Journal of Language Contact最新文献

The fact that body-part reflexives (bpr s) are widespread in Romance-lexifier pidgin, creole and mixed (pcm) languages of the Atlantic area has usually been accounted for in terms of substratum influence from West African languages, in which such reflexives are common. However, this approach does not explain why bpr s are also frequently found in Romance-lexifier pcm languages like Zamboanga Chavacano and Malacca Creole, which lack a demonstrable African substrate, are spoken outside the Atlantic area and are in contact with languages that lack bpr s. Drawing on cross-linguistic as well as historical corpus data, this paper argues that the source of bpr s in these languages should be traced back to the late-medieval and early-Renaissance lexifiers. More specifically, it is proposed that speakers of Romance-lexifier pcm languages identified, recapitulated and replicated reflexive-like uses of words such as ‘body’ and ‘head’ in the lexifiers. A number of bridging contexts is argued to have fostered these processes.

French in Burundi offers an interesting case of language contact: speakers have Kirundi as their first language and French imported during the colonial era was the variety spoken in Belgium, which does not share all the features of reference French. In this study, we analyze a corpus of 12 speakers (including 4 women; mean age 38.5) producing different speaking styles collected according to the methodology of the Phonologie du Français Contemporain project: word reading, text reading, and free narration. The results of the pronunciation analysis concern vowels, consonants and schwa. We identify eight pronunciation features that differ from reference French. In addition, we analyze for each one the possible interferences with Kirundi or with Belgian French. In conclusion, we discuss which of these features can be considered pan-African.

Considerable research has concerned the influence of Papua New Guinea’s Oceanic languages on the development of the pidgin/creole Tok Pisin, but little research has considered linguistic influence in the opposite direction. This paper adds to both bodies of research by investigating whether the colexification of ‘enough’, ‘able’ and ‘until’ in Papapana (Oceanic) and Tok Pisin results from internal or contact-induced change. Such a colexification is unattested/rare cross-linguistically therefore I argue that language contact is responsible. The Tok Pisin verb inap ‘enough, able’ grammaticalised as the preposition/subordinator ‘until’ because of semantic extensions by Oceanic language speakers whose languages demonstrate overlapping polysemies. The Papapana verb eangoi colexifies ‘enough’ and ‘able’ (common cross-linguistically), but the colexification with the lexicalised adverb eangoiena ‘able’ and grammaticalised preposition/subordinator eangoiena ‘until’ is pattern replication modelled on Tok Pisin. Based on areal data, I propose a tentative semantic map for enough, contributing to research on cross-linguistic colexification.

This article has three goals. First, it provides a broad cross-linguistic survey of phonological change in contact situations focusing on the suprasegmental domain. The term suprasegmental refers here to syllable structure, stress patterns, tonal patterns, and vowel and nasal harmony systems. Secondly, it assesses phonological change to suprasegmental variables whereby external influence causes an increase in complexity in the recipient language’s structure. Thirdly, using insights from the phonological typology literature, it provides a preliminary framework to evaluate suprasegmental phenomena, which can then serve as an additional tool to disentangle inheritance from contact-induced change. Data from 45 languages suggest that the suprasegmental domain provides fertile ground for inspecting contact-influenced increases in linguistic complexity. Overall, we argue that the data reviewed here highlight the relevance of phonological structure as a variable in studies of language contact, which have been mostly preoccupied with morphosyntactic variables.

The universality of kinship terms means they are regarded, like much basic vocabulary, as resistant to borrowing. Kin term borrowings are documented at varying frequencies, but their role in the dynamics of change in this core social domain is understudied. We investigated the dimensions and the sociolinguistic contexts of kinship borrowings with 50 kinship categories from a global sample of 32 languages, a subset extracted from the World Loanword Database. We found that more borrowings take place in affinal kin categories and in generations denoting relatives older than ego. Close kin categories also have borrowings, but the borrowed items usually coexist with other, presumably non-borrowed variants. Colonisation and the spread of cultures and religions were main inducing forces for kin term borrowings; new terms often enter a language via bilingualism. These tentative patterns can be studied further with larger datasets in future systematic studies of kinship borrowings.