Academic Paper |
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| Title: | Mechanisms of change in areal diffusion: new morphology and language contact |
| Author: | Chia-jung Pan |
| Email: | click here to access email |
| Homepage: | https://plone.jcu.edu.au/researchatjcu/research/lcrc |
| Institution: | James Cook University |
| Linguistic Field: | Morphology; Sociolinguistics; General Linguistics; Computational Linguistics |
| Abstract: | Borrowing, or diffusion, of grammatical categories in language contact is not a unitary process. In the linguistic area of the Vaups in northwest Amazonia, several different mechanisms help create new contact-induced morphology. Languages which are in continuous contact belong to the genetically unrelated East-Tucanoan and Arawak families. There is a strong cultural inhibition against borrowing forms of any sort (grammatical or lexical). Language contact in the multilingual Vaups linguistic area has resulted in the development of similar - though far from identical - grammatical structures. In Tariana, an Arawak language spoken in the area, reanalysis and reinterpretation of existing categories takes place when diffusion involves restructuring a pre-existing category for which there is a slot in the structure, such as case. A new grammatical category with no pre-existing slots may evolve via grammaticalization of a free morpheme - this is how aspect and aktionsart marking was developed. The development of a five-term tense-evidentiality paradigm involves a combination of strategies: reanalysis with reinterpretation accounts for the obligatory tense marking, and the history of visual, inferred and reported evidentials. The nonvisual evidential evolved via grammaticalization of a lexical verb while the most recent, assumed, evidential involves reanalysis and reinterpretation of an aspect marker and grammatical accommodation. |
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This article appears in Journal of Linguistics Vol. 39, Issue 1, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST . |
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