Radical analyticity as a diagnostic of adult acquisition

Abstract

Linguists have traditionally supposed that languages become radically analytic via two mechanisms: (1) pidginization and related processes of heavy and disruptive adult acquisition; and (2) ‘drift’ into analyticity due to withdrawal of stress from final syllables, or other grammar-internal processes sparked essentially by chance. However, theoretical economy directs us to suppose that radical analyticity emerges solely from adult acquisition, and that radically analytic languages such as Chinese and Yoruba can be identified as having experienced heavy second-language acquisition in their histories despite this not having been recorded historically. In support of this hypothesis this chapter notes that radically analytic languages are quite rare worldwide; that both older radically analytic languages and creoles bear the hallmark of eliminating contextual inflection rather than inherent; and that in this and other facets, radically analytic languages do not differ from synthetic ones only in degree of boundedness of morphemes. Rather, synthetic languages tend to mark a great deal of semantic distinctions that radically analytic ones do not mark with free morphemes, suggesting the operation of second-language acquisition rather than ‘drift’.