What is involved in acquiring a new dialect - for example, when Canadian English speakers move to Australia or African American English-speaking children go to school? How is such learning different ...from second language acquisition (SLA), and why is it in some ways more difficult? These are some of the questions Jeff Siegel examines in this book, which focuses specifically on second dialect acquisition (SDA). Siegel surveys a wide range of studies that throw light on SDA. These concern dialects of English as well as those of other languages, including Dutch, German, Greek, Norwegian, Portuguese and Spanish. He also describes the individual and linguistic factors that affect SDA, such as age, social identity and language complexity. The book discusses problems faced by students who have to acquire the standard dialect without any special teaching, and presents some educational approaches that have been successful in promoting SDA in the classroom.
This paper describes the complex tense and aspect morphology in Nama, a previously undocumented
Papuan language of southern New Guinea. Tense/aspect suffixes followed by agent/actor referencing ...suffixes
occur in combination with one of two sets of patient referencing prefixes. Most of the tense/aspect suffixes mark
two possible tenses, and the choice of a prefix from a particular set determines the appropriate interpretation. The
distinction between imperfective and perfective aspect is central to the Nama tense/aspect system, and the forms
of the perfectivity markers depend on the number category of the grammatical arguments: dual versus non-dual,
which encompasses both singular and plural (i.e. more than two). At the same time, the agent/actor suffixes and
patient referencing prefixes generally index two different number categories: singular versus non-singular. Each of
the two basic aspects has three different tenses, with some other aspectual distinctions occurring only with singular
arguments. A combination of imperfective and perfective marking is also used.
Abstract
The Relative Pronoun strategy is commonly used for relativization in European languages such as English – for
example:
The woman
who
won the lottery
is my neighbour.
In
this strategy the ...head nominal (here
the woman
) is indicated inside the relative clause by a clause-initial
pronominal element (the relative pronoun, here
who
). The Relative Pronoun strategy has been characterized as an
exclusively European areal feature (e.g.
Comrie 1998
). This article describes this
strategy in more detail, as well as previous accounts of its distribution, and goes on to demonstrate that the same strategy is
also found in Nama, a Papuan language of southern New Guinea.
This book provides explanations for the emergence of contact languages, especially pidgins and creoles. It assesses the current state of research and examines aspects of current theories and ...approaches that have excited much controversy and debate. The book answers questions such as: How valid is the notion of a pidgin-creole-postcreole life cycle? Why are many features of pidgins and creoles simple in formal terms compared to other languages? And what is the origin of the grammatical innovations in expanded pidgins and creoles - linguistic universals, conventional language change, the influence of features of languages in the contact environment, or a mix of two or more factors? In addressing these issues, the author looks at research on processes of second language acquisition and use, including simplification, overgeneralization, and language transfer. He shows how these processes can account for many of the characteristics of contact languages, and proposes linguistic and sociolinguistic constraints on their application in language contact. His analysis is supported with detailed examples and case studies from Pidgin Fijian, Melanesian Pidgin, Hawai'i Creole, New Caledonian Tayo and Australian Kriol, which he uses as well to assess the merits of competing theories of language genesis. Professor Siegel also considers his research's wider implications for linguistic theory.
Nama, a Papuan language spoken in southern New Guinea, indexes the person and number of the A argument of a transitive verb with a suffix, and the P argument with a prefix. For a large subset of ...transitive verbs, valency can be reduced to one argument by one of two strategies. In the first, an intransitive form of the verb stem is used and the remaining S argument is indexed like an A argument of a transitive verb. In the second strategy, the transitive verb stem is used and the S argument is indexed like a P argument. Thus, Nama appears to be a language with split intransitivity. After presenting some background information on Nama, this article describes these two strategies and their functions in detail. In comparison with other languages, the first strategy itself is not uncommon in detransitivizing languages, but the scope of its grammatical functions appears to be typologically unusual. The second strategy, however, is more unusual, but also more restrictive in function. The article concludes by discussing whether the use of a derived verb stem with an intransitive marker can, in fact, be considered as a valency reduction strategy.
This article examines the currently accepted view about the origins of grammatical change that has occurred in Austronesian languages in contact with Papuan languages in Melanesia. The view is that ...this change is the result of Austronesian speakers' bilingualism in a Papuan language, and therefore that Austronesian speakers were the agents of change. The article presents an alternative scenario-that the grammatical change may have been the result of a process involved in acquisition of the Austronesian language by Papuan speakers, who then would have been the agents of change. This scenario is supported by a description of similarities in the changed grammatical features of the Austronesian languages and those of contact languages, which clearly did arise from a process of acquisition-namely, language transfer. It is also supported by the degree of lexical borrowing in at least one of the changed Austronesian languages, Takia, which suggests acquisition rather than bilingualism played a key role.
This article shows how the psycholinguistic process of language transfer accounts for the many features of the grammatical morphology of language contact varieties that differ from those of their ...lexifiers. These include different grammatical categories, the use of contrasting morphological processes to express grammatical distinctions, lexifier grammatical morphemes with new functions, and new grammatical morphemes not found in the lexifier. After an introductory description of the general notion of language transfer, it presents five more specific types: transfer of morphological strategies, word order and grammatical categories, as well as direct morphological transfer and functional transfer. The article then gives some possible explanations for the distribution among different types of contact varieties of two kinds of functional transfer - functionalisation and refunctionalisation - and for the distribution of particular types of grammatical morphemes - i.e. free versus bound. The examples presented come from contact languages of the Australia-Pacific region: three creoles (Australian Kriol, Hawai'i Creole and Tayo); an expanded pidgin (Melanesian Pidgin, exemplified by Vanuatu Bislama and Papua New Guinea Tok Pisin); a restricted pidgin (Nauru Pidgin); and an indigenised variety of English (Colloquial Singapore English).
For over 40 years, sociolinguists have been demonstrating that all varieties of language are equal in linguistic terms. Yet vernacular varieties such as African American English and Hawai‘i Creole ...are still generally marginalized and excluded from the educational process, with the result that speakers of these varieties are disadvantaged in education as well as other areas. This article discusses four interrelated language ideologies that contribute to this state of affairs. Then it describes the “awareness” teaching approach, which in opposition to these ideologies includes marginalized varieties in the curriculum. This is followed by an examination of the extent to which the awareness approach deals with the inequalities perpetuated by the prevailing language ideologies. The article goes on to argue that a critical version of the awareness approach is a more effective alternative.
In an article in this journal, Bao (2005) proposes a constraint on functional transfer that he claims accounts for features of colloquial Singapore English (and other language contact varieties) ...better than the congruence constraint proposed by Siegel (1999) and subsequently developed in later works (e.g. Siegel 2003, 2008a). More specifically, Bao argues that the requirement of surface syntactic similarity for transfer is too strong. His analysis uses Mandarin to exemplify the Chinese substrate languages that were the source of transfer, following the view that there is a universal Chinese grammar (Chao 1968: 13). However, the present article shows that Bao's claim is unjustified because the actual source of transfer was a variety of Chinese that differs significantly from Mandarin in the area of grammar he examined.
This paper examines possessive marking in Pidgin Fijian as an example of morphological simplicity in a restricted pidgin. This is attributed to a process of simplification or lack of development in ...early second language acquisition. Here the only effect of the substrate languages appears to be in constituent ordering. The paper then goes on to look at morphological expansion in possessive marking in an expanded pidgin (or according to some, a creole): Melanesian Pidgin (MP). This is attributed to functional transfer from the substrate languages in extended second language use. While many core features of the Central Eastern Oceanic substrate are found in MP, the overt marking of alienable versus inalienable possession is not. One explanation is that this feature is 'functionally expendable' or 'inessential' in language (McWhorter 2002). However, the paper argues that the absence of formal marking of the alienable-inalienable distinction in MP can be best accounted for by availability constraints that prevented transfer of this feature at an earlier stage of development. Adapted from the source document
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