, simplification, variation, and change

that take place during the period in which a language is dying (see Dorian

1981: 114–156; Thomason 2001: 221–239).

The case that we are addressing involves a language that was almost

extinct when it was described, a language that coexisted for centuries (at

least four centuries, though perhaps more) with Mapudungun and also

with Spanish in Patagonia. However, it was mainly at the end of the nine-

teenth century and during the twentieth century that Spanish, the domi-

nant tongue, began to rapidly displace local languages.

4. Syntactic structure of Tehuelche or Aonek’o �a� jen

In Tehuelche or Aonek’o �a� jen, the syntactic structure described initially

was the marked-nominative structure. In this structure, A2 in the transi-

tive clause and S in the intransitive clause are marked by the adpositions

sP nP r,3 as long as P is not marked. This adpositional marker only

occurs when A/S comes before the verb (examples (3) and (4)). When it is

located after the verb, generally the marker disappears (examples (5) and

(6)), but we have found some cases where an A/S NP is located after

the verb and carries the adposition (example (7)) (Fernandez Garay and

Hernandez 2006: 121). When A/S comes before the verb, the adposition

appears with certain restrictions: it cannot appear if A/S is a dependent

pronoun4 and there is no quantifier before it (example (1)) or an adverb

of any kind (temporal, locative, dubitative: example (2)). In these cases,

the marker is a preposition. If A/S is an independent pronoun (example

2. We use ‘‘S’’ to refer to the unique participant of a prototypical intransitiveclause, ‘‘A’’ for the most agent-like participant of a prototypical transitiveclause, and ‘‘P’’ to indicate the most patient-like participant of a prototypicaltransitive clause.

3. The adposition s marks S/A when the predicate is determined by the realmood or when the mood is absent; n is employed when the predicate is deter-mined by the unreal mood; r marks S/A in questions when S/A is unknown orabsent.

4. There are two types of personals in this language: dependents are those thatare cliticized to nouns, verbs, postpositions, and adverbs (e-, m-, t-, etc.); inde-pendents do not need to lean on other lexical units: ja:, ma:, ta:, etc. Depen-dent personals sometimes cross-reference S NP of intransitive Group 2 verbsand A/P NP of transitive Group 2 verbs. Cross-reference is obligatory onlywith Group 1 verbs that agree in gender with S/P by means of k-P�-/Ø-.


(3)) or a nominal phrase (example (4)), the marker comes after it; in other

words, in these cases we are dealing with a postposition. This marker, as

was mentioned, has restrictions in terms of when it can appear, and even

in cases in which the conditions are met it may not appear (examples (8)

and (9)), which is considered typical in the optional syntax of a language

on its way to extinction (see Fernandez Garay 1998: 460).

(1) welom s o-s-k’eto pe-k’

all adp 1-pl-well be-rm

‘We are all well.’

(2) ma� s e-t-�o:mk’e-s-k’

now adp I-her-know-ps-rm

‘Now I know her.’

(3) ja: s ko:le-k’

I adp stay-rm

‘I stayed.’

(4) j-a:nk’o s e-mta:we-k’-e5

my-father adp me-raise-rm-m

‘My father raised me.’

(5) k’o:me-m-ts tewelce-ts

disappear-um-pl Tehuelches-pl

‘The Tehuelches disappeared.’

(6) kaj �-aXe-s-k’-n wen ka:rken

cloak.n 3n-paint-ps-rm-f this woman

‘This woman paints a cloak.’

(7) t-kawr newr e-me-s-n �eja: s

3-like this.way I-do-ps-f I adp

‘I do it this way, like she [does].’

5. In this example, we can see one of the numerous gender agreements that thenoun has with various syntactic classes. The real mood -k’ can add the mor-pheme -n when it agrees with a feminine or neuter noun, or the morpheme -ewhen it agrees with a masculine noun. The noun with which it agrees canfunction as S/A, as seen in (4).


(8) �emn ka:rken p’aje-ns

that woman get.married-dpt

‘That woman got married.’

(9) os-genk’enk te-wa:w �a:wke-sour-community.members he-only hunt.guanaco-ps

‘Our community members hunt only guanaco.’

At the same time, there is an ergative subsystem that is manifested in the

gender agreement that Group 1 intransitive and transitive verbs maintain

with S/P. The intransitives from Group 1 agree with the unique partici-

pant or S (example (10)), and the transitives of the same group agree with

P (example (11)), thus generating a typical ergative subsystem in which S

and P are indexed in the verbs of this group by the morphemes k-P �-(k- agrees with a masculine or feminine participant, �-/Ø- with a neuter

participant), while A is di¤erentiated from both because it is optionally

marked. In (11), A is marked by means of the ergative adposition s.6

Group 2 intransitive and transitive verbs show person agreement in exam-

ples (12) and (13) with S/P (see note 5).

(10) �-ajq’e-s-k’-n e-�or (intransitive clause)

it-be.snubbed-ps-rm-n my-nose.n

‘I am snub-nosed.’

(11) �a:we ma:ger s e-k-e:c ’o-s-k�o (transitive clause)

also Ma:ger.m adp I-him-greet-ps-fti

‘I will also say hello (greet) to Ma:ger.’

(12) �am t-xam-k’-n �enm (intransitive clause)

but 3-die-rm-f that.f

‘but that one (woman) died’

(13) �am n e-t-�or �ar-m-n ten-kot cen (transitive clause)

but adp 1-3-may.be find-um-f someone-nft subs

‘but maybe I will find some (woman)’

6. In ergative-absolutive systems, it is common for A to be the argument markedby case or adposition that indicates the ergative, while S/P are not marked,which is why they are called absolutive. However, ergative languages havedi¤erent types of strategies for marking S/P (see Dixon 1994: 40–49).


In addition, we should bear in mind that many verbs currently considered

Group 2 verbs, because they do not agree with S/P, could have been

Group 1 verbs because they have a k- at the beginning of the verbal mor-

pheme. It is evident that the ergative system has been disappearing, espe-

cially among intransitive attributive verbs, because there is great variation

among such verbs with respect to the appearance of the agreeing mor-

pheme k-P�-. This is the case with the intransitive verbs kajcer ‘to get

twisted,’ kemse ‘to get repented,’ kotqe ‘to get loose,’ and with transitive

verbs kamel ‘to give as a present,’ kamgeme ‘to plant,’ which seem to

have lexicalized the k- and at this moment they do not agree with S/P.

However, we cannot consider this a split system, because the presence

or absence of the ergative marker does not correspond with temporal,

aspectual, or personal morphemes, nor does it correspond with semantic

components like agency or volition of the agent, or semantic distinctions

between Group 1 and Group 2 verbs, which would lead us to think that

the system had in fact undergone a split (see Dixon 1994: 70–109). In addi-

tion (which is what led us to hypothesize that a change was in progress), the

two systems coexist and are connected in that they share the adposition.

This can be observed in (11), where the ergative marker is identical to the

nominative marker in the nominative-accusative system. We can see the

polyfunctionality of the adposition and the coexistence of the two agree-

ment systems in the following examples belonging to Group 1 verbs:

(14) �em �ajk’ s e-k-e:ge-k’-e lam

that posp adp I-3.m-leave-rm-m wine.m

‘For that [reason], I left the wine.’

(15) ta: s kaj �-a:Xe-s-k’she adp cloak.n it-paint-ps-rm

‘She paints the cloak.’

5. Historical change: internal or contact-induced?

Our conclusion (see Fernandez Garay 2007b: 114–125) is that the observ-

able variation as well as the coexistence of these systems indicate a process

of change from an ergative-absolutive system to a marked-nominative sys-

tem. If we observe one of the languages genetically related to Tehuelche,

Selknam (described by Najlis in 1973), we can observe that, though Najlis

does not explicitly say so, the syntactic system of this language is ergative-

absolutive (see Fernandez Garay 2007a) since, as she mentions, almost all


of the verbs of this language are ‘‘prefixable,’’ that is, they have the mor-

phemes k-P h- (cognates of k-P�- in Tehuelche) that agree with S in the

intransitive clause and with P in the transitive. Apparently, the few verbs

that do not have these ‘‘prefixes,’’ as she calls them, are the result of a pro-

cess of lexicalization that made verbal agreement with S/P impossible. On

the other hand, and this is important, Selknam does not have an agent

marker. In other words, the ergative is not marked in this language.

Therefore, if both languages present ergative-absolutive systems that are

manifested through the agreements among the Group 1 verbs in Tehuelche,

or when the ‘‘prefixables’’ in Selknam agree with S in the case of intransitive

verbs and with P in the case of transitives, we must conclude that the proto-

language, that is, Proto-Chon, had an ergative-absolutive system with the

same features, that is, with S/P indexed on the verb and A with no marker.

This leads us to ask how Tehuelche first developed an ergative-absolutive

system with a marked ergative case and then, based on that system, a

marked-nominative system. In other words, the question is: where did the

adposition sP nP r that is documented in Tehuelche as marking the

agent come from, and how did it develop first into an ergative marker

and then into a nominative marker?

It is evident that the adpositions come from postpositions existing in

the proto-language. We should bear in mind that there are only postposi-

tions in Selknam, while in Tehuelche postpositions are in the majority,

though in certain cases there are invariable postpositions7 in this language

that serve as prepositions as well (it is important to note the much more

frequent use of postpositional forms). This change, which only occurred in

Tehuelche, might be owed first to the influence of Mapudungun (Fernandez

Garay 2002b: 19, 2005a, 2005b), a language that was widely spoken

throughout Patagonia and has both prepositions and postpositions, and

later to the influence of Spanish, a language that only has prepositions.

It is possible that s might once have been a postposition marking a

circumstantial relational complement (‘‘with respect to’’) in Tehuelche,

but was later reanalyzed as an agent marker of the transitive clause, while

it was still an ergative-absolutive system, and that then the marker slowly

7. In Tehuelche, there are agreeing and invariable postpositions. The majorityare agreeing and they carry the gender prefixes k- (masculine and feminine)or �- (neuter) and agree with the noun that comes before them (k-awrP�-awr ‘on’; k-asP�-as ‘in’). The invariables, which may have once been agree-ing postpositions that have been lexicalized, do not vary (ka ‘of,’ go ‘like’).


extended to S when the contact with other nominative-accusative lan-

guages from the area (first Mapudungun and later Spanish) began to

change the linguistic panorama of Patagonia. In Fernandez Garay (2000:

165–177), it was observed that the A/S marker was less frequent in a

corpus collected by Suarez twenty years earlier in the same area – that is,

a corpus taken from Tehuelche spoken among the generation previous to

our informants. The most interesting di¤erence was that the frequency of

the adpositional marker was higher in the transitive clause than in the

intransitive one for both corpora, thus revealing that the marker first

grammaticalized as an A marker in the transitive sentence and then

extended from A to S. This shows that the system was probably ergative

at the beginning and later made the switch to marked-nominative when

the influence of the nominative-accusative languages in the area imposed

on the structure of Aonek’o �a� jen.This hypothesis of sP nP r as a postposition marking a circumstantial

complement in the past can be supported by the following argument. As

we proposed in Fernandez Garay (2007a), Selknam has a postposition s

whose meaning is, according to Najlis, ‘depends on, with respect to,’ that

is very likely a cognate of the agent marker of Tehuelche. At that time,

and only because of the meaning that Najlis gave to s, we can posit that

this postposition was a marker of a circumstantial relational complement,

although unfortunately Najlis o¤ers no examples in which its function

can be clearly seen. A postposition s could be reconstructed in the proto-

language that would have served as a marker of an oblique complement

and thus have been transmitted to both languages; subsequently this cir-

cumstantial marker in Tehuelche could be reanalyzed as the adposition

that marks the agent in the ergative-absolutive system and later extends to

S to constitute the marked-nominative system that manifests itself clearly

when the language is described. The reanalysis of a postposition as a new

case is well attested in the literature (see Harris and Campbell 1995: 89–90).

With respect to r, which marks A/S in questions, it only appears with

the indefinite xem ‘who, someone, no one,’ as can be seen in the following

example of our corpus:

(16) xem r m-mta:we-s-n

who adp you-bring.up-ps-f

‘Who brought you up?’

In Selknam, we find the question forms kejs ‘which, what, where, and in

which direction’ and kownes ‘who, to whom.’ These two interrogatives,

apparently ‘‘prefixable’’ (see the initial k in both cases) present a su‰x s


that currently seems to have lost its value, but which could come from a

postposition that marked an oblique complement in questions and ulti-

mately was lexicalized, losing its original meaning. This postposition

would have allowed the r in Tehuelche to become the A/S marker for the

interrogative clause, first through a process of reanalysis and later by

extension. We should keep in mind that the final /r/ sometimes becomes

voiceless in Tehuelche and is often confused with /s/.

As to the appearance of n as an A/S marker in Tehuelche, employed

when the verb is in unreal mood, we could postulate the existence of a

postposition that led to the creation of this marker, in the same way that

occurred with s and r. In Selknam, there are several postpositions with a

nasal, man, on, oni, ink, enk, am (Tonelli 1926), which could be cognates

of the Tehuelche marker. Najlis mentions the existence of nearly 70 post-

positions in Selknam but lists only 30, which makes it di‰cult to find the

cognate form of the A/S marker in Tehuelche that could have once served

as a circumstantial marker and was later reanalyzed as an A marker

finally extended to S.

5. Conclusion

It is highly probable that Proto-Chon presented an ergative-absolutive

system that passed into Tehuelche and Selknam. In Selknam the system

did not present an ergative case marker, while in Tehuelche this marker

began to develop through an adposition that marked a circumstantial rela-

tional complement, supposedly the cognate of an adposition that also

appears in Selknam, apparently with the same function. Although we

know that these processes, which involve realignment resulting from the

reanalysis and/or extension of a particular adposition, can occur as an

internal process in a language, it seems probable that in the case of

Tehuelche the influence of another language in the area helped to trans-

form an ergative language into a marked-nominative one. The coexistence

of Tehuelche with Mapudungun, a nominative-accusative language, led

the ergative marker or agent marker of the transitive clause to be extended

to S, that is, to the intransitive agent, leading to the transformation of this

ergative system into a marked-nominative one. However, the process was

never completed, since Tehuelche was replaced by Spanish before this

could happen. In a previous work (2005b) we have shown the influence

that Mapudungun has exerted over Tehuelche in its lexicon and in its


phonological and morphosyntactic levels. One feature taken from Mapu-

dungun is that the su‰x -n of the Tehuelche nominalization has replaced

su‰x -j, which still exists today in a few infinitives. Selknam has a nomina-

lization in -j, so it is evident that this change comes from the Mapudungun

nominalization in -n, the most frequent of the various nominalizations of

this language (Fernandez Garay 2006).

Another feature taken from Mapudungun is reduplication of nouns

and verbs, an extensive strategy of that language that could have passed

to Tehuelche nouns (cexcex ‘sand,’ ka:mka:m ‘dove,’ k’esk’es ‘a kind of

bird,’ etc.), and one that has not been observed in Selknam (Fernandez

Garay 2005b). A third feature is number morphology. In Tehuelche, dual

and plural markers are extended to all persons. But the plural su‰x in

Tehuelche can determine human, animate, and some inanimate nouns,

whereas the dual su‰x can only be observed in humans. Even if number

su‰xes in Tehuelche are di¤erent from those of Mapudungun, the exten-

sion of the markers in this language may have expanded it in Tehuelche,

given that in Selknam the dual appears only in the first person and the

plural only in the first and second persons, and that dual and plural markers

do not a¤ect nouns (Fernandez Garay 2007c). Based on the analysis of the

marked-nominative system and on the results from previous work on some

morphosyntactic features of Tehuelche, and in some cases of Gununa

kune, that seem to be borrowed from Mapudungun (reduplication of cer-

tain nouns, dual and plural markers extended to all persons, and a su‰x

-n that indicates a nominalization (Casamiquela 1983)), we might posit

the existence of a linguistic area; but to do so, further studies and com-

parative work on the languages of Patagonia are needed.

Abbreviations

adp Adposition

dpt Distant past tense

fti Future tense-intention

f Feminine

m Masculine

nft Near future tense

rm Real mood

n Neuter

pl Plural

posp Postposition


ps Predicate specifier

subs Substitute

um Unreal mood

1, 2, 3 First, second and third person

References

Campbell, L. 2003. Areal Linguistics: A Closer Scrutiny. Paper presented at the

5th NWCL International Conference: Linguistic Areas, Convergence, and

Language Change, 22–23 November 2002, University of Manchester. http://

www.ling.canterbury.ac.nz/documents/areal_linguistics.pdf

Casamiquela, R. 1965. Rectificaciones y Ratificaciones: hacia una interpretacion

definitiva del panorama etnologico de la Patagonia y area septentrional adyacente.

Bahıa Blanca: Cuadernos del Sur, Universidad Nacional del Sur.

Casamiquela, R. 1983. Nociones de gramatica del gununa kune: presentation de la

langue des Tehuelches septentrionaux austraux. Paris: CNRS.

Dixon, M. R. W. 1994. Ergativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dorian, N. 1981. Language Death: the Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect.

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Escalada, F. 1949. El complejo Tehuelche: estudios de etnografıa patagonica. Buenos

Aires: Coni.

Fernandez Garay, A. 1998. El Tehuelche: descripcion de una lengua en vıas de ex-

tincion [Estudios Filologicos, Anejo N� 15]. Valdivia: Universidad Austral de

Chile.

Fernandez Garay, A. 2000. Consecuencias linguısticas de la situacion de desgaste

del Tehuelche. In Memorias del Quinto Encuentro Internacional de Linguıstica

del Noroeste, Vol. 2, M. C. Morua Leyva and G. Lopez Cruz (eds), 165–177.

Sonora: UniSon.

Fernandez Garay, A. 2002a. Incorporacion nominal en Tehuelche o Aonek’o

�a� jen. In Actas del XIII Congreso Internacional de la Asociacion de Linguıstica

y Filologıa de America Latina (ALFAL), V. M. Sanchez Corrales (ed.), 553–

560. San Jose de Costa Rica: Universidad de Costa Rica.

Fernandez Garay, A. 2002b. Testimonios de los ultimos ranqueles. Textos originales

con traduccion y notas linguıstico-etnograficas [Coleccion Nuestra America,

Archivo de Lenguas Indoamericanas]. Buenos Aires: Instituto de Linguıstica,

Facultad de Filosofıa y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires.

Fernandez Garay, A. 2005a. Cambios en la estructura sintactica del Tehuelche o

Aonek’o �a� jen. ?Contacto o desgaste? In Contacto de lenguas en el sur argen-

tino, Y. Hipperdinger (ed.), 11–28. Bahıa Blanca: Ediuns.

Fernandez Garay, A. 2005b. Contacto linguıstico en Patagonia. Actas del X Con-

greso Nacional de Linguıstica. Salta: Sociedad Argentina de Linguıstica y Uni-

versidad Catolica de Salta, 5–8 July 2005.


Fernandez Garay, A. 2006. La nominalizacion en lenguas indıgenas de Patagonia.

Topicos del Seminario 15: 141–158.

Fernandez Garay, A. and Hernandez, G. 2006. Textos Tehuelches (aonek’o

�a� jen): homenaje a Jorge Suarez. Munich: Lincom Europa.

Fernandez Garay, A. 2007a. Analisis comparativo de los sistemas sintacticos

del aonek’o �a� jen y del selknam. In Estudios linguısticos y sociolinguısticos de

lenguas indıgenas sudamericanas, A. Fernandez Garay and M. Malvestitti (eds),

89–107. Santa Rosa: Universidad Nacional de La Pampa.

Fernandez Garay, A. 2007b. Coexistencia de dos sistemas sintacticos en Tehuelche.

International Journal of American Linguistics 73.1: 114–125.

Fernandez Garay, A. 2007c. Contacto tehuelche-mapuche en Patagonia. Actas del

I Congreso internacional de sociolinguıstica y linguıstica historica, Universidad

Nacional del Sur, Bahıa Blanca (in press).

Harris, A. C. and Campbell, L. 1995. Historical Syntax in Cross-linguistic Perspec-

tive. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



Matras, Y. 2009. Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Matras, Y. and Sakel J. (eds), 2007. Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-linguistic

Perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Musters, G. Ch. 1964. Vida entre los patagones. Buenos Aires: Hachette.

Najlis, E. 1973. Lengua Selknam [Filologıa y Linguıstica 3]. Buenos Aires: Univer-

sidad del Salvador.

Nardi, R. 1985. La araucanizacion de la Patagonia (sıntesis general). In Culturas

indıgenas de la Patagonia, 235–264. Madrid: Biblioteca del V Centenario.

Suarez, J. 1988. Clasificacion interna de la familia linguıstica Chon. In Estudios

sobre Lenguas Indıgenas Sudamericanas, 79–100. Bahıa Blanca: Universidad

Nacional del Sur.

Thomason, S. G. 2001. Language Contact. Washington, DC: Georgetown Univer-

sity Press.

Tonelli, A. 1926. Gramatica e glosario della lingua degli ona-selknam della Terra

del Fuoco. Turin: Societa Editrice Internazionale.


On polysemy copying and grammaticalization inlanguage contact1

Bernd Heine

1. Introduction

The Norman French dialect Guernesiais of the Channel Island Guernsey dis-

tinguished traditionally between the comitative preposition dauve ‘(together)

with’ and the instrumental prepositon atou ‘with, by means of.’ Guernesiais

was in contact with English for roughly 800 years and was extensively influ-

enced by English.2 English does not distinguish between the two, using with

for both, and contact with English appears to have been a contributing

factor for Guernesiais speakers to extend dauve from comitative to instru-

mental function, with the e¤ect that the instrumental preposition atou

gradually disappeared from the language (Jones 2002: 157).

In terms of a language contact analysis, this process can be described

thus: Guernesiais had two di¤erent case categories while English, the other

language spoken on Guernsey, had a case polysemy instead, using the

same form for both categories. What must have happened in the contact

situation on this Channel Island was that Guernesiais speakers replicated

the polysemy they were confronted with in English, thereby creating an

equivalence relation between the two languages concerned.

1. The present article was written while I was a visiting professor at the Centre deRecherches Linguistiques sur l’Asie Orientale, Ecole Nationale des HautesEtudes in Paris in May 2007. I wish to thank Hilary Chappell, the director ofthe Centre, and Alain Peyraube for the outstanding hospitality I was able toenjoy while in Paris. Furthermore, I wish to thank Tania Kuteva and WalterBreu for their valuable assistance on parts of the present article, and toClaudine Chamoreau and Regina Martinez Casas for introducing me to thefascinating world of language contact in Mexico.

2. Guernesiais (or Guernsey) has been spoken on the island of Guernsey in theChannel Islands archipelago for more than a thousand years but is now mori-bund. After World War Two, when many island inhabitants who had beenevacuated to England during the war returned home, English gradually beganto replace this Norman dialect, a process that appears to be ongoing (Ramisch1989; Jones 2002: 164).

Cases like this tend to be treated in the literature on language contact

as instances of calquing, structural borrowing, loan translation, or, more

recently, as polysemy copying (Heine and Kuteva 2005, chapter 3), whereby

a meaning or combination of meanings of the model language (English

in this case) is copied analogically in the replica language (Guernesiais).

Copying of this kind is a commonplace in the literature on both historical

linguistics and contact linguistics; the equivalents of nominal compounds

such as English skyscraper in the languages of Europe, or of predicative

expressions such as take part (German teilnehmen ‘part take,’ Israeli

Hebrew lakaxat xelek ‘take (a) part,’ and so on; Matras and Sakel 2007)

bear witness to this process. Polysemy copying can be described as an

abrupt rather than a gradual change, and it tends to be associated with

lexical rather than grammatical replication.

But rather than in terms of polysemy copying, there is another possible

interpretation of this case. Comitatives and instrumentals are semantically

and syntactically distinct categories, each requiring a di¤erent kind of

verbal argument structure, and roughly two thirds of the languages of the

world distinguish the two, using di¤erent grammatical expressions for

them, as Guernesiais formerly did. This situation contrasts with that of

Europe, where less than one third of the languages has such a morphol-

ogical distinction,3 and one salient process of contact-induced change in

European languages concerns the extension of comitative markers to also

introduce instruments (Heine and Kuteva 2006, chapter 5), thereby giving

rise to comitative-instrumental polysemy (for example, English with, French

avec). The process that happened in Guernesiais thus can be interpreted as

being yet another example of contact-induced grammaticalization from

comitative to instrumental.

The question then is which of the two hypotheses is to be preferred: did

Guernesiais speakers simply copy the polysemy of English with, or did

they grammaticalize their comitative preposition to also serve as an instru-

mental? The former option would seem to be intuitively clearly more plau-

sible, the more so since it is supported by massive evidence from lexical

replication, where polysemy copying is fairly common. But there are also

arguments in favor of grammaticalization, suggesting that lexical and gram-

matical replication do not always behave the same. One argument concerns

3. According to Stolz (1996: 127–128), 64.7 percent of his 323 languages of world-wide distribution distinguish comitatives from instrumentals, while in hissample of 51 European languages it is only 31.4 percent.

126 Bernd Heine

directionality of change:4 there appears to be a cross-linguistically regular

process leading from comitative to instrumental marking, Latin cum and

Greek meta being cases in point, while we are not aware of any develop-

ment in the opposite direction.5 As has been shown in Heine and Kuteva

(2006, chapter 5), the same kind of unidirectionality can be observed in

language contact.

The process that happened in Guernesiais thus is in accordance with

what we argue is a constraint on grammatical replication in particular

and contact-induced change in general; in accordance with this constraint,

it is fairly unlikely that Guernesiais speakers would have drawn on their

instrumental preposition atou to match the polysemy of English with. Still,

on the basis of one single piece of evidence there is reason to question

whether the grammaticalization hypothesis can be upheld. In the present

article we will look at other cases of contact-induced change in order to

explore whether this hypothesis can be defended. These cases all relate to

language contact in Europe; they concern articles in Section 2, the posses-

sive perfect in Section 3, and auxiliation in Section 4. In Section 5 we draw

some conclusions from the findings made.

Our concern in this article will be with grammatical replication, that is,

a process where speakers create a new grammatical meaning or structure

in language R (the replica language) on the model of some meaning or

structure of another language M (the model language). In the framework

used here, expounded in Heine and Kuteva (2005), grammatical replica-

tion contrasts with lexical replication, and both contrast with borrowing,

which concerns phonetic substance, that is, either sounds or form-meaning

units such as morphemes, words, or larger entities. Replication and bor-

rowing are the major manifestations of contact-induced transfer or code-

copying (Johanson 1992, 2002).

This article will deal with contact-induced grammatical replication as a

product, for which there is some cross-linguistic evidence, and I will have

little to say about the process leading to this product since it is still largely

ill understood. The following remarks are meant to provide at least some

general understanding of the nature of this process, which has both a socio-

linguistic and a linguistic component. At the beginning of the process as a

sociolinguistic phenomenon there typically is spontaneous replication in

bilingual interaction, where an individual speaker consciously or uncon-

4. For additional arguments, see Heine and Kuteva (2005), Section 3.2.5. Even if it should turn out that there are counter-examples to this generaliza-

tion, they will be rare.

On polysemy copying and grammaticalization in language contact 127

sciously propagates novel features in the replica language that have been

influenced by some other language (or dialect). Spontaneous replication,

described with references to notions such as ‘‘speaker innovation’’ (Milroy

and Milroy 1985: 15), is highly idiosyncratic and the vast majority of in-

stances of it will have no e¤ect on the language concerned, being judged as

what is commonly referred to as ‘‘speech errors.’’ But some instances may

catch on: being taken up by other speakers and used regularly, they may

become part of the speech habits of a group of speakers (early adopters),

and they may spread to other groups of speakers, in exceptional cases

even to the entire speech community. Still, this process does not neces-

sarily lead to linguistic change: such innovations may remain restricted to

some specific period of time, being abandoned either by the very speakers

who introduced them or by the next generation of speakers. It is only if an

innovation acquires some stability across time that grammatical replica-

tion has taken place.

There is still a widespread assumption among linguists that grammatical

structure, or syntax, cannot be ‘‘borrowed,’’ that is, transferred from one

language to another. This assumption is reflected in a recent survey article

by Sanko¤ (2001), who concludes that ‘‘[w]hether or not ‘‘grammar’’ or

‘‘syntax’’ can be borrowed at all is still very much in question . . . many

students of language contact are convinced that grammatical or syntactic

borrowing is impossible or close to it’’ (Sanko¤ 2001; see also Silva-Corvalan

2007). We consider this no longer to be an issue, considering that there is

by now abundant evidence to demonstrate that both grammar and syntax

can be ‘‘borrowed,’’ or, as we will say here, replicated (see for example

Ramisch 1989; Ross 1996, 2001; Johanson 1992, 2002; Aikhenvald 2002;

Heine and Kuteva 2003, 2005, 2006), and the present article will provide

further evidence in support of these observations.

2. Articles

In our first example we will look at what Breu (2003a) calls Slavic micro-

languages, namely Upper Sorbian and Molisean. Both Lower and Upper

Sorbian are spoken in eastern Germany and have been a¤ected by nearly

a millennium of contact with German. The present data are taken from

non-standard Upper Sorbian as spoken by the Roman Catholic com-

munity in the west of the Oberlausitz (Upper Lausitia) (Breu 2003a: 28).

Molise Slavic, in short Molisean, is the language of a community of

Croatian speakers from the Hercegovinian Neretva Valley who emigrated

128 Bernd Heine

around 500 years ago because of the Turkish invasion in the Balkans,

settling in areas of southeastern Italy that were sparsely inhabited due

to earthquakes and epidemics; today, Molisean is spoken in only two

villages, Acquaviva and Montemitro, in the Molise region of Campobasso

province. After contact both with the local varieties and with Standard

Italian over a period of half a millennium, their language has been mas-

sively influenced by this Romance language (for a survey, see Breu 1998;

see also Breu 1999, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c, 2004).

There are a number of di¤erences between the two micro-languages.

First, unlike Upper Sorbian, Molisean does not dispose of a standard form,

and second, the model language is German in the case of Upper Sorbian

but non-standard varieties of Italian spoken in the Molise region, as well

as, over the past 150 years, Standard Italian in the case of Molisean. Other-

wise, however, the situations of the two languages are fairly similar. The

two model languages are structurally alike with reference to the following

discussion, and contact between model and replica languages has in both

cases had a long history. Note that there is no evidence whatsoever of any

contact between speakers of the two micro-languages, so the changes that

the two languages experienced must have happened independently of one

another. The data to be discussed below are overwhelmingly from Breu

(Breu 1998, 1999, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c, 2004); most of them were not

available to us when we were working on Heine and Kuteva (2006).

2.1. Definite articles

Work on grammaticalization suggests that a number of stages need to be

distinguished in the gradual pragmatic and semantic progression of the

evolution of many definite articles; for the purposes of the present study,

they are typically the following (cf. Greenberg 1978; Hawkins 2004):

1. An item serves as a nominal modifier (rather than as a pronoun) for

both spatial-deictic (for example near vs. far) and for anaphoric refer-

ence (demonstrative).

2. The item is no longer associated with spatial reference; its main func-

tion is now to refer to entities (objects or situations) mentioned earlier

in discourse (definite anaphoric marker).

3. In addition to previous mentions, the item also refers to definite entities

that are recoverable via contextually available knowledge (context-

definite marker).

4. The item is no longer restricted to contextual knowledge; it may refer

to any entity that is identifiable via world knowledge, including both


individual (token) and generic (type) entities (marker of ‘‘semantically

definite’’).

5. The item is no longer restricted to definitely identifiable entities; it may

in addition refer to specific indefinite entities, that is, entities that are

not necessarily identifiable to the hearer. It can simply assert existence

(indefinite-specific marker).

6. The item loses its association with referentiality; it no longer has a

pragmatic or semantic function, it can occur in any context and with

any noun, and it may be exapted for other functions such as noun

classification (article loss).

Grammaticalization theory would predict that if a language has reached a

given stage then it has also passed through all preceding stages; accord-

ingly, this evolutionary scenario can also be mapped onto synchrony and

be used essentially as a synchronic implicational scale, with the proviso

that language history is complex and that in a particular case there may

be other factors interfering with the evolution.

Both German and Italian, the two main languages having served as

models for the Slavic languages that we are concerned with here, have a

definite article, but neither has proceeded beyond stage four. In this sense

they, like other definite articles in Europe (Heine and Kuteva 2006, chapter

3), could be called ‘‘fully grammaticalized’’ articles. But our concern is

with what happened in the replica languages. Slavic languages are well-

known for their absence of articles; except for Macedonian, Bulgarian,

and North Russian no definite articles are said to exist. So did language

contact a¤ect this situation? Thanks to two detailed studies by Breu (2003a,

2005), there is now more detailed information on at least one of the micro-

languages, namely Upper Sorbian, and the evidence presented leaves hardly

any doubt that this question must be answered in the a‰rmative (see also

Heine and Kuteva 2006, chapter 3).

Upper Sorbian6 has grammaticalized its proximal demonstrative (‘this’)

to a definite article, to the extent that the two are now formally distinct;

for example, the forms are ton/te/ta (masculine/feminine/neuter) for the

nominative singular of the definite article and tone/tene/tane for the demon-

strative.7 However, whereas German has developed a semantically definite

6. What we have to say in the following applies exclusively to non-standardvarieties of Upper Sorbian, not the standard language (see Breu 2005).

7. The present treatment is based entirely on Breu (2005), which provides a fine-grained analysis.

130 Bernd Heine

article (stage four), Upper Sorbian has not proceeded beyond the context-

definite stage three. In the examples below, sentences from Upper Sorbian

(US) are given, followed by a German (G) and an English translation (there

are no interlinear glosses in Breu’s publication; the markers in question are

printed in bold, ø stands for lack of article).

Example (1a) shows the deictic stage one, (1b) the anaphoric use (stage

two), where the article refers to an object previously mentioned, and (1c)

the context-definite (stage three) use, where the referent has not been pre-

viously mentioned but its identity is recoverable via context and/or world

knowledge. Stage four relates most of all to generic uses where a referent

is understood in its type rather its token value. Thus, a definite article is

required in (1d) in German but not in Upper Sorbian. Still, it would be

possible to use the article in the sense of stage two or three if the identity

of the secretary were recoverable from the previous discourse rather than

being understood in its type value. That it is type value that takes priority

over discourse reference in the placement of the definite article can be

shown with (1e), which is in accordance with the discourse setting of stage

two, yet no definite article can be used on account of the generic nature of

the referent.

(1) Upper Sorbian (Breu 2005: 37¤.)

a. Stage 1 US Ces ty ton kniu mec?

G Willst du das Buch haben?

‘Do you want to have the book (there)?’

b. Stage 2 US Won sej sitko na jenu cedlku napisa. Ha potom won

ton cedlu tom policajej pred nosom dzerzi.

G Er schreibt sich alles auf einen Zettel. Und dann halt er

den Zettel dem Polizisten vor die Nase.

‘He writes everything on a sheet of paper. And then

he presents the sheet to the policeman right under

his nose.’

c. Stage 3 US Mo smo zade jeno Lkweja jeli. Ton kur be sreklich.

G Wir sind hinter einem LKW hergefahren. Der Rauchwar schrecklich.

‘We drove behind a truck. The smoke was terrible.’

d. Stage 4 US ø Sekretarka wot sule jo zawo´a´a.G Die Schulsekretarin hat angerufen.

‘The secretary of the school has called.’


e. US Neke budzemo wot ø muchi pojedac. ø Mucha ma

dwe kridle.

G Jetzt sprechen wir uber die Fliege. Die Fliege hatzwei Flugel.

‘Now we will talk about the fly. The fly has two wings.’

These examples are meant to show three things: First, they correspond to

predictions of grammaticalization theory, according to which grammatical

changes proceed from less to more grammatical forms and structures.

Accordingly, we would be surprised if Upper Sorbian had grammaticalized

stage four but not any of the preceding stages. Second, it confirms what

has been argued for in Heine and Kuteva (2003, 2005, 2006), namely that

grammatical change in language contact is essentially unidirectional, in

the same way as it is in situations not involving contact. And third, replica

categories are generally less grammaticalized than the corresponding model

categories: As Table 1 shows, the Upper Sorbian definite article has not

reached the same advanced stage of grammaticalization as the German

model category has.

2.2. Further on definite articles: advanced grammaticalization

Grammaticalization is a continuous process, proceeding from one context

to another. When describing the process of grammatical replication in the

preceding section in terms of stages, we were segmenting the continuum

into a series of more salient points. In doing so, we were aware that the

primary locus of change is not a given stage but rather a given context.

We may illustrate this with an example from a contact situation that we

Table 1. Degree of grammaticalization from demonstrative to definite article inGerman and Upper Sorbian (Source: Breu 2003a, 2005).

Stage Function German Upper Sorbian

1 Demonstrative þ þ2 Anaphoric-definite þ þ3 Contextually definite þ þ4 Semantically definite þ5 Indefinite specific

6 Article loss

132 Bernd Heine

mentioned earlier in Section 1, namely that between Guernesiais and

English.

We saw in Section 2.1 how a language that had no article created a new

definite article in a situation of language contact. But language contact

may also be instrumental in the further grammaticalization of an already

existing article by extending it to a new range of contexts. Even in a lan-

guage such as English, which has a full-fledged stage four definite article,

there are some restrictions on its use, in that certain kinds of clausal partic-

ipants do not take the article the. Now, on Guernsey, where English has

been in contact with the Norman French dialect Guernesiais (see Section

1), the English definite article has spread to contexts where it would not be

used in England but is used in this Norman dialect, in particular before

names of languages (2a), adverbials of direction and position (for example,

street names) (2b), adverbials of time expressing a regular repetition (2c),

plural nouns with generic reference (2d), or nouns for institutions such as

school and bus in generic uses (2e).

(2) Replication in Guernsey English on the model of Guernesiais

(Ramisch 1989: 113–6; Jones 2002: 146)

a. They never did the Guernsey French at school.

b. He’s got a chain of h’m shops in the, in the Fountain Street.

c. And we go the Saturday evening like – old time dancing.

d. As a whole I believe the Guernsey people – are h’m friendly and

they work together.

e. It was always by the bus we went.

Extension of the English definite article as a result of language contact with

Celtic languages has also been reported for Irish English (for example, I had

a few jars over the Christmas) and English spoken in the Gaelic-speaking

area of Scotland (for example have porridge for the dinner; Ramisch 1989:

117). Furthermore, the extension of definite articles to new contexts is an

ordinary grammaticalization process that can happen language-internally

as well. For these two reasons, the present case need not be due to lan-

guage contact. That, nevertheless, contact was a contributing factor in

the case of Guernsey English is suggested by the fact that there are cor-

responding article uses in Guernesiais, that is, English speakers use the

article exactly in those contexts where it would be used in Guernesiais, as

can be seen in the examples of (3), corresponding to the English examples

in (2).


(3) Guernesiais (Ramisch 1989: 113¤.)

a. mo pr sav l� bwo frase e logje e l� patwa.

‘My father knew (the) good French, and English, and (the) patois.’

b. nu vþ a la vil pur §�pai.‘We go to (the) town for shopping.’

c. nuzi vþ l� samdi o ser.

‘We go there (the) Saturday (at.the) evening.’

d. lezfa apro vit loga‰ .‘(The) children learn a language quickly.’

e. nuze tu‰ur alai do la b�s.‘We always went by (the) bus.’

What this example may show is that the development of articles, whether

in language contact or language-internally, is not a discrete process but

rather is gradual, proceeding from one context to another.

2.3. Indefinite articles

The grammaticalization of indefinite articles proceeds similarly through

a series of contexts and stages. Thus, it is the following stages that mark

the gradual pragmatic and semantic evolution of many indefinite articles

(Heine 1997b: 70¤.):

1. An item serves as a nominal modifier denoting the numerical value

‘one’ (numeral).

2. The item introduces a new participant presumed to be unknown to the

hearer, and this participant is then taken up as definite in subsequent

discourse (presentative marker).

3. The item presents a participant known to the speaker but presumed to

be unknown to the hearer, irrespective of whether or not the partici-

pant is expected to come up as a major discourse participant (specific

indefinite marker).

4. The item presents a participant whose referential identity neither the

hearer nor the speaker knows (non-specific indefinite marker).

5. The item can be expected to occur in all contexts and on all types of

nouns except for a few contexts involving, for instance, definiteness

marking, proper nouns, predicative clauses, and so on (generalized

indefinite article).

134 Bernd Heine

Like the definite article scenario of Section 2.1, grammaticalization theory

would predict that if a language has reached a given stage, then it has also

passed through all preceding stages, and once again, this evolutionary

scale can be used synchronically as an implicational scale, again with the

proviso mentioned above.

Both German and Italian have indefinite articles of stage four, but neither

has stage five. Slavic languages are well-known for their absence of indefinite

articles, with the possible exception of Macedonian. Once again, there is

some information to suggest that there is more to this, and that language

contact played some role, as Breu (2003a) shows convincingly in his analysis

of Slavic micro-languages8 (see also Heine and Kuteva 2006, chapter 3).

In the examples below, sentences from Upper Sorbian9 (US) are given,

followed by a German (G) and an English translation (once again, there

are no interlinear glosses in Breu’s publication, and the markers in ques-

tion are printed in bold, ø ¼ lack of article, and *ø ¼ the article may not

be omitted). The US form for jen- ‘one’ is made up of a complex morpho-

phonological paradigm on the basis of distinctions of six cases, two num-

bers (singular, plural), and three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter;

see Breu 2003a: 36).

Like German, US has a fully grammaticalized stage two, three, and

four indefinite article that can be traced back to the numeral jen- ‘one.’

As the following examples show, their use is obligatory. Example (4a) illus-

trates the presentative use (stage two), characteristic of openings in tales,

(4b) the specific indefinite stage 3, and (4c) the non-specific indefinite stage

four. With abstract and generic referents as well, US shows roughly the

same degree of grammaticalization as the German indefinite article does,

cf. (4d).

(4) Upper Sorbian (Breu 2003a: 37¤.)

a. Stage 2 US To bese jemo jena stara zona. *ø

G Es war einmal eine alte Frau. *ø

‘Once upon a time there was an old woman.’

b. Stage 3 US Najmole jo jen to´sty muz nutr siso´ . *ø

G Plotzlich kam ein dicker Mann herein. *ø

‘Suddenly a fat man came in.’

8. We are not able to do justice to the fine-grained analysis presented by Breu(2003a); the reader is referred to this work for many more details.

9. All data analyzed by Breu (2003) are from a rural, spoken variety of UpperSorbian, which di¤ers considerably from Standard Upper Sorbian, especiallywith reference to the phenomena looked at here.


c. Stage 4 US Dys tybe jen polcaj s´ osi, ton tybe zasperwe. *ø

G Wenn dich ein Polizist hort, wird er dich einsperren. *ø

‘If a policeman hears you, he’ll arrest you.’

d. US Jen Serb nebci.

G Ein Sorbe lugt nicht.

‘A Sorbian never lies.’

Even in many contexts where the model language German has an optional

indefinite article, as with some collective and abstract nouns, the same

situation obtains in US.

(5) Upper Sorbian (Breu 2003a: 42)

US Mens, sym ja jen strach me´ ! or ø

G Mensch, habe ich eine Angst gehabt! or ø

‘Boy, was I scared!’ (Lit.: ‘Boy, did I have a fear’)

Thus, there appears to be a high amount of intertranslatability between

the two articles, and Breu (2003a: 66) concludes that US has reached the

same degree of development as the German model category, which both

are stage four articles. We thus seem to be faced with a situation where

the process of replication is concluded, and where the model and the

replica categories have become nearly identical. However, it would seem

that this is not entirely correct. First, the replica category has not been

extended to a number of idiomatic expressions where the model language

would require the indefinite article. And second, there are a number of

contexts, involving in particular generic concepts, where there must be an

indefinite article in German while in US the indefinite article is either

optional, as in (6a), or is disallowed, as in (6b).

(6) Upper Sorbian (Breu 2003a: 44)

a. US Ton jo tak sylny kaj jen elefant. or ø

G Er ist so stark wie ein Elefant. *ø

‘He is as strong as an elephant.’

b. US Ja sym ´ odny kaj ø law. *jen ‘a’

G Ich bin hungrig wie ein Lowe. *ø

‘I am hungry as a lion.’

To conclude: in spite of the fact that the US category has become a nearly

complete replica of the German model category, having reached the same

general stage of grammaticalization, there remain a number of contexts

where the replica category is less grammaticalized than the model.

136 Bernd Heine

Breu (2003a) describes a parallel case from Molisean, which also must

have lacked article-like grammatical forms prior to language contact. Like

the Upper Sorbian numeral for ‘one,’ the Molisean ‘one’ disposes of a

paradigm of morphophonological distinctions, one di¤erence being that

the Molisean forms have long and short forms in addition, for example,

je¨na vs. na (nominative masculine singular).

Like US, Molisean shows roughly the same degree of grammaticaliza-

ton of the numeral, having developed a stage four indefinite article of the

same kind as the model language Italian. The reader is referred to Breu

(2003a) for examples; it will su‰ce here to illustrate the more advanced

stages. In (7) below, sentences from Molisean (M) are given, followed by

an Italian (I) and an English translation (once again, there are no inter-

linear glosses; the markers in question are printed in bold, ø stands for

lack of article). Example (7a) illustrates the use of a stage three article

with an abstract noun, while (7b) shows a generic use of stage four, where

use vs. non-use of the indefinite article appears to be lexically determined.

Note that in both examples the replica and the model languages agree to

the extent that both can be used with and without article.

(7) Molisean (Breu 2003a: 42)

a. M Jo, sa jima na strah! or ø

I Ahi, ho avuto una paura! or ø

‘Boy, was I scared!’

b. M Ona je na studentesa. / ø profesoresa.

I Lei e una studentessa. / ø professoressa.

‘She is a student / a professor.’

As these examples show, Molisean speakers, like US speakers, have carried

their numeral through all stages of grammaticalization, developing a stage

four indefinite article largely equivalent to the Italian model. But here

again, the replica category is not entirely identical to the model category;

there are some contexts where the replica language does not use the article,

or else the article is accepted by some speakers but not by others. Thus, in

some generic uses of the non-specific stage four, Italian has an article, while

Molisean speakers preferably do not use one. Interestingly, the model lan-

guage employs not the indefinite but rather the definite article in the follow-

ing example:


(8) Molisean (Breu 2003a: 44–5)

M Kjikkjarijas kana ø tovar ada prdi.

I Parli come l’asino quando spetezza.

‘You are talking like a donkey when it passes wind.’

Table 2 shows two things in particular. First, it is precisely those Slavic

languages that have had the most intensive contact with languages having

stage four indefinite articles that also have created corresponding articles.

At one end there are Upper Sorbian in eastern Germany with a history of

nearly a millennium of contact with German, and Molisean, historically a

variety of Croatian spoken in southeastern Italy, that has been in contact

with Italian for roughly 500 years; at the other end there are the Eastern

Slavic languages Ukrainian and Belorussian, both languages with the least

amount of contact with article languages. Second, Table 2 also shows that

contact-induced grammaticalization proceeds in one direction from one

stage to the next, where a new stage is built on the stage immediately pre-

ceding it. Synchronically, this fact can once again be described in the form

of an implicational scale of the following kind: If a given article has stage

X then it also has all preceding stages of use.

Table 2. Degree of the grammaticalization from numeral ‘one’ to indefinite articlein selected Slavic languages (Sources: Breu 2003a; Heine and Kuteva2006, chapter 3).10

Stage Function UpperSorbian

MoliseSlavic

Mace-donian

Czech,Bulga-rian

Serbian,Croatian,Polish,Russian

Ukrainian,Belo-russian

1 Numeral ‘one’ þ þ þ þ þ þ2 Presentative þ þ þ þ (þ)

3 Specific indefinite þ þ þ (þ)

4 Non-specificindefinite

þ þ

10. Note that we are restricted here to non-standard, colloquial, varieties of thelanguages concerned. As Breu (2003; 2005) has shown for Upper Sorbian, anentirely di¤erent picture would arise if Standard Upper Sorbian were chosen.

138 Bernd Heine

To conclude, the same kind of constraint can be observed in definite as in

indefinite articles: First, contact-induced grammaticalization proceeds along

a largely predictable scale; there is no example where we would find, for

example, that a Slavic language has replicated a stage three article but not

a stage two article. Second, this suggests that in the replication of articles,

speakers proceeded along the scale of stages, hence stage 1 > 2 > 3 > 4.

And third, there is no language where in a situation of language contact

the replica language underwent a process in the opposite direction, develop-

ing a definite article into a demonstrative or an indefinite article into a

numeral.

With reference to the question raised in Section 1, namely whether

grammatical replication can be accounted for best with reference to poly-

semy copying or to grammaticalization, an answer in favor of the latter is

more plausible: Rather than simply copying a German or Italian poly-

semy pattern, Sorbian and Molisean speakers appear to have chosen a

more complex strategy, going through the whole process from demonstra-

tive or numeral to article.

3. Possessive perfects

Possessive perfects (‘have’-perfects), where a possessive verb is used both

to encode possession (9a) and verbal aspect or tense (9b), can be considered

to be a paradigm areal property of European languages: Nearly all lan-

guages of western and central Europe have one, while outside Europe

their occurrence is extremely rare (see Haspelmath 2001). The following

discussion is largely confined to some morphosyntactic properties of the

categories concerned. Thus, issues that have figured prominently in the

relevant literature, such as the semantic development from possessive via

resultative to perfect (anterior) and to past tense meanings (see Heine

and Kuteva 2006, chapter 4), or the relationship between ‘have’- and

‘be’-periphrasis, are not considered here (but see for example Pietsch 2004;

Cennamo 2005).11

11. We wish to thank Andrii Danylenko, Bridget Drinka, Zygmunt Frajzyngier,Victor Friedman, and Ulrich Obst for helpful comments and insightful sug-gestions on an earlier version of this section.


(9) English

a. She has a car.

b. She has come.

As is argued in Heine and Kuteva (2006), possessive perfects evolved in

the languages of Europe roughly in the course of the last two millennia

as a result of the grammaticalization of possessive constructions, more

precisely of constructions for predicative possession of the ‘have’-type

(Heine 1997a). On the basis of their evolution and structural characteristics,

the following four main stages of evolution can be distinguished.

0. There is a possessive ‘have’-construction, like in (9a), but no posses-

sive perfect.

1. There is now a resultative use pattern where the subject of the posses-

sive verb is no longer conceived as a possessor but rather typically as

an agent referentially identical with that of the verb constructed in the

past passive participle (PPP), and the construction expresses a state of

a¤airs resulting from the completion of the action denoted by the

PPP-verb. At this stage, the construction exhibits many or all of the

following properties: (a) Only transitive verbs are allowed as main

verbs. (b) The PPP-verb still has the structure of a modifier of the

patient, agreeing with the patient noun phrase in case, number, and/

or gender (if there are such morphological categories). (c) Never-

theless, the possessive verb tends to be interpreted as an auxiliary and

the PPP-verb as the new main verb. (d) Both the possessive and the

PPP-verbs tend to be associated with one and the same agent.

2. The main new properties are: (a) Instead of being transitive, the main

verb may be intransitive; cf. (9b). (b) A possessive interpretation is

now ruled out. (c) Agreement in number and gender between the

main verb and the object gradually disappears, that is, the PPP-verb

tends to be presented in one invariable form. (d) There is no more

ambiguity, that is, there is only one agent, which can no longer be

interpreted as a possessor.

3. The possessive perfect is now fully established and no longer subject

to constraints: (a) Instead of human agents there may now be inani-

mate ‘‘agents.’’ (b) There are no or hardly any restrictions on the

kinds of verbs serving as main verbs.

Perfect (or anterior) categories found in the languages of the world have a

limited number of conceptual sources (see Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca

1994). Among these sources, possessive constructions are extremely rare;

140 Bernd Heine

more importantly, however, possessive perfects conforming to the four-

stage model sketched above are found essentially only in Europe. On

typological grounds therefore it seems unlikely that such constructions

arose independently in di¤erent European languages; rather, the rise of

these constructions must have been due to historical factors. Accordingly,

Heine and Kuteva (2006) propose the following hypotheses:12

(a) The spread of possessive perfects across Europe is due mainly to lan-

guage contact.

(b) The di¤usion of these constructions across languages did not involve

borrowing, that is, a transfer of form-meaning units, but rather the

replication of a process whereby a possessive construction was gram-

maticalized to a construction marking aspect (in some cases later on

also to tense).

(c) The process was unidirectional, conforming to the four stages sketched

above.

3.1. On the rise of possessive perfects

Old Church Slavonic (863–950 CE) had a past passive participle formed

exclusively from transitive verbs, but it had no possessive perfect (Friedman

1976: 97),13 and there was also no possessive perfect in the earliest forms

of Island Celtic, Baltic, and Balto-Finnic languages. According to a wide-

spread view, the ultimate donor of European possessive perfects was

Ancient Greek. Thus, Drinka (2003b) argues that a new transitive peri-

phrastic perfect formed with ‘have’þ active aorist participle is found

already in the writings of the fifth-century BC tragedians Sophocles and

Euripides as well as in Herodotus. Greek is said to have provided the

model for Latin: it was Latin authors thoroughly educated in Greek who

replicated the possessive perfect in Latin. In the absence of a Greek-type

active aorist or perfect participle, those Latin writers used their own

past passive participle (PPP) as a complement for the verb habere ‘have’

(Drinka 2007: 19). The Latin construction subsequently spread across the

Roman Empire, including the Greek-speaking areas of the East.

12. For Old Iranian and Old Armenian – both of which are spoken outsideEurope – Benveniste (1952) argues that language contact is a highly unlikelyfactor for the development of the possessive perfect.

13. Friedman (1976: 97) refers to this construction as an analytic one, being‘‘midway between a true perfect and an adjectival construction,’’ occurring inBulgarian and Serbian.


The possessive perfect of modern European languages has its roots in

Early Latin. As a result of a gradual process, the possessive perfect

emerged in Late Latin as a distinct periphrastic active aspect category of

stage one. It denoted current relevance of a past event (¼present anterior),

spreading into narrative contexts. It is only after the sixth century that a

stage two perfect began to emerge, subsequently spreading to other lan-

guages of western Europe.

According to Haspelmath (1998: 285), possessive perfects di¤used across

Europe at the time of transition between antiquity and the Early Middle

Ages. In Iberian languages, habere was superseded by later reflexes of

Latin tenere ‘to hold’ as a possessive verb, and possessive perfects based

on tenere emerged fairly late. The Spanish tener-perfect gradually rose

from the thirteenth century on, and up to now it is confined to transitive

verbs, that is, it did not proceed beyond stage one. The Portuguese ter-

perfect on the other hand has reached stage two: it has spread to intransi-

tive verbs (Vincent 1982: 92).

That possessive perfects spread via replication from Romance languages

to Germanic is a plausible hypothesis, but it is not uncontroversial (see

Heine and Kuteva 2006, Section 4.3 for discussion). In English, the rise

of the possessive perfect goes back to the earliest stages of Old English,

where it was used only in possessive contexts as an early stage one con-

struction associated with resultative uses, while an advanced stage one

possessive perfect must have existed in North Germanic from the Runic

Scandinavian languages to Edda, and German appears to have turned

into a stage two language by around 1000 CE.

A historical reconstruction of the spread of the possessive perfect is

urgently required; what surfaces from the sketchy information that is avail-

able, however, is that language contact must have played quite a role in its

di¤usion. The result is that all Romance and Germanic languages are

nowadays stage three languages. But this situation contrasts sharply with

that to be found in what we will loosely refer to as Europe’s ‘‘linguistic

periphery.’’

3.2. A survey of ‘‘peripheral’’ European languages

The situation in the modern Finnic, Slavic, Baltic, and Celtic languages,

and in Basque, tends to be portrayed as one where there is essentially no

possessive perfect. Table 3 summarizes this situation with reference to

the stages distinguished above. In spite of all the research that has been

142 Bernd Heine

carried out on the possessive perfect, the situation in many Slavic lan-

guages is still far from clear, especially with reference to which stage a

given construction has reached; we have come across quite a number of

controversial classifications on this issue, and the following generalizations

therefore have to be taken with care.

Table 3. Stages of possessive perfects in ‘‘peripheral’’ European languages (mainsource: Heine and Kuteva 2006, Section 4.4).

Stage

Language Family 0 1 2 3

Finnish Finnic þLithuanian Baltic þStandard Russian Slavic þWelsh Celtic þIrish Celtic þ þPolish Slavic þ þUkrainian (dial.) Slavic þ þBelorussian (dial.) Slavic þ þCzech Slavic þ þSlovak Slavic þ þUpper Sorbian Slavic þ þSlovenian Slavic þ þSerbian Slavic þ þCroatian Slavic þ þBulgarian Slavic þ þBreton Celtic þ þ þSouthern Thracian Bulgarian Slavic þ þ þNorth Russian Slavic þ þ þEstonian Finnic þ þ þSouthwestern Macedonian Slavic þ þ þ þ


Note that the structure of the possessive perfect is not the same across

all the languages. In the Romance and Gemanic languages, predicative

possession is built on what is called in Heine (1997a) the action schema

[X has Y], relying on a more or less transitive ‘have’-verb. Accordingly,

the possessive perfect also has some features of a transitive structure,

where for example the agent is encoded as the subject of the clause. In

some other languages, di¤erent conceptual schemas have been employed.

Thus in the Celtic languages it was the goal schema [Y is to X] and in

North Russian and Estonian the location schema [Y is at X] that were re-

cruited, with the e¤ect that the resulting morphosyntactic structures of the

perfect in these languages are strikingly di¤erent from those of Romance

or Germanic languages, in that the agent is encoded as a locative argu-

ment rather than as the subject of the clause. The following example

from Estonian may illustrate this situation (for another example from

North Russian, see Heine and Kuteva 2004).

In the location schema of the Balto-Finnic language Estonian, the pos-

sessor is expressed as a locative complement marked with the adessive case

(ade) and placed typically clause-initially; nevertheless, it has some prop-

erties of a subject (Erelt and Metslang 2006). The possessee on the other

hand is marked as the subject which controls agreement. Thus, the posses-

sive stage 0, illustrated in (10a), can be glossed literally as ‘a new car is

at me.’ The patient may take a past passive participle verb (ppp), andthe construction expresses a resultant state where the ‘‘possessor’’ can be

understood to be either a possessor (i) or an agent (ii): the possessor is

the owner of the patient referent or the person a¤ected by the resulting

state, cf. (10b).

In other uses, this construction can only be interpreted meaningfully as

a stage one perfect, especially when the formal subject is suppressed, as in

(10c). This marks the transition to a stage two perfect, where the verb

marked with the ppp is intransitive, as in (10d). But Estonian does not

appear to have developed a stage three perfect, where the construction

is used with the inanimate locative participant. This example may show

that the absence of a ‘have’-verb was apparently no obstacle for Estonian

speakers to develop a possessive perfect: they simply grammaticalized

their location-based possessive construction into a perfect.

(10) Estonian (Lindstrom and Tragel 2007)

a. Mu-l on uus auto.

i-ade be.3.sg new car

Stage 0

‘I have a new car.’

144 Bernd Heine

b. Mu-l on auto pestud.

i-ade be.3.sg car wash.ppp

i. ‘My car is washed.’

ii. ‘I have washed the/my car.’

c. Mu-l on (sook) soodud.

i-ade be.3.sg dinner eat.pppStage 1

‘I have eaten (my dinner).’

d. Mu-l on magatud.

i-ade be.3.sg sleep.pppStage 2

‘I have slept.’

The reader is referred to Heine and Kuteva (2006) and Kuteva and Heine

(2006) for exemplification of the stages presented in Table 3. This table is

meant to show three conclusions. First, it is most of all those ‘‘peripheral’’

languages with a history of intense contact with Germanic or Romance

languages that have created a more advanced possessive perfect, such as

Breton with French, Estonian with German, and North Russian pre-

sumably with Scandinavian languages. Second, with the exception of the

southwestern dialects of Macedonian,14 none of these languages has devel-

oped a stage three perfect as it is generally found in the Romance and

Germanic languages. This is in fact to be expected since replicated cate-

gories tend to be less grammaticalized than the categories that provided

the model (see Section 2). And third, and this is again most relevant for

the purposes of the present article, the replication of possessive perfects

followed the same sequence of stages as we observed in the case of articles,

allowing for implicational predications of the form: If a language has

reached stage X then it has also reached all preceding stages. The fact

that there is no language that has, say, a stage three perfect but not a stage

one perfect suggests that diachronically the sequence of grammaticaliza-

tion was stage 0 > 1 > 2 > 3.

The observation that we made in Section 2 on articles is thus confirmed

by what we find in the replication of possessive perfects: Speakers do not

simply copy a polysemy pattern but rather choose a more complex solu-

tion by grammaticalizing the model category in a step-by-step procedure.

14. Southwestern Macedonian overlaps with Standard Macedonian since thelatter is based on western dialects. Note that Macedonian shows an arealpatterning of stages, ranging from stage three in the southwest to stage onein the northeast (see Friedman 1976).


3.3. Advanced grammaticalization

When dealing with definite articles we saw in Section 2.2 that a grammat-

ical category that is fairly well established can still be further grammatical-

ized as a result of language contact, being extended to new contexts. We

will now look at another example to show that this applies more generally

to contact-induced change. The situation we are concerned with is contact

between German and English (see Heine and Kuteva 2006; Section 4.4.3).

Both German and English have a well-established stage three posses-

sive perfect, but there is a di¤erence: While the English one is highly gram-

maticalized, being used with transitive and intransitive verbs, the German

possessive perfect is much less so, showing remarkable contextual con-

straints in that it is largely restricted to transitive verbs. For example,

with intransitive verbs such as geschehen ‘to happen,’ it may not be used;

instead, the ‘be’-perfect must be used, cf. (11). As a result of their contact

with English, speakers of Pennsylvania German have extended the use of

the possessive perfect at the expense of the ‘be’-perfect; the former is now

used with all transitive and most intransitive verbs, as it is in English. A

mechanism that appears to have contributed to this process of context

extension is that speakers of Pennsylvania German tend to equate their

verbs with corresponding English verbs and to use the possessive perfect

whenever the latter is required by the relevant English verb. For example,

the intransitive verb form geschehne ‘happened’ takes the possessive perfect

since the corresponding English verb form happened does so too, cf. (12).

(11) High German

Was ist geschehen?

what is happened

‘What has happened?’

(12) Pennsylvania German (Enninger 1980: 344)

Nau hoeret moll ihr liewe Leute, was geschehne hott zu derre Zeit.

now listen once you dear people what happened has at that time

‘Now listen, dear people, what has happened at that time.’

That there is in fact a unidirectional process of extension of the possessive

perfect from intransitive to transitive verbs and hence towards a general-

ization of this aspect category (at the expense of the older ‘be’-perfect)

has been observed in a number of situations where German is in contact

with English as the dominant language. Such situations include the Sauk

County of Wisconsin in the USA and Australia: in both situations, the

146 Bernd Heine

German possessive perfect is reported to have been generalized on the

model of English, to the extent that the competing ‘be’-perfect was given

up (Eichho¤ 1971: 53; Clyne 1972: 76).

To conclude, grammaticalization is a fairly open-ended process, and

the e¤ect of language contact can be that well-established functional cate-

gories, like the definite article in English or the possessive perfect in German,

are pushed further along the cline of grammatical evolution.

4. The auxiliation of ‘threaten’-verbs

In many languages there are words that behave both like lexical verbs and

like functional categories expressing distinctions of tense, aspect, modality,

and so on. The grammatical status of such words is frequently controver-

sial; while some authors treat them as belonging to one and the same gram-

matical category, others assign them to di¤erent categories. The present sec-

tion is concerned with such a case of ‘‘doublets,’’ a set of four constructions

associated with verbs for ‘threaten’ in European languages. The discussion

below is based on Heine and Miyashita (2008); the following example of

the Portuguese verb ameacar ‘to threaten’ illustrates these constructions,

which we will refer to as C1, C2, C3, and C4.

(13) Portuguese (Lima 2006)

a. seu irmao ameacava destruir os planos de seus sobrinhos.

her brother threatened destroy the plans of her nephews

C1

‘Her brother threatened to destroy the plans of her nephews.’

b. A firma ameaca falencia.

the firm threatens bankruptcy

C2

‘The company is threatened by bankruptcy.’

c. uma [. . .] melodia de amor [. . .] ameacava nao acabar

a melody of love threatened never to.finish

C3

‘A melody of love ‘‘threatened’’ to never end.’

d. um gordo e rubicundo merceeiro [. . .] ameacava estalar

a fat and reddish merchant threatened to.tear

C4

todas as costuras da farda.

all the seams of costume

‘A fat, reddish trader was about to burst the seams of his attire.’


In the C1 construction of (13a), ameacar functions as a lexical verb whose

meaning can be paraphrased as in (14a), while in all remaining construc-

tions there is what we will call functional ameacar. The meaning of the latter,

roughly paraphrased in (14b), has been described variously as an epistemic,

subjective, modal, semi-modal, evidential, or temporal-aspectual auxiliary.

C2 di¤ers from C1 in having an inanimate rather than a human subject,

and C4 di¤ers from C3 in having a human rather than an inanimate subject.

While C1 and C2 are lexical constructions, C3 and C4 can be described as

‘‘subject-to-subject raising’’ constructions; Table 4 summarizes the main

grammatical properties of the four constructions.

(14) A paraphrasis of the meaning of lexical (14a) and functional

‘threaten’ (14b)

a. ‘Someone points out that s/he intends to do something that is

undesirable to someone else.’

b. ‘Something undesirable is about to happen.’

Portuguese is Europe’s most westerly language but, as Table 5 shows,

roughly the same situation is found in other languages across Europe,

and it is not restricted to Indo-European languages: it also includes Finno-

Ugric languages such Hungarian and Estonian. Di¤erences among these

languages relate in particular to three points. First, the degree of produc-

tivity di¤ers among the languages concerned. While C1 is fully productive

in all languages, the remaining constructions may di¤er in the extent to

which they can be used productively. On the one hand there are languages

such as Dutch, German, Spanish, or Portuguese, where all constructions

are fully productive; on the other there are also languages where one of

the constructions is severely restricted in its occurrence, to the extent that

it has more in common with idiomatic expressions than with regularly used

Table 4. Distinguishing properties of the four ‘threaten’ constructions.

Construction The subjectreferent ishuman

threaten takesa subjectargument

threaten expressesa speech act

Meaning ofthreaten

C1 þ þ þ Lexical

C2 � þ � Functional

C3 � � � Functional

C4 þ � � Functional

148 Bernd Heine

grammatical constructions. Second, the meaning of functional ‘threaten’ is

not exactly the same across languages; in some languages it is more strongly

associated with epistemic modality, while in others it is the notion of a

proximative aspect (‘be on the verge of doing X’) or of evidentiality that

is more pronounced. Third, the morphosyntactic constructions are also

not really identical in the languages concerned. While most of the lan-

guages present the complement of the ‘threaten’-verb in the C3 and C4

constructions as an infinitival phrase, as can be seen in the Portuguese

example of (13), some languages use a finite complement clause instead,

as illustrated with the following examples from Hungarian, where there is

a complementizer (hogy) and a finite verb in the complement clause.

(15) Hungarian (Ferenc Horcher, personal communication)

a. A fal azzal fenyegetett, hogy ledoo�l.the wall with.that threatened that it.falls

C3

‘The wall threatened collapsing.’

b. Fenyegeto� volt, hogy M ¨aria el ¨ajul.threatening it.was that Mary s/he.lose.consciousness

C4

‘Mary threatened fainting.’

And finally, not all languages distinguish all constructions. More generally,

it is the most easterly European languages that show the smallest range of

constructions; thus, in Russian, Bulgarian, and Greek, only two of the

four constructions are found (cf. the overview in Table 5).

As shown in Heine and Miyashita (2008), the presence of these con-

structions across Europe must be the result of language contact, for sev-

eral reasons. First, we are not aware of any language outside Europe that

exhibits the same range of constructions. Second, genetic relationship can

be ruled out as a possible explanation: neither Proto-Romance, Proto-

Germanic, nor any other early European language distinguished these

constructions, but at the same time the constructions are found in lan-

guage families in Europe that are as far as we know genetically unrelated

(Indo-European and Finno-Ugric). And third, the rise and development of

these constructions took place roughly around the same general period in

the history of European languages (see below).

Our knowledge of the diachronic processes leading to the presence of

this ‘‘polysemy’’ pattern in European languages, while limited, still allows

for a couple of cross-linguistic generalizations. The first concerns chronology:

there are a few historical data that make it possible to date the changes


that are responsible for the structural diversity characterizing the ‘threaten’-

constructions in the modern European languages. These data are summar-

ized in Table 6 (for more details, see Heine and Miyashita 2008). What

they suggest is that the lexical C1 construction was the first to exist; except

for French, it was essentially the only construction to be found in Euro-

pean languages prior to 1500. C2 appears to have been next to arise, to

be followed by C3 and, from the eighteenth century onward, by C4. Thus,

Table 5. Degree of grammaticalization of ‘threaten’-constructions in Europeanstandard languages (Parentheses ¼ use of the construction is either mar-ginally possible or is restricted to certain contexts).

Language C1 C2 C3 C4

Portuguese þ þ þ þSpanish þ þ þ þFrench þ þ þ (þ)

Italian þ (þ) þ �Friulian þ þ þ �Romanian þ þ (þ) �English þ (þ) þ þDutch þ þ þ þGerman þ þ þ þDanish þ þ þ �Norwegian þ þ þ �Swedish þ þ þ �Estonian þ þ þ �Serbian þ þ (þ) �Bulgarian þ þ � �Slovak þ þ þ þRussian þ þ � �Greek þ þ � �Hungarian þ þ þ þ

150 Bernd Heine

there is a diachronic sequence C1 > C2 > C3 > C4 which is largely in

accordance with what grammaticalization theory would have predicted.15

This chronology furthermore suggests that the grammaticalization of

‘threaten’-constructions must have originated in French, subsequently being

replicated in other languages of western Europe, where it is attested only

several centuries later.16 The di¤usion of this grammaticalization process

in central and eastern Europe appears to be a more recent development,

being weakest in eastern Europe, where the process has not proceeded

beyond the C2 construction. As we observed already in Section 3, neither

genetic nor typological factors constituted any significant boundary in this

di¤usion process, which a¤ected Indo-European languages in much the

same way as their Finno-Ugric neighbors Hungarian and Estonian, both

sharing a long history of intense contact with German (cf. Table 5).

Table 6. A chronological overview of first attestations of stages in the grammatical-ization of ‘threaten’-constructions in European languages.

Con-struction

Frenchmenacer

Spanishamenacar

Germandrohen

Dutchdreigen

Englishthreaten

C1 Before 1100 Before 1500 Before 1500 Before 1500 Before 1500

C2 1200 1495 1560 1627

C3 1200 1494 1738 1566 1780

C4 1751 19th century ca. 1800

15. As pointed out in Heine and Miyashita (2008), the reconstruction based ongrammaticalization theory using synchronic evidence yields the developmentC1 > C2 > C3/C4. This reconstruction is less specific than the one basedon historical records since it does not determine whether C3 preceded orfollowed C4.

16. This hypothesis can be reconciled with extra-linguistic observations on Euro-pean history: Paris was in a culturally and intellectually privileged situationaround the time between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries, being a cen-ter of cultural di¤usion across much of Europe. Accordingly, there is reasonto assume that the development from lexical to functional ‘threaten’ startedout in northern France as part of a more general cultural di¤usion processa¤ecting a larger part of Europe.


The second kind of generalization concerns the grammaticalization pro-

cess that gave rise to the ‘threaten’-constructions. This process proceeded

gradually from lexical to grammatical to even more grammatical structures

along the following stages (we will return to this case in Section 5).

C1: At the beginning there was only a lexical construction which consisted of‘threaten’ as a control verb taking an agentive subject acting intentionally.

C2: The transition was made possible when the lexical C1 construction wasallowed to take inanimate subjects. Inanimate subjects are incompatiblewith agents acting intentionally and with the semantics and valency of‘threaten.’ While in the new construction ‘threaten’ still had the morphosyn-tactic format of a clausal predicate, its lexical semantics was desemanticized,giving way to that of the functional notion ‘something undesirable is aboutto happen’ (14b).

C3: The presence of inanimate subjects and a verb expressing a grammaticalfunction paved the way for the rise of the auxiliary-like ‘‘raising’’ construc-tion, with ‘threaten’ increasingly acquiring the properties of an auxiliaryand an infinitival complement assuming the role of the new main verb.17

C4: Finally, the end-point was reached when C3 was no longer restricted toinanimate subjects but could also take human subjects; accordingly, theemerging C4 construction is characterized by lack of the animacy constraint.

This example of ‘threaten’-constructions confirms what we saw in the pre-

ceding Sections 2 and 3. First, contact-induced grammatical replication

does not take place overnight; rather, it may require centuries to be

accomplished. Second, it is clearly structured, proceeding gradually from

less grammatical to more grammatical structures. Accordingly, we are deal-

ing once more with a grammaticalization scale of the kind we observed in

the preceding sections. Third, this example also shows that contact-induced

grammatical change has both a language-internal and an external com-

ponent. The change is internal since it is in accordance with universal

principles of grammaticalization (Heine, Claudi, and Hunnemeyer 1991;

Hopper and Traugott 2003) and, hence, could as well have happened

without language contact; as the rich literature on grammaticalization

shows, similar changes from lexical verb to auxiliary structure without

involving language contact are well documented (see for example Bybee,

17. In languages such as Slovak and Hungarian this was not a verbal infinitivecomplement but rather a finite complement clause (see Heine and Miyashita2008).

152 Bernd Heine

Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994). The external component relates to the fact

that the process was propelled by language contact: it is unlikely that a

process that took place in a number of European languages about the

same time in Europe’s history, but as far as we know nowhere else in the

world, could be accounted for in any way other than in terms of language

contact.

And finally, this example lends further support to the conclusion that

polysemy copying is not the mechanism, or the only possible mechanism,

leading to grammatical replication. As Table 6 shows, there is once more

an implicational scale where presence of construction X (for example, C4)

implies that all preceding constructions (C1, C2, and C3) have existed in

the language concerned. Accordingly, grammatical replication leading to

the rise of ‘threaten’-constructions in many European languages can

hardly be reduced to one where speakers in language contact simply repli-

cated a polysemy pattern of another language; rather, these speakers were

constrained by what is a possible replication and what is not. For exam-

ple, developing a C3 construction when a C2 construction already exists

is a possible contact-induced change, while developing a C2 construction

out of a C3 construction does not seem to be a linguistic change that can

occur in language contact.

5. Accounting for the sequencing of stages

Perhaps the most surprising observation made in the preceding paragraphs

was that there are significant constraints characterizing sequences of devel-

opment. This raises three questions:

(a) Why did speakers replicate one stage after the other rather than all in

one go?

(b) Why did these speakers not follow any other conceivable order in

replication?

(c) Is this behavior motivated by the situation that speakers of the replica

languages found in the respective model languages?

That question (c) must be answered in the negative is suggested by the

fact that in most, if not all, of the cases examined above, speakers of the

replica languages were exposed to the full range of stages and construc-

tions to be found in the model languages. For example, speakers of Upper

Sorbian and Molisean must have been familiar with all the stages of articles

in German and Italian respectively; nevertheless, they did not grammatical-

ize the entire range of stages (see Section 2). In a similar fashion, Breton


speakers were familiar with the whole range of stages of the French pos-

sessive perfect, and Estonian speakers with that of German; nevertheless,

they did not carry grammaticalization to completion (Section 3). Accord-

ingly, there is reason to argue that the structure of the model languages

cannot be held responsible for the sequencing of stages nor for the fact

that the replica categories are less grammaticalized than the corresponding

model categories.

There is a general answer to questions (a) and (b). The particular sequenc-

ing of stages in the development of replica categories is exactly as gramma-

ticalization theory would predict it, proceeding from lexical to grammatical

and from grammatical to even more grammatical constructions. But why

should this be so? Unfortunately, we still know too little about the histor-

ical and sociolinguistic processes concerned to give a satisfactory answer.

But among the case studies discussed above there is one that may shed

some light on the kind of process concerned. We argued in Section 4 that

the grammaticalization of ‘threaten’-verbs to a modal-aspectual auxiliary

in the languages of Europe is the result of a historical process of contact-

induced linguistic change. As the chronology of first attestations in Table

6 suggests, this process can be assumed to have started in medieval

France, subsequently di¤using across Europe (see Heine and Miyashita

2008 for more details). Accordingly, in languages such as Portuguese,

German, or Hungarian the process must have been due to grammatical

replication on the model of French.

In the languages other than French, up until the end of the fifteenth

century there was only a lexical construction (C1) which consisted of

‘threaten’ as a control verb taking an agentive subject acting intentionally.

What was replicated subsequently was not really a new construction, C2,

but rather the use of the lexical construction C1 with inanimate subject

referents that were presented metaphorically as agents. Thus, in Martin

Luther’s writings in the early sixteenth century, common subject referents

in Early New High German were abstract concepts like himmel ‘heaven,’

sunde ‘sin,’ urteil ‘judgment’ or gesetz ‘law.’ The following example illus-

trates the new pattern arising.

(16) Early New High German (Hans Sachs, 1494–1576)

dergleichen auch ohn-zahlbar sorgen, troen im abendt

such also countless sorrows threaten him evening

und den morgen.

and the morning

‘Countless sorrows of this kind are threatening him evening and

morning.’

154 Bernd Heine

Since inanimate subjects are incompatible with agents acting intentionally

and with the semantics and the valency of ‘threaten,’ the lexical meaning

(14a) of ‘threaten’ was desemanticized, giving rise to the aspectual-modal

meaning sketched in (14b). This new discourse pattern gained in frequency

of use and gradually turned into a new construction, that is, the C2 con-

struction as depicted in Table 4.

The next major innovation occurred in the late seventeenth century,

when the German C2 construction was no longer restricted to nominal com-

plements but could now be used with infinitival complements, as in (17).

(17) New High German

(Johann Heinrich Merck, 1741–1791; Briefsammlung 2, 45)

. . . die brust droht zu zerspringen.

the breast threatened to burst

‘. . . the breast threatened to burst.’

In the same way as the infinitival complement gradually assumed the func-

tion of the main verb, the ‘threaten’-verb acquired properties of an auxil-

iary, and the end product of this process was the grammatical construction

C3, characterized by an inanimate subject referent and an infinitival main

verb. The final major change occurred in the second half of the eighteenth

century, when speakers gave up the restriction of taking only inanimate

subjects, thereby making it possible to also have human subject referents,

as in (18) – thereby giving rise to the C4 construction.

(18) New High German

(Goethe, 1749–1832, Hermann und Dorothea, 40, 320)

es knackte der fuss, sie drohte zu fallen, . . .

it cracked the foot she threatened to fall

‘Her foot cracked, she was about to fall down. . . .’

The main changes portrayed in this brief sketch of the development of

German drohen ‘threaten’ suggest that first, rather than constructions or

stages, speakers appear to be replicating specific semantic and morpho-

syntactic properties in certain contexts that they observe in the model

language. The resulting sequence of stages thus can be interpreted most

appropriately as an epiphenomenal product of discourse manipulation.

And second, the changes that we observed are not independent of one

another; rather, one builds on the other in the rise of new constructions:

The development from human to inanimate subjects is a prerequisite for

C2, that from nominal to infinitival complements for C3, and the deseman-

ticization of subjects for C4.


These observations may have provided a basis for understanding why

grammatical replication in language contact is constrained in the way we

described it in the preceding sections, proceeding from one stage to another

rather than in one go and showing the kind of directionality it does, but

more data are required on this issue.

6. Conclusions

In the preceding sections we were restricted to a limited spectrum of ques-

tions that need to be addressed in understanding grammatical replication.

We ignored in particular the question of what exactly speakers take as

their model of transfer. Do they replicate the process of grammaticaliza-

tion that took place earlier in the model language or do they create a new

category in the replica language on the basis of universal principles of

grammaticalization? In other words, do they use replica or ordinary gram-

maticalization (Heine and Kuteva 2005)? All evidence available suggests

that, at least in the cases examined in this article, it is invariably the latter

that must have been involved. What speakers have at their disposal is as a

rule spoken or written discourse in the model language which provides

them with information on the structures concerned. But in designing the

replica categories they are constrained by what already exists in the replica

language. For example, they will not replicate a stage three structure

unless there already exists a stage two structure in the replica language;

in other words, they will ignore more advanced stages of grammaticaliza-

tion, even though the model language provides them with su‰cient infor-

mation on the presence of such advanced stages. That such information

in fact exists is hardly open to question, considering that in the cases

that we were concerned with, such as contact between Upper Sorbian

and German, or Molisean and Italian, there has been intense linguistic

interaction for centuries. But what remains unclear, in spite of all the work

that has been done by students of grammaticalization, is what exactly is

responsible for the existence of such constraints; more research is required

on this issue.

The examples discussed in this article lend support to what has been

observed in other cases where we have comparative data on contact-

induced grammatical change. Rather than replicating a grammatical cate-

gory in toto, speakers start out with the replication of a use pattern charac-

terizing the initial stages of grammaticalization, and it requires a situation

of long and intense contact for the replica category to attain the same

156 Bernd Heine

degree of grammaticalization as the corresponding category of the model

language. This constraint on contact-induced grammatical replication sug-

gests that, at least in cases such as the ones discussed in this article, there

really is no polysemy copying; rather, what language contact triggers is a

gradual process from less to increasingly more grammatical structure, a

process that occasionally ends up in a fully equivalent replica category,

the case of indefinite articles in Upper Sorbian and Molisean coming close

to being complete replicas of their respective German and Italian models.

In most of the cases that have been reported on grammatical replication,

however, the process does not run its full course; rather, the replica cate-

gories remain clearly less grammaticalized than the corresponding model

categories. In other words, they are not really complete replicas of their

models.

Another problem with the term ‘‘polysemy copying,’’ relating to direc-

tionality in contact-induced grammatical change, was pointed out in the

introductory Section 1. While being a complex process, grammatical repli-

cation exhibits one important constraint: it is essentially unidirectional.

Accordingly, we find comitative markers assuming the function of instru-

mental markers, demonstratives developing into definite articles, numerals

for ‘one’ into indefinite articles, possessive constructions giving rise to

verbal aspect categories, or lexical verbs turning into auxiliaries, but we

will not expect to find developments in the opposite direction, where for

example an article develops into a demonstrative or numeral, or an auxil-

iary into a lexical verb (see Heine and Kuteva 2003, 2005, 2006 for more

examples). This generalization about contact-induced grammatical change

is hard to reconcile with the view that speakers in language contact simply

copy a grammatical polysemy pattern.

It may well be that the term ‘‘polysemy copying’’ has some relevance in

cases where replication is restricted to one single grammatical property,

for example when a comitative marker assumes an instrumental function,

as we saw in Section 1. But even such a seemingly simple change actually

involves a more complex process: it entails that speakers, on the model of

some other language M, extend an existing use pattern in language R to a

new range of contexts where an interpretation in terms of a comitative

notion does not really make sense, including contexts where the partici-

pant introduced by the comitative marker is more reasonably interpreted

as an instrument rather than a companion. It furthermore entails that,

over time, this new context extension acquires some stability of use and

eventually comes to be accepted by some community of R speakers, first

as a use pattern and eventually perhaps as a new construction.


To conclude: polysemy copying does exist, as we saw in Section 1,

being based on a formula of equivalence like (19), where Mx stands for a

category (or structure) of the model language and Rx for a corresponding

category of the replica language. Compared to that, grammatical replica-

tion presents a more complex structure, as depicted in (20), where the

equivalent of Mx is not a category in the replica language but rather a

process from a non-equivalent category Ry to an equivalent category Rx.

(19) Mx ¼ Rx

(20) Mx ¼ [Ry > Rx]

Unlike grammatical replication, polysemy copying can be described as an

abrupt rather than a gradual process (cf. Matras and Sakel 2007), and it

tends to be associated with lexical rather than with grammatical replica-

tion. Thus, useful as it is for describing lexical replication, the notion of

polysemy copying does not contribute much to understanding what gram-

matical replication is about.

Abbreviations

ade Adessive case

ppp Past passive participle

sg Singular

1, 2, 3 First, second, third person

References

Abraham, W. (ed.). 2004. Focus on Germanic Typology (Studia Typologica, Beihefte

zu Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung [STUF] 6). Berlin: Akademie-

Verlag.

Aikhenvald, A. Y. 1996. Areal di¤usion in northwest Amazonia: the case of

Tariana. Anthropological Linguistics 38: 73–116.

Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2002. Language Contact in Amazonia. New York: Oxford Uni-

versity Press.

Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2003a. Mechanisms of change in areal di¤usion: new morphol-

ogy and language contact. Journal of Linguistics 39: 1–29.

Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2003b. Multilingualism and ethnic stereotypes: the Tariana of

northwest Amazonia. Language in Society 32: 1–21.

158 Bernd Heine

Aikhenvald, A. Y. and Dixon, R. M. W. (eds). 2001. Areal Di¤usion and Genetic

Inheritance: Problems in Comparative Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Alanne, E. 1972. Zur Rolle der syntaktischen Interferenz der verwandten und

unverwandten Sprachen. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 73: 568–574.

Aranovich, R. (ed.). 2007. Split Auxiliary Systems: a Cross-linguistic Perspective.

(Typological Studies in Language, 69) Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Backus, A. 2005. Codeswitching and language change: one thing leads to another?

International Journal of Bilingualism 9.3–4: 307–340.

Blake, B. J. and Burridge, K. (eds). 2003. Historical linguistics 2001: selected

papers from the 15th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Mel-

bourne, 13–17 August 2001. (Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of

Linguistic Science, 237) Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Boeder, W., Schroeder, C., Wagner, K. H., and Wildgen, W. (eds). 1998. Sprache

in Raum und Zeit: In memoriam Johannes Bechert. Volume 2. Beitrage zur em-

pirischen Sprachwissenschaft. Tubingen: Gunter Narr.

Boretzky, N., Enninger, W., and Stolz.T. (eds). 1989. Beitrage zum 5. Essener

Kolloquium uber ‘‘Grammatikalisierung: Naturlichkeit und Systemokonomie’’

Volume 1. (Essener Beitrage zur Sprachwandelforschung, 7) Bochum: Brock-

meyer.

Breu, W. (ed.). 1990a. Slavistische Linguistik 1989. Munich: Sagner.

Breu, W. 1990b. Sprache und Sprachverhalten in den slavischen Dorfern des Molise

(Suditalien). In Slavistische Linguistik 1989. W. Breu (ed.), 35–65. Munich:

Sagner.

Breu, W. 1992. Das italokroatische Verbsystem zwischen slavischem Erbe und

kontaktbedingter Entwicklung. In Slavistische Linguistik 1991, T. Reuther (ed.),

93–122. Munich: Sagner.

Breu, W. 1994. Der Faktor Sprachkontakt in einer dynamischen Typologie des

Slavischen. In Slavistische Linguistik 1993, H. R. Mehlig (ed.), 41–64. Munchen.

Breu, W. 1996. Uberlegungen zu einer Klassifizierung des grammatischen Wandels

im Sprachkontakt (am Beispiel slavischer Kontaktfalle). Sprachtypologie und

Universalien-forschung 49.1: 21–38.

Breu, W. 1998. Romanisches Adstrat im Moliseslavischen. Die Welt der Slaven 43:

339–354.

Breu, W. 1999. Die Komparation im Moliseslavischen. In Des racines et des ailes:

theories, modeles, experiences en linguistique et en didactique, R. Metrich et al.

(eds), 37–63. Nancy: A.N.C.A.

Breu, W. 2003a. Der indefinite Artikel in slavischen Mikrosprachen: Grammatika-

lisierung im totalen Sprachkontakt. In Slavistische Linguistik 2001, H. Kuße

(ed.), 27–68. Munich: Sagner.

Breu, W. 2003b. Bilingualism and linguistic interference in the Slavic-Romance

contact area of Molise (Southern Italy). In Words in Time: Diachronic Semantics

from Di¤erent Points of View, R. Eckardt et al. (eds), 351–373. Berlin: Mouton

de Gruyter.


Breu, W. 2003c. Impersonales Neutrum im Moliseslavischen. In Rusistika, Slavistika,

Lingvistika: Festschrift fur Werner Lehfeldt, S. Kempgen et al. (eds), 57–71.

Munich: Sagner.

Breu, W. 2004. Der definite Artikel in der obersorbischen Umgangssprache. In

Slavistische Linguistik 2002, M. Krause and C. Sappok (eds), 9–57. Munich:

Sagner.

Bybee, J. L., Perkins, R. D., and Pagliuca, W. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar:

Tense, Aspect and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago: University

of Chicago Press.

Cennamo, M. 2005. The rise and development of analytic perfects in Italo-Romance.

Paper presented at the Conference on Linguistic Theory and Grammatical

Change, Rosendal (Norway), 31 May 31–4 June, 2005.

Chikovani, G. 2005. Linguistic contacts in Central Asia. In Linguistic Convergence

and Areal Di¤usion: Case Studies from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic, E. Csato

et al. (eds), 127–32. London/New York: Routledge Curzon.

Clyne, M. 1972. Perspectives on Language Contact Based on a Study of German in

Australia. New York: W. S. Heinman.

Comrie, B. and Corbett, G. G. (eds). 1993. The Slavonic Languages. London/New

York: Routledge.

Csato, E.A., Isaksson, B. and Jahani, C. (eds). 2005. Linguistic Convergence and

Areal Di¤usion: Case Studies from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic. London/New

York: Routledge Curzon.

Danchev, A. 1989. Language change typology and adjectival comparison in con-

tact situations. Folia Linguistica Historica 9.2: 161–174.

Dorian, N. 1994. Varieties and variation in a very small place: social homogeneity,

prestige norms, and linguistic variation. Language 70: 631–696.

Drinka, B. 2003a. Areal factors in the development of the European periphrastic

perfect. Word 54.1: 1–38.

Drinka, B. 2003b. The formation of periphrastic perfects and passives in Europe:

an areal approach. In Historical linguistics 2001: selected papers from the 15th

International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Melbourne, 13–17 August

2001, B. J. Blake and K. Burridge (eds), 105–128. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Drinka, B. 2004. Prateritumschwund: evidence for areal di¤usion. In Focus on

Germanic Typology, W. Abraham (ed.), 211–240. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.

Drinka, B. 2007. The development of the HAVE perfect: mutual influences of

Greek and Latin. In Split Auxiliary Systems: a Cross-linguistic Perspective, R.

Aranovich (ed.), 101–121. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Durie, M. and Ross. M. (eds). 1996. The Comparative Method Reviewed: Regularity

and Irregularity in Language Change. New York: Oxford University Press.

Dutkova-Cope, L. 2001. The language of Czech Moravians in Texas: Do you

know what Parknu Karu u Hauza means? Southwest Journal of Linguistics 20:

51–84.

Eckardt, R., von Heusinger. K., and Schwarze. C. (eds). 2003. Words in Time:

Diachronic Semantics from Di¤erent Points of View. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

160 Bernd Heine

Eichho¤, J. 1971. German in Wisconsin. In The German Language in America: a

Symposium, G. G. Gilbert (ed.), 43–57. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Enninger, W. 1980. Syntactic convergence in a stable triglossia plus trilingualism

situation in Kent County, Delaware, U.S.A. In Sprachkontakt und Sprachkon-

flikt, P. H. Nelde (ed.), 343–350. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner.

Erelt, M. and Metslang, H. 2006. Estonian clause patterns – from Finno-Ugric to

Standard Average European. Linguistica Uralica 4: 254–266.

Filppula, M. 2003. The quest for the most ‘‘parsimonious’’ explanations: endogeny

vs. contact revisited. In Motives for Language Change, R. Hickey (ed.), 161–

173. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Flores Farfan, J. A. 2004. Notes on Nahuatl typological change. Sprachtypologie

und Universalienforschung 57: 85–97.

Fortescue, M. 1993. Eskimo word order variation and its contact-induced pertur-

bation. Journal of Linguistics 29: 267–289.

Friedman, V. A. 1976. Dialectal synchrony and diachronic syntax: the Macedonian

perfect. Chicago Linguistic Society, Papers from the Parasession on Diachronic

Syntax, 96–104.

Gast, V. and van der Auwera, J. 2006. What is ‘contact-induced grammaticaliza-

tion’? evidence from Mayan and Mixe-Zoquean languages. Typescript, Univer-

sity of Antwerp.

Gilbert, G. G. (ed.). 1971. The German Language in America: a Symposium. Austin:

University of Texas Press.

Gomez-Imbert, E. 1996. When animals become ‘‘rounded’’ and ‘‘feminine’’: con-

ceptual categories and linguistic classification in a multilingual setting. In

Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, J. Gumperz and S. Levinson (eds), 438–469.


Greenberg, J. H. 1978a. How does a language acquire gender markers? In Univer-

sals of Human Language, J. H. Greenberg et al. (eds), 47–82. Stanford: Stan-

ford University Press.

Greenberg, J. H., Ferguson, C. A., and Moravcsik. E. (eds). 1978. Universals of

Human Language. Volume 3: Word Structure. Stanford: Stanford University

Press.

Gumperz, J. and Levinson. S. (eds). 1996. Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. (Studies

in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language 17.). Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press.

Haase, M. 1997. Gascon et basque: bilinguisme et substrat. Sprachtypologie und

Universalienforschung 50.3: 189–228.

Haig, G. 2001. Linguistic di¤usion in present-day East Anatolia: from top to bottom.

In Areal Di¤usion and Genetic Inheritance: Problems in Comparative Linguistics,


versity Press.

Harris, A. C. and Campbell, L. 1995. Historical Syntax in Cross-linguistic Perspec-

tive. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Haspelmath, M. 1998. How young is Standard Average European? Language

Sciences 20.3: 271–287.

Haspelmath, M. 1999. Why is grammaticalization irreversible? Linguistics 37.6:

1043–1068.

Haspelmath, M. 2001. The European linguistic area: Standard Average European.

In Language Typology and Language Universals: an International Handbook,

M. Haspelmath et al. (eds), 1492–1510. New York: Walter de Gruyter.

Haspelmath, M., Konig, E., Oesterreicher, W., and Raible, W. (eds). 2001. Lan-

guage Typology and Language Universals: an International Handbook, Volume

2 (Handbucher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft 20.2), New York:

Walter de Gruyter.

Hawkins, J. 2004. E‰ciency and Complexity in Grammars. Oxford: Oxford Uni-

versity Press.

Heine, B. 1997a. Possession: Sources, Forces and Grammaticalization. Cambridge:


Heine, B. 1997b. Cognitive Foundations of Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Heine, B., Claudi, U., and Hunnemeyer, F. 1991. Grammaticalization: a Conceptual

Framework. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Heine, B. and Kuteva, T. 2002. World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. Cambridge:


Heine, B. and Kuteva, T. 2003. Contact-induced grammaticalization. Studies in

Language 27: 529–572.



Heine, B. and Kuteva, T. 2006. The Changing Languages of Europe. Oxford:


Heine, B. and Miyashita, H. 2008. Accounting for a functional category: German

drohen ‘to threaten’. Language Sciences 30: 53–101.

Hickey, R. (ed.). 2003. Motives for Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Hill, J. H. and Hill, K. C. 2004. Word order type change and the penetration of

Spanish de in modern Nahuatl. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 57:

23–48.

Hopper, P. J. and Traugott, E. C. 2003. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Hurch, B. 1989. Hispanisierung im Baskischen. In Beitrage zum 5. Essener Kollo-

quium uber ‘‘Grammatikalisierung: Naturlichkeit und Systemokonomie’’, N.

Boretzky et al. (eds), 11–35. Bochum: Brockmeyer.

Jastrow, O. 2005. Uzbekistan Arbic: A language created by Semitic-Iranian-

Turkic linguistic convergence. In Linguistic Convergence and Areal Di¤usion:

Case Studies from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic, E. A. Csato et al. (eds), 133–

139. London/New York: Routledge Curzon.

162 Bernd Heine

Johanson, L. 1992. Strukturelle Faktoren in turkischen Sprachkontakten. (Sitzungs-

berichte der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft an der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-

Universitat Frankfurt am Main, 29.5, 169–299.) Stuttgart: Franz Steiner.

Johanson, L. 2002. Structural Factors in Turkic Language Contacts. London:

Curzon.

Jones, M. C. 2002. Mette a haout dauve la grippe des Angllais: convergence on

the island of Guernsey. In Language Change: the Interplay of Internal, External

and Extra-linguistic Factors, M. C. Jones and E. Esch (eds), 143–168. Berlin:

Mouton de Gruyter.

Jones, M. C. and Esch. E. (eds). 2002. Language Change: the Interplay of Internal,

External and Extra-linguistic Factors. (Contributions to the Sociology of Lan-

guage, 86.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Kahr, J. C. 1976. The renewal of case morphology: sources and constraints. Work-

ing Papers on Language Universals (Stanford) 20: 107–151.

Karttunen, F. 1976. Uto-Aztecan and Spanish-type dependent clauses in Nahuatl.

(Papers from the Parasession on Diachronic Syntax.) Chicago Linguistic Society,

150–158.

Keesing, R. M. 1988. Melanesian Pidgin and the Oceanic substrate. Stanford:

Stanford University Press.

Keesing, R. M. 1991. Substrates, calquing and grammaticalization in Melanesian

Pidgin. In Approaches to Grammaticalization, E. C. Traugott and B. Heine

(eds), 315–342. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Kempgen, S., Schweier, U., and Berger, T. (eds). 2003. Rusistika, Slavistika, Ling-

vistika: Festschrift fur Werner Lehfeldt. (Die Welt der Slaven, 19.) Munich:

Sagner.

King, R. 2000. The Lexical Basis of Grammatical Borrowing: a Prince Edward

Island French case study. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Kiral, F. 2005. Modal constructions in Turkic of Iran. In Linguistic Convergence

and Areal Di¤usion: Case Studies from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic, E. A. Csato

et al. (eds), 285–293. London/New York: Routledge Curzon.

Krause, M. and Sappok, C. (eds). 2004. Slavistische Linguistik 2002. Munich:

Sagner.

Kroskrity, P. 1993 [1978]. Aspects of syntactic and semantic variation within the

Arizona Tewa speech community. Anthropological Linguistics 35: 250–273.

Kuße, H. (ed.). 2003. Slavistische Linguistik 2001. Munich: Sagner.

Kuteva, T. and Heine, B. 2004. On the possessive perfect in North Russian. Word

55.1: 37–71.

Lass, R. 1997. Historical Linguistics and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Leisio, L. 2000. The word order in genitive constructions in a diaspora Russian.

International Journal of Bilingualism 4: 301–325.

Leslau, W. 1945. The influence of Cushitic on the Semitic languages of Ethiopia.

A problem of substratum. Word 1.1: 59–82.


Leslau, W. 1952. The influence of Sidamo on the Ethiopic languages of Gurage.

Language 28.1: 63–81.

Li, C. N. 1983. Language contact in western China. Papers in East Asian Lan-

guages 1: 31–51.

Li, C. N. 1984. From verb-medial analytic language to verb-final synthetic lan-

guage: a case of typological change. Berkeley Linguistics Society 10: 307–323.

Lindstrom, L. and Tragel, I. 2007. Agent, patient and possessor in the Estonian

participle construction [ARGADE olema ‘be’ (P) VPAS-PST-PTCL ]. Paper presented

at the Spring School on Grammaticalization and Typology, Rakvere, Estonia,

21–24 March, 2007.

Matras, Y. 1998. Convergent development, grammaticalization, and the problem of

‘‘mutual isomorphism.’’ In Sprache in Raum und Zeit: In memoriam Johannes

Bechert. Volume 2. Beitrage zur empirischen Sprachwissenschaft, W. Boeder

et al. (eds), 89–103. Tubingen: Gunter Narr.

Matras, Y. and Sakel, J. 2007. Investigating the mechanisms of pattern replication

in language convergence. Studies in Language 31.4: 829–865.

Menz, A. 1999. Gagausische Syntax: eine Studie zum kontaktinduzierten Sprach-

wandel. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Metrich, R., Hudlett, A., and Luger, H. H. (eds). 1999. Des racines et des ailes:

theories, modeles, experiences en linguistique et en didactique. Nancy: A.N.C.A.

Miller, R. A. 1967. The Japanese Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Milroy, J. 2003. On the role of the speaker in language change. In Motives for

Language Change, R. Hickey (ed.), 143–157. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Milroy, L. and Milroy, J. 1985. Linguistic change, social network and speaker

innovation. Journal of Linguistics 21: 339–384.

Mougeon, R. and Beniak, E. 1991. Linguistic Consequences of Language Contact

and Restriction: The Case of French in Ontario, Canada. Oxford: Clarendon

Press.

Nelde, P. H. (ed.). 1980. Sprachkontakt und Sprachkonflikt. (Zeitschrift fur Dialek-

tologie, Beihefte, 32.) Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner.

Pietsch, L. 2004. Re-inventing the ‘perfect’ wheel: grammaticalization and the

Irish English medial-object perfects. Arbeiten zur Mehrsprachigkeit 65. Ham-


Prince, E. F. 1998. The borrowing of meaning as a cause of internal syntactic

change. In Historical Linguistics 1997, M. S. Schmid et al. (eds), 339–362. Am-

sterdam: John Benjamins.

Ramisch, H. 1989. The Variation of English in Guernsey/Channel Islands. (Bam-

berger Beitrage zur Englischen Sprachwissenschaft, 24). Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Ratcli¤e, R. R. 2005. Bukhara Arabic: a metatypized dialect of Arabic in Central

Asia. In Linguistic Convergence and Areal Di¤usion: Case Studies from Iranian,

Semitic and Turkic, E. A. Csato et al. (eds), 141–159. London/New York:

RoutledgeCurzon.

164 Bernd Heine

Rayfield, J. R. 1970. The Language of a Bilingual Community. (Janua Linguarum,

Series Practica 77.) The Hague: Mouton.

Reuther, T. (ed.). 1992. Slavistische Linguistik 1991. Munich: Sagner.

Ross, M. D. 1996. Contact-induced change and the comparative method: cases

from Papua New Guinea. In The Comparative Method Reviewed: Regularity

and Irregularity in Language Change, M. Durie and M. Ross (eds), 180–217.

New York: Oxford University Press.

Ross, M. 2001. Contact-induced change in Oceanic languages in North-West

Melanesia. In Areal Di¤usion and Genetic Inheritance: Problems in Comparative

Linguistics, A. Y. Aikhenvald and R. M. W. Dixon (eds), 134–166. Oxford:


Ross, M. 2003. Diagnosing prehistoric language contact. In Motives for Language

Change, R. Hickey (ed.), 174–198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ross, M. 2006. Calquing and metatypy. Journal of Language Contact 1. http://

cgi.server.uni-frankfurt.de/fb09/ifas/JLCCMS/

Sarhimaa, A. 1999. Syntactic transfer, contact-induced change, and the evolution of

bilingual mixed codes: focus on Karelian-Russian language alternation. (Studia

Fennica, Linguistica, 9) Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society.

Schmid, M. S., Austin, J. R., and Stein, D. (eds). 1998. Historical Linguistics 1997:

Selected papers from the 13th International Conference on Historical Linguis-

tics, Dusseldorf, 10–17 August, 1997. (Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and

History of Linguistic Science, 164) Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Silva-Corvalan, C. 2007. The limits of convergence in language contact. Paper

presented at the symposium ‘‘Language Contact and the Dynamics of Lan-

guage: Theory and Implications,’’ Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary

Anthropology, Leipzig, 10–13 May, 2007.

Stolz, T. 1996. Some instruments are really good companions – some are not:

on syncretism and the typology of instrumentals and comitatives. Theoretical

Linguistics 23.1–2: 113–200.

Sussex, R. 1993. Slavonic languages in emigration. In The Slavonic Languages,

B. Comrie and G. G. Corbett (eds), 999–1035. London/New York: Routledge.

Taeldeman, J. 1978. Franzosisch-flamische Sprachinterferenz in Flandern. In

Sprachkontakte im Nordseegebiet: Akten des 1. Symposions uber Sprachkontakt

in Europa, Mannheim 1977, P.S. Ureland (ed.), 43–66. Tubingen: Max Nie-

meyer.

Ternes, E. 1999. Ist Bretonisch SVO oder VSO? Typologische Uberlegungen zu

einer umstrittenen Frage. In Akten des Zweiten Deutschen Keltologen-Sympo-

siums, S. Zimmer et al. (eds), 236–253. Tubingen: Niemeyer.

Thomason, S. G. 2001a. Language Contact: an Introduction. Washington, DC:

Georgetown University Press.

Thomason, S. G. 2001b. Language Contact. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Thomason, S. G. 2007. Social and linguistic factors as predictors of contact-

induced change. Paper presented at the symposium ‘‘Language Contact and


the Dynamics of Language: Theory and Implications,’’ Max Planck Institute

for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, 10–13 May, 2007.

Tosco, M. 2000. Is there an ‘‘Ethiopian language area’’? Anthropological Linguis-

tics 42.3: 329–365.

Trask, R. L. 1998. The typological position of Basque: then and now. Language

Sciences 20.3: 313–324.

Traugott, E. C. and Heine, B. (eds). 1991. Approaches to Grammaticalization.

Volume 1. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Ureland, P. S. (ed.). 1978. Sprachkontakte im Nordseegebiet: Akten des 1. Sympo-

sions uber Sprachkontakt in Europa, Mannheim 1977. (Linguistische Arbeiten,

66). Tubingen: Max Niemeyer.

Verschik, A. 2004. Estonian compound nouns and their equivalents in the local

variety of Russian. Scando-Slavica 50: 93–109.

Vincent, N. 1982. The development of the auxiliaries habere and esse in Romance.

In Studies in the Romance Verbs, N. Vincent and M. Harris (eds), 71–96. London:

Croom Helm.

Vincent, N. and Harris, M. (eds). 1982. Studies in the Romance Verbs. London:

Croom Helm.

Wehr, B. 1984. Diskurs-Strategien im Romanischen: ein Beitrag zur romanischen

Syntax. Tubingen: Narr.

Zavala, R. 2002. Calcos sintacticos en algunos complejos verbales Mayas y Mixe-

Zoques. Pueblos y Fronteras 4: 169–187.

Zimmer, S., Kodderitzsch R., and Wigger, A. (eds). 1999. Akten des Zweiten

Deutschen Keltologen-Symposiums. Tubingen: Niemeyer.

166 Bernd Heine

The attraction of indefinite articles: on the borrowingof Spanish un in Chamorro

Thomas Stolz

1. Introduction1

The overt marking of definiteness and/or indefiniteness in noun phrases is

a relatively widespread phenomenon among the languages of the world. In

the World atlas of language structures (Haspelmath et al. 2005), Dryer

(2005a–b) provides two chapters dedicated to definite articles and indefinite

articles respectively. The focus of these chapters is on (in)definiteness mark-

ing on nouns and thus does not include other marking strategies in noun

phrases that do not directly a¤ect the head noun.2 In his surveys, Dryer

(2005a: 154) starts from the functions fulfilled by the expressions; this

practice justifies the lumping together of bound morphological markers

1. I am grateful to my French colleagues for inviting me to contribute to this

collection of articles. I am also indebted to my discussants on the occasion

of the workshop on Spanish contact influence on Amerindian languages

(Amsterdam, October 4 2008). Jorge Gomez-Rendon, Jeanette Sakel, and

Otto Zwartjes deserve special mention for their thought-provoking comments

on my talk, on which this article is based. Rafael Rodrıguez-Ponga kindly

drew my attention to some properties of the indefinite article in peninsular

Spanish and to the possibility that un in modern Chamorro shares more traits

with its Spanish ancestor than I originally assumed. I am also grateful to my

anonymous reviewer who made a number of insightful comments on the first

draft of this paper. Barbara Dewein kindly provided me with much needed

reading matter. As always, I assume the full responsibility for everything that

is said in my contribution.

2. In the two Baltic languages and some of the members of the South Slavonic

sub-phylum, definiteness is exclusively marked in complex NPs that contain

attributes such as adjectives, as in Latvian vec-s vı #r-s {old}-{nom.sg.m}

{man}-{nom.sg.m} ‘an old man’ vs. vec-ai-s vı #r-s {old}-{def}-{nom.sg.m}

{man}-{nom.sg.m} ‘the old man’ where the definiteness is marked overtly on

the adjective. In the absence of an attribute, however, the NP is ambiguous as

to definiteness. Unsurprisingly, other seemingly indirect strategies of definiteness

marking such as the definite object marking in Turkish (e.g. Ulku televizyon

and free or clitic-like articles. Typical representatives of these categories

are given under (1)–(2).3

(1) Articles

(1.1) Definite article: Hungarian [LPP Hungarian, 9]

A konyvben ez allt

def.art book:iness dem.dis assume:past

‘In the book, this was stated: . . .’

(1.2) Indefinite article: Turkish [LPP Turkish, 12]

Bana bir koyun ciz

I:dat indef.art sheep draw

‘Draw me a sheep!’

(2) Bound markers

(2.1) Definiteness marker: Swedish [LPP Swedish, 9]

bild-en forestallde en boaorm

picture-def.ut represent:imperf indef.art.ut boa

‘The picture represented a boa snake.’

(2.2) Indefiniteness marker: Kurdish (Wurzel 1997: 34)

Ez kecık-ek-e dıbinım

I girl-indef-obl.f see:1sg

‘I see a girl.’

aldı. – Televizyon-u nereden aldı? ‘Ulku has bought a TV. – Where has he

bought the TV?’ with -u marking the definite direct object [Ersen-Rasch 1980:

77]) are not taken into account in Dryer’s (2005a) survey. Thus, the topic of

definiteness vs. indefiniteness in language is much more complex than the extant

typologies suggest (Lyons 1999).

3. In the examples, I use boldface to highlight articles and occasionally also

additional elements further discussed in the ensuing paragraphs. Morpheme

boundaries are marked by hyphens only where I deem it indispensable for

the understanding of the data. Everywhere else I leave morpheme boundaries

unspecified and separate morphemes by <:> in the glosses. Except otherwise

stated, all translations are mine. Owing to the various spelling reforms and

individual orthographies used by particular authors, I keep the conventions

of my Chamorro sources, as any attempt at unification would be too time-

consuming.

168 Thomas Stolz

In (1), the free pre-nominal morphemes Hungarian a ‘the’ and Turkish

bir ‘a’ are employed to mark definiteness and indefiniteness, respectively,

whereas the definiteness marker Swedish -en ‘the’ and the indefiniteness

marker Kurdish -ek ‘a’ in (2) are su‰xes on their nominal hosts. Thus,

di¤erent morpheme classes can fulfil similar functions when it comes to

marking (in)definiteness. The definitions of the notions of definiteness and

indefiniteness employed by Dryer simplify the complex situation in this

functional area.4 However, they are handy for a first approach. The term

‘‘definite’’ requires that the noun that is characterized as definite refers to

an entity known to the speaker and hearer either because of prior introduc-

tion into the discourse or because of common knowledge. Accordingly, the

Hungarian a konyvben ‘in the book’ in (1.1) and the Swedish bilden ‘the

picture’ in (2.1) are anaphorically related to the antecedents Hungarian

egy konyvben ‘in a book’ and Swedish i en bok ‘in a book’ in the initial

sentence of the same paragraph. In contrast, the indefinite nouns in (1.2)

and (2.2) are newly introduced participants that have no antecedents and

thus refer to hitherto unknown entities.

Disregarding the slightly di¤erent sizes of Dryer’s samples (566 languages

checked for definiteness vs. 473 languages checked for indefiniteness), it is

clear from his statistics that it is relatively common for human languages

to mark definiteness in their noun phrases: 60 percent of the languages

of the survey attest definiteness marking either via proper articles (¼75

percent) or by bound morphemes (25 percent). In contrast, indefiniteness

is less often made explicit. About 43 percent of the sample languages

employ overt strategies to mark indefiniteness. In the bulk of the world’s

languages, bare nouns tend to have an indefinite interpretation, as in (3).

(3) Maltese [LPP Maltese, 1]

Din kienet turi serp boa qieg¡ed jibla’ cerv

dem.prox.f be:3sg.f 3sg.f:show boa prog 3sg.m:swallow stag

‘This [¼the picture] showed a boa that swallowed a stag.’

In the Maltese example, the new participants serp boa ‘boa’ and cerv ‘stag’

are bare nouns and thus indefinite.5

4. According to Lyons (1999: 157–198) various kinds of (in)definiteness have to

be distinguished (specificity, referentiality, generic). Heine (1997: 70) mentions

five di¤erent stages relevant to the grammatical development of articles, see

Section 2 below.

5. In languages that mark neither definiteness nor indefiniteness overtly, bare

nouns are ambiguous. The Finnish clause kirjassa sanottiin ‘it was said in

The attraction of indefinite articles 169

Only 11 percent of the languages with indefiniteness marking achieve

this goal via a‰xation of an indefiniteness marker. Some 88 percent con-

cur with Turkish in (1.2) in so far as they display proper indefinite articles

qua free morphemes. There are about twice as many languages that only

mark definiteness (81P14 percent) as there are languages that exclusively

mark indefiniteness (41 ¼ 7 percent). All these statistical facts are sug-

gestive of the higher degree of markedness of indefiniteness marking as

opposed to the relatively unmarked status of definiteness marking.

Dryer’s (2005b: 160–161) map also shows that there are certain hotbeds

of indefiniteness marking on the globe, albeit less clearly delimited than in

other cases of areal clustering. Indefinite articles abound especially in the

better part of Europe, the Near and Middle East, Papua-New Guinea,

Mesoamerica, and West Africa, with additional zones of accumulation

on the northern border of India as well as stretches of East Africa and

Austronesia. In point of fact, indefinite articles occur on each continent.

However, in some areas (such as South America and Australia) indefinite-

ness marking is clearly a minority solution, and throughout Northern Asia

the phenomenon is absolutely unknown. In genealogical terms, indefinite

articles are not monopolized. Indo-European, Uralic, Austronesian, and

other macro-phyla as well are divided as to the marking of indefiniteness.

Given that the geographic distribution of a typologically marked phe-

nomenon is uneven, one gets to thinking about the origin of some reported

indefinite articles in languages whose next of kin or immediate neighbors

do not boast this category. According to Dryer’s map, there are several

instances of genetically and/or areally unexpected attestations of indefinite

articles in various parts of the world. It is always possible that, at least in

some of these cases, indefiniteness marking has di¤used via language con-

tact. In this contribution, I exclusively look at indefinite articles.6 Thus

I survey the emergence/replication of the relatively marked category of

indefinite articles in situations of language contact (Section 2). A more

detailed case study is devoted to the borrowing of Spanish un in the Aus-

tronesian language Chamorro (Section 3). The conclusions in Section 4

assign the phenomenon under scrutiny a place in the catalogue of con-

tact-induced structural changes.

a/the book’ is a case in point, although word order and, for full-blown (inter-

nal) arguments of verbs, also case-marking are ways to mark indefiniteness or

definiteness indirectly in Finnish.

6. Since my examples illustrate only articles as such, I henceforth discontinue the

use of the abbreviation art in the morpheme glosses: def and indef su‰ce.

170 Thomas Stolz

2. Indefinite articles and language contact

Building on prior work by Haspelmath (2001: 1495), the areal spread of

indefinite articles throughout Europe is a major issue in Heine and Kuteva

(2006: 119–133). These authors observe that especially (but by no means

only) in non-standard varieties of languages spoken in eastern Europe

(plus Basque and Breton in the west), the cardinal numeral one has

acquired properties associated with indefinite articles. This development

from one > indefinite article is the most common grammaticalization

path of indefinite articles (Givon 1981). Among the prerequisites for oneto grammaticalize in this way is the use of the erstwhile cardinal in con-

texts where the exact quantification of the referent of the accompanying

noun is irrelevant or backgrounded. In these contexts, one would no longer

serve the purpose of quantifying the noun referent. Heine and Kuteva

(2006) report numerous cases of incipient and at times also further ad-

vanced grammaticalization of one according to the stage it has reached

on the ‘‘five grades’’ scale of Heine (1997). The stages come in the follow-

ing order:

Stage 1: purely numerical value of ONE

Stage 2: presentative marker

Stage 3: specific-indefinite marker

B

þ

grammaticalized

Stage 4: non-specific indefinite marker

Stage 5: generalized article

The map provided by Heine and Kuteva (2006: 133)7 is suggestive of a kind

of wave-like di¤usion from a partly SAE-borne center (mostly Romance

and Germanic) to the outskirts of the continent (Heine and Kuteva 2006:

120).8 The further away from the center a language is located, the lower

the stage its one-morpheme has reached on the scale of grammaticaliza-

7. In Stolz (2005, 2006), I provide maps that capture the distribution of various

definiteness marking strategies in Europe. These maps too show an areally

skewed distribution that is largely compatible with the findings by Heine and

Kuteva (2006).

8. Incidentally, in the softcover edition of Heine and Kuteva (2006) I have con-

sulted, the maps 3.1 for definite articles and 3.2 for indefinite articles in

Europe are absolutely identical as far as the hatching of the individual lan-

guages goes. Judging from the accompanying discussion of data by Heine

and Kuteva (2006), I doubt that this can be correct. On map 3.2, for instance,

Czech is presented as a language on whose article-like use of one there is no


tion towards an indefinite article. Stage 1 is typical of the outer periphery

in the east, north, and northwest, and the authors emphasize in their con-

clusions that outside the center of di¤usion, the articles – be they definite

or indefinite – have not advanced too far on the scale yet. Most often, the

best examples of the rise of definite and indefinite articles can be found in

non-standard varieties.

However, it is also possible to find examples of newly developed in-

definite articles that are tolerated by the norm of the languages, although

the origin of the indefinite article is presumably via language contact. Haase

(1992: 59–61) assumes that Basque bat ‘one’ has become the ubiquitous

indefinite article under the influence of the Romance neighbors of Basque

(Heine and Kuteva 2006: 132). Heine and Kuteva (2006: 131–132) argue

that the Breton indefinite article un ‘a’ has been remodeled after the

French pendent un(e) ‘a.’ It is also very likely that Hungarian egy ‘one’

developed in a parallel fashion because of the contact with German (and

partly also with Romance) (Barczi 2001: 184–185). In both cases, we

know from the history of the two non-Indo-European languages that on

their earliest documented stages, Hungarian and Basque did not employ

indefinite articles. The first attestations in Hungarian date back to the

sixteenth century, while the first half of the eighteenth century gives testi-

mony of the earliest uses of Basque bat as an indefinite article. Moreover,

the closest relatives of Hungarian are not equipped with indefinite articles

even today. Both Basque and Hungarian also display definite articles (or

rather definiteness markers in the case of Basque: [Heine and Kuteva

2006: 30–1]). For Breton, the historical evidence is less compelling, as the

indefinite article is attested already in Middle Breton (Lewis and Piette

1966: 10). What makes these cases especially intriguing from an areal-

linguistic point of view is the fact that it is next to impossible to pinpoint

language contact as the instigator of the grammaticalization processes.

information available, whereas in the main body of the text it is depicted as a

language whose term for one has reached stage 2 (perhaps even stage 3) on

the grammaticalization scale (Heine and Kuteva 2006: 123–124). Since map

3.1 likewise suggests that there are no data confirming or disconfirming the

presence of a definite article in Czech, while at the same time the Czech evi-

dence is discussed at length on the previous pages (Heine and Kuteva 2006:

114–115), I assume that something went wrong when the maps were printed.

This skepticism is further supported by the fact that Icelandic is correctly

located on stage 1 as to the grammaticalization of one on map 3.2. However,

it is assigned the same place with reference to the definite article on map 3.1,

which is untenable as it must have reached stage 4.

172 Thomas Stolz

This is precisely the argument of Heine and Kuteva (2006), who claim that

only those grammaticalization processes can be triggered via language con-

tact that would also be possible without an external stimulus. That is,

what happened in Basque and Hungarian may or may not have been the

result of influence exerted by neighboring languages. Of course, the likeli-

hood that we are facing contact-induced language change is rather high in

both these and other instances discussed by Heine and Kuteva (2006).

However, as the assumed replications only involve pattern and not matter,

according to the terminology introduced by Sakel (2007),9 absolute cer-

tainty about the contact origin of the phenomenon can never be obtained.

To underline this problem, a brief discussion of data from insular North

Germanic is in order. Icelandic and Faroese are representatives of stage 1

on map 3.2 in Heine and Kuteva (2006: 133), that is, their expression for

one has not advanced on the grammaticalization scale as it has purely

quantifying functions. This classification holds largely for Icelandic whereas

it is certainly wrong for Faroese, cf. (4)–(5).

(4) Icelandic [LPP Icelandic, 8]

Hun taknaði kyrkislongu sem var að

She picture:pret:3sg boa:acc rel be.pret.3sg to

melta fıl

digest:inf elephant

‘It [¼the picture] showed a boa that was digesting an elephant.’

(5) Faroese [LPP Faroese, 10]

Eg hevði teknað ein-a kvalarslangu

I have:pret:1sg draw:pp indef.art-acc boa:acc

sum var um at sodna ein elefant

rel be.pret.3sg about to digest:inf indef.art elephant

‘I had drawn a boa that was about to digest an elephant.’

Icelandic and Faroese are close relatives. Nevertheless, their article systems

di¤er considerably. Where Icelandic lacks an overt marker of indefinite-

ness (as the bare nouns kyrkislongu ‘[a] boa’ and fil ‘[an] elephant’ show),

Faroese obligatorily employs a full-blown indefinite article: eina kvalar-

slangu ‘a boa’ and ein elefant ‘an elephant.’ The Faroese indefinite article

9. This also applies to Breton no matter how closely Breton un and French un(e)

resemble each other: usually, it is assumed that Breton un originates from the

segmental erosion of the cardinal numeral unan ‘one’ (Lewis and Piette 1966:

21), that is, Breton un is not a direct loan from French.


einn ‘a’ is phonologically identical to the cardinal numeral einn ‘one’ with

which it shares the ability to inflect for gender, case, and number. The

latter ability to have plural forms qualifies the Faroese indefinite article

for stage 5 on the grammaticalization scale (Heine and Kuteva 2006:

105). Thrainsson et al. (2004: 91–2) describe the occurrence of the plural

forms of the Faroese indefinite article and state that its use is restricted to

combinations with pluralia tantum and ‘‘to indicate a pair of something,’’

cf. einir skogvar ‘a pair of shoes’ vs. skogvar ‘shoes’ where einir is the

nominative plural masculine of the indefinite article. Icelandic (Kress 1982:

100) makes similar use of the plural forms of the numeral einn ‘one’ to

indicate sets of objects represented by pluralia tantum.

Icelandic clearly reflects the historically older stage as there is no trace

of indefinite articles in the earliest (mediaeval) sources of Old Icelandic/

Old Norse (Braunmuller 1991). All the mainland Scandinavian languages

developed indefinite articles whereas Icelandic remained true to its old

solution without an indefinite article. For many centuries, Faroese has

been under linguistic pressure from Norwegian and especially from Danish.

In the absence of extensive textual documentation of stages of Faroese prior

to the early nineteenth century, we do not know when exactly the devel-

opment one > indefinite article commenced and how fast it proceeded

(Thrainsson et al. 2004: 370–372). Thus, it cannot be decided conclusively

whether the indefinite article in Faroese arose as a replication of its

Danish/Norwegian equivalents en/ett or on an independent (language-

internal) basis. If intra-Scandinavian language contacts are responsible

for what happened in Faroese, we are nevertheless dealing with pattern

replication. Trivially, the nature of pattern replication is such that there is

always at least a slim chance of independent parallel development. Thus,

to get a better understanding of the behavioral patterns of indefinite articles

in language contact situations, it is important to investigate instances of

matter replication or overt borrowing. Section 3 addresses the particularly

interesting case of the Spanish indefinite article un and its fate as a gram-

matical borrowing in Chamorro.

3. Spanish un in Chamorro

Chamorro is the indigenous Austronesian language of the Marianas Islands

on the western rim of the Pacific. Starting with Magellan’s visit to the

islands in 1521, Chamorro remained in contact with Spanish until the

end of the nineteenth century. For 230 years (1668–1898/9), the language

contact was especially intensive in the then colony of Spain. Direct Spanish

174 Thomas Stolz

influence came to a sudden halt at the turn of the twentieth century. How-

ever, modern Chamorro still carries the marks of Hispanization.10 Ac-

cording to some estimates (Rodrıguez-Ponga 1995), the share of Hispanic

elements in the lexicon of present-day Chamorro amounts to approximately

60 percent. Apart from purely lexical Hispanisms,11 there are scores of

function words with a Spanish etymology (discourse particles, conjunc-

tions, adpositions, modal verbs: Stolz and Stolz 1997). Furthermore, the

comparative construction is partially Hispanized (Stolz and Stolz 2001).

For Spanish-derived adjectives, we also find occasional evidence of gender

agreement (with human nouns: Stolz 1998, 2002). Sentence (6) from con-

temporary Chamorro prose illustrates the high incidence of Hispanisms in

the language. To facilitate recognition, Hispanisms appear in boldface in

this example.

(6) Chamorro [Hinengge 27]

Guaha unu ni’ gaige gi hiyong i sengsong

exi one rel be in outside def village

gi sentrat na patte-n i isla

in central link part-link def island

taiguini puesto-na ya put i klase-n familiabecause place-por.3 and for def class-link family

ni’ manasaga guihi

rel subj.pl:red:dwell there

kontiempo na humuyong este na estoria.prior_to link af:go_outside this link story

‘There is one [¼house] situated outside the village in the central part

of the island [which is special] because of its location and because of

the kind of families who were living there before this story started.’

10. Note that the general typological make-up of Chamorro has remained re-

markably una¤ected by Spanish influence (Pagel 2010). It is still a split-ergative

language with VSO/SVO word-order, and its rich morphology allows for

all kinds of a‰xation practices, including reduplication (Stolz 2003). For a

formalist appraisal of Chamorro syntax, I refer the reader to Chung (1998).

11. The massive borrowing from Spanish has resulted in the creation of numerous

synonym pairs consisting of an Austronesian lexeme and a semantically identi-

cal Spanish-derived equivalent. Modern speakers of Chamorro are not always

aware of the non-Austronesian origin of many of their lexical items (Salas

Palomo and Stolz 2008).


There are altogether eleven Hispanic elements (types and tokens) in the

sentence, that is, slightly more than 30 percent of all words. Besides the

usual lexical borrowings and function words,12 there is also the numeral

unu ‘one’, which ultimately guides us to the discussion of the indefinite

article in Chamorro. Before we enter the area of indefiniteness, however,

it must be pointed out that Chamorro also employs an inherited, that is

Austronesian, set of articles that remotely resemble the Philippine system

of focus articles (Topping 1973: 245–253).13 The four instances of i ‘the’

in (6) illustrate the usage of the most generalized of these articles.

3.1. On and about stage 1

For general information on the indefinite article and the numeral one in

contemporary Spanish and its overseas varieties, I refer the reader to the

reference grammar by Bosque and Demonte (1999). For brevity’s sake,

the following statements are made from the perspective of Chamorro

only. In (6), Chamorro unu ‘one’ clearly reflects the pronominal use of

the long form of the Spanish cardinal numeral uno ‘one.’ The distinction

of long and short forms in Spanish is restricted to the masculine gender.

The long form uno occurs only when used independently as head of a

noun phrase, whereas the short form un has to be used if the numeral

serves as a modifier of a head noun ([LPP Spanish, 62] En tu planeta los

dıas duran un minuto. ‘On your planet the days count [ just] one minute.’).

A similar distinction is made in Chamorro, as there are two allomorphs

of the numeral one, namely unu used pronominally or as head and un

used attributively. As in Spanish, the attributive allomorph is segmentally

12. The Spanish etymologies of the borrowed items are transparent: unu < Spanish

uno ‘one,’ sentrat < Spanish central ‘central,’ patte < Spanish parte ‘part,’

isla < Spanish isla ‘island,’ puesto < Spanish puesto ‘place,’ put [usually pot] <Spanish por ‘for, because of,’ klase < Spanish clase ‘class,’ familia < Spanish

familia ‘family,’ kontiempo < Spanish con ‘with’þ tiempo ‘time,’ este < Spanish

este ‘this,’ estoria < Spanish historia ‘story.’ All segmental di¤erences between

source language and target language reflect regular phonological correspon-

dence laws of Spanish loans in Chamorro.

13. The articles are: proper articles si and as, toponym article iya, common articles

i, ni, nu (Topping 1973: 130–136). Steve Pagel (personal communication)

ponders the idea that the article i, which tends to be used widely beyond the

boundaries of its supposed focus-based domain, has been influenced by Spanish

el ‘the.’ However, materially, i was already attested as a ‘‘definite article’’ in the

earliest sources of Chamorro in the seventeenth century.

176 Thomas Stolz

identical to the indefinite article un. This is the current general consensus

among the experts of Chamorro, all of whom acknowledge that Chamorro

un stems from Spanish no matter whether it is used as a numeral or as an

indefinite article. In Father Sanvitores’ grammar-cum-catechism of 1668

there is no trace of un, nor is there any evidence of an indefinite Austrone-

sian article (Burrus 1954). Since it took almost 200 years before the next

written documents appeared in Chamorro – among them the Spanish

school grammar by Ibanez del Carmen (1865)14 – we are left completely

in the dark about the intermediate processes that ultimately led to the

creation of the indefinite article in Chamorro. Moreover, scholars disagree

as to the extent of the domain of the indefinite article in Chamorro. The

e¤ects of the Spanish-derived indefinite article on the split-ergative system

of Chamorro are described in Stolz (2010).

In the only modern reference grammar of Chamorro, Topping (1973:

136–138) describes the position of un in the grammatical system of

Chamorro as marginal because he assumes that it is severely restricted in

use, such that it ‘‘usually occur[s] in fixed idiomatic expressions’’ (Topping

1973: 136). The examples Topping (1973: 137) provides are set phrases of

the type un diha ‘one day’ that consist entirely of Spanish-derived ele-

ments. In Stolz and Sabater Fuentes (2002), we demonstrate that already

in the earliest translation of the New Testament (1904), un freely combines

with Austronesian nouns too. The apparent preference for combinations

with Spanish etyma is the incidental e¤ect of the high number of Spanish

loan nouns in Chamorro. It is true that collocations like un bi’ahi ‘once’

(<Spanish viaje), un ratu ‘a moment’ (<Spanish rato), are lexical entries

in the Chamorro dictionary (Topping, Ogo, and Dungca 1975: 212) and

thus may be understood as unanalyzable units. However, un also occurs

in combination with Austronesian elements to form temporal adverbials

of this kind, as in (7).

14. In Chapter 2 of Ibanez del Carmen’s (1865: 5) grammar, the various articles

of Spanish are explained to the Chamorro pupils. The Spanish examples of

the use of the ‘‘artıculo indeterminante’’ are accompanied by Chamorro trans-

lations: Spanish un libro ¼ Chamorro un lebblo (today un lepblo) ‘a book’

and Spanish unos ninos ¼ Chamorro famaguonsija (today famagu’on siha)

‘children.’ This suggests that the indefinite article in the singular was already

en vogue in the mid-nineteenth century, but the Spanish plural forms had not

entered the Chamorro system.


(7) Chamorro [Hinengge, 47]

Un puengi humanao i tihu-na

indef night af:go def uncle-por.3sg

‘One night, his uncle went away.’

In this example, un combines with the Austronesian word puengi ‘night.’

Combinations of this kind are rather common: un ha’ani ‘one day,’ un

ogga’an ‘one morning,’ un tatalo’puengi ‘one late night,’ un gefpainge ‘one

late night,’ are only a few examples of the productivity of this etymologi-

cally hybrid pattern. This productivity is based on the analyzability of the

unþX construction as binary structure. Un can be still singled out and

used to build new functionally similar adverbials. For this reason, it would

be a mistake to consider the instances of the unþX construction frozen

relics.

Apart from these presumably lexicalized collocations, un is said to

occur where the ‘‘speaker wishes to emphasize the ‘oneness’ of the noun’’

(Topping 1973: 136) and may thus be translated by English one. In addi-

tion, Topping (1973: 137) mentions the possibility that un can appear

at ‘‘the beginning of stories.’’ Costenoble (1940: 190), who describes the

Chamorro spoken before 1920, makes similar observations and considers

the use of Spanish un in Chamorro restricted. For him the usual strategy

to mark indefiniteness operates on bare noun phrases. Other predecessors

of both Costenoble and Topping find the indefinite article hardly worth

mentioning. Sa¤ord (1903), Fritz (1903), Callistus (1910), Kats (1917),

and von Preissig (1918) do not elaborate on the issue of indefiniteness,15

if they mention it at all, so that one might get the impression that at the

turn of the twentieth century the indefinite article un still was not firmly

established. However, every once in a while, the reader finds instances

of Chamorro un used as the indefinite article by the grammarians just

mentioned when they illustrate other grammatical phenomena. Thus, un

was there already but perhaps not recognized as an important part of the

language, either because of its assumed low frequency or because of its

15. Most of these authors just mention that Spanish un is used as indefinite article,

e.g. von Preissig (1918: 7), who exhausts this topic in two and a half lines. This

is an extract from Sa¤ord (1903: 297) who adds that the use of Chamorro un

di¤ers from the European patterns such that the indefinite article is often lack-

ing where the English translation requires a/an. Callistus (1910: 173) repeats

the gist of Sa¤ord’s original statement; Fritz (1903) and Kats (1917) pass

over the indefinite article in silence.

178 Thomas Stolz

obvious foreign origin. It is possible that since the early twentieth century

Chamorro un has expanded its formerly more restricted domain, meaning

that at least some of the functional resemblances of Spanish and Chamorro

in this area could be independent parallel developments. However, in

Sostansian (1998), the monolingual Chamorro school grammar, the in-

definite article is not mentioned at all: that is, the form and function of

the indefinite article un are not taught at school. This practice casts doubt

on the position of un in the system. As with the grammarians writing in

the early twentieth century, however, there may be a kind of anti-Hispanic

purism behind the lack of information about the phenomenon under scru-

tiny because there can be no doubt that un occurs relatively frequently in

Chamorro texts (see below).

Translated into Heine’s (1997) terms (see above), Chamorro would have

to be placed somewhere between stages 1 and 2 of the gammaticalization

scale, as the description by Topping (1973) suggests that un is used as

a presentative, but only in a certain text genre. According to Heine and

Kuteva (2006: 105), the Spanish indefinite article has reached the highest

possible stage of the grammaticalization process, stage 5, where it is a gen-

eralized article: that is, its use is largely dissociated from the syntactico-

pragmatic properties of the head-noun it determines. This di¤erence of

the stages of grammaticalization assumed for Chamorro un and its Spanish

counterpart are very interesting for the student of language contact because

the apparent discrepancy suggests that the borrowing of matter was not

accompanied by the borrowing of all the patterns the donor language o¤ers.

However, Rodrıguez-Ponga (2001: 259–261) takes a markedly di¤erent

stance from Topping (1973), because in his view, ‘‘[l]a aparicion de un en el

discurso es frecuentısima. Es, probablemente, el hispanismo mas repetido en

Chamorro y representa uno de los elementos que mas claramente vinculan

la gramatica chamorra con la espanola’’ (Rodrıguez-Ponga 2001: 261).

According to this claim, Chamorro un cannot be considered a marginal

phenomenon. Furthermore, Rodrıguez-Ponga (2001) interprets his data16

as evidence of the close resemblance of the grammars of Spanish un and

Chamorro un. He hastens to clarify that this resemblance does not imply

absolute identity. In contrast to Spanish, Chamorro does not have distinct

feminine or plural forms of the indefinite article (Rodrıguez-Ponga 2001:

16. He draws his examples from the 1987 translation of St. Luke into Chamorro

(variety of the Northern Marianas).


261).17 In (8), the indefinite article is un although it is combined with a

Spanish-derived loan overtly marked for feminine gender and referring to

a human being (the masculine equivalent being hobensitu).

(8) Chamorro [Rai, 8]

ha li’e’ un hobensita mamaila’

3.erg see indef young_girl:f red:come

‘He saw a young girl coming.’

In point of fact, Chamorro un does not combine with nouns that may have

a plural reading. If indefiniteness is meant to be transnumeral, generic or

plural, zero-marking is the usual strategy in Chamorro, as in (9).


Estaba un dangkolon trongkon kannai mamamfe’ niyokexi.past indef big:link trunk:link arm red:pick coconut

gi hiyong i bentana

in outside def window

‘There was a huge arm picking coconut outside the window.’

The bare noun niyok ‘coconut’ refers to any number of coconuts the giant

is about to pick from the tree, which implies a harvest that will surely

go beyond just one coconut.18 Thus, the functional domains of the two

indefinite articles in Spanish and Chamorro cannot be one and the same.

In addition, even the morphosyntax of the Spanish-derived numeral

unu ‘one’ is not entirely in line with the Spanish patterns. Example (10) is

a short passage from a children’s story inspired by traditional European

fairy tales. The main character – a little girl – counts the bowls she found

in the house of the three bears.

17. Wherever there are remnants of the feminine una or the plurals unos/unas in

Chamorro, they are part of fixed expressions: unos kuantos [Pnoskuantos]

‘some,’ ala una ‘at one o’clock,’ una kosa ‘something,’ (Rodrıguez-Ponga

2001: 261). As to the absence of fully functional feminine forms of the in-

definite article in Chamorro, Rodrıguez-Ponga (personal communication) em-

phasizes that the masculine forms have been generalized also in Spanish-based

creoles like Chabacano in the Philippines and Papiamentu in the Caribbean.

18. Topping (1973: 137) translates malago’ yo’ niyok as ‘I want a coconut.’ This

option for indefiniteness in the singular is not convincing because the bare

noun niyok may refer to any amount of coconut and thus invites the transla-

tion ‘I want (some) coconut(s).’

180 Thomas Stolz


Ya atan ha’ i tres tason.

and look too def three bowl

Unu, dos, tres. Tres na tason.one two three three link bowl

Un tason dankolo, un tason midianu yan

one bowl big one bowl middle_size and

unu na tason dikike’.

one link bowl small

‘And look, the three bowls. One, two, three. Three bowls. One big

bowl, one middle-sized bowl, and one small bowl.’

Boldface characters single out two absolutely non-Spanish constructions

that are genuinely Austronesian.19 The wholesale adaptation of the Spanish

cardinal numerals (Rodrıguez-Ponga 2001) notwithstanding,20 Chamorro

has retained a pre-Hispanic solution to shape the morphosyntax of its

numeral phrases (Rodrıguez-Ponga 2001: 256–257). Besides the Spanish-

inspired juxtaposition of cardinal numeral and quantified noun (i tres

tason ‘the three bowls’), there is also the possibility of inserting the ubiqui-

tous linker particle na (Topping 1973: 138–141), which defines a right-

headed construction whose attribute precedes the linker (tres na tason

‘three bowls’). In contrast to Topping’s (1973: 139) reservations, the linker

na may also be used in combination with unu ‘one’ (unu na tason ‘one

bowl’). This last example is especially telling as unu na tason ‘one bowl’ is

functionally identical with the two previous instances of un tason in the

same utterance. Thus, in these cases, the short form un cannot represent

the indefinite article but must be classified as a cardinal numeral. Put

di¤erently, whenever the linker is employed the construction does not

express indefiniteness. Neither the complexity of the noun phrase nor the

definiteness of the entire numeral phrase seem to determine which of the

two construction types is chosen.

19. Obviously, numerically quantified nouns are not normally overtly marked for

number in Chamorro, which is another property Chamorro does not share

with Spanish.

20. The inherited Austronesian numerals had fallen out of use during the heyday

of the Spanish reign over the islands in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth

century, although elderly people were still reported to remember the pre-

Hispanic numerals in the early twentieth century (Rodrıguez-Ponga 2001:

271). Nowadays, there are attempts to revive the Austronesian numerals in

everyday communication.


Whenever the Spanish construction type is given preference, however, a

typical stage 1 situation arises, as it is di‰cult to tell quantification and

determination apart. Example (11) illustrates this potential ambiguity.


Guahu sina hu na’i hao

i.emph can i.erg give you.abs

un bunitu yan fresko na chada’

indef nice and fresh link egg

para i kumpleanos nana-mu

for def birthday mother-por.2sg

‘Me, I can give you a nice and fresh egg for the birthday of your

mother.’

In the story from which (11) is taken, a young boy has asked Senora Punidera

for something to give as a present to his mother on occasion of her birth-

day. He is o¤ered a high-quality egg. The problem remains whether or

not the use of un emphasizes the fact that it is exactly one egg (Topping’s

concept of ‘‘oneness,’’ see above). Alternatively, un bunitu yan fresco na

chada’ ‘a nice and fresh egg’ could easily also instantiate Heine’s (1997:

73) stage 3, where un would be a specific indefinite marker: the speaker

has a particular referent in his mind when he mentions the egg that in

turn is still unknown to the hearer. Following the logics of the above

grammaticalization scale, for the possibility of interpreting the example

in (11) as an instance of stage 3 we need evidence of un being used in func-

tions associated with stage 2.

3.2. Stage 2

Heine’s (1997: 73) stage 2 largely corresponds to Topping’s (1973) observa-

tion that un is used often in the opening paragraph of stories. This is

indeed the case, as example (12) suggests.


Un paloma un ga’lagitu yan un patgon nganga’

indef dove indef puppy and indef child duck

manafatta ni’ manna’manman siha na kosas

subj.pl:rec:boast by:def pass:caus:astonished pl link thing

ni’ nina’sinan-niha

by:def strength-por.3pl

‘A dove, a puppy, and a duckling were boasting about the astonish-

ing things achieved by their strength.’

182 Thomas Stolz

This is the very first sentence of a fairy tale. The three main characters of

the story are introduced as indefinite noun phrases. Of course, the virtual

storyteller already knows the characters because he is familiar with the

story itself. In a way, this means that these presentative cases are relatively

close to stage 3. Moreover, the presentative use of un is not restricted

to the beginning of stories. The indefinite article also occurs later in the

running text when a new discourse participant is introduced for the first

time and is important for the further development of the story. Sentence

(13) is taken from the tail-end of a story. Nevertheless, a new participant

has to be introduced, and this is done with the help of the indefinite article

un. The newly introduced participant (the headless man) has a crucial role

in the conclusion of this story.

(13) Chamorro [Mandidok, 168]

Ma li’e un dangkolon taotao ni tai ilu

3pl.erg see indef big:link man rel not_have head

‘They saw a man who had no head.’

We encounter the un-strategy relatively often with new participants whose

noun phrases are core arguments of the verb. For direct objects, there

is an autochthonous way of encoding indefiniteness, independent of the

use of articles. Cooreman (1987: 117–119) devotes part of her analysis of

Chamorro discourse to the description of the so-called indefinite anti-

passive. She observes that ‘‘[t]he Objects of Indefinite Antipassives in

Chamorro are always new, mentioned for the first time in the discourse.

They are also not maintained as topics in the narrative sequel’’ [original

italics and upper case] (Cooreman 1987: 118). This means that the in-

definite antipassive is used with unimportant participants, whereas the

un-strategy introduces participants whose importance is high enough to

equip them with a certain degree of topicality. Example (14) illustrates an

indefinite antipassive.


Yanggen puengi ya man-na-na’i chenchule’

when night and ap-red-give money_present

i taotao gi finatai

def person in death

‘If a person makes a present of money at night on occasion of

a death. . .’


The bare noun chenchule’ ‘money present’ is the internal argument of na’i

‘to give.’ As chenchule’ is not accompanied by an article it is indefinite and

this leads to reduced transitivity. The split ergativity of Chamorro is based

on the definiteness of the ‘‘direct object.’’ The man- prefix on the verb

is traditionally labeled an indefinite object marker (Topping 1973: 85).

Cooreman (1987) analyses man- as an antipassive marker. Still, the employ-

ment of man- is tightly connected to the indefiniteness of the internal argu-

ment of the verb. The introduction of the indefinite article thus has pro-

vided Chamorro speakers with the possibility of distinguishing formally

two di¤erent kinds of discourse participants, namely those with topicality

and those which lack topicality. According to a di¤erent theoretical stance,

antipassives like that in (14) may be understood as instances of object incor-

poration that usually gives rise to a generic reading that is not properly

indefinite. This is an issue that requires a separate study, as it calls for exten-

sive comparative data analysis.

Furthermore, before Spanish un was integrated into the Chamorro

system, indefiniteness marking via the antipassive was mainly a matter of

internal arguments or direct objects. External arguments or subjects lacked

a similar overt device for indefiniteness marking. With Spanish un the

structural means were made available for extending overt indefiniteness

marking to external arguments. It is not uncommon even in modern texts

to find the common article i as the determiner of a noun representing a

new participant. In this context, the i-article cannot be a fully-blown definite

article in the sense that it introduces a generally known participant; cf. (15).

(15) Chamorro [Mandidok, 4]

I famagu’on para u ma fa’tinas i Belen

def child.pl for fut.3 erg.3pl build def christmas_crib

‘The/some children are going to build the/a Christmas crib.’

This is the second sentence of a story that starts with the remark that

Christmas was drawing near. No children had been mentioned, nor had a

Christmas crib been mentioned. Thus the children and the crib are new

participants. Nevertheless, they are introduced by the common article i.

For the plural noun famagu’on ‘children’ this practice makes sense, as

there is no other strategy for marking indefiniteness on pluralized nouns

except zero, which, however, favors internal arguments/direct objects.

Since i famagu’on is the external argument/subject, the bare-noun strategy

is disfavored. This does not mean that zero indefiniteness is blocked com-

pletely. Examples like (16) can be found in the modern written register of

Chamorro.

184 Thomas Stolz


Guaha na taotao yan famagu’on siha

exi link person and child.pl pl

manmaestani ni’ i taotaomo’na

subj.pl:pass:wrath by def spirit.pl

‘There are times when adults and children experience the wrath of

the Taotaomo’na.’

In this example – again the opening sentence of a story – the coordinated

nouns tatao ‘person’ and famagu’on ‘children’ are additionally marked for

plural by siha. There is no accompanying article. It is very likely that the

use of i on one or both nouns is not barred by any rules of grammar.

As to example (15), if un and zero are ruled out or disfavored, i is

the last resort as an article. Zero is no option because there seems to be a

general constraint in Chamorro against bare nominals in sentence-initial

position. For the internal argument i Belen, these criteria do not hold. It

is a direct object and could thus be overtly marked as indefinite by un or

indirectly via the antipassive construction. The antipassive is impossible,

however, because the Christmas crib has high topicality in the remainder

of the story. Nevertheless, un fails to be employed. The use of i is probably

explicable by ‘‘associative definiteness’’: the theme of the story is the usual

activities in the pre-Christmas period, and building a Christmas crib forms

part of the agenda. I Belen thus is what both storyteller and listener/reader

expect because of their shared knowledge of what happens at Christmas.

The indefinite article is not confined to combination with arguments of

the verb and to more or less lexicalized temporal adverbials. The third

area where un is attested in abundance is that of prepositional phrases.

Consider example (17).


Gi un guma’ gi fina’bekka’ guini gi un songsong

in indef house in change:nml:hill here in indef village

ni’ gaige gi fihon i tasi ha hungok un nana

rel exi in near def sea erg.3sg hear indef mother

i essalao haga-na sottera

Def shout daughter-Por.3Sg bachelorette

ni’ kumakama sa’ malangu guihi na diha

rel af:red:bed because sick there link day

‘In a house above the hills in a village that is on the coast, a mother

heard the cry of her unmarried daughter who was resting in bed

because she felt ill on that day.’


In this longish sentence, there are four prepositional phrases headed by the

all-purpose locative preposition gi ‘in, at, on.’ Gi is the most frequently

used preposition in Chamorro and belongs to the small set of pre-Hispanic

prepositions, whereas the bulk of the prepositional inventory stems from

Spanish (Topping 1973: 119). In two cases gi is followed by un (gi un

guma’ ‘in a house,’ gi un sonsong ‘in a village’), and in the other two cases

gi immediately precedes its noun complement (gi fina’bekka’ ‘in the hills,’

gi fihon [usually: gi fi’on] ‘at the side of ’). These combinations are not

arbitrary. The preposition gi has a habit that interferes with definiteness

marking such that the noun phrases become ambiguous. Gi absorbs the

common article i: giþ iþN! gi N (Topping 1973: 122).21 This sandhi

rule yields a prepositional phrase that allows for two readings, namely

definite (‘in the N’) and indefinite (‘in an N’). The insertion of the indefi-

nite article un disambiguates the potential readings. Thus, the use of un in

gi-phrases is motivated by the need for clarity as to the definiteness of the

construction. Since the token frequency of gi-phrases is high because of

the high functional load of the preposition, many opportunities arise for

un to be employed in contexts that are ambiguous as to definiteness. Note

that none of the other prepositions of Chamorro requires the presence of

un when it comes to indicating indefiniteness, because they do not absorb

the common article i, and thus the bare noun complement is su‰cient to

pass as indefinite: see (18) and (19).

(18) Chamorro [Memmo,’ 5]

Gumupu tatte para i gima’-niha

af:fly back for def house-por.3pl

‘They flew back to their house.’

(19) Chamorro [Memmo,’ 6]

Taya’ tronkon hayu para nuhong.

nothing tree:link wood for shadow

‘[There was] not a single tree for shadow.’

The preposition para ‘for, to’22 combines with the common article i in (18)

and thus yields a construction that is overtly marked for definiteness. The

21. Topping (1973: 122) makes a distinction between formal speech where the

sandhi rule is blocked and the informal – mostly spoken – style where the

sandhi rule applies. However, even in written Chamorro, the absorption of i

by gi seems to be the rule.

22. Chamorro para [pæra] is probably the contamination product of a pre-Hispanic

preposition para and its Spanish look-alike para (Topping 1973: 124).

186 Thomas Stolz

noun itself additionally hosts the possessor su‰x –niha, which in a sense

makes the noun specific or even definite such that the indefinite marker is

ruled out anyway. Accordingly, para combines with the bare noun huyong

‘shadow’ in (19). As gi is the only preposition in Chamorro that ends in /i/

and thus fulfils the condition for absorbing the common article, the reason

for the frequent use of un in combination with this preposition is ulti-

mately phonologically motivated.23

3.3. Final destination: Stage 3

Chamorro un is an indefinite article that fits the description of a stage 3

phenomenon according to Heine’s (1997) scale because it can be employed

as a specific-indefinite marker. The speaker knows the participant intro-

duced by un, but for the hearer the participant is new. As shown above,

these usages are often di‰cult to distinguish from purely presentative,

that is stage 2, cases. In (20), I provide an example of a specific-indefinite

use of un.


Ti apmam un dikike’ patgon na palao’an matto

not long_while indef small child link woman arrive

gi gima’ i tres na osu

in house def three link bear

‘Soon after, a little girl arrived at the house of the three bears.’

The girl is introduced halfway through the story; nevertheless, she is the

main protagonist. The girl is of course known to the storyteller but she

comes as a surprise to the reader. In this usage, Chamorro un is relatively

frequent. In the foregoing subsections, I have also shown that un has

passed already through stages 1 and 2 and thus is qualified to enter stage

3. A detailed investigation of the texts available to me reveals that there

are as yet no instances of un being used according to the prerequisites for

stage 4.24

23. I am especially grateful to Jeanette Sakel who shared with me her intuition

about the phonological nature of the un-insertion after gi.

24. Rodrıguez-Ponga (personal communication) argues that there are, in modern

Chamorro, examples of non-specific indefinite use and even of generalized use

of un, which he attributes to recent English influence, such that the distribu-

tion of English a/an is copied inadvertently by bilingual individuals.


Thus, Chamorro boasts an indefinite article that only shares part of

the functional domain of its Spanish etymon. In contrast to Spanish,

Chamorro uses its indefinite article less freely because stages 4 and 5 still

lie outside the realm of Chamorro un. First of all, this means that the

replication of the Spanish patterns is but partial. The material borrowing

of un from Spanish notwithstanding, Chamorro has not accepted the

entire package of functions associated with Spanish un. However, the

situation is more intricate than that. In addition to the restriction of

Chamorro to stages below 4, there are also other peculiarities of its

employment that cannot simply be explained by Heine’s scale of gramma-

ticalization stages. On the one hand, Spanish-derived un still has to com-

pete with pre-Hispanic strategies of indefiniteness marking (antipassive,

common article, zero article). This competition bars the generalization

of un to a stage 5 phenomenon. Moreover, un is rather strong as a com-

ponent of temporal adverbials – a context that is skipped over in Heine’s

scale. Likewise, the use of un in combination with the preposition gi falls

outside the scope of Heine’s model. While the frequent occurrence of un in

temporal adverbials is absolutely in line with the givens of Spanish, restric-

tion to combinations with one special preposition cannot be attributed to

any Spanish pattern. All these observations boil down to the impossibility

of considering Chamorro un a straightforward copy of Spanish un. Some

of the properties of the indefinite article in Chamorro are clearly unrelated

to the grammar of the Spanish indefinite article. Chamorro un must have

acquired these properties in language-internal development (or in contact

with English) and not via replication in contact with Spanish. Owing

to the general scarcity of early textual documents of Chamorro, what one

can say about the diachronic steps through which un has passed must

remain guesswork. Three possibilities are conceivable:

– Chamorro un as indefinite article is an independent grammaticalization

of the numeral un(u), which means that only the cardinal numeral was

directly copied from Spanish (stage 1). The later processes followed

universal paths of grammaticalization.

– Chamorro un was borrowed with part of the functions of an indefinite

article (stage 2). From there, the development was strictly language-

internal.

– All functions of Chamorro un are replications of Spanish patterns (stage

3). There is no subsequent independent grammaticalization.

To my mind, the second scenario is the most likely. One should not forget

that for well over the last hundred years, Chamorro has been under pressure

188 Thomas Stolz

from English, resulting in almost 100 percent bilingualism with English and

the growing threat of extinction of the Austronesian language. The history

of Chamorro un does not stop with the end of the Spanish colonial rule over

the islands. Chances are that the English indefinite article has had a say

too in the shaping of the grammar of its Chamorro counterpart.

4. Conclusions

Heine and Kuteva (2006: 138–9) conclude their chapter on the di¤usion of

articles in Europe on a note that also fits the above case of the Chamorro

indefinite article. They state that language contact cannot be ruled out as a

factor contributing to the genesis of indefinite-article-like categories in a

variety of languages bordering on the territory occupied by the Standard

Average European languages. In most of the cases, the indefinite-articles-

to-be are reported to be lagging behind on the above grammaticalization

scale. Since the morphemes employed as indefinite articles always belong

to the inherited lexicon (of numerals) of the target language, it remains an

open question whether the indefinite article could have developed inde-

pendently of external influence. For Chamorro, however, there can be no

doubt that the morpheme un was borrowed from Spanish. Nevertheless,

Chamorro un behaves very much like the eastern European cases described

in Heine and Kuteva (2006), insofar as the grammaticalization of un has

not reached the stage of grammaticalization of Spanish un. The Spanish

indefinite article and its replication in Chamorro di¤er widely in their

grammar and grammaticalization.

This is an intriguing fact, because even if matter is borrowed and em-

ployed for functions similar to the patterns of the source language, this

does not imply or require that the whole functional domain of the source-

language item be copied too. Superficially, this is nothing new, as the

phenomenology of borrowings is replete with similar examples of partial

copies (Heine and Kuteva 2005). What is interesting, nevertheless, is the

fact that Chamorro seems to start the grammaticalization process all over

again instead of accepting the Spanish progress on the grammaticalization

scale as a fact. This is surprising, as there must be an original motivation

for borrowing the item from the source language. It is likely that this

motivation is tightly connected to the functions of the item. In our case,

the only functions that can have been attractive are those of marking

indefiniteness. However, the replication focuses only on part of the func-

tional range of the source-language item. As it appears, the focus is on


exactly those functions that occur at the bottom of the grammaticalization

scale, no matter how many others were available at the time of borrowing.

Once the item is borrowed together with its least grammaticalized proper-

ties, it develops largely language-internally, especially if the pressure by

the erstwhile prestige language ceases to be strong (as is the case with

Spanish after the disintegration of Spain’s colonial empire in the Pacific).

The Chamorro case is suggestive of a preference in language contact situa-

tions for grammemes to be replicated first on a low level of grammati-

calization in the target language no matter how far the grammeme has

advanced on the grammaticalization scale in the source language. To

verify or falsify this hypothesis, we urgently need more case studies of

matter borrowing and the correlated pattern borrowing.

To sum up, modern Chamorro displays an indefinite article of its own

that seems to deviate vastly from the patterns of its Spanish etymological

source. The borrowing, integration, and internal development of un has

yielded a category that is neither completely Spanish nor purely Austrone-

sian. In this sense, the borrowing of Spanish un is not a straightforward

replication but the creation of something new. Exactly how far Chamorro

and Spanish diverge in their grammars of the indefinite article can only

be determined more precisely in a detailed contrastive study of the two

languages, which is a task for the immediate future.

Abbreviations

abs Absolutive

acc Accusative

af Actor focus

ap Antipassive

art Article

caus Causative

dat Dative

def Definite

dem Demonstrative

dis Distal

emph Emphatic

erg Ergative

exi Existential

f Feminine

fut Future

190 Thomas Stolz

imperf Imperfect

indef Indefinite

iness Inessive

inf Infinitive

link Linker

m Masculine

nml Nominalizer

obl Oblique

pass Passive

past Past tense

pl Plural

por Possessor

pp Past participle

pret Preterit

prog Progressive

prox Proximal

rec Reciprocal

red Reduplication

rel Relative

sg Singular

subj Subject

ut Utrum

Sources

(a) Chamorro

[Hinengge] ¼ Onedera, Peter R. 1994. Fafa’na’gue yan hinengge siha.

Agana.

[Mandidok] ¼ Tamanglo, Roland L.G. et al. 1999. Mandidok yan

mamfabulas na hemplon Guahan. Hagatna: Government

of Guam, Department of Education.

[Memmo’] ¼ ESAA Project. 1974. I memmo’ yan i fanihi. Agana:

Government of Guam: Department of Education.

[Rai] ¼ ESEA Project. 1975. Estera si Rai. Agana: Government

of Guam: Department of Education.

(b) Translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Le Petit Prince [LPP]

[Faroese] ¼ Kristiansen, Alexandur [translator]. 1980. Tann Lıtli

Prinsurin. Fuglafjørður: Egið Forlag.


[Hungarian] ¼ Ronay, Gyorgy [translator]. 1971. A Kis Herceg. Buda-

pest: Nylocadik Kiadas.

[Icelandic] ¼ Þorarinn Bjornsson [translator]. 1988. Litli Prinsinn.

Reykjavık: Bokautgafa Menningarsjoðs.

[Maltese] ¼ Aquilina, Tony [translator]. 2000. Ic-Ckejken Princep.

Msida: Mireva.

[Spanish] ¼ Del Carril, Bonifacio [translator]. 1995. El Principito.

Madrid: Alianza.

[Swedish] ¼ Banf, Gunvor [translator]. 1993. Lille prinsen. Stock-

holm: Raben and Sjogren.

[Turkish] ¼ Uyar, Tomris [translator]. 1995. Kucuk Prens. Istanbul:

Can Yayınları.

References

Barczi, G. 2001. Geschichte der ungarischen Sprache. Innsbruck: Institut fur

Sprachwissenschaft.

Bosque, I. and Demonte, V. (eds). 1999. Gramatica descriptiva de la lengua espanola.

Madrid: Espasa.

Braunmuller, K. 1991. Die skandinavischen Sprachen im Uberblick. Tubingen:

Francke.

Burrus, E.J. 1954. Sanvitores’ grammar and catechism in the Mariana (or

Chamorro) language (1668). Anthropos 49: 934–960.

Callistus, P. 1910. Chamorro Worterbuch enthaltend I. Deutsch-Chamorro, II.

Chamorro-Deutsch nebst einer Chamorro-Grammatik und einigen Sprachubungen.

Hongkong: Typis Societatis Missionum ad Exteros.

Chung, S. 1998. The Design of Agreement: Evidence from Chamorro. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

Cooreman, A.M. 1987. Transitivity and Discourse Continuity in Chamorro Narra-

tives. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Costenoble, H. 1940. Die Chamoro Sprache. ‘s-Gravenhage: Nijho¤.

Dryer, M. 2005a. Definite articles. In World Atlas of Language Structures, M.

Haspelmath et al., 154–157. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dryer, M. 2005b. Indefinite articles. In World Atlas of Language Structures, M.

Haspelmath et al., 158–161. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ersen-Rasch, M.I. 1980. Turkisch fur Sie. Grammatik. Munich: Hueber.

Fritz, G. 1903. Chamorro-Grammatik. Mitteilungen des Seminars fur Orientalische

Sprachen an der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat Berlin 6: 1–27.

Givon, T. 1981. On the development of the numeral ‘one’ as an indefinite marker.

Folia Linguistica Historica 2: 35–53.

Haase, M. 1992. Sprachkontakt und Sprachwandel im Baskenland. Die Einflusse

des Gaskognischen und Franzosischen auf das Baskisch. Hamburg: Buske.

192 Thomas Stolz

Haspelmath, M. 2001. The European Linguistic Area: Standard Average Euro-

pean. In Language Typology and Language Universals, M. Haspelmath et al.


Haspelmath, M. et al. 2005. World Atlas of Language Structures. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.


Press.





Ibanez del Carmen, F.A. 1865. Gramatica chamorra. Manila: Ramırez y Giraudier.

Kats, J. 1917. Het Tjamoro van Guam en Saipan. ’s-Gravenhage: Nijho¤.

Kress, B. 1982. Islandische Grammatik. Leipzig: Enzyklopadie.

Lewis, H. and Piette, J. R. F. 1966. Llawlyfr Llydaweg Canol. Caerdydd [Cardi¤ ]:

Gwasg Prifygol Cymru.

Lyons, C. 1999. Definiteness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pagel, S. 2010. Spanisch in Asien und Ozeanien. Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang.

Rodrıguez-Ponga, R. 1995. El elemento espanol en la lengua chamorra (Islas

Marianas). Unpublished PhD thesis [since 2003 available on CD-ROM].

Madrid: Universidad Complutense. Facultad de Filologıa.

Rodrıguez-Ponga, R. 2001. Los numerales hispano-chamorras. In Lo propio y lo

ajeno en las lenguas austronesicas y amerindias, K. Zimmermann and T. Stolz

(eds), 253–278. Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert.

Sa¤ord, W. E. 1903. The Chamorro language of Guam. American Anthropologist

5: 289–311.

Sakel, J. 2007. Types of loan: matter and pattern. In Grammatical Borrowing

in Cross-linguistic Perspective, Y. Matras and J. Sakel (eds), 15–30. Berlin:

Mouton de Gruyter.

Salas Palomo, R. and Stolz, T. 2008. Pro or contra Hispanisms: attitudes of native

speakers of modern Chamoru. In Hispanisation. The Impact of Spanish on the

Lexicon and Grammar of the Indigenous Languages of Austronesia and the

Americas, T. Stolz, D. Bakker, and R. Salas Palomo (eds), 237–268. Berlin:

Mouton de Gruyter.

Sostansian. 1998. Sostansian i Chamorro-ta. Hagatna: Gubietnamenton Guahan.

Stolz, C. and Stolz, T. 1997. Universelle Hispanismen? Von Manila uber Lima bis

Mexiko und zuruck: Muster bei der Entlehnung spanischer Funktionsworter in

die indigenen Sprachen Amerikas und Austronesiens. Orbis 39: 1–77.

Stolz, C. and Stolz, T. 2001. Hispanicised comparative constructions in indigenous

languages of Austronesia and the Americas. In Lo propio y lo ajeno en las

lenguas austronesicas y amerindias, K. Zimmermann and T. Stolz (eds), 35–56.

Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert.


Stolz, T. 1998. Die Hispanitat des Chamorro als sprachwissenschaftliches Problem.

Iberoamericana 70.2: 5–38.

Stolz, T. 2002. General linguistic aspects of Spanish-Indigenous language contacts

with special focus on Austronesia. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 79: 133–158.

Stolz, T. 2003. Not quite the right mixture: Chamorro and Malti as candidates for

the status of mixed language. In The Mixed Languages Debate. Theoretical and

Empirical Advances, Y. Matras and P. Bakker (eds), 271–315. Berlin: Mouton

de Gruyter.

Stolz, T. 2005. Sardinian in areal perspective: morphonological interaction of

definite articles and adjacent words. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung

58.2–3: 288–320.

Stolz, T. 2006. Europe as a linguistic area. In K. Brown et al. (eds), Encyclopedia

of Language and Linguistics, vol. 4: 278–295. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Stolz, T. 2010. Don’t mess with ergatives! How the borrowing of the Spanish

indefinite article a¤ects the split-ergative system of Chamorro. Sprachtypologie

und Universalienforschung 63.1: 79–95.

Stolz, T. and Sabater Fuentes, A. 2002. El uso del artıculo indeterminado en la

primera traduccion chamorra del nuevo testamento. In Traspasando fronteras:

el reto de Asia y el Pacıfico, F. J. Anton Burgos and L. O. Ramos Alonso (eds),

vol. 2: 731–739. Valladolid: Asociacion Espanola de Estudios del Pacıfico.

Thrainsson, H. et al. 2004. Faroese: An overview and reference grammar. Torshavn:

Føroya Froðsskaparfelag.

Topping, D. 1973. Chamorro Reference Grammar. Honolulu: University of Hawaii

Press.

Topping, D., Ogo, P., and Dungca, B. 1975. Chamorro-English dictionary. Hono-

lulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Von Preissig, E. R. 1918. Dictionary and Grammar of the Chamorro Language of

the Island of Guam. Washington: Government Printing O‰ce.

Wurzel, P. 1997. Rojbas. Einfuhrung in die kurdische Sprache. Wiesbaden: Reichert.

Zimmermann, K. and Stolz, T. (eds). 2001. Lo propio y lo ajeno en las lenguas

austronesicas y amerindias. Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert.

194 Thomas Stolz

On form and function in language contact: a casestudy from the Amazonian Vaupes region1

Patience Epps

1. Introduction

In situations of language contact not involving substrate interference, it is

a typological commonplace that the borrowing of grammatical properties

(such as word order patterns, strategies of noun classification, subordina-

tion, and so on) is preceded by the borrowing of lexical items (Givon 1979:

26; Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 20, among others). This tendency was

formulated as a strict constraint by Moravcsik (1978: 110, cf. Thomason

and Kaufman 1988: 20), who wrote that ‘‘no non-lexical . . . property can

be borrowed unless the borrowing language already includes borrowed

lexical items from the same source language’’ (note that this should be

taken to imply a significant number of lexical items; as Thomason and

Kaufman [1988: 21] observe, including cases where just a few loanwords

are present would ‘‘trivialize the constraint’’). This pattern is presumably

motivated by several factors: first, it is simply easiest for speakers to borrow

lexical material under most circumstances, since this is most readily mani-

pulated and requires little accommodation by the receiving language;

also, new grammatical patterns may be introduced into the language by

the copied forms (for example, number and gender values, word order in

noun phrases); and finally, a shared word or other element of form may,

1. This work would not have been possible without the support, hospitality, andfriendship of my Hup hosts and language teachers, and likewise the assistanceof the Museu Parense Emılio Goeldi, the Instituto Socioambiental, andFOIRN in Brazil. Support from Fulbright-Hays, NSF (Doctoral DissertationImprovement grant no. 0111550), and the Max Planck Institute for Evolu-tionary Anthropology, Leipzig, is also gratefully acknowledged. I would liketo thank Alexandra Aikhenvald, Thiago Chacon, Elsa Gomez-Imbert, AnaMarıa Ospina, and Kristine Stenzel for sharing their data with me, and I amgrateful to the participants in the symposium on ‘‘Languages and Cultures ofthe Upper Rio Negro Region’’ at the 53rd ICA, Mexico City, July 22, 2009,for their comments. The input of three anonymous reviewers is also gratefullyacknowledged.

especially where bilingualism is high, provide a bridge for the transfer of

constructions that involve it.

However, like most rules, this one is not without exceptions. Perhaps

the best known counterexample is found in the Vaupes region of the

northwest Amazon, where the practice of linguistic exogamy, or obligatory

marriage across language groups, has fostered both a region-wide multi-

lingualism and a negative attitude toward language mixing (see, for example

Sorensen 1967; Jackson 1983). This unusual sociolinguistic situation has

generated a widespread resistance to the borrowing of lexical items (and

of phonological and morphological forms generally, as linguistic features

most salient to speakers), such that loanwords in these languages tend to

be relatively few (though not altogether absent). At the same time, heavy

di¤usion of grammatical structures and categories has taken place, and

has driven grammaticalization within the recipient languages to generate

new forms from existing (native) material to fill the new functions (see

Aikhenvald 2002; Gomez-Imbert 1996; Epps 2007a, 2008a).

The Vaupes contact situation is thus relatively unusual with respect to

cross-linguistic tendencies. Yet, on a more fine-grained level, the extent of

its exceptionality is unclear. How deep does the avoidance of shared forms

actually go? What, if any, role is played by form in restricting or enabling

the spread of grammatical categories and structures?

This article addresses these questions through the case study of a par-

ticular etymon that occurs throughout the Vaupes languages. While this

etymon has several variants among these languages, I represent it here

generally as ni (because most of the relevant forms in the languages dis-

cussed here share a nasal quality, a voiced coronal consonant, and a final

vowel i ). That the ni form is itself widespread throughout the Vaupes is

striking given the general resistance to borrowing of lexical and morpho-

logical forms in the region; moreover, there is an intriguing range of gram-

matical functions associated with this form, many of which are likewise

widespread. The overlapping forms and functions of ni (and associated

forms) across languages of the three di¤erent families represented in the

region – East Tukanoan, Nadahup (Maku),2 and Arawak – probably

2. The name ‘Nadahup’ is preferred because the name ‘Maku’ occurs in the litera-ture in reference to several unrelated language groups in Amazonia and is thusprone to confusion, and because the name ‘Maku’ (probably from Arawak‘‘do not talk’’; cf. Koch-Grunberg 1906) is widely recognized in the Vaupesregion as an ethnic slur, directed against the members of this ethnic/linguistic

196 Patience Epps

owe many of their similarities to contact among these languages. The dis-

cussion takes as its starting point the formal and functional distribution of

ni in Hup,3 a Nadahup (Maku) language of the Vaupes, and approaches

the related phenomena in other area languages from this vantage point.

In addition to being the language with which I am most familiar, Hup

exhibits a particularly wide range of uses for ni and, as a Nadahup lan-

guage in close contact with Tukanoan, provides an excellent opportunity

to consider the e¤ects of language contact.

As this article argues, the case of ni in Hup and the other Vaupes lan-

guages is of particular relevance to a typological understanding of language

contact and language change. It indicates that a general resistance to the

borrowing of lexical and morphological form does not necessarily entail a

resistance to the borrowing and elaboration of additional functions of a

shared lexical or morphological item (which itself may have entered some

of the languages via borrowing). Moreover, the distribution and pattern-

ing of ni in the Vaupes languages suggests that, in at least some cases, sim-

ilarity of form has actually facilitated the di¤usion of a grammatical struc-

ture. Accordingly, the ni case shows that certain generalizations about

mechanisms of language contact and change still apply even where they

seem to be most flagrantly violated: an awareness of shared form (which

may or may not come about through lexical borrowing) is likely to pre-

cede and even promote grammatical borrowing, even where shared forms

may otherwise be actively avoided.

The organization of the article is as follows: Section 2 gives an over-

view of Hup and the Vaupes languages, and the remarkable sociolinguistic

background to the region’s multilingualism and language contact. Section

3 introduces the essentially lexical function of ni as a verb of existence and

location. Section 4 turns to other functions of the form ni in Hup and its

Vaupes neighbors: as a copula in equative clauses (that is, with predicate

nominals and adjectives), the core of an evidential construction, an aspec-

tual marker in verb compounds, a light verb in a predicate chaining con-

group. ‘Nadahup’ combines elements of the names of the four establishedlanguages that make up the family (Nadeb, Daw, Yuhup, Hup). The nameVaupes-Japura (or Uaupes-Japura) has also been used (cf. Ramirez 2001c).Attempts to link the Kakua, Nukak, and Puinave languages to this familyhave so far proved inconclusive.

3. Information on Hup (aka Hupda, Jupde) was obtained via original fieldworkon the Rio Tiquie, Amazonas, Brazil, conducted in 2000–2004. See Epps(2008b) for a comprehensive description of Hup.

On form and function in language contact 197

struction, and a ‘‘verbalizer’’ in an incorporative construction. Sections 5

and 6 explore the extent to which language contact has played a role in

shaping the area profile of ni and its uses, and examine the implications

of the ni case for our understanding of the mechanisms of language con-

tact and contact-driven language change.

2. Hup and the Vaupes linguistic area

The Vaupes region, located in northwest Brazil and eastern Colombia,

is home to speakers of over a dozen languages belonging to the East

Tukanoan, Arawak, and Nadahup families, as well as Portuguese, Spanish,

and Nheengatu (or Lıngua Geral, a Tupi language brought by early mis-

sionaries). East Tukanoan languages spoken within the Vaupes include

Tukano, Desano, Kotiria (Wanano), Makuna, Tuyuka, Tatuyo, and Bara-

sana, among others. Arawak languages in the region include Tariana,

with Baniwa and several others located not far away. Of the Nadahup

family, Hup and its close relative Yuhup are spoken inside the Vaupes,

their sister Daw is on the periphery, and the more distantly related Nadeb

is spoken further away on the middle Rio Negro. Map 1 gives an approx-

imate idea of where these language groups are located. (Individual Tu-

kanoan languages are not distinguished on this map; Tukano and Desano

villages are currently found along the Tiquie and upper Vaupes Rivers, the

Tuyuka live on the upper Tiquie, the Kotiria live along the upper Vaupes,

and so on.)

A clear distinction exists between the region’s Tukanoan and Arawak

groups and the Nadahup peoples of the region. Unlike the Tukanoans

and Arawaks, who for the most part live along the rivers and rely on

fishing and manioc farming for subsistence, the Nadahup – including the

approximately 1500 speakers of Hup – are traditionally forest-dwelling

hunters and gatherers and practice only small-scale agriculture. Moreover,

it is only the Tukanoan and Arawak peoples within the Vaupes who prac-

tice linguistic exogamy. Nevertheless, the Hup and Yuhup peoples (and to

a lesser extent the Daw) interact extensively with their ‘‘River Indian’’

neighbors through trade and labor arrangements, and are treated as the

socially inferior members of the partnership – a situation that has resulted

in the unreciprocated bilingualism of Hup (and many Yuhup) speakers in

Tukano, the most widely spoken East Tukanoan language.

In the complex sociolinguistic situation of the Vaupes, multilingualism

is thus fostered both by the linguistic exogamy of the region’s Tukanoan

198 Patience Epps

and Arawak peoples and by their socioeconomic relations with the Nada-

hup. Likewise, all groups in the region share the negative attitudes toward

language mixing, even though the Nadahup people have assimilated this

cultural perspective without adopting the linguistic exogamy that is its

apparent source.

As noted above, this situation in turn has led to a general avoidance of

lexical borrowing, code-switching, and any other transfer of forms in all of

the Vaupes languages, while grammatical categories and structures (in-

cluding lexical calques) are widely shared.4 Hup, for example, has bor-

rowed only a handful of lexical items from Tukano, but has experienced

Map 1. Languages of the Vaupes and Rio Negro regions

4. It is important to note that these contact e¤ects cannot be dismissed assubstrate influence, at least in the case of Hup. Hup is clearly the primarylanguage of its speakers, and most children only pick up Tukano as a secondlanguage. The case is not quite as clear for speakers of Tukanoan and Tariana,on the other hand, since the practice of linguistic exogamy results in children’sexposure to their mother’s and father’s languages simultaneously as they aregrowing up.


profound structural di¤usion across many areas of its grammar (see Epps

2007a, 2008a). A similar situation has been documented for Tariana

(Aikhenvald 2002). Indeed, Tariana speakers appear to be hyper-aware

of the need to avoid language mixing, even avoiding some apparently

native forms that bear a resemblance to forms in Tukano, such as the pho-

neme /�/ (already uncommon in Tariana; see Aikhenvald 2001: 415); this

may be due in part to the fact that Tariana is currently severely threatened

by a shift to Tukano. Interestingly, the few Tukano loanwords that do

exist in Hup and Tariana include more verbs than nouns, in violation of

yet another cross-linguistic tendency of language contact (see Epps 2009;

Aikhenvald 2002: 224). As Aikhenvald has suggested, this may be due to

the fact that verbs in these languages tend to exhibit greater morphological

complexity than nouns (including frequent compounding), so borrowed

verbs are more likely to escape notice within the native material.

In addition to being a linguistic area characterized by grammatical dif-

fusion among languages of these three families, the Vaupes region can also

be considered a ‘‘grammaticalization area’’ – a region where several lan-

guages have undergone (and are currently undergoing) similar processes of

grammaticalization (see Heine and Kuteva 2005). One example of such

shared processes is the development of tense-aspect-mode morphology

from compounded or serialized verbs (for example Aikhenvald 2002: 127

for East Tukanoan and Tariana; Epps 2008b for Hup). The modal use of

‘want’ in (1)–(2) exemplifies such a marginally grammaticalized verb, and

also illustrates other areas of Hup-Tukano isomorphism, such as su‰xa-

tion, evidentiality, and subject dropping:

(1) Tukano (Ramirez 1997: 184)

ba’a sı ’ri-sa’

eat want-pres.nonvis

‘(I) want to eat.’

(2) Hup

wæd-tu-y¼h�eat-want-dynm¼nonvis

‘(I) want to eat.’

Other examples of likely grammatical di¤usion include Hup’s development

of a system of noun classification that organizes animates by gender and

inanimates by shape, with classifier terms derived via grammaticalization

from plant part nouns (see Epps 2007b). Similarly, Tukanoan influence

was undoubtedly responsible for the expansion of Hup’s evidential para-

200 Patience Epps

digm to include non-visual and inferred specifications, for which markers

were grammaticalized from the verbs ‘hear’ and ‘be inside’ (Epps 2005). A

similar expansion of the evidential system took place in Tariana, which

derived its non-visual evidential from the verb ‘hear, perceive’ (Aikhenvald

2002: 127).

Where the direction of borrowing can be ascertained (by compari-

son among related languages), it appears to be consistently Tukanoan >Nadahup, as the contemporary sociolinguistic situation would predict.

The greatest amount of Tukanoan influence appears to be present in

Hup, followed by Yuhup; Daw has significantly less, and Nadeb seems to

be entirely una¤ected (which again is in keeping with its current distance

from Tukanoan languages). Di¤usion involving Tariana also appears to

be almost entirely unilateral from Tukanoan (Aikhenvald 2002); there is

currently no contact between Hup and Tariana, and as yet no evidence

that the features shared between Hup and Tariana are due to anything

more than common influence from Tukanoan. Elsewhere in the Vaupes

there is evidence of di¤usion into Tukanoan languages, particularly involv-

ing Baniwa (Arawak) influence on Kubeo (Tukanoan) (Gomez-Imbert

1996), and bilateral transfer between Yukuna (Arawak) and Retuara

(Tukanoan) (Aikhenvald 2002). The Tukanoan languages have also un-

doubtedly influenced each other, but these e¤ects are considerably more

di‰cult to detect than are those resulting from di¤usion across unrelated

languages.

3. The verb ni ‘be, exist’

In Hup, the basic lexical identity of the form ni is a verb meaning ‘be,

exist.’ Ni may occur as a predicate by itself to mean ‘X exists; X is present

(in some unspecified location),’ as in (3), and as a copula with a predicate

locative construction (4).

(3) tahceb nı-ıytick be-dynm

‘There are ticks.’ (in general or in specific location)

(4) n’ıt w�d�g’��w’ hohod-ot ni-po-y yæh¼nih

there jacu.sp. clearing-obl be-emph1-dynm frust¼emph.co

j’ah tıh

dst:cntr emph2

‘(Those things) that were always there in that Jacu-bird clearing. . .’


Verbs that resemble Hup ni both in form and in function are found

throughout the Vaupes. Within the Nadahup family, we find YuhupPdi-

‘be, exist, live, have’ (Ospina 2002: 138), and Daw nı ‘be, exist’ (Martins

2004: 208, 567), both of which are formally identical to Hup ni-.5 Even

Nadeb, located well outside the Vaupes region, has a similar verb ‘exist,’

transcribed n� by Weir (1984: 99) and n�: or na: by Martins (2005: 267).

Whether the Nadeb form is in fact cognate with the forms in Hup, Yuhup,

and Daw remains to be resolved. Martins, in his reconstruction of ‘‘Proto-

Maku’’ (2005), considers the Nadeb form non-cognate; however, � P i cor-

respondences (in Weir’s orthography) do exist between Nadeb and its sister

languages (at least in non-nasal contexts; for example Nadeb h� PHup hi

‘go downstream’), and the overall similarity between these forms and their

functions suggests that it would be unwise to dismiss too quickly the

possibility that they may be cognate.

Forms resembling ni are also found widely throughout the East

Tukanoan languages (cf. Stenzel 2004: 262). In Tukano, the verb ni ı is

formally almost identical to the Hup form, and likewise occurs in clauses

of existence and location (compare example 3 above):

(5) Tukano (Aikhenvald 2002: 154)

tehe-a niı-sa-ma

tick-pl exist-pres.nonvis-3pl

‘There are ticks.’ (in general or in a specific location)

Similar forms of a verb ‘be, exist, live’ in other East Tukanoan languages

are Desano arı (Miller 1999: 125–126), TatuyoPadı (Gomez-Imbert and

Hugh-Jones 2000: 338), Tuyuca dı ı (Barnes and Malone 2000: 442), and

Pisamira Pdi (Gonzalez de Perez 2000: 389); see Table 1 below. These

forms would suggest a shared proto-form *Padi; however, it is not at

this point possible to determine whether the widespread presence of this

5. It is important to note that the orthographic conventions used here are some-what variable; I have retained those of the original sources. For Hup, Yuhup,and most of the East Tukanoan languages (as well as other languages of theregion), nasalization is a property of the entire morpheme; a form [nı ] maytherefore be written ni, dı, or Pdi, depending on how nasalization is marked.Similarly, the representation of long vs. short vowels in Tukanoan languagesis understood to be largely a matter of orthographic convention, reflectingtendencies for CV roots to undergo vowel lengthening when appearing asindependent words in order to meet prosodic minimality constraints, as dis-cussed in Stenzel (forthcoming: Section 2.3) for Kotiria (Wanano).

202 Patience Epps

etymon in East Tukanoan is due to di¤usion rather than shared inheri-

tance. Moreover, distinct forms exist in a few East Tukanoan languages:

Kotiria (Wanano) and Waikhana (Piratapuyo) have hi and ihi respec-

tively (however, the formPdi [ni ] does occur as an aspectual auxiliary in

Kotiria; see below and Stenzel 2004: 262). Makuna na and baji, Retuara

ıba, Barasano ya, and Kubeo ba and k� (example 6) are also distinct. A

verb ‘be, exist’ is also encountered in West Tukanoan languages, but is

likewise distinct from the ni variant: Orejon biayi, Siona ba� i, and Kore-

guaje pa� i (see Table 1 in section 5 below). It is possible that these forms

are cognate with Makuna baji, Retuara ıba, and Kubeo ba; if so, only this

form of the verb would appear to reconstruct to Proto-Tukanoan.

(6) Kubeo (Thiago Chacon, personal communication)

yo-i yawi k�-bihere-loc jaguar exist-3m

‘There is a jaguar here.’

In Tariana, the best-documented Arawak language spoken within the

Vaupes, we find the verb alia, which mirrors the use of Tukano niı in exis-

tence and location clauses:

(7) Tariana (Aikhenvald 2002: 154)

akuru-pe alia-mha

tick-pl be-pres.nonvis

‘There are ticks.’ (in general or in a specific location)

Aikhenvald (2002: 153) attributes the usage of Tariana alia to di¤usion

from Tukanoan. While the source of the form alia is unknown, Aikhenvald

(2002: 156) notes that it could well have been borrowed from Tukanoan,

particularly in a form like Desano arı, although it is now fully nativized. A

few other Arawak languages have verbs with related semantics that bear a

vague formal resemblance to alia, such as Nanti ainyo / aityo ‘exist, be’

(Michael 2008), and Kinikinau aneye ‘be here’ (Souza 2008); Yucuna

i’ima ‘be, exist’ (Schauer 2005) appears more distinct. Aikhenvald (2002:

155) observes that Baniwa lacks an existential verb; Ramirez (2001a: 228,

2001b: 198) indicates that the expression neeni or niıni (an inflected loca-

tive root) in Baniwa can be used in existential and presentative contexts

(for example ‘there are many people’). Whether any actual historical rela-

tionship exists among these forms must await future investigation.

Tariana also has a verb ni ‘do’ (Aikhenvald 2003: 606–608; see further

discussion in Sections 4.3 and 4.4 below), but the origin of this verb is like-


wise unclear. A brief survey of other Arawak languages yielded no com-

parable forms for ‘do’;6 whether Tariana ni ‘do’ might also be related

through borrowing to Tukanoan ni ‘be’ remains an open question.

The similarities among the forms and lexical functions of the ni etymon

across the Vaupes languages suggest that contact has played an important

role in shaping the current picture, although many of the particulars of

what should be attributed to contact and what to independent innovation

or shared inheritance remain unclear. It is possible that Hup, Yuhup, and

Daw ni ‘be, exist’ is a loan from Tukanoan, but the presence of a similar

verb in Nadeb suggests that the story may be more complex, particularly

since there is no evidence for contact between Tukanoan and Nadeb, or

Tukanoan and Proto-Nadahup (see Epps forthcoming). It is similarly

unclear whether Tariana alia and ni are loans, or are inherited from older

Arawak forms. Given these uncertainties, we must leave open the question

of whether the ni forms have an East Tukanoan, Arawak, Nadahup,

or other origin, and consider the possibility that di¤usion among East

Tukanoan languages may account for the widespread occurrence of the

ni etymon in this branch of the family. Whatever its history, the ni verb

appears to be old and fully nativized in all the languages in question.

Finally, we may note in passing one further similarity among most of

the Vaupes languages: a negative counterpart of the verb ‘be, exist’ that

is a distinct lexical item. The majority of East Tukanoan languages share

a related form (for example, Tuyuka badı, Tukano mari, Barasana ba;

see, for example, Malone 1988: 137).7 Tariana likewise has a ‘not exist’

verb sede; Aikhenvald (2002) attributes its existence to di¤usion from

Tukanoan, pointing out that no such distinct negative form is found in

Baniwa. Hup’s ‘not exist’ counterpart of ni is the predicative particle pa,

and Daw likewise has mh; Nadeb and Yuhup, on the other hand, use

the same negative morpheme for standard negation and in existential

clauses (Weir 1994: 301; Ospina 2002 and personal communication).

6. For example, verbs meaning ‘do’ include Baniwa deenhi, Apurina txa ‘say, be,do’ (Facundes 2000: 127), Kinikinau itu ‘do, build’ (Souza 2008: 87), Wapishanatum (Gomes dos Santos 2006: 269), Yavitero ma (Key 2007: 39, after Mosonyi1987), Matsiguenga aNt, Nanti og (Michael 2008: 265), and Yucuna la’a(Schauer 2005).

7. It is possible that this ‘‘negative existence’’ form is etymologically related tothe ba set of ‘be, exist’ verbs in Kubeo, Makuna, and the Western Tukanoanlanguages, plus a reflex of negation like Tukano -ti; another alternative couldinvolve the ‘be, exist’ set ani/ni plus an unidentified prefix. This question mustawait detailed comparative work on the Tukanoan family.

204 Patience Epps

4. Grammatical functions of ni

In addition to its identity as the verb ‘be, exist’ in Hup and other Vaupes

languages, the ni etymon serves a number of other functions that are more

grammatical than lexical, that is, in which the semantic contribution of the

verb is relatively neutral or is quite di¤erent from its basic lexical use.

While in principle the chances of accidental homonymy are relatively

high for a form having only two segments, this can almost certainly be

ruled out for the di¤erent functions of ni at least within Hup, as the

following discussion will demonstrate.

A number of grammatical functions of ni overlap from language to

language, and indeed no other lexical or morphological item appears to

be as widespread or as ubiquitous in the Vaupes languages. In fact, the

occurrence of ni forms and associated functions may well be greater than

this discussion implies; comparative data in the region are limited, since

detailed grammatical descriptions exist for only a few of these languages.

This discussion draws primarily on data from Hup and its Nadahup sisters

(Yuhup, Daw, Nadeb), the Arawak language Tariana and its geographi-

cally proximate sisters (particularly Baniwa, Bare, and Yucuna, though

data are limited), and those Tukanoan languages for which information

is available. However, the general scarcity of data necessarily results in a

relatively incomplete picture, particularly for the more fine-grained gram-

matical phenomena discussed here.

4.1. Copula in equative clauses

Not unlike its copular function in predicate locative clauses, the verb ni

also occurs in Hup as a copula in equative clauses, or clauses involving

predicate nominals and predicate adjectives (Epps 2008b: 768–772). How-

ever, and in contrast to predicate locatives, equative clauses may only take

a copula when certain exclusively verbal tense-aspect-mode markers or sub-

ordinators are present (such as the markers of perfective aspect, sequen-

tiality, and simultaneity). The copula then acts as a host for these inflec-

tional su‰xes; if they are not present, the copula is obligatorily absent as

well (this is cross-linguistically common behavior for copulas: see Pustet

2003).

(8) t�h¼tæhnfi�w’¼d’�h ni-e¼d’�h mah-an t�h w�d-ye-ay-ah3sg¼a‰ne¼pl be-pfv¼pl near-dir 3sg arrive-enter-inch-decl

‘He went to those who used to be his in-laws.’ (his wife had died)


(9) tu¼mæh¼yfi�� am¼� ıp m�yok nı-ıp¼mæh yuw-uh

low¼dim¼tel 2sg¼father rafter be-dep¼dim that.itg-decl

‘They are so low, the rafters of your father’s house.’

Negative verbal predicates also require copular ni to host inflectional

markers (10), and the copula is obligatory in the negative imperative (11).

(10) d’o� -ham-y�� -yo� , bahad-nfi�h t� h ni-yfi��-ay-ahtake-go-tel-seq appear-neg 3sg be-tel-inch-decl

‘After he had taken her away, she did not appear.’

(11) � �d-nfi� h-y�� nıh!speak-neg-tel be.imp

‘Don’t talk!’

In at least one dialect of Hup (that spoken near the Japu and Vaupes

rivers), the verb g’�h is used interchangeably with or in place of ni as the

copula in equative and negative clauses (12)–(13), while ni is always used

to mean ‘be, exist’ (note its co-occurrence with g’�h in 12).

(12) g’fi� wag g’��h-��¼nih, ‘‘� am-an næm¼d’�h nı-ıy hfi� d?’’hot day be-dynm¼emph.co 2sg-obj louse¼pl be-dynm 3pl

‘It was a hot dry-season day; ‘‘are there lice on you?’’ (he asked).’

(13) yfi� t¼mah t�h yo-d’o�-hipah-nfi� h g’��h-g’et-g’o�-op¼b’ay

thus¼rep 3sg dangle-take-know-neg be-stand-go.about-dep¼again

‘Then, it’s said, he (the man) was standing around again, not

knowing how to carry the fish.’

Among the other Nadahup languages, this copular function of ni is more

variable than is its ‘be, exist’ use. Of the Nadahup languages, YuhupPdi

patterns like Hup ni, but Daw nı and Nadeb n�/n�: /na: do not share the

copular function in equative clauses. In Tariana, the verb alia is used with

predicate nominals and adjectives (in addition to its ‘be, exist’ function:

example 14); however, this equative copular use is limited primarily to

younger speakers, leading Aikhenvald (2002: 153) to consider this a rela-

tively new use of alia, and not yet fully established in the language. A

copula is lacking in other Arawak languages of the wider region, such as

Baniwa (Ramirez 2001b: 118), Bare (Aikhenvald 2002: 153), Piapoco

(Ramirez 2001b: 269), and Yucuna (Schauer 2005).

206 Patience Epps

(14) Tariana (Aikhenvald 2003: 491)

at§a ihya alia-ka-nakaman: pl 2pl exist-decl-pres.vis

‘You are real men.’

All the Tukanoan languages surveyed here use a copula in equative con-

structions (cf. Aikhenvald 2002: 153). In most the copula is identical to

that language’s ‘be, exist’ verb (with the exceptions of Yuruti, Makuna,

Kubeo, and possibly Orejon; see Table 1 in Section 5 below): verbs such

as ‘be, exist’ are cross-linguistically common sources of copulas (Pustet

2003: 54). In a few Tukanoan languages, more than one copular option is

available; in Barasano, for example, ya conveys permanence, while bahi

is used for temporary associations (Jones and Jones 1991: 21–22). The

copula is optional in Retuara (Strom 1992: 124) and Kubeo (Thiago Chacon,

personal communication; Morse and Maxwell 1999: 17); in Kubeo, there

is a further choice between a copular clitic and a full copula (the latter is

used when tense-aspect-evidential values are marked). The optional nature

of the copula in these two languages is probably due to contact from the

neighboring Arawak languages Yukuna and Baniwa (Aikhenvald 2002:

155).

The use of the Tukano copula niı, as in many of the other Tukanoan

languages, is very similar to the use of ni and alia in Hup and Tariana

(examples 15–16). However, in Tukano the copula (which bears the

obligatory tense/person/evidential su‰xes) is required (cf. Ramirez 1997:

116, 140), in contrast to Hup and Tariana. Ramirez (1997: 116) observes

that the verb/copula niı is extremely common in Tukano discourse.


peduru fi�sa pak� niı-mi

pedro 1pl father be-pres.vis.3.nonf.sg

‘Pedro is our father.’ [my translation from the Portuguese]


a’tı-go ayu-go niı-mo

this-nmlz.f.sg good-nmlz.f.sg be-pres.vis.3.f.sg

‘This is pretty.’ [my translation from the Portuguese]

The patterns observed here suggest strongly that the use of ni (and asso-

ciated forms) as a copula in equative clauses is an areal feature of the


Vaupes region. The synchronic variability of this feature in Hup and

Tariana, and its absence in Hup’s sisters Daw and Nadeb, as well as in

Tariana’s Arawak relatives, all suggest that the equative copular use of

the ni etymon is relatively recent in these families. That a copula in equa-

tive clauses is obligatory in most Tukanoan languages (with the exception

of those influenced by Arawak) suggests that they are the source of this

feature (cf. Aikhenvald 2002: 153).

4.2. Inferred evidential construction

In another widespread grammatical function, the ni etymon forms the core

of an inferred (assumed) evidential construction. In Hup, evidential ni

appears as a verbal su‰x, followed by an additional, obligatory verbal

inflectional su‰x. It indicates information that is inferred, usually on the

basis of some sort of evidence at hand (Epps 2005, 2008b: 659–661).

(17) mumuy¼cum nut tfi� h-an t�h k�t-næn-d’�h-nı-h!arm¼begin here 3sg-obj 3sg cut-come-send-infr2-decl

‘Here on her upper arm he cut!’ (speaker saw the wound/scar)

(18) yup h�t�ah¼mah h�d ye-nı-p¼b’ay-ah

that other.side¼rep 3pl enter-infr2-dep¼again-decl

‘There on the other side (of the house, someone said) they

apparently got in again.’ (a fish has been stolen)

Hup’s ni evidential is distinct from the rest of its evidential paradigm,

which includes non-visual, reported, and an additional inferred specifica-

tion; these other evidential markers usually appear as enclitics, attaching

to predicates or – in the case of the reported form – to other clausal con-

stituents. Semantically, evidential ni behaves much like Hup’s other inferred

evidential (cud ), but is somewhat less dependent on tangible evidence.

Evidential ni may co-occur with Hup’s alternative equative copula g’�hfor some speakers (example 19), suggesting that the evidential function of

ni is more fully established in the language than is its copular function.

Both appear to have entered Hup via di¤usion from Tukanoan (see

below), and while it is unclear which was adopted first, it is possible that

for copular ni the similarity with Tukano is more salient to speakers than

it is for the morphologically bound evidential ni, resulting in a slower or

more uneven rate of assimilation.

208 Patience Epps

(19) yfi� n�h-mfi�� ¼mah yup tfi� h-an-ap, baktfi�b’-an-ap,that.itg.be.like-under¼rep that.itg 3sg-obj-dep spirit-obj-dep

b’oy¼d’�h g’��h-nı-htraira¼pl be-infr2-decl

‘At the same time, it’s said, for him, for the spirit, they were

traira fish.’

A relatively strong case can be made that Tukano is the source of Hup’s

ni evidential (see Epps 2005). In Tukano, a periphrastic construction in-

volving the verb niı conveys inferred evidential semantics. As example

(20) illustrates, this construction conforms to the following template:

stem–nominalizerþ ‘be’ – [visual.evidential/tense/person/number/

gender].


fi�sa pako meho nima me’ra werı-’ko

1pl mother detrimental poison com die-nmlz.f.sg.pfv

niı-wo

be-dst: pst.vis.3f.sg

‘Our late mother died from poison.’ (proof: typical e¤ects of poison)

The Hup construction appears to be the calqued equivalent of the Tukano

construction. Given that verb roots in Hup can be zero-nominalized (by

appearing without the otherwise obligatory verbal inflection), that the visual

evidential specification is unmarked, and that Hup typically takes a declara-

tive, dependent, or other su‰x where Tukano takes a tense-evidential-

person su‰x, the two constructions are essentially isomorphic. Moreover,

an inferred evidential construction (of any kind) appears to be lacking in

Hup’s sisters Daw and Nadeb, while Yuhup has one that resembles Hup’s

(although Yuhup’s evidential ni is laryngealized, which could possibly be

explained as deriving from a glottalized variant of the ni verb, such as the

variant a� rı in Desano; see Ospina 2002: 182).

In contrast, periphrastic evidential constructions resembling Tukano’s

are found in a number of other East Tukanoan languages (and likewise

involve these languages’ counterparts of the verb ‘be, exist’), including

Kotiria (Stenzel 2004: 358), Desano (Miller 1999: 64), Tuyuka (example

21), Kubeo (Morse and Maxwell 1999: 62), Pisamira, Yuruti, and Makuna

(Malone 1988: 136; see Table 1 in section 5 below). The construction is

not reported for several East Tukanoan languages (Tatuyo, Barasana,


Karapana, Siriano, and Retuara), but the available data on these languages

are relatively scarce. There is no evidence that this feature occurs in any of

the West Tukanoan languages, suggesting it may be confined to the East

Tukanoan branch.

(21) Tuyuka (Malone 1988: 136)

yee-g� dı ı-hı ı

crazy-m.sg be.apparent: pres

‘You’re/he’s crazy.’

In contrast to other Arawak languages of the wider region (see Aikhenvald

2002: 121), Tariana has a parallel inferred evidential construction based on

a form resembling ni. In the Tariana case, however, the evidential marker

has come about through the reanalysis of the anterior aspect marker -nhi

(in combination with past visual evidential forms); this development was

almost certainly inspired by the Tukanoan model (Aikhenvald 2002:

123). Tariana’s use of native material resembling the ni form for its evi-

dential suggests that the formal resemblance itself facilitated the shift of

meaning and the adoption of the new grammatical category (presumably

by creating a direct link to the intended meaning for speakers and listeners).

Thus, even though Aikhenvald (2001, 2002) reports that Tariana speakers

tend to actively resist forms that resemble those found in Tukano, Tariana’s

development of a ni evidential suggests that, as long as speakers are not

too consciously aware of it, form may play an important role in facilitat-

ing structural borrowing.

In sum, the inferred evidential construction with ni (or an associated

form) appears to be an areal feature in the Vaupes. Hup has probably

copied the construction directly from Tukanoan with the form ni intact;

Yuhup may well have done likewise. Tariana has created its own version

of the same construction, also involving a formal equivalent of ni. Its source

is most likely East Tukanoan, given that it is relatively widely attested in

this branch of the family.8

Although the transfer of formal material within a borrowed grammatical

construction almost never occurs in the Vaupes languages, it is likely that

Hup (and perhaps Yuhup) speakers’ recognition of the form ni (both as

present in the Tukano construction and as a nativized verb in their own

8. The development of an inferred evidential from a copular construction ap-pears to be cross-linguistically uncommon, but does have parallels elsewhere(for example Turkish; Pustet 2003: 59).

210 Patience Epps

languages) provided a vehicle for their assimilation of this new evidential,

and a similar awareness of form was almost certainly behind the parallel

development in Tariana.

4.3. Aspectual auxiliary

In Hup, the form ni also occurs as the final, auxiliary root in a verb com-

pound (that is, a contiguous serial verb construction), where it contributes

a progressive aspectual sense: it indicates that the subject has entered a

state in which the event is occurring or has relevance, and often serves to

set the stage for a description of other concurrent events (Epps 2008b:

423–424). In the other Nadahup languages, aspectual uses of a ni verb

are not reported.

(22) tfi� h-an y�Ø �¼d’�h tuk-nı-ay-ah . . . nup t�h3sg-obj wasp¼pl sting-be-inch-decl . . . here 3sg

t��h-ham-nı-ay-ahrun-go-be-inch-decl

‘The wasps are stinging him. . . here he’s running away.’

(looking at a picture)

(23) h�h�� h h�d key-eh, tog’ cfi� g-an pæm-nı-ıw-antoad 3pl see-decl room point-dir sit-be-flr-dir

‘They saw a toad, one who was sitting in the corner of the room.’

Elsewhere in the Vaupes, at least one Tukanoan language has a construc-

tion that bears a close resemblance to that found in Hup. In Tatuyo, the

verb Padi ‘be, exist, copula’ occurs as an auxiliary in serial verbs and

contributes a durative aspectual meaning:

(24) Tatuyo (Gomez-Imbert and Hugh-Jones 2000: 335, ex. 3i)

wada.Ppedı Padi

chat exist

‘Chat for a while.’ [my translation from the Spanish]

Another construction that bears some formal resemblance to the Hup and

Tatuyo cases is found in Kotiria. However, in Kotiria the auxiliary verb

occurs with a nominalized main verb in a periphrastic construction, as

opposed to a verbal compound. Kotiria uses the formPdi ‘be.progressive’uniquely in this construction, whereas elsewhere it employs hi for the verb

‘exist, be,’ the equative copula, and in the inferred evidential construction;


Stenzel (2004: 327) suggests that Pdi has probably been retained from

East Tukanoan while hi is an innovation.

(25) Kotiria (Stenzel 2004: 327)

y ’ -re a’ri-ro ch -dua-ro Pdi-ka1sg-obj dem: prox-sg eat-desid-nmlz be.prog-assert.impfv

‘This thing (the curupira) wants (is wanting) to eat me.’

Most of the other East Tukanoan languages surveyed here have a con-

struction that matches the Kotiria example, but use a distinct auxiliary

verb ‘do’ (even where a variant of ni exists in the language). This is the

case in Desano, which employs the verb ii ‘do’ as a form of progressive

aspectual auxiliary (rather than arı ‘be, exist’) with a nominalized main

verb:

(26) Desano (Miller 1999: 76)

ba-go ii-boeat-f.sg.nmlz do-3f.sg

‘She is eating.’

Similarly, West (1980: 67) describes a ‘‘continuative construction’’ in Tukano,

which is ‘‘used to describe a continuing activity or an activity that is cur-

rently ongoing.’’9 This construction involves a nominalized verb form plus

the inflected verb wee ‘do.’ Comparable examples are found in Tuyuka,

Siriano, and Yuruti (see Table 1 in section 5 below).

(27) Tukano (West 1980: 68, in West’s orthography)

ba’a-g � wee-’eeat-m.sg.nmlz do-pres.vis

‘I’m eating.’ [my translation from the Spanish]

Barasano has three di¤erent aspect-related auxiliary constructions of this

type. Progressive aspect may be expressed either via a nominalized main

verb followed by ‘do,’ as in the Desano and Tukano examples above, or

(with a stative main verb) by the copula verb bahi ‘be’ (Jones and Jones

1991: 97). Finally, a construction that resembles the Tatuyo compound in

(24) above, involving a bare verb stem followed by ya ‘be, exist,’ expresses

durative aspect (1991: 98; also described as progressive, p. 154).

9. My translation from the Spanish.

212 Patience Epps

(28) Barasano (Jones and Jones 1991: 154)

boa ya-go-de basa-ka-bo so

work be-f.sg-spcr sing-far.pst-3f.sg 3f.sg

‘She sang while she worked.’

A periphrastic progressive construction occurs in the East Tukanoan lan-

guage Kubeo (in which either the full copula or the copular clitics may be

used) and in the West Tukanoan languages Koreguaje and Siona. In these

languages, the verb ‘be’ acts as the auxiliary following the nominalized

main verb.

(29) Koreguaje (Cook and Criswell 1993: 84)

ai-� pa� i-m�eat-sim.m.sg be-m.sg

‘I am / he is eating.’ [my translation from the Spanish]

In Arawak Tariana, the verb ‘do’ – which has the form ni – appears in

serial verbs with the aspectual meaning of ‘prolonged action’ (Aikhenvald

2003: 432). Intriguingly, several other northern Arawak languages have

aspectual su‰xes with durative semantics that bear a formal resemblance

to Tariana ni: for example, Baniwa -nhi (Ramirez 2001: 168) and Piapoco

-Vni (Ramirez 2001b: 286, who glosses both ‘‘durative’’ [‘‘permansivo’’]).

It is not clear whether the Tariana construction owes anything to Tukanoan

influence; it is possible, though perhaps unlikely in light of cross-linguistic

tendencies of grammaticalization, that the form ni in this construction

began as an aspectual marker (cognate to other Arawak forms) and was

reanalyzed as a serialized verb root ‘do’ to conform to the Tukanoan

model. On the other hand, Arawakan influence in structuring the Tatuyo

form, for example, also cannot at this point be ruled out.

As the above examples illustrate, the use of an auxiliary light verb to

indicate some type of progressive or durative aspect appears to be com-

mon throughout the Vaupes, although there is significant variation with

respect to the choice of verb (‘be’ vs. ‘do’), and to the type of construction

involved (periphrastic with a nominalized main verb, vs. serial verb con-

struction/compound). The progressive vs. durative function may also be a

significant point of di¤erence, although these are semantically close and

some descriptions suggest that both may be indicated by a given con-

struction (for example Tukano, Barasano). In spite of these variations,

the form ni does appear to be implicated in this areal pattern. Given the

apparent absence of a similar construction in Hup’s Nadahup sisters, it is


likely that Hup has acquired this ‘‘progressive’’ serial verb construction

relatively recently. It is possible that Hup’s choice of ni as the aspectual

marker was promoted through contact with Tukanoan languages that use

the same form for this purpose; it is also possible that Hup’s use of ni

in this context was motivated language-internally, and resulted from the

generic and already multifunctional nature of this verb. Whatever the

motivation, it appears that the identity of ni as a shared form did not

hinder its extension to new contexts and functions in Hup, thus rendering

it even more ubiquitous in the language.

4.4. Light verb in predicate chaining construction

Yet another function of ni in Hup (and one that is not unlike its copular

function) involves its occurrence as a light verb in a predicate chaining

construction (Epps 2008b: 823). In this construction, a string of non-finite,

uninflected verb phrases is obligatorily followed by ni, which bears the

inflectional morphology that is normally required on all verbs in the in-

dicative mood. Ni contributes no real semantic content. In the majority

of cases, this predicate chaining strategy involves ‘‘reduplicative’’ predicates,

in which a single verb stem or verb phrase is repeated.

(30) nup p�Ø t b��-yo�, j ’fi�p j’fi� p j’fi� p nı-ıy h�dthis circle work-seq wrap wrap wrap be-dynm 3pl

d’�h-d’�h-ham-b’ay-ah

send-send-go-again-decl

‘Having made this loop, having wrap-wrap-wrapped (the string),

they would send (the toy top) o¤.’

(31) t�h¼t�g ca�-at cuh-d’�h-cak,3sg¼tooth box-obl string-send-climb

t�h¼t�g ca�-at cuh-d’�h-cak t�h nı-mah-ah.

3sg¼tooth box-obl string-send-climb 3sg be-rep-decl

‘(He) strung (one) up by the chin, strung (the next) up by the chin

(and so on), thus he did, it’s said.’

Hup’s chaining construction can also involve a series of di¤erent predicates:

(32) yup p�� -an mac-hu�-yfi��, hfi�d-an mæh-hu�-yfi��¼mah

that.itg thicket-dir chop.out-finish-tel 3pl-obj kill-finish-tel¼rep

h�d nı-ıh3pl be-decl

‘They chopped everything down in the thicket and killed them all.’

214 Patience Epps

Among Hup’s Nadahup sisters, a comparable construction appears to

exist in Daw (example 33), but none is reported for Yuhup or Nadeb.

(33) Daw (Martins 2004: 359)

nu�-p�n� nuh w�x �a-xuj nu�-p�n?

other-separate head break this-conj other-separate

nuh w�x-h �a-xuj nıhead break-neg this-conj exist

‘Of these, some broke their heads, others did not.’ (my translation

from the Portuguese)

A similar chaining construction (but typically involving di¤erent, non-

reduplicated predicates) is attested in several East Tukanoan languages

(although data at this level of detail are relatively scarce). In these lan-

guages, the chaining does not involve the verb ‘be,’ but rather ‘do.’ This

is the case for Kotiria yoa ‘do’ (example 34), for Desano ii ‘do’ (example

35), for Tukano wee ‘do’ (example 36), and for Barasano yi ‘do’ (Jones

and Jones 1991: 154, 180). I have found no mention of this construction

in the available data on Western Tukanoan languages.

(34) Kotiria (Stenzel forthcoming: Section 11.4)

cha-da’re ti-ro-re s ’o-ch yoa-afeast-prepare anph-sg-obj do.together-eat do/make-assert.pfv

‘She prepared a feast (and) ate with him.’

(35) Desano (Miller 1999: 87)

iri wi� i-ge eha gahi-do-re-ta weretabu ii-b�that house-loc arrive other-cl-obj-lim discuss do-non3.pst

‘Arriving at that house, we discussed other things.’

(36) Tukano (Aikhenvald 2002: 160)

k� na yocoa masa ya wi’i-p� k� mas� wa’a-pıhe they star people poss house-loc he man go-rem.pst.rep.3sg.nf

wa’a, to-p� k� wa’a, k� nocoa masa ya-wi’i-p� wa’a,

go there-loc he go, he star people poss-house-loc go

wee, to-p� ni-pı

do there-loc be-rem.pst.rep.3sg.nf

‘He, the man, went to the house of the star-people, having gone,

having gone there, having gone to the star people’s house, he did

(thus), there he stayed.’


In Tariana, the verb ni ‘do’ has a ‘‘recapitulating’’ function in serial verb

constructions (Aikhenvald 2003: 438), including (but not limited to) those

with several components. This construction bears a resemblance to the

chaining construction found in Hup and in Tukanoan that is likely not

accidental (Aikhenvald, personal communication).

(37) Tariana (Alexandra Aikhenvald, p.c.)

nu-sita nu-wa nu-ni-ka1sg-smoke 1sg-try 1sg-do-rec: pst.vis

‘I have tried/started smoking, this is what I did.’

Like the constructions examined in the preceding sections, predicate

chaining with a light verb appears to be an areal feature in the Vaupes,

although there is a certain amount of variation in the details of its realiza-

tion from language to language. The Hup construction may well have

been influenced by its Tukanoan counterpart, although it is noteworthy

that the Hup version occurs most commonly with reduplicated predicates,

whereas this is not the case in Tukanoan languages. As in the case of the

aspectual auxiliary discussed in Section 4.3 above, Hup uses ni ‘be’ as the

light verb in this construction, whereas all available Tukanoan examples

prefer an alternative light verb (‘do’). Tariana uses a light verb meaning

‘do’ – but with form ni – in a comparable construction. That Hup and

Tariana employed light verbs of the form ni in predicate chaining suggests

that, as we saw above with the aspectual auxiliary, the fact that this form

is widely shared in the Vaupes region was not an obstacle to its developing

(and/or maintaining) a high frequency of use in these languages.

4.5. Noun incorporation/verbalizer

A final use of ni in Hup is to derive verbs from nouns by means of an

incorporating construction. Although Hup has other (relatively marginal)

noun-incorporating mechanisms, this particular construction is specific to

ni. It is not fully productive, and while it typically yields the general sense

‘have N,’ it results in a number of lexically idiosyncratic forms. Examples

include tæh-ni- (o¤spring/son-be) ‘give birth; have a child’ (example 38),

do�-d’�h-ni- (child-pl-be) ‘have children,’ and the constructions in (39)–(40).

(38) � am-an � ah tæh-nı-ıy, tæh

2sg-obj 1sg o¤spring-be-dynm son

‘You are my son, Son.’ (lit. ‘I son-have you’)

216 Patience Epps

(39) d’apuh g’odh�� co� tfi� h-an h�m-nı-ıy¼b’ay¼cud tıh!

hand palm loc 3sg-obj sore-be-dynm¼again¼ infr emph2

‘Then she got another wound in the palm of her hand, apparently!’

(40) n’ikan y�h¼d’�h y��h-ni-maca-ay¼mah

over.there medicine¼pl medicine-be-gain.consciousness-dynm¼rep

‘The doctors treated/healed her over there.’

A parallel construction occurs in other Nadahup languages. In Daw, we

also find comparable idiosyncratic forms such as ‘give birth; have a child’

(example 41) and xat-nı- ‘name-be’ ¼ ‘famous’ (Martins 2004: 378; in Hup,

hat-ni- can mean both ‘famous’ and ‘give a name’).

(41) Daw (Martins 2004: 376)

dw �a-t� nı-g ham do� dw huj hid

Daw that-child be-rel: dem.emph go movement person com dir

‘The Daw person, the one who had a child, followed those people.’

In Nadeb, n� ‘be, exist’ is one of many verbs that can appear in an incor-

porating construction, where it signals possession (Weir 1990: 326). Weir

gives the following example, which closely resembles the Hup and Daw

forms in (38) and (41).

(42) Nadeb (Weir 1990: 326)

subih txaah n�ngSubih son exist: non.indicative

‘Subih has a son.’ (lit. ‘Subih son-exists.’)

In East Tukanoan languages and in Tariana, we find a construction remi-

niscent of Nadahup ni incorporation, and one which in some cases results

in closely comparable idiosyncratic lexical items. In these languages, how-

ever, verbal derivation does not involve the ni verb, but rather – in most

cases – a verbalizing su‰x. In Tukano, for example, the su‰x -ti trans-

forms a noun into a verb which, according to Ramirez (1997: 353), means

‘have N.’ Examples include po’ra-ti ‘have children,’ formed from the noun

po’ra ‘children’ (suppletive plural) (compare Hup do�-d’�h-ni- ‘have

children,’ from do�¼d’�h ‘children’ [regular plural]), and kamı-ti ‘have


wounds/sores’ (compare Hup h�m-ni- ‘have wounds/sores,’ see example

39 above). The verbalizer -ti also exists in Kotiria (Stenzel 2004: 259), as

do some of the same constructions (for examplePpho’da-ti ‘have children’).

The same process and many of the same lexical constructions are also

found in Desano, but use a verbalizing su‰x -k� (for example pora-k�‘have a child,’ oko-k� ‘be given medicine’; Miller 1999: 110). That these

two verbalizing su‰xes are in fact related, and derive historically from

an earlier process of noun incorporation, is evidenced by their counter-

parts in Tuyuca and Barasana; these languages derive verbs via noun

incorporation with the verb -k�t� ‘have’ (for example Tuyuca badfi�-k�t�‘husband-have’ ¼ ‘have a husband’; Barnes 1999: 220). In the Western

Tukanoan branch of the family, on the other hand, Koreguaje has a dis-

tinct mechanism for verbal derivation (the productive su‰x -�a, -� ; Cookand Criswell 1993: 79); information on the other Western languages is not

available.

In Arawak Tariana, the su‰x -ita or -ta (while usually used with verbs

as a causative) can combine with nouns to produce transitive verbs. Some

of these appear to closely match other lexical verbalizations in the Vaupes;

for example -ipitana ‘name’ > ipitaneta ‘give a name’ (compare Hup hat-

ni- [name-be] ‘give a name’ above). In Baniwa, verbalization is realized via

either the prefix ka- or the su‰x -hıta; the latter is probably cognate with

the Tariana su‰x, but is not productive and occurs with only a few roots

(relating to the expression of a physiological state).

The derivation of verbal ‘have-N’ constructions via a verbalizing mech-

anism, often one of noun incorporation, once again appears to be an areal

feature of the Vaupes region. This is further supported by the presence of

parallel, idiosyncratic lexical items resulting from this construction in

many of the region’s languages. However, the ultimate source of this strat-

egy is unclear. Comparative data suggest the ‘‘verbalizing’’ function of

ni is old in the Nadahup family, and its presence in Hup cannot be easily

attributed to Tukanoan contact, especially since Nadeb is largely out of

the Tukanoan sphere of influence. Yet whatever its origin, it is likely that

the ni verbalization strategy in Hup has been shaped or restructured by

contact with Tukanoan (especially given that influence in the opposite

direction is unattested), particularly regarding the calqued lexical con-

structions. If this is the case, the Hup examples serve as a further indica-

tion that grammatical transfer involving ni is not precluded by its formal

equivalence to a Tukanoan verb.

218 Patience Epps

5. Ni forms and functions: areal influence among Vaupes languages

Table 1 summarizes the functions served by Hup ni, the presence of simi-

lar constructions in other Vaupes languages, and the forms that code them

(which in many cases resemble ni).10

As the preceding discussion has demonstrated, the verb ni in Hup

serves a wide range of functions, ranging from the lexical to the relatively

grammatical. All of these occur in constructions that are widely similar

across other Vaupes languages (some of which also employ variants of

ni), and are particularly well established in Tukano and other languages

of the East Tukanoan family, which have had a profound influence on

Hup’s grammar in many other ways. In contrast, a number of these con-

structions are apparently not shared by other Nadahup languages, partic-

ularly Hup’s more distant sisters Daw and Nadeb: namely, the use of

ni (or comparable form) as a copula in equative clauses, as an inferred

evidential, as an auxiliary verb relating to progressive aspect, and as a

light verb in a predicate chain (although this last function appears to be

present in Daw).11 It is therefore probable that the variety of functions

of Hup ni have been structured at least in part according to an East

Tukanoan model, as is consistent with what we already know about

Tukanoan > Hup contact. We can also assume the same for a number of

10. Some classifications of the family treat Kubeo and Retuara (Tanimuka) as aseparate Central Tukanoan branch (for example Barnes 1999). Sources ofdata: Hup (my fieldnotes; Epps 2008b); Yuhup (Ospina 2002); Daw (Martins2004); Nadeb (Weir 1984, 1990, 1994); Tukano (Aikhenvald 2002, Ramirez1997, West 1980); Desano (Miller 1999); Kotiria (Wanano; Stenzel 2004 andforthcoming); Tatuyo (Gomez-Imbert and Hugh-Jones 2000); Barasana (Jonesand Jones 1991, Elsa Gomez-Imbert, personal communication); Tuyuka(Barnes and Malone 2000, Malone 1988); Pisamira (Gonzalez de Perez2000); Karapana (Malone 1988, Metzger 2000); Siriano (Criswell andBrandrup 2000); Yuruti (Kinch and Kinch 2000); Makuna (Malone 1988,Smothermon and Smothermon 1993); Kubeo (Thiago Chacon, personal com-munication; Morse and Maxwell 1999); Retuara (Tanimuka; Strom 1992);Orejon (Velie and Velie 1981); Koreguaje (Cook and Criswell 1993); Siona(Wheeler 1970); Tariana (Alexandra Aikhenvald, personal communication,2002, 2003); Baniwa (Ramirez 2001a, 2001b).

11. Of course, the fact that a feature is not reported in the description does notnecessarily mean that it is not present in the language. The conclusions pre-sented here are contingent on the available information about these languages,and may require revision in the future.

12. Aloisio Cabalzar, personal communication.


Table 1. Uses of ni and its counterparts in languages of the Vaupes and beyond (Blanks in thetable indicate the feature is not reported.)

existence/location:‘be, exist’

equativecopula

inferredevidential

auxiliary,progressiveaspect

light verbin predicatechain

nounincorp./verbalizer

NadahupðM

akuÞ Hup ni ni, g’�h -ni verbal

su‰xni (SVC) ni -ni

Yuhup Pdi PdiPdi verbalsu‰x

Daw nı none nı (?) nı

Nadebn� or na:/n�: none n�

East

Tukanoan

Tukano niı niı niı constr.wee ‘do’(periph.)

wee ‘do’ -ti

Desano arı arı arı constr.ii ‘do’(periph.)

ii ‘do’ -k�

Kotiria hi hi hi constr.Pdi

‘be.prog’(periph.)

yoa ‘do’ -ti

Tatuyo Padı PadıPadı (SVC)‘‘durative’’

Barasana ya ya, bahi

ya ‘do,’bahi ‘be’(periph); ya‘be’ (SVC)‘‘durative’’

yi ‘do’ -k�ti

Tuyuka dı ı, bi12 dı ı d ı ı constr.tii ‘do’(periph.)

-k�ti

Pisamira Pdi Pdi Pdi constr.

Karapana ani ani

Siriano aarı aarıja- or iri‘do’(periph.)

Yuruti dı ı jaa d ı ı constr.tii ‘do’(periph.)

Makuna na, baji ya ya constr.

Kubeo k� , ba

ba andcopularenclitics-be, -bu

ba constr.ba ‘be’(periph.)

Retuara ıba ıba

220 Patience Epps

the Yuhup categories, although whether this is due to Tukanoan influence

on the two languages independently or on their common ancestor is not

known.

East Tukanoan influence appears to be likewise responsible for at least

some of the Tariana functions of alia ‘be, exist’ and ni ‘do’ (cf. Aikhenvald

2002).13 The available information on other Arawak languages of the

region suggests that these have been less closely involved in the exchange

of ‘be/do’ features; however, at least some influence of Baniwa and

Yukuna (the other Arawak languages in close contact with Tukanoan

varieties) is evident in the partial loss of the copula in Kubeo and Retuara.

The form ni appears to be lacking from the West Tukanoan languages,

as are many of the associated functions discussed here. However, the

presence of a verb meaning ‘be, exist,’ which has additional functions as

a copula in equative constructions and as an aspectual auxiliary, suggests

that at least these features may be common to the Tukanoan family as a

whole.

existence/location:‘be, exist’

equativecopula

inferredevidential

auxiliary,progressiveaspect

light verbin predicatechain

nounincorp./verbalizer

WestTukanoan Orejon biayi bai, be

Koreguaje pa� i, pani pa� i pa� i ‘be’(periph.)

-a� , -�

Siona ba� i ba� i ba� i ‘be’(periph.)

Arawak Tariana alia

alia

(youngerspeakers)

nhi-/nih-(reanalyzedaspectmarker)

ni ‘do’(SVC)‘‘prolongedaction’’

-ni ‘do’ -ita, -ta

Baniwaneeni, niıni(loc ad)

none-nhi verbalsu‰x‘‘durative’’

ka-, -hita

13. It is also possible that some of the parallel developments in the Vaupes canbe attributed to common ‘‘typological poise’’ (cf. Enfield 2003: 5–6); that is,languages may undergo similar but independent developments due to parallelprevious developments (which may have involved contact). However, giventhat most of the Vaupes languages in question are currently in contact, thequestion of independent development may be essentially moot.


That similar constellations of functions for the verb ‘be, exist’ (and, to

a lesser extent, ‘do’) are found across a range of unrelated languages is

reminiscent of other contact situations. One relevant example is the poly-

functionality of the verb ‘acquire’ in languages of mainland Southeast

Asia, as described by Enfield (2003); however, while these languages share

the complex range of functions performed by the ‘acquire’ verb (such as a

variety of modal/aspectual markers and a marker of descriptive comple-

ment constructions), these are in general carried out by distinct etymons.

Such a copying of function independently of phonological form is

certainly well represented in the Vaupes as well, and is consistent with

speakers’ avoidance of shared forms generally. What is remarkable about

the case of ni, however, is that many functions of the same form are shared

from language to language, in spite of the sociolinguistic pressure to avoid

formal overlap. In some cases it is probable that shared form has even

facilitated the transfer of the new grammatical pattern. In still other cases,

particularly in Hup and Tariana, additional uses of ni have apparently

been developed or restructured through contact, unimpeded by any per-

ception of it as a shared form.

While all of the functions of Hup ni appear to be areal features of the

Vaupes, and undoubtedly owe at least some of their attributes to influence

from East Tukanoan, there are nevertheless some intriguing complications

to this picture. In particular, two functions of ni appear to be common to

all the Nadahup languages, and therefore cannot be easily attributed to

Tukanoan influence: the basic verbal value ‘be, exist,’ and the verbal deri-

vational function. Both of these linguistic features are likewise widespread

among the East Tukanoan languages and exist in Arawak Tariana,

although the formal means of realizing them are more variable (in par-

ticular, the Tukanoan languages and Tariana all use verbalizers unrelated

to ni). Whatever their origin, the close functional parallels among these

features across the Vaupes languages suggest that areal di¤usion has con-

tinued to shape them over time.

It is likewise di‰cult to pin down the origin of the form ni itself. That

both the phonological form of this etymon and its basic lexical function

‘be, exist’ in Hup, Daw, and Yuhup closely resemble the corresponding

etymons found in many Eastern Tukanoan languages would seem to sug-

gest that the form itself was borrowed among these languages, or between

their common ancestors. The phonologically and semantically similar verb

n�/n�:/na: in Nadeb cannot at this point be simply dismissed as non-

cognate with the forms in Hup, Yuhup, and Daw; similarly, a clearer

222 Patience Epps

picture of the history of Tariana alia and ni must await further compara-

tive work within Arawak.

In sum, there seem to be at least two strata of ni phenomena in the

Vaupes languages, particularly in Nadahup and in Tariana. The presence

of a basic verb ‘be, exist’ having a form akin to ni appears to be very

old. If ni was present in Proto-Nadahup, then independent innovation or

ancient areal contact seem to be the most likely explanations for its com-

mon presence in Nadahup and East Tukanoan, given that di¤usion from

Tukanoan into Nadeb or into Proto-Nadahup is otherwise unattested,

as is di¤usion from Nadahup into Tukanoan or Arawak. Similarly, the

verbal derivational function of ni in Nadahup also appears to be old;

more information about the phenomenon in Nadeb will help to determine

whether the parallels with the verbalizer -ti in Tukanoan are due to more

than a later restructuring of the Hup, Yuhup, and Daw counterpart

through contact. In contrast, the functions of ni as a copula in equative

clauses, an inferred evidential, an aspectual auxiliary, and a light verb in

a predicate chaining construction all appear to be relatively recent in

Hup, and more easily attributed to East Tukanoan influence; the same

certainly applies to at least some of the Tariana counterparts of these con-

structions. That the lexical function of ni appears to predate most of its

more grammatical functions in these languages is consistent with typolog-

ical tendencies of language contact and language change: lexical material

is more likely to develop grammatical functions than the reverse, and is

also (cross-linguistically) more likely to be borrowed than grammatical

material.

6. Conclusions

In a typology of language contact situations, the Vaupes region is an

unusual case. Local language ideologies promote widespread multilingual-

ism but restrict language mixing, resulting in speakers’ resistance to the

borrowing of linguistic elements of which they are more aware, primarily

lexical and morphological forms. Yet this situation also leads to speakers’

assimilation of many elements that are less easily identified as foreign,

primarily grammatical categories and structures. In this context, the over-

lapping constellations of similar functions and forms associated with the

etymon ni in the Vaupes languages are remarkable. While it is not fully

clear to what extent the ni forms have a common origin, their unmis-

takable formal similarity suggests that in many cases the matching of


ni forms to congruent functions throughout Vaupes languages is not an

accident, and that, at least in some instances, form itself has played a role

in facilitating the spread of grammatical structures. For constructions like

the inferred evidential and the aspectual auxiliary, described above, it is

likely that the formal resemblance to the target construction in the contact

language has allowed speakers and listeners to assemble and decode the

novel native-language construction in the early stages of language change.

Even where the involvement of a shared form in a given construction

may not have facilitated structural borrowing, it clearly has not deterred

it. Particularly in the Hup case, where ni is virtually identical to its

Tukano counterpart, the existence of a shared form, and speakers’ probable

awareness of this, has not prevented its expansion to additional functions,

making it more ubiquitous in the language. This has occurred in spite of

speakers’ general resistance to language mixing and formal borrowing.

For Hup speakers, it is likely that the expanding uses of ni – unlike most

potentially borrowable lexical and grammatical material – escaped censure

because ni was already present in the language as a nativized (or native)

lexical item, and because it was embedded within morphologically com-

plex grammatical constructions composed of native material (compare

Hup’s preference for borrowing verbs over nouns, which probably has

the same motivation).

Accordingly, the case of the ni etymon in Hup and other languages of

the Vaupes indicates that even where speakers actively avoid the sharing

of lexical and morphological forms, there are instances in which this resis-

tance may lapse and similarities of form slip ‘‘under the radar.’’ When this

occurs, we see that shared form may both precede and enable the di¤usion

of grammatical structures among the region’s languages, rather than hinder-

ing it. Thus, while the Vaupes contact situation appears at first glance to be

exceptional, a closer look reveals that it is still structured by many of the

same mechanisms that characterize language contact cross-linguistically.

Abbreviations

anph Anaphoric

appl Applicative

assert Assertion

cl Classifier

com Comitative

conj Conjunction

224 Patience Epps

coop Cooperative

decl Declarative

dem Demonstrative

dep Dependent

desid Desiderative

dim Diminutive

dir Directional

dst:cntr Distant past contrast

dst:pst Distant past

dynm Dynamic

emph Emphasis

emph.co Emphatic coordinator

f Feminine

fact Factitive

flr Filler

frust Frustrative

fut Future

imp Imperative

impfv Imperfective

inch Inchoative

infr Inferred

ints Intensifier

itg Intangible

lim Limiter

loc Locative

m Masculine

neg Negative

nmlz Nominalizer

nonf Non-feminine

nonvis Non-visual

obj Object

obl Oblique

pfv Perfective

pl Plural

poss Possessive

pres Present

prog Progressive

prox Proximate

pst Past

purp Purpose


rec:pst Recent past

rel:dem Relative demonstrative pronoun

rep Reported

seq Sequential

sg Singular

sim Simultaneous

spcr Spacer

tel Telic

vent Venitive

vis Visual

References

Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2001. Language awareness and correct speech among the Tariana

of Northwest Amazonia. Anthropological Linguistics 43.4: 411–430.

Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2002. Language Contact in Amazonia. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Aikhenvald, A. Y. 2003. A Grammar of Tariana. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Barnes, J. 1999. Tucano. In The Amazonian Languages, R. M. W. Dixon and

A. Y. Aikhenvald (eds), 207–226. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Barnes, J. and Malone, T. 2000. El tuyuca. In Lenguas indıgenas de Colombia: una

vision descriptiva, M. S. Gonzalez and M. L. Rodrıguez (eds), 437–452. Bogota:

Instituto Caro y Cuervo.

Cook, D. and Criswell, L. 1993. El idioma Koreguaje (Tucano occidental). Bogota:

SIL.

Criswell, L. and Brandrup, B. 2000. Un bosquejo fonologico y gramatical del

siriano. In Lenguas indıgenas de Colombia: una vision descriptiva, M. S. Gonzalez

and M. L. Rodrıguez (eds), 395–418. Bogota: Instituto Caro y Cuervo.

Enfield, N. J. 2003. Linguistic Epidemiology: Semantics and Grammar of Language

Contact in Mainland Southeast Asia. London: Routledge Curzon.

Epps, P. 2005. Areal di¤usion and the development of evidentiality: evidence from

Hup. Studies in Language 29.3: 617–650.

Epps, P. 2007a. The Vaupes melting pot: Tukanoan influence on Hup. In Grammars

in contact: a cross-linguistic typology, A. Y. Aikhenvald and R. M. W. Dixon

(eds), 267–289. (Explorations in Linguistic Typology 4.) Oxford: Oxford Univer-

sity Press.

Epps, P. 2007b. Birth of a noun classification system: the case of Hup. In Language

endangerment and endangered languages: linguistic and anthropological studies

with special emphasis on the languages and cultures of the Andean-Amazonian

border area, L. Wetzels (ed.), 107–128. (Indigenous Languages of Latin America

226 Patience Epps

series [ILLA].) Leiden University, The Netherlands: The Research School of

Asian, African, and Amerindian Studies (CNWS).

Epps, P. 2008a. Grammatical borrowing in Hup. In Grammatical Borrowing: a

Cross-Linguistic Survey, Y. Matras and J. Sakel (eds), 551–566. Berlin: Mouton

de Gruyter.

Epps, P. 2008b. A Grammar of Hup. (Mouton Grammar Library 43) Berlin:

Mouton de Gruyter.

Epps, P. 2009. Loanwords in Hup, a Nadahup language of Amazonia. In Loan-

words in the World’s Languages: a Comparative Handbook, M. Haspelmath

and U. Tadmor (eds), 992–1014. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Epps, P. Forthcoming. Language and subsistence patterns in the Amazonian

Vaupes. In The Languages of Hunter-gatherers: Global and Historical Perspectives,

T. Guldemann, R. Rhodes, and P. McConvell (eds). Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Facundes, S. da Silva. 2000. The language of the Apurina people of Brazil (Maipure/

Arawak). Ph.D. thesis, State University of New York at Bu¤alo.

Givon, T. 1979. On Understanding Grammar. New York: Academic Press.

Gomes dos Santos, M. 2006. Uma gramatica do Wapixana (Aruak) – Aspectos da

fonologia, da morfologia e da sintaxe. Ph.D. thesis, University of Campinas.

Gomez-Imbert, E. 1996. When animals become ‘rounded’ and ‘feminine’: concep-

tual categories and linguistic classification in a multilingual setting. In Rethink-

ing Linguistic Relativity, J. Gumperz and S. Levinson (eds), 438–469. Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gomez-Imbert, E. and Hugh-Jones, S. 2000. Introduccion al estudio de las

lenguas del Piraparana. In Lenguas indıgenas de Colombia: una vision descrip-

tiva, M. S. Gonzalez and M. L. Rodrıguez (eds), 317–320. Bogota: Instituto

Caro y Cuervo.

Gonzalez de Perez, M. S. 2000. Bases para el estudio de la lengua pisamira. In

Lenguas indıgenas de Colombia: una vision descriptiva, M. S. Gonzalez and M.

L. Rodrıguez (eds), 373–394. Bogota: Instituto Caro y Cuervo.



Jackson, J. 1983. The Fish People: Linguistic Exogamy and Tukanoan Identity in

Northwest Amazonia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jones, W. and Jones, P. 1991. Barasano syntax. (Studies in the languages of

Colombia.) Arlington: SIL/University of Texas at Arlington.

Key, M. R. 2007. Yavitero: IDS list. Available at http://lingweb.eva.mpg.de/cgi-

bin/ids/ids.pl?com=simple_browse&lg_id=268.

Kinch, R. and Kinch, P. 2000. El yuruti. In Lenguas indıgenas de Colombia: una

vision descriptiva, M. S. Gonzalez and M. L. Rodrıguez (eds), 469–488. Bogota:

Instituto Caro y Cuervo.

Koch-Grunberg, T. 1906. Die Maku. Anthropos 1: 877–906.

Malone, T. 1988. The origin and development of Tuyuca evidentials. International

Journal of American Linguistics 54: 119–140.


Martins, S. 2004. Fonologia e gramatica Daw. Ph.D. thesis, Free University, Am-

sterdam. Amsterdam: LOT.

Martins, V. 2005. Reconstrucao fonologica do Protomaku Oriental. Ph.D. thesis,

Free University, Amsterdam. Amsterdam: LOT.

Metzger, R. G. 2000. Marı Yaye Mena Carapana, Diccionario Carapana. Bogota:

Editorial Buena Semilla.

Michael, L. 2008. Nanti evidential practice: language, knowledge, and social

action in an Amazonian society. Ph.D. thesis, University of Texas at Austin.

Miller, M. 1999. Desano grammar. (Studies in the Languages of Colombia 6.)

Arlington: SIL/University of Texas at Arlington.

Moravcsik, E. 1978. Language contact. In Universals of Human Language: Vol. 1,

Method and Theory, C. Ferguson, J. Greenberg, and E. Moravcsik (eds), 93–

122. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Morse, N. and Maxwell, M. 1999. Cubeo grammar. Dallas: SIL.

Mosonyi, J. C. 1987. El idioma Yavitero. PhD Dissertation. Universidad Central

de Venezuela. Caracas.

Ospina Bozzi, A. 2002. Les structures elementaires du Yuhup Maku, langue de

l’Amazonie colombienne: morphologie et syntaxe. Ph.D. thesis, University of

Paris 7 – Denis Diderot.

Pustet, R. 2003. Copulas - Universals in the Categorization of the Lexicon. (Oxford

Studies in Typology and Linguistic Theory.) Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ramirez, H. 1997. A fala Tukano dos Ye’pa-Masa, Vol. 1: Gramatica. Manaus:

Inspetoria Salesiana Missionaria da Amazonia, CEDEM.

Ramirez, H. 2001a. Dicionario da Lıngua Baniwa. Manaus: Editora da Universi-

dade do Amazonas.

Ramirez, H. 2001b. Lınguas Arawak da Amazonia Setentrional: Comparacao e

Descricao. Manaus: Editora da Universidade do Amazonas.

Ramirez, H. 2001c. Famılia Maku ou famılia Uaupes-Japura? Paper presented at

the meeting of ANPOLL, Belem, Brazil.

Schauer, J. (ed.). 2005. Meke kemakanaka puraka�aloji: wapura�ako chu, eya

karıwana chu (Diccionario bilingue: Yukuna – Espanol; Espanol – Yukuna). 1st

ed. Bogota: Editorial Fundacion para el Desarollo de los Pueblos Marginados.

Smothermon, J. R. and Smothermon, J. H. (eds). 1993. Masa ye, gawa ye raca

amara tuti (Macuna – espanol diccionario de 850 palabras). Bogota: Editorial

Alberto Lleras Camargo.

Sorensen, A. 1967. Multilingualism in the Northwest Amazon. American Anthro-

pologist 69: 670–684.

Souza, I. de. 2008. A lıngua dos ındios Kinikinau. Ph.D. thesis, University of

Campinas.

Stenzel, K. 2004. A reference grammar of Wanano. Ph.D. thesis, University of

Colorado.

Stenzel, K. Forthcoming. A Reference Grammar of Kotiria (Wanano). Lincoln:

University of Nebraska Press.

228 Patience Epps

Strom, C. 1992. Retuara Syntax. (Studies in the languages of Colombia 3.) Dallas:

SIL.


Genetic Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Velie, D. and Velie, V. 1981. Vocabulario Orejon. Lima: SIL.

Weir, H. 1984. A negacao e outros topicos da gramatica Nadeb. M.A. thesis,

Federal University of Campinas.

Weir, H. 1990. Incorporation in Nadeb. In Amazonian Linguistics, D. L. Payne

(ed.), 321–363. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Weir, H. 1994. Nadeb. In Typological Studies in Negation, P. Kahrel and R. van

den Berg (eds), 291–323. (Typological Studies in Language, 29.) Amsterdam:

John Benjamins.

West, B. 1980. Gramatica popular del tucano. Bogota: Ministerio de Gobierno.

Wheeler, A. 1970. Grammar of the Siona language, Colombia. Ph.D. thesis, Uni-

versity of California/Berkeley.


The Basque articles -a and bat and recentcontact theories

Julen Manterola1

1. Introduction

The aim of this article is to criticize some claims that have been made for

Basque definite and indefinite articles within certain theories of contact.

It will become clear that contact played a crucial role in the evolution

of Basque articles, but not exactly the way proposed by the criticized

authors.

Haase (1992) and following him Heine and Kuteva (2003, 2005, 2006,

2007) have claimed that the indefinite article bat ‘a’ in Basque has devel-

oped diachronically under the influence of this grammatical category in the

Romance languages. This issue has not been explicitly discussed by main-

stream Basque diachronic linguistics. A contact-induced origin for the

definite article -a ‘the’ has been suggested (Michelena [1978] 1987: 366;

Trask 1997: 199), although Haase and Heine and Kuteva do not mention

this hypothesis. Still, as far as I can see, Haase and Heine and Kuteva are

the first researchers who take into consideration current theories on lan-

guage contact in approaching the question of Basque articles.

There is a twofold problem with Haase and with subsequent work by

Heine and Kuteva. First, when talking about the Basque indefinite article

they neglect one important fact, namely the existence of an ancient plural

indefinite article batzu ‘some’; this plural indefinite article is clearly essen-

tial for the understanding of the development of the singular indefinite

1. I would like to thank the following people: the audience at the workshop onLanguage Contact and Morphosyntactic Variation and Change for theirattention, Marianne Mithun and students of her Language Contact 2008winter course at the UCSB for their comments, Bernard Comrie for his support.Joseba Lakarra and Celine Mounole deserve special mention, since many of theideas here have been discussed with them. Finally, I am greatly indebted to twoanonymous reviewers’ comments, which really helped me improve this article.The research was made possible thanks to financial aid from the ResearchDepartment of the Government of the Basque Country.

article bat ‘a.’ Second, there is a problem with Heine and Kuteva’s main

hypothesis: it predicts that replicated grammatical features are less devel-

oped, but that is not at all the case with the Basque definite article -a,

which is much more developed in its grammaticalization path than its

counterparts in Romance languages.

My critique here falls into two parts: it relates to the diachrony of the

Basque indefinite and definite articles on the one hand, and on the other

hand to how Heine and Kuteva fit the diachronic development of Basque

articles into their theory of contact. The extreme grammaticalization degree

of the definite article, for instance, seems to be due to a contact process

di¤erent from their contact induced grammaticalization hypothesis.

The article is organized as follows: in section 2 I explain what definite

and indefinite articles are in grammaticalization terms; section 3 is devoted

to the relevant facts we know about Basque articles, their diachrony and

the role of contact in their development; section 4 focuses on how Basque

articles have been dealt with in most recent contact theories; finally in

section 5, I summarize the critique developed in the previous sections.

2. What is an article?

2.1. Definite articles

Following Himmelmann (2001), who in turn relies on Greenberg’s seminal

work (1978), I take a fairly strict diachronic view of what a definite article

is; it is only in this way that we can compare Basque and Romance definite

articles, since from a synchronic point of view one might think that they

do not represent the same functional category. I illustrate this synchronic

di¤erence in behavior with some examples below (see section 3.1.1).

Briefly, a definite article can be defined as a grammatical category at a

certain point on the diachronic continuum that leads from distal demon-

stratives to definite articles,2 then to specific articles, and finally to noun

2. This deliberately non-concrete synchronic definition of what we call ‘‘definitearticles’’ goes together with the wide range of di¤erent uses displayed by ele-ments of di¤erent languages that are assumed to be demonstratives and defi-nite articles. The diachronic and language-specific view we are taking in thisarticle will allow us to avoid these problems.

232 Julen Manterola

markers, via grammaticalization, as in Himmelmann’s schema (2001: 832):

‘‘demonstrative! definite article! specific article! noun marker’’.3

As a general term for the grammaticalized elements that derive from

a demonstrative, Himmelmann uses the term D-element. From a strict

methodological point of view, calling a certain morpheme a definite article

is thus simply a convention: we will not find a D-element in one language

that behaves exactly the same way as in another. This is why it is so

important to keep a diachronic perspective in mind when analyzing such

morphemes, especially when, following Heine and Kuteva, I discuss con-

tact-induced grammaticalization.

There are at least two observations to be made about this deliberately

simple definition. First, although this is not commonly mentioned in the

literature, it seems that definite articles may develop from sources other

than demonstratives. Frajzyngier (1996) discusses how what he calls

‘‘definite markers’’ have diachronically arisen from items such as va ‘hand’

in Gidar and from verbs of saying such as *(V )nV in other Chadic lan-

guages; these definite markers seem to display a range of uses analogous

to that of ‘‘typical,’’ such as European, definite articles.

Although these cases of grammaticalization provide very interesting

data about the diachronic evolution of definiteness marking, I do not

believe they a¤ect what I have to say here about the Basque definite

article, since we can almost certainly take for granted that it belongs to

the D-element continuum schema cited above.

Second, the line separating demonstratives from articles and noun

markers may sometimes be unclear, although we can draw on some criteria

for the distinction (see Himmelmann 2001). Good examples of how fuzzy

the borderlines between methodologically established phases of the con-

tinuum may be include Chinese and Montagnais, an Algonquian lan-

guage. They are both said to be ‘‘non-article’’ languages. Work by Huang

(1999) and Chen (2004: 1148–1156), among others, suggests that some

instances of demonstrative use in Chinese can be better understood as

article-like use; this might perhaps be understood as an indication of the in-

cipient development of a definite article in Chinese. The case of Montagnais,

according to Cyr (1993), may be much more extreme, since we may be deal-

ing with a D-element at a very high degree of grammaticalization: in this

3. Of course, this is a rudimentary schema, as Himmelmann himself admits (2001:832). We can look at many studies on di¤erent languages to get an idea of thedetails of this grammaticalization path; good examples are Company (1991) forSpanish and Epstein’s work (1993, 1994, 1995) for French.

The Basque articles -a and bat and recent contact theories 233

case, the identity of form has somehow concealed the fact that D-elements

preposed to the noun phrase are in fact articles, in contrast to postposed

demonstratives.

These problems do not arise in the tradition built by linguistics scholars

who have worked on Basque, since here the definite article is a well-

established category. On the contrary, problems may arise from the fact

that -a ‘the’ seems to be highly grammaticalized, as we see in section 3.1

below.

These two observations serve to emphasize the specific perspective from

which I approach the diachronic dimension of definite articles. This pro-

gressive grammaticalization perspective is the one taken by Heine and

Kuteva (2005) in their contact-induced grammaticalization approach to

contact issues. Moreover, it is this same diachronic point of view that

allows us to talk about a definite article – crucially, a D-element – in

Basque, even though its usage does not greatly resemble definite articles

in other western European languages.4 Usually terminological problems,

such as calling Basque -a an ‘‘individualizer’’ instead of a definite article,

are rooted in methodological decisions made when trying to identify the

essence of a hypothetical ideal definite article from a strictly synchronic

point of view.

2.2. Indefinite articles

I also look at indefinite articles in their diachronic dimension, as gramma-

ticalizing items; as mentioned above, this way of looking at the mor-

phemes is one of the basic features of contact-induced grammaticalization,

as outlined in Heine and Kuteva’s work (see section 4.2.1 below for a

summary of their hypothesis). Even so, in section 4.3 I will criticize some

particular claims these authors make regarding the specific grammaticali-

zation path of the Basque indefinite article.

It is well known that cross-linguistically the main source for an indefinite

article is the numeral ‘one.’ As Heine points out (1997: 71), ‘‘the evolution

from lexical to grammatical structure is not discontinuous but proceeds

gradually.’’ Looking at the progressive ‘‘contextually defined extensions’’

of the use of the numeral ‘one,’ it is possible to divide these extensions

4. As Milsark reminds us (1977: 5), the term ‘definite article’ ‘‘has been used forgenerations in the pedagogy and scholarly description of the Indo-Europeanlanguages’’ and its synchronic formal and semantic characterization hasalways been performed on the basis of the behavior of these languages.

234 Julen Manterola

into descriptively convenient stages. Heine proposes a five-stage model for

the diachronic development of the indefinite article. I invoke this model

mainly because it is the one on which Heine and Kuteva’s arguments

are based (2006: 104–105): ‘‘numeral ! presentative marker ! specific

marker! non-specific marker! generalized article’’.

I will not retrace the details of each of these stages; the interested reader

is referred to Heine’s work (1997: 71–76). I will simply mention one of the

characteristics Heine gives for the fifth stage, the generalized article: it is in

this last stage, he says, where ‘‘the use of the article is no longer restricted

to singular nouns but is extended to plural and mass nouns, as in the fol-

lowing example from Spanish’’ (1997: 73). Then he observes how Spanish

uno/una ‘a, one’ can be used with plural morphology, unos/unas ‘some’

(the two forms stand for masculine/feminine marking). I understand that

he intends this Spanish plural indefinite article to be a characteristic of a

final phase of the grammaticalization of an indefinite article. The rele-

vance of this point will become apparent later, where we see that Basque

also has an ancient plural indefinite article.

Besides this diachronic grammaticalization view, which following Heine

I take as a basic approach to indefinite articles, there are some further

points worth mentioning, related to certain implicational relationships

between definite and indefinite articles. First, it is widely noted in the

literature that definite articles develop earlier than indefinite ones, so that

there are more languages with a definite article but no indefinite article

than vice versa. Heine himself generalizes this observation (1997: 69): ‘‘If

a language has a grammaticalized indefinite article, it is likely to also have

a definite article, while the reverse does not necessarily hold true. Thus,

the presence of an indefinite article is likely to be accompanied by that of

a definite article, but not vice versa.’’

Perhaps related to this observation, there is the question of what areal

typology could tell us about indefinite articles; I quote Heine (1997: 79)

again:

Thus, one might expect with a certain degree of probability that a given lan-guage will have an indefinite article if the neighboring language or lan-guages also have one. The older Germanic languages did not have a definiteor indefinite article, in much the same way as the ancestor of the modernRomance languages did not. On the other hand, most modern Europeanlanguages across genetic boundaries have both kinds of article.

Interestingly enough, Basque also has both kinds of article, although

we do not know, at least as far as the indefinite article is concerned,


whether it had them prior to contact with indefinite-article languages. I

will come back to this point.

A second noteworthy cross-linguistic observation is that it seems that,

rather than extending the former numeral one to plural nouns (recall Spanish

unos/unas ‘some’), languages most frequently use alternative strategies to

introduce indefinite articles for plural nouns (Heine 1997: 77). This obser-

vation of the rarity of plural articles derived from the numeral one is also

made by Himmelmann (2001: 838), using the same example from Spanish.

Since languages with plural indefinite articles derived from numerals are

not cross-linguistically common, it is highly significant that there is an

area where this kind of item can be found across languages that are not

even genetically related, like Basque and Romance languages.

3. Basque articles

As a brief introduction, I outline the Basque declension. Some of the para-

digms here can be found in Hualde and Ortiz de Urbina (2003: 173–174).

Here I decline the word etxe ‘house’ in its determinerless form, definite

singular/plural, and indefinite singular/plural; only four cases are illustrated.

I prefer here to call the nouns in the first column determinerless or bare,

rather than indefinite, which is the term used in the grammar referred to

above. I keep ‘indefinite’ for the nouns with an indefinite article in the

last two columns. These may be mere terminological divergences; the

important thing is to know which are the morphemes under each label.

3.1. -a: Basque definite article

Basque does have a definite article, or at least a D-element as defined in

2.1; from a diachronic point of view the so-called definite article in Basque

is just one more instance of a grammaticalized distal demonstrative.

Table 1. Standard inflectional paradigm of etxe, ‘house’

- DET DEF SG DEF PL INDF SG INDF PL

ABS etxe etxe-a etxe-ak etxe bat etxe batzu-k

ERG etxe-k etxe-a-k etxe-ek etxe bat-ek etxe batzu-ek

DAT etxe-ri etxe-a-ri etxe-ei etxe bat-i etxe batzu-ei

GEN etxe-ren etxe-a-ren etxe-en etxe bat-en etxe batzu-en

236 Julen Manterola

The definite article in modern Basque is -a, a bound morpheme at-

tached to the rightmost element of the whole phrase it modifies; for further

information about its behavior, see Trask (2003: 118–121) and Hualde

(2003: 171–177).

3.1.1. The origin of the Basque definite article

There are two main forms of the distal demonstrative in modern Basque,

depending on the dialect: in western Basque, the distal demonstrative is

a ‘that’ and in central and eastern Basque (h)ura ‘that.’ The central and

eastern form is said to be a restructured form of a former distal demon-

strative, usually reconstructed as *(h)a(r) ‘that,’ although no convincing

explanation has been given for its exact formation. As we can see, the dis-

tal demonstrative a ‘that’ in western Basque coincides exactly in form with

the definite article -a, as in an example from Azkue (1923: 269).

(1) a. gizon a b. gizon-a

man that man-the

‘that man’ ‘the man’

Example (1b) illustrates the use of the definite article in all varieties of

Basque; for surface phonetic variants, see Hualde and Gaminde (1998).

The whole system of demonstratives is reconstructed as having an ini-

tial sound, usually an initial aspiration, which is why in standard Basque

their normative form is hau ‘this,’ hori ‘that,’ and hura ‘yonder.’ This is

how it is still pronounced in some northeastern varieties of the language.

Medieval documents contain some instances of the article that still

include the aspiration: Udalha, Adurzaha (Manterola 2006: 674). These

aspirated instances of the D-element are in fact very close to what has

been reconstructed as *(h)a(r), and confirm the common opinion of its

demonstrative origin (Azkue 1923: 269; Michelena [1971] 1987: 146; Trask

1997: 199).

In short, the definite article -a in Basque perfectly fits the D-element

description. It is in these terms that we can continue to call -a a definite

article; it has been so called in traditional Basque linguistics. These, I

believe, are terms Heine and Kuteva would agree with.

It is important to clarify this point about the origin of the Basque

definite article. Heine and Kuteva have written that ‘‘one may argue that

-a is not really structurally equivalent to definite articles in SAE lan-

guages’’ (2006: 32). It is true that, from a strictly synchronic point of


view, the definite articles in Basque and in geographically adjacent lan-

guages do not share the same morphosyntactic features, nor a common

behavior; but when Heine and Kuteva (2003, 2005) talk about model and

replica features, they are not thinking, as far as I understand them, in

terms of a strict synchronic grammatical or structural equivalence, but

rather of an equivalent grammaticalization path. To this extent, inasmuch

as it is an instance of the grammaticalization path outlined above, the

Basque definite article o¤ers a straightforward parallel to that of the

Romance languages.

The only di¤erence lies in the broader use Basque speakers make of it;

as Trask says, ‘‘[t]he label ’definite article’ is misleading, since this article is

of much broader use than the English definite article’’ (Trask 2003: 119).

It can even be used in predicates and existential sentences (2), as well as

in the citation form of nouns and adjectives. We are thus dealing with

an article moving from Greenberg’s stage II toward stage III (Greenberg

1978: 62–74), or toward the rightmost edge of the D-element continuum.

(2) a. ardo-a badago b. ibai irakasle-a da

wine-the5 there.is Ibai teacher-the is

‘There is wine.’ ‘Ibai is a teacher.’

We can also find this D-element, -a, in adjective predicates.

(3) a. Nerea neska jatorr-a da

Nerea girl nice-the is

‘Nerea is a nice girl.’

b. Nerea eta Maider neska jatorr-ak dira

Nerea and Maider girl nice-the.pl are

‘Nerea and Maider are nice girls.’

Later on it will become apparent why I give the plural example in (3b),

since some interesting contact-based reasons have been proposed for these

plural predicates (Irigoien 1985: 129). I cannot here provide a complete

description of the uses of -a; in fact, an exhaustive study of its use across

dialects and through history is still lacking. For further information about

dialectal and historical variation on the use of this D-element, as well as

5. I will continue to gloss it as the, in order to make explicit once again theparallel diachronic source shared by both morphemes, Basque -a and Englishthe.

238 Julen Manterola

for some possible semantic and functional explanations of its spread and

behavior, see among others Alvarez (1977), Artiagoitia (1998, 2002), and

Etxeberria (2005: 167–250).

3.1.2. Basque definite article -a and contact

Thus far, I have made two claims about the definite article -a: first, it has a

demonstrative origin, and second, it has gone further along the gram-

maticalization path for articles than Romance languages have done. Two

further points relate to what has been said in traditional Basque linguistics

regarding this -a article and contact issues. First, it has usually been assumed

to have arisen due to contact with Late Latin and incipient Romance lan-

guages (Michelena [1978] 1987: 366). There are at least two noteworthy

reasons in support of this hypothesis: languages typologically akin to

present-day Basque (agglutinative, SOV, postpositional) do not usually

have a definite article (Himmelmann 1998: 350; Plank and Moravcsik

1996: 205), so contact seems an appealing explanation for its presence in

Basque. On the other hand, Basque seems to have begun to develop its

definite article at the same time as neighboring languages (Lapesa 1961;

Epstein 1994); this would mean that Basque is simply one example of a

widespread western European phenomenon. The still aspirated instances

from the Middle Ages cited above point toward this dating of the emer-

gence of the article in Basque.6 Why the relative order (Basque nounþ article

versus Romance articleþ noun) is di¤erent has never been addressed.

I believe that the contact scenario might be an appropriate one, since

the development of definite articles seems to have been an areal event in

western Europe during the Middle Ages (Haspelmath 1998); however, we

have to distinguish clearly between speculation and empirically or theoret-

ically based certainties. Until now no thorough study has been carried out

to compare the parallel development of articles in Basque and Romance

languages (and data are not extensively available).

6. Some researchers have noticed (Irigoyen 1986: 86) the interesting existence ofa roughly 2000-year-old Latin inscription found close to Caceres (Spain)where the word Ibarra appears. It has been taken as proof of the early exis-tence of the definite article by others (Iglesias 2007), since in present-day Bas-que the word means ‘the valley,’ analyzed as ibarr-a ‘valley-the.’ As long asthis kind of data remains so scanty and isolated, I feel it more prudent notto draw large conclusions from it. Other authors with no connection to thistradition have also suggested the possibly ancient character of the Basquedefinite article, although for other reasons (Putzu and Ramat 2001: 121), andin a very tentative way.


Second, in discussions of contact and articles another issue in the Basque

linguistics tradition calls for attention: one of the reasons claimed (Irigoien

1985: 129) as explaining the spread of the singular and plural definite arti-

cles -a/-ak is the need to make clear a distinction otherwise non-existent in

the language, namely the morphological marking of the singular/plural

distinction. Since the articles were the only place in which that distinction

was overtly encoded, it seems that, by ‘‘forgetting’’ about their definite-

ness, both the articles (the singular -a and plural -ak) spread following

the model of Romance singular/plural overt morphology (cf. Spanish

cama/camas ‘bed/beds’).7 It might then be said that the overt singular-

plural distinction in nouns and adjectives has expanded at the expense of

the definite singular and plural articles.

While we wait for an exhaustive study of this topic, (3b) above might

be an example of this. The Spanish equivalents of the sentences in (3)

would be:

(4) a. Nerea es una chica agradable

Nerea is a girl nice

‘Nerea is a nice girl.’

b. Nerea y Maider son chica-s agradable-sNerea and Maider are girl-pl nice-pl

‘Nerea and Maider are nice girls.’

We can see here that the bare plural predicate chicas agradables ‘nice girls’possesses a plural marker, the bold -s at the end of both noun and adjec-

tive, a marking that modern Basque would have replicated using its

phrasal articles. The same holds for Trask’s observation that ‘‘ura may

correspond either to ‘water’ or to ‘the water,’ and umeak may correspond

either to ‘children’ or to ‘the children’.’’ (2003: 121).

Thus, even though the article might have arisen through contact, the

path of its expansion has perhaps not strictly followed the typical gram-

maticalization process usually assumed in the case of D-elements. Here

another contact factor may be involved, a factor with no direct relation-

ship to the emergence of a definite article: namely, the need for an overt

morphological distinction between singular and plural of the kind already

present in the nearby languages. This might well have played a crucial role

7. One could have doubts about the exact nature of the plural definite article; itis most usually related to the toponymy morpheme -aga, and said to be morerecent than the singular. This is a discussion I cannot take up here.

240 Julen Manterola

in the spread of the article, in that it is only in the articles that singularity

and plurality were overtly marked.

3.2. bat: the Basque indefinite article

Basque has an indefinite article, bat, which has exactly the same form as

the numeral meaning ‘one.’ It is thus commonly supposed that it has its

origin in the numeral. As far as I know, there is no extensive study of its

modern use, nor of how it has evolved through the centuries and across

di¤erent dialects. It is also commonly believed that its use is much more

restricted than in Romance languages (Trask 2003: 122).

I will o¤er here a single example in order to show briefly how bat ‘a’

functions in contrast to the ‘‘definite’’ -a ‘the.’ These examples, reminiscent

of Givon’s (1981: 36), are both translated by the English indefinite article a:

(5) a. azeri bat ikusi dute herrian

fox a seen have in.town

‘They have seen a (certain) fox in town.’

b. azeri-a ikusi dute herrian

fox-the seen have in.town

‘They have seen a fox in town.’ [not e.g. a wolf ]

We see that bat ‘a’ (5a) is used as a specific marker (Heine 1997: 72–73),

exactly as in Givon’s street Hebrew -xad. The noun phrase with -a in (5b),

given the appropriate context, can be interpreted in terms of kind refer-

ence; its street Hebrew counterpart would be a bare noun. If my language

intuitions are correct, these are instances of central Basque. There may

be (in fact there are) di¤erences across dialects and speakers. However,

no thorough study of the di¤erent values of bat has been carried out up

to now.

In French and Spanish, both sentences would also be translated with

un, the indefinite article diachronically resulting from the numeral. It is

widely recognized in the literature that the use of bat in Basque is much

more restricted than in its Romance counterparts. Looking at data like

those in (5), one might wonder whether there are other reasons for this

besides those proposed by Heine and Kuteva; I will come back to this

question in section 4.2.3.2.

With respect to the earliest evidence of the existence of the indefinite

article bat in Basque, we can only say that it appears in every text, in

di¤erent dialects, in the sixteenth century, and is thus not a recent innova-


tion. Its presence in every dialect might indicate that it goes back as far as

the period of ancient common Basque, around the fourth or fifth century;

but we have no examples of this like those we have for the definite article

-(h)a in the Middle Ages. The kind of corpus we have at our disposal from

the Middle Ages – mostly person and place names inserted in Latin

or Romance-language texts – does not make it likely that we will find

instances of indefinite articles. We simply cannot know how old bat is in

its role as an indefinite article.

3.2.1. batzu: the Basque plural indefinite article

Basque crucially has a plural indefinite article batzuk ‘some,’ morphologi-

cally based on the numeral/indefinite article bat ‘a, one.’ Leaving aside the

final -k, a newer addition to the older batzu, we can dissect it as batþ zu.

Bat has already been discussed in section 3.2, and -zu is a collective su‰x

that is no longer productive in modern Basque; indeed, its productivity, as

far as we can trace it, was already decreasing in the Middle Ages, as

shown by Michelena ([1971] 1987: 147). Batzu is also common to all

historical dialects,8 and has been present in the records since the very

beginning of the historical period for Basque in 1545. This most probably

means that batzu is at least a thousand years old, from a time when plural-

ity was marked in ways other than using the articles, as seen in 3.1.2; one

possibility is that it already existed at the time of the ancient Basque koine

1500 years ago (Michelena 1981). Of course, another possibility is that it

later spread from one dialect to other. Michelena himself thinks of it in

terms of a replication of the Spanish unos/unas, a hypothesis that is also

possible ([1971] 1987: 148).

8. A reviewer has pointed out to me that in present-day Zuberoan, an easterndialect, elibat ‘a bunch’ is used instead of batzu; Otsibar’s texts o¤er an exam-ple of this (2003). Nevertheless, we can confirm the use of batzu in someancient texts of that same dialect (Tartas 1666, Egiategi 1785). Interestingly,we may make an observation in line with this reviewer’s doubt about thepandialectal character of batzu: the contiguous eastern dialect, the extinctRoncalese, has another option as well as batzuk, seemingly also based on thenumeral bat ‘one’; these forms are banak (absolutive) and banek (ergative),whose exact morphological nature is unclear to me, but significantly seems tohave D-element based plural markers. In fact, contrary to what Azkue’s dic-tionary says (1905–1906: 138), I could not find a single instance of Roncalesebatzuk in the texts I consulted (Irigoyen 1957, Pagola 2004). A study of thespecific evolution of these eastern forms that could shed light on the dia-chronic evolution of the use of batzu is lacking.

242 Julen Manterola

Again, we simply do not know, and maybe cannot ever know.

The important point here for the following discussion is its unquestion-

able antiquity, as shown by its morphology (the old collective su‰x) and

especially by its presence in all dialects.

3.3. Basque articles and contact: summary

The best guess is that both articles arose roughly at the same time during

the Middle Ages. But there are some caveats here.

With respect to the indefinite article, the data we have at hand do not

shed any light on its status in the Middle Ages. We simply cannot demon-

strate its existence or non-existence prior to the Middle Ages; this is above

all an empirical issue for which no data are available. In other words,

we have no evidence for a stage of the language in which the indefinite

article did not exist; we also know of the intriguing ancient plural indefi-

nite article.

The situation for the definite article might seem clearer, since even as

late as the eleventh century there are instances of aspirated articles; this

could mean that it began to grammaticalize quite ‘‘late’’. An alternative

hypothesis, however, which is possible although maybe not probable, is

that it began to grammaticalize earlier in the Middle Ages or even before

then, and retained the aspiration for a longer time. My own view is that,

as long as no strong counter-evidence appears, the medieval character of

the definite article is the least extreme hypothesis.

It is worth keeping in mind that these hypotheses have at best the status

of most probable guesses; in responding to the question ‘‘What was the

situation before contact?’’ we should make a clear distinction between what

can be considered empirical evidence and what is purely hypothetical.

A final note on determinerless nouns – the first column in Table 1, or

what Haase calls transnumerals: it bears recalling that these forms were

much more widely used 500 years ago in every dialect. The most straight-

forward guess is that the old Basque noun phrase had no overt morpho-

logical mark for plurality (except probably for some collective particles)

nor for definiteness (Lafon 1954). Eastern dialects, especially Zuberoan

and Roncalese, exhibit an interestingly archaic character in this regard.

4. Basque articles and recent literature on contact

4.1. Haase, contact, and Basque articles

Haase’s (1992) analysis of Basque articles bears rereading, since it is the

first study intended as a general survey of Basque from the point of view


of modern contact theories. This rereading turns out to be unavoidable

given that important studies on contact, such as Heine and Kuteva’s, rely

almost exclusively on Haase as far as Basque is concerned. I first sum up

in subsection 4.1.1 his position on the definite article, and then in subsec-

tion 4.1.2 what he says about the indefinite article.

4.1.1. The definite article in Basque: Haase’s view

Haase devotes some 4–5 pages (1992: 53–58) to what I am calling here the

definite article. He limits himself to a brief description of its use and non-

use, a description that we can find in Lafitte (1944). He discusses instances

of the definite article in predicative sentences, and, following Iturrioz

(1985), states that the Basque definite article -a is a kind of individualizer,

not really an article. Iturrioz’ analysis of the -a morpheme, as far as I can

follow his main argument (1985: 176–181), is just a synchronic account of

the amazingly wide range of uses of the -a morpheme.

The inaccuracy of Haase’s description heavily biases Heine and Kuteva’s

view of the Basque definite article. There are some points I feel are lacking

in Haase’s analysis. First and most important, he says nothing about the

origin of the article; as noted in section 3.1.1, its characterization as a D-

element is widely accepted in the literature. Second, he says nothing about

the hypothesis according to which the Basque -a morpheme arose through

contact. This hypothesis is often mentioned and widely accepted in Basque

linguistics (see 3.1.2). He also says nothing about the possible role of the

singular/plural overt distinction in Romance languages in the spread of

the Basque definite article.

There are two other points which are more minor, but essential when

one is talking about contact over centuries. Haase says nothing about

dialect variation in the use of -a. It may be worth mentioning this since

the immediately contiguous dialect to the one he analyzes, Zuberoan,

exhibits extensive absence of the article in contexts where most dialects

would use it; interestingly, the behavior of this contiguous dialect has

been attributed either to archaism or to French contact (Azkue 1923:

265; Alvarez 1977). Moreover, he does not deal at all with historical varia-

tion, but many observations have been made about the gradual extension

of -a (Lafon 1954; Michelena [1970] 1987: 293, 1978).

Along with Haase’s failure to mention these facts about the Basque

definite article in his 1992 work, there are incorrect analyses and method-

ological gaps in his treatment of the definite article -a. First, he analyzes

the noun phrase of his sentence in (134) (1992: 55), here in (6), as if it

244 Julen Manterola

were an instance of what he calls a transnumeral. I give my own English

glosses.

(6) Hemen badira jende xahar bat-zuhere there.are people old one-pl

‘Here there are some old people.’

What Haase, following Iturrioz, calls transnumerals would correspond to

the determinerless or bare nouns in the first column of my Table 1. Since

the phrase at stake is jende xahar batzu ‘some old people,’ and it clearly

includes a plural indefinite article batzu modifying the noun or adjective

phrase, it is wrong to label it a transnumeral. Furthermore, Basque gram-

mars never mix up the transnumeral declension with the indefinite articles

of the noun declension (see Hualde and Ortiz de Urbina (2003: 118–136)

for a recent example). Second, Haase says nothing about the history and

development of definite articles in Romance languages, a debate with a

large literature; this gap is to some extent understandable, since he is not

aware that Basque -a is what he would call an Ubersetzungsaquivalent of

definite articles in Romance languages.

4.1.2. The indefinite article in Basque: Haase’s view

Haase devotes 1–2 pages to the indefinite article bat ‘one’ (1992: 59–61,

71). He aims to demonstrate that it arose due to contact, but in my opinion

he does not provide enough empirical support for his hypothesis (Haase

1992: 59).9

Der baskischen Transnumeral-Singular-Plural-Opposition steht in den roma-nischen Kontaktsprachen die Definit-Indefinit-Opposition gegenuber. Hierbeientspricht der indefinite Artikel dem Zahlwort ‘eins.’ Im Sprachkontakt wirddas baskische Zahlwort ‘eins’ ebenfalls zum unbestimmten Artikel (Emphasismine – JM) . . .

Anders ausgedruckt: bat und frz./gask. un sind im Bereich der ZahlworterUbersetzungsaquivalente. Wie in anderen Fallen . . . kann sich nun derFunktionsbereich von bat auf alle die Falle ausbreiten, in denen in denModellsprachen un gebraucht wird, also auch auf die Signalisierung vonIndefinitheit.

The Basque transnumeral-singular-plural opposition contrasts with thedefinite-indefinite opposition of Romance contact languages. In that sensethe indefinite article corresponds to the numeral ‘one.’ In a language contactsituation the Basque numeral ‘one’ likewise becomes an indefinite article(Emphasis mine – JM) . . .

9. I would like to thank Max Hofheinz and Ursula Laarmann for their help withthe exact understanding of these texts.


In other words: bat and French/Gascon un are translation equivalents in thedomain of the numerals. As in other cases . . . the range of functions ofbat can be extended to all the cases in which un would be used in the modellanguages, including therefore also the marking of indefiniteness.

After having stated this, he gives two more examples to show that bat, the

numeral ‘one’ moving towards an indefinite article, has been extending its

semantic meaning. He gives a sentence from a 1782 work and another

from the first printed book in Basque (1545), here in (7) (his examples

(161–162), (1992: 60)).

(7) balia dikezit senhar gaixto bat

can be.for you husband bad a

‘I can be a bad husband for you.’

He adds a comment on the use of the indefinite article bat:

Der Gebrauch von bat konnte durch das Verb baliatu ausgelost wordensein. Im Keim zeigt sich aber schon die im Sprachkontakt katalysierteEntwicklung.

The use of bat could have been triggered by the verb baliatu. However, at itscore it appears to be a development catalyzed by language contact.

I am not really convinced by a single example from a single language

that this bat use was triggered by language contact. I do not mean that

language contact plays no role (in fact, I believe it may have played a

determining role), but I would expect a much deeper analysis to support

this claim, with examples of as many old texts as possible, comparing

them to data from other dialects, periods, and model languages. Even

then, after having ‘‘squeezed’’ our data as much as we can, we sometimes

have to admit we can not go any further. In any case, a thorough knowl-

edge of old texts and dialects always comes first. These are our tools, and

we cannot neglect them. In short, two examples, dating from 1545 and

1782, are not enough support for the claim that Basque bat and French

and Gascon un are translation equivalents, nor for a direct inference about

the direction of an alleged contact-induced change.

Besides these poorly supported statements, there is a crucial silence

about another aspect of the indefinite article: its plural batzu ‘some.’ Since

Haase simply omits this article, we cannot know whether he would also

attribute its existence to contact. We may recall that batzu has to be quite

ancient (see section 3.2.1), or at least older than Haase’s description

together with Heine’s grammaticalization scale for indefinite articles

would lead us to think.

246 Julen Manterola

One further claim by Haase deserves comment (Haase 1992: 61), his

final statement before he proceeds to discuss case and postposition systems.

Das baskische Determinationssystem, das auf der Opposition zwischenTransnumeral, Singular und Plural beruht, ist – wie wir gesehen haben –destabilisiert worden. Zum einen wird die Unterscheidung von nicht-individualisiertem und individualisiertem Pradikatsnomen aufgegeben, zumanderen wird das Zahlwort fur ‘eins’ nach romanischen Vorbild zum in-definiten Artikel, der anstelle des Individualisierers eintreten kann.

The Basque system of determination, which rests on the opposition betweentransnumeral, singular, and plural, has been – as we have seen – destabilized.On the one hand, the di¤erence between non-individualized and individual-ized noun predicates is abandoned, on the other hand the numeral for ‘one’becomes, following the Romance model, an indefinite article, which cantake the place of the individualizer.

It is di‰cult to understand which time period Haase is taking as a basis at

any one point: sometimes it seems he is talking about recent changes in

Basque. An example of this might be the sentence in (166) from his own

fieldwork, given just before the sentence just quoted; I repeat it in (8)

with my own glosses.

(8) tokero bat zen

driver a was

‘(S)he was a cattle-driver.’

This might be a good example of how bat has extended its use on the

model of Romance languages, since in the dialect from which he takes

examples this profession noun predicate would usually bear no deter-

miner, while in western dialects it would take -a.

But Haase’s data do not tell us how ancient this instance of bat is, nor

can we determine this based on the sole example he provides in his analysis.

Nor do we know which Romance model he has in mind. In his defense,

it does not seem that Haase intends this sentence to be more than an

example of current contact-induced use of bat. If he is taking this kind of

example as evidence for a recent destabilization of what he calls Basque

transnumeral-singular-plural opposition, I might perhaps agree with him.

At other times, still with reference to the last quoted example, one has

the impression that Haase is talking about changes from long ago: when

he says that bat became an indefinite article following the model of

Romance languages, one can assume that he is aware of the relative anti-

quity of bat in indefinite article uses. If this is so, then there is a problem


when he treats all contact-induced changes and analysis of language

systems/oppositions from di¤erent periods simultaneously.

The Transnumeral-Singular-Plural opposition he takes as the ancient

and original determination system in Basque, the one represented by the

three leftmost columns in Table 1, is no such thing.

As discussed in 3.1.2, this opposition in present-day Basque cannot

really be the ‘‘original’’:10 what Haase calls singular and plural in fact

possess a demonstrative-based definite article. We have also seen that

they arose in the Middle Ages at the same time as in some other western

European languages, most probably in an areal configuration. The prob-

lem is, again, that Haase does not treat his ‘‘individualizer’’ as an instance

of the D-element grammaticalization path (section 3.1.1).

Suppose that at roughly the same time, in the Middle Ages, an indefinite

article had appeared (recall our ignorance about its exact date of arrival,

section 3.3). In fact the alleged appearance of bat in the Basque system

might well have happened simultaneously with the appearance of the

singular and plural articles and the configuration of bare-noun vs. definite

articled-nouns in modern Basque (Haase’s transnumeral-singular-plural

opposition). In that case the indefinite article bat would not have destabi-

lized any former transnumeral-singular-plural opposition; this latter oppo-

sition would surely have been developing together with the further gram-

maticalization of the indefinite article bat.

All these observations, I believe, make it much more di‰cult to under-

stand what Haase means when he treats the Basque transnumeral-singular-

plural system as in opposition to the Romance definite-indefinite. More-

over, the singular-plural opposition might have developed by ‘‘parasitizing’’

the definite-indefinite one, as suggested in section 3.1.2.

As a final comment on the quotation above regarding the transnumeral-

singular-plural opposition that Haase takes as originally Basque, recall the

points made in section 3.3. The ‘‘original’’ Basque, of perhaps 1600 years

ago, certainly had no Romance-influenced overt morphological marking

of singular vs. plural, or any overt morphological definiteness marking.

Whatever we might think about how Haase deals with contact and the

indefinite article bat, I believe some of the spread of the indefinite article

could be accounted for in terms of contact; we should, however, start by

10. It always depends, of course, on what we mean by ‘‘original.’’ Here I refer(and I believe Haase wanted to talk in these same terms) to the possible systemof Basque before contact with Latin and subsequent Romance languages(bearing in mind that we have no data available).

248 Julen Manterola

locating it in its correct chronology relative to the development of articles

in Romance languages. This is a basic task that remains to be done.

Basque linguistics should some day construct a description of the uses of

the indefinite article in historical data from 1545 onward, across di¤erent

dialects. Claims about change have to be supported by as many examples

as possible, coming from di¤erent dialects and historical periods.

Unfortunately, Haase’s contribution, discussing only four or five exam-

ples of bat, is not helpful for the accomplishment of this task. As I have

tried to show here, some points in his reasoning should be taken cau-

tiously, while others could be better understood with a wider knowledge

of Basque diachrony.

4.2. Heine and Kuteva’s model of contact and Basque articles

In this section I first o¤er a summary of some of the generalizations Heine

and Kuteva make about language contact situations (section 4.2.1), then

focus on how they have treated Basque indefinite and definite articles

(4.2.2).

4.2.1. Generalizations about contact-induced grammaticalization

One of the basic features of contact-induced grammaticalization as ex-

plained by Heine and Kuteva is that change is gradual rather than abrupt.

Speakers of the replica language activate a pattern in their own language,

the one corresponding most closely to the model, thus developing a struc-

ture that is equivalent to the one in the model language. This pattern

eventually grammaticalizes into a new fully-fledged grammatical category,

similar to that of the model language (Heine and Kuteva 2005: 121).

Thus, although initially lacking a category structurally equivalent to that

of the model language, a pattern in the replica language may follow a

grammaticalization path analogous to the one the model language may

previously have followed. To this extent, it is legitimate to suppose that

the similarity between replica and model language resides especially in

the fact that they share the same grammaticalization path for their parallel

structure.

Other main points Heine and Kuteva make about contact-induced

grammaticalization are summed up well in this passage (2005: 101):

[W]herever there is su‰cient evidence, it turns out that the replica construc-tion is less grammaticalized than the corresponding model construction . . .in the initial stage of grammaticalization, the new category tends to beambiguous between its literal and its grammaticalized meaning, it tends tobe confined to few contexts, and its use is optional. . . . Such properties arecommonly encountered in replicated categories.


Thus, according to them, when a language ‘‘copies’’ a certain feature or

category, it does so gradually, somehow beginning a grammaticalization

process of its own that parallels the one in the model language.

This hypothesis is a very appealing one, since it allows us to recon-

struct, on the basis of the degree of grammaticalization of two features,

which language has been the model and which one the replica (Heine

and Kuteva 2005: 120): ‘‘[I]t seems possible to determine in a situation

where no diachronic information is available which is the model and which

is the replica category.’’ (Emphasis mine – JM)

Of course, the authors themselves are aware of the limits of this recon-

structive technique, and admit that if the contact situation lasts long

enough, both categories, model and replica, may eventually ‘‘become

structurally indistinguishable’’ (2005: 120).

There is a risk here, as I see it, of falling into a circular argument when

determining the contact relationship of two languages on the basis of this

hypothesis; an in-depth knowledge of the diachrony of the languages con-

cerned should always come first.

These indications of Heine and Kuteva’s approach to contact-induced

grammaticalization will su‰ce to make sense of the discussion in the next

sections. The following section is a reminder of how cautious we have to

be when we seemingly lack diachronic information. Data from Basque,

which at first sight seemed to fit the above hypothesis, turn out to be con-

trary to it if we look at them with no theoretical bias of any kind.

4.2.2. The Basque definite article in Heine and Kuteva’s work

As far as I can see, Heine and Kuteva explicitly discuss the definite article

in only one book (2006: 32). Here they write:

[T]he primary function of the ‘definite article’ -a is to individualize referents,and these referents can be, and not uncommonly are, indefinite or even non-specific . . .

. . . that Basque has a definite article can be justified on the grounds that -a ismore likely to mark definite than indefinite reference. However, one mayargue that -a is not really structurally equivalent to definite articles in SAElanguages. In this case, a taxonomic conclusion that one could draw fromthe observations made is that, rather than having a definite but no indefinitearticle, Basque has an indefinite but no definite article – hence, quite theopposite of what a discrete-categorization approach of the kind employedby the typologists cited suggests. (Emphasis mine – JM)

250 Julen Manterola

Although they make no strong claims about the definite article in

Basque, it is clear that relying exclusively on Haase’s work has heavily

biased their view of what has been happening over the last thousand years.

It is true, as they point out, that -a can be used for non-specific reference

(see (4b)), and to that extent one could argue it is something other than

a definite article; again, this depends on what we understand by ‘definite

article’. I do not believe that being structurally equivalent, or not, to other

languages is at all relevant to the point Heine and Kuteva want to make.

Indeed, it is contrary to the terms they themselves are proposing for their

own approach. What has to be equivalent in the languages we compare is

the grammaticalization path of the relevant feature in each language, as

suggested in section 4.2.1. Moreover, at least where definite articles are

concerned we can barely find such a structural equivalence across lan-

guages, depending of course on how we define ‘structurally equivalent’.

As already seen in previous sections (3.1.1), the so-called definite article

in Basque perfectly fits the grammaticalization path that leads from demon-

stratives to articles; articles in Romance languages do so as well, inasmuch

as many of them have a Latin ille origin. To this extent I believe that

Heine and Kuteva would have to admit that we can compare definite arti-

cles in Basque and in Romance languages. Moreover, they have already

been compared before in the literature, and it has been claimed that the

Basque definite article arose in a contact situation (section 3.1.2).

However, a problem immediately arises for Heine and Kuteva’s reason-

ing: Basque -a is used in a more extended way than its Romance counter-

parts. This relationship between the degree of grammaticalization of articles

in Basque and in Romance languages does not fit their expectations: their

working hypothesis is that in Basque, as the replica language, the replica

feature should be much less grammaticalized than in the model languages.

As far as I can see, there are two logically possible solutions to this

situation if we want to retain Heine and Kuteva’s hypothesis: either (A)

Basque is the model language and Romance languages are the replica

languages, or (B) the contact situation has lasted so long that the former

relative degrees of grammaticalization between features of the replica and

the model have been blurred by time. But each of these possibilities has its

problems. In case (A), can we say that Basque is the model language for

the definite article, but the replica language for the indefinite one? As we

will see below, and as already suggested, according to Heine and Kuteva

the development of the Basque indefinite article fits perfectly with its char-

acterization as a replica feature. Is this a problem if we also want to claim


that the Basque definite article is a model feature for Romance languages?

The most straightforward answer to this is yes.

If we adopted this explanation, we would be deciding which is the rep-

lica and which the model language not on the basis of real sociolinguistic

data (which we lack), but on the basis of what fits our hypothesis. In order

to avoid this and other methodological problems I propose we disregard

this possibility.

What the discussion of this logically possible solution indirectly suggests

is that perhaps we cannot decide which one is the replica and which one

the model on the basis of the relative degree of grammaticalization of the

relevant features. This should lead us to reconsider the position of Heine

and Kuteva regarding the Basque indefinite article bat; we will come back

to this issue in the next section (4.2.3.1).

Solution (B) is indeed one that Heine and Kuteva take into consideration,

although not specifically in the Basque case. They write (2005: 265): ‘‘[O]ne

caveat with regard to this generalization: given enough time, replica cate-

gories can develop in the same way as their models. . .’’.

Again, if we are to adopt this solution, a problem mirroring the one we

sketched for the first solution arises: if the contact situation has lasted so

long that the replica category (definite article -a in our case) has developed

to the same degree (and beyond, in this case) as its models, what are we to

say about the indefinite article bat? Is not the contact period equally long

for both definite and indefinite articles? As I suggested above (section 3.2),

the indefinite article in Basque may be at least as old as the definite one.

Another possibility, of course, is that in our alleged model language(s)

the grammaticalization of definite and indefinite articles happened at

di¤erent speeds or times. There is a deeper question hovering over these

considerations, that of the relative speed at which language change happens,

but I will not take this up here.

As I have briefly sketched out, some problems arise when we take the

development of the definite article as something to be explained in the

same way Heine and Kuteva propose for other features. Furthermore,

when we analyze it together with the indefinite article bat new problems

surface for their hypothesis. In the next section I discuss the indefinite

article in more detail.

4.2.3. The Basque indefinite article in Heine and Kuteva’s work

The Basque indefinite article bat is discussed or mentioned in four works

by Heine and Kuteva (2003: 556–557; 2005: 101, 247; 2006: 30, 132, 246;

252 Julen Manterola

2007: 327). Here I will only o¤er some relevant quotations, since the ideas

presented in each work do not di¤er substantially.

4.2.3.1. The indefinite article bat as a replica feature

Heine and Kuteva take for granted that the indefinite article was acquired

via contact, although we have no evidence of a time when Basque lacked

such a category. ‘‘As a result of this contact, Basque speakers introduced a

category which they did not have previously, namely an indefinite article.’’

(Heine and Kuteva 2003: 556; emphasis mine – JM)

We can find other claims in the same vein in their work (Heine and

Kuteva 2005: 247). In their most recent work (Heine and Kuteva 2007:

327) they write:

[I]n the earlier history of the Basque language there was no indefinite article,while the surrounding Romance languages Spanish, French, and Gasconhad indefinite articles. As a result of centuries of close contact with theseRomance languages, speakers of Basque grammaticalized their numeral for‘one,’ bat, to an indefinite article. . . . as Haase (1992) demonstrates, it wasonly one out of a large number of instances of grammatical replication thatBasque speakers introduced on the model of their dominant Romanceneighbor languages. . .

This explicitly denies the existence of an indefinite article in the earlier

history of Basque. Of course it depends on how we understand the term

‘‘history,’’ but as I have shown in sections 3.2 and 3.3, they are strictly

speaking not correct: bat as an indefinite article appears in all Basque

historical records. There are no extensive records of Basque for the time

when it allegedly lacked an indefinite article; again, we simply do not

know when it emerged in Basque. As a possibility, as plausible as any

other, we should conjecture that Basque had an indefinite article prior to

contact with Romance languages.

Of course, we know (see section 2.2) that languages do not tend to have

only the indefinite article, so one hypothesis based on cross-linguistic

tendencies is that Basque did not have an indefinite article before the defi-

nite one emerged, allegedly in the Middle Ages. But we must distinguish

between what we conclude on the basis of our theoretical assumptions

from what we know for sure on the basis of actual data. We should also

keep in mind that languages like Turkish are an exception to this tendency,

especially since Turkish seems to be close to Basque in typological terms

(Comrie 2008).


In short, we cannot draw any conclusions as to whether Basque had an

indefinite article before the Middle Ages by asking which possibility best

fits a given hypothesis. This is first of all an empirical problem, one of the

lack of relevant data, or rather of how to make good use of the data at our

disposal.

4.2.3.2. The gradual (and ‘‘delayed’’) grammaticalization process in a

replica language

Heine and Kuteva also focus on the lesser degree of grammaticalization

that Basque bat shows as compared to Romance un ‘a.’ That Basque

bat is less grammaticalized fits with their expectations about the relative

chronology of model and replica features. As they write (2003: 556–557):

The grammaticalization of indefinite articles normally proceeds along thefollowing main stages. . . . While the French indefinite article has goneessentially through all these stages, the Basque indefinite article has not. . . .While there are incipient uses as a non-specific marker as early as 1545, thegrammaticalization as a non-specific article is clearly a recent innovation ofBasque. . . . it has not reached the same degree of grammaticalization as e.g.the corresponding French article. . .

The only relevant passage from their 2005 work expresses essentially the

same idea (Heine and Kuteva 2005: 101):

. . . and the indefinite article of Basque, replicated on the model of Romancelanguages, exhibit properties of categories in the early stages of grammatic-alization. . . . They thus di¤er from the corresponding categories in the modellanguages, which both are fully grammaticalized articles.

I do not believe that the reason the Basque indefinite article is less developed

than in the alleged model languages is exclusively that it is a replica cate-

gory. Consider this example of present-day central Basque:

(9) a. Eneko gizon on-a da. b. ??Eneko gizon on bat da.

Eneko man good-the is Eneko man good one is

‘Eneko is a good man.’

In its Romance equivalents we find most typically Eneko est un bon

homme or Eneko es un buen hombre, with the un indefinite article. It

becomes clear that there may be other issues at stake: how did the spread

of -a a¤ect the use and further grammaticalization of bat? The role that

the remarkable spread of the definite article may have played in prevent-

ing the use of the indefinite bat should also be taken into consideration.

254 Julen Manterola

At the same time, a mirroring phenomenon should be noted: bat can be

used in certain constructions in some texts and varieties (my impression is

that this mostly a¤ects eastern dialects). Sentences like Fantosma bat da

‘It is a phantom’ by Leizarraga (1571: 334, Mat. 14: 26) are good exam-

ples; however, it is also possible to find examples like the western Basque

Lecu on bat da Escocia ‘Scotland is a good place’ in Perez de Lazarraga

(c. 1564: 1204r).11

The question is then whether this broader use of bat is related or not

to the lesser use of -a in these dialects. This is a further point that lacks

detailed study, and these conjectures all call for empirical testing.

These questions are raised by internal facts about definiteness marking

and the behavior of determiners in Basque; I believe that a general theory

should also o¤er solutions to this kind of language-specific problem. In

support of Heine and Kuteva I can refer back to their suggestion that a

long contact period may have blurred the relative degree of grammaticali-

zation of model and replica languages; but in that case we need to come

back to the problems I sketched in 4.2.2. No clear solution can be found

by retaining their arguments, at least for Basque.

At the same time, we may ask what it means to not be strongly gram-

maticalized (in Heine’s 1997 terms), since Basque has a plural indefinite

article batzu. The next section is devoted to this topic.

4.2.3.3. The plural indefinite article batzu and the theories of Heine

and Kuteva

In their 2006 work Heine and Kuteva mention the indefinite article bat

three times (2006: 29, 132, 246); they discuss it in the same terms as before,

11. I owe these specific data to a reviewer. I would also like to note that example(9b) may indeed be a correct one in present-day central Basque given theappropriate context, and was most surely built on the basis of a particularSpanish model construction. As a first approach to the data, I would say thatthe phrase with -a in (9a) is not a referential one but rather some sort of kindreference; its most direct Spanish counterpart would be Eneko es buen hombre,not such a ‘‘good’’ sentence to me, especially when compared to Eneko es buenchico ‘Eneko is a good boy.’ The (9b) example would ideally stand for SpanishEneko es un buen hombre (or maybe for Eneko es un hombre bueno?), a nounphrase with presumably a higher degree of referentiality and probably ofemphatic expressiveness. The borderline between di¤erent readings is oftenfuzzy; the di¤erent readings of these constructions, together with the e¤ect ofmodel constructions’ readings on replica constructions, are interesting aspectsof a multi-faceted discussion I cannot address here.


still relying on Haase’s (1992) work. The bulk of my criticism of Haase in

section 4.1 is relevant here and will not be repeated; however, one passage

(2006: 246) calls for two further comments: ‘‘[B]ut the grammaticalization

as a non-specific article is clearly a recent innovation of Basque. While the

Basque article exhibits a high degree of grammaticalization, it is still less

grammaticalized than its equivalents in the Romance model languages.’’

First, the data Heine and Kuteva o¤er to show that the grammaticali-

zation of a non-specific article is a recent innovation are not conclusive. I

do not mean that this is definitely not the case, but that Haase’s few exam-

ples are not enough. This is another topic for which a detailed analysis,

based on as many texts as we have at our disposal, is still lacking.

Second, what would it mean in Heine’s (1997) terms that the article in

Basque is still less grammaticalized? I have repeatedly noted the existence

of an ancient plural indefinite article batzu (section 3.2.1). I see two logical

possibilities if we seek to retain Heine and Kuteva’s (2003, 2005, 2006,

2007) and Heine’s (1997) views on this issue. If we follow Heine’s gram-

maticalization scale for the indefinite article, especially what he says about

the final stage, we have to admit that the Basque indefinite article bat was

highly grammaticalized at an early period. If this were the case, the basis

of Heine and Kuteva’s work would be weakened, as it would seem that

the usual grammaticalization path does not apply in this specific case.

The second logical possibility is that Heine’s scale is not correct, since the

Basque indefinite article bat has not advanced very far along its gramma-

ticalization path, yet it has an ancient plural batzu.

What is striking, of course, is that bat as an indefinite article seems to

be grammaticalized and not grammaticalized at the same time. If we feel

free to reject these authors’ theoretical proposals, we may decide that the

grammaticalization of the indefinite article, triggered or not by a contact

situation, has not followed the typical path proposed by Heine.

In fact, as we have seen already (section 3.2.1), plural batzu could

indeed have been formed on the model of Romance languages (at least

Spanish); the fact that plural indefinite articles based on the numeral are

rare (section 2.2), also makes us think that this is an areal feature.

Many questions come to mind that will inevitably remain open. What

do intensive contact situations mean for grammaticalization scales? We

could perhaps answer that the model indefinite plural unos ‘some’ was

so powerful that it made Basque bat ‘a’ skip over some stages in its

grammaticalization path. We would then not need to reject Heine’s gram-

maticalization path, and we would open up a new line of research into

256 Julen Manterola

the interaction between ‘‘natural’’ grammaticalization paths and contact-

a¤ected ones. This option could perfectly well be complementary to Heine

and Kuteva’s proposals for grammaticalization and contact issues.

From a more local perspective, we might also wonder about the rela-

tionship between the Spanish romances and present-day French Basque

dialects, or what the internal relationship between western and eastern

dialects has been, or what is the complementary relationship between

definite -a and indefinite bat. General theories ought also to have some-

thing to say about these seemingly less important issues.

4.2.4. Concluding remarks on Heine and Kuteva’s hypothesis for Basque

I have tried to show that Basque data as used by Heine and Kuteva do not

o¤er solid support for any of their contact hypotheses. Nevertheless, I

would like to make clear that contact has surely played a determining

role in configuring the character and range of uses of articles in Basque.

On the one hand, although I have not focused on this issue, the remark-

able extension of the definite article -a could be explained by contact –

not simply by the ‘‘typical’’ contact-induced grammaticalization of demon-

stratives, but rather by another e¤ect of contact, the spread of the overt

marking of singular / plural morphology.

On the other hand, it is true that the use of the indefinite article bat has

been extended on the model of Romance languages, as Trask (2003: 122)

notes: ‘‘The quantifier batzuk ‘some, several’ . . . is formally a plural of this

bat. Among some younger speakers, there is a tendency to extend the use

of bat to calque the much broader use of the Spanish article un(a).’’

This extension may in fact be a measurable contact-induced change,

but recent work by Heine and Kuteva (with Haase as their basis) does

not address this phenomenon. The fault is not entirely theirs, since Basque

linguistics in general still has no in-depth study of the topic.

Many interesting issues arise from this probably contact-induced exten-

sion; here I propose guesses about two of them. First, as mentioned above,

the indefinite article’s extension might have been a¤ected by the wide-

spread use of the definite article; this definite article is the one whose use

has most evidently been spreading during the last four or five centuries

when Basque as a whole is considered. Second, it might seem that the

indefinite article on the model of Romance languages is more widespread

in eastern than in central and western varieties of Basque. One could

speculate that this is due to the lesser use that eastern varieties make of

the definite article -a.


These possibilities, as I said, are merely guesses; further study is needed

to corroborate or dismiss them. They are intended simply as a sample of

the line of research we might follow, since they are not addressed by

Haase.

5. Summary and concluding remarks

Thus far, it has become clear that linguistic reality presents a much more

complex, variegated situation than Haase’s and Heine and Kuteva’s pro-

posals would lead us to imagine.

I have shown that Heine and Kuteva’s hypotheses cannot hold for both

Basque articles, definite and indefinite, together (section 4.2.2). Their basic

problem comes from the fact that as far as Basque is concerned they rely

exclusively on Haase’s work. There are many other sources against which

Haase’s seminal work on contact should be checked in order to get a

reliable analysis of diachronic, dialectal, and contact issues in Basque.

Dialectal and historical data cannot be neglected; proposals arising

from theoretical insights should help in understanding the history, dialec-

tal variation, and distribution of language-specific features. But Heine and

Kuteva leave many issues unaddressed and unexplained.

1. Their approach does not solve specific problems already identified in

Basque diachronic linguistics, such as the early existence of the indefinite

plural batzu (section 3.2.1).

2. It says nothing about contact issues present in the literature on Basque,

such as the contact-induced emergence of the definite article -a.

3. There is no mention of the remarkable spread of the definite article -a,

which seemingly could have been due to contact.

4. Interesting questions, such as the relationship between definite and

indefinite articles in a contact situation, are not raised.

This entirely new view of the issues relative to articles in Basque forces

us to review Heine and Kuteva’s theoretical claims (section 4.2.1), insofar

as facts about Basque were supposed to support them.

1. The relative degree of grammaticalization of parallel categories is not

to be taken as the first approach to contact issues between two lan-

guages. If we want to establish their diachronic relationship, other

questions have to be answered first.

258 Julen Manterola

2. When diachronic information is not available we should be much

more cautious; the example of Basque has shown that when we do

have more and better information than Heine and Kuteva (consider-

ing both articles together), their predictions turn out to be incorrect.

3. Thus, their caveat in the passage I quoted in section 4.2.2 points in an

interesting direction for further studies, focusing on the time dimen-

sion of these developments.

4. New questions are prompted by their hypotheses, such as how di¤erent

contact e¤ects can each conceal the other’s typical diachronic paths

(see section 3.1.2, on the role of the overt distinction of singular/plural

marking). The question of how intensive contact a¤ects the replica

language should also be a concern of the theory (see sections 3.2.1

and 4.2.3.3 on the possible contact origin of batzu).

All these considerations, rather than completely ruling their hypotheses

out, might help to improve and update them with what we empirically

know about Basque. They are also a call for caution, given that we are

dealing with a language with no decisive data in some of its aspects, and

a reminder of how important it is to acquire a good knowledge of the

history of the languages involved.

At this point we may recall some of Thomason’s (2007) proposals for

basic steps to be taken before a claim of contact-induced change can

be considered firmly established. Her fourth and fifth steps (Thomason

2007: 11–12) are directly linked to my point about the importance of a

good knowledge of the history of the languages involved. She notes that

we need to prove that the proposed interference features did not exist in

the receiving or replica language before it came into contact with the

source language, which can be done either by inspecting documents show-

ing earlier stages of the language or by examining related languages which

can give us clues to the ancient mother language. And, of course, we need

to prove that the relevant transferred features were already present in the

source or model language by the time it came into contact with the receiv-

ing language. As far as I can judge, neither of these basic steps has been

accomplished by Haase for Basque definite and indefinite articles, nor by

Heine and Kuteva; ancient texts are not well analyzed, and variation

between dialects (replacing related languages in the case of isolate Basque)

has not been studied.

These methodological gaps diminish the accuracy of Heine and Kuteva’s

analyses of Basque contact issues. Furthermore, one would expect their


hypotheses to shed some light on language-specific problems, and theory

and fact to strengthen each other. This has not been the case; Basque has

been shown not to be a good starting point for their hypotheses as far as

articles are concerned. Nonetheless, Heine and Kuteva’s hypotheses have

been seen to be testable against new data; their theory may be strength-

ened as these data are gradually fed into it.

References

Alvarez, J. L. 1977. L’emploi de l’indefini en souletin. Fontes Linguae Vasconum

25: 29–54.

Artiagoitia, X. 1998. Determinatzaile sintagmaren hipotesia euskal gramatikan.

Uztaro 27: 33–61. [Available at http://www.uztaro.com/]

Artiagoitia, X. 2002. The functional structure of the Basque noun phrase. In

Erramu Boneta: Festschrift for Rudolf P. G. de Rijk [ASJUren Gehigarriak

XLIV], X. Artiagoitia, P. Goenaga and Lakarra J. A. (eds), 73–90. Bilbao:

EHU.

Azkue, R. M. 1905–1906. Diccionario vasco-espanol-frances. Bilbao: La Gran

Enciclopedia Vasca. [Reprinted 1969]

Azkue, R. M. 1923. Morfologıa Vasca. Bilbao: La Gran Enciclopedia Vasca.

[Reprinted 1969] [Available at http://www.euskaltzaindia.com/euskera]

Chen, P. 2004. Identifiability and definiteness in Chinese. Linguistics 42.6: 1129–

1184.

Company, C. 1991. La extension del artıculo en el espanol medieval. Romance

Philology XLIV. 4: 402–424.

Comrie, B. 2008. Basque, Romance, and areal typology: what do we learn from

the World Atlas of Language Structures? In Lenguas en dialogo. El iberorro-

mance y su diversidad linguıstica y literaria. Ensayos en homenaje a Georg Bos-

song, H.-J. Dohla, R. Montero, and F. Baez de Aguilar (eds), 55–63. Madrid:

Iberoamericana.

Cyr, D. 1993. Cross-linguistic quantification: definite articles vs. demonstratives.

Language Sciences 15.3: 195–229.

Egiategi, J. 1785. Lehen liburia edo filosofo huskaldunaren ekheia [Euskararen

Lekukoak 6]. Bilbao: Euskaltzaindia. [Reprinted 1983]

Epstein, R. 1993. The later stages in the development of the definite article:

evidence from French. In Historical linguistics [Current Issues in Linguistic

Theory 124], H. Andersen (ed.), 159–175. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Epstein, R. 1994. The development of the definite article in French. In Perspectives

on Grammaticalization [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 109], W. Pagliuca

(ed.), 63–80. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Epstein, R. 1995. L’article defini en ancien francais: l’expression de la subjectivite.

Langue Francaise 107: 58–71.

260 Julen Manterola

Etxeberria, U. 2005. Quantification and domain restriction in Basque. PhD Dis-

sertation, University of the Basque Country. [Available at www.ehu.es/hitt/

etxeberria.htm]

Frajzyngier, Z. 1996. On sources of demonstratives and anaphors. In Studies in

Anaphora [Typological Studies in Language 33], B. Fox (ed.), 167–203. Amster-


Givon, T. 1981. On the development of the numeral ‘‘one’’ as an indefinite

marker. Folia Linguistica Historica 2.1: 35–53.

Greenberg, J. H. 1978. How does a language acquire gender markers? In Univer-

sals of Human Languages, J. H. Greenberg, J. Ferguson, and E. Moravcsik

(eds), 47–82. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Haase, M. 1992. Sprachkontakt und Sprachwandel im Baskenland: Die Einflusse

des Gaskognischen und Franzosischen auf das Baskische. Hamburg: Helmut

Buske Verlag.

Haspelmath, M. 1998. How young is standard average European? Language

Sciences 20.3: 271–287.

Heine, B. 1997. Cognitive Foundations of Grammar. New York/Oxford: Oxford

University Press.


Language 27.3: 529–572.





Heine, B. and Kuteva, T. 2007. The Genesis of Grammar. A Reconstruction [Studies

in the evolution of language 9]. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Himmelmann, N. P. 1998. Regularity in irregularity: article use in adpositional

phrases. Linguistic Typology 2: 315–353.

Himmelmann, N. P. 2001. Articles. In Language Typology and Language Univer-

sals: An International Handbook [Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication

Science 20.1], M. Haspelmath, E. Konig, W. Oesterreicher, and W. Raible (eds),

831–841. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter.

Hualde, J. I. 2003. Case and number inflection of noun phrases. In A grammar of

Basque, J. I. Hualde and J. Ortiz de Urbina (eds), 171–186. Berlin: Mouton de

Gruyter.

Hualde, J. I. and Gaminde, I. 1998. Vowel interaction in Basque: a nearly exhaus-

tive catalogue. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 28.1: 41–77. [Available at

https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/jihualde/www/V_sequences.pdf ]

Hualde, J. I. and Ortiz de Urbina, J. (eds). 2003. A grammar of Basque. Berlin:

Mouton de Gruyter.

Huang, S. 1999. The emergence of a grammatical category definite article in

spoken Chinese. Journal of Pragmatics 31: 77–94.


Iglesias, H. 2007. Observations concernant les recentes critiques et omissions de

Joseba Lakarra a propos des recherches d’Hector Iglesias sur la problematique

‘‘basco-iberique’’ suivies d’une hypothese inedite concernant l’inscription de

Liria. [Available at http://artxiker.ccsd.cnrs.fr/]

Irigoien, A. 1985. Euskarazko izen sintagma mugatzailerik gabekoez. Euskera 30:

129–139. [Available at http://www.euskaltzaindia.net/euskera]

Irigoyen, A. 1957. Cartas de Mariano Mendigacha a D. Resurreccion Marıa de

Azkue. Euskera 2: 119–170. [Available at http://www.euskaltzaindia.com/

euskera]

Irigoyen, A. 1986. En torno a la toponimia vasca y circumpirenaica. Bilbao: Uni-

versidad de Deusto.

Iturrioz, J. L. 1985. La funcion de -a y de -ta a la luz de la dimension de individua-

cion. Euskera 30: 175–213. [Available at http://www.euskaltzaindia.net/euskera]

Lafitte, P. 1944. Grammaire Basque (Navarro-Labourdin litteraire). Donostia,

Bayonne: Elkar.

Lafon, R. 1954. Le nombre dans la declinaison basque. Via Domitia 1: 111–121.

[Reprinted in Lafon 1999: 209–217]

Lafon, R. 1999. Vasconiana [IKER 11]. Bilbao: Euskaltzaindia.

Lapesa, R. 1961. Del demostrativo al artıculo. Nueva Revista de Filologıa Hispanica

15: 23–44.

Leizarraga, I. 1571. I. Leicarragas Baskische Bucher von 1571, herausgegeben von

Th. Linschmann und H. Schuchardt. Bilbao: Euskaltzaindia. [Reprinted 1990]

Manterola, J. 2006. -a euskal artikulua definituaren gainean zenbait ohar. In Studies

in Basque and Historical Linguistics in Memory of R. L. Trask [Anuario del

Seminario de Filologıa Vasca ‘‘Julio de Urquijo’’ XL], J. A. Lakarra and Hualde

J. I. (eds), 651–676. Donostia, Bilbao: Gipuzkoako Foru Aldundia.

Michelena, L. 1970. Nombre y verbo en la etimologıa vasca. Fontes Linguae

Vasconum 2: 67–93. [Reprinted in Michelena 1987: 283–309]

Michelena, L. 1971. Toponimia, lexico y gramatica. Fontes Linguae Vasconum 9:

241–267. [Reprinted in Michelena 1987: 141–167]

Michelena, L. 1978. Miscelanea filologica vasca. Fontes Linguae Vasconum 29:

205–228. [Reprinted in Michelena 1987: 363–385]

Michelena, L. 1981. Lengua comun y dialectos vascos. Anuario del Seminario de

Filologıa Vasca ‘‘Julio de Urquijo’’ 15: 291–313. [Reprinted in Michelena 1987:

35–55]

Michelena, L. 1987. Palabras y textos. Bilbao: EHU.

Milsark, G. L. 1977. Toward an explanation of certain peculiarities of the existen-

tial construction in English. Linguistic Analysis 3.1: 1–29.

Otsibar, K. 2003. Lehenago Gamere. Maule: Su Azia. [Available at www.suazia.

com]

Pagola, R. M. (ed.). 2004. Bonaparte Ondareko eskuizkribuak. Bilduma osoaren Edi-

zio Digitala. Bilbao: Deustuko Unibertsitatea. [Available at http://tesitek.com]

262 Julen Manterola

Perez de Lazarraga, J. C. 1564. Manuscript. [http://lazarraga.gipuzkoakultura.net]

Plank, F. and Moravcsik, E. A. 1996. The Maltese article: language-particulars

and universals. Rivista di Linguistica 8.1: 183–212.

Putzu, I. and Ramat, P. 2001. Articles and quantifiers in the Mediterranean lan-

guages: a typological-diachronic analysis. In Aspects of Typology and Univer-

sals [Studia Typologica 1], W. Bisang (ed.), 99–132. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

Tartas, I. 1666. Onsa hilceco bidia. Orthez: Iacques Rovyer. [Available at http://

klasikoak.armiarma.com/]

Thomason, S. G. 2007. Social and linguistic factors as predictors of contact-

induced change. Paper presented at the Symposium on Language Contact and

the Dynamics of Language: Theory and Implications, Leipzig, 10–13 May 2007.

Trask, R. L. 1997. The history of Basque. London: Routledge.

Trask, R. L. 2003. The Noun Phrase: nouns, determiners and modifiers; pronouns

and names. In A grammar of Basque, J. I. Hualde and J. Ortiz de Urbina (eds),

113–170. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.


Contact phenomena/code copying in Indian OceanCreoles: the post-abolition period1

Sibylle Kriegel

In this article, I will show that some minor di¤erences in the syntax of

closely related Mauritian and Seychelles Creole clearly can be interpreted

as contact-induced phenomena due to di¤erent contact situation after the

abolition of slavery in 1835. In order to explain these contact induced

phenomena, I will work with the concept of code copying developed by

Johanson (2002).

1. Socio-historical background

Mauritian and Seychelles Creole are mutually intelligible despite minor

di¤erences between the two languages. To explain this fact, I begin this

article with a brief socio-historical survey. I do not retrace here the debate

between Chaudenson (1974, 2003, etc.) and Baker and Corne (1982, 1987;

see also Baker 2007) with respect to the exact conditions of creolization in

the Indian Ocean; I only briefly summarize the comparable migration

movements up to the abolition of slavery in 1835, before focusing on the

di¤erent contact situations after 1835.

Following a series of settlement disputes, Mauritius was ultimately settled

by the French in 1721. According to Baker (1982), the population groups

imported to Mauritius up to 1740 came from Madagascar, India, Benin,

1. Most parts of this article were written during a stay at the Freiburg Institutefor Advanced Studies (FRIAS) where I was invited as an external fellow inNovember 2008. I am very grateful to the colleagues of the FRIAS andthe University of Freiburg, Peter Auer, Daniel Jacob, Stefan Pfander, andWolfgang Raible for discussion of the main points of this article. I am alsovery grateful to Paula Prescod, Ralph Ludwig, and Fabiola Henri. RalphLudwig and Fabiola Henri are my co-authors on two articles dealing withlanguage contact between Mauritian Creole and Bhojpuri (see references).Some of the data discussed in these articles as well as a yet to be publishedcorpus collected during fieldwork in 2005 with Ralph Ludwig and FabiolaHenri largely inspired section 3 of this article.

Senegambia, and Mozambique. Between 1740 and 1835, Baker (1982: 51)

states, the vast majority of arrivals were slaves from two regions, Mada-

gascar and East Africa, in spite of the great diversity of places from which

Mauritius was settled. As far back as 1773, the existence of a Creole lan-

guage is attested:

Un jeune Negrillon Mozambique, nomme Favori, age de 13 ans, appartenantau Sr. Pierre Maheas, habitant a la Montagne Longue, a disparu depuis le31 Janvier. Comme ce jeune noir sest probablement egare & qu’il n’entendpas la langue creole, il n’aura pu dire le nom de son maıtre ni retrouver samaison. (1773, ‘‘Annonces, a‰ches et avis divers pour les colonies des islesde France’’)

A young male slave from Mozambique called Favori, aged 13 and belong-ing to Pierre Maheas, a planter at Long Mountain, has disappeared sinceJanuary 31st. As this young slave is probably lost and does not understandthe Creole language, he will not be able to give the name of his owner norfind his way home . . . (translation by Baker and Muhlhausler 2007: 85).

The uninhabited islands of the Seychelles were settled in 1770 by the

French, mainly from Mauritius, but also from Reunion (Bollee 2007b).

The settlers and their slaves imported what was already considered a

Creole language into this new subcolony, which continued to be ruled

from Mauritius. Until the abolition of slavery in 1835 both territories

evolved in almost the same contact situation, although they both came

under the rule of Britain during the Napoleonic Wars in 1814. However,

after abolition in 1835, the demographic situations in the two territories

developed di¤erently (Kriegel 2008).

In Mauritius, in order to compensate for the lack of labor for the sugar

industry, indentured laborers from the Indian subcontinent were imported

and quickly became the dominant population group. According to Baker

(1982), as early as 1871 they formed 68 percent of the population. This

trade lasted until the beginning of the twentieth century, and today the

descendants of Indian indentured workers still form the majority of the

population in Mauritius. These indentured laborers were mostly speakers

of Bhojpuri2 or related Indic languages (Neerputh 1986: 9¤., see also

2. We will use the name Bhojpuri because the speakers of this variety themselvescall their language by this name, even if, according to linguistic and geo-graphic criteria, this does not seem to be entirely justified. In this vein, Bakerand Ramnah (1988: 67) state: ‘‘In view of our findings that Magahi was amajor contributor to MB [Mauritian Bhojpuri, SK], ‘‘Bhojpuri’’ would seemto be less than ideal as the choice of name. A more suitable alternative, onboth linguistic and geographic grounds, might be ‘‘Mauritian Bihari’’ (Bakerand Ramnah 1988: 67).

266 Sibylle Kriegel

Mesthrie 1991: 26). Bhojpuri is still spoken in Mauritius: according to an

o‰cial census in 2000 it is the first home language of 12.07 percent of the

total population (Kriegel et al. 2008), and less recent figures indicate that

approximately a third of the population speaks Bhojpuri (alongside Creole).

The Seychelles received ‘‘rescued’’ slaves in the second half of the nine-

teenth century (see Bollee 1977; Chaudenson 1974; Nwulia 1981), when

the English liberated people found on ships in the Indian Ocean destined

for the illegal slave trade. According to Baker they were predominantly

speakers of Bantu languages and formed a third of the population in the

Seychelles in the late nineteenth century (Baker 1993: 130). However, the

use of their languages has been lost in the Seychelles, where Creole is

today the main spoken language.

Today, both territories are independent countries belonging to the British

Commonwealth.

Mauritius became independent in 1968 and was declared a republic in

1992. Even though English is the o‰cial language, its use is very restricted.

Mauritius is multilingual, with Mauritian Creole as the main language

spoken at home followed by Bhojpuri (see above; for a detailed account

see Kriegel et al. 2009).

In the Seychelles, three languages were made o‰cial in 1978, two years

after independence. Since 1981, Creole (Kreol Seselwa) has been the first

o‰cial language, followed by English and French. Creole is the native lan-

guage of about 95 percent of the population (Michaelis 2008). Nowadays,

even if in both countries we are witnessing an increased use of Creole in

formal contexts as a consequence of independence, it must be stressed

that the use of Creole in formal contexts is much more common in the

Seychelles than in Mauritius (see Kriegel 2008).

Recent research (Bollee 2007a and b; Kriegel 2008; Michaelis 2008)

tends to present Seychelles Creole as a continuation of stable varieties of

Mauritian Creole. The varieties are extremely close, but there are some

minor di¤erences between them, above all in the lexicon (see e.g. Chau-

denson 1974: 448). More recent research has also focused on slight di¤er-

ences in the field of morphosyntax (see e.g. Bollee 2004; Kriegel 1996). For

instance, the di¤erent encoding of the passive voice in both varieties has

been interpreted elsewhere as a direct consequence of the increased written

use of Seychelles Creole during the post-independence years. This article

examines two grammatical features which will be interpreted as a con-

sequence of the di¤erent language contact situations in which the two

varieties have evolved since the abolition of slavery in 1835.

Contact phenomena/code copying in Indian Ocean Creoles 267

2. The tools of contact linguistics

Creoles play a predominant role in contact linguistics because they are

considered the outcome of extreme contact in special sociolinguistic settings.

Like pidgins and bilingual mixed languages, they are examples of language

genesis situations. Although Creoles are the object of my analysis, I will

not address the issue of genesis; rather, I am interested in the evolution of

already existing Creole languages in new contact situations. In addition to

situations of language genesis, Thomason and Kaufman (1988; see also

Thomason 2001, etc. and Winford 2003) subdivide contact patterns into

two further types: language maintenance, where a language is maintained

and influenced by another language, and language shift, concerned with

the death of a language that only leaves traces in another language. The

cases I will analyze are situations of language maintenance, where extant

Creole languages are influenced by other languages. In the case of Mauritius

this influence came from the Indic language Bhojpuri, and in the case of

the Seychelles from Bantu languages, di‰cult though this is to prove. Situa-

tions of language maintenance are typically related to processes of borrow-

ing. On Thomason and Kaufman’s influential borrowing scale, one end

is characterized by casual contact, where only non-basic vocabulary is

borrowed, whereas with growing intensity of contact structural elements

are also borrowed. Here I am interested in some function words between

lexicon and grammar that the French linguist Meillet called ‘‘des petits

mots a valeur grammaticale.’’ They are the adposition depi of Indo-

Mauritian Creole varieties and the complementizer pourdir of Seychelles

Creole. According to Thomason and Kaufman (1988: 74), function words

are borrowed in situations of ‘‘more intense contact’’ (Phase 3 of their scale).

Given the heterogeneous terminology in the English and French litera-

ture for the definition of terms like borrowing and calquing, I will base

my considerations on the concept of code copying developed by Johanson

(e.g. 2002).

Johanson distinguishes between selective and global copying. Other

authors make similar distinctions, for instance Sakel (2007; see also Matras

and Sakel 2007) speaks of MAT borrowing (relating to matter) and PAT

borrowing (relating to pattern). PAT describes the case in which only

a pattern from one language is replicated in another language. In MAT

borrowing, morphological material and its phonological shape are repli-

cated. In most cases the function of the borrowed element is also adopted,

that is, MAT and PAT are combined. Heine and Kuteva (2005) are

268 Sibylle Kriegel

almost exclusively interested in PAT borrowing, which they call ‘‘gram-

matical replication’’ (see also Chamoreau 2007). Stolz and Stolz (1996)

make a similar distinction when they speak of overt copies (overte Kopien)

where phonological material is concerned (this would correspond to com-

bined MAT and PAT borrowing) and of covert copies (koverte Kopien)

where the material side is not concerned (corresponding to PAT). The

examples discussed in this paper refer to PAT borrowing. Following Stolz

and Stolz (1996), I will speak of covert copies.

3. The data

Our corpus contains diachronic texts as well as synchronic spoken and

written data from Mauritian and Seychelles Creoles. Particular attention is

paid to modern corpus data, which are sometimes complemented by elicited

examples.

The first written texts in Mauritian Creole date from the late eighteenth

century and, to a greater extent, the beginning of the nineteenth century

(Baker and Fon Sing (eds) 2007, Furlong and Ramharai 2006, Chaudenson

1981). The first written data for Seychelles Creole are from the late nine-

teenth century (Stein 2007) and the first text of significant length dates

from the first third of the twentieth century (Young 1983). In this paper,

I analyze some examples from the old texts Philip Baker circulated in an

electronic version to the contributors to Baker and Fon Sing (2007).

The spoken data in my corpus of modern Mauritian Creole were col-

lected in fieldwork and contain the spoken, spontaneous texts in Kriegel

(1996) and Ludwig et al. (2001) as well as the unpublished corpus by

Kriegel, Ludwig, and Henri (2005). The spoken data from Seychelles Creole

mainly draw on Bollee and Rosalie (1994). The modern written data im-

clude a wide variety of written texts in di¤erent genres.

I will examine two function words: some uses of the French-derived

preposition depi in Indo-Mauritian Creole varieties (Section 3.1) and the

complementizer pourdir in Seychelles Creole (Section 3.2). I argue that in

both cases we are dealing with phenomena involving code copying.

3.1. Depi: Path marking in Indo-Mauritian Creole varieties

Depi is derived from the French preposition depuis. Its temporal uses,

attested in all varieties of Mauritian Creole, can easily be explained by

French where depuis has exactly the same temporal uses.


(1) Mauritian Creole

ou ’nn konn enn sanzman ki ’nn, ki ’nn

2sg compl know indf change rel compl rel compl

koul pei la net depi lindepandans

drown country def completely since independence

‘[It’s as if ] you had realized a change which, which completely ruined

the country since Independence.’ (unpublished corpus Kriegel,

Ludwig, and Henri 2005)


li ’nn ale li ’nn ale depi lontan wi

3sg compl go 3sg compl go since long time yes

‘He went away, he went away a long time ago.’ (Kriegel 1996)

Alongside those temporal uses we find, in Indo-Mauritian Creole varieties,

depi in path marking (Talmy 1985), more precisely in ablative marking

(motion from) as in (3). Although local uses of depuis in French are

attested (Kriegel et al. 2008), the much more productive use of depi in

local contexts of Mauritian Creole cannot be explained by French semantics.

(3) Indo-Mauritian Creole

mo papa sort depi Sesel, li ’nn vini

poss father come.from abl seychelles 3sg compl come

pou travay dan Moris

for work Loc Mauritius

‘My father comes from the Seychelles, he came to work in

Mauritius. . . .’ (Bord la Mer 1980)

Before analyzing the data in more detail, a closer look at the theoretical

background on which I base my considerations may be useful (see Kriegel

et al. 2008). According to Lehmann (1992), a local situation presents the

following structure: a moving or located object (the Figure in Gestalt psy-

chology), is involved in a situation and locally related or oriented with

respect to a local region of a reference object, the Ground. An important

distinction is made between the local region or place of the Ground and

the orientation or path (Talmy 1985). The following types of path can

be distinguished: essive (at rest, ‘‘to be at’’), allative (motion to, ‘‘to go

to’’) and ablative (motion from, ‘‘to come from’’).3 In this article we will

3. Like Michaelis (2008: 238), I understand the notions of path as semanticcategories and not as morpho-syntactic language-specific cases. Therefore theyare represented in small capitals.

270 Sibylle Kriegel

be concerned with the coding of the ablative (and allative) relation in

intransitive movement.4

In most varieties of Mauritian Creole we have the construction type

common to a lot of Creole languages, including Seychelles Creole, in which

ablative and allative are not marked di¤erently (Michaelis 2008: 239).

Example (4) from Seychelles Creole is an exact match with example (5)

from Mauritian Creole.

(4) Seychelles Creole

Ablative mon sorti dan lafore

1sg.sbj come.from loc.in forest

‘I come out of the forest.’

Allative mon al dan lafore

1sg.sbj go loc.in forest

‘I go into the forest.’


Ablative mo sorti dan lafore

1sg.sbj come.from loc.in forest

‘I come out of the forest.’ (Kriegel et al. 2008: 175)

Allative mo al dan lafore

1sg.sbj go loc.in forest

‘I go into the forest.’

The unmarked expression of ablative and allative in Mauritian Creole

is exactly the same as in Seychelles Creole. Michaelis (2008) argues con-

vincingly that the pattern of ablative coding, which seems strange from

a European perspective, ‘‘clearly mirrors the Eastern Bantu pattern in

that allative and ablative are not marked di¤erently.’’

The element dan refers to the ‘‘local region’’ or ‘‘place’’ of the Ground

and not to path. Path, ‘‘the orientation with respect to,’’ is typically

coded by a preposition or by case in European languages. More specifi-

cally, French uses de for ablative as opposed to the unmarked coding of

allative. In Seychelles Creole and most varieties of Mauritian Creole,

path is exclusively coded in the semantics of the verb sortir.

4. Also see Kriegel et al. (2008) for Mauritian Creole. Michaelis (2008, section 6)analyzes data from Seychelles Creole and Eastern Bantu languages and givesa visual presentation of the structure of a local situation following Lehmann(1992) and Jackendo¤ (1983: 161¤.).


However, here I will deal with the marked expression type of ablative,attested in Indo-Mauritian Creole varieties. Alongside examples of type

(3) drawn from a spoken register, we also find examples in written registers

of Mauritian Creole. The extensive use of depi in the political writings of

the political party Lalit (7)–(9) is striking and could be interpreted as an

indication of its propagation to other varieties of Mauritian Creole.


. . . ti ena enn vie diksioner ek enn vie liv gramer

pst have Indf old dictionary and indf old book grammar

Angle ki li ti amen ar li depi lot-pey.

English rel 3sg pst bring with 3SG.OBJ abl other country

‘There was an old dictionary and an old English grammar he brought

with him from another country.’

(TIZISTWAR 1, Dev Virahsawmy, http://pages.intnet.mu/develog/)


Fode pa zot gayn sa kas-la depi dan pos

Modal neg 3.pl.sbj get dem cash abl loc.in pocket

klas capitalist

class capitalist

‘They should not get this money from the pocket of the capitalist

class.’ (Lalit 24 May 2008, Akimilasyon capital, article by Rosa

Luxemburg, translated into Mauritian Creole,

http://lalitmauritius.org)

Depi in this use, marking the ablative, is not attested in closely related

Seychelles Creole nor in any other French-based Creole. The combined

use of depi with dan in (7) clearly shows that depi is used in the pathexpression while dan marks the local region or Ground.

Like ablative markers of other languages, depi may also be used in a

range of non-concrete spatial (or temporal) functions referring to source in

a more abstract sense, as in (8)–(9).


Li pa kapav tini enn sanglo

3sg.sbj neg can prevent indf sob

ki sorti depi profonder so nam.

rel come.out abl depth poss soul

‘She couldn’t help but let out a sob from the depth of her soul.’

(TIZISTWAR 1, Dev Virahsawmy, http://pages.intnet.mu/develog/)

272 Sibylle Kriegel


Li sibir presyon depi institisyon kuma FMI, kuma

3sg.sbj su¤er pressure abl institution like FMI like

Labank Mondyal, WTO.

world bank WTO

(FAS A KRIZ SISTEMIK, FAS A POLITIK BURZWA KI

STRATEZI? by Diskur Ram Seegobin, Jean-Claude Bibi, Oupa

Lehulere, Lalit 27/07/2007, http://lalitmauritius.org)

‘He is subjected to the pressure of institutions like FMI, like the

World Bank, WTO.’

These more abstract uses seem to be limited to written registers. Given the

high token frequency of this construction type, for instance in the texts

published by Lalit, it is reasonable to claim that the use of depi by some

writers is a conscious strategy to copy the preposition de coding ablativein French, which was lost during creolization. But this is certainly not the

case for the concrete spatial contexts in which we find uses of depi, as in

(3) or (6)–(7). These uses of depi in concrete contexts of ablative coding

are already attested in old texts. The first attestations are from the 1880s,

the ‘‘critical’’ period when the majority of the population became of

Indian origin.

(10) Old Mauritian Creole

Lher la foul conne ca, zot sivre li a pie

when def crowd know this 3pl follow 3sg.obj by foot

dipi tou zot la vil.

abl all 3pl.poss town

‘The people heard about it, they followed him on foot from the

towns.’ (Matthew, 14: 13, translation by Anderson 1885)


soley va vine noar, la line na pa va

sun fut become black moon neg fut

donne so clarte, e zetoal va tombe dipi dan le ciel . . .

give poss clearness and star fut fall abl loc heaven

‘Soon after the trouble of those days, the sun will grow dark, the

moon will no longer shine, the stars will fall from heaven. . .’

(Matthew 24: 29, translation by Anderson 1885, electronic

corpus Baker)


Another interesting phenomenon is the use of depi to encode not only the

ablative but also the allative in patterns where local points of departure

and arrival are expressed. Here depi is used instead of ziska to mark the

endpoint of a movement. The first attestation is from 1880.


Mais so cloisons lacambe la napas dibois napas plances:

but poss partition room def neg wood neg planks

dipis en haut, dipis en bas toute loison neque ene grand

abl top all bottom all partition just indf big

grand laglace meme.

big mirror

‘But the partition in his/her room is not made of wood or boards:

from top to bottom the partition is a big, big mirror.’

(Baissac 1880: 56)

This confusion between depi and ziska is still rather common in Indo-

Mauritian Creole varieties, and Baissac makes the following comment on

this rare phenomenon in his 1880 grammar:

Depuis, dipis. Depuis ici jusque-la, Dipis ici zousqua-la; mais le creole disaitavant qu’il connut zousqua ou zisqua, jusque, au lieu de: J’ai saute depuisici jusque la, Mo te saute dipis la, dipis-la, ce qui etait plus original. (Baissac1880: 78)

From, dipis. From here to there, Dipis ici zousqua-la; but the Creole wouldsay before he knew zousqu’a or zisqua, ‘to’, instead of: I jumped from hereto there, Mo te saute dipis la, dipis-la, which was in fact more original.

In the modern Indo-Mauritian Creole variety, we also have examples of

the following type:


Depi sannmars depi lagar ena trafik

abl champs.de.mars all station aux tra‰c

‘From the Champs de Mars up to the station, the tra‰c is jammed.’

(unpublished corpus Kriegel, Ludwig, and Henri 2005)


Depi lao depi anba ena bokou pou marse

abl top all bottom aux much to walk

‘[To go] from top to bottom, there’s a lot of walking to do.’


274 Sibylle Kriegel

As in (12), in example (13) and (14) not only is the ablative marked by

depi but so too is the allative, a construction type which is impossible

in all French varieties. In French and also in the Creole variety spoken

by speakers without Indo-Mauritian background, the allative (motion

to) is normally marked by ziska ( jusqu’a) as is the case in (15) and (16).


Depi Vakwa ziska Maybour Pol inn dormi dan loto

abl vacoas all Mahebourg Paul compl dormir loc voiture

‘Paul has been sleeping in the car from Vacoas to Mahebourg.’



Li ’nn get mwa depi lao ziska anba.

3sg compl look.at 1sg.obj abl top all bottom

‘He looked at me from top to bottom.’ (¼from head to toe)


The confusion between depi and ziska in Mauritius is associated with

‘‘people who come from homes where Bhojpuri was the principal language

during their childhood’’ (Baker 1996: 48), a statement which our informants

confirmed during fieldwork carried out in 2005 with Ralph Ludwig and

Fabiola Henri.

The ‘‘construction material’’ is from French, but depi cannot be ex-

plained by French in most of its local uses, especially when combined with

dan or when encoding ablative and allative. Instead an examination of

Bhojpuri may be of help. We argue that the generalization of depi as an

ablative and sometimes even as an allative marker may be explained

by influence from Bhojpuri (see also Kriegel et al. 2009). In all Bhojpuri

varieties the highly frequent and polyvalent postposition se is attested

(see Baker and Ramnah 1988, Mesthrie 1991: 262, Shukla 1981: 161).

The similarity between the two elements can be observed in example (17).

(17) a. Mauritian Bhojpuri

Ham ghar se awa thain

1sg house abl come aux.asp.1sg

b. Mauritian Creole

Mo pe vini depi lakaz

1sg asp come abl house

‘I’m coming from the house.’



In cases expressing the local beginning and endpoint we have the follow-

ing examples in Bhojpuri:

(18) Mauritian Bhojpuri

Ronpwen se lagar (le) trafik ba

roundabout abl station (all) tra‰c aux

‘From the roundabout up to the station, the tra‰c is jammed.’


The use of le is optional and according to our informants, it is often con-

fused with se. Se also has temporal uses, exactly like depi.

I believe that depi is a copy from se. Furthermore, I posit that it is a

covert copy, or an instance of PAT borrowing, following the term used

by Sakel (2007). The phonological shape does not come from Bhojpuri

but from Creole, the copying code. The copy is also ‘‘selective’’ (Johanson

2002) in another way: in Bhojpuri se is a postposition, but it appears as a

preposition following the word order rules of the copying code. But the

fact that it is indeed a copy is supported by sociolinguistic evidence.

3.2. Pourdir: complementizing in Seychelles Creole

My second example comes from Seychelles Creole and is based on corpus

analysis. In some corpora of Seychelles Creole, especially in the oral texts

in Bollee and Rosalie (1994) and a corpus of folk tales published in Kriegel

and Neumann-Holzschuh (2007), we often find, alongside ø marking and

ki from French que, the complementizer pourdir, a lexicalization of the

French preposition pour in combination with the infinitive of the verb

dire. Examples (19)–(22) illustrate the three types of coding.

Ø-complementation is highly frequent in spoken registers.


Dizef kot nou pa gannyen nou dir nou a manz tou le zour

egg where 1pl neg have 1pl say ø 1pl fut eat everyday

‘When people do not have any eggs they say they could eat eggs

every day.’ (Bollee and Rosalie 1994: 202)

Complementizing by French derived ki is more frequent in written registers,

but also attested in spoken data.

276 Sibylle Kriegel


Ou ’n deza dir mwan ki ou deza travay lo

2sg compl already say 1sg.obj that 2sg already work on

en serten zil

indf certain island

‘You have already told me that you worked on some island or

another.’ (Bollee and Rosalie 1994: 216–7)

In this article we will focus on the third and least frequent technique of

complementizing, the use of pourdir.5


Me Zozef-Fou ti konmans rakont bann serviter

but Joseph-Fou pst start tell pl servant

pourdir kaptenn ki ’n zet Tizan dan delo

comp captain rel compl throw Tijean in water

‘But Joseph-Fou began to tell the servants that it was the captain

who had thrown Tijean into the water.’

(Kriegel and Neumann-Holzschuh 2007)


Dimoun lontan ti per, ti kwar pourdir i

people long time pst fear pst believe compl 3sg

annan en bonnfanm ki apel Bonnfanm San Tet . . .

have indf woman that call woman-without-head . . .

‘A long time ago people were afraid, they believed that there was

a woman called Woman-without-head.’

(Bollee and Rosalie 1994: 266/7)

According to the corpus data and based on the interviews conducted during

fieldwork in the Seychelles in 2003, only elderly people make a wider use

of pourdir as a complementizer ((21)–(22)), especially in spoken discourse.

It appears with certain verb groups (verbs of utterance, knowing, believ-

ing, and perception), and especially in the corpus of spoken texts by Bollee

and Rosalie (1994) in contexts where the speaker is doubting the factual

nature of the utterance (see Kriegel 2004, 2008). This nuance seems to get

5. While Bollee (1977: 84) is the first linguist to note the existence of pourdir in acomplementizing function, Chaudenson (2003: 380¤.) still questions the exis-tence of pourdir as a complementizer in Seychelles Creole.


lost in more recent written data: semantic bleaching seems to have taken

place (for a discussion in the context of grammaticalization theory, see

Kriegel 2008). Interestingly, pourdir in Seychelles Creole has another use:

it also serves as a downtoning particle. This use corresponds to French

pour ainsi dire (so to speak/as such). An analysis of the Estrie corpus re-

vealed that in overseas varieties of French we even find pour dire without

ainsi in a modalizing function (see also Belisle 1979: 754).

(23) Quebecan French

on fait absolument rien / les fetes pour nous / ca veut pas dire

grand#chose pour dire

‘We do not do anything at all, celebrations for us, they do not mean

much, as such.’ (Estrie corpus)

This use of pourdir in a modalizing function is attested in the dictionary of

De St. Jorre and Lionnet (1999: 240) and in Chaudenson (2003: 383). We

can also find some examples in corpora of spoken language, as in (24).


me pour dir fer en louvraz metye nonbut modalizer do indf work job neg

‘But you cannot really say that I had a job as such.’

(Ludwig et al. 2001: 259)

Such uses as a modalizer or downtoning particle are also attested in other

French-based Creole languages, as for instance in Dominican and Guade-

loupean French Creole (see Ludwig et al. 2002, poudi ‘c’est le cas de dire,’

so to speak/as such).

(25) Dominican Creole

Mem si mon pa ni twavay poudi mon ka twavay

even if 1sg neg have work modalizer 1sg ipfv work

‘Even though I don’t have a job which could really be called a job

as such. . .’ (elicited from Shelly-Ann Meade)

However, pourdir as a complementizer is only possible in Seychelles Creole.

In this function it does not exist in any other Indian Ocean French Creole,

nor in the other French Creoles. Whereas an explanation of pourdir as

modalizer by French influence seems su‰cient, it is not plausible to explain

the complementizer function of pourdir as a result of French influence.

278 Sibylle Kriegel

The grammaticalization of verbs of saying is a very common gramma-

ticalization path in languages worldwide (Heine and Kuteva 2002; Ebert

1991). In Creole Studies, the complementizers derived from verbs of

saying (above all in English-based Creoles) are a very popular example

for substrate influence from West African languages (see e.g. Bruyn 2003

for Sranan, Parkvall 2000: 66 for a list of varieties, Mufwene 2008 for a

discussion). After closer examination, we realize that in these languages

we are concerned with a finite form of say, whereas in Seychelles Creole

we are dealing with a lexicalization of the French preposition pour and the

infinitive of the verb dire. Grammaticalizations of this type are also known

from di¤erent language families, including di¤erent Bantu languages.

Gilman (1993) was the first linguist to point out the possible relationship

between the use of pourdir as a complementizer in Seychelles Creole and

Bantu languages. I will take an example from Swahili, one of the lan-

guages that may have been spoken by the late nineteenth-century immi-

grants to the Seychelles. Note, however, that the pattern is also attested

in other Eastern Bantu languages (see Kriegel 2008; Guldemann 2002).

(26) Swahili

a-li-sem-a kw-amb-a a-ta-kw-end-a.

he-past-say-fin to-say-fin he-irr-to-go-fin

‘He said he would go.’ (Perrot 1951: 166, cited in Gilman 1993: 52)

Kw (or ku before consonants) is an infinitive prefix also used to mark

finality.

So a possible explanation for pourdir in a complementizing function lies

in the fact that during the second half of the nineteenth century only the

Seychelles received large numbers of speakers of Bantu languages (see

section 1), even if from a methodological point of view this is very di‰cult

or impossible to prove. Pourdir could also be a much older copy dating

from the period of creolization: it could have come into Seychelles Creole

via Mauritian Creole. However, pourdir as a complementizer is not

attested in Mauritian Creole, either old or modern varieties. Of course,

this can be due to coincidence, the element simply not being attested in

the relatively sparse data. Nonetheless, I think that it is safer to assume

that pourdir is a copy which came into Seychelles Creole in the second

half of the nineteenth century as a consequence of the immigration of

speakers of Bantu languages. Leaving aside the discussion surrounding

the likely period when the complementizer pourdir was copied into Creole,

I think that we have, as for depi, a covert copy into Creole. The evolution


of pourdir in Seychelles Creole could be interpreted as a case of conver-

gence (Bollee 1982; Kriegel 2003) between a French pragmatic strategy of

modalizing and a Bantu complementizer.

4. Conclusion and perspectives

Let us briefly summarize the main points: Mauritian and Seychelles Creole

are two closely related French-based Creoles. The varieties are mutually

intelligible. The extant Mauritian Creole was exported to the Seychelles

before the end of the eighteenth century. The minor di¤erences between

the two languages concern, above all, the lexicon and some aspects of

syntax on which research has not really focused until now. I have tried to

show some contact-induced phenomena concerning function words: I have

examined the ablative marking adposition depi in Mauritian Creole,

which I interpret as a covert copy from Bhojpuri, as well as the comple-

mentizer pourdir in Seychelles Creole, which I interpret as a covert copy

from Bantu languages.

The concept of code copying, and the analysis of copies which do not

come from the base language that provided the majority of the ‘‘con-

struction materials’’ in the respective Creoles, enable us to understand the

challenges posed by the notion of linguistic change in Creole languages.

When we deal with elements that come from the base languages we are

very often unable to judge if the existence of certain phenomena dates

from the period of creolization or if we are seeing more recent copies.

The absence of data from the period of constitution of Creoles and the

sparse data in their later evolution do not permit of a definite answer.

This problem has been discussed at length in Kriegel (2008). A good candi-

date to illustrate the problem of determining when code copying occurred

is pourdir, because we have to distinguish between two periods of contact

with Bantu languages. Oral varieties of French as well as Bantu languages

have contributed to the constitution of Mauritian and Seychelles Creole

(roughly before 1773); after the abolition of slavery in 1835, the Seychelles

(though not Mauritius) received significant numbers of Bantu-speaking

immigrants. It is therefore di‰cult to determine at which moment of the

evolution of Seychelles Creole the element in question, in our case pourdir,

was copied into Creole. The analysis of data from Mauritian Creole, a

Creole that is evolving in a new contact situation with a language that

did not contribute to its constitution (Bhojpuri), sheds new light on an

often neglected topic in Creole studies: the indeterminacy related to dating

280 Sibylle Kriegel

the copy of elements into the Creoles. This problem is even more pro-

nounced when we are dealing with elements from the base language.

References

Baissac, C. 1880. Etude sur le patois creole mauricien.Baker, P. 2007. Elements of a sociolinguistic history of Mauritius and its Creole

(to 1968). In The Making of Mauritian Creole. Analyses diachroniques a partirdes textes anciens, P. Baker and G. Fon Sing (eds), 133–156. London: West-minster Creolistics series, vol. 9, Battlebridge Publications.

Baker, P. 1996. On the development of certain prepositional forms in Mauritianand other French Creoles. In Materiaux pour l’etude des classes grammaticalesdans les langues creoles, D. Veronique (ed.), 41–59. Aix-en-Provence: PUP.

Baker, P. 1993. Assessing the African Contribution to French-Based Creoles. InAfricanisms in Afro-American Language Varieties, S. Mufwene (ed.), 123–155.New York: The University of Georgia Press.

Baker, P. 1982. The contribution of non-Francophone immigrants to the lexiconof Mauritian Creole. PhD dissertation, School of Oriental and African Studies,University of London.

Baker, P. and Corne, C. 1987. Histoire sociale et creolisation a La Reunion et aMaurice. Revue quebecoise de linguistique theorique et appliquee 6.2: 71–87.

Baker, P. and Corne, C. 1982. Isle de France Creole: A‰nities and Origins. AnnArbor: Karoma.

Baker, P. and Fon Sing, G. (eds). 2007. The Making of Mauritian Creole. Analysesdiachroniques a partir des textes anciens. London: Westminster Creolistics series,vol. 9, Battlebridge Publications.

Baker, P. and Muhlhausler, P. 2007. Creole Linguistics from its Beginnings,through Schuchardt to the Present Day. In Creolization. History, Ethnography,Theory, C. Stewart (ed.), 84–107. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Baker, P. and Ramnah, A. 1988. Recognizing Mauritian Bhojpuri. In LanguageTransplanted. The Development of Overseas Hindi, R. K. Barz and J. Siegel(eds), 45–65. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.

Belisle, L. A. 1989. Dictionnaire nord-americain de la langue francaise, Laval,Quebec: Beauchemin.

Bollee, A. 2007a. Beitrage zur Kreolistik. Hamburg: Kreolische Bibliothek Band21, Helmut Buske Verlag.

Bollee, A. 2007b. Les textes religieux de Philippe Caulier C. M. et l’histoire descreoles de l’ocean Indien. In P. Brasseur and D. Veronique (eds), Mondescreoles et francophones. Melanges o¤erts a Robert Chaudenson, 61–72. Paris:L’Harmattan.

Bollee, A. 2004. Le developpement du demonstratif dans les creoles de l’oceanIndien. Creolica. http://www.creolica.net/bollee2.pdf.

Bollee, A. 1982. Die Rolle der Konvergenz bei der Kreolisierung. In Die Leistungder Strataforschung und der Kreolistik. Typologische Aspekte der Sprachkon-


takte. Akten des 5. Symposions uber Sprachkontakt in Europa, Mannheim 1982,P. S. Ureland (ed.), 391–405. Tubingen: Niemeyer.

Bollee, A. 1977. Le creole francais des Seychelles. Esquisse d’une grammaire –textes – vocabulaire. Tubingen: Niemeyer.

Bruyn, A. 2003. Grammaticalisation, reanalyse et influence substratique: quelquescas du sranan. In Grammaticalisation et reanalyse: Approches de la variationcreole et francaise, S. Kriegel (ed.), 25–48. Paris: CNRS Editions, Langage.

Chamoreau, C. 2007. Grammatical borrowing in Purepecha. In GrammaticalBorrowing in Cross-linguistic Perspective, Y. Matras and J. Sakel (eds), 465–480. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Chaudenson, R. 2003. La creolisation: theorie, applications, implications. Paris:Langues et Developpement, L’Harmattan.

Chaudenson, R. 1981. Textes creoles anciens (La Reunion et Ile Maurice). Hamburg:Buske, Kreolische Reihe.

Chaudenson, R. 1974. Le lexique du parler creole de la Reunion, 2 volumes. Paris:Champion.

De St. Jorre, D. and Lionnet, G. 1999. Diksyonner kreol – franse. Dictionnairecreole seychellois – francais. Bamberg/Mahe: Imprimerie Difo-Druck.

Ebert, K. H. 1991. Vom Verbum dicendi zur Konjunktion – Ein Kapitel derGrammatikentwicklung. In Von Europa bis Ozeanien – von der Antonymie zumRelativsatz, W. Bisang and P. Rinderknecht (eds), 77–95. Zurich: University ofZurich.

Furlong, R. and Ramharai, V. (eds). 2006. Panorama de la litterature mauricienne.La production creolophone. Volume 1: des origines a l’independance. Mauritius:TIMAM.

Gilman, C. 1993. A Bantu model for the seychellois ‘pour-dire’ complementizer.In Atlantic meets Pacific, F. Byrne and J. Holm (eds), 49–55. Amsterdam:John Benjamins.

Guldemann, T. 2002. When ‘say’ is not say. The functional versatility of the Bantuquotative marker ti with special reference to Shona. In Reported Discourse. AMeeting Ground for Di¤erent Linguistic Domains, T. Guldemann and M. vonRoncador (eds), 253–288. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Haspelmath, M., Dryer, M. S., Gil, D., and Comrie, B. (eds). 2005. The WorldAtlas of Language Structures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Heine, B. and Kuteva, T. 2005. Language Contact and Grammatical Change.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Heine, B. and Kuteva, T. 2002. World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Jackendo¤, R. 1983. Semantics and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Johanson, L. 2002. Contact-induced change in a code-copying framework. In Lan-

guage Change. The Interplay of Internal, External and Extra-Linguistic Factors,M. C. Jones and E. Esch (eds), 285–313. Berlin/New York: Mouton deGruyter.

Kriegel, S. 2008. Creoles entre lexique et syntaxe: contact et changement. Docu-ment de synthese pour l’obtention de l’Habilitation a diriger des Recherches,Aix-en-Provence.

282 Sibylle Kriegel

Kriegel, S. 2004. Juste pour dire que pourdir existe toujours. Creolica, 16 December2004, http://www.creolica.net.

Kriegel, S. (ed.). 2003. Grammaticalisation et reanalyse: Approches de la variationcreole et francaise. Paris: CNRS Editions, Langage.

Kriegel, S. 2003. Introduction: Vers une interpretation multicausale du change-ment linguistique. In Grammaticalisation et reanalyse: Approches de la variationcreole et francaise, S. Kriegel (ed.), 7–21. Paris: CNRS Editions, Langage.

Kriegel, S. 1996. Diathesen im Mauritius – und Seychellenkreol. Tubingen: GunterNarr, ScriptOralia.

Kriegel, S., Ludwig, R., and Henri, F. 2009. Les rapports entre creole et bhojpouria Maurice: contact de langues et actes identitaires. In Multiple Identities inAction. Mauritius and Some Antillean Parallelisms, V. Hookoomsing, R.Ludwig and B. Schnepel (eds), 203–252. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Kriegel, S., Ludwig, R., and Henri, F. 2008. Encoding PATH in Mauritian Creoleand Bhojpuri: problems concerning language contact. In Roots of Creole Struc-tures. Weighing the Contribution of Substrates and Superstrates, S. Michaelis(ed.), 169–196. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Lehmann, C. 1992. Yukatekische lokale Relatoren in typologischer Perspektive.Zeitschrift fur Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung 45:626–41.

Ludwig, R., Montbrand, D., Poullet, H., and Telchid, S. (1990/ 2002). Diction-naire creole, 2, revised edition. Paris: SERVEDIT–Maisonneuve and Larose–Editions Jasor.

Ludwig, R., Telchid, S., and Bruneau-Ludwig, F. (in collaboration with Pfander,S. and de Robillard, D.) (eds). 2001. Corpus creole. Textes oraux dominicais,guadeloupeens, guyanais, haıtiens, mauriciens et seychellois. Hamburg: Buske,Kreolische Bibliothek.

Matras, Y. and Sakel, J. (eds). 2007. Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-LinguisticPerspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Meillet, A. [1921] (1982). Linguistique historique et linguistique generale. Geneva/Paris: Slatkine/Champion.

Mesthrie, R. 1991. Language in Indenture. A Sociolinguistic History of Bhojpuri-Hindi in South Africa. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

Michaelis, S. (ed.). 2008. Roots of Creole Structures. Weighing the Contribution ofSubstrates and Superstrates. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Michaelis, S. 2008. Valency patterns in Seychelles Creole: Where do they comefrom? In Roots of Creole Structures. Weighing the Contribution of Substratesand Superstrates. S. Michaelis (ed.), 225–251. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Mufwene, S. S. 2008. Language Evolution. Contact, Competition and Change.London/New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.

Neerputh, N. C. 1986. Le systeme verbal du Bhojpuri de L’Ile Maurice. Paris:L’Harmattan.

Nwulia, M. D. E. 1981. The History of Slavery in Mauritius and the Seychelles,1810–1875. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Parkvall, M. 2000. Out of Africa. African influences in Atlantic Creoles. London:Battlebridge Publications.


Sakel, J. 2007. Types of loan: matter and pattern. In Grammatical Borrowing inCross-Linguistic Perspective, Y. Matras and J. Sakel (eds), 15–29. Berlin: Moutonde Gruyter.

Shukla, S. 1981. Bhojpuri Grammar. Washington, DC: Georgetown UniversityPress.

Stein, P. 2007. Le creole Seychellois en 1882: les textes recoltes par Hugo Schuchardt.In Mondes creoles et francophones. Melanges o¤erts a Robert Chaudenson, P.Brasseur and D. Veronique (eds), 129–140. Paris: L’Harmattan.

Stolz, C. and Stolz, T. 1996. Funktionswortentlehnung in Mesoamerika: spanisch-amerindianischer Sprachkontakt (Hispanoindiana II). Sprachtypologie undUniversalien-forschung (STUF) 49.1: 86–123.

Talmy, L. 1985. Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in lexical forms. InGrammatical Categories and the Lexicon, Volume 3, T. Shopen (ed.), 57–149.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thomason, S. G. 2001. Language Contact. An Introduction. Edinburgh: EdinburghUniversity Press.

Thomason, S. G. and Kaufman, T. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization, andGenetic Linguistics. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Winford, D. 2003. An Introduction to Contact Linguistics. Oxford: BlackwellPublishing.

Corpora6

Baissac, C. 1880. Etude sur le patois creole mauricien. Nancy: Imp. Berger-Levrault.Bord la Mer. 1980. Port Louis: Port Louis Harbor and Dock Worker Union.Bollee, A. and Rosalie, M. 1994. Parol ek memwar. Recits de vie des Seychelles.

Hamburg: Buske.Corpus Estrie: Martel, P. and Beauchemin, N. Echantillon de textes libres,

Sherbrooke: Recherches sociolinguistiques dans la region de Sherbrooke.Kriegel, S. 1996. Diathesen im Mauritius und im Seychellenkreol. Tubingen:

Gunter Narr Verlag, ScriptOralia.Kriegel, S., Ludwig, R., and Henri, F. 2005. Six hours recorded in Mauritius.Kriegel, S. and Neumann-Holzschuh, I. 2007. Siranndann! Zanbaget! Contes

creoles des Seychelles. Creolica, 52 p., http://www.creolica.net/.Virahsawmy, D. http://pages.intnet.mu/develog/.Young, R. 1983. Fables de La Fontaine traduites en creole seychellois. Hamburg:

Buske, Kreolische Bibliothek.

6. Some of the corpora are also cited in the references, where we refer to theo-retical information and to examples.

284 Sibylle Kriegel

Grammaticalization of modal auxiliary verbs in PimaBajo: an internal or a contact-induced change?1

Zarina Estrada-Fernandez

1. Introduction

Second position clitics are traditionally taken to be auxiliaries responsible

for encoding information related to verbs, such as tense-aspect-mood, or

information related to the topic (subject) of a sentence, that is, person

and number or agreement (Steele 1999). The second position clitics have

been widely discussed in the linguistic literature as the Wackernagel’s posi-

tion, since such clitics usually appear after the first word or constituent in

a sentence. Moreover, for some languages, such as Serbo-Croatian, second

position clitics are considered to be verbs. The linguistic discussions rela-

tive to this kind of element deal mostly with the morphological aspects,

although syntacticians also consider them; among them, Anderson (2005: 9)

proposes that many auxiliary verb constructions have their origins in com-

plex predicate constructions.

Takic and Tepiman Uto-Aztecan languages from the southwest US and

northwest Mexico, including Cupeno (Hill 2005), Luiseno (Steele 1981),

and O’odham (Saxton 1982), are recognized as having second position

clitics, most of them functioning as auxiliary verbs.2 A closer compara-

tive approach to the study of second position clitics in Tepiman languages

(Estrada 2005, 2007) shows that for some languages of this Uto-Aztecan

branch (such as O’odham) second position clitics are obligatory, while in

1. I gratefully acknowledge the valuable comments of Søren Wichmann, MarianneMithun, Daniel Hintz, and Frank Seifart on various versions of this manuscript.Of course, the responsibility for any errors is entirely mine. Financial supportfor the research reported here was provided by Conacyt.

2. According to Steele (1999: 49), ‘‘auxiliary is a term that names elements thatbear resemblance to verbs in both their morphology and position.’’ Anderson(2005: 4) considers an auxiliary verb ‘‘to be an item on the lexical verb-functionala‰x continuum, which tends to be at least somewhat semantically bleached, andgrammaticalized to express one or more of a range of salient verbal categories,most typically aspectual and modal categories.’’ See Heine (1993) for a similardefinition.

others (Northern and Southern Tepehuan as well as Nevome, an extinct

variety of Pima Bajo) they are optional. The scenario for Pima Bajo is quite

distinct: on the one hand, the second position clitics in the language are

restricted to mood, that is, the imperative markers, ¼in ‘sg.imperative’and ¼var ‘pl.imperative,’ or to person and number pronouns in depen-

dent clauses only, but on the other hand, the language has modal auxiliary

verbs. In this respect Pima Bajo is quite di¤erent from other languages of

the Tepiman branch, although, as I will show, some evidence of auxiliary

verbs is sporadically observed in other modern varieties of Uto-Aztecan

languages – Yaqui, Tarahumara, and Nahuatl.

This article addresses the topic of modal auxiliary verbs in Pima Bajo

as well as the possible trajectories of change that have given rise to the

appearance of these verbs in the grammar of this language. The analysis

presented here suggests two hypotheses: that internal reconstruction is

central to the analysis of the evolution of a particular element or category

within a language, and that language contact must be considered as a

possible influence which might contribute to making a particular change

viable. A necessary background for the analysis of modal auxiliary verbs

in Pima Bajo is the description of inter-clausal relations, in particular of

verbal complements, since it is in this domain that auxiliary verbs appear

in this language.3

The study of verbal complements among the Uto-Aztecan languages of

northwestern Mexico helps us to understand two possible directions in

the evolution of auxiliary verbs. One occurs in languages with a strong

tendency to be polysynthetic, as I will argue is the case for Yaqui, and

another occurs in languages that show a strong tendency to be analytical,

which seems to be the case in Pima Bajo. The study of verbal comple-

ments, as I will demonstrate, is relevant to our understanding of the devel-

opment of modal auxiliary verbs as the result of a typological change in

languages such as Pima Bajo, but in this case the typological change may

have been influenced by language contact. The phenomenon is not a direct

case of language change caused by contact, but it may be an instance of

the indirect typological change described by Heine and Kuteva (2008:

218) as ‘‘language-contact phenomena working in conspiracy with gram-

maticalization.’’ Similar cases are observed when languages with particu-

lar kinds of morphosyntactic properties are in contact with languages

3. According to Givon (2001), modal auxiliary verbs must be considered partof a semantic continuum which also includes manipulative, cognitive, andutterance verbs.

286 Zarina Estrada-Fernandez

with distinct morphosyntactic profiles. The phenomenon is complex, since

it involves not only the emergence of auxiliary verbs but also the unstable

occurrence of what has been described as the second position clitic or

auxiliaries in some Uto-Aztecan languages from the Takic and Tepiman

branches (cf. Steele 1981; Hill 2005).

For the purposes of the present article, I adopt Anderson’s (2005)

typology of Auxiliary Complex Constructions (ACC) and his suggestion

that some Uto-Aztecan languages are doubly inflected – aux-headed and

lex-headed – while others are lex-headed only.4 Based on Anderson’s

typology, I will show that the information conveyed by some verbal com-

plement constructions, and in particular the morphological information

related to the predicate (tense-aspect-mood and person-number), has

followed two distinct directions or pathways of grammaticalization.5 In

certain Uto-Aztecan languages, including Cupeno (Hill 2005), Yaqui

(Estrada and Buitimea 2009; Guerrero 2004), and Pima Bajo, both of those

pathways – the aux-headed and the lex-headed – are present, whereas the

lex-headed pattern is the only one available for some other Uto-Aztecan

languages, such as Ute (Givon 1990). In the lex-headed pattern all the

tense-aspect-mood information is encoded within the boundaries of the

verb (su‰xed to it), while in the aux-headed pattern the inflectional

morphology is only encoded in the auxiliary verb. In languages where

both types of auxiliary complex constructions have developed, the aux-headed and the lex-headed, the influence of language contact with some

Yuman languages in California and Arizona should be considered; later,

contact with Spanish may have led to the development of bare modal

auxiliary verbs such as those in Pima Bajo (see below).

This article is organized as follows: Section 2 provides a description of

verbal complements in Pima Bajo against the backdrop of other Uto-

Aztecan languages. In Section 3 the analysis of verbal complements in

4. Anderson (2005: 23¤ ) defines five distinct types of auxiliary constructionsor ‘‘macro-patterns’’: (i) the so called ‘aux-headed’ constructions, where onlythe auxiliary verb contains inflectional morphology; (ii) the ‘doubled’ auxiliaryconstruction, where both the lexical verb and the auxiliary verb contain it, (iii)the ‘lex-headed’ auxiliary construction, where only the lexical verb is inflected;(iv) the ‘split’ auxiliary construction, where the information conveyed by theauxiliary and the lexical verb is divided among the lexical head and theauxiliary; and (v) the ‘split/doubled’ construction, which combines patterns(iii) and (iv).

5. Anderson (2005: 111) considers Tubatulabal and Serrano to follow the aux-headed pattern.

Grammaticalization of modal auxiliary verbs in Pima Bajo 287

Nevome, an extinct variant of Pima Bajo, is addressed. Section 4 discusses

the grammaticalization pathways for the modal auxiliary verbs in Pima

Bajo and section 5 introduces a contact-induced change hypothesis.

2. Verbal complements in Pima Bajo and Uto-Aztecan

Uto-Aztecan languages – in particular, Northern Uto-Aztecan languages

like Ute, Cupeno, and Kawaiisu – have been characterized as languages in

which most if not all of the subordinate clauses are nominalized (Givon

1990, 2006; Hill 2005; Zigmond et al. 1990). Observe in (1) an example of

a verbal complement from Ute where the nominalization is accomplished

by means of two nominal su‰xes, -na- and -’ay, and a dependent genitive

subject, ’aapa-ci ‘boy-gen.’ Both the control verb and the nominalized

verb are inflected with the aspectual anterior su‰x -qa or -kaa, which

could be an argument for a not fully nominalized verb.

(1) Ute (Givon 1990: 288)6

mama-ci ’u pucucugwa-qa

woman-nom that/sbj know-ant

’aapa-ci ’uwa-y picu-kaa-na-’ayboy-gen that/gen arrive-ant-nmlz-obj

‘The woman knew (anterior) that the boy had arrived.’

Examples from Cupeno in (2a–b) (Jane H. Hill personal communication),

however, show a two-verb construction: a finite inflected control verb tul

‘to finish’ followed by half-nominalized verbal complements, where both

of them, qine ‘to plough’ in (2a) and wal ‘to dig’ in (2b), bear person,

number, and case inflections, and at the same time a nominalizer su‰x

-’a in (2a) and -a in (2b). The auxiliary verb root -tul- ‘to finish’ in both

(2a–b) is fully inflected.

(2) a. pe-tul-qali pe-qini-’a-y, me¼m¼pe

3sg-finish-ds.sg 3sg-plough-nmlz-obj, and¼3pl¼ irr

maan-pem-ngiy-pi

leave-3pl-go.away-irr.sub

‘When he has finished plowing, they will let him go.’

(that is, no longer employ him)

6. For Ute, Cupeno, Kawaiisu, Tumbisa, Yaqui, O’odham (Papago), Tarahumara,Nahuatl, Nevome, and Huichol, I follow the glosses and translations providedby the authors.


b. tul-qa¼ne wal-ne-n-a-y temal

finish-prs¼1sg.erg dig-1sg-in-nmlz-obj dirt

‘I finished digging.’7

The example in (3) from Kawaiisu (Zigmond et al. 1990), illustrates an

instance where the main predicate is nominalized, with the control verb

mee ‘to say,’ but the verb �uskwee ‘to go’ in the complement clause is

not. The overall construction corresponds to a direct quotation.

(3) n�� mee-g�-ka-d�¼m� �ukkwee-n¼b�n�I say-ben-r-nmlz-¼you go-mom-ex

‘I said to you, Go!’

Nominalizations like those illustrated in (1–3) have been observed in Yaqui,

a southern Uto-Aztecan language where all verbal complements, except

for the auxiliary verb aa ‘to be able,’ as I will show later, are expressed

by either morphologically complex verb constructions or by nominalized

clauses. Nominalized clauses in Yaqui are characterized by having at least

one nominal su‰x attached to the complement verb: the plural -m or the

case su‰x -ta (both in 4a), a dependent subject encoded as an accusative

(or genitive) pronoun, enchi ‘2sg.acc’ in (4a–b), and one of the sub-

ordinator su‰xes -’u or -m(e) respectively in (4b) and (4c).

(4) a. Yaqui (Guerrero 2004)

inepo Maria-ta enchi kuna-m-ta bicha-k

1sg.nom Maria-acc 2sg.acc marry-nmlz-acc see-pfv

‘I saw that Maria married you.’

b. Yaqui (Guerrero 2004)

Peo kaba’i-m enchi jinu-ka-’u suale-n

Peter.nom horse-pl 2sg.acc buy-pfv-comp believe-past

‘Peter believed that you bought the horses.’

c. itepo wa’ame lu’ute-m-me bicha-k

3sg.nom dem.acc finish-nmlz-nmlz see-pfv

‘We saw that they have finished.’

7. The abbreviation in is provided for a thematic su‰x, which according to Hill(2005) appears on most transitive verbs.


The examples in (5), by contrast, show morphologically complex verbs in

Yaqui with verbal su‰xes, for example -tua causative, -pea desiderative,-i’a prospective.8

(5) a. aapo kutam a’abo¼nee tohi-tua-k3sg.nom wood.pl loc¼1sg.dat bring-caus-pfv

‘He made me bring wood.’

b. inepo kot-pea1sg.nom sleep-des

‘I want to sleep.’

c. im¼ne enchi tawa-ı’ahere¼1sg.nom 2sg.acc remain-prosp

‘I want you to continue here.’

Nominalizations such as those illustrated in (1–4) are rarely observed in

Pima Bajo, where verbs requiring a verbal complement are encoded with

three distinct types of constructions: (i) a morphologically complex verb,

as in (6), (ii) an analytical construction, as in (7), or (iii) an uninflected

modal auxiliary, as in (8–10).9

(6) Hoan in-daad si’ a’as-tarJohn 1sg.nsbj-mother int laugh.pfv-caus

‘John made my mother laugh.’

In analytical constructions, the verbal complement is treated as an adjunct

or peripheral argument. This is illustrated for a verb of perception in (7a),

a mental predicate in (7b), and a causative verb in (7c). In all the exam-

ples in (7) the verbal complement is introduced by the subordinator ko

followed by a person and number subject clitic: ¼(a)p ‘2sg.sbj’ in (7a),

¼at ‘1pl.sbj’ in (7b), or zero for the third singular person in (7c).

8. Unless otherwise noted, the data from Yaqui come from my own field work orfrom Estrada and Buitimea (2009).

9. As an exception, Pima Bajo also has a nominalized construction that is re-stricted to the verb � lid ‘to think, to want, to like.’ The construction is some-how frozen or fossilized, since it is only associated to one single lexical item:

aan oob no’ok in-� lid1sg.sbj Pima speak.pfv 1sg.nsbj-want.non.fin

‘I want to speak Pima’ / ‘My wanting is to speak Pima.’


(7) a. aan im vagmad ko¼p tud-an

1sg.sbj neg like.prs sub¼2sg.sbj dance-irr

‘I don’t like you to dance.’

b. Peier mat k¼at kav mua

Peter know.pfv sub¼3pl.sbj horse kill-pfv

‘Peter knew that we killed the horse.’

c. Peier tiah ko n� ’irPeter make.pfv sub.3sg.sbj sing.pfv

‘Peter makes him sing.’

Verbal complements in (8–10) follow uninflected modal auxiliary verbs:

apod ‘can,’ vutag ‘begin,’ tum ‘try.’ Following Anderson (2005), I consider

auxiliary verbs such as apod ‘can,’ vutag ‘begin,’ tum ‘try,’ to be elements

that contribute some grammatical or functional content to the construc-

tion, and the lexical verbs, as tuda ‘dance,’ mua’a ‘kill,’ or n� ’id ‘see,’ to

be those that contribute the lexical content. Such auxiliary verbs in Pima

Bajo, for example in (8–10), correspond to the class known as modal, equi,

or subject control verbs. In Pima Bajo such verbs have di¤erent degrees of

grammaticalization: some, as in (8), are now invariable uninflected modal

verbs (that is, they bear no tam morphology and do not have their own set

of arguments).

(8) a. aan apod da’ad-a

1sg.sbj can fly-fut

‘I can fly.’

b. Huan vutag t�kpan-iaJohn begin work-prob

‘John begins to work.’

c. li oob tum koi am kav-tam

dim person try sleep.pfv loc horse-loc

‘The boy tried to sleep on the horse.’

Constructions with another type of modal auxiliary verb are provided in

(9). Verbs such as sontag ‘to start,’ vuus ‘to finish,’ have been grammatical-

ized from adverbials or adjectives, but coexist in the grammar as both.

The diachronic origin of verbs in (9) is as follows: sontag ‘to start’ (on a

daily basis) < adv. sontag ‘early,’ in (9a); vuus ‘to finish’ < adv. v��s ‘all,’in (9b), and vutag ‘begin to’ (for the first time), ‘start to’ < v�tag ‘new,’

in (9c).


(9) a. k�k� l sontag t�kpan-a serrus-tam

rdp.man start.st work-fut sawmill-loc

‘The men are starting to work at the sawmill.’

b. aan a¼vuus n� i-va101sg.sbj unsp.obj¼finish sing.compl

‘I just finished singing it.’

c. Mari iskueel-tam vutag dah

Maria school-loc begin.st be.pfv

‘Maria begins to be at school.’

A third type of auxiliary verb is maat ‘to know’; this verb occurs in the

language as both a modal auxiliary verb, in (10), and an independent

main verb, in (11).

(10) Huaan maat n� ’iJohn know sing.prs

‘John knows how to sing.’

(11) Marii in¼maat te’op-tam

Maria 1sg.nsbj¼know.pfv church-loc

‘Maria knew me at the church.’

Modal auxiliary verbs in Pima Bajo, like those illustrated in (8) to (10),

have not yet received any attention in the linguistic literature about Uto-

Aztecan languages. This class of verbs are considered here to be modal

auxiliaries since they exhibit four characteristic properties: they constitute

a closed class of verbs, that is, only a few of them have been attested; they

express a modal meaning, since they convey some information concerning

the mood of the main verb; they are subject-control verbs (equi or raising

verbs); and they correspond to a class of verbs that, according to Heine

(1993: 9) as well as Givon (1984), has been characterized as midway

10. In this construction, the clitic pronoun a¼ attaches to the left of the modalauxiliary verb, but is an argument of the lexical verb n�ia ‘sing.’ The cliticcannot intervene in the verbal sequence vuus n� iva.


between auxiliary and main verbs.11 Heine (1993: 17) considers modal

auxiliary verbs to be polysemous by nature, since usually they can func-

tion as both main and auxiliary verbs.12

Documentation of this class of verbs in southern Uto-Aztecan languages

is scarce. In Yaqui, as mentioned earlier, only one modal auxiliary verb,

aa ‘to be able,’ has been attested (Estrada et al. 2004; Guerrero 2004;

Dedrick and Casad 1999).

(12) jamuchim tajo’o-ta aa baksia

women.nom cloth-acc be able wash.prs

‘Women can (know how to) wash the clothes.’

In other southern Uto-Aztecan languages modal auxiliary verbs are rarely

described or even mentioned. An example from Tarahumara, in (13), is

provided by Caballero (2006: 61–62), where the verb i¢ire ‘make,’ can

have a modal interpretation, ‘being able to,’ and is attested as an un-

inflected verb.

(13) a. Tarahumara (Caballero, 2000: 61–62):

Juane i¢ire me’a-re rowi

Juan make kill-pfv rabbit

‘John was able to kill the rabbit.’

In a similar way, examples from Nahuatl in (14) containing the verb

tamik are provided by Peralta (2005), who claims that this class of verbs

has evolved in the language as a result of language contact with Mixe-

Zoquean languages. Observe that in this language, the lexical verbs goci

‘to sleep’ and pa:k ‘to wash’ are, following Anderson (2005), lex-headedinflected verb forms, since they have person and number prefixes attached

to them.

(14) a. Nahuatl (Peralta 2005)

tamik ni-goci-k

v.aux 1sbj-sleep-pret

‘I just slept.’

11. For a full discussion of the list of properties of auxiliary verbs, see Heine(1993: 22–23).

12. Marchese (1986: 96) points this out for Kru languages: ‘‘when a verb takes onauxiliary characteristics, the verb from which it is derived does not cease toexist.’’


b. tamik ni-k-pa:k mo-goton

v.aux 1sbj-3obj-wash.pret 2poss-shirt

‘I just washed your shirt.’

Examples from Pima Bajo (8–10), Yaqui (12), Tarahumara (13), and

Nahuatl (14) contrast with the one provided in (15) from Huichol (Gomez

1999), a southern Uto-Aztecan language of the Cora-Chol branch. In this

construction, the verb yua ‘to begin’ is inflected for mood, as in Ute exam-

ple (1), but not for person and number, as in Cupeno example (2).

(15) Huichol (Gomez 1999: 41)

muwa niu ta m-e-ta-yua he-i-kwa-ne-t�loc quot part as-inv-am-begin inv-3sg.obj-eat-pgr-simss

he-i’-in�-ne-t�inv-3sg.obj-cut-pgr-simss

‘It is said that (he) began to eat them (the fruits) cutting (them)

from the tree.’

For other northern Uto-Aztecan, as for example Timbisha (McLaughlin

2006) and Kawaiisu (Zigmond et al. 1990), there is almost no documenta-

tion of auxiliary verbs, since modality is provided in those languages by

su‰xes on the main verb. Examples of morphologically complex verbs

from Timbisha (Shoshoni) and Kawaiisu are given in (16) and (17) respec-

tively; the examples show the modal verb su‰xed to the main verb.

(16) a. Timbisha (McLaughlin 2006: 42)

sut�n t�kka-h/tt�ki3sg.dem.nom eat-start

‘He started to eat.’

b. Timbisha (McLaughlin 2006: 43)

sut�n nukkwi-sua3sg.dem.nom run-want

‘He wants to run.’

(17) a. Kawaiisu (Zigmond et al. 1991: 97)

ka-ga�a-na¼ ina � ��virdp-eat-start¼his13 now

‘He is starting to eat now.’

13. Zigmond et al. (1991) gloss the su‰x -na- which translates as ‘start’ as cmp,that is, as a complementizer.


b. Kawaiisu (Zigmond et al. 1991: 97)

ta� nipizi ka�a-s�bi-ga-di wanipi-a

man eat-want14-exht-nmlz mush-acc

‘The man wants to eat the pinon mush.’

(16) and (17) illustrate morphologically complex verbs such as those

provided earlier for Yaqui in (5) and for Pima Bajo in (6). Aspectual or

modal verbs illustrated so far for Yaqui, Pima Bajo, Timbisha (Shoshoni),

and Kawaiisu constitute a morphologically complex class of verbs. These

elements di¤er from the auxiliary verbs in Pima Bajo provided in (8–10)

and (12–14); the latter occur in analytical constructions and correspond

to auxiliary verbs.

In this section I have shown that Uto-Aztecan languages have distinct

possibilities for encoding verbal complements: (i) nominalized construc-

tions for Ute, Cupeno, and Kawaiisu, examples (1–3), and Yaqui (4); (ii)

morphologically complex predicates in Yaqui, example (5), Pima Bajo (6),

Timbisha (16), and Kawaiisu (17); (iii) analytical periphrastic constructions,

that is, modal auxiliary verbs, for Pima Bajo, examples (8–10), Yaqui

(12), and Tarahumara (13). Verbal complements may also be encoded as

in (iv), the least integrated biclausal construction or adjunct-like construc-

tion, as was illustrated for Pima Bajo, example (7). No claim is made here

for Huichol and Nahuatl, since at least for the latter language the analysis

of such constructions will only be possible after considering the Mixe-

Zoquean languages.

However, a finer distinction must be provided for Cupeno (2), a lan-

guage that marks person and number agreement on both the control or

auxiliary verb and the lexical verb. Anderson (2005) uses this property

to distinguish between Uto-Aztecan languages such as Pipil, which has

double subject-marking, example (18), since the inflectional morphology

occurs in both the auxiliary and the lexical verb, and other languages like

Tubatulabal (19) and Serrano (20), which he considers to be aux-headedrather than lex-headed. Examples provided by Anderson in support of

this claim are given below.

(18) Pipil (Anderson 2005: 158 [Campbell 1985: 138])

ti-yu-t ti-yawi-t ti-pa:xa:lua-t ne:pa ka ku:htan

1pl-aux-pl 1pl-go-pl 1pl-walk-pl there in woods

‘We are going to go take a walk there in the woods.’

14. Zigmond et al. (1991) gloss the su‰x -s�bi which translates as ‘want’ as irr,that is, as irrealis.


(19) a. Tubatulabal (Uto-Aztecan, USA)

(Anderson 2005: 111 [Voegelin 1935: 128–129])

ta’naha’-gilu’ts tı ’ tı ’k

opt-1pl part eat

‘would we were eating.’

b. ih-ma’-ts tı ’k

here-hort-3 eat

‘let him eat here.’

(20) Serrano (Uto-Aztecan, USA)

(Anderson 2005: 111 [Langacker 1977: 36])

kw�’¼n kwa’a

pot-1 eat

‘could I eat it.’

The typology of verbal complements described so far can only be explained,

in accordance with Givon (2001, 2006), as di¤erent stages on the gramma-

ticalization pathways available in these languages for verbal complements.

However, two questions in connection with these data arise: Why are

bare modal auxiliary verbs, as illustrated above for Yaqui, Pima Bajo,

and Tarahumara, only attested in languages that have been in contact

with Spanish over the last three hundred years? And why are languages

from the Takic branch, in particular Serrano and Tubatulabal, the only

aux-headed languages in the group? These questions will be considered

in the next section after a brief presentation of the relevant data from

Nevome, an older variety of Pima Bajo. The data from Nevome are par-

ticularly useful for our analysis because of the historical information they

may provide.

3. Nevome as the ancestor of Pima Bajo

The study of modal auxiliary verbs in Nevome, an extinct variety of Pima

Bajo documented in the seventeenth century, is facilitated by the grammar

published by Smith (1862), as well as later studies by Shaul (1982, 1986).

The available data show that in Nevome most, if not all, verbal comple-

ments were encoded as morphologically complex predicates. This seems to

suggest that we may be faced with languages with di¤erent morphological

profiles, Nevome being more polysynthetic and Pima Bajo more analytic.


The author of the seventeenth-century grammar of Nevome describes dis-

tinct infinitival verbs in this language (pp. 25–27), among them complement-

taking verbs like muta ‘to want’ (a same subject verb) and orida ‘to want’

(a di¤erent subject verb); verbs of manipulation such as tani ‘to cause,’ or

tuhanu ‘to make’; mental verbs such as urha ‘to think,’ ‘to imagine,’ or

simatu ‘to know,’ and finally utterance verbs, such as aaga ‘to tell.’ Among

these verbs only muta ‘to want’ has a modal interpretation, even though

all of them share the same morphosyntactic properties.15

One such property is related to word order position: the examples in

(21) show that the verbs are adjacent to each other, resembling a morpho-

logically complex predicate rather than an auxiliary verb construction,

where the control verb appears on the rightmost edge of the construction

and the complement precedes the main verb.

(21) a. mumu an’ igui cauari s’ haquiard’ ori-da16

2pl.nsbj 1sg.sbj as eggs st count want-ds

‘I want you to count the eggs.’

b. am’ an’ igui s’ himi muta-da, posa pare pima

loc 1sg as st go want-ds but priest neg

‘I want to go there, but the priest does not.’ (Shaul 1986: ex. 47)

c. Pare Tonich vusa ni buy n’ himi taniPadre Tonichi dir 1sg.nsbj to 1sg.nsbj go make

‘The priest made me go to Tonichi.’

Although the constructions in (21a–c) look quite similar, in that both

verbs appear in a sequence where the control verb, ori ‘to want,’ muta ‘to

want,’ or tani ‘to make,’ is the first verb on the right and the dependent

verb is ordered to the left of it and no other element intervenes between

the two verb roots, the constructions di¤er: (21a–b) illustrate cases of bi-

15. One of the reasons that modal verbs have not yet received good documenta-tion in both old and new grammars is that modal verbs provide informationrelated to pragmatics rather than semantics (see Levinson 1983, Hopper andTraugott 1993: 7–98); since semantics takes care of stable meanings and prag-matics deals with beliefs and inferences of the participants, it is common thatthis kind of information is underrepresented in many grammars.

16. For the purposes of this article I have omitted Shaul’s segmentation marksbetween words and morphemes and follow the original presentation of thedata by Loaysa, the author of the original grammar, but I have preservedShaul’s translations and glosses.


clausal constructions and the switch-reference su‰x -da for the di¤erent

subject confirms the analysis. Conversely, (21c) illustrates a more inte-

grated or monoclausal construction, since the causative verb tani ‘to make’

is responsible for changing the case marking of the agent of the verb himi

‘to go,’ which is encoded as a non-subject, with the non-nominative pro-

noun n’ ‘1sg.nsbj.’Constructions in (22) show the same distributional properties of the

control and dependent verb; hakiarida mut’ ‘want to count,’ in (22a), and

ohana simat ‘know how to write,’ in (22b). However, in such constructions

a second position clitic, which encodes person and number as well as TAM

values, is present: in (22a), the second position clitic an’ igui ‘1sg.sbj e,’appears after the verb sequence hakiarida mut’ ‘want to count,’ and in

(22b) there appear two distinct clitics, one for each clause: cad’ am igui

‘impf loc e’17 after the verbal sequence ohana simat ‘know how to write,’

and an’ t’ igui ‘1sg.sbj pfv e’ preceding the verb hukibuo ‘to forget,’ in the

second clause.

(22) a. humatcama s’ hakiarida mut’ an’ iguipeople int count.appl want 1sg.sbj as

‘I want to count the people.’

b. ohana simat cad’ am igui, posa vusi an’ t’ igui hukibuowrite know impf loc as but all 1sg.sbj pfv as forget

‘I knew how to write, but I have forgotten everything.’

The examples in (23) show that the second position clitics can break up

the verbal sequences by appearing in the middle between the two verb

roots, that is, in the penultimate position, or second position starting

from the end of the sentence. (23a) illustrates the clitic t’ io ‘pfv.fut’appearing after the verb sicoana, and (19b), the clitic t’ ‘pfv’ in a medial

position between the verbal sequence ohana urha.

(23) a. pare oi aspi ti gaga sicoana t’ io ti tuhanu

priest soon likely our fields weed pfv fut us order

‘The priest is likely to order us to weed our fields soon.’

b. haitu an’ igui ohana t’ urha

thing 1sg.sbj as write pfv think

‘I think that I wrote something.’

17. Although Shaul considers this particle an ‘irrealis marker,’ throughout hisexamples he represents it with the abbreviation E. I consider it to be an asser-tive particle (as) with its diachronic origin in a demonstrative.


The diachronic scenario observed for Nevome shows no auxiliary verbs in

the language. All verbal complements in Nevome appear either encoded

by morphologically complex constructions, such as (21–22), which resem-

ble the one provided for Yaqui in (5), or those from Pima Bajo in (6),

Timbisha (Shoshoni) in (15), and Kawaiisu in (16), or by means of construc-

tions such as those illustrated in (23) where the second position clitic – that

is, the encoding of the future tense io in (23a), or the perfective aspect t’ in

(23b) – appears between the two verbs, the main or control and the depen-

dent verb. I will return to such cases in the following section.

4. Grammaticalization of auxiliary verbs in Pima Bajo

We now turn to the analysis of the development of modal auxiliary verbs.

Cross-linguistically, Anderson (2005), Frajzyngier (1996), Givon (2001),

Heine (1993), and Traugott and Heine (1991) have observed that the

grammaticalization of complex constructions or sentences is the result

of the di¤erent constructions which are available for the encoding of a

particular syntactic domain. Thus, the grammaticalization of complex

constructions observed in a given language is the direct result of the di¤er-

ent principles that operate in the language. In addition, Givon (2006) has

pointed out that the di¤erent types of verbal complement must be con-

sidered the result of the distinct grammaticalization pathways of such

constructions. The development of complex constructions or predicates,

however, may also be the result of language contact (Bowern 2006).

With regard to the genesis of modal auxiliary verbs in Pima Bajo, we

may consider two di¤erent modes of explanation, the internal hypothesis

and the contact hypothesis. These are discussed in turn below.

The development of auxiliary verbs, in particular when seen from the

perspective of clause linkage, clause combining, or clause union, has been

richly discussed in the linguistic literature. Thus, Haiman (1985: 212) be-

lieves that an auxiliary verb is formed as a result of an ‘‘extreme’’ concep-

tual fusion among two verbs where one of them loses some of its proper-

ties. Foley and Van Valin (1985) and Van Valin (1993) view auxiliary verb

constructions as cases of nuclear cosubordination, a type of clause union

or linkage where one of the verbs loses its argument requirements. In his

discussion of the typology of clause linkage, Lehmann (1988) calls atten-

tion to the di¤erent stages in the desentialization of subordinate clauses,

and proposes a continuum in which auxiliary verbs are ordered between

serialized verbs and verbal derivation, that is, morphologically complex


verbs. Recently, Anderson (2005: 303¤.) has also discussed the historical

development of auxiliaries in terms of a continuum of monoclausal verb

combinations, that is, serialized constructions or verb combinations. In

particular, Anderson distinguishes between the lexical head (the semantic

head or element that determines the number and semantic role of its argu-

ments) and the auxiliary verb, or element that conveys some ‘‘auxiliary’’

information, such as tense, aspect, mood, polarity, and so on.

As mentioned earlier, all of the Uto-Aztecan languages discussed in this

paper possess more than one type of construction for verbal complements.

As a starting point for my analysis, I have proposed four groups of lan-

guages (although a finer distinction might be necessary for languages like

Cupeno, as suggested in Section 2). Recall that languages can be grouped

according to four types of construction: (i) nominalized constructions such

as those observed in Ute, Cupeno, Kawaiisu, and Yaqui, examples (1–4);

(ii) morphologically complex predicates observed in Yaqui (5), Pima Bajo

(6), Timbisha (15), Kawaiisu (16), and Nevome (21–22); (iii) analytical

periphrastic constructions where the auxiliary verb occurs without any in-

flectional morphology, that is, modal auxiliary verbs, such as those shown

above for Pima Bajo (8–10), Yaqui (12), and Tarahumara (13). Finally,

(iv) the least integrated biclausal construction or adjunct-like construction,

as was illustrated for Pima Bajo (7).

The special status of languages like Cupeno is mainly due to the occur-

rence of the second position clitic or clitic complex (Hill 2005). Data from

Nevome with this type of element, (23), also enters into the discussion,

since this clitic may be creating the syntactic conditions for the gramma-

ticalization of modal auxiliary verbs.

Steele (1990) has characterized the aux or second position clitic as an

element that may contain all the relevant grammatical information for

an utterance: the person and number of the subject as well as the tense,

mood, voice, and aspect of the verb. The examples in (24–28) illustrate

the second position clitic, or clitic complex, in some modern Uto-Aztecan

languages, some from the Takic branch (Luiseno and Cupeno) and others

from the Tepiman branch (O’odham, Northern Tepehuan, and Southern

Tepehuan).

(24) Luiseno (Steele 1999: 6, 129)

a. notaax nil chaqalaqiqus

1sg.refl aux.1sg tickle.past.cont

‘I was tickling myself.’


b. chaqalaqi-wun pum hengeemali

tickle.pl-prs aux.3pl boy.obj

‘They were tickling the boy.’

In Luiseno, in (24), the clitics nil or pum encode the person and number of

the subject, and appear in a second position either preposed (24a) or post-

posed (24b) to the verb. In Cupeno, the clitics encode only mood (25a) or

person, number, and case of the subject as well as aspect and mood (25b–c).

(25) Cupeno (Hill 2005: 86, 72)

a. me aya¼ ’ep hay-pe-ya-qal

and then¼r finish-3sg-yax-pis

‘and then it was finished.’

b. Ne¼ ’ep¼ne ersaar-qa

1sg¼r¼1sg.erg pray-prs

‘I was praying.’

c. Hi-sh¼qwe¼me aya pu’u’uy?

What-npn¼noni¼3pl.erg then eat.hab

‘What can they eat then?’

The examples from the Tepiman branch, O’odham (26), Northern Tepehuan

(27), and Southern Tepehuan (27), confirm the inflectional possibilities of

the second position clitic or complex. In all these languages, the clitic

encodes the person and number of the subject as well as the tense-aspect

or mood of the verb.

(26) O’odham (Saxton, 1982: 128)

am a-t-ki ˘ �uuloc 3sg-t/a-mod rain.pfv

‘It rained there.’

(27) Northern Tepehuan (Bascom, 1982: 281)

im�-na-p�-sago-pot-2sg-quot

‘He said that you must go.’

(28) Southern Tepehuan (Willett, 1979)

ya’ n-p� ix ca-vaqui-a’

loc 1sg-t/a while-enter-fut

‘I will be inside there in a while.’


In addition, in examples from Nevome provided in (23) and in languages

from the Tepiman branch, the second position clitic expresses tense.

The second position clitic must be analyzed as a suitable position for

the encoding of subject agreement markers, that is, person and number,

as well as for the temporal values/operators of the clause – tense, aspect,

and mood. This scenario predicts that in any combination of verbs, that is,

periphrastic or serialized constructions, the languages have two alterna-

tives for encoding this information: either a bare uninflected root or stem,

as in Serrano (20) (aux-headed according to Anderson 2005: 111), or

more than one element encoding the inflectional values, as in Cupeno (2)

(double-subject marking according to Anderson 2005). A third possibility

is the one observed in Pima Bajo, where modal auxiliary verbs appear; in

fact, Anderson (2005: 130) considers Pipil a lex-headed language, that is,

a language where the modal auxiliary verb occurs without any inflection

and all the relevant information is encoded on the lexical head.

(29) Pipil (Anderson 2005: 130 [Campbell 1985: 139])

weli ni-nehnemi wehka

mod 1-walk far

‘I can walk far.’

5. Contact-induced change hypothesis

The Pipil example in (29), as well as the auxiliary verbs provided for Pima

Bajo, Tarahumara, and Yaqui, resemble periphrastic constructions with

modal auxiliary verbs from Spanish.

(30) Yo puedo caminar ‘I can walk’

Pedro quiso cantar ‘Peter wants to sing’

El hombre debio venir ayer ‘The man should have come

yesterday’

La mujer empezo limpiando

la casa

‘The woman started cleaning

the house’

Such periphrastic or multiple-verb constructions from Spanish contain a

first or aux-verb conveying tense-aspect-modality as well as subject person

and number; the second verb, the lex-verb in Anderson’s (2005) terms,

can be either an infinitive or a gerund, that is, a non-finite verb form. If

we consider that the Uto-Aztecan languages under discussion have been

in contact with Spanish for at least the last three hundred years, then it is


possible that the modal auxiliary verbs in languages like Pima Bajo are an

instance of structural language change due to the influence of Spanish.

However, how can we demonstrate that language contact is the pre-

ferred analysis for the development of auxiliary verbs in Pima Bajo? Or

else, how can we argue in favor of an external explanation rather than a

genetic internal change? Authors like Thomason and Kaufman (1998: 36)

have argued for a theory where the sociolinguistic history of the speakers

of a language and not only the structural facts or constructions must be

considered as the most important factor for determining language contact.

Moreover, Thomason and Kaufman claim (1998: 38) that minor structural

borrowing, and probably calques, should be expected in situations where

speakers are able to show minor phonological interference, i.e. adoption

or incorporation of some of the phonemes of the contact language.

The Pima Bajo’s speakers as well as the Tarahumara and other indige-

nous languages originally from Mexico, have been in contact for more

than three hundred years with speakers of Spanish. Its common day life

turns out to be reduced to family members only, but for any need the

speakers of Pima Bajo must deal with speakers of Spanish. The Pima

Bajo language has been influenced by Spanish with a huge amount of

lexical borrowings, most of all used for naming artifacts, instruments,

meals, domestic animals, etc. Structurally, and as a result of language con-

tact, the language have also developed a middle marker pronoun a-, which

is now used in almost the same contexts as the se middle marker from

Spanish (Estrada 2005: 288).

(31) a. pueert a-kuupdoor 3numntr.nsbj-close.pfv

‘The door closed’ (Sp. ‘La puerta se cerro’)

b. ko’okil v�g a-nat’iachilies red 3numntr.nsbj-become.fut

‘The chilies will become red’ (Sp. ‘Los chiles se enrojecieron’)

c. t�mis-kar ��rbadag a-haintortilla-ins middle 3numntr.nsbj-break.pfv

‘The comal [tortilla grill] broke in the middle’

(Sp. ‘El comal se quebro en medio’)

The adoption of clause connectives or conjunctions from Spanish, e.g.

porque, para que, hasta, is also common on the everyday use of the lan-

guage (Gomez Rendon 2008: for borrowing of conjunctions and preposi-

tions in Quichua, Guaranı and Otomı).


However, the borrowing of grammatical elements like the auxiliary verbs

is not common. In his study about language borrowings in the American

languages, Quechua, Guaranı and Otomı, Gomez Rendon (2008: 413)

found out that borrowing auxiliary verbs was only observed in Otomı

(where the percentage of borrowing in contrast with other grammatical

categories was of only 0.6%). The few examples of Otomı of the borrowed

auxiliaries show similar properties than those that I have pointed out for

examples from Pima Bajo illustrated in (8–9): the verbs occur in a peri-

phrastic or serializing construction, and in at least two examples, illus-

trated in (32), the verb borrowed from Spanish occur as bare forms, i.e.

without TAM morphology or person and number agreement markers:

(32) a. nesesita da. . . nuya ja’ui da¼hnunta

need FUT.3 DEM.PL person FUT.3¼get.together

pa da¼hoku ’nar¼mehe

for FUT.3¼build INDEF.S¼well

‘These people need to get together in order to build a well’

b. ya mi¼pwede nda¼mats’I j¼ar ’batha.

already IMPF.3¼be.able FUT.3¼help LOC¼DEF.S field

‘They could already help in the field’

(Gomez Rendon 2008: 407–408)

As Gomez Rendon (2008: 512) had mentioned ‘‘linguistic borrowing is

an adaptation to discursive and communicative needs imposed by the

dominant language,’’ Calque is a step ahead of such complex behavior.

In the case of Pima Bajo, no more empirical data are available by now.

The hypothesis that I have explored for the auxiliary verbs in Pima Bajo

shall remain descriptive rather than explanatory. The need of more written

and oral materials in this language may provide empirical evidences to

demonstrate the viable contact origin of the auxiliary verbs that are

emerging in this language. The documentation of those materials is still

waiting to be collected.

6. Conclusion

The linguistic facts described in this paper have two possible hypothetical

explanations. One is internal to the language, where the cross-linguistic

comparative data allow us to propose di¤erent diachronic stages in the


grammaticalization of verbal complements, while the other is contact-

induced change.

The comparison of the data from Nevome and modern Pima Bajo

might lead us to reject unidirectionality as an explanation of the gramma-

ticalization of modal auxiliary verbs. This would be based on a scenario in

which the Nevome data were taken to be the historically previous stage;

but according to the internal reconstruction method this is not necessarily

the case. As Givon (2006) says, the synchronic di¤erences observed in a

language must be analyzed as ‘‘mere syntactic consequences of the di¤er-

ent diachronic pathways.’’ The same situation may apply to the di¤erences

among languages. Nevome does not necessarily represent the oldest stage

of structural development. Within this context, modal verbs in Pima Bajo,

may be viewed as the result of structural borrowing from Spanish.

Abbreviations

1, 2, 3 First, second, third person

acc Accusative

am Actional mood

ant Anterior

as Assertive

aux Auxiliary

ben Benefactive

cap Capabilitive

caus Causative

comp Complementizer

compl Completive

cont Continuous

dat Dative

dem Demonstrative

des Desiderative

dim Diminutive

dir Directional

ds Di¤erent subject

emph Emphatic

erg Ergative case

ex Exhortative

fut Future

gen Genitive


hab Habitual

imp Imperative

impf Imperfective

in Thematic su‰x (Hill 2005)

ins Instrument

int Intensive

inv Invisible

irr Irrealis

loc Locative

mod Modal

mom Momentaneous

neg Negative

nmlz Nominalizer

nom Nominative

nsbj Non-subject

numntr Number neutral

obj Object

opt Optative

pasc Past continuous

pass Passive

pfv Perfective

pgr Progressive

pl Plural

pot Potential

prob Probability

prosp Prospective

prs Present

pst Past

quot Quotative

rdp Reduplication

refl Reflexive

sbj Subject

sg Singular

simss Simultaneity same subject

ss Same subject

st Stative

sub Subordinator

unsp.obj Unspecified object

v Verb

yax Theme class su‰x.


References

Aikhenvald, A. Y. and Dixon, R. M. W. 1998. Dependencies between grammati-

cal systems. In Language 74.1: 56–80.

Anderson, G. D. S. 2005. Auxiliary Verb Constructions. Oxford: Oxford Univer-

sity Press.

Bascom, B. 1982. Northern Tepehuan. In Studies in Uto-Aztecan Grammar 3. Uto-

Aztecan Grammatical Sketches, R.W. Langacker (ed.), 267–393. Dallas: The

Summer Institute of Linguistics/The University of Texas at Arlington.

Bisang, W. 2004. Grammaticalization without coevolution of form and meaning:

the case of tense-aspect-modality in East and mainland Southeast Asia. In

What Makes Grammaticalization? A Look from its Fringes and its Components,

W. Bisang, N. P. Himmelmann, and B. Wiemer (eds), 109–138. Berlin: Mouton

de Gruyter.

Bowern, C. The historical linguistics of complex predication. http://www.ruf.

rice.edu/~bowern/Mypapers/Intro.Cpreds.pdf

Caballero, G. 2002. Mecanismos de transitividad del Raramuri. B.A. tesis. Uni-

versity of Sonora.

Campbell, L. 1985. The Pipil Language of El Salvador. Berlin: Mouton de

Gruyter.

Dedrick, J. M. and Casad, E. H. 1999. Sonora Yaqui Language Structures. Tucson:

University of Arizona Press.

Estrada Fernandez, Z. 2005. Gramaticalizacion de los conectivos en construc-

ciones complejas en pima bajo. In Trace 47: 18–29.

Estrada Fernandez, Z. 2005. The Pronominal Form -a as a Middle Marker in

Pima Bajo. International Journal of American Linguistics. 71.3: 277–302.

Estrada Fernandez, Z. 2007. Cambio linguıstico y contacto entre lenguas: grama-

ticalizacion de verbos auxiliares en pima bajo. In Revista UniverSOS. Revista

de Lenguas Indıgenas y Universos Culturales 4: 91–114.

Estrada Fernandez, Z. and Buitimea Valenzuela, C. 2009. Yaqui de Sonora. Archivo

de lenguas indıgenas. Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico.

Estrada Fernandez, Z., Buitimea Valenzuela, C., Gurrola Camacho, A. E., Castillo

Celaya, M. E., Carlon, A. 2004. Diccionario yaqui-espanol. Obra de preserva-

cion linguıstica. Mexico: Editorial Plaza y Valdes.

Foley, W. A. and van Valin Jr., R. D. 1984. Functional Syntax and Universal

Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Frajzyngier, Z. 1996. Grammaticalization of the Complex Sentence. A Case Study

in Chadic. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Givon, T. 1981. Typology and functional domains. In Studies in Language 5.2:

163–193.

Givon, T. 1984. Syntax. A Functional-typological Introduction 1. Amsterdam: John

Benjamins.


Givon, T. 1990. Ute reflexives, complementation and clause integration. In Devel-

opment and Diversity. Linguistic Variation across Time and Space. A Festschrift

for Charles-James N. Bailey, J. A. Edmondson, C. Feagin, P. Muhlhausler

(eds), 287–296. Dallas: The Summer Institute of Linguistics/The University of

Texas at Arlington.

Givon, T. 2001. Syntax. An introduction 1. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Givon, T. 2009. Multiple routes of clause union: the diachronic of syntactic com-

plexity. In The Genesis of Syntactic Complexity, T. Givon, 61–96. Amsterdam:

John Benjamins.

Gomez Lopez, P. 1999. Huichol de San Andres Cohamiata, Jalisco. Archivo de

lenguas indıgenas de Mexico. Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico.

Gomez Rendon, J. 2008. Typological and social constraints on language contact:

Amerindian languages in contact with Spanish. Volume 2. Netherlands: Graduate

School of Linguistics.

Guerrero, L. 2004. The syntax-semantic interface in Yaqui complex sentences, a

role and reference grammar analysis. PhD Dissertation. The State University

of New York at Bu¤alo.

Haiman, J. 1985. Natural Syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Heine, B. 1993. Auxiliaries, Cognitive, Forces, and Grammaticalization. Oxford:


Heine, B. and Kuteva, T. 2002. World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. Cambridge:




Heine, B. and Kuteva, T. 2008. The explanatory value of grammaticalization. In

Linguistic Universals and Language Change, J. Good (ed.), 215–230. Oxford:


Hill, J. H. 2005. A grammar of Cupeno. University of California Publications in

Linguistics 136. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hopper, P. J. and Traugott, E. C. 1993. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Langacker, R. W. 1977. Studies in Uto-Aztecan Grammar vol 1. An Overview of

Uto-Aztecan Grammar. Dallas: The Summer Institute of Linguistics/The Uni-

versity of Texas at Arlington.

Lehmann, C. 1998. Towards a typology of clause linkage. In Clause Combining in

Grammar and Discourse, J. Haiman and S. Thompson (eds), 181–225. Amster-


Levinson, S. C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Marchese, L. 1986. Tense/Aspect and the Development of Auxiliaries in Kru Lan-

guages. Dallas: The Summer Institute of Linguistics/The University of Texas

at Arlington.

McLaughlin, J. E. 2006. Timbisha (Panamint). Munich: LINCOM-Europa.


Peralta Ramırez, V. 2005. El nawat de la costa del Golfo. Algunas semejanzas y

diferencias estructurales con el nahuatl central. Proceedings of the Conference

on Indigenous Languages of Latin America II. 27–29 October 2005. http://

www.ailla.utexas.org/site/cilla2/Peralta_CILLA2_nawat.pdf

Saxton, D. 1982. Papago. In Studies in Uto-Aztecan Grammar 3. Uto-Aztecan

Grammatical Sketches, R. W. Langacker (ed.), 93–266. Dallas: The Summer

Institute of Linguistics/The University of Texas at Arlington.

Shaul, D. L. 1982. A grammar of Nevome. Ph. D. Dissertation. University of

California, Berkeley.

Shaul, D. L. 1986. Topics in Nevome Syntax. Publications in Linguistics 109.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

Smith, B. 1862. Arte de la lengua nevome que se dice pima de Sonora, propia de

Sonora; con la doctrina Christiana y confesionario anadidos. San Agustın de

la Florida. New York: Cramoisy Press. [1970. New York: Shea’s Library of

American Linguistics. AMS Press, Inc.]

Steele, S. 1990. Agreement and Anti-agreement. A Syntax of Luiseno. Dordrecht/

Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Steele, S. 1999. Auxiliaries. In Concise Encyclopedia of Grammatical Categories.

K. Brown and J. Miller (eds), 49–56. Oxford: Elsevier.

Steele, S. 1981. An Encyclopedia of AUX: a Study in Cross-linguistic Equivalence.

Cambridge: MIT Press.

Thomason, S. G. and Kaufman T. 1991. Language Contact. Creolization and

Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California.

Traugott, E. C. and Heine, B. (eds). 1991. Grammaticalization. Amsterdam: John

Benjamins.

Van Valin, Jr., R. D. (ed.). 1993. Advances in Role and Reference Grammar. Am-

sterdam: John Benjamins.

Voegelin, C. F. 1935. Tubatulabal Grammar. Berkeley: University of California

Press.

Willett, E. 1979. Reduplication and accent in Southeastern Tepehuan. In Work

Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota, 23:

47–65.

Zigmond, M. L., Booth, C. G., and Munro, P. 1990. Kawaiisu. A Grammar and

Dictionary with Texts. University of California Publications in Linguistics 119.

Berkeley: University of California Press.


Contact, convergence, and conjunctions:a cross-linguistic study of borrowing correlationsamong certain kinds of discourse, phasal adverbial,and dependent clause markers1

Anthony P. Grant

1. Introduction

Certain discourse markers and conjunctions that head many types of depen-

dent or subordinate clauses are among the first structural or ‘‘grammatical’’

features speakers of a less dominant language are likely to borrow from the

language of a more dominant or prestigious group. This claim has been put

forward in Matras (1998 and subsequent work) and his observations have

helped inform the statements which I intend to make in this contribution.

In some cases, such as the Eskimo-Aleut language Siberian Yupik, these

kinds of borrowings (discourse markers, adverbials, and other function

words, which have been taken from Chukchi) account for more than half

the total of loans into the less prestigious language from the more presti-

gious one, with considerable consequences for the shape and flexibility of

the syntactic structure of this language at clause level and above (as shown

in de Reuse 1994).

Following the method of comparison introduced by Matras (1998), in

this article I discuss the degree to which certain kinds of discourse markers,

phasal adverbs, coordinating and especially subordinating conjunctions (the

latter as used in some major and frequently occurring kinds of dependent

clauses) have been borrowed in a wide range of languages (some 22 in

all), which themselves have had frequent recourse to the replacement of

inherited elements by means of borrowing, or in some cases the reinforce-

1. I would like to thank an anonymous referee, Alexandra Aikhenvald, LameenSouag, Graham Thurgood, and Miriam van Staden for otherwise unavailabledata, and a second anonymous referee, Alexandra Aikhenvald, Dik Bakker,Paul Heggarty, and Paz Buenaventura Naylor for suggestions which havefound their way into this article, though they are in no way responsible forany use I may have made of them.

ment of inherited modes of indicating clausal coordination and subordina-

tion by means of borrowed elements. One might call such languages ‘‘heavy

borrowers.’’

I am interested in seeing the extent to which it is possible, if at all, to

establish an implicational hierarchy of conjunction borrowing, given that

it has long been recognized that markers of dependent clauses in the form

of conjunctions are quite widely borrowed in many of the world’s lan-

guages. For example, if a conjunction with a sense X is borrowed from

another language, can we assume that a conjunction with a sense Y is

also going to be borrowed?

Examination of such works as Heine and Kuteva (2002) shows how the

meanings of discourse particles, phasal adverbs, coordinating conjunc-

tions, and even subordinating conjunctions interact with one another,

and also how the sense of these items can change over time. In the case

of borrowed elements, we can sometimes see how the senses of such items

can change between their use in the donor language and their incorpora-

tion in the recipient language.

The categories listed above are more porous than initial inspection may

suggest, as can be seen from the tracking of the meanings of loan items.

Thus asta in Cochabamba Quechua, borrowed from Spanish (and itself

taken from Arabic ¡atta) means ‘until’ as in Spanish, and also ‘even’; it is

used in Cochabamba Quechua as both a subordinating conjunction and a

phasal adverb. A form deriving from Spanish mas que, Portuguese mas

que ‘but, on the other hand,’ and found in languages as widespread as

Afrikaans and Tok Pisin, is a discourse particle in some languages (such

as Tok Pisin maski ‘it doesn’t matter’; Alexandra Aikhenvald, personal

communication) and an adversative subordinating conjunction in others

(such as Tagalog maski ‘although’). Similarly the Chamorro subordinating

conjunction sinembatgo ‘although’ derives from the Spanish adversative

discourse particle sin embargo ‘however.’ As I point out in Section 8,

Finnish ja ‘and’ is of Germanic origin; its etymon is reflected by Gothic

jah ‘indeed’ and German ja ‘yes.’ Here a discourse particle has changed

over time to a coordinating conjunction.

Contact-induced syntactic change and the development of subordinating

conjunctions from other sources (including forms themselves deriving from

other subordinating conjunctions) have long been attested in languages. It is

also the case that various kinds of function words may develop from words

belonging to other form classes in the course of the history of a language:

Posner (1966: 220–227) demonstrates this for several kinds of function

words in a number of Romance languages. Furthermore, di¤erent forms

312 Anthony P. Grant

within the same form class, such as subordinating conjunctions, can change

or expand their meanings over time. Deutscher (2000) discusses the rise of

a complementizer kıma in Akkadian which derived from a form with the

primary meaning of ‘because.’

A certain amount of work has thus already been done on this general

subject. Much of this has focused on borrowing such items into Aztecan

and Mayan languages and on other languages of Mesoamerica which have

been influenced by Spanish. Already in 1930 Franz Boas was drawing

examples of syntactic borrowing in a corpus of modern Nahuatl texts he

had gathered at Milpa Alta, near Mexico City, and was discussing the

degree to which Milpa Alta Nahuatl was borrowing these kinds of forms

and also absorbing more purely lexical and acculturational elements from

Mexican Spanish (Boas 1930). This kind of borrowing in Mesoamerican

languages is not confined to items from Spanish. Macri and Looper (2005)

point out the borrowing of Nahuatl i:wa:n ‘and then’ as a discourse particle

into the Mayan language of ancient Ch’olan inscriptions, where it is

recorded from as early as 702 CE.

More recently Brody (1987, 1993) discussed the use of discourse markers

in a number of Mayan languages where such discourse markers have been

borrowed from Spanish. The borrowed items are used to link segments

of discourse of various sizes (phrase, clause, sentence, or paragraph), and

many of them have the same illocutionary e¤ect as conjunctions have.

An important article by Matras (1998), inspired in part by the work on

bilingual discourse particles in Salmons (1990), examines the borrowing

of fillers, tags, interjections, some phasal adverbs, and some coordinating

conjunctions and certain other items, which he categorises as ‘utterance

modifiers’ because of their detachability from clauses or because they con-

strain the contextual relevance of their host utterance. These are elements

against which the borrowing of subordinating conjunctions should be

seen, and indeed Matras provides a set of purported universals of borrow-

ing of utterance modifiers, among which he includes the discourse markers

and coordinating conjunctions mentioned above. Such purported univer-

sals can therefore be analyzed and tested for their universality against a

di¤use data set of languages from around the world. Matras’s own work

here focuses on findings from varieties of Romani, Russian influence on

the German of speakers born in Russia, and on languages influenced by

Hebrew or Arabic, such as Swahili or Domari (there styled Nawari). Matras

(2000a) suggests that this borrowing of discourse particles in particular

(and the borrowing of utterance modifiers in general) occurs because of

bilingual speakers’ overwhelming need to monitor and direct their dis-

Contact, convergence, and conjunctions 313

course for the benefit of their hearers; he terms this feature Fusion. Matras

further classifies and grades these forms according to three criteria: degree

of pragmatic detachability (turn-related forms are borrowed before con-

tent-related forms), their place on the semantic scale (lexical and deittic

forms are borrowed last), and their place on the category-senstitive scale,

where forms expressing restriction, change or contrast are borrowed before

forms which express continuatiom elaboration or addition. The work which

has been carried out at various times by Boas, Brody, and Campbell has

been copiously supported and amplified by subsequent work on the struc-

tural e¤ects of Spanish on indigenous languages in Mesoamerica and

beyond by Thomas Stolz, often in conjunction with Christel Stolz (notably

Stolz and Stolz 1997, and Stolz 2002).2 Torres (2006) continues this work

and discusses consequences of the borrowing of Spanish discourse markers

into some languages of Latin America.

Turkic languages have also received much attention in regard to their

borrowing of conjunctions from other languages (mostly from Arabic and

Persian, but in languages spoken in the former Soviet Union also from

Russian). Baran (2000), discussing the borrowing of Russian discourse par-

ticles into the Uzbek of Tashkent, and works by Lars Johanson, such as

Johanson (1993; 2002), discussing the borrowing of causal and other con-

junctions into several Turkic languages from Russian, Farsi, and other

sources, are of major note here. A later work on this topic is Matras and

Sakel (2007).

My approach to the syntactic analysis of subordinating conjunctions

and their use in dependent clauses is informed by the work of Thompson,

Longacre, and Hwang (2007). That chapter (happily for us) includes inter

alia a short discussion of borrowing among dependent clauses, drawing

examples from two indigenous Mexican languages, namely the Uto-Aztecan

language Yaqui and the Otomanguean language Isthmus Zapotec. In both

cases the borrowed subordinating conjunctions discussed are taken from

Spanish, though the two languages have not borrowed the same conjunc-

tions in every case. The e¤ects of this borrowing are those we find in all

the languages surveyed in this study: borrowing conjunctions aids conver-

gence insofar as it makes details of the clausal syntax of the borrowing or

recipient language resemble the respective details of the donor language

syntax, often more than the syntax of the recipient language previously did.

2. One may see also studies of the impact of Spanish on Nahuatl by Suarez(1977), Hill and Hill (1987) and Field (2002), while Karttunen and Lockhart(1976) examine the impact of Spanish in Nahuatl in earlier centuries. Suarez(1983) looks at this issue cross-linguistically within Mesoamerica.


It is essential from the start for us to recognize that, at the level of a

construction, the act of borrowing from one language to another involves

the use of one or both of two strategies that are certainly not mutually

exclusive in their operations and often co-occur. The first of these is

‘‘transfer of pattern’’ (Grant 2002). In this strategy, structural features of

a construction in one language (the donor language) are replicated in

another by means of morphemes already existing in the language that

took them over, the recipient language. (This term was first mentioned,

though referred to as ‘‘pattern transfer’’ without a specific definition being

provided, in Heath 1984.) The other strategy is ‘‘transfer of fabric,’’ also

discussed by Grant (2002). In this operation, morphemes used to express

the structural concept under examination are taken over from the language

from which the construction is itself taken, the donor language. The two

types of transfer are not mutually incompatible.

In this article I also intend to determine the degree to which morphemic

transfer correlates with pattern transfer, and to see what light these findings

shed on an enhanced theory of the role of contact influences in actuating

and reinforcing morphosyntactic change.

2. A crosslinguistic perspective on the borrowing of conjunctions and

phasal adverbs

2.1. The languages surveyed

The languages whose dependent clause linking strategies are surveyed in

this article were chosen because they all exhibited a high degree of borrow-

ing or replacement of everyday lexicon (and often also replacement of

Swadesh list-style basic lexicon) from other languages. All of them exhibit

some borrowing of certain dependent clause markers. (English itself has

borrowed the forms of until and although and the first part of the bipartite

coordinating conjunction both . . . and . . . from Norse, and the second

morpheme of because from Latin by way of French.) In order to ensure

that a fuller sense of the degree of such borrowing could be ascertained,

and to make sure that enough information was available on the nature

and mode of expression of a wide variety of clause and discourse-linking

techniques, I only included languages in which at least 12 of the 18 dis-

course markers, adverbs and conjunctions discussed in this study were

represented in the material available to me. In this way I hoped to ensure

that the borrowed items which have been chosen were set more fully


within the wider context of the di¤erent kinds of conjunctions and other

items being surveyed.

Setting aside Present-Day Standard English, for which my source has

been the OED online, the 21 chosen languages are listed below. The major

data source has been asterisked (other data sources are used only if relevant

forms are missing from the major data source):

– Eastern Yiddish (*Jacobs 2005)

– Kalderash Romani, a diasporic language that spread from Romania in

the late nineteenth century (*Gjerdman and Ljungberg 1964; Boretzky

1992)

– Kildin Saami of the Kola Peninsula, Russia (*Kert 1968, 1971; Riessler

2007)

– Livonian of Kurzeme or ‘‘Curonia,’’ coastal Latvia, in the form of the

Kolka dialect (de Sivers 2001; Kettunen 1938; Vaari 1968; *Moseley

2002; Suvca #ne and Ernstrieite 1999), and formerly also (in the form

known as the Salis dialect) spoken in Livland (as described in *Sjogren

1861, 1861b)

– Uluagac Cappadocian Greek (*Dawkins 1916; Kesisoglou 1951)

– Standard Turkish (*Kornfilt 1997)

– Turoyo (properly Tu#royo) Eastern Neo-Aramaic of southeastern Turkey,

a variety widely used in the ‘‘Assyrian’’ diaspora (*Jastrow 1992; see also

Matras 2000b for etymologies)

– Urdu (*Schmidt 1999; Shahani n.d.)3

– Acehnese of northern Sumatra (Cowan 1981; *Daud and Durie 1998)

– Tsat (Hainan Cham) of Hainan Island, China (*Zheng 1997; personal

information from Graham Thurgood)

– Tagalog of the Philippines (*Rubino 1998)

– Tidore of Tidore Island, Halmahera, Indonesia (van Staden 1999)

– Tetum Dili of Timor Leste (*Williams-van Klinken, Hajek, and Nord-

linger 2002)

– Chamorro of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands (*Topping with

Dungca 1973)

3. Many of the forms of Farsi or Arabic origin found in Urdu are also recordedfor Hindi, which also avails itself of some forms of Sanskrit origin, such asparantu ‘but,’ which are not used in Urdu. It is salutary to note both the paucityof inherited conjunctions and the like from Sanskrit to be found in Urdu andRomani and also the lack of shared inherited forms common to KalderashRomani and Urdu.


– Ifira-Mele of Mele village and Fila Island, Vanuatu (Capell 1942; *Clark

1998, 2002)

– Siwi Berber of Siwa Oasis, Egypt (*Laoust 1931; Vycichl 2005; Souag

2010)

– KiUnguja, a southern Swahili dialect that is the basis of Standard

Swahili (Wald 2001; *Perrott, revised Russell 2002)

– Siberian Yupik (St. Lawrence Island, Alaska; de Reuse 1994; a similar

variety also containing many Chukchi loans is also spoken in Siberia

and is known as Chaplinski after Chaplino, the main village where it

is used)

– Pipil of El Salvador (Campbell 1985, 1987)

– Garifuna of Belize (Taylor 1958, 1977; Cayetano 1993)

– Bolivian Quechua, especially Cochabamba Quechua (*Lastra 1968

documents this diasporic form of Southern Peruvian Quechua, though

much of the syntax is undiscussed; see also Muysken 2001).

Notes on a few of these languages may not be unwelcome. I have selected

the variety of Greek spoken until the early 1920s at Uluagac in Cappadocia

because this variety of Cappadocian Greek, now apparently extinct, was

probably the one most heavily influenced by Turkish. I regret that a dearth

of suitable descriptive material precluded me from including a similar study

of a dialect of Arvanitika or of Arberesht (varieties of emigrant Southern

Tosk Albanian, as spoken in mainland Greece or in pockets of central and

southern Italy respectively), or one of Italiot Greek, Molise Croatian, or

of Istro-Romanian.

For its part, Siwi is probably the most heavily Arabized variety of

Berber in existence, and by virtue of being spoken hundreds of miles

from the nearest Berber varieties, located in Libya, it has developed in

general isolation from other Berber varieties in North Africa. English,

Yiddish, Kildin Saami, and KiUnguja Swahili are also among the 40 or

so languages being examined in the Loanword Typology Project hosted

by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, a

project that looks also at other varieties of Berber, Romani, and Quechua

(Tarifiyt, Hungarian Rumungro, and Imbabura Ecuadorian Quechua,

respectively) from those which are discussed here.

The di¤erent kinds of material available to me for each language vary

widely; I had access to some textual material for all of them, and to lexical

material (of widely varying degrees of comprehensiveness and copiousness)

and sentential material for most of them (though my data on Tidore,

Siberian Yupik, and Turoyo are probably the sparsest in this regard).

Information taken from dictionaries is the kind of material most readily


available to me for many of these languages, and this study is a little more

‘‘dictionary-driven’’ than some might like; the authors of other studies on

bilingual discourse markers, such as those by Matras, Boas and Weil-

bacher, Stolz, and Salmons, argue from the findings in their text corpora.

But for all of them, the information on the nature and approximate num-

ber of borrowed conjunctions is su‰cient for me to be able to develop the

present study, and the conclusions are borne out by textual material on

these languages.

Certain unwelcome external constraints upon this study need to be

pointed out and certain assumptions need to be taken on trust. To take

one example, this study relies largely on contemporary data sources. We

must avoid relying on argumenta a silentio when positing ideas about the

syntactic history of a language; simply because we do not have any evidence

in modern materials on a language for a pre-contact system of dependent

clause markers, this does not mean that the language in question never

had them. We must not assume that languages acquired subordinating

conjunctions solely through borrowing, and that prior to borrowing these

conjunctions the speakers of such languages had no means of indicating

hypotactic relations in speech, so that they strung clauses together without

connecting elements. However, we cannot always be sure of the status or

even of the presence of overt conjunctions, as opposed to other clause-

combining techniques in earlier stages of the languages being surveyed.

This is because of the paucity or absence of documentation (especially earlier

stages of documentation) of some of the languages described. Indeed, some

potentially promising contributors to this study had to be excluded because

the minimum of 12 elements I felt were needed for inclusion in this study

were not present in the accumulated literature on the language in question

available to me.

In many cases we simply do not possess information on the means of

forming some of the kinds of dependent clauses being examined here as

they might have been available to speakers of these languages, say 300

years ago, or at least in the period before the language(s) that provided

subordinating conjunctions came into contact with the language in ques-

tion. There is no textual material, for example, of Ifira-Mele that contains

dependent clauses and also dates from before the 1940s; Capell (1942),4 is

4. This article contained a text in the form of a letter from a schoolboy who wasbeing educated in Suva, Fiji, but who came from Fila, and who spoke a dia-lect which was somewhat less strongly influenced by the locally once dominantSouth Efate language than Mele is (though still strongly so).


the first textual example of any use for this language in this study. Pre-

modern textual material that may show strategies for discourse marking

that do not use borrowed items, and for which evidence from closely

related languages is not available, is also elusive for Tsat, Cochabamba

Quechua, Kildin Saami, and Tidore. Dictionary or other lexical material

(often provided with extensive and reliable etymological information) is

plentiful for most of these languages, structural material is available and

often abundant, but textual material of the kind most useful for this sort

of study is often sparse, and even exemplary sentential material which

demonstrates the use of these conjunctions in relevant dependent clauses

is not always available. Unfortunately the material available to me regard-

ing borrowed conjunctions in some of these languages was a bare listing of

conjunctions and of the etymological sources of these forms.

Examples of some of the conjunctions or of the types of dependent

clauses expressed by such conjunctions are not always available to me in

the technical literature (insofar as it exists) for some of the languages being

examined. The result of these omissions from the sources is that there are

gaps in the published linguistic record on the coverage of such clauses.

Indeed, this study has focused on the kinds of dependent clause markers

most frequent in occurrence: the most common manifestations of those

are associated with conditional, causal, temporal, purposive, and conces-

sive dependent clauses, and complement and relative clauses. Among the

temporal markers I have preferred to look for instances of borrowed

‘before’ and ‘until’ rather than those of borrowed ‘while’ and ‘after,’ for

two reasons. Firstly, ‘after’-clauses are often subsumed in ‘when’-clauses,

which if showing identical agents in main and dependent clause themselves

may be expressed or implied in some languages in non-finite dependent

clauses relating to a main clause whose verb refers to an action that occurred

subsequent to that of the dependent clause. Secondly, ‘while’-clauses express

the coterminous nature of a verb’s action, which results in their being ex-

pressed by non-finite verb-forms in many languages. WHEN is the cardinal

member of any class of temporal adverbial clause markers by its very

nature, so that data on this have been collected and used in this study.

But even then one must take what one can find. For instance, one

should not be surprised to find that it is easier when looking through this

material to find attested examples of conditional clauses formed with

equivalents of IF in the materials than examples of conditional clauses

formed with equivalents of EVEN THOUGH or with EXCEPT (FOR

THE FACT) THAT, because IF is more frequently used than these other

conjunctions (the website for Leech, Rayson and Wilson 2001 has 59


occurrences of EVEN THOUGH, 14 for EXCEPT THAT, 41 for EXCEPT

as a conjunction and 2369 occurrences for IF). It is also easier to find in-

stances of conditional IF than of the IF that in English introduces indirect

yes-no questions and alternates with WHETHER. This is an interesting

kind of dependent clause marker, one that is less frequently illustrated in

materials on many of the examined languages than others, which I have

thus sadly had to omit from the study. I have also concentrated on modes

of expression of subordination in verb clauses where the subject of the

main clause and that of the dependent clause are not the same, as many

languages (Hindi/Urdu for instance) have non-finite construction strategies

available for use when the subject or agent of main and dependent clause

is identical.

2.2. The kinds of markers under study

The result of this paucity of data is that even though some of the material

available to me (for instance the rather copious data on Chamorro, Yiddish,

Urdu, and Kalderash Romani, to say nothing of English) suggests that

these less frequently occurring dependent clause markers are more likely

to be encoded by borrowed items than the more common equivalents, I

have reluctantly decided not to include instances of equivalents of these

dependent clause markers of rarer occurrence in the cross-linguistic study.

This is because it has not always been possible to find equivalents for these

glosses in material available on other languages in the sample. As stated

above, I have only included languages in my sample if at least 12 of the

18 elements surveyed can be found in the materials available to me, with

at least one example each of the discourse markers (or ‘‘Wackernagel par-

ticles’’), the adverbial conditional and causal dependent clause markers,

complementizers, relativizers, and purpose and temporal clause markers

attested before the language is included in the sample. Sometimes not

even extensive grammars of the language can provide us with enough of

the required information. Information on certain kinds of temporal adver-

bial dependent clauses is often especially hard to gather from published

descriptions for a number of languages.

Some considerations should be brought to attention from the first, how-

ever, as they may have a bearing upon the hierarchy of borrowability of

the coordinating conjunctions in question. The first caveat is that many

languages use more than one form that can be translated as ‘and,’ since

they use one conjunctional form (not necessarily a free form) to connect

noun groups and another, di¤erent form (often reinforced with a temporal


adverb or other element in order to express the sense of ‘and then’) to con-

nect verb groups. In a number of languages, the form used to link noun

groups also has a meaning (sometimes a primary meaning) of ‘with,’ so

that this form for ‘with’ may be inherited (or innovated), with ‘and’ as

a secondary meaning. The second consideration is that both AND and

OR, but not BUT (by its very nature and meaning as an adversative which

does not need a preceding contrasting conjunction), may in many lan-

guages be used in paired forms, as a means of forming multiple conjunc-

tions, sometimes involving other grammatical elements (with senses such

as EITHER . . .OR . . . , NEITHER . . .NOR . . . , and BOTH. . .AND. . . ).

This usage has been attested in a number of languages throughout time

and space. For instance, in Latin we find et . . . et . . . (‘both . . . and . . . ,’ liter-

ally ‘and . . . and . . .’), aut . . . aut . . . , sive . . . sive . . . , seu . . . seu . . . , all three

pairs meaning ‘either . . . or . . .’ (literally: ‘or . . . or . . .’), and nec . . . nec . . .

(‘neither . . . nor . . . ,’ literally ‘and not . . . and not . . .’). Similar situations

involving the use of doubled conjunctions can be found elsewhere, for

instance in Attic Greek and in Classical Arabic. In fact, doubling of use

of these forms in such constructions may serve as a means of reinforcing

or extending the use of some conjunctions that might otherwise be open to

replacement, for instance because of their phonological brevity. If BUT is

paired with or opposed to anything it is generally the second half of a pair

of which the first is a negator. (Neither of these points was exploited much

in Matras 1998, which surveys borrowing of simplexes for AND, OR,

BUT.)

Doubling of such forms is the case, for instance, in Standard Yiddish,

which uses paired conjunctions, some of them inherited from German,

such as say . . . say . . . ‘either . . . or . . . .’ (etymologically identical with

modern Yiddish zay ‘be!’ and with modern German sei . . . sei . . . . ‘be it . . .

be it . . . ,’ and which Jacobs 2005: 16 indicates as being remarkable as the

only Yiddish form of German origin in which original initial s- is still

realized as an unvoiced sibilant in Yiddish), others of them from Hebrew

or Aramaic (hen . . . hen . . . ‘either . . . or . . . ,’ in rabbinical and formal usage)

or from Slavic (for example i . . . i . . . ‘both . . . and . . . ,’ an item probably

of Polish origin, or the variant found in Ukrainian Yiddish, namely to . . .

to . . . ‘both . . . and . . . ’; Eastern Yiddish data are from Jacobs 2005, and

have been retranscribed into the YIVO orthography which is generally

used for Romanizing Standard Yiddish). BUT does not (and cannot) be

part of such a pair of conjunctions, since it either contrasts with a negator

or with nothing at all. The ‘‘simple’’ conjunctions BUT (and here nayert is

used after negatives, otherwise ober), AND (un), OR (oder) in Yiddish are


all of Middle High German origin; however, this is not the case with

forms for BOTH . . . AND . . . , and one of the forms used for EITHER . . .

OR . . . . is also borrowed. But the equivalent forms in Modern German

(sowohl X wie Y ‘both X and Y,’ entweder X oder Y ‘either X or Y,’ weder

X noch Y ‘neither X nor Y’) are not used in modern Standard Yiddish,

which uses the Slavic forms listed above.

Again, Tagalog uses a conjunction at from Kapampangan (the language

once spoken in what is now the heart of Tagalog territory in southern

Luzon) for ‘and,’ as I mention below, but for ‘both . . . and . . . .’ it uses i . . .

i . . . from Spanish, while o ‘or’ and o . . . o . . . ‘either . . . or . . . ’ (also Tagalog

ni . . . ni . . . ‘neither . . . nor . . . .’) are borrowed from Spanish, which itself uses

these repeated conjunctions for ‘either . . . or . . .’ and ‘neither . . . nor . . . .’

The following sentences are English examples of the kinds of sentences

whose use of conjunctions interests me; I have capitalized the conjunctions

in question. I regret not having had the opportunity of eliciting such

sentences (or of collecting texts containing clause subordinators) from

speakers of the languages in question. My debt in regard to the delineation

of sample sentences to the contents of the Tense-Aspect-Mood question-

naire in Dahl (1985: 198–206) will be obvious.

(1) ALTHOUGH it is raining, I will walk into the village (concessive).

(2) IF the teacher comes, we will go to the beach.

(3) IF the teacher came here, he would be lonely (1–2 are conditional

clauses).

(4) UNTIL the dog finds the bone, the rabbit will be scared.

(5) BEFORE the nurse began to work in the hospital, the doctor

emptied her o‰ce.

(6) AS the night became wet, we ran into the barn.

(7) WHILE it rained we stayed in the barn.

(8) SINCE the house is empty, I shall sing and dance (3–8 are temporal

clauses).

(9) He cannot swim BECAUSE his arm is broken (causal clause).

(10) I came to the city IN ORDER TO find work.

(11) The king built a wall SO THAT/IN ORDER THAT the soldiers

would be safe (10–11 are purposive or purpose clauses).


(12) They say THAT you are happy.

(13) I know THAT you are happy.

(14) I hope THAT you are happy (12–14 are complement clauses,

13 expressing a realized complement while 12 and 14 expressed

unrealized complements).

(15) The farmer WHO/THAT lives by the river grows wheat.

(16) The woman WHO/WHOM/THAT we saw lives near the forest.

(17) The cat WHICH/THAT I saw yesterday had a long tail.

(18) The car WHICH/THAT rolled down the hill broke the gate.

(19) The child TO WHOM I gave the book likes toys a lot (or: The child

THAT I gave the book to likes toys a lot).

(20) The woman WHOSE umbrella I borrowed stayed inside when it

rained.

(21) WHOEVER/They WHO ate that bread will be sick. (Examples

15–21 are relative clauses; 21 is a so-called headless relative clause).

Here we see the overt use of dependent clause markers (capitalized) in the

sample of English sentences. However, in English and many other languages

(including several of those illustrated here) it is possible to construct certain

kinds of dependent clauses without being compelled to introduce them

with an overt dependent clause marker, just so long as the main clause is

well-formed. Present-Day Standard English is able to omit THAT when it

introduces post-verbal complement clauses, and it can also omit the forms

THAT (which is more colloquial in terms of register in UK English than

the other English relativizers are), WHICH, and WHO or WHOM in

cases when the antecedent in the main clause is the direct or indirect object

of the relative clause. Additionally, speakers of English sometimes replace

these with non-finite dependent clauses or with nominalizations. I have

represented the ‘‘missing’’ complementizers and relativizers (and in the

case of sentences 26 and 27, also the missing copular verbs) with Ø:

(22) They think Ø it’s all over.

(23) They say Ø there is no hope.

(24) I wish Ø the rain would stop.

(25) I hope Ø the bus will come soon.


(26) I saw the man Ø running away from the blazing building.

(27) The train Ø now standing at Platform 5 does not stop at

Warrington.

(28) I saw the film Ø I had read about last week.

(29) They have met the people Ø they wish to hire.

Similarly, some temporal clauses in English only contain an implied tempo-

ral element, by which the sequence of events is implicit within the discourse

structure of the sentence; in such cases English can employ non-finite depen-

dent clauses (which are also available for other kinds of dependent clauses).

This is possible (but not compulsory) if the subject of the two clauses is the

same.

(30) They went through the park. They saw a red kite.

(31) Having gone through the park, they saw a red kite.

(32) Subsequent to going through the park, they saw a red kite.

(33) After going through the park, they saw a red kite.

(34) After they had gone through the park, they saw a red kite.

All these expressions are generally equivalent.5

Although English uses the same marker, in this case THAT, as the

complementizer for both realized and unrealized complement clauses,

many languages do not do so. They use distinctive forms (for instance

Croatian sto for realized and da for unrealized complements), and if one

of the members of this set of complementizers is borrowed, it appears

from the evidence we have that it is most often the one used with unrealized

complement clauses.

In some of the languages in this sample, the use of dependent clauses

not specifically introduced with (or followed by) dependent clause markers

represents the most common pattern of formation of such clauses. The use

of kinds of nominalization constructions is especially characteristic of the

formation of restrictive relative and complement clauses in such languages.

This is also the case with some kinds of dependent temporal clauses in

which the time of the action of the dependent clauses is either synchronous

with that of the main clause or else precedes it immediately (the VERB

5. As are other constructions, such as They went through the park, (and) Afterthis, they saw a red kite.


STEMþ kar clause in Hindi/Urdu is an instance of this). This being the

case, we should not be surprised if we fail to find a large number of instances

of borrowed markers for relative clauses, or a great number of borrowed

complementizers among the sampled languages.

It should finally be noted that in most of the languages surveyed (Que-

chua being an exception), dependent clause markers usually precede the

body of the clauses with which they are connected. Reasons for the relative

placement of main and dependent clauses within the sentence are discussed

in Diessel (2001, 2005), while Diessel (2004) points out that children acquir-

ing complex sentences in English as their first language make great use of

the strategic positioning of main and dependent clauses within a sentence.

3. A caveat: sources of dependent clause marker constructions

other than borrowing

Although borrowing is a widespread process, we have to keep the degree

of borrowing of dependent clause markers into a language in its proper

perspective. It would be foolish for us to assume from the outset that the

only way in which speakers of a language which has hitherto made little

or no use of dependent clause markers can equip themselves with such

elements is for them to borrow such markers in large quantities from

languages of greater prestige with which they are in contact. Although

borrowing is one of the means of acquiring such forms, it is in no sense

the only means, any more than zero-marking such relations is.

Processes of grammaticalization that expand the meaning of a mor-

pheme already being used in another sense provide one pathway for devel-

oping dependent clause markers. For instance, English OR is historically

related to OTHER, from which it has developed, and has been semanti-

cally bleached in the course of the history of English (www.oed.com).

Similarly, as I pointed out in Section 2.2, the use by speakers of Yiddish

of what were originally subjunctive forms of the verb ‘to be’ to express

‘either . . . or . . .’ is an example of (secondary) grammaticalization of a pre-

existing form for a new purpose (this is a case of grammaticalization

which is also found in German, though the subjunctive mood has been

lost in Yiddish). Such a construction is not exclusive to Germanic lan-

guages; it can be found, for example, in Spanish sea . . . sea . . . ‘either . . .

or . . . ,’ literally ‘that it be . . . that it be. . . .’ Kortmann (2001) contains a

wealth of information about the rise, development, and expansion of

adverbial conjunctions in European languages. The secondary use of


formerly spatial adverbs to express temporal relations is also very frequent

in these cases.6

Borrowing in the form of transfer of fabric should be seen as just one

resource for linguistic expansion that will provide subordinating con-

junctions. Transfer of pattern has also long played a part in the creation

of new subordinators. One notes, for instance, that French parce que

‘because’ and Old English for þœm þe are exactly congruent: both literally

mean ‘for this that.’7 The use of former discourse markers or pronouns, or

even members of other form-classes, as conjunctions is also well attested

in studies of grammaticalization. English THAT and the cluster of forms

comprising WHICH, WHO(M), WHOSE were originally demonstrative or

interrogative pronouns, and they still serve these roles, just as the word

ho, he #, to which had started out as the definite article in Attic Greek,

also (and secondarily) served as a subject relative pronoun. English BUT

comes from Old English be-u #tan ‘outside,’ which completely supplanted

inherited ac. ALTHOUGH is both a borrowing and a form deriving from

a discourse particle, while UNTIL is borrowed from a Norse noun phrase

und till ‘up to the end (of ).’ OR derives from the same stem which gives

OTHER. As to temporal adverbial forms such as AFTER and BEFORE,

which in English as in many other languages are secondary developments

from spatial adpositions, Leech, Rayson, and Wilson (2001), drawing on

the massive British National Corpus, point out that BEFORE occurs 434

times per million words as a preposition and 305 times per million words

as a conjunction. For AFTER the proportions are 927 and 233 occurrences

per million words respectively, though SINCE’s figures are 295 occurrences

per million words as a conjunction and only 178 as a preposition.

It would also be erroneous for us to assume ab initio that all languages

will use dependent clause markers to the same extent and with the same

frequency in their equivalents of the same prompt sentences or clauses,

and that they continue to operate according to this principle to this day.

An analysis of comparable texts in some of these languages, which per-

force are translations (for instance of admittedly very formal texts such as

the Paternoster and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human

6. An interesting counterexample to this is the English compound preposition infront of, in which front is a borrowing from French. The earlier prepositionbefore can still be used spatially, but its use as a temporal adverbial conjunc-tion is its most frequent one nowadays.

7. So also does Russian potomu cto, which has been borrowed bodily into KildinSaami (Rießler to appear).


Rights, translations of both of which I have examined for several of the lan-

guages included here) makes clear that this is not the case. See www.

christusrex.org for the Lord’s Prayer, and www.un.org/en/documents/

udhr/ for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Indeed, some lan-

guages use conjunctions in their version of this text much more than others

do, these others making more use of asyndeton or of clause-combining

clitics.

This last situation is very much the case with Turkish, in which the use

of borrowed conjunctions of Farsi origin is well attested (it also makes

much use of asyndeton). Nonetheless in Turkish the di¤erent kinds of

dependent clauses are frequently formed using bound morphs incorporated

in dependent verb forms. In fact, an examination and comparison of the

1000 commonest Turkish and English words, based on a Wikipedia fre-

quency count for the Turkish data and Leech, Rayson, and Wilson (2001)

for written English data, shows that the English words AND, THAT (when

it is lemmatized by Leech, Rayson, and Wilson as a complementizer), BUT,

IF, OR, and BECAUSE occur at 3rd, 12th, 28th, 33rd, 49th, and 117th

places in terms of frequency in English, while their Turkish equivalents

ve, ki, amma, eger, (ve)ya, and cunku, all of them borrowings from Farsi

(some of them being loans into Farsi from Arabic), occur at 2nd, 21st,

39th, 238th, 43rd (97th in the case of veya), and at 112th places respec-

tively. Indeed, only the relatively poor showing of eger for ‘if,’ coming in

at 238th place, is cross-linguistically somewhat surprising. But its rather

low ranking when compared with other borrowed conjunctions becomes

clear when one understands that Turkish has a complete conditional

mood in its verbal system for the expression of ‘if ’-clauses, and that (as

Lewis 1967: 270 points out) the use of eger, which itself requires use of

the conditional mood of the verb, at the beginning of a Turkish sentence

serves largely to indicate to the listener that a sentence containing a con-

ditional clause or two is about to begin. For its part Swahili similarly

expresses conditionals with an infixed conditional verbal mood with or

without the clause-initial use of kama ‘if.’

4. The data for the study

Data on borrowed conjunctions have been taken from English and 21

other languages from around the world. Table 1 gives some basic informa-

tion on the languages being examined. For each language I supply the

name of the language, its genealogical a‰nity, and the language(s) that


Table 1. The languages used in the sample

Language Genealogicala‰liation

Language(s) ofinfluence(italicizedlanguages furnishconjunction)

Are modernspeakers bilingualin the language ofinfluence?

Borrowed itemson Swadesh 207-item list?

English Indo-European:West Germanic

French, Norse,Latin

No, most neverwere

16%

KalderashRomani

Indo-European:Indic

Romanian,Greek, SouthSlavic, Iranian,Armenian,contiguouslanguages

Not since latenineteenthcentury in thecase of manyKalderara withRomanian

25%

Eastern Yiddish Indo-European:West Germanic

Hebrew-Aramaic,West Slavic

Not completely;much knowledgeof Hebrew

5%

Kildin Saami Uralic: Finnic:Saami

Russian, olderforms fromGermanic

Yes, in Russian Not known butat least 20%;mostly fromGermanic

Livonian Uralic: Finnic:Balto-Finnic

Latvian; LowGerman

Yes, in Latvian <5%

CappadocianGreek

Indo-European:Greek

Turkish Yes (thislanguage is nowobsolete)

c. 10%

Turkish Turkic Arabic, Farsi No, most neverwere.

9%

Turoyo Afro-Asiatic:Semitic

Kurdish, Turkish,Arabic

Yes, in Kurdishand oftenTurkish

Uncertain butadmittedly low(<10%)

Urdu Indo-European:Indic

Arabic, Farsi No; most neverwere

20%

Acehnese Austronesian:Malayo-Polynesian:Malayo-Chamic

Malay, Arabic,Bahnariclanguages,Sanskrit

Yes, in Malay 20%þ

Tidore NorthHalmaheran

Portuguese,(Moluccan)Malay

Yes, in NorthMoluccan Malay

<5%

Tagalog Austronesian:Malayo-Polynesian:Greater CentralPhilippine

Malay, Spanish,Kapampan-gan,Hokkien, English

Increasingly so inEnglish; Tagalog-Spanish bilin-gualism wasnever widespread

20%


Language Genealogicala‰liation

Language(s) ofinfluence(italicizedlanguages furnishconjunction)

Are modernspeakers bilingualin the language ofinfluence?

Borrowed itemson Swadesh 207-item list?

Tetun Dili Austronesian:Central Malayo-Polynesian

Mambae,Portuguese

Often inPortuguese

<5%

Tsat (HainanCham)

Austronesian:Malayo-Polynesian:Malayic

Bahnaric;Minnan andPutonghuaChinese

Yes, Minnan,increasingly inCantonese and/or Mandarin

c. 10% from Chi-nese, 20%þ fromsubmerged Mon-Khmer language

Chamorro Austronesian:Malayo-Polynesian

Spanish, Tagalog,Japanese, English

Only in Englishnow, manyformerly inSpanish

<25%

Ifira-Mele Austronesian:Malayo-Polynesian:Oceanic:Polynesian Outlier

South Efate,Bislama

Yes, in Bislama(bilingualism inS. Efate till earlytwentieth century)

20%

Siwi Berber Afro-Asiatic:Berber

Egyptian Arabic Yes, in EgyptianArabic

<25%

KiUngujaSwahili

Niger-Congo:Bantu

NorthernSwahili, Arabic

No; most neverwere

20þ%

Siberian Yupik Eskimo-Aleut:Yupik

Chukchi, Russian Yes, but inRussian inSiberia and inEnglish in Alaska

2%

Pipil Uto-Aztecan Spanish Yes, Spanish isreplacing Pipil

10%

Garifuna Maipurean /Arawakan

Kari’na (TrueCarib), AntilleanCreole French,Spanish, English

Increasinglyshifting toSpanish andCreole English

<20%

CochabambaQuechua

Quechuan:Quechua II

Aymara/Jaqilanguages;Spanish

Increasinglybilingual in ordominant inSpanish

<10% fromSpanish, manyearlier Jaqi loansshared with otherSouthern PeruvianQuechua varieties

Table 1. (Continued )


have influenced it most strongly, with special reference to the language or

languages that have provided it with the borrowed subordinating conjunc-

tions found in the language (the names of languages that have provided

such forms have been italicized). Unsurprisingly, many conjunctions have

entered some of these languages via other languages that were the imme-

diate sources of these loans. This is the case, for instance, of some con-

junctions from Arabic and Sanskrit found in Acehnese, which entered the

language by virtue of being previously (and currently) used in Malay.

I also provide (where this is possible) information on the proportion of

borrowed elements on the 207-item Swadesh list for each of the languages

in question. Data on the length of time for which languages surveyed have

been in contact with the languages from which they have borrowed con-

junctions are generally sparse and in many cases they will likely remain so.

Nevertheless, we do have a few approximate time periods for a few pairs of

languages, and the scanty evidence available to us suggests that the periods

in question for each pair of languages probably range from about 300

years (in the case of English and Norse, for instance, see Thomason and

Kaufman 1988, or of Chamorro and Spanish, this last period being marked

at its beginning by attempts at genocide of the Chamorros on the part of

the Spanish), through a period of 500–700 years of contact in the case of

Cappadocian Greek and Turkish (Dawkins 1916), to a period of closer to

a millennium or maybe even more. This may be the period of contact of

the Neo-Aramaic language Turoyo with Kurdish and its ancestor Median,

or of Tsat speakers’ contacts with local forms of Chinese (Zheng 1997).

We see that the degree of borrowing of discourse particles and conjunc-

tions is not much greater in the case of those languages still in contact

with the languages that have exerted greatest influence upon them, nor

does it correlate closely with the length of time that donor and recipient

language have been in contact.

Several of these varieties have been documented for centuries, but some

of them have only been recorded in the past 100–150 years (Kalderash

Romani, Kildin Saami, Cappadocian Greek, Turoyo, Tidore, Tetun Dili,

Ifira-Mele, Siberian Yupik, Cochabamba Quechua, Tsat). All of these have

closely related varieties that have come into contact with other speech com-

munities, a fact that allows us to monitor and establish that some of their

conjunctions are indeed borrowed. In the case of other languages we have

some earlier textual documentation (albeit often in the form of transla-

tions from Western European languages or as material in closely related

varieties, such as in Classical Nahuatl in the case of Pipil, or in the obsolete

Welsh Romani in the case of Kalderash), and analysis of these varieties


enables us to see that (for instance) Garifuna has acquired most of its con-

junctions and has developed a more complex syntax with a greater degree

of structural variation, as it did not have specific free-standing equivalents

for such forms as ‘and’ in earlier centuries. However, in other cases (for

example Livonian) the comparative and diachronic linguistic evidence

available to us suggests that borrowed conjunctions have replaced original

conjunctions.

This may even be the case with Welsh Romani, since it exhibits an

unusually small proportion of borrowed elements among conjunctions

and phasal adverbs for a Romani variety (see Sampson 1926: 1: 219).

For instance, where most other Romani varieties, Kalderash included,

have borrowed forms for ‘because’ Welsh Romani uses odoleskı # ‘for-that,’a form comprised of inherited morphemes if perhaps not an inherited con-

junction in the truest sense.) Yet even then some Welsh Romani forms

which are what Jacobs 2005 terms ‘disjunctive conjunctions’ are borrowings,

such as ı #t ‘yet, still,’ from English.) The same concept may be expressed in

the sample languages with elements which had di¤erent primary uses; for

instance relativisation in Yiddish is carried out with vos, which has extended

its original meaning of ‘what?’, while in Tetun Dili the relativiser nebe pre-

serves its earlier meaning of ‘where?’, while Tsat and Turoyo independently

use elements originally only used in nominal possessive constructions.

Drawing on earlier work on borrowed discourse markers of Spanish

origin in Mayan languages (Brody 1987, 1993), Matras (1998, 2000b) has

analyzed the patterns of borrowing of sentential discourse markers, with

some attention paid also to the subset of temporal adverbials known as

phasal adverbials (for instance soon, already, now), and has also presented

some evidence for a possible hierarchy of universals in borrowing of coor-

dinating conjunctions. Matras based his universals of discourse marker

borrowing for the most part on evidence from languages of the Middle

East (especially minority or diasporic languages that are known to have

borrowed heavily from other languages, such as certain varieties of Neo-

Aramaic and Domari, the Indic language of the Nawar). In addition, he

presented data from some other languages that have borrowed extensively

from Arabic (including Farsi, Urdu, Pashto, Somali, Swahili, Kurmanji

Kurdish, Turkish, Lezgian, Tamazight Berber, Fulbe, and Hausa), and

from several varieties of Romani that have themselves been in contact

with a wide variety of coterritorial languages. This is a sample of languages

that overlap among one another to some extent because of their connection

with influences from Arabic, Farsi, and Turkish (especially strongly so in


Table 2a. Coordinating conjunctions, discourse markers and some adverbs in thelanguage sample

–> Word And Or But Well, . . . Even

Language

English and or but well. . . even

KalderashRomani

thaj vaj numa <Romanian

no < Slavic dazi <Russian

EasternYiddish

un oder ober; nayert(afternegation)

nu < Slavic afile <Hebrew

Kildin Saami i, a: both <Russian.ja <Germanic(found inother Fenniclanguages)

ili < Russian a, ne:both <Russian

no, vot:both <Russian

?

Livonian un < LowGerman (viaLatvian)

vaj (Salisdialect), aga #(also Kolkadialect)

bet <Latvian

ni < Latvian ı #z

CappadocianGreek

ke ya < Turkish ama, lekin,both <Turkish

? daha <Turkish,akum

Turkish ve < Arabic ya, veyaboth <Arabic

amma <Arabic

ha daha <Arabic

Turoyo w ya <Arabic.wayaxut <Turkish.

amma <Arabic

? ¡etta <Arabic

Urdu aur yaa lekin <Arabic

he abhii

Acehnese ngeun atawa <Sanskrit viaMalay

teutapi <Sanskrit viaMalay

nyankeuh ¼‘you see’

pih, cit

Tidore se, sodio,sodigo

bolo tapi <Malay, ma

e mai


–> Word And Or But Well, . . . Even

Language

Tagalog at <Kapam-pangan

o < Spanish pero <Spanish,nguni’t,subali’t(second partis Kapam-pangan)

bueno <Spanish

pareho <Spanish,pantan

Tetun Dili i < Port., ho o <Portuguese

mais < Port.,maybe

ne duni mezmu <Portuguese

Tsat (HainanCham)

ngan33 ‘da:n’32si11 <Chinese

ta:n33;‘da:n’32.both <Chinese

? lien11 <Chinese

Chamorro yan o < Span. pero < Span. pues <Spanish

sikeramas(ke)eha<Spanish

Ifira-Mele(Mele-Fila)

ngo < Efate pe aa ntaa < Efate,aoo

?

Siwi Berber d- Nemma amma <Arabic

aha maza #l,¡atta <Arabic

KiUngujaSwahili

harafu ‘andthen’ <Arabic; na

au < Arabic ama <Arabic,lakini <Arabic

Je hata <Arabic, ijapo

SiberianYupik

enkaam,aama,both <Chukchi

enraq <Chukchi

pu(yu)ruChukchi

enta <Chukchi

saama <Chukchi

Pipil i < Spanish;wan

o < Spanish pero <Spanish,sino <Spanish;ma(n)

pues <Spanish

?

Garifuna an < English odi anhein;pero <Spanish

bueno <Spanish

yaragua;asta <Spanish

CochabambaQuechua

i < Spanish o < Spanish peroPpiru <Spanish

pues <Spanish

asta <Spanish <Arabic ‘until’

Table 2a. (Continued )


Table 2b. Discourse markers and phasal adverbs in the language sample

–> Word Also Only Still Already

Language

English also only still already

KalderashRomani

vi < Iranian feri <Romanian

ink� <Romanian

aba < ?

Eastern Yiddish oykh nor nokh shoyn

Kildin Saami nıdtse <SaamiþRussian

toalke <Russian

? ?

Livonian ka ı #ksiggin, ı #d vel, ve #l ju < Latvian

CappadocianGreek

hem <Turkish < Farsi

yal�n�z <Turkish

akum ?

Turkish hem < Farsi biricik, sadece hala < Farsi,buna de

zaten < Farsi,evvelce <Arabic ‘first’þTurkish

Turoyo -ste tane < Kurdish he < Kurdish ?

Urdu abhii sirf < Arabic bhii pahle se

Acehnese cit, sit cuma nantong ka lheueh

Tidore ? bato moju rai

Tagalog din, rin lamang gayun pa rin (tapos) na

Tetun Dili mos de’it ne’e ona

Tsat (HainanCham)

kia33siang33 <Chinese

tsi11 < Chinese yong32 zi11king33 <Chinese

Chamorro ademas <Spanish, lokkue

solu < Spanish trabia <Spanish

esta < Spanish‘it is’

Ifira-Mele mwasu < Efate mwasu < Efate ngana ?

Siwi Berber da’a < Arabic gı #r < Arabic mazal < Arabic ?

KiUngujaSwahili

pia lakini < Arabic,tu

hata sasa <ArabicþSwahili

kabla yawakati < Arabicelements in Swa-hili pattern

Siberian Yupik enekiitek <Chukchi, ama

katam <Chukchi

ametall <Chukchi

enris < Chukchi

Pipil nusan ? ? ?

Garifuna -gien -rugu gua- ?

CochabambaQuechua

tambyen <Spanish

solamente <Spanish

? ya < Spanish


the case of Romani varieties spoken in the southern Balkans, often used

by groups Islamized under the Ottoman Empire).

In my sample, I have incorporated for comparison the glosses of the

forms of discourse markers, phasal adverbs, and coordinating conjunc-

tions that Matras has surveyed in his articles in the tables for the lan-

guages he examined, and I have used these to examine some of the claims

made in those articles. The hierarchy which Matras (1998) proposed for

coordinating conjunctions states that if borrowing of such conjunctions

takes place, then the form for the adversative ‘but’ will be borrowed

before the form for ‘or,’ which in its turn will be borrowed before the

equivalent of ‘and.’ ALREADY is uncoded in Turoyo and Siwi.

It should be possible for us to test this hypothesis with data from lan-

guages whose coordinating conjunctions some of which have not hitherto

been sampled for this purpose. Matras (1998) cites data from Turoyo,

Urdu, Turkish and Pipil. I have tried to provide instances of languages

that have borrowed a considerable number of their conjunctions from

what were formerly or are now languages of empire, notably Spanish,

Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Farsi, and Malay. Data on a language that

has borrowed mostly lately but heavily in this sphere from Chinese (namely

Tsat) are also included. In Tables 2 and 3, I present the glosses for the

adverbs and conjunctions I have surveyed in this study according to the

structural class to which each belongs, listing in Table 2 some coordinat-

ing conjunctions (and, but, or), discourse markers (well, even, only, also),

and phasal adverbs (still, already), then (in Table 3) subordinating conjunc-

tions. These last conjunctions are organized into adverbial (if, because,

although, so that/in order to), complement, and relative clause markers,

with a final section of temporal adverbial clause markers (when, before,

until ). The sources’ orthographies are used. I also present the linguistic

forms from the 21 languages plus English assembled for etymological

analysis in this study. Borrowed forms are in boldface, have origins indi-

cated, and are listed before non-borrowed forms with similar meanings.

Concepts expressed by morphological or other structural means (such as

by using nominalization structures or converbs) rather than by separate

words are indicated as such in the languages where this occurs. In cases

of ambiguity, or where a language has two or more forms for AND, the

sense of AND that is addressed in this table is the form that links two or

more verb groups or predicates rather than the one linking two or more

noun groups. Items for which I have been unable to find a form in sources

for a particular language are marked with question marks. The use of Ø


Table 3a. Subordinating conjunctions in the sample of languages

–> Word If Because Although So that, inorder to

COMPLE-MENTIZER

Language

English if because ¼EnglishþFrench <Latin

although <Norse

in orderto < French;so that

that

KalderashRomani

te (fin)k� <Romanian

mada <Hungarian

te te

EasternYiddish

aaz vorem khotsh <Slavic,hagam <Hebrew

kedey(tsu) <Hebrew

az

Kildin Saami jesli <Russian

patamuste <Russian

god’d’ <maybeRussian

stobe <Russian

sto <Russian

Livonian asP az ku, sı #epiersst laz kil <LatvianþLivonianblend

laz <Latvian

ku

CappadocianGreek

eyer <Turkish; an

cunku <Turkish <Farsi

keske‘although,eventhough’ <Turkish

itsin <Turkish, ati

ki <Turkish <Farsi

Turkish eger < Farsi;conditionalverb moodsusing -se-and no con-junction arecommoner

cunku <Farsi

-digihalde <Farsi,egerce <Farsi, -ekarısın

-mesi icin nominaliza-tion; ki <Farsi

Turoyo enkan <Arabic

m-ide-d- ? la #sa #n <Arabic

d-

Urdu agar < Farsi kyuNkii;cuuNke‘since’ <Farsi

agarce <Farsi

(verb plus)liye

kii < Farsi

Acehnese jika <Malay <Skt; kalo <Malay

keureuna <Malay <Sanskrit,seubap <Malay <Arabic

meureuki <Sanskrit

beu- Ø


–> Word If Because Although So that, inorder to

COMPLE-MENTIZER

Language

Tidore coba, kalauboth <Malay

karma <Malay <Sanskrit

maskena <Portuguese

supuya <Malay, le

Ø

Tagalog kung sapagkat maski <Spanish

para <Spanish, na

(non-finiteverb)

Tetun Dili se <Portuguese;karik

tanba kaideuk para <Portuguese,atu

katak

Tsat (HainanCham)

zi11ko11 <Chi.

zin33vui11<Chinese

sui33zian11< Chinese

? Ø

Chamorro komu >Spanish,yanggen

potke <Spanish

sinembatgo< Spanish‘however’masehanan< Spanish‘whatever itmay be’ plusChamorroa‰x

para ke <Spanish

ke < Spanish

Ifira-Mele(Mele-Fila)

tausia <Efate

tonlake <Efate

? rakina <South Efate

Ø

Siwi Berber (en)kan <Arabic

s�bab <Arabic

'er < Arabic asa�a �nni

KiUngujaSwahili

kama <Ar. –optional;used withobligatoryconditional)

-kwasababu <ArabicþSwahili

Ingawa ili < Arabic Ø

SiberianYupik

iiwen <Chukchi

qayuXłak waran <Chukchi

inqun <Chukchi

-nu-

Pipil si < Spanish;(a)su

porke <Spanish,tayika

melka, mal pal ke <Spanish,ka(h), ma(:)

Garifuna anha- luruma-,luduya

-lau su Ø Ø

CochabambaQuechua

si < Spanish porke <Spanish

? -eh ke < Spanish

Table 3a. (Continued )


Table 3b. Further subordinating conjugations in the sample of languages

–> Word Relative clausemarker

When(subordinatingconjunction)

Before(conjunction)

Until

Language

English who, which when before (un)til < Norse

KalderashRomani

kaj ¼ ‘where’ kana angla te zi-kaj

Eastern Yiddish vos ven, az For; eyder <Hebrew,

viz

Kildin Saami katora <Russian

poka < Russian;kuess

? ?

Livonian ku kuna #s, siz ku jedmol od soni od <Latvian

CappadocianGreek

op (also ‘where’) itsin < Turkish;on

? ?

Turkish (non-finite nounclause)

-digi zaman <Arabic

-meden once -e kadar <Arabic

Turoyo d- me d- meq�m me d- holP hul

Urdu jo jab X ke aage X tak

Acehnese nnyang ‘oh, yoh sigohlom sampoe/sampe <Malay

Tidore Ø coba < Malay yang sado

Tagalog (non-finite verbconstruction)

nang, kaliannoon(¼Kapam-panganþTagalog)

bago, noon hanggang sa

Tetun Dili nebe bain-hira nolok ato (coinciden-tally similar toPort. ate)

Tsat (HainanCham)

sa33 (possessivemarker)

? pudzien11 <Chinese

?

Chamorro nai nai antes ke <Spanish

asta < Spanish


indicates that no morpheme marks this particular syntactic relation overtly

in the language in question.

In the transcriptional system for Urdu, <N> indicates vowel nasalization.

In Siberian Yupik <X> indicates a uvular fricative, and <g> is its voiced

counterpart, as opposed to velar <x>; the source uses double vowel symbols

such as <aa> to represent long vowels, <ll> for a voiceless lateral fricative,

and <e> for schwa; these conventions are preserved here. Cappadocian

Greek capitalized <E> is schwa. In Siwi long vowels are written with

macrons. In Tsat the numerals after each syllable indicate the tone of the

syllable according to a system in which 11 is high level and 55 is the lowest

tone, and a tone such as 32 is a rising one. In Acehnese <eu> represents a

high back unrounded vowel and <oe> represents a mid-central vowel; here

as in Tsat <ng> represents the velar nasal. Capitalized voiced final con-

sonants in Livonian are voiceless.

It may be of interest to present some examples of sentences that include

some of the borrowed subordinating conjunctions.

–> Word Relative clausemarker

When(subordinatingconjunction)

Before(conjunction)

Until

Language

Ifira-Mele Ø napoo moage(preposition)

fanfan < SouthEfate(¼ ‘walk-walk’),jiipia

Siwi Berber w�n, t�n tanta, mak qb�l < Arabic al

KiUngujaSwahili

-ye- wakati (wa) <Arabic

kabla (ya) <Arabic

hata < Arabic

Siberian Yupik (nominalization) -meng ? ?

Pipil ke < Spanish,maa

uk; keeman ? asta < Spanish

Garifuna -lau, -tau dan (me) le <Antillean CreoleFrench (dan, le)and Kari’na(me)

lubarugien darı, dagalumoun

CochabambaQuechua

(nominaliza-tions)

-spa ? asta < Spanish

Table 3b. (Continued )


Conditional clauses:

(35) Tetun Dili (Williams-van Klinken et al. 2002: 112).

se ita la fan sasan, osan la iha

if we no sell good, money not exist

‘If we don’t sell any goods, we don’t have any money.’

Causal clauses:

(36) Kalderash (Boretzky 1994: 217)

dar mange ke saj te mer-ava i me skoro

fear to.me because can comp die-1sg.pres and i soon

‘I’m scared because I to may die soon.’

Concessive clauses:

(37) Yiddish (Jacobs 2005: 206)

hagam er iz a raykher, i er a karger

although he is a rich.man, is he a miser

‘Although he is a rich man, he’s a miser.’

Purpose clauses:

(38) Tidore (van Staden 1999: 705)

ona gahi ena la, supaya una-ge

they do it in.order.to, in.order.to 3sg-that

wo-koliho yali

3sg.subject-return again

‘they do it so that he’ll return once more.’8

Complement or noun clause:

(39) Urdu (author’s own knowledge of the language)

ham log jaan-te ha ı, ki aaj bilkul

we folk know-pres.ptcp.pl are, comp today extremely

garm din hai.

hot day is.

‘We know that today is a very hot day.’

8. We may note the double marking of the purpose clause, using both a borrowedconjunction and an inherited form; van Staden (2000: 38) points out that theloan is superfluous in this sentence because the inherited form already servesthe same purpose, while the borrowed form fits into a slot which is typicalof borrowed conjunctions in this language, and van Staden (2000: 30) citesevidence that supaya can be used on its own to form purpose clauses.


Relative clauses:

(40) Pipil (Campbell 1985: 129)

kunih ne ta:ka-t ke ki-kutamin k-its-ki ne chumpipi

then the man-abs rel it-throw it-grab-pret the turkey

k-wi:ka ka i-chan

it-take to its-house

‘‘then the man who threw it down grabbed the turkey and took it

to his house’’

(data indicate that the borrowed relativizer can be used both with

subjects and direct objects, as in the example here)

‘When’-clauses:

(41) Livonian (Moseley 2002: 65–66)

nu siZ, ku mina ı #rgiZ na’de midegest siZ vo’l

well then when i began see something-part then was

kozgenD neikku

wedding thus

‘well then, when I began to notice things

[¼ ‘when I was growing up’, APG], that’s how a wedding was done.’

Other temporal clauses:

(42) Chamorro (Topping, Ogo, and Dungca 1973: 151)

asta.ki hu danche todu este, na bai hu para.

until i hit all this, then fut i stop

‘until I can hit all of them I’m going to stop.’

5. Degrees of transfer of fabric among the selected conjunctions in the

languages surveyed

Since we are examining an issue in language contact, the sample surveyed

has deliberately been skewed so that it only contains languages that have

borrowed at least one discourse particle, phasal adverb, or conjunction

of some kind from another language. Consequently languages such as

Mandarin Chinese, French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, and German, which

do not have borrowed forms for any of these surveyed conjunctions (though

in many cases they may be the direct or ultimate sources of such conjunc-


tions in the languages surveyed), have been omitted. Nonetheless, it seems

from a cursory examination of the available material that relatively few

languages contain a large number of items whose historically and struc-

turally primary role is as subordinate or dependent clause markers. As I

pointed out in Section 3, both borrowing and other techniques have led

to the development of dependent clause markers in languages.

The results for the amount of borrowing in the various languages are

not always directly comparable because referents for certain glosses in a

number of languages are (despite my best e¤orts) unavailable in all the

material on those languages that I could access. Yet it is clear, even from

these partial data, that some of the languages surveyed do more borrow-

ing of function words of these kinds than others. Others rely more on

other techniques for developing dependent clause marker (for instance by

extending to temporal situations the semantic range of adverbs or adposi-

tions that originally referred to spatial situations; English before is now

mostly used to refer to time, but its original sense, still in use, was ‘in front

of ’).

We should recognize from the outset that perfect implicational hierar-

chies of borrowing may not appear from an analysis of our data. The

article by Hekking and Muysken (1995) presents interesting data on the

very di¤erent comparative and contrastive patterns of borrowing of

Spanish conjunctions and the like into Otomı and Quechua. While doing

so with elegance and plenty of information, it presents an augmented table

providing an analysis of the borrowing of Spanish function words into

eleven representative indigenous languages of Mexico (chosen because

they are members of di¤ering language families) taken from Suarez

(1983). Some conjunctions are more likely to be borrowed than others,

but gaps in the data may not provide the observer with an equivalent of

any sort for the gloss item in question, so they do not allow us to say

whether the borrowed word is used and whether or not it coexists with a

non-borrowed form (in addition to the assumed absence of the borrowed

Spanish word in the language in question). This means that the implica-

tional hierarchy is not perfect.

Some especially heavily borrowing languages in terms of conjunctions

are Siberian Yupik (a language where conjunctions were previously barely

recognized as a formal category, as conjunctions are not a separate form-

class in Eskimoan languages, though particles are), Turkish, and Chamorro.

Chamorro has long been a heavy borrower, from Spanish and also Japanese,

English, and Philippine languages, and previously from other unidentified


Austronesian languages, for several centuries, as is flashed up in its

Swadesh-list vocabulary.9 But this appeal to the e¤ects of heavy borrow-

ing applies less to Turkish than it does to Chamorro (even if one allows

for the e¤ects of the puristic Turkish language reforms of the 1930s: Lewis

1999) and to Siberian Yupik. Thanks to comparative evidence from sister-

languages of these, we know that Proto-Turkic and Proto-Yupik both

had other means of indicating the kinds of relationships that Turkish and

Siberian Yupik have so often encoded by using borrowed forms. In purely

syntactic typological terms, the consequences of this spate of heavy syn-

tactic borrowing are that Turkish and Siberian Yupik are more like Farsi

and Chukchi (and more like Russian and English) respectively than they

are like the languages from which they have descended.

The situation concerning the development of free-standing conjunctions

in Siberian Yupik, which has borrowed a whole new form-class of conjunc-

tions (a development that was part of the extensive borrowing of Chukchi

adverbials that has had such a striking e¤ect on the decline of traditional

Eskimoan postbases in this language), is similar in nature. But here syn-

tactic and typological change has arguably been even more striking than

in otherwise heavily borrowing languages such as Pipil. The Siberian Yupik

case of borrowing conjunctions and assimilating them as a new and distinct

form-class is something that has also been documented for the variety of the

language used in Siberia and often referred to as Chaplinski (Menovshchikov

1969), and in a more detailed manner for the form of Siberian Yupik used

in the two villages, Savoonga and Gambell, of St. Lawrence Island, Alaska

(de Reuse 1994). What is more, a sentence in Menovshchikov (1969: 124)

exemplifies the three stages of the absorption of a Chukchi coordinating

conjunction enkaam ‘and’ (spelt ınkam in Menovshchikov’s material) into

the syntax of this variety. The first stage shows the language operating

without overt conjunctions but using identical paired clitics to link two

noun phrases; the second shows the use both of the borrowed conjunction

and the paired clitics in an act of double marking; the third shows only the

conjunction used to link two noun phrases. Menovshchikov (1969: 124)

provides glosses.

9. The textual material composed by Fray Luis de Sanvitores presented in Burrus(1954), translation from the Latin though it be, attests to the fact that Chamorrohad other clause-combining mechanisms at its disposal in the 1660s, beforethe period of wholesale borrowing from Spanish had begun.


(43) a. nunavigmi kijaxtaqut tıgi'at-łju qawa'ıt-łjuon.tundra they.live beasts-comit. birds-comit

b. nunavigmi kijaxtaqut tıgi'at-łju ınkam qawa' ıt-łjuon.tundra they.live beasts-comit and birds-comit

c. nunavigmi kijaxtaqut tıgi'at ınkam qawa' ıton.tundra they.live beasts and birds

‘On the tundra live beasts and birds.’

We can be sure that this is an instance of contact-induced syntactic

change. Central Alaskan Yupik (described in Miyaoka 1997) is a closely

related language to Siberian Yupik but it has not borrowed any Chukchi

conjunctions; it uses Eskimoan postbases (derivational su‰xes, generally

used with clearly defined lexical meanings) instead to carry out clausal

linking (Siberian Yupik uses a few of these itself, as seen in Table 3), and

its clausal and sentential syntax is therefore more typical of Eskimoan

languages.

6. Instances of transfer of pattern in the languages surveyed

It is not only through borrowing particular forms with phonological shapes

and meanings from donor languages that one language’s dependent clause

markers are influenced by those of another language. In a number of cases,

the influence of other languages on these constructions involves instances of

metatypy, the replication of the syntactic structural patterns of one language

by using the morphemes already available in the recipient language (Ross

1996). A classic instance of this is Pipil wan ‘and,’ which began life as a

postposition that required nouns or possessive prefixes (-wan ‘with’), and

which (following a long-established and cross-linguistically well attested

path of grammaticalization, though one that has not apparently been dis-

cussed in Heine and Kuteva 2002) was then construed more and more as

being isomorphic with Spanish con ‘with,’ being used as a coordinating

conjunction later on in Pipil, and being equated in use with Spanish y.

Outright borrowing is therefore only the most obvious form of linguistic

influence. Transfers of pattern often involve transfers of fabric as well, and

borrowed elements can also develop patterns of distribution of their own,

unknown in the source language, after being borrowed. In Ifira-Mele the

borrowed conjunction rakina ‘in order to, so that’ also serves as the pre-

position meaning ‘for,’ thereby presumably following a grammaticaliza-

tion pathway from adposition to conjunction that is well-trodden in other


languages. (For a non-standard British English example from Greater

Manchester, one may compare working-class Wigan English fert [f�t]‘particle introducing certain kinds of dependent clauses’ < for to).

There are also several cases of calquing, in which a conjunction is not

borrowed from a donor language outright but instead the structure of

a conjunction in a language that has exerted influence upon a recipient

language is imitated or recreated using morphemes already present in the

recipient language. This is the case with Livonian laz kil ‘although,’ which

is calqued upon the Latvian form lai kas. Another example of calquing on

the basis of a construction in the more prestigious language is Pipil pal

‘in order to X,’ which resembles Spanish para phonologically (helped by

the fact that /r/ does not occur in native Pipil words) but which actually

derives from an inherited bound relational noun -pal. More independent

kinds of grammaticalization also have roles to play. Again this tendency

can be illustrated well from Pipil, where we see wan ‘and,’ whose develop-

mental history from its origins as an adposition has been documented in

Campbell (1987).

Subordination strategies that involve the use of some form of a‰xation

of material onto or within the verb group seem to be especially immune to

replacement by borrowed dependent markers, as is evident from the state

of a¤airs in Cochabamba Quechua in Table 3. Even so, the means of forma-

tion of conditional sentences in Turkish indicates that there is some scope

for coexistence of two morphologically di¤erent modes of expressing the

same idea while using double marking.

As we have seen before, borrowed forms of these conjunctions in some

of these languages often coexist with earlier, non-borrowed techniques.

This is especially striking in Turkish, where such concepts as AND and

IF may be encoded either with (generally) pre-clausal elements that have

been borrowed from Farsi and sometimes into Farsi from Arabic or (more

frequently) with verb-final enclitics that are not borrowed items and in

many cases are inherited from earlier stages of Turkic. For instance, Kornfilt

(1997) discusses the conditional in Turkish extensively in her grammar,

but all her sentential examples use the conditional mood of the verb, not

the borrowed conditional particle that may be used with it.

7. On the presence of blends in the data set

Perusal of the tables will indicate that there are several concepts or gloss

items among the conjunctions and other function words that are readily


expressed in some languages either by a borrowed or a non-borrowed form,

even if the scope of the applicability of these two sets of forms may not

always be identical. But some forms in the data set occupy an ambiguous

historical position, because they are blends or ‘‘loan-blends.’’ These are

combinations of inherited and borrowed elements that have arisen within

the language itself, but represent the transfer of a previously unfamiliar

pattern into the recipient language. This is the case, for example, with

Kildin Saami nıdtse ‘also,’ a form that reflects the Saami demonstrative

stem ni- combined with the borrowed Russian enclitic -ze in an imitation

or translation of Russian toze ‘also’, where the first part reflects Russian

to- ‘‘that’’.

Some of the conjunctions used in the languages in this sample are not

blends as such, because the elements can exist separately, but rather are

compound words involving the use of a borrowed item together with a

non-borrowed item, in languages where both items can exist separately.

Two Tagalog forms for ‘but,’ subali’t and nguni’t, are examples of this,

since in each case the second element is an abbreviated form of at ‘and,’

a conjunction borrowed from Kapampangan, the original language of

much of the area in southern Luzon where Tagalog is now used. (Nguni

on its own can mean ‘but, on the other hand’; subali alone means ‘reserva-

tion, objection’). Other mixed compounds include the English form in order

to, while because is originally by cause of (itself a calque on French a cause

de; cause in French is itself a cultism from Latin causa, the inherited form is

chose ‘thing’).

The form for the dependent adverbial clause marker ‘when’ in Garifuna

is especially interesting from the point of view of language contact and

especially of the transfer of fabric, as it combines three borrowed elements

(two of them, dan, and le, a form with its origins in the French l’heure ‘the

hour’ [sc. ‘when’], come from Antillean Creole French da ‘in’ and le ‘time,

when’ and another one, me, from Kari’na/Carib). These are used together

to construct a combination that is an innovation in the language and has

no direct parallel in Kari’na or any form of French.

8. Are there hierarchies of borrowing of coordinating and

subordinating conjunctions?

There is much borrowing of discourse markers, Wackernagel particles, co-

ordinating and subordinating conjunctions in many of the world’s languages.

All the concepts surveyed in the data set are expressed by a borrowed form


in at least one of the languages examined, and any language in the data set

that has borrowed a coordinating conjunction has borrowed at least one

subordinating conjunction as well. An examination of the borrowed co-

ordinating and subordinating conjunctions exemplified and discussed in

the data shows that there are tendencies but not universals in patterns of

borrowing among and within various groups of dependent clause markers.

This is only to be expected.

Hierarchies exist among coordinating conjunctions in regard to the like-

lihood with which they will be borrowed, as Matras (1998) demonstrates,

showing that if borrowing occurs then a form meaning BUT is likely to

be borrowed before a form meaning OR, which is in turn likely to be

borrowed before AND. But these hierarchies are not universally applicable

in a Greenbergian sense of ‘‘universal’’, because there are counterexamples

(indeed there were with many of Greenberg’s universals: Campbell, Bubenik

and Saxon 1988). The same is true of the hierarchy of borrowing sub-

ordinating conjunctions both across and within the various groups of

such conjunctions that can be distinguished (complementizers, relativizers,

and di¤erent kinds of adverbial clause markers: causal, concessive, con-

ditional, resultative, purpose, temporal markers, and so on). There are

apparent tendencies in borrowing, but when we try to claim that they are

exceptionless (with the quite bold suggestion that they therefore indicate

something to us about the workings of human cognition and of language

processing), we find that this is not so.

The case of borrowing patterns in Livonian coordinating and subordi-

nating conjunctions is especially interesting here. Livonian has borrowed

very heavily from Latvian, and Latvian has in its turn borrowed (though

less heavily) from Livonian (Kettunen 1938: 600–616 lists about 265 such

loans in that direction as compared with over 3000 loans that have gone

from Latvian to Livonian). Livonian also contains loans from German

(especially from Middle Low German) and latterly from Russian. The Low

German loans are largely shared with Latvian, and also to some extent with

Estonian. But the Livonian loans into Latvian include a number of ‘‘basic’’

elements, including some adverbs, particles, and common verbs, and even

the noun meaning ‘house’ (ma #ja, meaning ‘estate’ in Livonian).

Now Livonian (especially Salis Livonian) and modern Latvian share

the same words for AND, BUT, OR, but since the two languages are un-

related genetically some borrowing must have taken place somewhere.

‘And,’ un, is a loan from Low German un, and we may compare modern

High German und; Lithuanian, the other modern Baltic language (and

one that has not borrowed from Livonian), uses ir. ‘But’ is expressed in


both Livonian and Latvian by bet, which is also used in Lithuanian and

which coincidentally looks like the English form, but is actually a Baltic

development of a form of the verb ‘to be.’ Salis Livonian has vaj for ‘or’

and modern Latvian has vai; this form is evidently a loan from Livonian

to Latvian since Lithuanian has a di¤erent form for ‘or,’ namely ar, while

Estonian has the related form voi which is cognate with the Livonian

form. Similarly Finnish and Estonian have used an old borrowing, ja

from Proto-Germanic ‘indeed’ (cf. Gothic jah) for ‘and,’ but Finnish, for

instance, employs home-grown terms for BUT (mutta; Estonian uses aga,

kuid ) and OR (tai; recall Estonian voi), and Finnish subordinating con-

junctions are not borrowed forms. But in the case of subordinating con-

junctions Livonian either uses native forms or else employs forms based

on Latvian models, apart from taking over the Latvian loan laz ‘in order

to’ and developing the Latvian-Livonian blend laz kil meaning ‘although.’

Looking further afield, we can see that Garifuna has preserved an original

form for OR but uses loans for AND and BUT on those occasions when

they are expressed overtly. Data from Yiddish may be of interest here too.

The forms in the table above for Standard (Eastern) Yiddish include ele-

ments from German (including some forms that are obsolete in modern

German such as nayert ‘but’), Hebrew and Aramaic, and West Slavic.

However, these source languages cannot be apportioned out smoothly ac-

cording to any functional or structural criteria. For example, dependent

clause markers in Yiddish may be German (ven ‘when,’ vorem ‘because,’ az

‘if,’ oyb ‘if, whether’), Slavic (khotsh ‘although,’ abi ‘as long as’) or Hebrew-

Aramaic (eyder ‘before,’ kedey tsu ‘in order to,’ kol-zman10 and beys, both

meaning ‘while,’ mekhutsn ‘except that’). We cannot come up with hard and

fast rules that state that (say) in Yiddish the temporal or causal adverbial

clause markers must all come from one particular source. We can find

tendencies in borrowing, but we will not find inviolable hierarchies.

This is certainly true of discourse markers. Using a corpus of Texas

German amounting to 305,429 tokens Boas and Weilbacher (2006, 2007)

show that the principle whereby discourse markers are especially prone to

borrowing is not universal. They demonstrate that Matras’ 1998 universals

find counterexceptions in the discourse markers of Texas German. These

are continued from German (Boas and Weilbacher illustrate that eben,

halt, doch, mal and ja account for 532 tokens in the corpus above) even

10. In Hebrew this phrase literally means ‘all (the) time,’ the second part beinga loan into Hebrew from Akkadian, by way of Old Persian and Aramaic(Mankowski 2000: 54–55).


though Texas German dialects have been in contact with English for

several generations and have borrowed considerably from it.

9. Conclusions: are the postulated borrowing hypotheses

confirmed or refuted?

The picture of borrowing among discourse markers, phasal adverbs, and

coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, involves transfer of fabric

and transfer of pattern – the two basic components of contact-induced

change – from donor to recipient languages, often with fabric and pattern

being transferred together within a single word. (The two transfer types

are of course far from being mutually exclusive.) The e¤ects of contact-

induced change here are certainly extensive, as one can see from examining

the many fascinating contributions among the chapters in Matras and Sakel

(eds. 2007). Yet the picture of borrowing is not as smooth as one might

imagine. Few languages show a clean sweep of borrowed function words

in the realms surveyed: few of the languages examined have borrowed all

their subordinating conjunctions, for instance. It is also the case that the

patterns of borrowing in those languages for which we may assume we

have full or fairly full data for the presence of both borrowed and non-

borrowed elements do not align perfectly from one language to another.

As far as we can tell from earlier forms of the language or from related

languages, few languages in the sample surveyed seem to have borrowed

coordinating or subordinating conjunctions simply because they previously

lacked such forms in their structure and were therefore inspired to acquire

conjunctions as a result of intensive contact with speakers of languages

that used conjunctions and served as donor languages to these recipient

languages. Those languages to have done so have seen these features of

their syntax converge more closely toward the syntax of the languages

that (presumably) had more prestige than did the recipient languages.

The results have been considerable in their scope, but even they have

been restricted. For instance, the work by Wald (2001) shows that Swahili

has similarly added some conjunctions, such as kama ‘if ’ as an optional

extra to the form of preexisting conditional constructions, though condi-

tional verbal markers such as the infixal morpheme -nge- are still obligatory

in such constructions. Cochabamba Quechua seems to exhibit a similar

state of a¤airs; there double-marking of subordinating constructions is

commoner than the complete replacement of one subordination strategy

by another, and subordinating strategies that involve the use of verbal


morphology have been especially stable, even if they have been faced with

rival strategies involving extrinsic double marking of the means of subor-

dination. This enables the speakers of a language to present or recreate the

semblance of isomorphism with the syntactic structures in a more presti-

gious language, while simultaneously retaining the structural features that

their language used before it came into contact with Spanish.

In formulating my conclusions and generalizations about borrowing, it

has not been my deliberate intention, here or elsewhere, to exaggerate or

overplay (or indeed to underplay) the number and proportion of borrowed

forms in any language included in the sample.

The main trends in regard to borrowing are as follows:

1. Borrowing of function words among the languages in the sample is

widespread in all the categories discussed, and indeed all categories

and all the items among the function words discussed and exemplified

exhibit borrowing in at least one of the languages surveyed, although

it occurs least with relative clause markers and is fairly infrequent

with complementizers.

2. There are 92 instances of borrowing among the nine dependent clause

markers which are examined in the dataset compared with 52 instances

among the coordinating conjunctions expressing ‘and, but, or’ and 61

instances among the six phasal adverbs and discourse markers sampled.

Some slots contain two or more items, while 25 slots are empty.

3. The degree of borrowing of these forms ranges from 3/18 in Tetun

Dili to 14/18 in Chamorro, while the degree of borrowing of original

forms ranges from 1 case of borrowing relative clause markers out of

22, to 19/22 for BUT.

4. If a language has borrowed a coordinating conjunction it will (almost

certainly) have borrowed at least one subordinating conjunction or

dependent clause marker as well. (There are no exceptions to this

principle in this data set.)

5. Less frequently used dependent clause markers seem to be borrowed

more readily than forms such as IF and BECAUSE, which can be con-

sidered to be more basic inasmuch as these are ‘prototypical’ markers

of their kinds of dependent clauses (conditional and causal respectively).

6. Dependent clause markers are almost as likely to be borrowed as

coordinating conjunctions, phasal adverbs, and discourse markers are.

7. Examination of the borrowing patterns in the tables suggest that the

potency of the scales developed in Matras (1998) could be stronger;

there are counterexamples in each category, and the case against lexical

items being borrowed last is especially questionable.


8. General implicational hierarchies of probability of borrowing can be

set up, but there are counterexamples to all of them, and we are better

o¤ thinking that they operate in terms of tendencies.

9. There does not seem to be any especially close relationship or correla-

tion between the particular source language (eg. Spanish) and the degree

of borrowing of these items.

10. Many languages also have other strategies at their disposal in addition

to using borrowed markers in order to express a particular structural

concept.

11. The degree and length of contact11 (including the amount of active or

passive bilingualism) between the donor and recipient languages is not

the only factor to a¤ect borrowing (some probably important factors

such as the attitude of speakers of the recipient language to that of the

donor language, or the degree of knowledge of and literacy in the

donor language – an important factor in the case of Yiddish – may

be more di‰cult to discover or calibrate). Not all the heavy borrowing

languages in the sample are still in contact with the source language(s)

of their borrowed dependent clause markers.

12. Borrowing of dependent clause markers that were themselves borrowed

from another language (for example languages that borrowed Spanish

hasta ‘until,’ itself a loan from Arabic ¡atta) seems to be especially

frequent.

13. Many languages express certain dependent clause relationships by

using inherited conjunctions or other words whose original senses have

been expanded (transfer of pattern) as a result of contact with lan-

guages from which they have also borrowed conjunctions or adverbs

(transfer of fabric; Grant, 2002 etc.). Discourse markers also often

come to be used secondarily as certain kinds of conjunctions, includ-

ing subordinating conjunctions.

14. The degree of borrowing of dependent clause markers shows only a

weak correlation with the degree of borrowing of allolexical material

into the basic lexicon of the borrowing language.

15. The case studies above usually illustrate the borrowing of dependent

clause and other markers from adstrate languages with which speakers

11. We simply do not always know how long a donor and recipient language havebeen in contact in each of the cases, though, for instance, material in Taylor(1977) shows that Antillean Creole French was able to exert considerableinfluence on Belizean Garifuna even though speakers of the two languageswere in contact for under 200 years (c. 1635–1798).


of the languages discussed above (or their ancestors) usually came into

direct contact. An exception would be the items of Kapampangan origin

in Tagalog, as much of what was once Kapampangan territory now

speaks Tagalog.12

16. The amount and degree of borrowing of dependent clause markers and

other function words is severely underrepresented in the tables above

for many languages because of the lack of information available on

the means of expression of a number of constructions in some of the

languages. This dearth of information is especially acute in the case

of data on types of temporal adverbial dependent clauses, and this

is something to which linguists concerned with comprehensiveness of

language descriptions should give keen attention to documenting.13

In regard to the interrelationships and patterns of borrowing involving

AND, OR, and BUT, Matras’ claims about the borrowing sequence

BUT > OR > AND stand up quite well but are not universally applica-

ble, as there are other patterns exhibited in these data and elsewhere. One

finds exceptions to this allegedly universal hierarchy in Ifira-Mele, Livonian,

and Garifuna, for instance (and indeed in Finnish and Estonian), in all of

which the form meaning AND is borrowed while OR is inherited. What

works as a linguistic universal for the Near East may be less applicable

in the eastern Baltic, the western Caribbean, or Vanuatu. Meanwhile in

Tagalog, although the usual forms for AND, BUT, and OR are all bor-

rowed, the form for AND is probably (and paradoxically) the oldest borrow-

ing of the lot, as it is taken from Kapampangan, the indigenous language

of much of the area where Tagalog is now used. Yet Tagalog has not

borrowed discourse markers or Wackernagel particles, though Chamorro,

which has also been inundated with Spanish linguistic material, has borrowed

some of these. The quest for universals of borrowing is far from over.

12. Other speech varieties may incorporate dependent clause markers, discoursemarkers, et cetera from substrate languages, or from languages which speakersacquired first but later used less frequently than their second but dominanteveryday language. This is for instance the case with the use of forms such asnu ‘well. . . .’, from Yiddish, in some forms of Jewish English (a usage madefamiliar to the outgroup, for instance, in Rosten 1971)

13. Indeed, there is the danger that the amount of borrowing of conjunctionsin some languages has been overplayed in the literature on some of thelanguages, to the detriment of the documentation and representation of non-borrowed conjunctions with similar senses or other function words.


Abbreviations

abs Absolutive

comit Comitative

comp Complementizer

fut Future

pl Plural

pres Present

pret Preterite

ptcp Participle

rel Relativizer

sg Singular

1, 2, 3 First, second, and third person.

References

Baran, D. 2000. The role of Russian function words in urban colloquial Uzbek. In

Proceedings from the Eighth Annual Symposium about Language and Society.

Austin: Texas Linguistic Forum 44.1: 18–32.

Boas, F. 1930. Spanish elements in modern Nahuatl. In Todd Memorial Volumes,

Philological Papers I, J. D. Fitz-Gerald and P. Taylor (eds), 85–89. New York:

Columbia University Press.

Boas, H. C. and Weilbacher, H. 2006. The unexpected survival of German dis-

course markers in Texas German. Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society

42: Main session, edited by Jacqueline Bunting, Sapna Desai, Robert Peachey,

Christopher Straughn, uzana Tomkova, 1–15. Chicago: Chicago Linguistics

Society.

Boas, H. C. & Weilbacher, H. 2007 How Universal Is the Pragmatic Detachability

Scale? Evidence from Texas German Discourse Markers. The Proceedings of

the Texas Linguistic Society IX Conference, 2005, edited by Frederick Hoyt,

Nikki Seifert, Alexandra Teodorescu and Jessica White, 33–58. Stanford: CSLI

Boretzky, N. 1994. Romani: Grammatik des Kalderas-Dialekts mit Texten and

Glossar. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Brody, J. 1987. Particles borrowed from Spanish as discourse markers into Mayan

languages. Anthropological Linguistics 29: 507–521.

Brody, J. 1993. Borrowing the ‘unborrowable’: Spanish discourse markers in in-

digenous American languages. In Spanish in Four Continents, C. Silva-Corvalan

(ed.), 132–147. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

Burrus, E. J. 1954. Sanvitores’ Grammar and Catechism in the Mariana Language.

Anthropos 49: 934–960.


Campbell, L. 1985. The Pipil Language of El Salvador. The Hague: Mouton

(Mouton Grammar Library 1).

Campbell, L. 1987. Syntactic change in Pipil. International Journal of American


Campbell, L., V, Bubenik and L. Saxon. 1988. Word order universals: refinements

and clarifications. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 33: 209–230.

Capell, A. 1942. Notes on the language of Fila, New Hebrides. Journal of the

Polynesian Society 51: 153–180.

Cayetano, E. R. (ed.) 1993. The People’s Garifuna Dictionary. Dangriga, Belize:

The National Garifuna Council of Belize.

Clark, D. R. 1998. A Dictionary of the Mele Language (Atara Mele). Canberra:

Pacific Linguistics C-149.

Cowan, H. K. J. 1981. A sketch of Achehnese phonology and morphology. Bulle-

tin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 44: 522–549.

Dahl, O. 1985. Tense and Aspect Systems. Oxford: Blackwell.

De Reuse, W. J. 1994. Siberian Yupik Eskimo: The Language and its Contacts with

Chukchi. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

Daud, B. and Durie, M. 1999. Kamus Basa Aceh, Canberra: Pacific Linguistics C-

151.

Dawkins, R. M. 1916. Modern Greek in Asia Minor. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press.

De Sivers, F. 2001. Parlons live. Paris: L’Harmattan.

Deutscher, G. 2000. Syntactic Change in Akkadian. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Diessel, H. 2001. The ordering distribution of main and adverbial clauses: a typo-

logical study. Language 77: 345–365.

Diessel, H. 2004. The Acquisition of Complex Sentences. [Cambridge Studies in

Linguistics 105]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Diessel, H. 2005. Competing motivations for the ordering of main and adverbial

clauses. Linguistics 43: 449–470.

Escure, G. 2005. Garifuna in Honduras and Belize. In Creoles, Contact and Lan-

guage Change, A. Schwegler and G. Escure (eds), 35–65. Amsterdam: John

Benjamins.

Field, F.W. 2002. Linguistic Borrowing in Bilingual Contexts. Amsterdam: John

Benjamins.

Gjerdman, O. and Ljungberg, E. 1964. The language of the Swedish Coppersmith

Gipsy Johan Dimitri Taikon. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell.

Grant, A. P. 2002. Fabric, pattern, shift and di¤usion: what Oregon Penutian can

tell the historical linguist. In Proceedings of the Meeting of the Hokan-Penutian

Workshop, June 17–18, 2000, University of California at Berkeley, L. Buszard-

Welcher (ed.). Report 11, Survey of California and Other Indian Languages,

33–56. Department of Linguistics, University of California at Berkeley. [Written-

up version of a paper presented on June 17 2000.]


Grant, A. P. 2006. Correlations in some heavy borrowing languages: the Swadesh

list and beyond. Paper presented to the Departmental Seminar, Department of

Linguistics, Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 26 September

2006.

Heath, J. 1984. Language contact and language change. Annual Review of Anthro-

pology, 367–384.

Heine, B. and Kuteva, T. 2002. World Lexicon of Grammaticalisation. Cambridge:


Hekking, E. and Muysken, P. 1995. Otomı y Quechua: una comparacion de los

elementos gramaticales prestados del espanol. In Lenguas en contacto en His-

panoamerica, K. Zimmermann (ed.), 101–118. Frankfurt: Vervuert.

Hill, K. C. and Hill, J. H. 1986. Speaking Mexicano: the Dynamics of Syncretic

Language in Central Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Hout, R. van and Muysken, P. 1994. Modeling lexical borrowability. Language

Variation and Change 6: 39–62.

Jacobs, N. G. 2005. Yiddish: a Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Jastrow, O. 1992. Lehrbuch der Turoyo-Sprache. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.

Johanson, L. 1993. Typen turkischer Kausalsatzverbindungen. Journal of Turkology

(Szeged) 2: 213–267.

Johanson, L. 2002. Structural Factors in Turkic Language Contacts. London:

Curzon.

Karttunen, F. and Lockhart, J. 1976. Nahuatl in the Middle Years: Language Con-

tact Phenomena in Texts of the Colonial Period. University of California Publi-

cations in Linguistics 85. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California

Press.

Kert, G. M. 1968. Saamskij jazyk. Jazyki naroidov SSSR 3: 155–175. Moscow:

Nauka.

Kert, G. M. 1971. Saamskyj jazyk (kil’dinskij dialect). Moscow: Nauka.

Kesisoglou, I. I. 1951. To glossiko idioma tou Oulagats. Athens: Collection de

l’Institut Francais d’Athenes.

Kettunen, L. 1938. Livisches Worterbuch mit grammatischer Einleitung. Helsinki:

Suomen Ugrilainen Seura.

Kortmann, B. 2001. Adverbial Conjunctions. In Language Typology and Lan-

guage Universals, M. Haspelmath, E. Konig, W. Oesterreicher, and W. Raible


Laoust, E. 1931. Siwa I: son parler. Paris: Ernest Leroux.

Lastra, Y. 1968. Cochabamba Quechua syntax. The Hague: Mouton.

Leech, G. N., Rayson, P., and Wilson, A. 2001. Word Frequencies in Written and

Spoken English. London: Pearson.

Lewis, G. L. 1967. Turkish Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Lewis, G. L. 1999. The Turkish Language Reform: a Catastrophic Success. Oxford:



Macri, M. J. and Looper, M. G. 2003. Nahua in ancient Mesoamerica: evidence

from Maya inscriptions. Ancient Mesoamerica 14: 285–297.

Mankowski, P. V. 2000. Akkadian Loanwords in Biblical Hebrew. Winona Lake:

Eisenbrauns.

Matras, Y. 1998. Utterance modifiers and universals of grammatical borrowing.


Matras, Y. 2000a. Fusion and the cognitive basis for bilingual discourse markers.

International Journal of Bilingualism 4: 505–528.

Matras, Y. 2000b. How predictable is contact-induced change in grammar? In

Time Depth in Historical Linguistics, C. Renfrew, R. L. Trask, and A. M. S.

McMahon (eds), 563–583. Cambridge: McDonald Institute.

Matras, Y., and Sakel, J. 2007. Investigating the mechanisms of pattern replica-

tion in language convergence. Studies in Language 31, 829–865.

Matras, Y. and Sakel, J., eds., 2007. Grammatical borrowing in cross-linguistic per-

spective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Menovshchikov, G. A. 1969. O nekotoryx social’nyx aspektax evoljucii jazyka. In

Voprosy social’noj lingvistiki, 110–134. Leningrad: Nauka.

Miyaoka, O. 1997. Sketch of Central Alaskan Yupik. Handbook of North Ameri-

can Indians volume 17: Languages, I. Goddard (ed.), 325–363. Washington:

Smithsonian Institution.

Moseley, C. 2002. Livonian. Munich: Lincom Europa.

Muysken, P. C. 2001. Spanish grammatical elements in Bolivian Quechua: the

‘Transcripciones Quechuas Corpus.’ In El propio y lo ajeno en las lenguas

austronesicas y amerindias: Procesos interculturales en el contacto de lenguas

indıgenas con el el espanol en el Pacıfico e Hispanoamerica, K. Zimmermann

(ed.), 55–82. Frankfurt: Vervuert.

Posner, R. 1966. The Romance Languages. New York: Anchor.

Riessler, M. 2007. Grammatical borrowing in Kildin Saami. In Grammatical Borrow-

ing in Cross-linguistic Perspective, Y. Matras and J. Sakel (eds), 229–244. Berlin:

Mouton de Gruyter

Ross, M. 1996. Contact-induced change and the comparative method: cases from

Papua New Guinea. In The Comparative Method Reviewed, M. Durie and M.

Ross (eds), 180–217. New York: Academic Press.

Rosten, L. C. 1971. The Joys of Yiddish. London: Penguin.

Rubino, C. R. G. 1998. Hippocrene Tagalog English-English Tagalog (Pilipino)

Dictionary. New York: Hippocrene.

Perrott, D. V. revised by Russell, J. C. 2002. Teach Yourself Swahili Dictionary.

London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Salmons, J. 1990. Bilingual discourse marking: code-switching, borrowing and

convergence in some German-American dialects. Linguistics 29, 453–480.

Sampson, J. 1926. The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Schmidt, R. L. 1999. Urdu: an Essential Grammar. London: Routledge.


Shahani, A. T. n.d. (c. 1940). The Pocket English-Hindustani Dictionary. Karachi:

Educational Publication Company.

Shopen, T. (ed.). 2007. Language Typology and Syntactic Description, 3 vol.


Sjogren, A. J. 1861a. Livische Grammatik nebst Sprachproben. Gesammelte Schriften

Bd 2, hrsg. v. F. J. Wiedemann. Imperatorskaja Akademija Nauk. St. Petersburg:

Eggers.

Sjogren, A. J. 1861b. Livisch-deutsches und deutsch-livisches Worterbuch, hrsg. v.

F. J. Wiedemann. Imperatorskaja Akademija Nauk. St. Petersburg: Eggers.

Souag, M. L. 2010. Grammatical contact in the Sahara. PhD Dissertation, School

of Oriental and African Studies.

Staden, M. van. 1999. Where does Malay end and Tidore begin? In Perspectives

on the Bird’s Head of Irian Jaya, Indonesia, J. Miedema, C. Ode, and R. A. C.

Dam (eds), 691–716. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Staden, M. van. 2000. Tidore: a linguistic description of a language of the North

Moluccas. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam.

Stolz, C. and Stolz, T. 1997. Universelle Hispanismen? Von Manila uber Lima bis

Mexiko und zuruck: Muster bei der Entlehnung spanischer Funktionsworter in

die indigenen Sprachen Amerikas und Austronesiens. Orbis 39: 1–77.

Stolz, T. 2002. General linguistic aspects of Spanish-indigenous language contacts

with special focus on Austronesia. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (Liverpool) 79:

133–158.

Suarez, J. A. 1977. La influencia del espanol en la estructura gramatical del nahuatl.

Anuario de Letras 15: 115–164.

Suarez, J. A. 1983. The Mesoamerican Indian Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Suvca#ne, V. and Ernstrieite, I. 1999. Latvian-Livonian-English Phrasebook. Available

at: http://www.eraksti.lv/R013.php?gid=86.

Taylor, D. M. 1958. Island Carib IV: Syntactic notes and texts. International Journal

of American Linguistics 24: 16–40.

Taylor, D. M. 1977. Languages of the West Indies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-

versity Press.


Genetic Linguistics. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Thompson, S. A., Longacre, R. E., and Hwang, S. J. J. 2007. Adverbial clauses.

In T. Shopen (ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description 2: 237–300.


Topping, D. M. with Dungca, B. C. 1973. Chamorro Reference Grammar. Honolulu:

PALI.

Torres, L. 2006. Bilingual discourse markers in indigenous languages. International

Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 9: 615–624.

Vaari, E. E. 1968. Livskij jazyk. In Jazyki narodov SSSR 3: 138–154. Moscow:

Nauka.


Vycichl, W. 2005. Berberstudien and a Sketch of Siwi Berber. (edited by Kossmann,

M. and Ibriszimow, D.). Cologne: Rudiger Koppe.

Wald, B. 2001. Substratal and superstratal influences of the evolution of Swahili

syntax: Central East Coast Bantu and Arabic. In Historical Language Contact

in Africa, D. Nurse (ed.), 455–522. (Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika 16/17).

Cologne: Rudiger Koppe.

Williams-van Klinken, C. L., Hajek, J., and Nordlinger, R. 2002. A short Grammar

of Tetun Dili. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics 520.

Zheng Yiqing. 1997. Huihui Yu Yanjiu. Shanghai: Yuandong Chuban She.

URLs:Oxford English Dictionary online. www.oed.com. Accessed June 21 2011.

Turkish word frequency list at http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:

Frequency_lists. Accessed June 21 2011.

Lord’s Prayer/Paternoster: www.christusrex.org, accessed June 8 2011.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights: www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/,

accessed June 8 2011.


On a Latin-Greek diachronic convergence: the perfectswith Latin habeo /Greek echo # and a participle*

Carla Bruno

Que avoir soit un auxiliaire au meme titre que etre,c’est la quelque chose d’etrange[That to have is an auxiliary with the same status asto be is a very strange thing]

E. Benveniste (1966: 193)

1. Introduction

In their diachronic evolution, Latin and Ancient Greek show a number

of apparently parallel linguistic innovations crucially characterizing their

progression to modern stages, with the result that Romance languages

and Modern Greek may display analogies lacking in their oldest documen-

tations (cf., e.g., Horrocks 1997: 73¤ for a survey of some possible areas of

convergence).

Independent parallel developments are not unusual in genetically related

languages like Latin and Greek. However, in view of the early and close

contacts between Romans and Greeks, various attempts have been made

to trace some of the similarities observed back to influences exerted by

each language on the other.

As a result of immigration from Southern Italy and trade contacts, the

presence of the Greek language in Rome dates back to the eighth century

BCE, but it is especially from the third century BCE onwards that it

became particularly pervasive, when, besides being spoken by native

speakers (especially among the slave population), it spread among upper-

class Romans as a second cultural language.1 By this time, Greece had

* This study was developed within the Italian national project Livelli di analisinell’evoluzione delle lingue indoeuropee co-financed by the MUR. My warmestthanks to Marina Benedetti – directly involved in the initial stages of thisstudy – for fruitful discussions and suggestions, and to Ignazio Mirto forvaluable comments on a previous version of the paper.

1. For a discussion of slavery as an ‘‘influential institution’’ in the spread ofGreek among Romans, see Adams (2003: 761). The spread of Greek amongthe Roman upper classes is well documented by direct testimonies of many

become part of the Roman world and Latin was imposed on the Greeks as

the language of administration and bureaucracy (cf., e.g., Adams 2003: 757

for a discussion of Roman language policies in Greece and Dubuisson 1992:

95 for testimonies of the familiarity of upper-class Greeks with Latin). Sub-

sequently, within a few centuries, the spread of Christianity was to supply

further scenarios for possible linguistic interactions, such as the translation

of the Gospels from Greek into Latin (its role in the development of Latin,

e.g., was assumed by Norden 1898: 610 as ‘‘ein bedeutsames Ingrediens

des sog. Vulgarlateins [a significant ingredient of the so-called Vulgar

Latin]’’).

It is in the context of such intricate and enduring socio-cultural relations –

here only briefly outlined – that it has actually been possible to infer a

bidirectional channel of influence, both of Greek on Latin and of Latin

on Greek.2

For instance, apparent convergences in the renewal of respective tense-

aspectual systems have been variously ascribed to a close Latin-Greek

interaction, such as the progressive merger of inherited aorist and perfect

stems in Greek, parallel to Latin, where already in a pre-documentary stage

the two stems merged in the perfectum (see for example Dubuisson 1985:

243),3 and the emergence of new (analytical) forms alongside the perfectum

in Late Latin, possibly due to the example of the Greek dichotomy between

perfect and aorist (see among others Pisani 1981).

As a matter of fact, pre-existing structural similarities resulting from

the genetic relationship may have favored mutual shifts of linguistic fea-

tures as well as their subsequent integration on many occasions of contact,

intellectuals such as Cicero in Tusc., 1.15: ‘‘dicam si potero Latine. scis enimme Graece loqui in Latino sermone non plus solere quam in Graeco Latine’’(‘‘I will tell you if I can in Latin; for you know I am no more used to bring inLatin sentences in a Greek discourse than Greek in a Latin one’’, transl. C. D.Yonge).

2. See e.g. Coleman (1977), who particularly emphasizes the influence of theGreek community in Rome on Latin. The vicissitudes of the Greek-Latin con-tacts and their linguistic consequences are at the center of a rich literature, thediscussion of which is beyond the scope of this paper; see among others Kaimio(1979); Coleman (1977); Dubuisson (1992); Horrocks (1997); Adams (2003).

3. Some, such as Horrocks (1997: 77), are more skeptical about it: ‘‘there is . . .little reason to see here any particular impact of the Latin perfect in general. . . ,other than as providing a general external stimulus to the Greek trends alreadyunder way.’’

360 Carla Bruno

so that even when external influence is likely, its very direction could be

crucially at issue, as in the case discussed in the following pages.4

Both Romance language varieties and Modern Greek include within

their verb system periphrastic perfects consisting of a so-called ‘‘possessive’’

verb form (derived, respectively, from Lat. habeo and Gr. echo#) and a

‘‘passive’’ perfect participle (derived, respectively, from Lat. -tus and

Gr. -menos forms) which, under appropriate conditions, may agree with

a direct object. It is generally acknowledged that these participles do

not relate only to the passive; therefore, in the following pages, the label

‘‘passive’’ is marked by double inverted commas whenever referred to

these forms.

As the following examples show, these periphrastic constructions, re-

gularly appearing in transitive structures in both Romance languages

(example 1 with Italian data) and Modern Greek (example 2), contrast

with others, in the passive, featuring a di¤erent pattern of auxiliation and

participle agreement. Note that the contrast between transitive and passive

structures is taken to illustrate the contexts in which the two classes of

auxiliaries are opposed in Romance languages, where (as is well known)

their distribution is subject to variation (see e.g. La Fauci [1988] 1994 for

an overview).

(1) a. ho scritto la lettera

have.prs.1sg write-pst.pass.ptcp the letter

‘I have written the letter.’

b. la lettera e stata scritta

the letter is been write-pst.pass.ptcp-f.sg

‘The letter has been written.’

(2) a. echo # grammeno to gramma

have.prs-1sg write-pst.pass.ptcp the letter


b. to gramma einai grammeno5

the letter is write-pst.pass.ptcp-n.sg


4. Cf. Vogt (1949: 38), who, while excluding interference between languages thatare structurally unrelated, considers Indo-European languages as unsuitablefor contact studies.

5. Notice that, in the passive, Modern Greek di¤ers from Romance (i.e. Italian)in excluding over-composed forms. Cf. La Fauci (2000) on composed andover-composed forms in Italian passive structures.

On a Latin-Greek diachronic convergence 361

More than once, in literature, habeo perfects have been traced back to a

Latin calque from Ancient Greek, particularly insisting on the generally

undervalued influence of the Greek language on spoken Latin registers

and, consequently, on Romance developments (Bonfante 1960; Coseriu

1971; Pisani 1981; but also Pasquali 1927: 245 who, suggestively, com-

pares Greek to ‘‘il lievito nella formazione e nello svolgimento del latino

della conversazione [the leavening of the formation and the development

of spoken Latin]’’. Still, no convincing antecedents of the Gr. echo # gram-

meno type are actually found in Ancient Greek, and consequently on the

basis of this hypothesis, their vitality in Greek speech is merely inferred on

the basis of the occurrence of their Latin correlates in the works of Plautus

and Petronius, so steeped in Graecisms (see particularly Coseriu 1971).

Conversely, the late documentation of the structure in Greek, where it

particularly occurs in authors prone to Latinisms such as Diodorus Siculus

or Plutarch, is crucial for claiming its Latin source in Greek (see among

others Horrocks 1997).6 Finally, some, such as Coleman (1977), excluding

an external explanation, have argued the possibility of parallel develop-

ments from similar structural premises.

Though far from being exhaustive on such a controversial issue, which

has recently been discussed in a typological framework by Drinka 2007,

this article aims to o¤er a contrastive description of the structural circum-

stances accompanying the rise of Latin habeo and Greek echo# perfectiveconstructions within each respective language, in order to evaluate a

possible external influence (and its direction) only considering the degree

of integration of the feature in each system. Such an approach is based

on the idea conveyed by Jakobson (1938: 54) that ‘‘la langue n’accepte

des elements de structures etrangeres que quand ils correspondent a ses

tendances de developpement [languages accept only alien structural features

that agree with their inner evolutional trends]’’, from which this paper

draws its inspiration.

2. Rise of Lat. habeo/Gr. echo # perfects: a basic outline

2.1. Preliminary considerations

Since their oldest documentation, both Latin and Greek have employed

structures in which the Lat. -tus and Gr. -menos perfect participles, both

6. ‘‘This is a wholly unclassical construction which begins to appear in the morepolished ‘literary’ registers . . . in the Roman period. It is not used by theAtticists . . . and it does not appear in low-literary or subliterary texts’’ (Horrocks1997: 77).

362 Carla Bruno

middle-oriented, are respectively supported by a form of the verb sum in

Latin and eimı in Ancient Greek (both featuring the Indo-European root

*h1es-).7 Their usage – as in the case of the modern correlates cited above

in (1b) and (2b) – appears invariably confined to middle structures such as

the ones following in (3) and (4):8

(3) Plaut., Amph., 418

quid Amphitruoni a Telobois

what Amphitryon-dat.sg by Teleboan-abl.pl

datum est?

give-prf.pass.ptcp-nom.sg is

‘What was Amphitryon given by the Teleboans?’

(4) Hom. Il. 1, 388

e #peıle #sen muthon, ho de#threaten.aor-3sg word-acc.sg which now

tetelesmenos estı

accomplish.prf-md.ptcp-nom.sg is

‘He spoke a threatening word that has now been brought to pass.’

(A. T. Murray)

7. Functional notions such as middle and non-middle (i.e. active) are here takenfrom a syntactic point of view following La Fauci ([1988] 1994), who works ina framework mainly referable to Relational Grammar. Accordingly, clauses –taken as the outcome of interacting grammatical relations – are definablein terms of relational networks, which (in accordance with general laws andprinciples) may undergo alterations, which are conventionally formalized insequences of di¤erent syntactic levels (i.e. strata). In this respect ‘‘a contrastbetween middle and active is registered in any phenomenon (case marking,conjugation, agreement, word order) that distinguishes between. . . : (i) finalsubjects which bear the direct object relation in some stratum (i.e. final subjectof clauses containing a passive, an unaccusative initial stratum, a reflexive orreciprocal multiattachment, an antipassive etc.) and (ii) final subjects which donot bear the direct object relation in any stratum’’ (La Fauci [1988] 1994: 15).

8. That the Latin periphrastic conjugation was originally limited to perfect andmiddle structures is widely known (see 2.2 here below). It is also commonknowledge that in Greek the type was particularly used in Attic prose, espe-cially for modal stems, but – as variously pointed out, see e.g. Aerts (1965) –also the usage in the indicative appears quite common from early stages (par-ticularly in the third person both singular and plural).


In Latin as well as in Greek, therefore, constructions in which middle

oriented participles supported by a di¤erent verb form (Lat. habeo and

Gr. echo#) may occur in non-middle (that is, active) structures come across

as a basically innovative feature.9

On the other hand, both languages share those structural conditions –

specifically singled out in Latin by La Fauci (1997, 2005, 2006) – leading

up to the development of an auxiliary form here competing with sum and

eimı. In Latin as well as in Greek, this is the verb form that regularly

opposes sum and eimı in constructions such as the following.

(5) a. Cic., Fam., 6.7.5

in te mihi omnis spes est

in you-abl.sg I-dat.sg all-nom.sg hope-nom.sg is

‘My entire hope lies in you.’ (D. R. Shackleton Bailey)

b. Cic., Fam., 7.7.1

spem maximam habeo in Balbo

hope-acc.sg chief-acc.sg have.prs-1sg in Balbus-abl.sg

‘My greatest hope is in Balbus.’ (D. R. Shackleton Bailey)

(6) a. Hom., Il., 15.217

no #ın ane #kestos cholos estai

we.two-dat.du unappeasable-nom.sg wrath-nom.sg will be

‘Between us twain shall be wrath that naught can appease.’

(A. T. Murray)

b. h. Cer. 354

he d(e)’ ainon echei cholon

she ptc fearful-acc.sg have.prs-3sg wrath-acc.sg

‘Her wrath is dreadful.’ (M. L. West)

As shown by La Fauci (1997, 2005, 2006), structures like the ones contrast-

ing in a and b represent multi-predicative complexes, where a noun predi-

cate is supported by an auxiliary verb, whose lexical characterization –

9. There is a wide discussion – opened by the seminal Benveniste (1966) revisit-ing Meillet (1924) – on its emergence and di¤usion in western Indo-Europeanlanguages; see among others Isacenko (1974). See also Baldi and Cuzzolin(2005) for a survey of the di¤erent lexical forms to which the new auxiliarypattern – an areal (European) feature according to recent typological research(see among others Drinka 2003 and, more recently, Giacalone Ramat 2008) –can relate.

364 Carla Bruno

sum and eimı occurring in middle structures and habeo and echo# in non-

middle structures – is a matter of diathesis, with the result that the lexical

contrast of the auxiliary form here actually expresses a feature otherwise

incompatible with a noun predicate.10

Thus, before sharing the auxiliation of participles, sum and habeo in

Latin and eimı and echo # in Greek had already shared the auxiliation of

nouns (see La Fauci 1997, 2005, 2006 regarding Latin, and Benedetti and

Bruno forthcoming regarding Ancient Greek) in diathetically opposed

structures. Consequently, the growth both of Romance and Modern Greek

active periphrastic perfects can be traced back to a generalization of the

verb form originally opposing sum and eimı in auxiliating nouns, which ex-

tends to auxiliating participles (where sum and eimı were already allowed).

In view of this common structural background, the emergence of the

new active periphrastic perfects with habeo, in Latin, and echo #, in Greek,

appears as an option allowed in both languages.

Whether this circumstance leads up to parallel independent develop-

ments or linguistic interference will be evaluated in this section through a

specific consideration of the generalization of habeo (in 2.2) and echo# (in2.3) in the new contexts within the respective systems. Due to the intricacies

of these centuries-long diachronic processes, drastic simplifications will

obviously be adopted in order to single out those points particularly rele-

vant for our purposes, necessarily neglecting others.

2.2. Lat. habeo perfects

A perfective periphrastic conjugation is, in Latin, originally confined to

middle structures, and the development of active analytic perfects is com-

monly acknowledged as one of the phenomena crucially characterizing the

shift to Romance languages.11 The innovation is generally assumed to rest

upon the re-analysis of structures in which a perfect ‘‘passive’’ participle

-tus applies to a noun in the accusative case combining with habeo, as in

the one exemplified in the following passage:

10. It is here obviously assumed that, as well as verb forms, nominal items cancover the function of predicate in the clause. See Rosen (1987, 1990) for a pio-neering exploration of such a possibility and Blake (1990) for a basic outlineof this theory.

11. The phenomenon is amply documented and studied in depth under variousapproaches. Among a great many works, this short account basically takesup the considerations of La Fauci (1990, [1988] 1994, 1997, 2004, 2005, 2006).


(7) Plaut., Trin., 347

multa bona bene parta

many-acc.pl good-acc.pl well procure-prf.pass.ptcp-acc.pl

habemus

have.prs-1pl

‘We have many goods honestly obtained.’

A sequence like this – at a still undefined linguistic stage – may then

correspond to two di¤erent structures.12 In the former, the more ancient,

generally assumed as ‘‘possessive,’’ habeo and the participle pertain to

di¤erent predicative domains. In particular, the participle here covers a

predicative function only regarding the accusative noun (with which it

agrees), without any direct interaction with the subject of the construction,

as, following a common use, can be represented in (8):13

(8) 1plþ (bonaþ parta)þ habemus

In the latter (and more recent) structure, to which a sequence like the one

in (7) may be related, the participle and habeo cover complementary func-

tions within the same predicative domain: they share the same argument

structure and interact directly both with the subject and the direct object

in the clause, as represented, again by means of parentheses, in (9):

(9) 1pl þ bonaþ ( partaþ habemus)

It is important to note, in the shift from the former (non-periphrastic) to

the latter (periphrastic) type, the apparent loss of the passive value of the

-tus perfect participle and the consequent re-interpretation of the structure

as a transitive one, in which both arguments are licensed by the participle.

Viewed from the Latin standpoint, the emergence of the habeo active

periphrastic forms then results in the balancing of a perfective system orig-

inally showing periphrastic forms only in middle structures. In particular,

the new periphrastic system appears to be structured in such a way that,

12. It is particularly at issue whether the process could have started since classicaltimes, as e.g. Pinkster (1987) argues. For an early dating of the structure, seealso, more recently, Nuti (2005).

13. See e.g. Pinkster (1987: 196), but also Ramat (1987: 143) who explicitly refersto a constituent analysis.

366 Carla Bruno

the participle here being diathetically inert, possible diathetic variations

can only be expressed by the auxiliary form.14

The same, as we will see, could not be claimed about the growth of the

corresponding structure in Greek.

2.3. Gr. echo # perfects

2.3.1. Classical evidence

At least twice in its history, Greek has tested – parallel to eimı – combina-

tions of echo # with participles. The modern echo # grammeno type, struc-

turally parallel to Romance languages, is in fact preceded in the fifth

century BCE by structures in which echo # is related to mostly active perfect

or aorist participles, as (10) and (11) respectively show:15

(10) S., OT, 701

Kreontos, hoıa moi bebouleuko#sCreon-gen.sg what I-dat.sg intrigue.prf-act.ptcp-nom.sg

echei

have.prs-3sg

‘Creon is the cause, and the plots he has laid against me.’

(R. Jebb)

14. The two classes of periphrases also di¤er in the participle agreement, which iscontrolled by the subject in the middle periphrases and by the direct object inthe new active ones. Thus, unlike the middle periphrases, the active ones fea-ture a dissymmetry between the agreement of the auxiliary (controlled by thesubject) and the participle (controlled by the object). See La Fauci (1990,[1988] 1994: 32) for a general discussion of the diachronic e¤ects of this dis-symmetry on the coding system.

15. Although sporadically the system does not exclude even combinations withpresent participles, as in the following passage:

E., Tr., 315–7:

mater, . . . / ton thanonta patera patrıdamother-voc.sg the die.aor-act.ptcp-acc.sg father-acc.sg country-acc.sg

te phılan katastenous(a)’ echeisand dear-acc.sg mourn.prs-act.ptcp-nom.sg have.prs-2sg

‘mother, . . . you keep lamenting my dead father and our dear country.’(D. Kovacs)


(11) E., Med., 33–4

hos sphe nun atimasas echei

who her now dishonour.aor-act.ptcp-nom.sg have.prs-3sg

‘(a man) who has now cast her aside.’ (D. Kovacs)

In view of its widespread use among Attic writers, in particular tragedians

(and especially Sophocles and Euripides), the pattern has been labeled as

ske #ma attikon (or Sophokleion) in literature, where it is generally assumed

to be an emphatic perfective form (see among others Kuhner 1904; Aerts

1965; Moorhouse 1982; Kurzova 1997).

Here, the participle interacts directly with the subject of the clause with

which it agrees, and can vary both formally and functionally. It can fea-

ture the active form both in transitive structures (cf. examples 10 and 11

above), as well as, more sporadically, in intransitive ones as in (12), and

it appears also – as specifically documented in prose – with the middle

form (cf. 13), although never in passive structures.

(12) S., Ant., 1272

echo # matho #n deılaios

have.prs-1sg learn.aor-act.ptcp-nom.sg miserable-nom.sg

‘I have learnt it in misery!’ (A. Brown)

(13) Hdt., Hist., 6.126

Kleisthene #s kaı dromon kaı

Cleisthenes-nom.sg and race course-acc.sg and

palaıstre #n poie#samenos . . . eıche

wrestling pitch-acc.sg make.aor-md.ptcp-nom.sg have.impf-3sg

‘Cleisthenes had arranged a race course and a wrestling pitch.’

In consideration of the prevailing occurrence of this pattern in transitive

structures, Aerts (1965) relates the development of this early echo# periphrasisto the new ‘‘resultative’’ sense which, as traditionally acknowledged (see

Chantraine 1927), is excluded by the oldest usages of the inherited Indo-

European (synthetic) perfect. On the other hand, even when echo# combines

with middle participles, it covers usages generally considered originally

incompatible with the perfect formations. The language of the fifth cen-

tury, particularly in the tragedy, thus appears to be the laboratory where

368 Carla Bruno

new (analytical) forms are tested for the new functions gained by the perfect

category.16

However, no traces of this pattern remain after that century. In fact,

this early generalization of echo# to the combination with participles turns

out to be an unsuccessful innovation in the history of the language. Post-

classical language, rich in periphrastics featuring echo# or eimı (see Browning

1983: 32), is generally lacking in this type of construction (see Aerts 1965).

Conversely, combinations of eimı and participles persist through the

centuries along with the synthetic perfect, and, as actually documented

from the classical stage onwards, they can also appear (besides the cases

observed in 2.1) with the active form of the participle (see also Blass

1967: 179).17

(14) Pl., Plt., 257a

houto # touto . . . phe #somen ake #kootes eınai tou

thus that say.fut-1pl hear.prf-act.ptcp-nom.pl to be the

perı logismous kaı ta geo #metrika kratıstou?

in counting-acc.pl and the geometrical-acc.pl greatest-gen.sg

‘Thus, we will say that we have heard such words from the greatest

in counting and geometry?’

Acts, 21.33

epunthaneto tıs eıe # kaı tı estin

ask.impf-3sg who be.optv-3sg and what is

pepoie #ko #sdo.pfr-act.ptcp-nom.sg

‘(The commanding o‰cer) inquired who he was and what he had

done.’

Thus, by the first appearance of the echo # grammeno type, Greek has

already experienced the growth of active periphrastic structures, which –

16. The ways in which ‘‘resultative’’ values may correlate to the periphrastic typeshere at issue have been widely discussed; see among others Napoli (2007) andreferences quoted therein.

17. Periphrastic perfects with eimı in prose are traditionally observed in literature;see among others Chantraine (1927: 246) and Schwyzer (1953: 812). Moregenerally, the variety of the usage of participles combined with eimı is stressedby Rosen (1957), who, through an investigation of Herodotean prosed, assumesa complete system of periphrastic forms alongside the monolectic ones.


unlike the modern ones involving a -meno participle – can feature echo #or eimı, and are consistently characterized by the active form of the par-

ticiple, which always agrees with the subject of the clause. As will be dis-

cussed more specifically in 2.3.2, old structures di¤er from modern ones in

the participle, which, preserving its functional properties, is consequently

prone to corresponding formal variations.

2.3.2. Post-classical evidence

Although in Greek, sequences possibly leading to the modern echo # gram-

meno periphrasis – structurally parallel to the Romance one – date from

the classical stage, there is no apparent evidence for indisputable antece-

dents of the modern periphrasis before the late first century BCE in texts

(as anticipated in 1.2) evidently close to the Latin world.18

(16) D.S., Bibl. hist., 2.37.3

eputheto tous Gandarıdas echein

learn.aor-3sg the Gandaridae-acc.pl have.prs-inf

tetraschilıous elephantas polemiko#sfour thousand-acc.pl. elephant-acc.pl for war

kekosme #menous

equip.prf-md.ptcp-acc.pl

‘He learnt that the Gandaridae had four thousand elephants equipped

for war.’

Compared with the previous independently developed periphrases, this struc-

ture shows some obvious inconsistencies, especially concerning the participle

that here appears (1) formally invariable (it is always a -menos form), (2)

regularly agreeing with the direct object, and (3) diathetically inert (the

construct being transitive in spite of the middle form of the participle).

18. As shown in the following passage:

Hdt. 7.8 [d]

hos an de echo #n he #ke #iwho ptc ptc have.prs-ptcp-nom.sg come.subjv-3sg

pareskeuasmenon straton kallista, do #so # oiequip.prf-md.ptcp-acc.sg army-acc.sg best give.fut-1sg to.him

do #ragift-acc.pl

‘and whoever comes having his army best equipped, I will give him gifts.’

370 Carla Bruno

All these aspects are in contrast with the conditions elsewhere observed

in the presence of echo # and eimı, where the participle (1) can, in principle,

vary in form and function, (2) always agrees with the subject of the clause,

and (3) preserves its diathetic features.

It is, in particular, the diathetic neutralization of -menos – a necessary

requirement for a reanalysis of the original structure – that appears espe-

cially notable in Greek, where the participial system includes a rich range

of forms variously characterized not only on the tense-aspectual plane

but also on the diathetic one. In contrast, Latin shows quite a simplified

participial system, including a single perfective form, -tus su‰xed, invariably

‘‘passive’’ and apparently unsuited to showing diathetic variations. Accord-

ingly, while -menos participles always paradigmatically oppose their active

-o #s counterpart, no perfect active forms contrast with the Lat. -tus partici-

ple. In other words, while Latin appears to be structured in such a way

that the loss of the perfect participle diathetic features in the periphrasis

would bring about no functional conflict, Greek does not.

It would not be inappropriate, then, to conclude that whereas both

Latin and Greek have shared structural conditions potentially leading to

the emergence of an active perfective auxiliary form (respectively com-

peting with sum and eimı ), they crucially diverge in the participial system,

with the result that only Latin, and not Greek, accepts the development of

active periphrases from a predicative use of a perfect ‘‘passive’’ participle.

3. Concluding remarks

Languages change only in accordance with the possibilities given by their

system, and Latin and Greek did exactly this.

On the one hand, Latin – whose participial system is unsuited to show-

ing diathetic variations – developed a set of periphrastic structures express-

ing voice changes through the lexical characterization of the auxiliary,

that is, habeo versus sum. On the other hand, in Greek, the presence of a

complex participial system has continuously interfered with attempts to

systematize the opposition between eimı and echo # in auxiliating par-

ticiples, similar to what takes place in the auxiliary selection for nouns.

Unlike nouns, participles are not diathetically neutral, nor, in Greek,

prone to neutralization. Thus, one cannot reasonably exclude the possibil-

ity that the echo # grammeno active perfects, involving a similar process,

may here reproduce an external (Latin) model.


However, in Modern Greek the participle system appears to be much

simpler than in Ancient Greek (see e.g. Jannaris [1897] 1987: 489 for an

outline of its drastic reduction in the modern language). In fact, as once

was the case in Latin, in Modern Greek the -meno perfect participle does

not oppose paradigmatically an active form, with the result that in the

absence of an active counterpart the structural condition blocking the

diathetic neutralization fails.

Still, alongside the ‘‘Latin-Romance’’ type, apparently limited in its use

to a number of transitive structures (see Moser 2003: 247), Modern Greek

more widely employs an alternative periphrase (cf. Seiler 1952 for a con-

trastive analysis of the two types). Attested since the end of the Byzantine

era, this consists of echo # plus a non-finite, indeclinable form, the so-called

aparemfato (lit. ‘infinitive’), whose origin has long been debated (see Aerts

1965 with reference therein mentioned for a summary). This form (possi-

bly an ancient aorist infinitive) can vary according to whether the clause is

active (17a) or non-active (17b).

(17) a. echo # grapsei to gramma

have.prs-1sg write-act.aprf the letter


b. to gramma echei graftei

the letter have.prs-3sg write-md.aprf


Apparently, in a di¤erent form, an old pattern still persists in these modern

perfects, where – as in the more ancient perfective periphrases – the aux-

iliated participle contributes decisively to specifying the diathetic orienta-

tion of the clause.

Thus, in the end, the echo# grammeno type reveals itself to be a structure

so alien to the inner drift of development of the language that it cannot

significantly a¤ect its diachrony. Limited in its usage, the pattern is even

considered by some scholars as less integrated into the Greek tense system

than the competing type (cf. e.g. Holton, Mackridge, and Philippaki-

Warburton 1997). Moreover, like the classical ske #ma attikon, the current

periphrastic pattern shows only one auxiliary form, i.e. echo#, combined with

a non-finite verb form diathetically variable. What a comparison between

Ancient and Modern Greek ultimately demonstrates, then, is a deep con-

sistency between new and old trends of evolution over the course of time.

372 Carla Bruno

References

Adams, J. N. 2003. Bilingualism and the Latin Language. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Aerts, W. J. 1965. Periphrastica. An Investigation into the Use of eınai and echein

as Auxiliaries or Pseudo-auxiliaries in Greek from Homer up to the Present Day.

Amsterdam: Hakkert.

Baldi, P. and Cuzzolin, P. 2005. Considerazioni etimologiche, areali e tipologiche

dei verbi di ‘‘avere’’ nelle lingue indoeuropee. In Latin et langues romanes.

Etudes de linguistique o¤ertes a J. Herman, S. Kiss, L. Mondin, and G. Salvi

(eds), 27–36. Tubingen: Niemeyer.

Benedetti, M. and Bruno, C. forthcoming. A proposito di alcuni costrutti con

echein nel greco antico. In Discontinuita e creolizzazione nella formazione del

l’Europa linguistica, L. Lorenzetti and M. Mancini (eds). Roma: Il Calamo.

Benveniste, E. 1966. Etre et avoir dans leurs fonctions linguistiques. In Problemes

de linguistique generale, 187–207. Paris: Gallimard.

Blake, B. J. 1990. Relational Grammar. London/New York: Routledge.

Blass, F. 1967. A Greek Grammar of the Testament and other Early Christian Lit-

erature [transl. of the revised nineteenth German ed. incorporating supplemen-

tary notes of A. Debrunner by R. W. Funk]. Chicago: Chicago University

Press.

Bonfante, G. 1960. Les rapports linguistiques entre la Grece et l’Italie. Collection

Latomus 44: 171–182.

Browning, R. 1983. Medieval and Modern Greek. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press.

Chantraine, P. 1927. Histoire du parfait grec. Paris: Champion.

Coleman, R. 1977. Greek influence on Latin syntax. Transactions of the Philologi-

cal Society 74: 101–156.

Coseriu, E. 1971. Das Problem des griechischen Einflusses auf das Vulgarlatein.

In Sprache und Geschichte, E. Coseriu and W. D. Stempel (eds), 135–147.

Munich: Fink.

Drinka, B. 2003. Areal factors in the development of the European periphrastic

perfect. Word 54: 1–38.

Drinka, B. 2007. The development of the HAVE perfect. Mutual influences of

Greek and Latin. In: Split Auxiliary Systems, R. Aranovich (ed.). Amsterdam:

John Benjamins.

Dubuisson, M. 1985. Le latin de Polybe: les implications historiques d’un cas de

bilinguisme. Paris: Klincksieck.

Dubuisson, M. 1992. Le contact linguistique greco-latin: problemes d’interference

et d’emprunts. Lalies 10: 91–109.

Giacalone Ramat, A. 2008. Areal convergence in grammaticalization process.

In Rethinking Grammaticalization: New Perspectives, M. J. Lopez-Couso (ed.),

129–167. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.


Holton, D., Mackridge, P., and Philippaki-Warburton, I. 1997. Greek: a Compre-

hensive Grammar of the Modern language. London/New York: Routledge.

Horrocks, G. 1997. Greek: a History of the Language and its Speakers. London/

New York: Longman.

Isacenko, A. 1974. On ‘have’ and ‘be’ languages. A typological sketch. Slavic

Forum: Essays in Linguistics and Literature, M. S. Flier (ed.), 43–77. The

Hague: Mouton.

Jakobson, R. 1938. Sur la theorie des a‰nites phonologiques des langues. In Actes

du quatrieme congres international de linguistes (Copenhagen, 27 August–1 Septem-

ber 1936), 48–59. Copenhagen: Munksgaard.

Jannaris, A. N. 1897. An Historical Greek grammar. London/New York: Macmillan

(repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1987).

Kaimio, J. 1979. The Romans and the Greek Language. Helsinki: Societas Scien-

tiarum Fennica.

Kuhner, R. 1904. Ausfuhrliche Grammatik der Griechischen Sprache. II Teil. [dritte

Auflage besorgt von B. Gehrt]. Hannover/Leipzig: Hahnsche.

Kurzova, H. 1997. Notes on Greek participial constructions. In Studi di linguistica

greca II, E. Banfi (ed.), 107–127. Milano: Angeli.

La Fauci, N. 1990. La continuita nella diversita formale. Aspetti di morfosintassi

diacronica romanza. In Innovazione e conservazione nelle lingue, V. Orioles

(ed.), 135–158. Pisa: Giardini.

La Fauci, N. 1994. Object and Subjects in the Formation of Romance Morpho-

syntax [translation by C. Rosen of the original published by Pisa: Giardini,

1988). Bloomington: IULCP.

La Fauci, N. 1997. Per una teoria grammaticale del mutamento morfosintattico.

Dal latino verso il romanzo. Pisa: ETS.

La Fauci, N. 2000. Modularita della diatesi. Convergenze e divergenze gram-

maticali nel passivo. In Processi di convergenza e di¤erenziazione nelle lingue

dell’Europa medievale e moderna, F. Fusco, V. Orioles, and A. Parmeggiani

(eds), 73–97. Udine: Forum.

La Fauci, N. 2004. Armonia di¤erenziale dell’ausiliazione perfettiva nel volgare

di Dante. In SintAnt. La sintassi dell’italiano antico, M. Dardano and G.

Frenguelli (eds), 237–252. Roma: Aracne.

La Fauci, N. 2005. Il fattore HABEO. Prolegomeni a una nuova considerazione

della genesi del perfetto e del futuro romanzi. In Latin et langues romanes.

Etudes de linguistique o¤erts a J. Herman, S. Kiss, L. Mondin, and G. Salvi

(eds), 441–451. Tubingen: Niemeyer.

La Fauci, N. 2006. Dinamiche sistematiche. Perifrasi perfettive e futuro sintetico:

dal latino al romanzo. In Atti della giornata di linguistica latina (Venezia, 7

maggio 2004), R. Oniga and L. Zennaro (eds), 101–131. Venezia: Cafoscarina.

Mackridge, P. 1987. The Modern Greek Language. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

374 Carla Bruno

Meillet, A. 1924. Le developpement du verbe ‘avoir.’ In ANTIDO#RON, Festschrift

J. Wackernagel, 9–13. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht.

Moorhouse, A. C. 1982. The Syntax of Sophocles. Leiden: Brill.

Moser, A. 2003. Tense, aspect, and the Greek perfect. In Perfect Explorations, A.

Alexiadou, M. Rathert, and A. von Stechow (eds), 235–252. Berlin: Mouton de

Gruyter.

Napoli, M. 2007. Latino habeo piu participio perfetto passivo. Riflessioni su

grammatica e lessico. Archivio Glottologico Italiano 92: 3–50.

Norden, E. 1898. Die antike Kunstprosa. Stuttgart: Teubner.

Nuti, A. 2005. A few remarks on the habeoþ objectþ passive perfect participle

construction in archaic Latin, with special reference to lexical semantics and

the reanalysis process. In Latina Lingua!, G. Calboli (ed.), 393–404. Roma:

Herder.

Pasquali, G. 1927. Review of J.B. Ho¤mann, Lateinische Umgangssprache. Rivista

di filologia e di istruzione classica, Nuova Serie 5.55: 245.

Pinkster, H. 1987. The strategy and chronology of the development of future and

perfect tense-auxiliaries in Latin. In Historical Development of Auxiliaries, M.

Harris and P. Ramat (eds), 193–223. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Pisani, V. 1981. Origini e fortuna del passato prossimo. In Logos semantikos. Studia

linguistica in honorem E. Coseriu. Vol. IV, C. Roher (ed.). Berlin: Mouton de

Gruyter.

Ramat, P. 1987. Linguistic Typology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Rosen, C. 1987. Possessors and the internal structure of nominals (ms.). Ithaca:

Cornell University.

Rosen, C. 1990. Rethinking Southern Tiwa: the geometry of triple-agreement

language. Language 66: 609–713.

Rosen, H. B. 1957. Die ‘‘zweiten’’ Tempora des Griechischen. Museum Helveticum

14 (3): 133–154.

Schwyzer, E. 1953. Griechische Grammatik I. Munich: Beck.

Seiler, H. 1952. L’aspect et le temps dans le verbe neo-grec. Paris: Les Belles

Lettres.

Thumb, A. 1964. A Handbook of the Modern Greek Language. Chicago: Argonaut.

Vogt, H. 1949. Dans quelles conditions et dans quelles limites peut s’exercer sur le

systeme morphologique d’une langue l’action du systeme morphologique d’une

autre langue. In Actes du sixieme Congres International de Linguistes, M.

Lejeune (ed.), 31–45. Paris: Klincksieck.


Author index

Abraham, Werner 51, 158, 160Adams, James Noel 359, 360, 373Aerts, Willem Johan 363, 368, 369,

372, 373Aikhenvald, Alexandra vii, 5–7, 18,

50, 77–79, 81–86, 89, 91, 92, 94,95, 97–100, 102–105, 128, 158–159, 195, 196, 200–208, 210, 213,215, 216, 219, 221, 226, 307, 311,312

Allin, Trevor R. 78, 80, 91, 92, 94, 95,104

Alvarez, Jose Luis 239, 244, 260Andersen, Paul 60, 61, 71, 74Anderson, Gregory David S. 273, 285,

287, 291, 293, 295, 296, 299, 300,302, 307

Artiagoitia, Xabier 239, 260Aschmann, Richard P. 91, 92, 104Azkue, Resurreccion Maria 237, 242,

244, 260, 262

Backus, Ad 23, 50, 159Baissac, Charles 274, 281, 284Baker, Philip 265–267, 269, 275, 281Bakker, Peter 18, 50, 51, 193Baldi, Philip 364, 373Baran, Dominika 314, 353Barczi, Geza 172, 192Barnes, Janet 202, 218, 219, 226Bascom, Burton 301, 307Bath, D. N. S. 60, 74Baugh, Albert C. 94, 104Belisle, Louis-Alexandre 278, 281Benedetti, Marina 359, 365, 373Benveniste, Emile 141, 364, 373Bettoni, Camilla 78, 105Blake, Barry J. 159, 160, 365, 373Blass, Friedrich 369, 373Boas, Franz 95, 313, 314, 318, 348,

353Boeder, Winfried 51, 159

Bollee, Annegret 204, 266, 267, 269,276, 277, 284

Bonfante, Giuliano 362, 373Boretzky, Norbert 159, 162, 316, 340,

353Bosque, Ignacio 176, 192Bowern, Claire 299, 307Brandrup, Beverly A. 219, 226Braunmuller, Kurt 174, 192Breu, Walter 125, 128–132, 135–138,

159, 160Brody, Jill 313, 314, 331, 353Browning, Rorbert 369, 373Bruneau-Ludwig, Florence 283Bruno, Carla viii, 12, 13, 359, 365, 373Bruyn, Adrienne 279, 282Buitimea Valenzuela, Crescencio 287,

290, 307Burridge, Kate 159, 160Burrus, Ernest 177, 192, 343, 353Bybee, Joan 140, 152, 160

Caballero, Gabriela 293, 307Callistus, Pater 178, 192Campbell, Lyle 5, 9, 13, 14, 77, 78, 80,

94, 95, 102, 105, 114, 120, 123,124, 161, 295, 302, 307, 314, 317,341, 345, 347, 354

Capell, Arthur 317, 318, 354Capistran, Alejandra 57, 74Carlin, Eithne 78, 80, 89, 90, 104, 105Carlon, Anabela 307Casad, Eugene 293, 307Casamiquela, Rodolfo 111, 112, 122,

123Castillo Celaya, Marıa 307Cayetano, E. Roy 317, 354Cennamo, Michela 139, 160Chamoreau, Claudine vii, 1, 3, 4, 9,

13, 14, 53, 54, 56, 57, 61–65, 71,74, 77, 80, 102, 105, 125, 269, 282

Chantraine, Pierre 368, 369, 373Chapman, Shirley 79, 105Chaudenson, Robert 265, 267, 269,

277, 278, 282Chen, Ping 233, 260Chung, Sandra 175, 192Clark, D. Ross 317, 354Claudi, Ulrike 152, 162Clyne, Michael 147, 160Coleman, Robert 360, 362, 373Company, Concepcion 233, 260Comrie, Bernard 43, 51, 160, 231,

253, 260Cook, Dorothy 213, 218, 219, 226Cooreman, Ann 183, 184, 192Corne, Chris 265, 281Coseriu, Eugen 362, 373Costenoble, Helen 178, 192Cowan, H. K. J. 316, 354Criswell, Linda 213, 218, 219, 226Cuzzolin, Pierluigi 74, 364, 373Cyr, Danielle 233, 260

Dahl, Osten 322, 354Dal Negro, Silvia 94, 105Daud, Bukhari 316, 354Dawkins, Richard McGillivray 316,

330, 354de Castellvı, Marcelino 91, 107Dedrick, John M. 293, 307Demonte, Violeta 75, 176, 192Dench, Alan 95, 105Derbyshire, Desmond C. 79, 105de Reuse, Willem J. 311, 317, 343,

354de Sivers, Fanny 316, 354de St. Jorre, Danielle 278, 282Deutscher, Guy 313, 354de Wavrin, Robert 91, 92, 94, 96, 109Diessel, Holger 325, 354Dillon, Kathleen 78, 108Dixon, Robert 77–82, 85, 95, 96, 102–

106, 117, 118, 123, 226, 307Dorian, Nancy 4, 5, 13, 14, 81, 94,

105, 106, 115, 123, 160

Drinka, Bridget 139, 141, 160, 362,363, 373

Dryer, Matthew 60, 74, 167–170, 192Dubuisson, Michel 360, 373Dungca, Bernadita C. 177, 194, 316,

341, 357Durie, Mark 160, 316, 354

Ebert, Karen 279, 282Ehlich, Konrad 20, 51Eichho¤, Jurgen 149, 161Elsık, Viktor 26, 42, 51Enfield, Nick J. 221, 222, 226Enninger, Werner 146, 161Epstein, Richard 233, 239, 260Erelt, Mati 144, 161Ernstrieite, Ieva 316, 357Ersen-Rasch, Margarete 168, 192Escalada, Federico 111, 123Esch, Edith 14, 163, 282Estrada Fernandez, Zarina vii, 9, 11,

13, 74, 285, 287, 290, 293, 303,307

Etxeberria, Urtzi 239, 261Evans, Nicholas 96, 106

Facundes da Silva, Sideney 204, 227Farabee, William 90, 106Fernandez Garay, Ana vii, 5–7, 14,

111, 114–116, 118–120, 122–124Field, Fredric 17, 51, 314, 354Foley, William 95, 106, 299, 307Fon Sing, Guillaume 269, 281Frajzyngier, Zygmunt 139, 233, 261,

299, 307Francois, Alexandre 80, 106Friedman, Victor 139, 141, 145, 161Friedrich, Paul 71, 74Fritz, Georg 178, 192Furlong, Robert 269, 282

Galant, Michael Rene 58, 61, 74Gaminde, Inaki 237, 261Gardani, Francesco 94, 106Giacalone Ramat, Anna 364, 373

378 Author index

Gilberti, Maturino 60, 61, 75Gilman, Charles 279, 282Givon, T. 171, 192, 195, 227, 241,

261, 286–288, 292, 296, 299, 305,307, 308

Gjerdman, Olof 316, 354Golovko, Evgeniy 45, 51Gomes dos Santos, Manuel 204, 227Gomez-Imbert, Elsa 161, 195, 196,

201, 202, 211, 219, 227Gomez Lopez, Paula 294, 308Gomez Rendon, Jorge 167, 303, 304,

308Gonzalez de Perez, Marıa Stella 202,

219, 226, 227Grant, Anthony viii, 12, 311, 315,

351, 354, 355Green, David 20, 33, 41, 51Greenberg, Joseph 129, 161, 232, 238,

261, 347Grenoble, Leonore 80, 102, 106, 107Grosjean, Francois 20, 44, 51Gruzdeva, Ekaterina 78, 81, 96, 107Guerrero, Lilian 287, 289, 293, 308Guldemann, Tom 227, 279, 282Gumperz, John 20, 51, 161

Haas, Mary 80, 107Haase, Martin 17, 51, 161, 172, 192,

231, 243–249, 251, 253, 256–259,261

Haiman, John 299, 308Hajek, John 316, 358Hamp, Eric 84, 107Hardenburg, Walter 91, 107Harris, Alice 9, 14, 114, 120, 124, 161Haspelmath, Martin 139, 142, 162,

167, 171, 193, 239, 261, 282Haugen, Einar 17, 51, 81, 107Hawkins, John 129, 162Heath, Je¤rey 17, 51, 95, 107, 315,

355Heine, Bernd vii, 3, 7–10, 14, 17, 51,

53, 55, 59, 61, 63, 71, 72, 75, 114,124, 125–130, 132–135, 138–147,

149–152, 154, 156, 157, 162, 169,171–174, 179, 182, 187–189, 193,200, 227, 231–238, 241, 244, 246,249–261, 268, 279, 282, 285–286,292–293, 299, 308, 312, 344, 355

Hekking, Ewald 72, 342, 355Henri, Fabiola 265, 269, 270, 274–

276, 283Henzl, Vera 78, 107Hernandez, Graciela 115, 124Hill, Jane 5, 14, 78, 80, 102, 107, 162,

205, 287–289, 300, 301, 306, 308,314, 355

Hill, Kenneth 78, 102, 107, 162, 314,355

Himmelmann, Nikolaus 232, 233,236, 239, 261

Hjelde, Arnstein 78, 107Holton, David 372, 374Hopper, Paul 152, 162, 297, 308Horrocks, Geo¤rey 359, 360, 362, 374Howard, Catherine 90, 107Hualde, Jose Ignacio 236, 237, 245,

261Huang, Shuanfan 233, 261Hugh-Jones, Stephen 202, 211, 219,

227Hunnemeyer, Friederike 152, 162Hwang, Shin Ja J. 314, 357

Ibanez del Carmen, Aniceto 177, 193Iglesias, Hector 239, 262Igualada, Fray de 91, 107Irigoien, Alfonso 238, 240, 262Isacenko, Alexander 364, 374Iturrioz, Jose 244, 245, 262

Jackendo¤, Ray 271, 282Jackson, Jean 196, 227Jacobs, Neil 316, 321, 331, 340, 355Jacobsen, William H. 6, 14Jakobson, Roman 362, 374Jannaris, Antonius 372, 374Jastrow, Otto 162, 316, 355Je¤erson, Gail 20, 52

Author index 379

Johanson, Lars 11, 14, 84, 102, 108,127, 128, 163, 265, 268, 276, 282,314, 355

Jones, Mari 14, 125, 133, 163Jones, Paula 207, 212, 213, 215, 219,

227Jones, Wendell 207, 212, 213, 215, 219

227Jungraithmayr, Herrmann 95, 108

Kagan, Olga 78, 108Kaimio, Jorma 360, 374Karttunen, Frances 163, 314, 355Kats, J. 178, 193Kaufman, Terrence 2, 15, 17, 18, 52,

54, 76, 195, 229, 268, 284, 303,309, 330, 357

Kert, Georgij 316, 355Kesisoglou, I. 316, 355Kettunen, Lauri 316, 347, 355Key, Mary Ritchie 204, 227Kinch, Pamela 219, 227Kinch, Rodney 219, 227Klintborg, Sta¤an 78, 108Knudson, Lyle 71, 72, 75Koch-Grunberg, Theodor 196, 227Kortmann, Bernd 325, 355Kress, Bruno 174, 193Kriegel, Sibylle vii, 9, 11, 14, 265–267,

269–271, 274–280, 282–284Kroskrity, Paul 96, 108, 163Kuhner, Raphael 368, 374Kurzova, Helena 368, 374Kuteva, Tania 9, 10, 14, 17, 55, 63,

72, 75, 114, 124, 125–130, 132,135, 138–146, 156, 157, 162, 163,171–174, 179, 189, 193, 200, 227,231–235, 237, 238, 241, 244, 249–261, 268, 279, 282, 286, 308, 312,344, 355

La Fauci, Nunzio 361, 363–365, 367,374

Lafitte, Pierre 244, 262

Lafon, Rene 243, 244, 262Langacker, Ronald 296, 308Lanza, Elizabeth 20, 51Laoust, Emile 317, 355Lapesa, Rafael 239, 262Lass, Roger 2, 14Lastra, Yolanda 9, 13, 74, 105, 317,

355Laycock, Donald 95, 108Lee, Young 80, 108Leech, Geo¤rey 319, 326, 327, 355Leglise, Isabelle vii, 1, 13, 14Lehmann, Christian 74, 270, 271, 283,

299, 308Leizarraga, Ioannes 255, 262Levinson, Stephen 161, 227, 297, 308Lewis, Geo¤rey 327, 343, 355Lewis, Henry 172, 173, 193Lindstrom, Liina 144, 164Lionnet, Guy 278, 282Ljungberg, Erik 316, 354Lockhart, James 314, 355Longacre, Robert 314, 357Looper, Matthew 313, 356Lopez Sanz, Rafael 84–87, 108Loukotka, Cestmir 91, 108Loveday, Leo 26, 51Ludwig, Ralph 265, 269, 270, 274–

276, 278, 283, 284Lyons, Christopher 168, 169, 193

Mackridge, Peter 372, 374Macri, Martha 313, 356Malone, Terrell 202, 204, 209, 210,

219, 226, 227Mankowski, Paul 348, 356Manterola, Julen vii, 2, 10, 231, 237,

262Marchese, Lynell 293, 308Marquez Joaquın, Pedro 55, 75Martins, Silvana 202, 215, 217, 219Martins, Valteir 202, 228Maschler, Yael 41, 51Matiso¤, James 94, 108

380 Author index

Matras, Yaron vii, 2, 3, 9, 12, 15, 17–19, 23, 24, 31, 32, 34, 36, 39, 42,47, 81, 52, 55, 74, 75, 89, 108,114, 124, 126, 128, 164, 193, 194,227, 268, 282–284, 311, 313, 314,316, 318, 321, 331, 335, 347–350,352, 356

Maxwell, Michael 207, 209, 219, 228McGregor, William 78, 80, 83, 108McLaughlin, John 294, 308Meillet, Antoine 9, 15, 268, 283, 364,

375Menovshchikov, Georgiy 343, 356Mesthrie, Rajend 267, 275, 283Metrich, Rene 159, 164Metslang, Helle 144, 161Metzger, Ronald 219, 228Michael, Lev 219, 228Michaelis, Susanne 267, 270, 271, 283Michelena, Luis 231, 237, 239, 242,

244, 262Milani, Celestina 78, 108Miller, Marion 202, 209, 212, 215,

218, 219, 228Milroy, James 128, 164Milroy, Lesley 128, 164Milsark, Gary 234, 262Miyaoka, Osahito 344, 356Miyashita, Hiroyuki 147, 149–152,

154, 162Monzon, Cristina 56, 71, 75Moorhouse, Alfred 368, 375Moravcsik, Edith 17, 52, 161, 195,

228, 239, 261, 263Morse, Nancy 207, 209, 219, 228Moseley, Christopher 316, 341, 356Moser, Amalia 372, 375Mosonyi, Jorge 204, 228Mufwene, Salikoko 279, 281, 283Muhlhausler, Peter 266, 281, 308Muntzel, Martha 5, 13, 77, 78, 80,

102, 105Musters, George 114, 124Muysken, Pieter 17, 52, 317, 342, 355,

356

Najlis, Elena 112, 118, 120, 121, 124Napoli, Maria 369, 375Nardi, Ricardo 113, 124Natterer, Johann 85, 108Nau, Nicole 17, 52Nava, Fernando 56, 75Neerputh, Naving 266, 283Nelde, Peter 161, 164Neumann-Holzschuh, Ingrid 276, 277,

284Newman, Stanley 94, 108Noonan, Michael 60, 75Norden, Eduard 360, 375Nordlinger, Rachel 316, 358Nuti, Andrea 366, 375Nwulia, Moses 367, 383

Oesterreicher, Wulf 76, 162, 261, 355Ogo, Pedro 177, 194, 341Ortiz de Urbina, Jon 236, 245, 261,

263Ospina Bozzi, Ana 195, 202, 204, 209,

219, 228Otsibar, K. 242, 262

Pagliuca, William 140, 153, 160, 260Paradis, Michel 41, 52Parkvall, Mikael 279, 283Pasquali, Giorgio 362, 375Payne, Doris 91, 95, 108Peralta Ramırez, Valentin 293, 309Pereltsvaig, Asya 78, 109Perez de Lazarraga, Juan 255, 263Perkins. Revere 140, 153, 160Perrott, Daisy 317, 356Philippaki-Warburton, Irene 372, 374Pietsch, Lukas 139, 164Piette, Jean Raymond 172, 173, 193Pinkster, Harm 366, 375Pisani, Vittore 360, 362, 375Plank, Frans 239, 263Poplack, Shana 41, 52Posner, Rebecca 312, 356Price, Susan 58, 75Pryor, John 95, 109

Author index 381

Pustet, Regina 205, 207, 210, 228Putzu, Ignazio 239, 263

Raible, Wolfgang 76, 162, 261, 265,355

Ramat, Paolo 239, 263, 366, 375Ramharai, Vicram 269, 282Ramirez, Henri 99, 100, 109, 197, 200,

203, 206, 207, 209, 213, 217, 219,228

Ramisch, Heinrich 125, 128, 133, 134,164

Ramnah, Amarnath 266, 275, 281Rayson, Paul 319, 326, 327, 355Rehbein, Jochen 20, 52Remmers, Arend 18, 52Riessler, Michael 316, 356Riionheimo, Helka 78, 79, 97, 109Rivara, Rene 62, 75Rivet, Paul 91, 92, 94, 96, 109Rodrıguez-Ponga, R. Salamanca 167,

175, 179–181, 187, 193Rojas Nieto, Cecilia 58–60, 75Rosalie, Marcel 269, 276, 277, 284Rosen, Carol 365, 374, 375Rosen, Haiim 369, 375Ross, Malcom 128, 165, 344, 356Rosten, Leo 352, 356Rubino, Carl 316, 356Rudolph, Elisabeth 34, 52Russell, Joan 317, 356

Sabater Fuentes, Anna 177, 194Sacks, Harvey 20, 52Sa¤ord, William 178, 193Sakel, Jeanette 15, 17, 52, 74, 114,

124, 126, 158, 164, 167, 173, 187,193, 227, 268, 276, 282–284, 314,349, 356

Salas Palomo, Rosa 175, 193Salmons, Joe 19, 52, 313, 318, 356Sampson, John 331, 356Sasse, Hans-Jurgen 4, 5, 15, 81, 94,

109Saxton, Dean 285, 301, 309

Schauer, Junia 203, 204, 206, 228Scheglo¤, Emanuel A. 20, 52Schmid, Monika 164, 165Schmidt, Annette 77, 79, 109Schmidt, Ruth 316, 356Schomburgk, Robert 90, 109Schroeder, Christopher 51, 159Schwyzer, Eduard 369, 375Seiler, Hansjakob 372, 375Shabibi, Maryam 31, 52Shahani, Anandra 316, 357Shaul, David 296–298, 309Shopen, Timothy 74, 75, 284, 357Shukla, Shaligram 275, 284Silva-Corvalan, Carmen 128, 165,

353Sjogren, Andreas 192, 316, 357Smith, Buckingham 296, 309Smothermon, Je¤rey R. 219, 228Smothermon, Josephine H. 219,

228Sorensen, Arthur 196, 228Souza, de Ilda 203, 204, 228Stassen, Leon 59, 61, 70, 71, 75, 76Steele, Susan 285, 287, 300, 309Stein, Peter 269, 284Stenzel, Kristine 195, 202, 203, 209,

212, 215, 218, 219, 228Stolz, Christel 71, 76, 89, 109, 175,

193, 269, 284, 314, 357Stolz, Thomas vii, 2, 7–9, 71, 76, 89,

109, 126, 165, 167, 171, 175, 177,193, 194, 269, 284, 314, 318, 357

Strom, Clay 207, 219, 229Suarez, Jorge 75, 113, 120, 124, 314,

342, 357Suvca #ne, Valda 316, 357Swadesh, Morris 95, 109, 315, 328–

330, 343, 355

Talmy, Leonard 270, 284Tartas, Ivan 242, 263Taylor, Douglas 317, 351, 353, 357Tessmann, Gunter 91, 109Thiesen, Wesley 92, 94, 109

382 Author index

Thomason, Sarah 2–4, 6–7, 9, 15, 17,18, 52–54, 72, 76, 114, 115, 124,165, 195, 229, 259, 263, 268, 284,303, 309, 330, 357

Thrainsson, Hoskuldur 174, 194Tonelli, Antonio 121, 124Topping, Donald 176–182, 184, 186,

194, 316, 341, 357Torres, Lourdes 314, 357Tragel, Iiona 144, 164Trask, Robert 166, 231, 237, 238, 240,

241, 257, 262, 263, 356Traugott, Elizabeth 152, 162, 163,

166, 297, 299, 308, 309Tsitsipis, Lukas 5, 15, 77, 102, 109Tufan, Sirin 32, 52

Ureland, P. Sture 107, 108, 165, 166,282

Vaari, Eduard 316, 357van Hout, Roeland 17, 52van Staden, Miriam 311, 316, 340,

357van Valin Jr., Robert 299, 307, 309Velie, Daniel 219, 229Velie, Virginia 219, 229Vincent, Nigel 142, 166Virahsawmy, Dev 272, 284

Voegelin, Charles 296, 309Vogt, Hans 361, 375von Preissig, Edward 178, 194Vycichl, Werner 317, 358

Wagner, Karl 51, 159Wald, Benji 317, 349, 358Weinreich, Uriel 17, 52Weir, Helen 202, 204, 217, 219, 229West, Birdie 212, 219, 229Whaley, Lindsay 80, 107Wheeler, Alva 219, 229Whi¤en, Thomas 91, 109Willett, Elizabeth 301, 309Williams-van Klinken, Catharina 316,

340, 358Wilson, Andrew 319, 326, 327, 355Winford, Don 7, 15, 18, 52, 268, 284Wurzel, Petra 168, 194

Young, Rodolphine 269, 284

Z’graggen, John 95, 108Zheng, Yiqing 316, 330, 358Zigmond, Maurice 288, 289, 294, 295,

309Zimmer, Stefan 165, 166Zimmermann, Klaus 76, 193, 194,

355, 356

Author index 383

Language index

Acehnese (Achehnese) 316, 328, 330,332, 334, 336, 338, 339, 354

AfricaEast 105, 109, 170, 266North 317West 170, 279

Afro-Asiatic 328, 329Akkadian 313, 348, 354, 356Albanian 15, 32, 81, 109, 317Angloromani 47, 52Aoniko-aish 111Arabic 35, 312–314, 316, 327–339,

341, 345, 351, 358Bukhara 164‘Canonical’ 31, 32Classical 321Egyptian 329Gulf 31Khuzistani 32, 52Palestinian 31, 40

Araki 80, 106Aramaic 316, 321, 328, 330, 331, 348Arawak 6, 10, 79, 80, 82, 84, 85, 89–

94, 97, 98, 100, 103–106, 108,109, 196, 198, 199, 201, 203, 204,206–208, 210, 213, 218, 221–223,227, 228, 329

Armenian 328Old 141

Australian 78, 83, 95, 96, 104–106,108, 109, 170

Austronesian 8, 9, 76, 170, 174–178,181, 189, 190, 193, 194, 328, 329,343, 357

Aymara 329

Bahnaric 328, 329Baltic 141–143, 167, 347, 348, 352Balto-Finnic 141, 144, 328Baniwa/Kurripako 94, 98, 198, 201,

203–207, 213, 218, 219, 221, 228

Bantu 267, 268, 279, 280, 282, 329,358

Eastern 11, 271Barasana 198, 204, 209, 218–220, 227Barasano 203, 207, 212, 213, 215, 227Bare 78, 82, 84–87, 89, 102, 103, 108,

205, 206Basque vii, 10, 142, 161, 166, 171–

173, 231–263Belorussian 138, 143Berber 317, 329, 331, 333, 334, 337,

339, 358Bhojpuri 11, 265–268, 275, 276, 280,

281, 283, 284Bislama 329Bora 6, 82, 91–96, 109Breton 143, 145, 153, 165, 171–173Bulgarian 19, 130, 138, 141, 143, 149,

150

Carib 6, 90, 105, 180, 329, 346, 352,357

Celtic 133, 141–144Chadic 95, 233, 307Chamorro vii, 7, 8, 167, 168, 170,

174–194, 312, 316, 320, 329, 330,333, 334, 337, 338, 341–343, 350,352, 357

Chinese 35, 233, 260, 261, 329, 330,333–335, 337, 338, 341

Chon 111, 113, 124Protochon 7, 119, 121

Chukchi 311, 317, 329, 333, 334, 337,343, 344, 354

Cora-Chol 294Creole 11, 266–268, 276, 279–283,

354Antillean 329, 339, 346, 351Dominican 278English based 279French-based 11, 278, 280, 281

Guadeloupean 278Indian Ocean vii, 265, 278Mauritian 11, 265, 267–275, 279–

283Mauritian Old 273, 274, 280Seychelles 11, 265, 267–269, 271,

272, 276–280, 282, 283Spanish-based 180

Croatian 128, 138, 143, 317, 324Cubeo (see Kubeo)Cupeno 5, 285, 287, 288, 294, 295,

300–302, 308Czech 78, 138, 143, 160, 171, 172

Danish 150, 174Desano 97, 198, 202, 203, 209, 212,

215, 218–220, 228Domari 31, 39, 40, 313, 331Dutch 18, 148, 150, 151Dyirbal 78–81, 105, 106, 109

Efate, South 318, 329, 333, 334, 337,339

English 18, 21, 23, 25, 26, 30, 33, 35,39, 40, 44, 47, 78, 81–84, 94, 96,104, 106, 107, 125–127, 131, 133–135, 140, 142, 146, 147, 150, 151,164, 178, 187–189, 194, 238, 241,245, 262, 267, 272, 279, 315–317,320, 323–336, 338, 342, 343, 345,346, 348, 349, 352, 355–358

Gaelic 133Guernsey 133, 163, 164Irish 133, 164Old 142, 272, 326

Eskimo-Aleut 161, 311, 329, 342–344,354

Estonian 97, 143–145, 148, 150, 151,154, 161, 164, 166, 347, 348, 352

Faroese 173, 174, 191, 194Farsi 314, 316, 327, 328, 331, 334–

336, 343, 345Finnish 97, 143, 169, 170, 312, 348, 352Ingrian 78, 79, 97

French 25, 49, 50, 75, 126, 145, 150,151, 154, 163, 164, 172, 173, 233,241, 244, 246, 253, 254, 257, 260,265–273, 275, 276, 278–281, 315,326, 328, 329, 336, 339, 341, 346,351

Norman 125, 133Quebecan 278

Friulian 150Fulbe 331

Garifuna 12, 317, 329, 331, 333, 334,338, 339, 346, 348, 351, 352, 354

Gascon 161, 246, 253German 8, 19, 21, 23–25, 27, 28, 30,

33, 34, 36, 39, 40, 44–46, 52, 105,126, 128–132, 135, 136, 138, 139,142, 144–151, 153–158, 160–162,171–173, 235, 312, 313, 321, 322,325, 328, 332, 341, 347–349, 353,356, 373

High 146, 154, 155Low 18, 38, 39, 328, 347Pennsylvanian 146West 328

Gidar 233Gooniyandi 83Grass 95Greek viii, 12, 13, 32, 81, 109, 127,

141, 149, 150, 160, 317, 321, 326,328, 359, 360, 362–365, 367, 369–375

Ancient 141, 359, 360, 362, 363,365, 371, 372, 374

Cappadocian 316, 317, 328, 330,332, 334, 336, 338, 339

Modern 354, 359, 361, 365, 372–375Guenena Iajitch 111Guernesiais 125–127, 133, 134Gununa iajech 112, 113

Hausa 331Hebrew 17, 23, 27–29, 33–38, 44–46,

50, 126, 241, 313, 321, 328, 332,336, 338, 348, 356

Language index 385

Hindi 281, 283, 316, 320, 325Hokkien 328Huichol 288, 294, 295, 308Hungarian 148–152, 154, 168, 169,

172, 173, 192, 317, 336Hup 10, 195, 197–211, 213–224, 226,

227

Icelandic 172–174, 192Old 174

Ifira-Mele 317, 318, 329, 330, 333,334, 337, 339, 344, 352

Ilgar 96Indic 11, 266, 268, 328, 331Indo-European 60, 148, 149, 151, 170,

172, 234, 328, 361, 363, 364, 368Iranian 31, 160, 162–164, 328, 334Old 141

Irish 133, 143, 164Italian 8, 78, 105, 108, 129, 130, 135,

137–139, 150, 153, 156, 157, 361Iwaidjan 96, 106

Japanese 25, 26, 164, 329, 342Jaqi 329

Kakua 197Kambot 95Kapampangan 322, 328, 333, 338,

346, 352Karapana 210, 219, 220Kari’na 329, 339, 346Kawaiisu 288, 289, 294, 295, 299, 300,

309Kinikinau 203, 204, 228(Ki)Unguja 317, 329, 333, 334, 337,

339Koreguaje 203, 213, 218, 219, 221,

226Kotiria (Wanano) 198, 202, 203, 209,

211, 212, 215, 218–220, 228Kubeo (Cubeo) 201, 203, 204, 207,

209, 213, 219–221, 228Kurdish 168, 169, 194, 328, 330, 334Kurmanji 331

Ladino (Judezmo) 37, 38Latin viii, 12, 13, 108, 127, 141, 142,

160, 329, 242, 248, 251, 315, 321,328, 336, 343, 346, 359, 360, 362–366, 370–375

Latvian 167, 328, 332, 334, 336, 338,345, 347, 348, 357

Lekoudesch 46Lengua de Michoacan 3, 4, 55, 58, 60,

61, 65, 66, 70, 75Lezgian 331Lithuanian 143, 347, 348Livonian 12, 316, 328, 331, 332, 334,

336, 338, 339, 341, 345, 347, 348,352, 356, 357

Kolka 316Salis 316, 347, 348

Luiseno 285, 300, 301, 309

Macedonian 8, 19, 130, 135, 138, 143,145, 161

Maipurean 329Maku (see Nadahup)Makuna 198, 203, 204, 207, 209, 219,

220Malay 328, 330, 332, 335–338, 357Malayo-Polynesian 328, 329Maltese 169, 192, 263Mambae 329Manambu 78, 81, 82, 84, 102, 104Mandarin 329, 341Mandawaka 84Mapudungun 7, 114, 115, 119–122Marrku 96, 106Mawayana 6, 78, 80, 82, 89–91, 93,

95, 96, 101, 105, 107Median 330Mele-Fila 333, 337Mesoamerican 55, 71, 72, 170, 313,

314, 356, 357Minnan 329Miskito 94Misumalpan 94Mixe-Zoquean 71, 72, 161, 166, 293,

295

386 Language index

Molisean (Molise Slavic) 8, 128, 129,137–139, 153, 156, 157, 159, 160,317

Montagnais (Algonquian) 233Murrinh-patha 95

Nadahup (Maku) 10, 196–199, 201,202, 204–206, 211, 213, 215, 217–220, 222, 223, 227

Nadeb 197, 198, 201, 202, 204–206,208, 209, 215, 217–220, 222, 223,229

Nahuatl 57, 71, 107, 161–163, 286,288, 293–295, 313, 314, 353

Classical 330, 355Nanti 203, 204, 228Neo-Aramaic 316, 330, 331Nevome 286, 288, 296, 297, 299, 300,

302, 305, 309Ngan.gitjemerri 95Nheengatu (Lingua Geral) 198Nivkh 78, 79, 96, 107Norse 174, 315, 326, 328, 330, 336,

338Norwegian 51, 78, 81, 107, 150, 174Nukak 197Nyulnyul 78, 80, 83

O’odham 285, 288, 300, 301Orejon 203, 207, 219, 221, 229Otomi 57, 72, 303, 304, 342, 355Otopamean 57, 72, 314

Paleo-Siberian 78, 96Papua New Guinea 78, 82, 104, 165,

170, 356Paumarı 79, 104, 105Persian 31, 32, 314, 348Piapoco 94, 98, 206, 213Pima bajo vii, 11, 285–292, 294–296,

299, 300, 302–305, 307Pipil 5, 295, 302, 307, 317, 329, 330,

333–335, 337, 339, 341, 343–345,354

Piratapuya 97

Pisamira 202, 209, 219, 220, 227Polish 36, 138, 143, 321Polynesian 328, 329Portuguese 85, 88, 89, 142, 147–150,

154, 198, 312, 328, 329, 333, 335,337

Brazilian 84, 85, 88, 89, 198Puinave 197Purepecha 3, 4, 53–58, 61–75, 77, 282Putonghua 329

Quechua 304, 312, 317, 319, 325, 329,330, 333, 334, 337, 339, 342, 345,349, 355, 356

Querandı 112, 113

Resıgaro 6, 78, 80, 82, 91–96, 101,104, 108, 109

Retuara 201, 203, 207, 210, 219–221,229

Romance 129, 142, 144, 145, 149, 159,160, 166, 171, 172, 231, 232, 235,236, 238–242, 244, 245, 247–249,251–254, 256, 257, 312, 356, 359,361, 362, 365, 367, 370, 372, 374

Romani 18, 24–26, 39, 41, 47, 51, 313,316, 317, 320, 328, 330–332, 334–336, 338, 353

Romanian 150, 317, 328, 332, 334Russian 18, 78, 96, 108, 109, 130, 138,

143–145, 149, 150, 163, 166, 313,314, 326, 328, 329, 332, 334–336,338, 341, 343, 346, 347, 353

Saami, Kildin 316, 317, 319, 326, 328,330, 332, 334, 336, 338, 346, 356

Salishan 95Sanskrit 316, 328, 330, 332, 336, 337Scandinavian 94, 142, 145, 174Selknam 111, 112, 118–122, 124Semitic 328Serbian 138, 141, 143, 150Serbo-Croatian 285Serrano 287, 295, 296, 302Siona 203, 213, 219, 221, 229

Language index 387

Siriano 210, 212, 219, 220, 226Slavic 7, 8, 107, 128, 130, 135, 138,

139, 142, 143, 159, 321, 322, 328,332, 336, 348

Slavonic, Old Church 141, 160, 165,167

Slovak 143, 150, 152Slovenian 143Sorbian, Upper 8, 128–132, 135–139,

143, 153, 156, 157Spanish vii, 3, 4, 8, 9, 12, 37, 52, 54,

55, 57–60, 62–65, 67–73, 75, 77,84, 85, 88, 89, 114, 115, 119–121,142, 148, 150, 151, 162, 167, 170,174–182, 184, 186, 188–190, 192–194, 198, 235, 236, 240–242, 253,255, 256, 287, 296, 302–305, 308,312–315, 322, 325, 328–331, 333–335, 337–345, 350–353, 356, 357

Sranan 279, 282Standard Average European

(SAE) 189, 261Sumu 94Swahili 279, 313, 317, 327, 329, 331,

333, 334, 337, 339, 349, 358Swedish 78, 108, 150, 168, 169, 192,

354

Tagalog 312, 316, 322, 328, 329, 333,334, 337, 338, 346, 352

Takic 285, 287, 296, 300Tangale 95Tarahumara 286, 288, 293–296, 300,

302, 303Tariana 6, 79, 80, 82, 86, 94, 97–102,

198–201, 203–208, 211, 213, 216–219, 221–223, 226

Tatuyo 198, 202, 209, 211–213, 219,220

Tehuelche (Aonek’o �a�jen) vii, 7, 14,111–116, 118–124

Tepehuan 286, 300, 301, 307, 309Tepiman 285–287, 300–302Tetun Dili 329–331, 333, 334, 337,

338, 340, 350, 358

Teushen 111, 112, 114Tidore 316, 317, 319, 328, 330, 332,

334, 337, 338, 340, 357Timbisha 294, 295, 299, 300, 308Tok Pisin 78, 82, 84, 312Totonac 71Trio 82, 89, 90, 96Tsat 316, 319, 329–331, 333–335,

337–339Tubatulabal 287, 295, 296, 309Tucano 6, 97–102, 226, 229Tupi 198Tupı-Guaranı 84Turkic 160, 162–164, 314Turkish 49, 50, 129, 167–170, 192,

210, 253, 316, 317, 327, 328, 330–332, 334–336, 338, 342, 343, 345,355

Macedonian 32, 33, 51, 52Turoyo 316, 317, 328, 330–332, 334–

336, 338Tuyuca 97, 202, 218, 226, 227

Ukrainian 138, 143, 321Urdu 316, 320, 325, 328, 331, 332,

334–336, 338–340, 356Ute 287, 288, 294, 295, 300, 308Uto-Aztecan 5, 11, 57, 71, 163, 285–

289, 292–296, 300, 302, 308, 314,329

Uzbek 314

Waikhana (Piratapuyo) 203Waiwai 6, 82, 89, 90, 93, 96Wanano 97, 198, 202, 203, 219, 228Warrwa 83Welsh 47, 143Witoto 6, 82, 91–96, 104

Yaqui 286–290, 293–296, 299, 300,302, 307, 308, 314

Yiddish 316, 317, 320–322, 325, 328,331, 332, 334, 336, 338, 340, 348,351, 352, 355, 356

Yidiny 78, 81, 96, 105, 106

388 Language index

Yucuna 203–206Yuhup 197, 198, 201, 202, 204–206,

209, 210, 215, 219–223, 228Yuman 287Yupik, Central Alaskan 344, 356

Yupik, Siberian 311, 317, 329, 330,333, 334, 337, 339, 342–344, 354

Yuruti 207, 209, 212, 219, 220, 227

Zapotec, Isthmus 74, 314Zoque 71, 72, 75

Language index 389

Subject index

ablative 11, 50, 270, 271–275, 280active structure 363–372adposition 7, 42, 111, 115, 117–122,

175, 261, 268, 280, 326, 342, 344,345

adverbialclause 85, 352, 354, 357marker 86, 133, 177, 178, 185, 188,

291, 311, 319, 320, 325, 326, 331,335, 343, 346–348, 352, 355

analytical construction 286, 290, 295,300, 360, 369

applicative type 61, 66, 67arealcontact 57, 223di¤usion 104, 158–159, 160, 164,

171, 222, 226influence 75, 219property (feature) 139, 145, 207,

210, 213, 216, 218, 222, 256, 364typology 235, 239, 260

article vii, 2, 8, 9, 128, 153, 168, 189,243

definite 2, 8, 10, 18, 32, 129–134,139, 146, 147, 157, 167–169, 171–172, 176, 179, 184, 192, 194, 231–234, 236–241, 243–245, 248–252,257–263, 326

indefinite vii, 2, 8, 9, 10, 134–139,157, 167, 168, 170–174, 176–181,184–186, 189, 192, 194, 231, 234–236, 241–243, 245–263

auxiliary 140, 152, 155, 157, 159, 364,365, 367, 371, 372

aspectual 148, 154, 203, 211–214,216, 219–224

modal vii, 11, 285–305auxiliation 8, 127, 147, 361, 365

bilingual 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 30,33–41, 43–45, 50–52, 69, 127, 313

mixed language 268

bilingualism 18, 19, 26, 39, 50, 52,189, 196, 198, 351

borrowability 15, 18, 41, 52, 320borrowing vii, viii, 6–9, 12, 18, 21, 39,

41, 43, 80, 92, 96, 101, 141, 167,175, 190, 201, 204, 268

discourse marker (conjunction) 84,311, 314–352

grammatical 12, 51, 52, 62, 63, 67,128, 194, 195, 304, 313

integration 9, 190lexical 3, 10, 23, 25, 26, 127, 176,

195–197, 223, 303morphological 10, 196, 197, 223,

268pronominal 6, 82, 91, 94, 95structural 7, 10, 17, 43, 54, 126,

210, 224, 303, 305word-forms 19, 67, 71, 72, 98, 170,

174, 188

calque 6, 17, 24, 62, 97, 102, 199,209, 218, 257, 303, 304, 345, 346,362

calquing 81, 98, 126, 268, 345cautiousness 11, 249, 250, 259clause combining 33, 299, 327, 343clitic 56, 57, 63, 85, 89, 98, 100, 101,

115, 168, 207, 208, 213, 220, 285–287, 290, 292, 298–303, 327, 343,345, 346

code copying vii, 11, 14, 265, 268,280

comitative 125–127, 157communicativegoal 2, 20, 23, 49interaction 3, 20, 22, 33, 42, 48

comparative construction 3, 4, 54, 55,58–64, 66, 68–76, 175, 193

complement clause 60–63, 86, 149,152, 289, 323, 324

complementation 11, 12, 276complementizer 11, 63, 149, 268, 269,

276–280, 294, 313, 320, 323–325,327, 336, 337, 347, 350

conjunction viii, 12, 33–35, 81, 83–85,88, 89, 175, 303, 311–322, 326–331, 335–336, 338–352

constituent order 57, 64contact-inducedgrammatical replication 127, 152,

157grammatical change 8, 11–13, 152,

312, 344grammaticalization 7, 10, 138, 139,

233, 234, 249, 250, 257language change vii, 1–7, 17–20,

23, 26, 43, 46–49, 53, 54, 66, 68,77, 94, 101, 102, 111, 118, 126,127, 146, 153, 173, 231, 246–248,257–259, 265, 280, 285, 288, 302,349

structural change 9, 55, 64, 170convergence viii, 12, 19, 27, 52, 62, 64,

280, 311, 314, 359, 360coordination 12, 60, 61, 65–67, 312copula 197, 201, 205–208, 210–214,

219–223, 303creolization 11, 265, 273, 279, 280cross-linguistic tendency 4, 70, 200

demonstrative 59, 68, 69, 129, 130,132, 139, 157, 232–234, 236, 237,239, 248, 251, 257, 298, 326, 346

dependent clause marker viii, 12, 311,315, 318–320, 323–326, 342, 344,347, 348, 350–352

diachronic perspective 1, 10–13, 26,145, 149, 151, 188, 231–238, 241,242, 250, 258–259, 269, 291, 298,299, 304, 305, 331, 359, 365,367

diachrony 12, 232, 249, 250, 372diathetic variation 365, 367, 370–

372diglossia 18, 30

discourse marker 12, 19, 21, 35, 40–42, 81, 83, 84, 311, 313–315, 318,320, 326, 331, 332, 334, 335, 346,348–352

dominant language 6, 19, 30, 31, 34,36–38, 41, 77–78, 80–81, 83, 89,90, 97, 101, 102, 146, 304, 311

donor language 43, 179, 312, 314, 315,344, 345, 349, 351

equative construction 207, 221ergative 7, 111, 117–121, 175, 177,

242evidential 100, 101, 148, 149, 197,

200, 201, 207–211, 219–224evidentiality 149, 200external influence 189, 361, 362

fluent speaker 47, 77, 78, 82–84, 89,96

gap 6, 19, 24, 35, 244, 245, 259, 319,342

grammatical di¤usion 10, 200grammaticalization vii, 7–11, 17, 27,

125–127, 129, 130, 132–140, 145–147, 150–152, 154, 156, 157, 171–174, 179, 182, 188–190, 196, 200,213, 232–235, 238–240, 246, 248–250–258, 278, 279, 285–288, 291,296, 299, 300, 305, 325, 326, 344,345

hispanization 71, 175, 176, 178, 186

imperative 96, 98, 99, 206, 286infinitive 122, 152, 276, 279, 302, 372influence 3–5, 7, 29, 36, 49, 57, 77, 80,

90, 92, 96, 97, 99, 100, 112, 114,119–121, 125, 128, 129, 167, 172,173, 175, 176, 187, 189, 199–201,208, 213, 216, 218–223, 231, 248,268, 275, 278, 279, 286, 287, 303,313, 315, 317, 318, 328–332, 344,351, 359–362

Subject index 391

insertion 3, 23–26, 39, 44, 46–49, 186,187

instrumental 24, 42, 125–127, 133,157

internalchange vii, 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 10, 58, 66,

81, 97, 118, 121, 133, 134, 152,174, 188, 190, 214, 255, 257, 285,299, 303, 304

reconstruction 11, 286, 305

languagechange 1, 2, 5, 9, 13, 17, 20, 23, 28,

31, 38, 41, 43, 45, 48, 77, 79, 89,101, 197, 198, 223, 224, 252, 286,303

contact vii, 1, 2, 4, 5, 8–13, 21, 22,53, 58, 77, 78, 81, 82, 90, 96, 97,102, 125–127, 130–134, 139, 146,149, 152, 153, 170–174, 179, 189,196–198, 223, 224, 231, 246, 249,267, 286, 287, 293, 299, 303, 341,346

creation 2, 4, 18, 47, 65, 67, 68, 121,177, 190, 326

extinction 6, 96, 102, 114, 116, 189innovation vii, 1–4, 18, 20, 23, 25,

27, 29, 31, 38, 46, 48, 49, 53, 55,67, 70, 72, 77, 128, 155, 204, 212,254, 346, 359, 365

learning 2, 18, 30maintenance 2, 18, 30, 268mixing 23, 44, 45, 47, 49, 80, 98, 99,

196, 199, 200, 223, 224obsolescence vii, 4–7, 77–82, 84–

85, 88, 89, 95–97, 100–102, 114shift 2, 13, 18, 19, 30, 47, 54, 77,

80–82, 97, 100, 102, 200, 210,268, 329, 360, 365, 366

lexicalborrowing (see borrowing)insertions 3, 23, 25, 39, 44, 48, 186transfer 4, 17, 18, 60, 71–73, 199,

210light verb 197, 213, 214, 216, 219–223

linguistic area 10, 97, 98, 114, 122,198, 200

linguistic exogamy 97, 196, 198, 199loans 17, 25, 26, 81, 83, 84, 89, 91,92, 94, 96, 97, 99, 126, 173, 176,177, 180, 204, 311, 312, 317, 327,329, 330, 340, 346–348, 351

loanword 7, 49, 73, 195, 196, 200,317

locative phrase 4, 61, 64, 65, 67–69loss 4–7, 53, 77, 80, 81, 130, 132, 221,

366, 371

marked-nominative system 7, 111,118–120, 122

metatypy 344middle structure 363, 365, 366model language 3, 53–55, 58, 64, 71,

73, 126–129, 136, 137, 153–158,246, 249–252, 254, 256, 259

monolingual 3, 19, 21, 25, 26, 33, 41,43–45, 179

morphosyntactic changes 53, 315multilingual 1, 2, 4, 6, 19, 21, 23, 33–

35, 41, 45, 46, 49, 267multilingualism 20, 79, 97, 196–198,

223

non-standard varieties 128–130, 138,171, 172, 345

noun classification 130, 195, 200

obsolescent language change(see obsolescence)

participle viii, 13, 140, 141, 144, 359–372

pidgin 18, 268polysemy vii, 8, 125–127, 139, 145,

149, 153, 157, 158postposition 32, 56, 57, 68, 115, 116,

119–121, 239, 247, 275, 276,344

precautionary principle 1, 10–12predicate chaining 197, 214, 216, 223

392 Subject index

preposition 4, 54, 57, 59, 64, 65, 68–73, 115, 119, 125–127, 185–188,269, 271, 273, 276, 279, 303, 326,339, 344

pronominal form (pronoun) 6, 7, 19,27, 28, 56, 68, 69, 82, 89–96, 101,115, 129, 176, 286, 289, 292, 298,303

recipient language 10, 38, 43, 62, 196,312, 314, 315, 330, 344–346, 349,351

reduplication 122, 175relative clause 5, 32, 59, 68, 69, 319,

323, 325, 335, 338, 339, 341, 350repertoire 2, 3, 19–21, 23, 25–30, 33,

34, 38, 41, 47–49replica language 3, 28, 30, 53–55, 58,

60, 62–64, 70, 126–132, 136, 138,139, 153–158, 238, 249–256, 259,268

replication 7, 8, 12, 17, 23–24, 27, 29,30, 48, 49, 54, 62, 64, 67, 71, 126–128, 133, 136, 139–142, 145, 152–158, 170, 173, 174, 188–190, 242,269, 344

serialized construction 200, 213, 299,300, 302

simplification 6, 77, 80, 115, 365social

pressure 41prestige 2, 19setting 18, 41, 46, 268

subordinate clause 56, 88, 288, 299,311

subordination 42, 195, 299, 312, 320,345, 349, 350

substrate 18, 195, 199, 279, 352synchronic perspective 6, 7, 26, 58, 77,

151, 208, 232, 234, 237, 244, 269,305

typological consequences of thecontact 3, 10, 18, 53, 72, 195,197, 223, 286

unpredictable change 2, 3utterance modifier 39, 313

verbal complement 11, 286–291, 295,296, 299, 300, 305, 323

verbal derivation 217, 218, 222, 223,299

Subject index 393

chamoreau, léglise (2012) dynamics of contact-induced language change

Documents