L1 transfer and input demand in contact-driven syntactic change

Abstract

Studies of New Englishes often examine contact-based change by comparing the two language systems involved, to see if feature x from the substrate language appears in the contact variety. In this article I show that this approach is incomplete. Looking across a bilingual cline of Indian English speakers, I show that only some substrate features have stabilized across the whole population, and that a different subset of the same features has stabilized in Singapore English. L1 transfer alone cannot account for this difference; it over-predicts change. I focus on a different hallmark of postcolonial Englishes—diminishing input from the original colonial English variety—and show the need for a further factor, input demand: the amount of input needed to acquire an L2 syntactic form given a specific L1. The relative strength of the two factors is then assessed in a four-way typology of syntactic changes. Both are instrumental in long-term stable outcomes, but substrate type appears to sometimes place hard limits on aspects of learnability regardless of input. The study demonstrates the importance of key constructs in Second Language Acquisition theory for the study of long-term contact-driven language change.