The Syntax of ‘Contact’

Course Description

“Languages have been in contact certainly for thousands of years [and] there is no evidence that any languages have developed in total isolation from other languages” (Thomason 2001: 6, 8). Given this premise about the evolution of language, it is very surprising that ‘language contact’ is still treated in modern linguistics as resulting from exceptional communicative practices in which speaker/signer-learners (SLs) of different communities and languages interact often enough to be affected by each other’s languages. Taken this way (i.e., the population perspective), the phenomenon seems to be sociolinguistic in nature, and is commonly ignored in formal syntactic or semantic theories, as well as in computational models of language.

This course takes a radically different perspective, one in which daily communicative practices between SLs of different dialects, registers, languages, feed into their individual mental grammars. In this framework, a universal aspect of the human mind is multilingualism. Accordingly, ‘contact’ is ubiquitous in human communication, and provides the appropriate context for the acquisition of grammars. These grammars are inherently hybrid constructs resulting from heterogenous inputs. This view requires a rethinking of the featural and structural make-up of syntactic categories, and how linguistic features recombine to form new categories.

In the first half of the course, we will revisit some syntactic theories of ‘contact’ based on mixed languages, creoles, second language acquisition, and heritage language. In the second half, we will focus on universal multilingualism as discussed in Aboh (2020) and reflect on specific cases of syntactic hybridization. The course ends with a discussion on invariant and variable properties of language, and what this entails for the so-called process of grammaticalization.

Area Tags: Syntax, Language Contact, Creoles, Typology, Variation

Instructor: Enoch Oladé Aboh (Sapir Professor)