Diachronica - Volume 29, Issue 3, 2012

Language contact plays a key part among the factors leading to change in grammars, and yet the study of syntactic change, especially in the generative or innatist tradition, has tended to neglect the role of contact in this process. At the same time, work on contact-induced change remains largely descriptive, with theoretical discussion restricted mostly to the putative limits on borrowing. This article aims at moving beyond these restrictions by outlining a psycholinguistically-based account of some of the ways in which contact leads to change. This account takes Van Coetsem’s (1988, 2000) distinction between recipient-language and source-language agentivity as its starting point, building on this insight in the light of work on language acquisition and first language attrition, and showing how these principles can be integrated into a unified acquisitionist model of syntactic change in general. The model is then applied to case studies of contact-induced syntactic change in Yiddish and Berber.

In late Middle Dutch, the temporal adverb dan “then” grammaticalized into an adversative coordinator (“but”), which remained in use up to the nineteenth century. This paper investigates how adversative dan can be deduced from earlier usages and why it later disappeared. The paper’s first part discusses how temporal dan developed an exclusive function (“except”), from which the adversative use is derived. Semantic maps are used to represent the development, and to make clear similarities and differences with German and English cognates of dan (dann/denn and than/then respectively). The second part reports corpus studies of seventeenth and eighteenth-century letters and diaries, showing text type and frequency effects on the use of adversative dan, which led to its disappearance. This will be interpreted as a peculiar case of degrammaticalization, lacking semantic enrichment and syntactic flexibilization which normally accompany degrammaticalization. The case of dan suggests that text type and frequency are important factors in (de)grammaticalization.

This paper analyses the morphosyntactic status of pronouns in Umpithamu, a language from Cape York Peninsula (Australia). The analysis shows that pronominal morphosyntax in Umpithamu deviates from what can be expected historically and typologically, and attributes this to restructuring under the influence of intensive contact with Lamalamic languages, to which it is not closely related. The evidence for contact-induced restructuring combines a clear linguistic case involving a rare morphosyntactic pattern with a rare function, with a well-documented anthropological case for long-standing language contact. The outcome of the process is morphologically hybrid, combining the external structure of enclitic forms with the internal structure of free forms, which testifies to the abrupt nature of the process that was involved.