Transfer: bio

[Anders Hougaard]

Dear all,
 
Here's a summary of the responses I got to my
inquiry on this mailing list regarding functional work on transfer:
 
1) Heine & Kuveta. "Language Contact and Grammatical Change" (Cambridge University Press,
2005). [thanks to Bernd Heine]

2) Relevant data should be found on works on 2nd-L pidgin. (Derek Bickerton
& I published one such thing long ago in CLS 1976, parasession on
diachronic syntax). But that's, in my opinion, the best way of looking
at it. In my SYNTAX (2001, Amsterdam, J. Benjamins) in the chapter on
word-order & morphotactic typology (in vol. I) there are many examples
that boil down to this.  [thanks to Tom Givon]

3) I have worked on this issue -- but have argued that it really isn't the
syntax that transfers but the discourse 'meaning' of the L1 form,
attaching to an 'analogous' but purely native L2 form (native to L2,
that is), often leading to real or apparent *internal* syntactic change
in L2. The following paper is downloadable from my website
(http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~ellen):

The borrowing of meaning as a cause of internal syntactic change. In
Schmid, M., Austin, J.R., and Stein, D., eds. Historical linguistics
1997. Current issues in linguistic theory. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John
Benjamins. Pp. 339-62. 1998. [thanks to Ellen Prince]

4) In the pidgin and creole literature, there's a lot on
transfer of features in shift or the adoption of features
in borrowing. It is compatible with functionalist
approaches to language. I would suggest you look at:

Thomason and Kaufman, 1988, chapters on shift, on
creolization
Roger Andersen (ed.), 1983, Acquisition as creolization
Salikoko Mufwene, 2001, Ecology of language evolution (ch.
6) William Croft, 2000, Explaining language change
[thanks to Clancy Clements]
 
 
Cheers,
Anders R. Hougaard
Assistant professor, PhD
Institute of Language and Communication
University of Southern Denmark, Odense
hougaard at language.sdu.dk
Phone: +45 65503154
Fax: + 45 65932483