Intra-system variability and change in nominal and verbal morphology

Barbara E. Bullock and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio

The Pennsylvania State University

It is a relatively uncontroversial assumption in studies of language variation that contact between languages, particularly contact defined by extensive bilingualism, may both enhance linguistic variation and accelerate linguistic change at all levels of the grammar (see Dorian 1986, Silva-Corvalán 1986, 1991, 1994/2000, Thomason 2001). If it can reasonably be argued that individual bilingualism hastens inherent grammatical evolution, then it follows that the changes witnessed at the individual level should parallel internal diachronic developments. In this work, we draw on data from French-English and Spanish-English bilinguals to demonstrate how the fluctuations in the expression of nominal and verbal features in bilingual speech are indeed reminiscent of common processes of historical linguistic development in that change in the specification of grammatical features need not signal any fundamental loss of formal linguistic properties. In essence, in both historical and bilingual contexts, the grammar remains unchanged. However, since a ‘new grammar’ could conceivably arise from external influence, our analysis considers the extent and the limits of structural convergence, a vehicle of language change that is unique to bilingual contexts. It has been suggested that language loss via convergence is selective and does not affect all linguistic domains equally. Thus, phonology may be affected in convergence (Paradis 2000, Bullock & Gerfen forthcoming a) while syntax may remain unchanged, and within syntax proper, the computational core may be impervious to change while the periphery may be vulnerable to external influence.

Our inquiry is similar to that of others: “If bilinguals display patterns of language loss, of particular interest for linguistic theory is to identify potential vulnerable areas of grammatical knowledge, and to seek reasons to explain why systematic patterns of erosion or incompleteness, if they exist, look the way they do” (Montrul forthcoming). In this paper, we seek an explanation for why the patterns of loss in bilingual speech mirror those of diachronic change. Ultimately, we propose that language change over time is not the immediate result of incomplete acquisition or faulty transmission rather change is the result of the acquisition of a system that is not a complete replication (Bullock & Gerfen forthcoming a), a transmission pattern that is especially accelerated in a bilingual contexts. Our work adds to the literature in historical Romance linguistics in both

concrete and theoretical ways. First, we provide new empirical evidence from unique sources that speak to the issue of change in progress in a naturalistic bilingual context. And by interpreting our evidence in light of theoretical advances in the study of bilingualism, we are able to probe directly the longstanding problem of the role of external convergence in language change.

The paper is organized as follows: in §1, we provide an overview of the structural variability and convergence that may be observed in language contact situations. It will be demonstrated that the components of the grammar of contact varieties of French and Spanish may be differentially affected by external influence; that is, phonology may be subject to inter-systemic convergence (Paradis 2000, Bullock & Gerfen, forthcoming a, b), whereas the formal computational syntax may be impervious to external influence (Schwartz & Sprouse 1996, Gavruseva & Lardière 1996, Lardière 1998a, 1988b, 2000, Sorace 2000, Haznedar 2001, Toribio 2001, Montrul 2003). In §2, we consider extant evidence from studies of heritage and second-language bilinguals whose non-target forms may be variously ascribed to deficiencies in morphological spell-out or to convergence at the syntax-pragmatic interface (Sorace 1990, 1993, Silva Corválan 1991, 1994/2000, Paradis & Navarro 2003, Montrul forthcoming, Toribio forthcoming). §3 introduces empirical evidence from two case studies of bilinguals—one French-English and one Spanish-English– in which the speakers present ample evidence of morphological reduction and of apparent syntactic convergence in the absence of standardized norms. In §4, the patterns observed in those data are likened to general diachronic changes that cannot be unequivocally accredited to language contact. In situations similar to the cases under study, eventual syntactic change may arise from intergenerational transmission of reanalyzed morph-syntactic mappings (or from morphological reanalysis (King 2000)).That is, external contact does not directly induce formal linguistic change; rather, novel structures are inferred from non-target, though licit, native language forms (Meisel 2001).

1. Variability and convergence in language contact situations

It is well-established by linguistic research that a decline in the pattern or the frequency of use of a language in a bilingual setting may lead to significant variability and linguistic change, sometimes compressed into a small amount of time. The rapidity of change is documented most fully by Schmidt (1985) and that of variation in a homogeneous bilingual community by Dorian (1994). As these authors have shown, variability may be particularly manifest in communities or contexts where normative linguistic pressures are lacking. Especially salient in such situations is the inconsistency of the expression of morphological features. The exponents of gender, number and person, or of tense-mood-aspect can be subject to both inter-speaker and intra-speaker variation. For example, in the French-English data to be discussed more fully in §3, the past participle of the verb mourir ‘to die’ is produced by one speaker as mort and by another as meuru. The former is the standard participle form although it has become syncretic with respect to gender, which can be phonologically signaled for this verb (mor(t), MASC. versus mor[t]e , FEM.). The latter is an analogical reformation, composed of the stem of the indicative singular, meur-, and an overgeneralization of the –u

participle marker. These forms were produced in the same stretch of discourse when the study participants were conversing with one another. Especially revealing is the fact that these speakers are generally one another’s sole interlocutors yet they apparently have no consensus about which form is the correct one. Thus, in the absence of social pressure, variation persists.

Thomason (1997: 12) reminds us that “any and all contact-induced changes are possible,” yet much of the variation and change seen in the bilingual data under discussion in the present work and in the extant bilingual literature nonetheless follows a relatively unexceptional path. That is to say, the various kinds of neutralization revealed in bilingual studies —such as syncretism (shown above), analogical extensions, and paradigm leveling (also shown above)—occur regularly cross-dialectally and diachronically and are generally accompanied by competition, perhaps even free variation, between conservative and innovative forms. It is important to note that variable feature realization, including the absence of any exponent for a given feature, need not signal a concomitant loss of a grammatical category. Thus, the lack of gender realization on the past participle of mourir among our French-English bilinguals does not imply that the category of gender or its attendant agreement properties have been lost. Instead, variability of this sort may represent a deficiency in the mapping between morphology and syntax (i.e., morphological Spell-out) such as that which is frequently attested in L2 acquisition (Gavruseva & Lardière 1996, Schwartz and Sprouse 1996, Meisel 1997, Lardière 1998a, 1988b, 2000, Haznedar 2001, Prévost and White 1999, 2000, Herschensohn 2001).

Attendant to internally-induced changes, languages in contact situations often manifest transparent properties of inter-linguistic influence such as borrowings, semantic extensions, or syntactic calquing. It is, of course, possible to over-attribute change in bilingual speech to externally-induced interference. While contact may hasten change, it does not automatically follow that change is the result of external influence (Silva-Corvalán 1994/2000). Instead, the linguistic restructuring that occurs in bilingual contexts often parallels that which is attested in monolingual communities. However, structural similarity or overlap between languages may reveal areas of the grammatical system that are especially vulnerable to external interference. In such cases, language change may reasonably be imputed to external linguistic influence, or convergence. Much recent research on language variation and change in a bilinguals’ grammar suggests that the convergence of grammatical properties is either of a lexical nature (King 2000, Montrul 2003) or it occurs primarily at the interface of syntax and pragmatics/semantics (Silva Corválan 1991, 1994, Montrul forthcoming, Toribio forthcoming). In essence, while lexical and pragmatic aspects of a language may be borrowed, the purely formal aspects of a linguistic system appear to remain intact. This implies that within the syntax, at least, only the peripheral features are affected by convergence, not the core.

While syntax proper (i.e., the purely formal system) is arguably immune to convergence, there is evidence that the phonological system may be vulnerable to external influence. The impact of external influence on the phonology but not the syntax of bilingual children has been demonstrated by Paradis (2000) who suggests that her results may be merely an artifact of her methodology. However, Bullock & Gerfen (forthcoming a, b) similarly argue that the introduction of the American rhoticized schwa,

as in sir, as a replacement for the mid front rounded vowels in the French vocalic system of Frenchville bilinguals is a change that can only be understood as externally-induced. That the phonetic system of bilinguals reflects convergence in measurable ways has been amply demonstrated (see Piske, Flege & MacKay 2001 for an overview). However, linguists generally assume that the phonological system is more abstract and formally organized than the phonetic system and thus, like syntax, probably resistant to systemically disruptive external influence (on phonology, see Cook 1989, 1991). In the case of Frenchville French, the “borrowed” rhoticized schwa has a number of direct formal reflexes; it has resulted in the loss of allophonic variation, a loss of possible functional contrasts, it has possibly increased phonological markedness, and perhaps most important, it has established a phonological contrast between the new rhoticized schwa and a French schwa that was not preexistent.

The differential impact of convergence over various domains of the grammar is not at issue in this analysis. However, we would like to tentatively suggest, following Bullock & Gerfen (forthcoming a), that the categorical separation of phonology and phonetics can probably not be maintained (Ohala 1981). As the phonetic system is open to convergence, so too is the phonology. What then distinguishes phonology from syntax with regard to convergence is that the surface realization of a formal syntactic feature is entirely incidental and dependent on the lexicon; in fact, features like case may have no concrete expression at all. Aspects of formal syntax have no necessary overt correspondents but even in its most formal aspects, phonology is dependent upon and, in very large part, cannot be divorced from phonetic features.

2. Target-deviant morpho-syntax

Numerous authors have examined non-target nominal and verbal forms on the part of second language bilinguals. While early research had sought to draw direct parallels between morphological inflections and their structural correlates (cf., Eubank 1993/1994; Vainikka and Young-Scholten 1998), more recent work converges on the dissociation between the exponents of inflection and the presence of higher functional categories (cf., Schwartz and Sprouse 1996, Lardière, 1998a, 1998b; Haznedar, 2001; Herschensohn 2001). Thus, for example, Herschensohn (2001) reports on a longitudinal study of two second-language learners of French who demonstrate knowledge of verb raising independently of the acquisition of paradigms associated with agreement; indeed, as shown in (1), the development of higher functional categories TP, AgrP, and CP precedes accuracy in TP-related morphology (cf., Haznedar 2001).

(1) A quelle heure est-ce que le musée ouvrer? At what hour is it that the museum open-INF.“At what time does the museum open ? ”Cf., A quelle heure est-ce que le musée ouvre ? (Herschensohn 2001, Emma III)

Analogous findings from Lardière’s (1998a, 1998b) examination of the naturalistic fossilized English-language productions of a native Chinese speaker lead her to conclude that areas of divergence from the target system reside in “precisely those PF areas increasingly seen as ‘external’ or ‘extraneous’ to the computational (CHL) component of the grammar (1998b: 370).”

The impoverished forms examined by researchers in first language attrition and convergence also fall outside the scope of the computational system, which is regulated by purely syntactic/formal properties such as Agreement and Case, and into the interpretive module, which is subject to properties of meaning such as Tense/Mood, Topic, and Focus (cf., Silva-Corvalán 1989, 1994/2000; Sánchez 1997; Toribio forthcoming; Zapata et al. 2002; Montrul 2003, forthcoming; Paradis and Navarro 2003). For instance, Montrul’s studies of heritage speakers of Spanish reveal variable behavior in the production and interpretation of tense, mood and aspect morphology (Montrul 2002), as in (2a), in lexical selection and expression of unaccusativity and unergativity (Montrul, in press), and in the distribution of subject and object arguments and semantically conditioned clitic-doubling (Montrul forthcoming), as in (2b).

(2) a. Cuando *caminó [PRET.] por el bosque se encontró con el lobo. (Cf., caminaba [IMP] ‘walked’)‘When she walked through the forest she met up with the wolf.’ (Montrul 2002; early child L2)El llegó a la casa de la abuela antes que ella llegó [PRET.] (Cf., llegara [PAST SUBJ] arrived’)“He arrived at the grandmother’s house before she arrived.” (Montrul 2002; simultaneous bilingual)

b. Y lo que hizo el lobo era también *comió la Caperucita. Lo que hizo el cazador para dar un lección al lobo fue cortar el estómago del lobo y *quitar la abuela y la Caperucita. (Cf., comer a la Caperucita… cortarle el estómago… y quirtar a la abuelita)“And what the wolf did was also eat the Little Riding Hood. What the hunter did to teach a lesson to the wolf was to cut the wolf’s stomach and take out the grandmother and the Little Riding Hood.” (Montrul forthcoming, subject # 210, advanced)

Sánchez offers similar conclusions in her studies of bilinguals residing in a Quechua-Spanish contact situation: bilinguals evince convergent, non-target semantic features of definiteness and specificity in the use of Spanish null object pronouns (Sánchez 1997), in (3a), and convergent aspectual and discourse-oriented features in verbal selection and morphological specification (Sánchez forthcoming), in (3b).

(3) a. Nomás sacas [todas las yerbas]i y después que sacas [proi] echas abono. “You just pull out all the herbs and after you pull them out you put fertilizer.” (Sánchez 1997)

b. Había una abuelita…no…una viejeta…vieja. Ya había…estaba sembrando y habé…ha encontrado un pájaro. De(s)pués el pajáro estaba enfermo... y después se llevó a su casa. Eso hizo, después, daba alimento.“There was a granny, no an old woman. (She) was sowing and she found a bird. Then the bird was ill and then (she) took it to her house. She did that and she later gave (it) food.” Sánchez forthcoming).

The core linguistic system of all of these Spanish-English and Spanish-Quechua bilinguals approximates that of the full variety spoken by their Spanish monolingual

counterparts, but those areas where the syntax interfaces with other cognitive or extra-grammatical areas are vulnerable to underspecification or respecification.

From the foregoing discussion, it should be evident that morphological errors and target-deviant semantic and pragmatic performance are to be attributed to deficiencies in mapping at Spell-out and the interface levels of lexical-semantics, syntax-semantics and discourse-pragmatics, rather than to discrepancies in formal (i.e., [-interpretable]) morpho-syntactic features. The ensuing paragraphs turn to the examination of data from two bilingual case studies that, despite their different natures, reveal strikingly similar morpho-syntactic properties, further confirming that variability and loss in the PF and interpretative interfaces are not necessarily accompanied by a similar fluctuation or degradation in core syntax.

3. Two Case Studies

Our study references two naturalistic language samples. One data set consists of the transcripts of audio-taped interviews with two brothers who reside in the formerly-French-speaking enclave community of Frenchville in Pennsylvania. The other set is a record of journal entries that depict the life of a Spanish-speaking agricultural worker as her family follows the ripening beet crops in south- and mid-western States. The French-speaking participants in the present analysis are two brothers, aged 69 and 72 years old at the time of the recordings. They are not literate in French. However, unlike other residents of the area, they have continued to speak French either occasionally with one another or with the first author of this article. Both have lived in Frenchville all of their lives, and both spoke French at home exclusively until they married and moved out of their parents’ home in their early twenties. Because their wives do not speak French, English is now the language of their homes. Both brothers terminated their formal educations by the age of 14. The data referred to in this paper were collected in structured but naturalistic field interviews with the first author in 2002. The interviews represent structured discourse in that they are monitored and recorded, however, the participants are comfortable and familiar with the interviewer with whom they have little trouble producing or comprehending French. Often, they do not hesitate to go beyond the questions asked, as in the following citation where one of the brothers offers, unsolicited, his view of language loss.

(4) Ça prend pas trop de temps pour le perdre si tu ne parler [sic] pas. Je parler [sic] avec lui de temps en temps un mot ou deux ou trios et c’est tout. C’est peut-êre quelque chose qu’on dit l’un l’autre qu’on ne peut pas dire à personne d’autre.‘It doesn’t take much time to lose it if you don’t speak it. I speak with him from time to time a word, or two, or three but that’s all. It’s perhaps something that we say to one another that we can’t say to anyone else.’

As with the transcriptions of the Frenchville interviews, the language samples contained in the diary of the migrant worker are very revealing of the author. The diary entries in general demonstrate that the author has had insufficient training to instruct her in the normative conventions of Spanish orthography; it represents a simplification of the complex mapping between sound and graphemes to a few known values, and reproduces many of the phonological characteristics of her rural dialect. The lexicon of the text

speaks to her occupational segregation in agricultural communities with other speakers of colloquial Mexican Spanish, as well as to contact with English. For example, there appear phonetically unincorporated forms such as stand by and workshop, and others that follow the structural organization of the Spanish language, e.g., fil ‘field’ and files ‘fields,’ which are phonologically and morphologically well-formed in Spanish, semantic extensions, e.g., atender for ‘to attend,’ rather than ‘attend to,’ registrar for ‘to register’ rather than ‘to check,’ and loan translations, such as pero ya mero no la hacía ‘I nearly didn’t make it (lit. trans.), which may be uninterpretable to the reader who has no knowledge of English.

(5) Sali para D. en avion a las 2 de la tarde, pero ya mero no la hacía como antes de llegar al aero-puerto se nos fletio la llanta de la troca de J. Estuve en D. por cerca de 4 horas. estaba en “stand by.” [sic] “I left for D. by plane at 2 in the afternoon, but I almost didn’t make it since before arriving to the airport we got a flat tire on J’s truck. I was in D. for close to 4 hours. I was on ‘stand by.’”

With respect to morphology and syntax, both data sets are replete with evidence of language impoverishment (relative to the full variety). Widespread is gender and number overgeneralization in nouns and adjectives, as in (6). Witness the Spanish words that end in –a, identified with feminine gender (6g), and the overgeneralization of the plural chevaux into singular paradigms in the Frenchville data (6c).

(6) Alterations in nominal gender and number agreement

a. Il fume un pipe (cf., une [FEM])“He smokes a pipe”

b. un bête français (cf., une bête française [FEM])“a French beast” (idiomatic, “a French idiot”)

c. deux chevaux ... le chevau noir...le chevau blanc (cf., cheval [SG])“two horses...the black horse...the white horse”

d. un bouteille de bière (cf., une [FEM])“a bottle of beer”

e. à la moulin (cf., au=a le [MASC])“to the mill”

f. notre premier cousin [sic] (cf., cousine [FEM]))“our first cousin”

g. Nosotros en la medio dia vinimos comer. [sic] “In the morning we came to eat.” (cf., el medio día])

h. Que diferencia no tener ninguna problema. [sic] “What a difference not to have any problems.” (self-correction)

i. Fuimos a dejar el televición viejo a la casa. [sic] “We went to leave the old television at the house.” (cf., el televisor viejo [MASC]/la televición vieja [FEM])

j. Nomás los muchachos de mí tios…[sic]“Only my uncles’ kids…” (cf., mis tíos [PL])

k. Le vamos a llamar al Viejo otra vez, al del Betavel para ver cuando esta listos para irnos. [sic]“We’re going to call the old man again, the one of the Beet crop/s to see when it/they are ready so that we can go.” (cf., están listos [PL] or está listo [SG])

Perhaps the most immediately outstanding features of the French data set are the abundance of infinitival verbal forms in finite clauses (7a-c), overextension of auxiliary avoir (7d), and analogical stem forms such as (e-i).1

(7) Alterations in verbal morphology: French

a. Ma femme ne parler pas; sa femme ne parler [INF] pas. (cf., parle)“My wife doesn’t speak; his wife doesn’t speak.”

b. Ça prend pas trop de temps pour le perdre si tu ne parler pas. Je parler avec lui de temps en temp...(cf., parles, parle)“It doesn’t take a long time to lose it if you don’t speak it. I speak with him from time to time.”

c. Eux allaient à l’école parler français i pourraient pas parler anglais (cf., parlant)“They went to school speaking French ; they couldn’t speak English.

d. ...il s’a fait tuer dans une accident (cf., s’est fait) “he got himself killed in an accident”

e. Un a meuru .... (cf., une est morte)“One (fem.) died”

f. Une est mort (cf., une est morte)“One (fem.) died”

g. Notre soeur qui viver va être septante huit le sept de mars [sic] (cf., vit)“Our sister who is still living will be seventy eight the seventh of March”

h. Pourquoi que disez soixante quinze... (cf. dîtes)“Why say seventy five...”

i. Oui, il peurrait. (cf. pouvait)“Yes, he could”

In the Spanish data, the result of erosion, made more transparent since verbal morphology is more robust, is a number of verbs that follow the regular conjugation. We observe that in the preterit tense, the second person singular form may contain an epenthetic final -s by analogy with other forms, as in hablastes for hablaste ‘you spoke;’ two patterns of regularization of irregular stem-changing verbs such as venir ‘to come’ and quebrar ‘to break’—either the full paradigm is made to include the diphthong, or none of them do (i.e., the stem-change in -ie is present in various forms of the present 1 In Frenchville French, the infinitival suffix of the first conjugation is homophonous with the second person plural and with the imperfect of the singular paradigms. The first author has erred on the side of caution in transcribing as imperfect only those forms that entail past reference.

tense of venir: viene, vienieron ‘s/he comes, they come;’ but we also note the simplification of the stem-changing verb quebrar [cf., quiebra]); also noteworthy are forms such as trajieron ‘they brought’ [cf., trajeron] and poné ‘I put’ [cf., puse] both illustrative of the general process of regularization, and the shift in the first person plural personal ending -mos, which often becomes -nos, by analogy with the subject and object pronouns nosotros and nos.

(8) Alterations in verbal morphology: Spanish

a. Si la sierras se quebra… [sic] “If you close it it breaks…” [cf., quiebra]

b. Sabes salemos todos negríos de la labor. [sic] “We come out all black from the field.” [cf., salimos]

c. Para los muchachos cuando vienieran a medio dia. [sic] “For the boys when they would come at mid-day.” [cf., vinieran]

d. Ama me digo que le poniera un bote de agua… [sic] “Ama told me to put a bottle of water…” [cf., pusiera]

e. Casi simpre oyemos la estancíon… [sic] “We always listen to the station…” [cf., oímos]

f. Es nativo de C. donde vivamos nosotros. [sic] “He is a native of C. where we live.” [cf., vivimos]

g. Nadie me ha escribido. [sic] “No one has written to me.” [cf., escrito]

h. Pues digo que si esperáranos… [sic] “Well I say that if we wait…” [cf., esperáramos]

As noted, the overt syntax is the part of the language that appears most resistant to internally motivated change. Of course, linguistic change is accelerated as a consequence of direct interlingual influence. Attested in the interviews and the journal are a number of patterns that may be attributed to contact with English models. Although some of these patterns may appear to induce syntactic change—e.g., the ordering of pas relative to justement in (9b)—they may be more reasonably analyzed as semantic extensions (cf., Otheguy 1995).

(9) Lexico-semantic calquing:

a. Fred, il est 25 puis et ma fille elle est 40. (cf., il a 25 ans; elle en a 40)“Fred, he is 25 (years old) and my daughter, she is 40.”

b. b. C’est pas justement la même chose aussi. (cf., c’est pas du tout la même chose)“It’s just not the same thing.”

c. ...deux ans plus vieux que moi ...elle a cinq ans, cinq ans plus vieille que moi. (cf., deux an plus âgée )“…Two years older than me… she is five years older than me.”

d. Combien vieux que croyez que j’ai ? (cf., Vous croyez que j’ai quel âge?)“How old do you think I am?”

e. Estuve en D. por cerca de 4 horas. [sic] “I was in D. for close to 4 hours.” [cf., casi]

f. A la noche vamos al “chancleo” [sic] “At night we’re going to a party.” [cf., en]

g. Nos fuimos para L., como 9 millas de allí. [sic] “We went to L., about 9 miles from there” [cf., como a 9 millas]

h. Pos yo digo a uno le hace sentirse… [sic] “Well I say it makes one feel…” [cf., digo que a uno]

i. Ama digo que no movíeramos nada hasta sepamos de verdad. [sic] “Ama told us not to move anything until we know for sure.” [cf., hasta que sepamos]

j. Bueno las tengo que contestar pronto para salgan el Lunes. [sic] “Well I have to respond to them quickly so that they go out on Monday.” [cf., para que salgan]

The patterns exemplified in (10) are also possibly due to contact with English, although they are already extant in French and Spanish. Included among these examples are the extension of possessive pronouns in the expression of inalienable possession, as in (10a, f), preposition stranding (10b), the licensing of null objects (10b, d, e, g), object pronouns in situ (10c), and non-contrastive use of subject pronouns (10h).

(10) Non-target syntax-pragmatic features:

a. botter son derrier (cf., le derrière)“kick his behind”

b. ...il y a personne là où elle vit pour parler avec (cf., à qui elle peut parler )“...there is no one there where she lives for her to speak with”

c. Aussi mo’ garçon ... il est avec nous, il parle pas français, parle pas à lui. (cf., lui parle pas)“Also my son, he’s with us, he doesn’t speak French, [we] don’t speak to him [in French].”

d. Et lui, il y a peut-être une semaine ou deux semaines que je vois pas du tout. (cf., je le vois pas)“And him, there’s maybe a week or two weeks when I don’t seem [him] at all.”

e. ...son père a vendu à un autre homme (cf., l’a vendue)“...his father sold [it] to another man”

f. Las flores que estan en un lado de mi ventana se fueron cayendo las ramas. [sic] “The stems on the flowers that are on one side of my windows started falling.” (cf., a las flores…se le fueron cayendo)

g. Siempre había sábido que el doctor B. era muy buena jente yo le dije era. [sic]

“She had always known Dr. B. to be a good person. I said he was that.” (cf., le dije que lo era]

h. yo le dije era, pero lo que yo no entiendo es porque ni una receta le dieron. (cf., le dije ue lo era, pero lo que no entiendo)“I said he was, but what I don’t understand is why they didn’t even give him a prescription.”

It is clear that in surviving largely as an oral language, the French of the Frenchville brothers and the Spanish of the Mexican migrant worker have been altered in isolation from the codified norm and have adapted in contact with English. Significantly, however, while specific morphological manifestations and syntactic options may be prone to erosion and variability, underlying formal features seem resistant to deterioration or re-specification. Thus, mistakes in verbal affixation need not signal a lack of knowledge of the formal morphological features that motivate and license specific derivations. For example, even a cursory review of both data sets sampled attests to the availability of abstract functional features and projections that require verb raising. Consider in this respect the correct placement of the inflected (or infinitival) verb relative to the negative pas, in (11).

(11) a. Je ne peux pas me rappeler.“I can’t remember.”

b. AgrP3

Spec Agr’Jei /Ellei 3

Agr TPne + V 3

Spec T’ti 3

T NegPtneg+v 3

Spec Neg’pas 3

Neg VPtv 3

Spec V’proi g

Vtv

Also noteworthy in the French data is the preverbal positioning of the object clitic (12a), which is assumed to be licensed in AgrO (12b). Although the data demonstrate frequent correct use of direct object clitic, and occasionally of indirect object clitics as well (as in 12a), it merits pointing out, however, that there is a preference for in-situ indirect object pronouns, as shown above in (10c).

(12) a. Elle m’a dit qu’elle ne peut pas le parler.“She told me that she can not speak it.”

b. TP3

Spec T’3

T AgrOP3

Spec AgrO’3

AgrO AgrIOPle 3

Spec AgrIO’3

AgrIO VP(lui)

Similarly, the Spanish data exemplify the presence and projection of uninterpretable features and functional projections that license postverbal and null referential subjects, as in (13), though these options may not be fully exploited (see 10h).

(13) a. pero no estaban saliendo los aviones por la tempestad que [pro] había. [pro] estaba llovisnando bien recío. [pro] llegamos a T. a las doce de la noche.“But the planes weren’t leaving because of the storm there was. It was raining real hard. We arrived in T. at midnight.”

b. AgrP3

Spec Agr’3

Agr TPV 3

Spec T’[pro]/DPi 3

T VPtv 3

Spec V’ti g

Vtv

In similar fashion, there is evidence of the articulation of structure of the left periphery (14), but there is no contingency between the availability of these functional projections and their selection for particular interpretive options.

(14) a. todos mis gastos A.C. pago por ellos. yo ni dinero traíba. [sic] “All of my expenses A.C. paid for them. I didn’t even carry any money.”

b. Top3

todos mis gastos Top’3

Top FocP3

Spec Foc’A.C. i 3

Foc AgrP3

Spec Agr’ti 3

Agr TP

As shown, our speakers exhibit all of the characteristics of the full variety spoken by monolinguals as regards core grammatical phenomena. Hence, the morpho-syntactic features that subserve French- and Spanish-language constructs do not appear to be lost although their exponents (in morphological Spell-out in the selection of specific syntactic options) may be target-deviant.

4. Analysis and Synthesis

The evidence from the Spanish-English and French-English bilinguals studied in §3, coupled with similar findings from different bilingual language pairings (Hulk & Müller 2000, Sanchez 2004) from L2 acquisition data (Herschensohn 2001, Montrul 2002), and from studies of attrition (Silva-Corvalán 1991, 1994/2000, Toribio 2001) all point toward similar conclusions. That is, deficiencies in morphological inflections do not entail syntactic erosion in bilingual speech nor does the presence of non-target syntactic structures. The latter can arguably be attributed to the dual effects of lexico-semantic calquing and the over-extension of native-language syntactic options into new pragmatic contexts. As we have argued, while showing all these non-target-like features, the Spanish diary entries and the speech of the Frenchville residents manifest the properties diagnostic of a complete syntactic system with intact functional projections.

We believe that these data are of particular interest to the issue of diachronic language change for several reasons. First, the inflectional deficits that occur in these data are quite similar to, if not identical with, normal processes of language change. Thus, our speakers deploy mechanisms of analogy, paradigm leveling and, semantic extension, which are often characterized as ‘impoverishments’ in the linguistic systems of contemporary bilinguals but which, in fact, reflect quite unexceptional diachronic developments. On the other hand, these data do not appear to speak at all to the issue of structural changes over time because, as we have argued, despite the occasional selection of contextually inappropriate syntactic options, the core syntactic systems of bilinguals remain unchanged. In essence, we have said that our speakers demonstrate unique structural

properties but none that indicate any parametric shifts in the formal grammar. If it is indeed the case that leakage between the two grammars of a bilingual does not impact the formal syntax then how can we account for parametric structural change through time and how do we reconcile this with the argument that “bilingualism is also a crucial, and possibly necessary, condition for grammatical change to become possible” (Meisel 2001:3).

We maintain that bilingual data such as ours point to the possibility of observing grammatical change in progress. For our speakers, variation is not confined to inflectional morphology but extends as well into particular syntactic properties of grammar. We propose that bilinguals, particularly those for whom one language has become relatively ‘weaker’ than the other, tend to reduce the syntactic options available for expressing pragmatic differences in a language and to fix on the structure that is the most congruent across languages (Muysken 2000). There is, then, at least the possibility that a child acquiring French or Spanish from speakers like those examined here may reinterpret the preference for certain structures as the syntactic rule, leading them to eliminate options since the pragmatic contrast that originally guided the variation in syntactic expression has been neutralized.

Imagine, for instance, that a child were acquiring the Spanish of the diary writer that is described above. Provided that the social conditions were available for the compete acquisition of this variety of the language, from the input, the child could be led to reanalyze the grammar of this language as one with overt subject pronouns and fixed SVO word order. That is, what was once a pragmatic option would become a permanent syntactic change. Similarly, acquiring French under the same conditions from our Frenchville study participants might lead a child to construct a new grammar in which only direct object clitics were placed pre-verbally but indirect objects clitics remained in situ in their tonic form. In both cases, the child would be led to infer a new grammar on the basis of the available input, which was syntactically well-formed in the source variety although subject to selection only under a restricted set of pragmatic conditions. Importantly, the original syntactic options were transmitted to the child yet also with a strong bias toward one of them. This is not a transmission failure and it need not even reflect a case of incomplete acquisition. Instead these processes can be viewed as cases of incomplete replication. In sum, we follow Meisel (2001), in suggesting that changes witnessed at the level of the individual bilingual speaker may provide insights and, ultimately, perhaps some answers about how languages change through time. It is our position that external influence does not directly induce formal linguistic change in a bilingual grammar but, given the right social conditions, it may do so indirectly when the converged bilingual grammar comes to serve as the input for a new generation.

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