SOME ISSUES IN THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE CONTACT*
Donald Winford
Ohio State University
1. Introduction
The earliest conceptions of the field of Contact Linguistics envisioned it as a multi-disciplinary area
of study, encompassing a broad range of language contact phenomena and issues, linguistic,
sociolinguistic, sociological and psycholinguistic. The field of study developed out of several lines
of research dating back to the 19th century. Among its foundations was work on dialect contact and
the formation of pidgins and creoles, as conducted by researchers such as Schuchardt, Hesseling,
and others. Other lines of research concerned with contact phenomena included work on the
linguistic and social aspects of code-switching, contact-induced language change, the dynamics of
language maintenance and shift in immigrant and other multilingual communities, and the nature of
bilinguals’ linguistic competence and cognition. All of these diverse lines of enquiry have become
part of the general study of languages in contact, but we are still far from integrating them into a
coherent and comprehensive theoretical/methodological framework. Some time ago, Appel &
Muysken (1987: 7) claimed that “bilingualism or language contact in itself is not a scientific
discipline.” More recently, Van Coetsem (2000: 39-40) pointed out that “Contact linguistics still
lacks an adequate conceptual basis on which a synthesis can be built that is theoretically wellfounded.”
One of the factors that appear to contribute to the apparent disunity in the field is the
territoriality adopted by scholars in various disciplines. Researchers in “Bilingualism,” Codeswitching”, “Creole Linguistics”, Historical Linguistics” and so on, seem to want to preserve the
boundaries and distinctiveness of their own area of interest. In general, researchers tend to define
the field in terms of their particular concerns, or in opposition to other areas of study that investigate
language contact. For Myers-Scotton (2002: 5), for example, “Contact Linguistics belongs with
theoretical studies of grammar; it can contribute to, and challenge, theories of syntax and
morphology as well as phonology.” Despite this heavily linguistic bias, she still includes within the
field a wide range of contact phenomena, including borrowing, morphosyntactic change, language
attrition, pidgin and creole formation, and Interlanguage, that is, “the grammar(s) of learners of a
second language” (ibid.). Yet, most interestingly, she distinguishes Contact Linguistics from
*
I wish to express my gratitude for the useful comments made by a reviewer of this paper. I alone am
responsible for any errors or omissions.
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Bilingualism, which she defines as “a much broader topic that typically includes language contact
and may include contact linguistics.” Bilingualism, in her view, is concerned with such questions as
the social factors involved in how people become bilingual; childhood acquisition of two languages;
bilinguals and their cognition; and language policy toward bilinguals. Thus, on the one hand, she
sees bilingualism as akin to sociolinguistics and the sociology of language, and, on the other, to
psycholinguistics.
This kind of partitioning of the field is also seen among those who study bilingualism. For
instance, in his excellent study of the interaction of sociopragmatic and psycholinguistic factors in
bilingual language production, Walters (2005: 4) acknowledges that he must ignore several areas of
research on contact phenomena, including structural (linguistic) approaches to second language
acquisition (e.g, Epstein & al. 1996); bilingual code-switching (Poplack 1980) and, curiously,
Contact Linguistics (Winford 2003). Of course, limiting one’s study in this way is often necessary
and understandable, given the scope and complexity of contact phenomena. Nevertheless, whether
intentionally or not, it encourages an atomistic view of the various areas of study, rather than the
kind of comprehensive and integrated approach that the field needs.
In fact, all of the phenomena listed above by Myers-Scotton and Walters fall under the scope of
Contact Linguistics in the broad sense of the term. Whatever the approach may be, we are all
concerned, ultimately, with the same problem – how to analyze and account for language contact
phenomena. Hence we should be devoting our efforts to achieving consensus and unity in the field.
We might begin by agreeing on the range of phenomena that we are all interested in. There is
growing agreement that these include: bilingual code-switching and mixture; second language
acquisition; borrowing and convergence between languages; and language attrition or obsolescence.
Bilingual mixture has traditionally been seen as the province of “Bilingualism”, yet to distinguish
this field from “Contact Linguistics”, as Walters does, is an odd thing to do, since they are
concerned with the same issues. With regard to second language acquisition, contact linguists are
particularly interested in the formation of “indigenized” varieties of languages, such as Hiberno
English or Singapore English, and the second language varieties of dominant languages used by
immigrants in Europe, the Americas and elsewhere. Borrowing, substratum influence, and
convergence have traditionally been the concern of historical linguistics, but their products are now
being increasingly examined within the framework of contact linguistics. Language attrition and
death has recently emerged as a major area of study in its own right, but the phenomena it deals
with are similar in many ways to those found in cases of language shift and convergence. Each of
these types of contact has been instrumental in various types of contact-induced change, and in the
creation of “new” contact languages such as bilingual mixed (intertwined) languages, pidgins, and
creoles. The huge task facing Contact Linguistics is to integrate all of these phenomena and the
various disciplinary approaches to them, into a coherent framework. The elements of such a
framework include, among other things, a consistent terminology for dealing with the phenomena in
question, a common set of criteria for classifying various outcomes of language contact, and a
theory that includes all aspects of language contact, whether linguistic, sociolinguistic, or
psycholinguistic. I do not pretend to have such a framework to offer here, nor to be able to show
how such integration of approaches can be accomplished. It would be a gigantic, and (given our
current knowledge) near impossible task to cover all of the issues that are relevant to a
comprehensive theory of contact-induced change. Hence, I limit my attention to linguistic
approaches to contact phenomena and the kinds of progress they have made. I also briefly discuss
ways in which linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to contact phenomena might inform each
other.
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2. Problems of definition and classification
I suggest that there are two broad problems that linguistic approaches have failed to adequate
address, with the result that we still lack a coherent theoretical framework of our own. One has to
do with matters of definition and classification; the other involves questions of the processes and
principles underlying contact-induced change. Obviously, there is much more to the problem than
just these questions, for instance, the role of sociolinguistic factors in shaping the outcomes of
contact. But I confine my attention here just to issues concerning definition, classification and
process, all of which are in fact closely related. In this connection, I argue that the linguistic model
of contact-induced change proposed by Van Coetsem (1988, 2000) offers the best approach to
understanding such issues. I also focus particularly on recent research that suggests how
psycholinguistic models of language production can shed light on processes of contact-induced
change, and perhaps contribute toward the integrated theory we seek.
2.1 Definition and classification
At this point, we are still far from consensus on even the definition of a contact language, and what
criteria we should use for their classification. As Markey (1982: 170) notes: “All languages are
contact languages. For purposes of contact-linguistic classification, we need another notion than
‘mixing’ or ‘intertwining’”. No contact linguist would disagree with Markey’s observation. Usually,
however, we focus our attention on a subset of the outcomes of language contact, paying particular
attention to salient cases such as bilingual mixed languages, pidgins, and creoles. I follow the latter
tradition here, but this does not deny the fact that the processes of change found in these
“prototypical” cases are simply extreme manifestations of what is found in every case of language
contact. The framework I discuss later, that of Van Coetsem (1988, 2000) is in fact sufficiently
broad to account for most of the phenomena associated with cross-linguistic influence, but I apply it
here only to the more limited set of “contact languages.”
For the most part, we still define the class of contact languages in terms of what we know of
their history, rather than in terms of the structural or typological features that they all share, or the
linguistic processes that brought them into existence. There is continuing disagreement over the
classification of contact phenomena, inconsistency and variance in the terminology used to describe
them, and lack of consensus concerning the linguistic processes involved in their creation. Whether
one examines code-switching, bilingual mixed languages, pidgins or creoles, one confronts a
variety of competing definitions and classifications. For instance, there is still no agreement on what
constitutes code-switching as opposed to borrowing, as opposed to code-alternation, etc. This led
Clyne (2003:72) to conclude that “the term ‘code-switching’ has now become so polysemous and
unclear that it is necessary to find more precise terms to map out the boundaries and interfaces.”
Similarly, debate continues as to what constitutes bilingual mixed languages, or as they have
alternatively been called, ‘intertwined’ or ‘split’ languages. Here, as in other cases of contact, the
tendency has been to identify a prototype, and then try to classify similar outcomes in terms of how
well they match that prototype. Traditionally, the bilingual mixed language (BML) prototype is
roughly described as combining the grammar of one language with the lexicon of another, as
exemplified by Media Lengua. But, as Matras (2003: 152-167) demonstrates, many languages
assigned to this category do not adhere to the prototype, a fact that is due to various factors,
including the nature and degree of bilingualism among the creators of such languages, the functions
and scope of use of the language, the social processes that lead to their formation, and the
typological distance between the contributing languages.
Fine-grained classifications of contact languages, whether based on linguistic (structural) or
sociolinguistic grounds, are of course useful, but they are not an end in themselves. What we need
to ask is how the particular configuration of linguistic inputs and social contexts produced the
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particular outcome it did. Hence, as Clyne (2003: 7) has rightly argued, ‘taxonomies and
components of models need to be kept open-minded, as combinations of factors can change the
influence of any individual factor.”
Recognition of this fact has led to drastic revision of definitions and taxonomies in the field of
pidgin and creole linguistics. Scholars now acknowledge that both of these labels have been applied
too loosely to a broad variety of contact languages. In the case of pidgins, a clear distinction can be
made between highly reduced and marginal languages such as Russenorsk, Delaware Pidgin,
Eskimo Pidgin and others, and so-called ‘extended pidgins’ such as Tok Pisin and Bislama, which
are as structurally complex as creoles or any other language. Creoles, for their part, are now
recognized as constituting a diverse assortment of contact varieties, ranging from languages like
Bajan, which preserves many features of the SW English dialects on which it is based, and at the
other extreme, the Surinamese creoles, which preserve far more West African than English features.
It is now accepted that the common thread connecting these outcomes to each other, and indeed to
other contact languages such as Hiberno English and Singapore Colloquial English, is that they
were created via the process of natural second language acquisition. What distinguishes them, once
more, is the peculiar interplay of linguistic inputs and social factors that shaped their formation in
the first place. We could cite several other examples of similar weaknesses in traditional
classifications of contact languages. In general, it is clear that no single definition is adequate to
describe any category of contact languages, or their structural characteristics. We clearly need a
framework that would be flexible enough to recognize these facts. I discuss such a framework in the
next section.
2.2 Frameworks and processes of contact-induced change
Since the publication of Weinreich’s (1953) classic and pioneering work in the field, frameworks
for investigating contact-induced change have become increasingly sophisticated. Weinreich’s
distinction between borrowing and interference as the two basic types of cross-linguistic influence
was further expanded and refined by Thomason & Kaufman (1988), with reference to a wide
variety of contact situations. More recently, other scholars have found weaknesses in these classic
frameworks and attempted to further refine the distinction between the two basic mechanisms of
contact-induced change. The fact is that the traditional frameworks did not make explicit enough the
distinction between the two mechanisms. Moreover, the terminology they used to describe the types
of change was variable and inconsistent. For instance, different scholars have used terms like
‘interference’ and ‘transfer’ to refer to any type of cross-linguistic influence, including borrowing.
Other scholars restricted the former terms to the effects of an L1 or primary language on an L2 or
secondary language, especially in the context of second language acquisition. Andersen (1983: 7)
discusses the “long and confusing history” of these terms. Moreover, many of the terms used to
describe cross linguistic influence were used in various senses, to refer either to the outcomes of
contact, or to the putative linguistic processes of change involved. Such vagueness and
inconsistency has posed a serious problem for the classification and analysis of contact phenomena.
The most promising attempt to address these problems, in my view, is the framework formulated
by Van Coetsem (1988, 2000). With regard to classification of contact phenomena, Van Coetsem
(2000: 101-103) suggests that we use criteria such as:
a.
The types or patterns of transfer, eg. borrowing vs imposition (see below)
b.
Motivation of speaker for using the language (communication, self-identification, etc)
c.
Nativeness
d. Reduction.
I focus my attention here on the first of these criteria.
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Van Coetsem’s major contribution was to further refine the traditional distinction between
borrowing and ‘interference’ by defining these types of cross-linguistic influence more precisely,
and above all, by distinguishing the kinds of agentivity they involve. Van Coetsem’s framework
distinguishes between two types of cross-linguistic influence, or what he calls ‘transfer types”,
namely, borrowing and imposition.1 The latter is largely equivalent to terms like ‘interference via
shift’, ‘transfer’ ‘indirect diffusion’, and ‘substratum influence’ that appear in the literature.
Borrowing and imposition, in this framework, are not seen as ‘mechanisms’ or ‘processes’, but
rather as vehicles of contact-induced change. In both cases, there is a source language (SL) and a
recipient language (RL). These terms serve as alternatives to various other terms that have been
used in the literature, such as ‘donor language’, ‘substrate’, ‘replica language’ and the like.
The direction of transfer of linguistic features is always from the source language to the RL, and
the agent of transfer can be either the recipient language or the source language speaker. In the
former case, we have borrowing (RL agentivity), in the latter, imposition (SL agentivity). Also
highly relevant to the distinction between borrowing and imposition is the notion of language
dominance. As Van Coetsem (2000: 84) explains, difference in linguistic dominance is the main
criterion for distinguishing between recipient language and source language agentivity. In the
former case, the recipient language is the dominant language of the speaker, while in the latter case,
the source language is the dominant language. When we speak of dominance here, we are referring
to linguistic dominance, that is, the fact that the speaker is more proficient in one of the languages
in contact. This must be distinguished from social dominance, which refers to the political or social
status of one of the languages. The socially dominant language may or may not be the linguistically
dominant language of the speaker. Of course, dominance relationships may change over time, both
in the individual speaker. And such shifts in dominance may result in different outcomes, or lead to
attrition of the previously dominant language. These considerations require us to distinguish the
agents of change from the kinds of agentivity they employ in introducing changes to an RL. The
fact is that the same agent can employ either type of agentivity, and hence both transfer types, in the
same contact situation. This is particularly true of highly proficient bilinguals, though not restricted
to them alone.
Differences between recipient language and source language agentivity are also related to what
Van Coetsem (1988: 25) calls the ‘stability gradient’ of language. This refers to the fact that certain
components of a language, such as phonology, morphology and syntax, tend to be more stable and
hence resistant to change, while others, such as vocabulary, are less stable and thus more amenable
to change. This is partly why borrowing tends to be mostly lexical, and to have little if any effect on
the recipient language grammar. On the other hand, in imposition, where the source language
grammar is more stable and resistant to change, grammatical features can be transferred more
readily, leading to significant structural change in the speaker’s version of the RL. There may well
be differences in degree of stability within different aspects of the grammar, which may lead to
different potential for transfer. Thus certain function morphemes tend to be transferred more readily
than others, and word order, for instance, seems to be transferred more readily than, say, embedding
strategies.
2.3 Implications of van Coetsem’s framework
Van Coetsem argued that language contact studies should focus on the transmission mechanism,
which is an individual phenomenon, and not just on the diffusion of change, which is a social
phenomenon. The former has to do with the (psycho)linguistic processes of change that reside in
individual minds, while the latter has to do with processes of diffusion, leveling and focusing
1
Van Coetsem (2000: 66) acknowledges that the term “imposition” had previously been used in a similar
sense by scholars like Gass (1983: 70); Milroy (1983: 190) and Trudgill (1983: 205).
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(conventionalization) within speech communities, which are sociolinguistically motivated. I believe
this emphasis on the cognitive processes involved in the creation of contact languages is equally as
important as the traditional concern with socio-historical and sociolinguistic aspects of contact. It
allows for new links to be made between purely structural and sociolinguistic approaches to contact,
and psycholinguistic models of bilingual speech production.
Van Coetsem’s approach represented a shift in focus away from taxonomies based on
‘prototypical’ cases, to classifications based on the actual mechanisms involved in contact-induced
change, as well as the constraints on their operation. Moreover, Van Coetsem reaffirmed the
distinction between the results of such change, and the processes or ‘mechanisms’ underlying them.
This remedied a serious weakness in previous approaches, where terms like ‘borrowing’, ‘transfer’
and the like had long been used (and still are) to refer both to the outcomes of contact, and the
mechanisms that produce them. This problem was recognized quite early by Haugen, who noted
that “borrowing as defined here is strictly a process and not a state, yet most of the terms used in
discussing it are ordinarily descriptive of its results rather than of the process itself” (1950: 213).
The same problem existed in the case of “transfer.” Thus Hammarberg (1997: 162) comments on
the different ways in which the term has been used and interpreted by SLA researchers, that is:
(a) at the level of strategy, with regard to the learner’s plan of action to solve a particular
problem; (b) at the level of execution, with regard to the event or process of carrying out
the strategy; and (c) at the level of solution, with regard to the product (as manifested in
the learner’s L2 performance) of the applied strategy.
Recognition of the primacy of ‘process’ over ‘result’ leads in effect to more meaningful
classifications and analyses of the outcomes of contact-induced change.
2.4 Structural and psycholinguistic processes of language contact
No one would deny that one of the biggest problems facing Contact Linguistics today is how to
determine and analyze the processes or ‘mechanisms’ by which contact-induced change arises. With
regard to borrowing, Haugen introduced a distinction between ‘importation’ and ‘substitution’ – the
latter referring to the recipient language speakers’ tendency to “substitute some of the habits of their
own language for those in the source language” (1953:383). Van Coetsem, for his part, makes a
distinction between ‘imitation’ and ‘adaptation’, which for him come into play not just in
borrowing, but also in imposition. The difference is that, in borrowing, imitation occurs before
adaptation, while the reverse obtains in imposition. In borrowing, imitation yields an innovation in
the recipient language which is only an approximation to the source language item, which is then
adapted to conform to the rules of the RL, whose structure remains largely unaffected. In
imposition, on the other hand, adaptation of recipient language (L2) material to the source language
(L1) is the primary mechanism, and usually yields a marked change in the speaker’s version of the
RL. Terms like ‘imitation’ and ‘adaptation’ are, of course, only metaphors for the true (psycho)linguistic processes underlying contact-induced change, which remain problematic to observe and
analyze. But they point in the right direction, and they remind us that we must pay heed to both the
linguistic and psycholinguistic processes involved in contact-induced change.
Much of the recent literature has been concerned with the attempt to arrive at a more precise
characterization of these underlying mechanisms. On the one hand, linguists have been attempting
to formulate theoretical frameworks for describing the structural operations involved. On the other,
psycholinguists continue to focus on the language production process itself. Lately, there has been a
growing rapport between the two lines of approach, which bodes well for progress toward a more
integrated theory of Contact Linguistics.
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2.5 Linguistic approaches to contact phenomena
Within Linguistics, scholars have addressed various kinds of contact phenomena, including codeswitching, bilingual mixed languages, and processes of pidgin and creole formation. More recently,
traditionally distinct fields such as “natural” second language acquisition and the emergence of
‘indiginized’ varieties of an L2, have been seen as part of the broader area of contact linguistics.
Following van Coetsem’s framework, these phenomena can be divided into two broad categories:
those that arise via mechanisms of borrowing, and those that arise via imposition. I am not
claiming, of course, that these are the only mechanisms involved in contact-induced change.
Processes of simplification and internal developments, among others, also play a crucial role. But
here I confine my attention to borrowing and imposition, which I would argue constitute the only
ways in which languages directly influence each other. Lexical borrowing, “classic” code-switching
(CS), and some bilingual mixed languages fall into the first category. Cases of pidgin and creole
formation, as well as second language acquisition, fall into the second category. There is yet a third
category of contact phenomena that cannot be so neatly characterized, since they involve
simultaneous operation of the two transfer types. Some bilingual mixed languages, for example, as
well as many cases of structural convergence, clearly fall into this category. I discuss each category
in turn, and assess the attempts that have been made to characterize the linguistic processes
involved in each case.
2.6 Cases of recipient language (RL) agentivity
There has been a great deal of debate and uncertainty as to what constitutes borrowing, and what
kinds of phenomena may be borrowed. To a large extent, the confusion results from different
conceptions of borrowing that are not always clearly motivated. Given the sense in which I use
‘borrowing here, following Van Coetsem, it becomes a more straightforward task to distinguish the
manifestations of this transfer type from other contact phenomena. It seems clear that most cases of
lexical borrowing fall into this category, though it is also possible for vocabulary to be transferred
via imposition. Recall that the key criteria for borrowing include recipient language agentivity, and
preservation of the recipient language structure. The kinds of ‘classic’ code-switching that MyersScotton (1993) and others have described clearly conform to these criteria. Myers-Scotton (1993,
2002) proposed her Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model to account for such types of codeswitching, as illustrated in the following example of French/Arabic switching (Arabic in italics):
(1) j’ai vu un ancien tilmid djali
‘I saw an old student of mine.’ (Bentahila & Davies (1983: 319)
Myers-Scotton demonstrated that, in these types of bilingual speech, one language, the recipient
language in our terms, acts as the matrix language, that is, provides the morphosyntactic frame for
the bilingual utterance, and that the features transferred from the ‘embedded’ language, the source
language in our terms, included primarily content items, and more rarely, free function items such
as articles. This of course corresponds exactly to the workings of recipient language agentivity.
Clearly, the linguistically dominant language in these kinds of bilingual mixture is the matrix
language. Bentahila & Davies (1992) in fact argue this point with regard to the kinds of (classic)
code-switching produced by Arabic/Dutch bilinguals for whom Arabic is the dominant language.
The same can be argued with respect to bilingual mixed languages like Media Lengua, AngloRomani, Ma’a or Inner Mbugu, and others, as Winford (2005) has argued. Such languages conform
closely to the putative ‘prototype’ of a BML mentioned earlier, which involves “a split between the
source language of the ‘grammar’ and that of the lexicon, with variation within the class of function
words” (Matras 2003: 151). In Media Lengua, for example, Quechua supplies the vast majority of
the grammatical apparatus, while Spanish provides the (phonetic shapes of) lexical items, as well as
some function words such as prepositions, conjunctions and personal pronouns. Such cases of
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massive incorporation of source language lexical items into a maintained recipient language
structural frame represent extreme manifestations of borrowing transfer under recipient language
agentivity.
The principles and constraints proposed by the MLF model of classic code switching seem to go
a long way toward explaining these blends of recipient language grammar and source language
lexicon. The more important principles include the Matrix Language Principle (that only one
language supplies the morphosyntactic frame); the related Asymmetry Principle (that classic code
switching is characterized by an asymmetrical participation of the languages involved); and the
Morpheme Sorting Principle (that mostly content morphemes and a few ‘system’ morphemes can
be incorporated into the ML from the source language). Myers-Scotton would later refer to such
system morphemes as “early system morphemes”, including determiners, plurals and derivational
affixes, which pattern with content morphemes in conveying conceptual information. This would
explain, for example, the fact that Spanish-derived nouns in Media Lengua bring along with them
Spanish-derived definite and indefinite articles.
2.7 Cases involving complementarity of the transfer types
The MLF model was limited in so far as the constraints it proposed were somewhat post-hoc, and
not motivated by any particular theoretical framework. It was also limited in that it accounted only
for the kinds of classic codeswitching described above (including prototypical BMLs). The model
therefore could not be applied to many other kinds of bilingual speech that did not conform to its
constraints. Salient cases of such contact phenomena are cases of code-switching in which the ML
contains a blend of structural apparatus from both languages as well as certain BMLs that draw on
grammatical elements or structures from both languages to make up their grammar. Among the
latter are languages like Mednyj (Copper Island) Aleut, Michif, etc. As Matras (2003: 152) points
out, in Michif the division is not between grammar and lexicon, but roughly between (Frenchderived) Noun Phrase and (Cree-derived) Verb Phrase. On the other hand, Mednyj Aleut employs
finite verb inflection and various grammatical features from Russian, with nominal and nominalized
bound morphology and other grammatical features from Aleut. Cases like these defy traditional
constraints on what structural or functional features can be incorporated into the morpho-syntactic
frame of the mixed language. But that does not mean they refute the basic distinction between
recipient language and source language agentivity that lies at the heart of the distinction between
borrowing and imposition. In fact, they represent cases where the two transfer types act in concert
to produce a new synthesis of structural and lexical elements. Van Coetsem (2000: 36) notes that
situations like these involve complementary co-agentivity, that is co-occurrence of both recipient
language and source language agentivity. In such cases, speakers with high degrees of proficiency
in both languages can choose to manipulate their resources in ways not possible for other kinds of
bilingual speech. Van Coetsem (2000: 84) refers to the transfer type in such situations as
“neutralization’, suggesting that constraints on transfer are neutralized.2 But it is noteworthy that,
even in these extreme cases, speakers still rely on one of the languages for the core of the grammar.
Matras (2003: 155) refers to this language as the INFL-language, that is, the language in which the
predication is anchored and processed. So, in a sense, these contact languages do conform to the
idea that one of the contributing languages is more dominant in the production of the bilingual
mixture. This does not necessarily mean, however, that we can characterize the incorporation of
structural elements from the less dominant language as an instance of borrowing transfer in the
strict sense. When bilinguals implement both recipient language and source language agentivity in
2
Note that this idea of the neutralization of constraints is consistent with the widespread view that the
creation of BMLs is in many respects a conscious and deliberate strategy (Matras & Bakker 2003: 13).
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concert, it is practically impossible to distinguish the effects of borrowing from those of
imposition.3
There are many other contact languages that are characterized by significant mixture of
structural elements from the contributing languages, which are not traditionally included within the
class of BMLs. They include Ngandi, an Aboriginal language of Northern Australia, which has
incorporated structural elements from Ritharngu (Heath 1981), Asia Minor Greek, whose grammar
was heavily influenced by that of Turkish, and several descendants of Oceanic languages in Papua
New Guinea, whose structure changed drastically under the influence of the indigenous languages
that were originally spoken there (Thurston 1987, 1994). I think there is good reason for
distinguishing languages of this type from BMLs proper, since they, unlike the latter, tend to arise
in cases of asymmetrical bilingualism. This means that many of the features adopted by the
recipient language (Greek, Ngandi, etc) from the source language (Turkish, Ritharngu, etc.) are
primarily due to the effects of imposition (Winford 2005).
2.8 Agentivity and dominance-relations in the creation of BMLs
Myers-Scotton’s (2003) classification of BMLs (her ‘split languages’) in fact says little about types
of process and agentivity. She identifies three types of BML, one of which, Type C, need not
concern us here, since Myers-Scotton (2003: 92) herself acknowledges that it is least clearly
defined. In Type A, she claims, “the actual surface-level late system morphemes come from the less
dominant language in one or more constituent types, and function as they would in that language”
(2003: 92). She cites Ma’a – a language in which practically all the morphosyntactic frame is Bantu,
as one example of this type. This is curious, since it implies that Bantu was the ‘less dominant’
language in this case of contact – a claim that is not true either in the social or linguistic sense. It is
clear that it was Bantu-dominant bilinguals who created Ma’a, inserting Cushitic content
morphemes and some functional elements into a Bantu morphosyntactic frame, in ways similar to
the creation of Media Lengua. In other words, Ma’a is a clear case of recipient language agentivity.
Myers-Scotton also includes Mednyj Aleut in her Type A, claiming that the dominant language
in this case was Aleut. But the dominance relations between Aleut and Russian appear to be far
more complex than she suggests. On the one hand, Aleut supplies most of the lexicon, a variety of
function words (object personal pronouns, indefinite pronouns, copula, etc.), noun inflection, NP
word order, some subordination patterns and some aspects of verb morphology, among other things
(Golovko 1994). But on the other hand, Russian supplies most of the syntactic structure, including
word order, most clause combining elements (co-ordinators, subordinators, etc.), negation, and
TMA marking (Golovko 1996: 73). This led Matras (2003: 165) to conclude that Russian was the
“INFL language” in this case, that is, the base into which lexifier language [Aleut –DW] material is
incorporated. Still, the pervasiveness of Aleut structural elements in Mednyj Aleut makes if difficult
to claim that this was simply a case of recipient language agentivity. Rather, the evidence suggests
that this was a case in which recipient language and source language agentivity operated in concert,
with Russian playing the primary role in the language production process, particularly at the level of
the Formulator.
Myers-Scotton’s second category of BMLs, Type B, includes cases in which “the less dominant”
language supplies abstract grammatical structure underlying surface-level late system morphemes in
one or more constituent types of the dominant language (2003: 92). According to her, languages of
3
Van Coetsem (2000: 91-97) cites Media Lengua, along with Michif and Mednyj Aleut as results of
“neutralization”. But the greater incorporation of structural features in the two latter languages seems to
distinguish them clearly from cases like Media Lengua and Ma’a, where it is mostly lexicon that is
incorporated into the dominant language. See Van Coetsem (2000: 251-261) for further discussion of his
view of these BMLs.
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this type contain no surface-level late system morphemes from the more dominant language. One
example she cites is Ganjou Chinese – the variety of Chinese spoken by speakers of Mongolian and
other languages in Qinghai Province. Such languages, particularly Minhe Munguor, have had a
profound influence on the syntax, morphology and phonology of Ganjou Chinese. In this case,
Myers-Scotton claims, Chinese is the dominant language, while Munguor is the “outside” language
(2003: 95). But once more, in failing to make a distinction between social and linguistic dominance,
Myers-Scotton seems to misrepresent the nature of the creation of Ganjou Chinese. Since this is a
situation involving language shift from Mongolian (and other languages) to Chinese, it seems quite
probable that the speakers who created Ganjou Chinese were linguistically dominant in Mongolian,
etc., and that imposition played a significant role in creating their L2 version of Chinese. This
would explain the use of Mongolian morpho-syntactic patterns in Ganjou Chinese – a typical
product of imposition under source language agentivity in cases of natural second language
acquisition. I will argue later that the same type of agentivity is involved in the creation of contact
languages such as creoles and ‘indigenized’ varieties of European languages.
In sum, then, while Myers-Scotton’s language production-based model is a promising attempt to
characterize BMLs, her actual classification and her account of their creation are misleading, since
they are based on misunderstanding of (a) the nature of the dominance relationships among the
input languages, and (b) the kinds of agentivity involved in the creation process. If we take criteria
such as these as our starting point, we could argue that there are indeed three types of BMLs, as
follows:
Type A: Most content morphemes and some function items are incorporated from a
source language into a recipient language under recipient language agentivity. In
such cases, the recipient language is activated as the linguistically dominant language
in the production process, and supplies practically all of the morpho-syntactic frame.
Languages like Media Lengua and Ma’a fall into this category.
Type B: Most content morphemes come from one of the languages, but there is a
more intricate mixing of structural features from both languages. However, the
outcome still preserves, essentially, the core morphosyntax (INFL-structure) of one
language, which presumably is activated as the more dominant language in the
production process. While this is similar in some respects to cases of recipient
language agentivity, it would appear that source language agentivity also played a
significant role. Languages like Michif and Mednyj Aleut fall into this category.
Type C: Outcomes in which speakers of an ancestral language have shifted or are
shifting to a socially dominant language. In such cases, the ancestral language is the
linguistically dominant language, and this leads to imposition from this language on
the other. These cases involve primarily source language agentivity. Languages like
Ganjou Chinese fall into this category.
2.9 Convergence and imposition.
Myers-Scotton and others characterize the kinds of mixture found in bilingual mixed languages
(BMLs) as cases of “convergence” and argues that her approach can explain not only these cases,
but also other contact languages as well. Myers-Scotton (2003: 86) claims that convergence is the
process or mechanism underlying not only ‘split’ (bilingual mixed) languages, but also the
outcomes of attrition, language shift, and creole formation.
But there is a caveat concerning the kinds of convergence that can take place, and the nature of
the processes and types of agentivity that lead to them. It seems clear that “convergence” can come
about in different ways, hence it is potentially misleading to think of it as a unified process common
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Donald Winford
to a broad range of contact phenomena. In fact, “convergence” is one of those terms that are so
poorly defined and “polysemous”, that its usefulness in describing contact phenomena has been
seriously compromised. It seems safer to think of convergence as simply a cover term for various
ways in which languages become more similar to each other. For Myers-Scotton (2003: 85),
convergence is both a result and a process. As a result, it refers to “a linguistic configuration with
all surface morphemes from one language, but with only part of its abstract lexical structure from
that language, and the rest from another” (2003: 85). As a process, she describes it as “largely a
one-way phenomenon … [that] involves the grammar and lexicon of a source language, generally
one that has more socioeconomic prestige, impinging on another language” (2002: 172). This in
fact is reminiscent of imposition, with certain differences. On the one hand, it is true that imposition
is largely a one-way process that involves transfer of structural and other features from a source
language to an RL. But it is not always or even typically the case that the source language is the
socially dominant or more prestigious language.4 In some situations, the two do coincide. But in
others, the linguistically dominant language is the socially subordinate language – a scenario that is
true of most cases of natural second language acquisition, including creole formation. In still other
situations, changing dominance relationships at the level of individual language proficiency lead to
growing imposition from a language being shifted to, on the language that was once linguistically
dominant (the ancestral language). This appears to apply to cases such as Turkish-influenced Greek
in Asia Minor (Dawkins 1916, Janse 2005), English-influenced Spanish in Los Angeles (SilvaCorvalán 1994, 1998) and English-influenced French in Prince Edward Island, Canada (King 2000).
(See Winford 2005 for further discussion.)
Despite differences in the contact situations, all of these involve imposition under source
language agentivity. We therefore have to distinguish the kinds of convergence that take place in
different contact languages by examining more closely the underlying processes.
3. Combining linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to language contact
So far, there have been few attempts to develop a theoretical model that would account for all the
kinds of structural convergence that we have discussed so far. One promising attempt is that of
Myers-Scotton & Blake (2000a, 2000b, 2001). Acknowledging that the original MLF model of
code-switching could not account for cases involving structural convergence, they proposed two
additional models, the 4M model and the Abstract Level Model, to explain such cases. These
models recognize a significant difference between ‘classic’ CS, and ‘composite’ CS, which MyersScotton (2002: 105) described as a phenomenon with morphemes from two languages within a
bilingual CP, and with the abstract morphosyntactic frame derived from more than one language.
The 4-M model refined the earlier distinction between content and system morphemes by proposing
that there were three types of system morphemes, divided into two categories, ‘early’ and ‘late’
system morphemes. Among the former are items like articles, possessive adjectives, plural number
and others, while the latter consist of elements that combine content morphemes with one another
into larger constituents or syntactic structures. They include “bridge’ morphemes such as possessive
–s and of, which expand their heads into phrasal constituents such as NPs, PPs, etc, and ‘outsider’
morphemes, which create structures such as IPs and full CPs, and express grammatical relations
such as agreement, case, and so on. Cases of structural convergence such as BMLs are viewed as
products of the mixture of some elements of abstract grammatical structure from one language with
those of the other, to create a composite matrix language frame. Such abstract structure is
expressed, in part, by late system morphemes.
4
Myers-Scotton (2003: 75) states more explicitly that “in convergence, the more sociolinguistically dominant
language contributes structure to another language.”
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The crucial innovation in the 4-M model is that it is based on psycholinguistic models of
language production such as those of Levelt (1989) and others who distinguish three stages of the
language production process, as follows (See Levelt (1989: 9) for a more detailed representation.)
The Conceptual level: The messages the speaker intends to convey.
(the Conceptualizer)
The Functional level
Lemmas (abstract entries in a speaker’s mental lexicon) are
(the Formulator):
accessed. Lemmas activate morpho-syntactic procedures (e.g.
argument structure and morphological realization patterns)
The Positional level:
Phonological representations and surface structure are realized.
The hypothesis concerning bilingual language mixture which underlies the 4-M model is
expressed by Myers-Scotton (2002: 17) as follows:
The different types of morpheme under the 4-M model are differently accessed in the abstract
levels of the production process. Specifically, content morphemes and early system morphemes
are accessed at the level of the mental lexicon, but late system morphemes do not become
salient until the level of the Formulator.
The 4-M model provides a useful way of distinguishing, and to some extent, explaining the
various types of bilingual mixture that we have discussed so far. In the first place, it provides some
rationale for the kinds of mixture and particularly for the incorporation of both content and early
system morphemes in both ‘classic’ codeswitching and in prototypical BMLs. In the second place,
the model suggests a way to account for the more pervasive mixture of grammatical elements (late
system morphemes) from both input languages, which we find in non-prototypical BMLs such as
Michif, Mednyj Aleut and others. But to understand this further, we need to understand certain
other aspects of the language production process.
In this connection, Myers-Scotton & Jake (2000) proposed their Abstract Level Model, which
suggests further ways of accounting for different types of structural convergence from the
perspective of language production models. The model focuses on the way in which lemmas are
accessed and activate morpho-syntactic procedures at the functional level of the Formulator.
Lemmas are that part of a lexical entry (the other being its phonological shape or lexeme) which
contains information about the semantic, morphological, syntactic and other properties of the lexical
item. In monolingual language production, accessing a lemma activates the (morpho-) syntactic
procedures associated with the lexical item in question. In bilingual language production,
differences may arise in the way (different aspects of) lemmas are accessed and associated with
source language and recipient language lexemes, creating new combinations of elements of one
language with those of another. The Abstract Level Model is based on the premise that all lemmas
in the mental lexicon include three levels of abstract lexical structure, namely:
-
Lexical conceptual structure (semantics and pragmatics)
-
Predicate-argument structure (how thematic roles are realized in phrase
structure)
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Donald Winford
34
-
Morphological realization patterns (surface morphological elements and their
order
Myers-Scotton (2002: 99) suggests that, in certain kinds of bilingual speech, the 3 levels of a
lemma in one language can be split and recombined with levels in the lemma of another language,
leading to creation of a new morphosyntactic frame (or composite ML) of the sort we find in nonprototypical BMLs. Whereas the 4-M model seems more concerned with the transfer of actual
structural elements in composite CS, the Abstract Level Model addresses bilingual speech
phenomena such as the mixing of structural patterns, or the expression of abstract structural features
from one language by means of surface forms from another.
Though the Abstract Level Model has been applied primarily to cases of composite code
switching of the kind found in certain bilingual mixed languages, it has the potential to shed light on
other contact phenomena. One weakness of the model, as pointed out earlier, is its failure to
differentiate the two primary transfer types, borrowing and imposition, and their associated types of
agentivity. Perhaps because of this, it has paid little attention to contact phenomena that involve
imposition, that is, source language agentivity. Among these are the kinds of contact-induced
change associated with creole formation, and the emergence of ‘indigenized’ varieties of European
and other languages. The types of convergence that gave rise to these outcomes are quite different
from those involved in the creation of bilingual mixed languages. The former involve transfer of
abstract structural patterns, while the latter involve transfer of mostly surface system morphemes
and the like. Hence different psycholinguistic mechanisms appear to operate in each case. Let us
now examine the role of such mechanisms in creole formation.
4. Creole formation and imposition.
Creolists too have struggled to agree on a framework within which creole formation can be
explained. Researchers have attempted to explain this phenomenon by appealing to various notions
such as “transfer”, “relexification”, “substratum influence”, and “convergence.” I will argue that all
of these labels refer to the same underlying process, imposition under source language agentivity.
Research on “transfer” in cases of tutored second language acquisition is broad in scope, and
well documented (see, e.g. Ellis 1994). Hence I will pay little attention to it here, focusing instead
on how the notion has been extended to cases of “natural” SLA. Such cases include indigenized
varieties of English and other languages, such as Hiberno-English, Singapore Colloquial English,
etc. It is now also generally recognized that creoles were the result of processes of natural SLA,
albeit in unusual social circumstances. There is a rich literature documenting the ways in which the
creators of creoles, both in the Pacific and Atlantic areas, transferred structural and lexical patterns
from their native languages to the new contact languages they were creating. For instance, Siegel
(1999), Keesing (1988), and others have demonstrated the strong influence of Oceanic languages on
the grammar of Melanesian Pidgin varieties. Siegel (2000) has further shown that immigrant
languages such as Chinese and Portuguese exerted significant influence on the grammar of Hawai’i
Creole English. Similar evidence has been presented for the pervasive influence of West African
languages, particularly those of the Gbe family, on the structure of the Surinamese creoles (Bruyn
1994, Essegby 2005, Migge 1998, 2003), and on the structure of Haitian Creole (Lefebvre 1998). In
terms of van Coetsem’s model, all of these contact languages resulted mostly from imposition under
source language agentivity. Other contact languages whose creation seems to have involved
massive imposition include Sri Lanka Portuguese and Sri Lanka Malay (Smith 1979a, b); the
Austronesian-based contact languages of NW New Britain in Papua New Guinea (Thurston 1987);
Asia Minor Greek (Winford 2005: 402-409); and others.
The structural features of these contact languages and their sources in the various substrate
languages have been described in some detail. But the “transfer” model has simply documented
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35
these correspondences without attempting to explain the psycholinguistic processes involved in
these types of language creation.5 The models that come closest to such an attempt are the Abstract
Level Model of Myers-Scotton and the “relexification” model of Lefebvre and Lumsden (1994). I
would argue that these two models are quite compatible with each other. Lefebvre & Lumsden
(1994), Lefebvre (1998), and others have argued that the process central to creole formation is
“relexification”, which they describe as a process in which the creators of a creole retain their L1
lexical entries more or less intact, while replacing their phonetic shapes with those of superstrate
lexical entries. This is based on Muysken’s (1981: 61) characterization of relexification as “the
process of vocabulary substitution in which the only information adopted from the TL in the lexical
entry is the phonological representation.” Muysken argued that BMLs like Media Lengua arose in
this way. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that the type of “relexification” described
by Muysken is different in kind and motivation from the type that Lefebvre describes for creole
formation.6 In Media Lengua, for example, all of the information in the Quechua lexical entry,
including morphology, morphosyntactic properties and (for verbs) subcategorization, are retained
intact. Only the lexeme associated with that lexical entry changes. Winford (2006) characterizes this
process as “relexemization” (compare Lefebvre’s “relabeling”). This process is clearly an instance
of borrowing under recipient language agentivity, in which the incorporated lexeme is fully adapted
to the morphology and morpho-syntax of the linguistically dominant language, in this case
Quechua. By contrast, in creole formation, the morphology and certain morpho-syntactic properties
of the substrate lexical entry are not transferred to the new creole lexical entry. Only some abstract
semantic and morpho-syntactic features are retained. The result is that the lemma associated with
the creole lexical entry is not a total replica of that associated with the substrate lexical entry. The
explanation for this is that the reconstitution of lexical entries in creole formation is a case of
imposition under source language agentivity. In this, it matches other cases of transfer in SLA, in
which only some aspects of L1 structure are incorporated into the emerging interlanguage.
The kind of “relexification” or lexical manipulation found in creole formation seems amenable
to treatment in terms of Myers-Scotton’s Abstract Level Model, since it involves the splitting and
recombination of the different levels of abstract lexical structure associated with the respective
lexical entries of the input languages. Here, as in some cases of SLA, the lexical entries of the
contact variety are shaped primarily in terms of the lexical information supplied by the substrate(s),
as the linguistically dominant language(s). This is in keeping with Myers-Scotton’s view that
persons creating a creole could easily access superstrate content morphemes, particularly when they
matched the semantics of their L1 lexical items. But they could not access the grammatical frame of
the superstrate, hence they “had to fall back on their L1s for the morpho-syntactic frame” (2002:
278).
Obviously, much more work has to be done if we are to fully understand the mechanisms of
restructuring due to imposition. But it seems clear that we can learn much from current research on
SLA that also appeals to psycholinguistic models of language production. A noteworthy example of
this is the work of Pienemann (1999), which illustrates how the nature of the language production
5
6
The transfer model does attempt to identify certain principles or constraints that regulate the kinds of
transfer that can take place. These include “availability” constraints (which determine what substrate
features become available for transfer), and “reinforcement principles”, including frequency, which operate
to determine “which of the transferred features will actually be retained in the creole” (2000: 83). I would
argue that such principles are post-hoc in nature, based on the empirical observation of correspondences
between creole and substrate structure. Hence they do not explain the psycholinguistic processes that
underlie transfer in the first place.
Van Coetsem (2000: 178) himself fails to recognize the distinction between these two types of lexical
manipulation. He refers to relexification as ‘rapid replacement of vocabulary’, and cites examples such as
creole formation and BMLs like Media Lengua as instances of such “relexification”.
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Donald Winford
and grammatical processing of language learners differs fundamentally from that of fully proficient
speakers. It is well known that, in the earlier stages of SLA, learners acquire L2 lexical items
without acquiring all of the morphological and syntactic properties associated with them. Hence, at
this stage, the learner cannot appeal to knowledge of the lemmas associated with the L2 lexical
items in trying to produce syntactic structures in the L2 (Pienemann 1999: 76). Much of the
language learning process consists in trying to build and reconstitute L2 lemmas based on the
available input. When that input is rich and readily accessible, the learner can progress more rapidly
toward that goal, eventually re-creating L2 lemmas with high degrees of accuracy. When the input
is poor and less accessible, as in most cases of creole formation, learners rely more on their L1
knowledge to aid in the reconstruction of lexical entries. In other words, the stage is ripe for
processes of imposition. Appealing to language production models can potentially provide insight
into the workings of this mechanism, by elucidating the ways in which learners reconstitute the
lemmas associated with L2 items.
5. Conclusion
This paper had three main goals. First, I have tried to show how clarification of the terminology and
classifications we apply to contact languages can lead to better understanding of the types of contact
languages, and the kinds of process that produce them. Secondly, I have argued that van Coetsem’s
framework offers a sound basis on which to achieve a more uniform terminology and classification.
Third, I tried to show that this model clarifies the distinction between the two major mechanisms by
which languages directly influence each other, borrowing via recipient language agentivity, and
imposition via source language agentivity. Failure to distinguish these two mechanisms accurately
has negative implications for our understanding of the processes by which various contact
languages are created. Moreover, Van Coetsem’s distinction between borrowing and imposition in
terms of types of agentivity is consistent with what we know about language production in
bilinguals. In other words, the differences in transfer type identified by Van Coetsem correspond to
differences in the language production processes underlying the two broad categories of contactinduced change. In the case of recipient language agentivity, one language is activated as the
dominant one, thus providing the morphosyntactic frame for the bilingual mixture. This happens in
classic code-switching, and in the formation of bilingual mixed languages such as Media Lengua. In
the case of source language agentivity, when knowledge of the recipient language is limited, the
bilingual appeals to knowledge of his dominant language and activates its morpho-syntactic
procedures, that is, argument structure and morphological realization patterns, to help create the
grammatical frame of the contact variety. This happens in natural second language learning,
including the creation of “indigenized” varieties such as Singapore Colloquial English, and creoles.
In still other cases of bilingual production, fluent bilinguals can activate the procedures associated
with each language at will, giving rise to the kinds of mixture found in bilingual mixed languages
like Michif and Mednyj Aleut. In short, integrating linguistic analyses of contact phenomena with
psycholinguistic models of language production promises to shed further light on the processes that
underlie contact-induced change, and how they lead to various outcomes. Such integration will go a
long way toward achieving the kind of theoretical model that Van Coetsem saw as lacking in the
field of Contact Linguistics.
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37
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