The article focuses on two markers of progressive aspect that are emerging in a Balkan Slavic dialect in Albania, presumably under Albanian influence. One of them dates back to locative (ǵe ‘where’). Two processes intertwine on the grammaticalisation path of the other (toko): originally an adversative conjunction (‘but’), it was structurally mapped to its polysemic (adversative, but also affirmative

In a variety of Brazilian Portuguese in contact with Veneto, variable vowel reduction in clitic position can be partially accounted for by the phonotactic profile of clitic structures. We show that, when phonotactic profile is controlled for, vowel reduction is statistically more frequent in non-pronominal than in pronominal clitics, which indicates that these clitic types are represented in separate

In this article, I analyse the phonological adaptation of Anglicisms in three languages (French, German and Czech) from a contrastive perspective. The classification of standard phonological forms, based on a system of eight adaptation principles, aims at capturing the degree of phonological permeability/resistance for each of the languages. Phonological approximation (the substitution of foreign phonemes

) investigated variation in spoken Nigerian Pidgin data by educated speakers and found no evidence for a continuum of lects between Nigerian Pidgin and English. Many speakers, however, speak both languages, and both are in close contact with each other, which keeps the question of the nature of their relationship on the agenda. This paper investigates 67 conversations in Nigerian English by educated

The aim of this paper is to investigate two Francoprovençal speaking communities in the Italian region of Apulia, Faeto and Celle di St. Vito. Despite the regional neighborhood of the two towns, and their common isolation from other Francoprovençal speaking communities, their sociolinguistic conditions are deeply different. They differ in reference to the functional distribution of the languages of

The debate as to whether syntax can be borrowed has spurred much scholarly inquiry among those who argue that syntax cannot be borrowed () and those in favor of the ‘anything-goes’ argument (Thomason, 2001). In contribution to this debate, this study examines the contact-induced processes behind the variation of Basque Differential Object Marking (dom). We examine the use of Basque dom in the spontaneous

The aim of this paper is to provide an explanation of the emergence of dom in peripheral Macedonian dialects through a reevaluation of the contact hypothesis. The southern and south-western dialects in the contact zones with Greek and Aromanian use a dative-based pattern to mark specific, predominantly human and animate referents. However, the contact hypothesis cannot fully explain the origin of dom

This paper focuses on the Arborense Differential Object Marking (dom) system, which in line with the typical Sardinian dom system marks the object noun phrases characterized by a high degree of animacy and specificity with the preposition a. This is why the Sardinian dom is also called prepositional accusative. Authors dealing with other Sardinian dialects agree in identifying three domains of distribution

This paper is a comparison of nine Arawakan languages sharing a rare phenomenon in the Americas: differential subject marking. We argue that the languages involved display a group of predicates with oblique case marking on the subject, similar to the subject-like obliques in Icelandic and Hindi. Comparison with bivalent constructions provides a strong argument for the diachronic process of objects

The present paper explores Differential Object Marking in a variety of Asturian (Western Iberian Romance) spoken in western Asturias (northwestern Spain). This ancestral form of speech stands out from Central Asturian and especially from Standard Spanish. For a number of reasons, ranging from profound changes in pronunciation, vocabulary, morphology and information structure to slight but very relevant

In Cappadocian and Pharasiot, the two main members of the inner Asia Minor Greek dialect group, the head nouns of NPs found in certain syntactic positions are marked with the accusative if the relevant NPs are definite and with the nominative if the NPs are indefinite. This differential case marking (dcm) pattern contrasts with all other Modern Greek dialects, in which the accusative is uniformly used

The present paper provides first insights into emblematic language use in Bunia Swahili, a variety of the Bantu language Swahili as spoken in and around the city of Bunia inIturi Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Structural variability in Bunia Swahili shows that this language variety consists of basilectal, mesolectal and acrolectal registers, which are used by speakers to express different

This paper discusses the historical borrowing of an enclitic across unrelated Papuan languages spoken along the lower Sogeram River in the Middle Ramu region of present-day Madang Province, Papua New Guinea. The enclitic *=a, which attached to the right edge of a prosodic unit, was borrowed from the Ramu family into the ancestor of three modern Sogeram languages. Both morphological and prosodic substance

This article aims to test the general validity of borrowability scales by investigating contrastively two contact induced linguistic varieties of Greek. It tries to elucidate the factors that facilitate or inhibit the borrowability of free grammatical elements, which are usually considered as less amenable to transfer. It argues against the formulation of any borrowability scales of a generalized predictive

This paper examines the influence of language contact and multilingualism on the encoding of transfer events in the heritage variety of Javanese spoken in Suriname. Alongside Javanese, this community also speaks Sranantongo and Dutch, of which Sranantongo had the longest contact history with Javanese. It is shown that this long period of contact had a structural influence on the expression of transfer

Structuralists and generativists have insisted for a long time that the elements and structures one language could borrow from another are constrained by typological compatibility, naturalness, and other factors (cf. : 13–34). Such constraints are still thought to apply to structural interference, or pattern replication in the terms of , and the often concomitant contact-induced grammaticalisation

The northwestern part of the island of New Guinea has been the site of intense contact between a hugely diverse set of languages. Languages from at least nine non-Austronesian families (plus several isolates) are spoken alongside Austronesian languages from the South Halmahera-West New Guinea branch, which arrived in the region roughly 3500 years ago. This paper looks at lexical items in the semantic

Amongst the problems of contact grammaticalisation research in past studies has been, first, the problem of searching for diachronic evidence in relatively ‘new’ language situations, something which was advocated by , amongst others as essential to contact grammaticalisation research. Because of the absence of stage-by-stage diachronic evidence for contact grammaticalisation, many cases of ordinary

In this article, I examine the intrusion of the Spanish preposition de into the languages of Mexico. Following , I apply the distinction of matter (mat) and pattern (pat). The exploration of the 35 Archivo de lenguas indígenas de México publications which serve as a comparable database shows that Chontal, Mexicanero, Nahuatl de Acaxochitlán, Otomi, Yucatec, Zoque, and Zapotec, have borrowed de or a

After decades of debate in linguistic theory, the lexical/functional status of adpositions is still controversial. Lexicon-Grammar mixed languages such as Media Lengua, spoken in Northern Ecuador, are excellent testing cases for such grammatical categories: This mixed language displays a conservative Quichua morphosyntactic frame while approximately 90% of its lexical roots are relexified from Spanish

In this article, I reconsider the evidence for a Central Andean linguistic area. I suggest that there is no evidence for a clear-cut linguistic area comprising the entire Central Andes narrowly defined, and that perceived homogeneity is partially due to an overemphasis on the largest and surviving Central Andean language families, Quechuan and Aymaran. I show that none of the other Central Andean languages

The purpose of this article is to study the linguistic evidence of Slavic-Albanian language contact in the kinship terminology of the Mrkovići, a Muslim Slavic-speaking group in southern Montenegro, and to demonstrate how it refers to the social context and the kind of contact situation. The material for this study was collected during fieldwork conducted from 2012 to 2015 in the villages of the Mrkovići

This study examines the language of the Druze community in Israel as going through the process of convergence and a composite Matrix Language formation, resulting in a split language, a.k.a. mixed language, based on Myers-Scotton’s Matrix Language turnover hypothesis (2002). Longitudinal data of Palestinian Arabic/Israeli Hebrew codeswitching from the Israeli Druze community collected in 2000 and 2017

The aim of this paper is to examine contact-induced changes, visible on lexical and lexico-syntactical levels, in the set of twenty sixteenth-century petitions in Nahuatl from the region of Santiago de Guatemala. They comprise such phenomena as the creation and usage of neologisms, extentions of meaning, the adoption of loans in the morphological system of Nahuatl and the usage of calques. The material

This paper discusses historical and ongoing morphological simplification in Alorese, an Austronesian language spoken in eastern Indonesia. From comparative evidence, it is clear that Alorese lost almost all of its morphology over several hundred years as a consequence of language contact (, 2012, to appear). By providing both linguistic and cultural-historical evidence, this paper shows that Alorese

This paper explores borrowing of nouns between two unrelated Australian languages with a long history of contact: Mudburra, a language with no grammatical gender, and Jingulu, which has four genders and super-classing. Unusually, this case involves extensive borrowing in both directions, resulting in the languages sharing 65% of their nouns. This bi-directional borrowing of nouns allows us to simultaneously

This paper investigates contact-induced changes in the argument structure of Middle English verbs on the model of Old French. We study two issues: i) to what extent did the English system retain and integrate the argument structure of verbs copied from French? ii) did the argument structure of these copied verbs influence the argument structure of native verbs? Our study is based on empirical evidence

This paper sketches the integration of Greek-origin loan verbs into the valency and transitivity patterns of Coptic (Afroasiatic, Egypt), arguing that transitivities are language-specific descriptive categories, and the comparison of donor-language transitivity with target-language transitivity reveals fine-grained degrees of loan-verb integration. Based on a comparison of Coptic Transitivity and Greek

Creole languages consistently show valency patterns that cannot be traced back to their lexifier languages, but derive from their substrate languages. In this paper, I start out from the observation that a convincing case for substrate influence can be made by adopting a world-wide comparative approach. If there are recurrent matches between substrate and creole structures in a given construction type

We explore valency and transitivity patterns in Cameroon Pidgin English (cpe) from a language contact perspective, with particular focus on (a) lexical and (b) constructional phenomena. With respect to (a), many verbs of English origin surface in cpe with additional senses and valency properties to those they display in the lexifier, illustrating the drive towards polysemy in a language with a relatively

This paper looks at the different ways French (and English) loan verbs are being integrated in Michif, a mixed language (the noun system is French, the verbal one is Cree) based upon two dictionaries of the language. The detailed study of the available data has shown that loan verbs are almost exclusively assigned to the vai class, i.e. a class of verbs whose single core argument is animate. This seems

We examine spontaneous production data from the dialect of Modern West Thracian Greek (mwtg) (the local dialect of Evros) with regard to a hypothesis of syntactic borrowing of verbal transitivity. We argue that mwtg allows omission of the direct object with specific reference, in contrast to Standard Modern Greek (smg) and other Modern Greek (mg) dialects (spoken in Greece), but similar to Turkish

Verb clusters are a linguistic phenomenon where two or more verbs align in adjacent order. This paper discusses the structure of a certain type of verb cluster, namely modal infinitivo pro participio (IPP) structures, in main clauses of a moribund heritage variety of German, Moundridge Schweitzer German (MSG), spoken in Kansas. An acceptability judgment task was conducted with twelve participants to

Previous studies on gender in Scandinavian heritage languages in America have looked at noun-phrase internal agreement. It has been shown that some heritage speakers have non-target gender agreement, but this has been interpreted in different ways by different researchers. This paper presents a study of pronominal gender in Heritage Norwegian and Swedish, using existing recordings and a small experiment

In this paper we take a closer look at the oft-touted divide between heritage language speakers and adult second language (L2) learners. Here, we explore whether some properties of language may display general effects across different populations of bilinguals, explaining, at least partially, why these two groups show some common differences when compared with monolinguals. To test this hypothesis

This article investigates the morphosyntax of American Norwegian noun phrases that show mixing between Norwegian and English and proposes a formal analysis of these. The data show a distinct pattern characterized by English content items occurring together with Norwegian functional material such as determiners and suffixes. In the article, it will be argued that an exoskeletal approach to grammar is

The finite verb typically occurs in second position in main clauses in Germanic languages other than English. Hence they are often referred to as ʽverb-second languagesʼ or V2-languages for short. The difference between a V2-language and a non-V2 language is shown in (i)–(ii) with Icelandic examples and English glosses (the finite verb is highlighted): In example (i) the finite verb occurs in second

Wisconsin has a long history of heritage language use, which continues to the present. Latinos, Hmong, and Somalis are groups, which now call Wisconsin home. As new generations of American-born individuals emerge, more removed from immigrant culture, the vitality of the language as a heritage language may weaken. This study examines the vitality of Somali as a heritage language in Barron, Wisconsin

This study explores the bilingual phonology of two heritage speakers of Moundridge Schweitzer German ( MSG ) from Moundridge, Kansas. The speakers are descendants of Mennonite speakers of German who settled in the area around Moundridge, Kansas, in the 1870s. The production of Moundridge Schweitzer German /a/ and /ɔ/ and American English /a/ and /ɔ/ were compared and no evidence of phonological or

The paper examines the role of lexical, morphological, and discourse-referential factors in gender assignment with animate nouns in heritage Russian in order to explore the extent to which these different interfaces are challenging in heritage language acquisition. The analysis of concordant and discordant agreement patterns with nouns representing each type of gender categorization mechanism points

This article first presents an overview of the social and demographic phenomena specific to the language shift situation in Sanpete County, Utah, focusing on the biggest non-English-speaking group, the Danes. This overview includes the assimilation norms that were present in the community (including from the dominant religion, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), social and geographical

The present article takes a quantitative approach to investigating contact-induced change, using typological parameters established for the purposes of cross-linguistic comparison. Specifically, it examines the likelihood that a socio-politically dominant language, Greek (Indo-European), influenced the morphological structure of a socio-politically subordinate indigenous language, Coptic (Afroasiatic)

The issue of ‘ language contact ’ has been widely explored from the perspectives of empirical description and theoretical development, as well as from sociolinguistic, societal and cognitive angles. I would like to broach the subject from a different view, to deepen reflections of an epistemological and methodological order, building on my “distanced” (but empirically grounded) examination of language

This study tests the effect of multilingualism and language contact on consonant perception. Here, we explore the emergence of phonological stratification using two alternative forced-choice (2AFC) identification task experiments to test listener perception of stop voicing with contrasting minimal pairs modified along a 10-step continuum. We examine a unique language ecology consisting of three languages

The present article proposes a non-aprioristic approach to analyzing the domains of information structure and reference systems. The article is inspired by the papers in Information structuring of spoken language from a cross-linguistic perspective (Fernandez-Vest and Van Valin (eds.), 2016), and from my own research on languages for which only spoken data exist. As an outcome of this study it may

This article focuses on one particular linguistic feature of Singapore Colloquial English ( SCE ), sentence-final what , which has been referred to as an ‘objection particle’. SCE (Smith, 1985: 126)Context: Discussion of a student who is going overseas for one month and will be missing classes.a. He’ll never pass the third year.b. It’s only for one month what .Sentence-final what in SCE is analyzed

The Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova, 2008) assumes functional morphology to be a particular challenge in second language (L2) acquisition whereas acquisition of syntax and semantics to be unproblematic. I propose, following Polinsky (2011), that functional morphology can be seen as an acquisitional bottleneck for heritage language (hl) speakers as well. Russian verbal aspect is known to be problematic

With this detailed and comprehensive survey, Maarten Kossmann provides not only Berberists and Arabists, but also all linguists interested in language contact and related issues, with an impressive amount of data and with food for thought. Based on considerable documentation, his work offers a synthesis that had never been attempted before of most of the elements in the Maghrebian Berber languages

The American Midwest is an area that stretches over huge distances. Yet it seems that the Norwegian language in this whole area has some similarities, particularly at the lexical level. Comparisons of three types of vocabulary across the whole area, as well as across time, building on accounts in the previous literature from Haugen (1953) onwards, are carried out. The results of these comparisons convince

This paper explores patterns in the integration of Hungarian and Romanian nouns as well as adjectives in the German dialect of the speech community of Palota, a German Sprachinsel in North-West-Romania. The main focus of the study is on both inflectional and derivational noun and adjective morphologies and on how they behave in the case of some more or less distantly related contact languages. Based

Many studies have focused on substrate influence on the creole languages of Melanesia – Tok Pisin, Solomons Pijin and Bislama. The same cannot be said with regard to influence in the opposite direction: contact-induced change occurring in local vernaculars due to pressure from the creole. This paper presents a case study of several instances of structural borrowing and semantic category change in Paluai

Using loanword data from Haugen (1953), this paper investigates variation in vowel integrations of English loanwords in the Norwegian among 19 th century Norwegian immigrants to the United States, as first-language Norwegian and second-language English speakers. Previous research, most notably Flege (1995), has argued that speakers make use of L1 categories that are the most similar to the integrated

Old Rapa, the indigenous Eastern Polynesian language of the island of Rapa Iti, is no longer spoken regularly in any cultural domains and has been replaced in most institutional domains by Tahitian. The remaining speakers are elders who maintain it only through linguistic memory, where elements of the language are remembered and can be elicited but they are not actively used in regular conversation

A contrastive (or antithetical) construction which makes simultaneous use of two separate particles is identified through a mainly corpus-based study as a typical feature of a number of lesser-desc ...

The volume Stability and divergence in language contact: Factors and Mechanisms edited by Braunmuller, Hoder and Kuhl (2014) contains eleven studies about divergence and/or stability in language contact. The contributions plead for a differential description of language development (variation, change, stability) insofar as a given contact phenomenon makes sense in a different way from various perspectives

Makary Kotoko, a Chadic language spoken in the flood plain directly south of Lake Chad in Cameroon, has an estimated 16,000 speakers. An analysis of a lexical database for the language shows that of the 3000 or so distinct lexical entries in the database, almost 1/3 (916 items) have been identified as borrowed from other languages in the region. The majority of the borrowings come from Kanuri, a Nilo-Saharan

This research examines borrowings from Hebrew into Arabic as used by Nazarene and Iksali 1 Palestinian Israelis in the context of Arabic computer-mediated communication ( CMC ), specifically the written colloquial Palestinian Israeli dialect of Arabic in Facebook. The study focuses on the frequency of the borrowed items, phonological adaptation, and the reasons for borrowing from Hebrew. Three hypotheses

This paper is a linguistic, anthropological and philosophical exploration of language, with particular focus on language contact. The goal is not to address linguistic phenomena from a descriptive perspective, in the classical sense of the term, nor as if they were a “given”, and nothing further. Nor is the goal to craft a model. Instead it is an attempt to account for all relevant elements which (empirically)

This paper examines the emergence of perfective aspect in Cantonese-English bilingual children from the perspective of contact-induced grammaticalization, focusing on the novel use of already . Although the adverbial already seems to serve a function similar to that of the Cantonese perfective marker zo2 in the bilingual children, other model constructions suggest that the function of already may combine

The article deals with the analysis of phenomena of language contact between Spanish and Quechua, found in the Doctrina Christiana y Catecismo para instruccion de los Indios (1584). These phenomena include primarily loanwords, loan blends, shifts of meaning and morphosyntactic calques, encountered throughout the Quechua version of the Doctrina Christiana y Catecismo , a profound ecclesiastical work