bernd heine & tania kuteva universität zu köln & heinrich

Journal of language contact – THEMA 2 (2008) www. jlc-journal.org

CONSTRAINTS ON CONTACT-INDUCED LINGUISTIC CHANGE1

Bernd Heine & Tania Kuteva

Universität zu Köln & Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf

1. The default position

One of the main achievements of Thomason & Kaufman’s (1988) seminal work on language contact was that they proposed a strong generalization:

As far as the strictly linguistic possibilities go, any linguistic feature can be transferred from any language to any other language; and implicational universals that depend solely on linguistic properties are similarly invalid. (Thomason & Kaufman 1988:14)

This generalization has been reiterated ever since by Thomason in later publications; thus, Harris & Campbell (1995:149) observe that “virtually anything can (ultimately) be borrowed”, and Curnow (2001:434) concludes that we may never be able to develop universal constraints on borrowability on the basis of the data available (see also Campbell 1993: 104). In a recent document, Thomason provides an overview of the present situation of research on contact-induced linguistic change, concluding, first, that “no one has successfully proposed absolute linguistic constraints on contact-induced change”, second, that “there are no absolute constraints on the kinds or numbers of features that can be transferred from one language to another” and, third, that “theories that claim, or assume, the existence of absolute linguistic constraints on such changes” must be rejected (2007).2 Note that the term “constraint” is taken by Thomason (2008:42) in a fairly rigid sense, meaning that ”it cannot happen”, rather than what she portrays as “the much more

1 We wish to thank Sally Thomason and Johannes Helmbrecht for valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. Part of the work leading to the paper was carried out during the first author’s stays at various research institutions, to which we are deeply indebted, in particular the Institute for Advanced Study, LaTrobe University and the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, Melbourne and its directors Bob Dixon and Sasha Aikhenvald, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) and its Rector Wim Blockmans, and to Peter Siemund and Lukas Pietsch and the Sonderforschungsbereich Mehrsprachigkeit (SFB 538) of the University of Hamburg. 2 This is largely, though not entirely, a repetition of what Thomason had said earlier, namely that “[…] there are no linguistic constraints on interference: any linguistic feature can be transferred to any language […], and any change can occur as an indirect result of language contact […], all the specific constraints on contact-induced change that have been proposed have been counterexemplified” (Thomason 2001b: 85).

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58 Bernd Heine & Tania Kuteva


flexible “constrain t” of the sort popularized in Optimality Theory”. But the no-linguistic-constraint hypothesis has not gone unchallenged. For example, Oksaar

(1972:492) concludes that there are “no clear cases that would permit the generalization of statements that grammatical paradigms, bound morphemes, word order etc. can be subject to interference”. In particular, it has been argued that there is at least one domain of language structure that is immune to transfer (or convergence), namely “core syntax” (Sanchez 2004; Montrul 2004; Silva-Corvalán 2007; see Dog ruöz & Backus 2007:7). Still, there is evidence that even “core syntax” is vulnerable to language contact: Given enough time, new modes of core syntactic organization can evolve in situations of intense language contact—however “core syntax” may be defined (see Heine & Kuteva 2005; 2006 for examples).

We therefore concur with Thomason (2008:43) that the hypothesis is best taken to be the default

position and that “the burden of proof”, as she puts it, is now with those refuting this hypothesis. In the present paper we hope to refute it, arguing that there are some factors that have not been taken into account by Thomason & Kaufman (1988) or any of the more recent works by Thomason. It would seem that there are in fact constraints on contact-induced linguistic change, and that these factors can be accounted for in a principled way. Our concern will be exclusively with grammatical replication, more precisely with contact-induced grammaticalization, which both concern the transfer of meanings and structures rather than of form-meaning pairings or of phonetic substance (see Heine & Kuteva 2005, chapters 2 and 3), although we do not wish to exclude the possibility that there are similar constraints in other domains of contact-induced linguistic transfer.

We will say that contact-induced linguistic change has taken place when a group of speakers regularly shows a linguistic behavior that differs from that of earlier generations of speakers, and where this behavior can be demonstrated to have been influenced in some way by language contact3. This definition is deliberately general; thus, a “group of speakers” may include an entire speech community, the speakers of a dialect, or any smaller social unit, such as a family or a peer group. Similarly, “linguistic behavior” can relate to anything from a phonetic feature to the syntax of clause structure or the organization of discourses, and “generations of speakers” can involve in extreme cases dozens of generations or only one generation. What is important is that that behavior is regular (rather than idiosyncratic) and is shared by all speakers of the relevant group.

One has to be aware, however, that contact-induced linguistic change is a fairly complex process. The little evidence that is available suggests that at the beginning of the process as a sociolinguistic phenomenon there typically is spontaneous replication in bilingual interaction, where some individual speaker—consciously or unconsciously—propagates a novel feature in the replica language that has been influenced by some other language (the model language). Spontaneous replication is highly idiosyncractic and the vast majority of instances of it will have no effect on the language concerned, they may involve e.g. features of the speaker’s L1 that are carried over into his L2 or the other way round, being judged as what is commonly referred to as a “speech error” or the result of imperfect learning. But some instances may catch on: Being taken up and used regularly by other speakers, 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 necessarily lead to what we refer to as 3 According to Thomason (2007:9), “contact is a source of linguistic change if it is less likely that a given change would have occurred outside a specific contact situation”. This proposal is not entirely satisfactory; as we will see in this paper, there are a number of changes that are crosslinguistically likely to occur outside a specific contact situation, yet that can also be instances of contact-induced linguistic change (see the changes discussed below, such as demonstrative > definite article, ‘go to’ > future tense, etc.).


Constraints on Contact-Induced Linguistic Change 59


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 linguistic change (including grammatical replication) has taken place.

Most stages that make up this process are still poorly documented, and in the present paper we will be satisfied with comparing the initial stage with the final stages of this process; more specifically, we will deal with cases that are fairly uncontroversial instances of contact-induced linguistic change. To this end, an outline of the model used here is presented in section 2, and in section 3, evidence is adduced in support of our hypothesis that linguistic change in situations of language contact is subject to at least one significant constraint. In section 4 we will look into the question of what other constraints there are in language contact, and in the final section 5 some conclusions are drawn on what the findings presented in the paper mean with reference to what we know about language contact.

2. Grammatical replication

In the model used here, grammatical replication is part of a network of types of linguistic transfer, which can summarily be represented as in figure 1. Figure 1. Main types of contact-induced linguistic transfer.

Contact-induced linguistic transfer

Replication Borrowing

Grammatical replication Lexical replication

Contact-induced grammaticalization Restructuring

Loss Rearrangement

Grammatical replication, widely referred to as “structural borrowing” or “grammatical

calquing”, is a process whereby speakers of a language, called the replica language, create a new grammatical structure on the model of some structure of another language, called the model language.4 It concerns meanings and the structures associated with them, but not forms—that is, phonetic substance is not involved. Like other cases of replication, grammatical replication contrasts with borrowing, which—in our terminology—involves phonetic substance, that is, either sounds or form-meaning units such as morphemes, words, or larger entities. Both replication and borrowing are manifestations of contact-induced transfer or code-copying (Johanson 1992; 2002a; 2002b).

The paper will deal with contact-induced grammatical replication as a product, for which there is

4 We are using the phrase “a language” as a shorthand for “speakers of a language”; it goes without saying that languages cannot do such things.




some crosslinguistic evidence, and we 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 sociolinguistic 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 unconsciously—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 & Milroy 1985:15), is highly idiosyncractic and the vast majority of instances of it will have no effect 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, and they may spread to other groups of speakers—in exceptional cases even to the entire speech community. Still, this process does not necessarily 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 replication has taken place.

3. A survey of grammatical structures

In the present section we will provide the evidence in support our claim that there is a linguistic constraint in language contact. To this end we will look at three major domains of grammatical structure, namely the noun phrase, the verb phrase, and the way clauses are combined into complex clauses. It goes without saying that—for reasons of space—we cannot treat these domains in great detail; rather, we will be restricted to exemplary categories characterizing each of these domains; the reader is referred to Heine & Kuteva (2005; 2006) for similar generalizations on other kinds of categories.

3.1. Articles

In looking at the domain of the noun phrase we will restrict discussion to markers of definite and indefinite reference (3.1.1) and to case marking (3.1.2) since there are some data on the behavior of these categories in situation of language contact.

Definite markers

That the marking of definite reference is sensitive to language contact has been established in a number of studies on contact situations in various parts of the world. The most detailed description that exists concerns Upper Sorbian of eastern Germany, which has been affected by nearly a millennium of contact with German. The present data are taken from non-standard Upper Sorbian as spoken by the Roman Catholic community in the west of the Oberlausitz (Upper Lausitia; Breu 2003a:28).

Prior to language contact, Upper Sorbian did not have any articles but, on the model of German, speakers have grammaticalized their proximal demonstrative (‘this’) to a definite article, to the extent that the two are now formally distinct; for example, the forms are tón/te/ta (masculine/feminine/neuter) for the nominative singular of the definite article and tóne/tene/tane for the demonstrative.5 There is however a difference between the model and the replica language: Whereas German has a semantically-definite article (where the existence of a referent can be derived from world knowledge), Upper Sorbian has a less grammaticalized, context-definite article, illustrated in the following example, where the reference of ‘smoke’, expressed by the definite article tón, can only be derived from the preceding context. As the detailed comparison between 5 The present treatment is based entirely on Breu (2005), which provides a fine-grained analysis.




German and Upper Sorbian shows (Breu 2004; see also Heine 2007), there can be little doubt that this is a case of contact-induced transfer.

(1) Upper Sorbian (Breu 2004:37ff.; the second line presents the corresponding German

sentence)6 Mó smó zade jeno Lkweja jeli. Tón kur be sreklich.

‘Wir sind hinter einem LKW hergefahren. Der Rauch war schrecklich.’ ‘We drove behind a truck. The smoke was terrible.’ A similar example of a development from demonstrative to definite article can be found in Pipil,

a Uto-Aztecan language of El Salvador, belonging to the Nahua subgroup of Aztecan. The language is now nearing extinction; the remaining few hundred speakers are all Pipil-Spanish bilinguals, and for many of them Spanish is the dominant language. Accordingly, Pipil’s more recent linguistic history is shaped primarily by its interaction with Spanish. Campbell (1987) notes that prior to language contact with Spanish, Pipil speakers did not dispose of conventionalized devices for marking definite reference on nouns; today, Pipil nouns occur with the definite article ne corresponding to the definite article of Spanish (for an example, see (6) below). What appears to distinguish the Pipil case from the Upper Sorbian one is that already before to language contact, the Pipil demonstrative was already weakly grammaticalized as an article, and contact had the effect that the erstwhile demonstrative developed into a full-fledged article, becoming “nearly a complete match” of the Spanish definite article (Campbell 1987:272).

A third example concerns an Oceanic language. Ross (1996; 2001) describes a situation where two genetically unrelated languages spoken on Karkar Island off the north coast of Papua New Guinea have become semantically and syntactically largely intertranslatable while each of the two has retained its own lexical material—a situation he proposes to call metatypy. The model language is Waskia, a Papuan language of the Trans-New Guinea type, and the replica language Takia, a Western Oceanic language of the Bel family of the North New Guinea cluster. In an attempt to assimilate their language to the Papuan language Waskia, speakers of the Western Oceanic language Takia largely replicated the syntax of the Papuan language Waskia. The development of a new postponed determiner on the model of the Papuan language was part of this process: Takia speakers created a new determiner an, which appears to act as a definite article, by grammaticalizing their deictic morpheme *a (‘that’, near speaker) in combination with a pronominal suffix agreeing in person and number with the head noun (Ross 2001:142). Thus, once more we observe that language contact has the effect a demonstrative, either on its own or in combination with some other element, develops into a marker for definite reference.

Our final example comes from Singlish, a shorthand for Colloquial Singaporean English (or Singaporean Colloquial English). It is a basilectal, low-prestige variety of English (Platt 1975), mainly used as L2 although it has acquired a substantial number of native speakers. In contact with languages such as Cantonese, Hokkien, Mandarin, Singaporean Malay, and Bazaar Malay, Singlish created a catalogue of new functional categories. One new set of categories concerns articles: While the inherited article the did not disappear but survived as an optional marker, Singlish speakers developed a new article by grammaticalizing the distal demonstrative attribute that to an optional definite marker (Gil 2003:474), e.g., Geraint eat that apples ‘Geraint ate the apples’7. That it was Singaporean Malay which provided the model for the replication of the new article is suggested by 6 No glosses are provided by the author. 7 Gil does not provide translations of his Singlish examples. The translations are therefore ours based on the information available.




the following observation: Like the new Singlish article, the Singaporean Malay item itu ‘that’ is ambiguous, serving both as a distal demonstrative and a definite article, and both are transnumeral, that is, they are neutral with respect to number, hence they can co-occur with plural head nouns and, when in combination with a head noun which is equally transnumeral, there is a non-plural interpretation in both languages (Gil 2003:474-5).

The reader is referred to Heine & Kuteva (2006, chapter 3) for additional examples of this kind. What all these examples suggest is that one effect that language contact may have is that speakers of one language create a new definite article on the model on another language by grammaticalizing a demonstrative attribute to an article. This process is unidirectional, both in language contact and elsewhere: We are not aware of any language that has gone in the opposite direction by developing a definite article into a demonstrative—hence, we suggest that it constitutes a constraint on language contact, even if it is not restricted to language contact.

Indefinite articles

The most detailed description of how a language acquires an indefinite article as a result of language contact is, once more, provided by Breu (2003a) on Upper Sorbian in eastern Germany and on Molisean of southeastern Italy. Molise Slavic, in short Molisean, is the language of a community of Croatian speakers from the Hercegovinian Neretva Valley who emigrated around 500 years ago because of the Turkish invasion on the Balkans, settling in the Molise Region, Campobasso Province, of southeastern Italy. After contact both with the local varieties and with Standard Italian over a period of half a millennium, Molisean has been massively influenced by Italian (for a survey, see Breu 1998; see also Breu 1999; 2003a; 2003b; 2003c; 2004).

Upper Sorbian and Molisean are what Breu (2003a) calls Slavic “micro-languages”, having been surrounded for centuries by speakers of the dominant languages German and Italian, respectively and, like other Slavic languages, they lacked indefinite articles prior to language contact while dominant languages have full-fledged articles. As a result of contact, however, both “micro-languages” created indefinite articles by grammaticalizing their numeral for ‘one’. That language contact was the propelling force in these processes is suggested among others by the fact that the replica categories are associated with roughly the same kinds of contexts as the corresponding categories in the model languages; the reader is referred to Breu (2003a) for a detailed description of the situation in the two languages (see also Heine 2007).

A similar example is provided by Basque (Haase 1992; Heine & Kuteva 2006, section 7.2). As a result of centuries of intense contact with Gascon and later on with French, Basque speakers in southwestern France introduced an indefinite article by grammaticalizing their numeral for ‘one’, bat. There are incipient uses as a non-specific marker as early as 1545, occasional uses of bat as a specific marker are attested already in 1782, but 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.

Another example can be found in the Uto-Aztecan language Pipil of El Salvador: In contact with the dominant language Spanish, Pipil-Spanish bilinguals developed their numeral se: ‘one’ into an indefinite article of the same kind as the corresponding article in Spanish, as Campbell (1987:272) observes. Note that in pre-Conquest times—that is, prior to language contact—se: was a numeral but not an article.

A further instance of this process is found in Mexico, involving the grammaticalization of the numeral see ‘one’ of another Aztecan language, Nahuatl, to an indefinite article as an equivalent of the indefinite article in the contact language Spanish, cf. (2), whereby the use of see was extended from the paradigm of numerals to a new paradigm of articles.




(2) Nahuatl (Flores Farfán 2004:92) see O- pipitsah.

one 3.SG- kiss ‘It’s a kiss.’

And the colloquial Singaporean English variety Singlish also provides an example of this kind.

Although the inherited article a(n) survived as an optional marker, Singlish speakers drew on their numeral one to create a new indefinite article, e.g., Geraint eat one apple ‘Geraint ate an apple’8 (Gil 2003:472-4). The rise of the new indefinite marker one might be an instance of replica grammaticalization since virtually all the languages with which Singlish is in contact (Cantonese, Hokkien, Mandarin, as well as Singaporean and Standard Malay) use their numeral ‘one’ as a marker of indefiniteness (Gil 2003:502).

These examples do not exhaust the number of cases where language contact, either as a propelling or an accelerating process, was responsible for the rise of new indefinite articles via the grammaticalization of numerals for ‘one’ (see Heine & Kuteva 2006, chapter 3). Once again, we are not aware of any examples of a reverse process whereby an article developed into a numeral; accordingly, we seem to be dealing with the same kind constraint in language contact that we observed in the case of definite articles.

Résumé

The observations made in this section suggest, first, that reference marking on nouns or noun phrases is a phenomenon that appears to be highly sensitive to language contact: New structures for expressing definite and indefinite reference can easily develop in situations of contact. Second, these observations also suggest that this process is unidirectional and, hence, constitutes a constraint on what is a possible contact-induced linguistic change and what is not. And third, the observations also allow to formulate probabilistic predictions of the following kind: If new articles arise in language contact then very likely they will lead from demonstrative to definite article and from numeral ‘one’ to indefinite article while a development in the opposite direction is highly unlikely.

3.2. Case marking

We will say that case markers are grammatical forms, typically nominal affixes or adpositions, whose main function it is to assign a case property to the noun (phrase) they govern. They concern on the one hand the core (or argument) case functions A (subject of transitive clauses), O (object of transitive clauses) and S (subject of intransitive clauses), and on the other hand peripheral (or adjunct) case functions such as ablative, allative, dative, benefactive, comitative, instrumental, locative, or possessive (or genitive). Our interest in this section is with the latter, more specifically with contact-induced changes from one case function to another. On the one hand we will look at the change from comitative to instrumental case function; on the other hand, our concern is with adpositions giving rise to genitive case markers. Note that the two kinds of change differ from one another in a significant way: Whereas the former has no noteworthy syntactic consequences, the latter entails a change from clausal to nominal syntax.

From comitative to instrumental marking

Comitatives are a common source for other case functions, including clause combining. One

8 Gil does not provide translations of his Singlish examples. The translations are therefore ours based on the information available.




common line of grammaticalization concerns the extension of comitative markers to also present instruments. This observation has been made crosslinguistically in what is presumably language-internal grammatical change (Luraghi 2001; Heine & Kuteva 2002:84-6); but it has also been observed in language contact: As shown in Heine & Kuteva (2006, chapter 5), there are a number of cases where speakers in language contact developed a comitative-instrumental polysemy on the model of another language by grammaticalizing their comitative marker. The following are examples illustrating this kind of change, including cases that are not discussed in Heine & Kuteva (2006).

Basque is a language with a rich morphological paradigm of cases distinguished by means of suffixes. This paradigm includes both a comitative and an instrumental suffix. The Romance languages Spanish, Gascon and French, with which Basque is or was in contact all have a comitative-instrumental polysemy: Spanish con, Gascon dab, dambe, and French avec are used for both comitative (‘together with’) and instrumental (‘by means of’) participants. As a result of these contacts, Basque is in a process of giving up this distinction: Wherever in the Romance model languages9 the comitative-instrumental preposition is used to present instrumental participants, Basque uses its comitative case suffix -ekin (or -ekilan) for instrumentals. The instrumental case suffix –(e)z can still be used to some extent to present instruments or means, but in most contexts it tends to be replaced by the comitative case since the model languages would use the comitative-instrumental preposition in this context. In other words, the instrumental case is gradually being replaced in the Basque varieties by the comitative suffix—that is, in an attempt to establish equivalence with the model languages, the comitative-instrumental polysemy of the model languages is replicated in Basque by grammaticalizing the comitative to also present instrumental participants (Haase 1992; 1997; Heine & Kuteva 2005).

A similar example is provided by the Norman French dialect Guernésiais of the Channel Island

Guernsey, which distinguished traditionally between the comitative preposition dauve ‘(together) with’ and the instrumental prepositon atou ‘with, by means of’. Guernésiais was in contact with English for roughly 800 years and was extensively influenced by English.10 English does not distinguish between the two, using with for both, and contact with English appears to have been a contributing factor for Guernésiais speakers to extend dauve from comitative to instrumental function, with the effect that the instrumental preposition atou gradually disappeared from the language; Jones (2002:157) found atou to be used only in 3 % of the contexts in which her informants had to respond using instrumental ‘with’.

A third example is the following. Croatian displays the Slavic pattern of case marking,

distinguishing the comitative and instrumental by means of the preposition s, cf. (3a). But there is one variety of Croatian that has experienced a development whereby this case discrimination developed into case polysemy, namely the one that we mentioned already in the preceding section. As Breu (1996:26-8) demonstrates, Molisean has extended the use of its comitative preposition s to also mark instrumental participants. Accordingly, a Standard Croatian instrumental phrase as in (3a) is expressed in Molisean as in (3b) on the model of Italian, cf. (3c).

9 Note that the influence of Gascon on Basque was not unilateral; rather, it appears that Basque has also acted as a model language for Gascon (see Haase 1997). 10 Guernésiais (or Guernsey) was spoken on the Island of Guernsey of the Channel Islands archipelago for more than a thousand years but is now moribund: After the World War II, when many island inhabitants who had been evacuated to England during the war returned back home, English gradually began to replace this Norman dialect, a process that appears to be ongoing (Ramisch 1989; Jones 2002: 164).




(3) Instrumental marking in Standard Croatian, Molisean, and Italian (Breu 1996:26) a Standard Croatian noz‡em ‘with a knife’ (knife.INSTR) b Molise Croatian s noz‡em ‘with a knife’ (with knife.INSTR) c Italian con un coltello ‘with a knife’ (with a knife)

Molisean is not the only Slavic language that has extended its comitative preposition to also

mark instruments in a situation of language contact; further examples are provided by Slovenian, which has acquired a comitative-instrumental polysemy presumably as a result of German influence (Stolz 2001:601), and the same applies to Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian, which use their preposition z(e) ‘with’ both as a comitative and an instrumental marker, cf. (4).

(4) Upper Sorbian (Lötzsch 1996:56) a Ja re‡c‡u z pre‡celom. (I speak with friend.INSTR) ‘I speak with my friend.’ b Ja dze‡lam z ruku. (I work with hand.INSTR) ‘I work with my hand.’ As Lötzsch (1969; 1996:56) argues convincingly, the two Sorbian languages have, as a result of

nearly one millennium of intense contact with German, replicated the German comitative-instrumental polysemy by grammaticalizing the comitative preposition z(e) ‘with’ to an instrumental marker—with the effect that this preposition is now used obligatorily for both comitative (4a) and instrumental participants (4b). Thus, those Slavic communities that are known to have had a long history of intense language contact with German and Italian, both having a comitative-instrumental polysemy, have acquired that very polysemy via grammaticalization of the comitative, while Slavic languages such as Polish, Ukrainian, Belorussian and Russian, which do not have such a history, have retained the Slavic case distinction.

To conclude, there appears to be a unidirectional development in language contact, leading from comitative to instrumental marking, while no development in the opposite direction has been recorded. Thus, we argue that this is another constraint on what is a possible contact-induced change and what is not and, once again, this constraint is of a more general nature, not being restricted to language contact.

From preposition to genitive marker

There are a number of different ways in which a new structure of attributive possession (or genitive marking) can arise, but presumably the most common one is via the grammaticalization of adpositions (prepositions or postpositions). For example, the form de ‘from’ was a preposition in




Latin but developed into a genitive marker in the Romance languages, and similar developments also occurred in some other European languages, where ablative prepositions, such as English of , German von, Dutch van gave rise to genitive markers (see Heine & Kuteva 2002). And the same kind of process can be observed in language contact. German von and Yiddish fun both serve on the one hand as ablative prepositions ‘from’ and on the other hand as case markers of attributive possession ‘of’ (genitive marker), while English speakers distinguish the two (from vs. of). Now, Rayfield (1970:65) found that Yiddish speakers at The Beach in Venice along the coast next to Los Angeles, most of whom were strongly bilingual in English, often used from in their variety of English instead of genitive of, e.g., the door from the house. What this suggests is that the English ablative preposition from was being grammaticalized to a new case marker on the model of Yiddish, thereby creating the same polysemy as is found in Yiddish.

Another example is provided by Molisean, the variety of the Slavic minority that we were dealing with already in the preceding sections. As Breu (1990b:54; 1996:26-7) observes, speakers of this minority language tend to add prepositions having functional equivalents in corresponding Italian prepositions to nouns marked by case suffixes. In this way, the instrumental case suffix is “strengthened” by the comitative preposition z ‘with’ to present instrumental participants on the model of Italian con, and in attributive possession, a new construction [possessee do possessor.GEN] was created on the pattern of Italian [possessee di possessor], where the Croatian allative preposition do ‘to, toward’ (governing the genitive case) was selected as an equivalent of the Italian possessive marker di, cf. (5):

(5) Italian vs. Molisean Croatian (Breu 1990b:54; 1996:26) a Italian la casa di quella donna b Molisean Slavic hiz‡a do one z‡ene (the house of that woman.GEN)11 ‘the house of that woman’ As a third example we may use the Aztecan language Pipil of El Salvador again. In pre-

Conquest times, Pipil had neither prepositions nor postpositions, using relational nouns instead. More recently, however, it has developed these relational nouns into a set of prepositions on the model of Spanish, which became “true prepositions of the Spanish type” (Harris & Campbell 1995:126). But the replication process has gone even further: One of the emerging prepositions, pal, was grammaticalized into a periphrastic genitive equivalent to Spanish de ‘of’. The following example illustrates the resulting use pattern:

(6) Pipil (Aztecan, Uto-Aztecan; Harris & Campbell 1995:126) Kinekit kikwat ne nakat, ne ihyak nakat pal ne masa:t. they.want they.eat the meat the stinking meat of the deer ‘They want to eat the meat, the stinking meat of the deer.’ These examples show that language contact can lead to, or contribute to a grammatical change

from preposition to genitive marker. To our knowledge, no case of a development in the opposite direction has been documented, that is, a situation of language contact where a preposition developed out of a genitive case marker. Accordingly, we maintain that this is another constraint on 11 Glosses are ours; no interlinear glosses are provided by the author.




contact-induced linguistic change.

3.3. Future tenses

In the same way as grammatical forms for discourse reference (3.1) and participant relations (3.2) do new forms for tense, aspect, and modality constantly arising in situations of language contact. A paradigm example is provided by the diffusion of possessive perfects across the languages of Europe (Heine & Kuteva 2006, chapter 4). In the present section we will look at one particular grammatical function, namely future tense, in order to determine whether they as well conform to the kind of constraint that we observed in the preceding sections.

Work on grammatical categories of tense has shown that there is a limited spectrum of conceptual pathways in which markers for future tense may evolve. The main source is provided by motion schemas involving goal-directed verbs for ‘come to’ [X comes to Y] or ‘go to’ [X goes to Y], or a volition schema [X wants Y] using a verb for ‘want’ (Bybee et al. 1991; 1994); following Dahl (2000b:319ff.) we will refer to these schemas, respectively, as the de-venitive, de-allative, and de-volitive schemas or constructions. Most of this work has been done on what is presumably language-internal grammatical change but, as has been shown in Heine & Kuteva (2005, section 3.3), the same kind of process can also be observed in situation of language contact; in the following we will present a selection of such cases.

De-allative futures are found, among others, in French (aller faire) and English (be going to), and some languages that have been in close contact with these two languages appear to have replicated these tense forms. One example is reported from Luxembourgeois, where speakers of this German dialect are said to have replicated the French de-allative construction aller faire (‘go to’) by developing their verb goen ‘go’ into a future auxiliary (Alanne 1972); note that French is the second or the primary language of these speakers.

A clearly more influential model was provided by English. One example has been reported from the Indo-Aryan language Romani: In the dialect spoken in Wales, Romani speakers developed a de-allative future on the model of English be going to (Boretzky 1989:368), cf. (7).

(7) Romani of Wales (Boretzky 1989:369) bris‡indo dz‡ala te del. (rain goes to give) ‘It is going to rain.’ But more than British English it was American English that provided a model for de-allative

futures: In a number of situations where communities speaking other languages were in contact with English in the USA or Canada, some form of a future using a verb for ‘go to’ evolved, even if not always in a strongly grammaticalized form. One example is provided by Old Order Mennonites in Waterloo County, Canada. In their variety of Pennsylvania German there is an emerging de-allative immediate future tense involving the verb geh ‘to go’ (Burridge 1995:61ff.), and another example can be seen in the speech of a community of Yiddish speakers in Venice along the coast next to Los Angeles, which is strongly bilingual in English although Yiddish predominates in everyday conversations (Rayfield 1970). As a result of intensive contact with English, Yiddish speakers have created a future tense on the model of the English be-going-to future, illustrated in (8).




(8) Yiddish of Venice, California (Rayfield 1970:69; quoted from Myers-Scotton 2002:216-7) All right, ge ikh kum- en bald. all right go 1.SG come- INF soon ‘All right, I’m going to come in a minute.’ As a final example we may return to the Pipil language of El Salvador. As we saw above, Pipil

has been strongly influenced by Spanish, and one effect of this influence is that Pipil speakers developed a new ‘go to’-future tense category, which Campbell (1987:267-8) attributes to the influence of the local Spanish de-allative future (lo voy a hacer ‘I’m going to do it’). That it is the conceptual schema of directed motion rather than the morphosyntactic structure of the Spanish future tense that provided the basis for replication is suggested by the fact that Pipil uses the main verb in its finite form while in the Spanish model structure the main verb appears in the infinitive, cf. (9).

(9) Pipil (Aztecan, Uto-Aztecan; Campbell 1987:268) ti- yu- t ti- yawi- t ti- pa: xa: lua- t ne: pa ka ku: htan. we- go- PL we- go- PL we- walk- PL there in woods ‘We are going to go take a walk there in (the) woods.’ The second major pathway of future tenses triggered or influenced by language contact is

provided by de-volitive constructions, where a verb for ‘want, wish’ is grammaticalized to a future auxiliary or affix. A paradigm case is provided by the languages of the Balkan sprachbund, which have generally drawn on this pathway12:

A future tense based on a reduced, often invariant, form of the verb ‘want’ is found in Greek, Tosk Albanian, Rumanian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, and Romani. (Joseph 1992:154).

While it is unclear which of the languages provided the ultimate model for the Balkan futures, it is fairly uncontroversial that contact played some role in their spread. Evidence for this hypothesis is provided, among others, by Romani: As Boretzky (1989) shows, Romani speakers have as a rule replicated the future category of the dominant language they were confronted with. For example, we saw above that for Romani speakers in Wales this was the English de-allative future; for speakers of Romani varieties on the Balkans this was the de-volitive future: They developed a future category marked with ka(m)-, which is derived from the verb kam-av ‘want, love’13 (Boretzky 1989:368).

The data provided in this section were meant to show, first, that the rise of new future tense

categories can be induced by language contact. For example, one is tempted to predict with a certain degree of probability that speakers in southeastern Europe will develop a new future tense by using a verb for ‘want’ since the de-volitive schema offers the primary conceptual choice for speakers on the Balkans, while immigrant speech communities in the USA are most likely to draw on the de-allative schema to create a new future construction in their L1 because the English be-going-to 12 Other European languages are English (will), Danish (vil), Norwegian Bokma°l (vil), Faroese (vil), and Frisian wal; (Dahl 2000b: 322). 13 In the course of grammaticalization, this verb has experienced a number of erosion processes; accordingly, the future tense marker is e.g. kan- in a Krim dialect, am- in northwestern Bulgaria, ka- in a number of other dialects, and perhaps –ma/m in central Balkan dialects (Boretzky & Igla 1999: 718).




future provides the most immediately available model for replication. Second, we saw that grammatical replication was generally unidirectional: There were lexical verbs of physical motion (‘go to’), and of volition (‘want, wish’) that developed into future tense markers, and there does not appear any language where—with or without language contact—a future tense marker gave rise to a verb meaning ‘go to’ or ‘want’. Accordingly, we are confronted with the same kind of constraint that we encountered in the preceding sections: Speakers in language contact observe principles of grammaticalization in much the same way as they do in situations not involving language contact: They draw on lexical material in order to form new functional categories, and they are unlikely go in the opposite direction, even if such a possibility can never be entirely ruled out.

3.4. Passives

We observed in section 1 that “core syntax” is claimed by some to be immune to transfer in language contact. Irrespective of whether one may consider operations such as passivization to belong to core syntax, passives turn out to be fairly vulnerable in language contact.

Passive markers in European languages commonly use ‘be’ or ‘become’ as auxiliaries, with the main verb being encoded as a past perfect participle form or some equivalent of it. But Rhaeto-Romance, Italian, and the Bavarian dialect of German share a periphrastic passive construction where the passive auxiliary is historically derived from the lexical verb ‘come’, cf. (10).

(10) The Alpine ‘come’-passive (Ramat 1998:227-8) a Ladin (Rhaeto-Romance) Co fl vain fabricheda la scuola nouva. (here comes built the school new) ‘Here the new school is constructed.’ b Italian Qui viene costruita la scuola nuova. (here comes built the school new) ‘Here the new school is being constructed.’ c Bavarian (German) Da° kummt de nei(e) Schul gebaut. (here comes the new school built) ‘Here the new school is constructed.’ We argue that contact-induced replication of a grammaticalization process from a construction

[‘come’ + perfect participle] to a passive construction was involved in this case, for the following reasons: First, ‘come’-passives do not appear to be common crosslinguistically (but see below) and it is therefore statistically unlikely that these three neighboring languages should have undergone such a rare process independent of one another. Second, common genetic inheritance can be ruled out as a contributing factor: The ‘come’-passive cannot be traced back to earlier stages of Romance or Germanic languages. And third, the languages concerned can be shown to share a history of contact; Ramat (1998:227-8) notes that there have been centuries of contact between southern Germany and northeastern Italy and that it was the Romance type that “has influenced the geographically contiguous Bavarian passive”. Accordingly, areal diffusion among these




geographically adjacent communities appears to offer the most reasonable account. But there is another language that has created a ‘come’-passive in language contact, and once

again Italian appears to have provided the model, the replica language being Maltese (Malti). Maltese has various ways of expressing passive-like functions; nevertheless, it has replicated the [venire + past participle]-passive of the model language Italian (e.g. viene usato ‘is being used’) by grammaticalizing the imperfective form jig *i14 of its lexical verb g *ie ‘come’ to a passive auxiliary, with the main verb appearing in the participle form (e.g. jig *i uz*a-t ‘being used’).15 Like its Italian model, the new Maltese category is a dynamic passive, thus expressing a function not covered by the already existing Maltese categories (Drewes 1994:95-6; Stolz 2003; Heine & Kuteva 2005, section 4.1).

Another fairly unusual passive construction is found in German. Technically known as the German dative, indirect, or recipient passive, it serves to promote a recipient argument (indirect object) to subject status, where any of the verbs bekommen, kriegen, or erhalten ‘get, receive’, serve as auxiliaries and the main verb appears in the past perfect participle. The dative passive was replicated in both Upper and Lower Sorbian, first attested in Sorbian in 1814, where Sorbian speakers used their verb krynus in the creation of the passive. The German verb kriegen ‘get, receive’ was borrowed in the form krynus (or krynuc or kry(d)nyc ) in both Upper and Lower Sorbian, and as kregac in Slovincian. However, as Nau (1995:107) argues, Sorbian speakers did not borrow krynus as a passive auxiliary but rather as a lexical verb, and they grammaticalized the borrowed verb in a similar way as German speakers had done earlier with kriegen, cf. (11), where there is a structurally corresponding German translation in (11a) and a free English translation in (11b).

(11) Upper Sorbian (Lötzsch 1969:105) Pón ... jo kryny ten mun zapisany. (then... is gotten the mill registered) a ‘Dann ... hat er die Mühle eingetragen gekriegt.’ b ‘Then ... he’s got the mill registered.’ In examples such as (11), replica grammaticalization concerned a borrowed item. But the same

replication process also took place involving an inherited Sorbian verb: Upper Sorbian dóstac or dostas‡ ‘get’ was also grammaticalized to an auxiliary of the dative passive around the same time as krynus , first attestations dating back to 1811 (Nau 1995:107):

(12) Upper Sorbian of 1811 (Lötzsch 1969:105) Ta holca […] howu wotcatu dósta. (the girl head.FEM.ACC.SG cut.off.FEM.ACC.SG got) a ‘Das Mädchen ... bekam den Kopf abgeschnitten.’ b ‘The girl ... had her head cut off.’ In modern written Sorbian, the Sorbian verb dóstac or dostas‡ ‘get’ has replaced krynus as the

passive auxiliary. From its earliest attestations, the Sorbian construction shows roughly the same

14 EDITOR: The superscript circle is a superscript dot in the original. 15 This construction is however not restricted to use in the imperfective aspect (Bernard Comrie, p.c.).




advanced stage of grammaticalization as the corresponding German dative passive—with one exception: Whereas in German the past perfect participle form of the main verb does not exhibit agreement with the object noun, this is not the case in Sorbian, where the (-n-,-t-) participle agrees with the object noun in gender, case, and number.

And the same process has taken place in another Slavic “micro-language”, Slovincian, where the German dative passive was replicated by grammaticalizing the lexical verb kregac ‘get’ in combination with the main verb encoded as a participial form to a dative passive echoing the structure of the corresponding German use pattern (Lötzsch 1969:108). And a similar situation has been reported from yet another Slavic “micro-language”, Kashubian, where the German dative passive also provided the model for a passive-like use pattern. Once more, the lexical verb recruited for grammaticalization was not a borrowed one but rather the inherited Slavic verb dostac ‘get’ (Lötzsch 1969:108).

Once again we are dealing with a unidirectional process in all examples concerned, where a lexical verb was grammaticalized to a passive auxiliary as the nucleus of a passive construction on the model of some other language. And once again, no case has been reported so far—neither in language contact nor elsewhere—where a reverse process took place, that is, where a passive auxiliary developed into a lexical verb for ‘come’, ‘get’, or any other verb. Thus, we seem to be dealing with the same general constraint that we observed in the preceding sections, whereby speakers replicate grammatical structures of another language by using material available in the replica language and grammaticalizing it into structures corresponding to those of the model language.

3.5. Subordination

Another domain of grammar that tends to be affected by language contact is clause combining, and in the present section we will look at a few cases that illustrate how subordinate clauses behave in language contact.

Ethiopia or, more appropriately, the Ethio-Eritrean area, which includes all modern Ethiopic Semitic languages as well as Cushitic and Omotic languages, is widely held to form a sprachbund (Ferguson 1976; Crass & Meyer 2008). One of the features characteristizing this sprachbund is that verbs meaning ‘say’ have been grammaticalized to complementizers and other subordination markers; Tosco describes the situation thus:

Generally, this trait involves an extension of direct speech, marked by a more or less desemanticized verb ‘to say’, in order to link various subordinate sentences, as in Amharic betun t Àäbbqi bla azzäzäc‡c‡at ‘she ordered her to watch the house’ (lit. ‘the-house watch she-saying she-ordered-her’)16. Further desemanticization of ‘to say’ may lead to its use in an auxiliary-like manner; for example, in order to express imminence, as in Amharic baburu lihed sil därräsku ‘I arrived when the train was about to leave’ (roughly, ‘the train to-going when-saying I-arrived). (Tosco 2000:345)

While the grammaticalization of ‘say’-verb to markers of clause subordination is crosslinguistically far from unusual and, hence, can as well occur language-internally, we nevertheless argue that its spread within this sprachbund must have been contact-induced, especially for the following reason: Across the languages of the sprachbund we find the same cluster of processes leading from ‘say’ to (a) quotative marker, (b) complementizer, (c) adverbial clause subordinator, and (d) marker introducing ideophones. Since genetic relationship cannot be held responsible for these similarities, the only reasonable explanation is one in terms of language contact. Tosco (2000:346, 353) says that this grammaticalization occurred after the tenth century

16 EDITOR: “ tÀÀ” stands for “t” with a dot underneath.




AD and that it is the result of influence of Cushitic languages on Semitic languages, that is, Cushitic languages appear to have provided the model which was replicated in the Ethiopic Semitic languages.

That verbs for ‘say’ may turn into markers of clause subordination in situations of language contact has also been reported from other parts of the world. One specific manifestation of this process is that ‘say’-verbs give rise to purpose clause subordinators (Heine & Kuteva 2002:261-5). This is a process that also characterizes the Vaupés region of northwestern Amazonia: As Aikhenvald (2002:164-5) shows, it has given rise to purpose (‘so that’) clauses in East Tucanoan languages, and from there it was replicated in the North Arawak language Tariana, where the complementizer consists of the nominalized verb ‘say’ and the complement is a secondhand imperative. Accordingly, a sentence like ‘I cut the parrot’s wings so that it won’t escape’ is expressed both in the model language Tucano and the replica language Tariana as ‘I cut the parrot’s wings saying let him not escape on someone else’s order’; note that—so far as we know—Tucano and Tariana are genetically unrelated.

The two cases just looked at point in the same direction: There is a verb for ‘say’ that in situations of language contact is grammaticalized to a marker of one or more functions of clause subordination, and once again, this is a unidirectional process: It is unlikely that language contact can be responsible for the rise of verbs meaning ‘say’ out of some form of clause subordination.

Another contact-induced process, one that has been described in some detail (Heine & Kuteva 2006, chapter 6), concerns question words developing into markers of clause subordination. This process appears to be largely—though not entirely—a European and an Indo-European one; if attested elsewhere, this is likely to be in languages that have had some history of contact with European languages. Documented examples of the process whereby one or more question words developed into clause subordinators in or as a result of language contact include the following:

a Basque on the model of Spanish, Gascon, and French (Hurch 1989:21; Trask 1998:320). b Balkan Turkish on the model of Balkanic languages (Matras 1998). c The North Arawak language Tariana of northwestern Brazil on the model of Portuguese

(Aikhenvald 2002:183). d The Aztecan language Pipil of El Salvador on the model of Spanish (Campbell 1987:259-

60). e The Aztecan language Nahuatl of Mexico on the model of Spanish (Karttunen 1976). f The Indo-Aryan language Konkani as spoken by the Saraswat Brahmins on the model of

the Dravidian language Kannada (Nadkarni 1975). An example from Basque may illustrate the process; for more examples, see Heine & Kuteva

(2006, chapter 6). In Basque, a finite relative clause precedes its head; there is no relative pronoun, but the verb takes a suffix marking it as subordinate. However, for some generations now, a new relativization strategy has been used in certain parts of the Basque-speaking area under the influence of Spanish. What happened is that the question marker zein ‘which?’ or ‘who?’ was used as an equivalent of the Spanish interrogative pronouns and zein was grammaticalized to a relative clause marker (Trask 1998:320). This grammaticalization of zein is documented in texts already in the 17th century but as a rule only in translations (Hurch 1989:21). The new form does not replace the earlier structure; rather, zein is added to the existing relative construction (but see also Trask 1998:320)—with the result that there is now double marking on post-nominal relative clauses. But it was not only relative clauses that were affected by what has been referred to as the “Romance subordination type”, that is, the interrogative-to-subordination grammaticalization: Basque speakers




in France have used a range of question words, such as non ‘who?’, zer ‘what?’, nun ‘where?’, nola ‘how?’, and zoin ‘which?’, to replicate complement and adverbial clauses of Gascon and French; the following example illustrates the resulting structure.

(13) Basque (Haase 1992:149) Ba- dakizü, zer de- n? ENZ- know.PRS.3.SG<2.SG what PRS.3.SG- SR ‘Do you know what he/she/it is?’ In all the languages looked at above we observed the same unidirectional process leading from

interrogative forms to markings of clause subordination. And in the same way as we saw in the preceding sections, there does not appear to be a process in the opposite direction: There is so far no evidence that language contact may give rise to a development from subordinate clause marking to question word.

3.6. “Politeness” pronouns

That there is further evidence for the constraint hypothesis will now be shown with another example that does not involve a canonical instance of grammaticalization. As Thomason and Everett (2005) show, there are no discernible constraints on the borrowing of personal pronouns. The situation is different when grammatical replication, rather than borrowing, is involved. According to Helmbrecht (2005), one areal characteristic of European languages is the presence of T/V pronouns, a distinction made in personal pronouns to express contrasts in social status, politeness, and/or social distance. The acronyms “T” and “V” were introduced in a seminal study by Brown & Gilman (1968), who proposed to refer to the two forms respectively as the T-form (cf. Latin tu ‘you.SG’) and the V-form (Latin vos ‘you.PL’), French tu vs. vous being an example of this distinction; following Helmbrecht we will refer to V-forms generally as “politeness” pronouns.17 In Helmbrecht’s (2005:424) sample of 59 European languages, only 16 (29 %) have no honorific/politeness distinction in personal pronouns; in two thirds (32) of all languages the distinction consists of the 2.PL pronouns for polite reference. English had the distinction but gave it up in the 17th century, when the thou/(ye)you contrast was neutralized via the generalization of the erstwhile plural pronoun. Languages lacking the distinction are located either at Europe’s periphery or outside Europe.

We concur with Helmbrecht (2005:426ff.) in arguing that this grammatical characteristic of European languages is due to language contact. The following are arguments in support of the contact hypothesis: First, the distinction cuts across genetic boundaries. Second, there is no evidence from any of the early European languages to suggest that the distinction is genetically inherited. Third, none of the macro-regions adjacent to Europe exhibits any comparable density in the distribution of the distinction. Fourth, there is historical sociolinguistic evidence in support of the contact hypothesis: From Medieval times up to the late 18th century, the distinction in Europe was asymmetric: Lower social categories used V with upper categories but received T, where the distinction was typically one of nobility vs. the people, master vs. servant, parents vs. children. Asymmetry appeared first in the French royal court, spreading rapidly to other European societies. From the 19th century onward, asymmetry gave way to symmetry. Since this process was roughly the same across languages, occurring around the same time in Europe, it can be accounted for 17 Such distinctions have been described by means of terms such as “familiar”, “intimate”, “formal”, “polite”, “honorific”, etc. Head (1978: 153) avoids these terms using the complex label “respect and/or social distance” as a cover term for distinctions in social meaning.




reasonably only in terms of language contact. Fifth, in some cases there is more concrete information on the process, such as the following on Scottish Gaelic, as reported by Mühlhäusler & Harré:

But in Scotland the influence in the eighteenth century of all things French led to the importation of the custom of using the second person plural [...] as an honorific, in which role it persists today in the few remaining Gaelic-speaking areas. (Mühlhäusler & Harré 1990:141)

Sixth, in societies that acquired the T/V distinction only recently, such as Albania and Armenia, use of the distinction is more pronounced in the urban than in the rural areas. Another example is provided by the situation of Romani and its dialects, which has not developed such a distinction. However, presumably under the influence of Slovak, sedentary Roma in Slovakia have recently developed their 2.PL pronoun into a honorific 2.SG pronoun (Helmbrecht 2005:426).

And finally, there is also direct historical evidence supporting the contact hypothesis (see e.g. Simon 1997:271). As Helmbrecht (2005:442) shows, the creation of a pronominal politeness distinction based on the extension of second person plural pronouns (2.PL) to a honorific/polite singular category (2.SG) in Europe is the result of cultural processes taking place in the Middle Ages in western Europe (France, Italy, Spain, Germany in particular). Ultimately going back to the time between the 3th and the 5th century Latin (tu/vos), the first attested examples of the process stem from the end of the 9th century Old High German, where ir (2.PL) appears for singular reference, possibly replicated directly from Latin via clerical communication, and this usage continued through Middle High German. In the French royal court, the tu/vous distinction emerges in the 12th century, subsequently replicated in adjacent kingdoms. Norman influence led to the introduction of the distinction in the upper class of England in the 12th century, spreading in England between the 12th and 15th centuries. In Spanish, the extension of vos to the second person singular is attested since 1140, while in Italian first uses of voi for the second singular stem from the 13 th and 14th century, and in Danish, the 2.PL pronoun is attested in 1325 as a politeness pronoun.

Czech created a politeness pronoun in the 15th century by replicating the German 2.PL>2.SG

process, giving rise to a honorific T/V distinction ty (2.SG familiar) vs. vy (2.SG honorific). Also in the 15th century, the second person plural wy of Polish was extended to serve as a honorific second person singular pronoun, giving rise to a distinction ty (2.SG familiar) vs. wy (2.SG honorific). In Icelandic, the second person plural þér developed into a honorific second person singular honorific pronoun around the 17th century.

French was the prestige language of the Russian upper class, and the second person plural

pronoun wy arose as a respectful address in 18-19th century Russia. The most recent developments occurred in the Southern Slavic languages Bulgarian, Serbian and Croatian, and in Armenian, where the T/V distinction also arose in the 18-19th centuries. In Armenian, the T/V distinction is restricted to towns, in the rural areas only the T form is found. The most recent development took place in Macedonian, where the distinction appeared only in the second half of the 20th century after World War II. Table 1 summarizes the rise of the process from second person plural to second person honorific singular pronoun in European languages.




Table 1. The 2.PL>2.SG strategy in the rise of “politeness” pronouns in European languages (based on Helmbrecht 2005).

Language First attestation (century) Latin tu/vos (southern France) 3-5 German du/ir (2.PL) Late 9 French tu/vous (2.PL) 12 English thou/you (ye) (2.PL) 12 Spanish tu/vos (2.PL) 12 Italian tu/voi (2.PL) 13-14 Danish 14 Swedish du/ni (2.PL) 15 Czech ty/vy (2.PL) 15 Polish ty/wy (2.PL) 15 Islandic / þér (2.PL) 17 Scottish Gaelic 18 Russian 18-19 Armenian 18-19 Serbian, Croatian 19 Bulgarian 19 Macedonian after 1950 But the process just sketched is not the only contact-induced development that occurred in the

history of Europe. A second, distinctly later one emerged in the 17th century, presumably originating in Germany. The source forms were nominal expressions (‘your grace’, ‘your excellency’, etc.) triggering the use of third person agreement pronouns for honorific second person reference. Roughly from the middle of the 17th century on, the German third person singular er ‘he’ and sie ‘she’ (3.SG) appeared for second person singular reference (2.SG), followed in the 18th century by the 3.PL pronoun sie ‘they’, which has been retained right into present-day German. This usage was replicated in 17th century Danish and Swedish, where at the same time as in German the third person pronouns (Danish han ‘he’, hun ‘she’, Swedish han/hon) appeared as politeness pronouns for second person, in Danish also followed in the early 18th century by the 3.PL De as a politeness pronoun. In Czech as well, a honorific T/V distinction ty (2.SG) vs. vy (2.PL) came into being in the 18th century, and in upper Italy and the Toscana the third person pronoun lei ‘she’ gave rise to a honorific second person pronoun. A somewhat different development occurred in Polish of the late 18th century, where a complex nominal expression containing the noun pan ‘sir’ developed into the polite address forms Pan (2.SG.M) and Pani (2.SG.F).

Once again, there is hardly any reason to doubt that this was a contact-induced diffusion process18, presumably originating in Germany and spreading south, north, and somewhat later to the east, as the chronology in table 2 suggests.

18 We are ignoring here the development in Spanish and Portuguese, which, even if structurally similar (Helmbrecht 2005: 440-1), may not be historically related to that of central Europe.




Table 2. The 3>2 strategy in the rise of politeness pronouns in European languages (based on Helmbrecht 2005).

First attestation (century) German er/sie M/F 17 (3.SG>2.SG) 18 (3.PL>2) North Italian lei 3.SG.F 17? Danish han/hun 3.SG.M/F 17 (3.SG>2.SG) 18 (3.PL>2) Swedish han/hon M/F 17 (3.SG>2.SG) Czech on/ona M/F, oni 3.PL 18 (3.SG>2, 3.PL>2) Polish Late 18 (pan ‘sir’ > Pan/Pani

2.SG.M/F) To conclude, we are dealing with two diffusion processes characterizing the history of Europe.

The general motivation underlying them can be seen in human activity aimed at finding optimal ways of saying what is both socially appropriate and most advantageous for the speaker in a given sociolinguistic context. What is important for our purposes is that both processes are unidirectional, leading either from second person plural or from third person to second person singular pronouns; we are not aware of any counterexample, that is, a development where in a situation of language contact a first or second person singular pronoun developed into a second person plural pronoun or into a third person pronoun. This generalization does not appear to be restricted to Europe: In quite a number of languages all over the world, speakers have under appropriate social conditions extended the use of second person plural or third person pronouns to also address or denote second person singular referents but, to our knowledge, no process in the opposite direction has been documented so far—irrespective of whether or not language contact was involved. To be sure, the possibility that there are exceptions can never be excluded; but if indeed there should be exceptions they are likely to be rare.

4. On sociolinguistic predictors

The concern of this paper is with a constraint on one manifestation of language contact, namely grammatical replication, traditionally referred to with terms such as “structural borrowing”, “structural interference” or “calquing”, and the question is whether there are any constraints on when grammatical replication will, or will not, take place. That there are sociolinguistic constraints has in fact been argued for in the Thomasonian tradition of contact linguistics ever since Thomason & Kaufman (1988)—e.g. to the effect that a social relationship of dominance and subordination is a powerful predictor of contact-induced change. In this tradition, Thomason hypothesizes that if there is significant structural interference but few or no loanwords, “then the interference must have come about via imperfect learning of a target language during shift, not through borrowing”, and she calls this a prediction which is “rooted firmly in a large body of evidence and with no certain counterexamples” (Thomason 2001b:80).

According to this hypothesis there are conditions external to language structure, such as imperfect learning and (language) shift, that allow for predictions on contact-induced change. It would seem, however, that this hypothesis in its strong form is in need of reconsideration. First, loanwords are fairly easy to identify and have been intensively studied, while we still know very little about grammatical replication (or “structural interference”). What the research data that are available suggest is that the latter is much more common than has previously been thought (see Heine & Kuteva 2005; 2006). Accordingly, any generalization on the relative magnitude of lexical borrowing as opposed to “structural interference” would therefore seem to be premature given our limited knowledge of the latter.




Second, there are cases of significant “structural interference” with little lexical borrowing without involving imperfect learning or language shift. For example, Ross (1996; 2001) describes a situation where two genetically unrelated languages spoken on Karkar Island off the north coast of Papua New Guinea have become semantically and syntactically largely intertranslatable. This situation, involving the Papuan language Waskia as the model and the Western Oceanic language Takia as the replica language, is due to massive “structural interference” but the languages have essentially retained their inherited lexical material, and there are no indications that imperfect learning or language shift were involved.

And third, there is perhaps a more serious problem, which concerns general constraints on the sociolinguistic environment in which “structural interference”, more precisely grammatical replication, may take place. As has been shown in Heine & Kuteva (2005; 2006), this is a fairly ubiquitous process that can be reciprocal: In the same way as speakers replicate structures of an L2 in their L1, they may as well replicate structures of their L1 in their L2—in other words, sociolinguistic properties of a given language do not necessarily determine whether that language will undergo “structural interference”. For example, English served both as a model and as a replica language vis-à-vis the French Norman dialect Guernésiais on the Channel island Guernsey (Ramisch 1989; Jones 2002), the Austronesian language Tigak of the New Ireland island of Papua New Guinea, served both as a replica and a model language of grammatical replication vis-a-vis the lingua franca Tok Pisin, an English-based pidgin/creole (Jenkins 2002), and in the Vaupés region of northwestern Amazonia, the North Arawak language Tariana acted as a replica language vis-a-vis East Tucanoan languages but as both a replica and a model language for the lingua franca Portuguese (Aikhenvald 2002). In a similar fashion, Basque served as a replica language vis-a-vis its Romance neighbors Spanish, French, and Gascon (Hurch 1989; Haase 1992; 1997) but it also acted as a model language for Spanish speakers in the Basque Country (Cárdenas 1995), and Turkish served both as a model and as a replica language for Macedonian (Friedman 2003); for more examples, see Soper (1987).

To conclude, ”structural interference”—whether significant or not—does not seem to be a factor that necessarily correlates positively with sociolinguistic variables. This observation should not be taken to refute sociolinguistic generalizations of the kind proposed by Thomason; but it suggests that sociolinguistic predictions or constraints of the “it-cannot-happen” type of Thomason (2008:1) are probably more difficult to come by than this author suggests.

5. Discussion

In the preceding sections we saw that grammatical change in language contact is generally in accordance with principles of grammaticalization. But the question is what exactly the scope of the generalizations that we proposed is. This is an issue that requires much more research. The following observations address two issues that would seem to benefit from further elaboration. One of them concerns the limits of contact-induced grammaticalization. In commenting an earlier version of this paper, Sarah Thomason (p.c.) observes that, contrary to what grammaticalization theory would predict, there are three examples of a development from functional to lexical categories. The examples adduced by Thomason concern the preposition avec ‘with’ and the conjunctions que and pourquoi of French, which can somehow be said to have been borrowed in English as nouns: There is a restaurant in Chicago called Avec, and a Google search shows that que is defined as “a graphic/web request listing usually found on company intranets”, and there are a lot of hits for pourquoi, as in Pourquoi Tales/Stories.

That closed-class items such as adverbs, adpositions, conjunctions, or derivational affixes may

acquire the status of open-class categories such as nouns or verbs is a commonplace in historical




linguistics, frequently mentioned English examples being the ups and downs (< up, down, adverbs, prepositions), the ifs and buts (< if, but, conjunctions), Her ex is a monster (< ex-, affix), etc. And this process is not confined to morphemes, it may as well affect “quasi”-forms, such as an ade (cf. lemonade), the cheese-burger (cf. hamburger), and even sounds or letters (there are two e’s in my name). All these cases, however, do not concern grammaticalization (more precisely “degrammaticaliztion”) but rather lexicalization: Unlike grammaticalization, which is a long and gradual process that may extend over hundreds of years, lexicaliation is abrupt, and it is not directional (see Heine 2003; Brinton & Traugott 2005).

But there is another, more important reason why Thomason’s examples do not seem to be relevant to the subject matter considered here. The present paper is concerned exclusively with grammatical replication, that is, with the transfer of meanings and structures rather than with form-meaning pairings or phonetic substance (see section 2). By contrast, the cases adduced by Thomason all relate to form-meaning pairings, i.e. to borrowing (in the narrow sense; see figure 1).

The second issue concerns the subject matter that we discussed in section 3.2, more specifically

the extension of comitative morphologies to also express an instrumental function. Thomason (p.c.) draws attention to a hypothetical situation where one of the languages in contact having polysemous comitative-instrumental case marking is influenced heavily by another language with a comitative-only case—in other words, where there are distinct case markings for the comitative and the instrumental functions. She rightly points out that such a situation could provide a test case on whether the development postulated by us can be reversed. On the basis of findings on grammaticalization there are two possibilities when such a situation obtains: Either there is no change, that is, language contact does not affect these case functions. Alternatively, there is change, and in this case we would predict that the comitative marker would be extended to give rise to a new instrumental marker—with the effect that either there are now two instrumental markers or that the old instrumental marker gives way to the new marker.

While the data available are severely limited, there is at least partial evidence to suggest that our prediction is confirmed. Like Lithuanian and Estonian, the Baltic language Latvian has been influenced by German. At an earlier stage in its history, the instrumental case was used in Latvian both as an instrumental and a comitative case, hence there was case polysemy. Then the preposition ar was introduced as a comitative marker, and the subsequent development is sketched by Stolz thus:

[...] by the introduction of the preposition ar, the inherited Indo-European morphological instrumental, which covered both comitative and instrumental functions, first was split up in[to] two distinct categories, viz. a prepositional comitative and an inflectional instrumental, before the new comitative took over the entire functional domain of the original instrumental. (Stolz 2001:601)

Subsequently, the prepositional pattern ousted the simple morphological instrumental (Stolz 2001:600-1). With the generalization of the preposition ar to also mark instrumentals, the formerly distinct morphological instrumental case was marginalized, gradually disappearing from the Latvian case paradigm of both nouns and pronouns. There are, however, two caveats with this example. First, that this change was induced by contact is likely but far from being “proven”, and second, assuming that German was the model language, this language did not have distinct case markings for comitative and instrumental but rather had a case polysemy. Be that as it may, the fact remains that so far no instance of a development instrumental > comitative has been documented while there is ample evidence for a development in the opposite direction (see Stolz et al. 2006; Heine & Kuteva 2006, chapter 5).




6. Conclusions

The constraint that we were concerned with in this paper was overwhelmingly one that can be predicted within the framework of grammaticalization theory (see Heine & Kuteva 2007, section 1.2). But there was also one that goes beyond grammaticalization, namely the one that we were confronted with in section 3.6: First, the rise of “politeness” pronouns does not lead from concrete to more abstract meanings, nor from less grammatical to more grammatical forms; what happened is simply that an expression for one concept of personal deixis was also used for another deictic concept. Second, it responds only to one of the three central parameters of grammaticalization (see Heine & Kuteva 2007, section 1.2): There is extension, in that an expression for a personal pronoun is extended to a new context which triggers a new meaning, namely second person singular reference. But there is neither desemanticization (loss of meaning) nor decategorialization (loss of morphosyntactic properties): The (polite) second person singular pronoun is neither semantically nor morphosyntactically poorer than any of the pronouns from which it is historically derived. Still, the constraint is of the same kind as that characterizing grammaticalization: The development is unidirectional—that is, we do not expect it to be reversed.

In both kinds of cases, the constraint has several components. First, it concerns choices that speakers make when looking in the replica language for translational equivalents of use patterns and categories that they find in the model language. For example, we observed in section 3.3 that in a number of languages a new future tense category was created on the model of some other language. In doing so, speakers typically draw on a universally available strategy by grammaticalizing e.g. a verb for ‘go to’ or ‘want’, but they are unlikely to choose a verb for, say, ‘hit’ or ‘cut’.19 And in order to replicate an indefinite article of the model language (3.1), most likely they will select their numeral for ‘one’, or a demonstrative attribute to replicate a definite article, rather developing ‘one’ into a definite or a demonstrative into an indefinite article. In a similar fashion, we saw in section 3.6 that in order to create a new form for second person singular reference, speakers draw on second person plural pronouns but apparently never, e.g., on a first person singular pronoun.

Second, constraints relate to directionality in contact-induced grammatical change. To use the examples just mentioned, it has happened time and again that a language developed a future tense20 via the grammaticalization of ‘go to’ or ‘want’, etc., but it is highly unlikely that language contact will have the effect that a future tense marker develops into a verb for ‘go’ or ‘want’, an indefinite article into a numeral for ‘one’, or a definite article into a demonstrative. And in the case of “politeness” pronouns (3.6) the replication process goes e.g. from plural to singular reference rather than the opposite way—in other words, grammatical change in language contact situations is essentially unidirectional.

And third, the development of contact-induced grammaticalization proceeds along a step-by-step sequence, as we showed in our example of indefinite articles in Slavic languages. Accordingly, it is unlikely that speakers will replicate a highly grammaticalized use pattern of the model language prior to replicating less grammaticalized use patterns (see Heine 2007). This does not apply to “politeness” pronouns though: Rather than going through the gradual and long process characterizing grammaticalization, these pronouns can arise within a relatively short time; what is required is simply that an innovation like 2.PL > 2.SG be propagated by some speaker and accepted 19 An unusual case of future development is reported from Pennsylvania Dutch: In this variety of German, two verbs of counting, zeele ‘count’ and figgere ‘figure’, have been grammaticalized to future tense auxiliaries, and this process is said to have been induced by contact with English (Louden 2008). More information on what exactly the model language English contributed in this process is required. 20 Note that we are using here and elsewhere a shorthand convention. If we say that “a language has developed” then it goes without saying that languages cannot do such things, rather it is the speakers of this language that do.




by the community. In some way, the constraints that we were discussing in the preceding paragraphs are of a

peculiar kind: Rather than looking in the replica language for a grammatical category that is semantically and morphosyntactically similar to a corresponding category in the model language they choose a fairly complicated procedure: They recruit a structure of the replica language that has little in common with that of the model language. For example, in order replicate a future tense affix of the model language (M) one might imagine that perhaps the most obvious way would be to choose another tense affix in the replica language (R) that is similar in meaning, e.g. an affix having a modal function. Instead, speakers not only draw on a lexical construction involving verbs such as ‘go to’ or ‘want’—that is, a construction that semantically and morphosyntactically contrasts sharply with the future tense affix of the model language, but they also have to go through a process whereby the lexical construction gradually turns into a functional category equivalent to that of the model (see Heine & Kuteva 2005, chapter 6 for discussion):

(14) Contact-induced replication of a de-allative future tense Model language Replica language Function Form Function Formfuture tense affix ‘go to’ verb v v future tense verb v affix Creating formulas of grammatical equivalence in situations of language contact thus is a

complex process: Rather than establishing equivalence between two languages by equating a category x of the model language M (= Mx) with a similar category of the replica language R (= Rx), speakers tend to create an equivalent category for Mx by grammaticalizing category y of language R. This means that, rather than immediately relating two categories to one another, speakers relate a category (Mx) in one language to a process (Ry > Rx) in another language—the result can be captured with the asymmetric formula in (15).

(15) Mx = [Ry > Rx]. The complexity inherent in this strategy is further aggravated by the fact that grammaticalization

entails a development that does not take place overnight; rather, it may extend over many generations of speakers. Accordingly, notions such as equivalence or structural isomorphism will refer to different things at different stages of the development.

Note, however, that our concern in this paper was exclusively with grammatical replication. In

other cases of lexical replication, such a complex situation does not arise, that is, instead of the complex formula of (15) there is likely to be a simple formula Mx = Rx, in that speakers tend to establish a one-to-one correspondence between some model category (Mx) and a category of the replica language (Rx) that they conceive of as being the most appropriate equivalent of Mx.

The constraint discussed in this paper is perhaps not one that one might have associated with




language contact since it is not restricted to contact situations. Still, to the extent that it applies to language contact it is a generalization on what can happen in contact-induced linguistic change and what can not. Beyond that, it suggests that linguistic behavior in language contact does not appear to be all that different from linguistic behavior elsewhere and that it may be possible to account for it with reference to the same principles as language-internal change. This might be taken as suggesting that contact linguistics does not qualify as a distinct field of linguistics. But there is also an alternative perspective on this issue: Language contact concerns sociolinguistic environments and patterns of linguistic interaction not to be found in other situations of linguistic communication; hence it can be instrumental for creating a broader foundation for understanding both linguistic behavior and language change, that is, of linguistics in general.

Abbreviations

ACC = accusative; ART = article; CLASS = classifier; DAT = dative; DEF = definite marker; DET = determiner; ENZ = enunciative; F, FEM = feminine; GEN = genitive; INSTR = instrumental; M = masculine; NEG = negative marker; PL = plural; OPT = optative marker; PRED = predicative marker; PREP = preposition; PRS = present tense; REL = relative clause marker; SG = singular; SR = subordinator; 1, 2, 3 = first, second, third person. References

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