The verbal morphosyntax of non -canonical contact languages: Malay -derived constraints and the inflectional domain in Afrikaans and Sri Lankan Malay.
Item
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Title
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The verbal morphosyntax of non -canonical contact languages: Malay -derived constraints and the inflectional domain in Afrikaans and Sri Lankan Malay.
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Identifier
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AAI3169983
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identifier
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3169983
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Creator
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Slomanson, Peter.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Edward H. Bendix
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Date
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2005
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Language, Linguistics
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Abstract
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This dissertation deals with selected morphosyntactic processes in the grammars of two non-canonical contact languages, Afrikaans and Sri Lankan Malay. The parallel between the two languages lies in the fact that their respective lexica and morphosyntactic systems have diverged in ways which suggest that the interaction of their input languages triggered radical morphosyntactic changes. This involved the creation of new contact grammars, heavily influenced by stabilized L2 varieties. Although both Afrikaans and Sri Lankan Malay are known to have creole antecedent languages, neither modern language can be characterized as a creole. One linguistic property which the two languages share is the fact that they both display grammatical constraints which can be accounted for by reference to a history of language contact and the collective influence of bilingual speakers. In the case of Afrikaans, the syntactic properties of its input languages have conspired to produce productive verb-verb compounding and robust movement of the resulting lexically-incorporated verbs. I argue that substrate effects based on the syntactic properties of Malay modals and verbs mitigate against modal-verb incorporation in Afrikaans. In the case of Sri Lankan Malay, phonological verbs display contrasts such as contrastive tense that cannot be marked on verbs in antecedent Malay varieties such as Ambonese Malay and Jakarta Malay, and this divergence from the older contact Malay pattern seems to follow in part from semantic influence from Sri Lankan Muslim Tamil. Yet the weak morphosyntactic features associated with the Malay verb have blocked the development of the kind of robust verb movement and agglutinative morphology that we associate with the Tamil verb. The limited verb movement that we do find in Sri Lankan Malay is attributed to a finiteness contrast which is also unknown in antecedent Malay varieties, and which is located just above an aspectual projection in the inflectional domain. I conclude that both Afrikaans and Sri Lankan Malay feature distinctive morphosyntactic systems which represent a level of compromise between their component grammars which is significant for our understanding of the development of syntactic and morphological systems by bilinguals, in social configurations conducive to the creation of new grammars.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy Restricted.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.