Language Ecology - Current Issue

This paper takes as its starting point a contact-induced grammatical innovation at the level of attributive predications that has been reported for various Romani speakers, in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and the United States. Adopting a cross-disciplinary approach, we present evidence both from a historical study that documents individual and family itineraries in the Americas during the first half of the twentieth century and from a multi-sited ethnographic study on biographical narratives. These studies reveal the existence of close links among individuals from geographically distant localities. We suggest that, in the absence of normative linguistic institutions, complex multilingual practices seem to have modified grammar at the level of the bilingual speaker and ultimately of the network as a whole. More generally, by considering a less-studied population engaged in transnational mobile practices, we seek to illustrate how mobility allows for linguistic change to spread rapidly and widely.

This study investigates the meaning-form interface in the Balkan Sprachbund (BS), by researching five different languages: Italian, Russian, , Romanian, and Greek. I consider two models that account for recurring properties of the relevant languages in the Sprachbund: convergence and diglossia. If convergence is the cause behind shared features typical of the BS, that predicts that Bulgarian and Romanian would be more transparent than Russian and Italian. Under the diglossic analysis, Koine Greek is assumed to be the source of shared features, which predicts that the BS languages, Romanian, Bulgarian and Greek, would be similar. To compare the two models, I investigate twenty-four opacity features, divided into five categories: Redundancy (one-to-many), Fusion (many-to-one), Discontinuity (one meaning split in two or more forms), Form-based Form (forms with no semantic counterpart: zero-to-one), and a group of typical BS features. The results are consistent with the diglossia model: Romanian, and Greek manifest similar features, which points in the direction of diglossia as the underlying cause of language similarity.

As a probe into the degree of integration of the bilingual lexicon, a series of lexical-decision tasks was carried out in two bilingual speech communities with greatly differing linguistic, cultural, and socio-historical characteristics: Misiones province in northeastern Argentina (Portuguese-Spanish), and three indigenous communities in northern Ecuador (Quichua and the mixed language known as Media Lengua). In both cases the results suggest a tightly integrated bilingual lexicon, but the pattern of responses was qualitatively and quantitatively different for each group, to such an extent as to potentially challenge the assumption of universal validity for lexical decision tasks.

In their typological survey of pidgins, Parkvall and Bakker (2013) observe that pidgin discourse is characterized by an exceptionally low type-token ratio. Taking this observation as its starting point, the present paper examines the type-token ratio in Lingua Franca, a contact language traditionally classified as a pidgin. The study is based on a unique mini-corpus consisting of parallel translations in Lingua Franca and four comparator languages: Italian, Spanish, French and English. The paper shows that the type-token ratio of the Lingua Franca variety reflected in the mini-corpus matches, and in parts surpasses, those of its Romance lexifiers and English. The study expands our knowledge of the basilect/acrolect distinction in Lingua Franca and contributes to the discussion about the role of lexical diversity in the typological categorization of contact languages.