27.2332, Review: Historical Ling; Socioling; Typology: Velupillai (2015)

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Subject: 27.2332, Review: Historical Ling; Socioling; Typology: Velupillai (2015)

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Date: Tue, 24 May 2016 11:30:47
From: David Robertson [ddr11 at columbia.edu]
Subject: Pidgins, Creoles and Mixed Languages

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-2390.html

AUTHOR: Viveka  Velupillai
TITLE: Pidgins, Creoles and Mixed Languages
SUBTITLE: An Introduction
SERIES TITLE: Creole Language Library 48
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: David Douglas Robertson,  

Reviews Editor: Robert Arthur Cote

SUMMARY

Among the more rapidly evolving subfields in linguistics wanting a
state-of-the-art summary is the study of contact languages. Building on newly
available descriptive surveys (Haspelmath et al. 2005 [''WALS''], Michaelis et
al. 2013 [''APiCS'']), Viveka Velupillai (hereafter ''VV'') has created such a
handbook in a bipartite format whose brevity (with chapters averaging around
15 pages) is accessible for those with basic linguistic knowledge, and whose
breadth (knowledgeably referencing hundreds of scholarly sources) makes it a
useful reference for advanced researchers. Its organization is referenced in
the following discussion.

EVALUATION

This book is valuable as a reference summarizing the state of linguistic
understanding about contact languages. It usefully outlines an introductory
course though its chapters' brevity necessitates clarifications and invites
instructor-led discussion. My discussion of Chapter 1 will illustrate several
points that this volume suggests that would reward some elaboration in the
classroom or in a second edition. For subsequent chapters, I will limit my
remarks.

Chapter 1 “Pidgins” illuminates individuals' subtle accommodation in
tourist-type contact between mutually intelligible languages as “dialect
levelling” (p.16), a concept, normally conceived at the abstract group level
and on historical timescales, which could be overtly contrasted with the more
urgent and thoroughgoing restructuring that marks pidginization. Section 1.1.1
contrasts contact outcomes: ad-hoc versus languages per se, varying by “Levels
of Stability”, though that metric isn't defined. (It seemingly conflates
structural complexity, temporal persistence, and “uniformity”, cf. p. 70.)
Unpacking this concept to demonstrate how it validates accepted
categories--jargon vs. pidgin vs. extended pidgin/pidgincreole--would help.
Perhaps the category “jargon” should be moved into the chapter's opening
remarks on nonce communication strategies, as “an individual solution...not
typically passed on to others” (p.19)—a jargon is not an identifiable entity,
a “language”. Thus the valuable Snapshot of understudied Sami-Swedish “trade
jargon” Borgarmålet (§1.4.1) might withstand relabeling; it meets VV's
pidginhood criteria, being structurally consistent (contra VV herself, p. 32)
except lexically. “Synonyms are generally not expected” in pidgins (p.31),
while here ''give'' has four synonyms—but this is the extent of variation in
the data, and other languages acknowledged as pidgins, such as Russenorsk
(§12.4.1), vary more in lexicon.

 Pages 17, 19, etc. continue the valid generalization that “a pidgin is
typically not the mother tongue of its speakers”, although “communitywide
mother tongue” would give optimal contrast within VV's contact-language
typology. Her apparent characterization of pidgins as the initial level of
“stabilization” from a jargon stage (§1.1.12) is hard to disprove, but we have
scant evidence for clearly structureless precursors to any pidgins. VV rightly
observes “most of those who use a pidgin will have some other primary language
that they...use...for more expressive functions, such as story telling or
poetry” (p. 20). However, because it is sociohistorical factors that best
define pidgins (cf. p.19 and Chapter 4), the counterexample bears noting: in
some pidgins, like Chinuk Wawa, songs are typical and frequent (Boas 1888,
also evidently Russenorsk, pp.417-418 of this volume). The typology of contact
outcomes could note that contact situations logically can, and sometimes do,
persist but with shift away from pidgin use: either back to an extant L1
(pidgin language death, a phenomenon warranting investigation) or to an L2
(language shift, cf. Thomason and Kaufman 1988:110-146). The impressionistic
categorization of pidgin types at §1.2 focuses on kinds of interactions
occurring at genesis, but it could be pointed out that categories like
“plantation” and “military” can apply to creoles too (viz. Berbice Dutch,
Kinubi), and “urban” probably to creoles and mixed languages. The chapters on
various contact-language types could further integrate if comparable metrics
were introduced early, for example the creole chapter's “endogenous-exogenous”
distinction (§2.2), and mixed languages' “in-group” orientation (Chapter 3)
which implicitly contrasts with the out-of-group orientation leading to
pidgin/creole genesis.

 With regard to pidgincreoles (§1.1.1.3), such a language is aptly
distinguished in sociological terms as a “main language for its community”,
typically “a mother tongue for some of its speakers” (pp. 20-21). The separate
formal claim—it will have “a larger set of structural norms” than a pidgin (p.
21)--suffers from another non-definition, that of linguistic complexity and
levels thereof; §1.3.1 contrasts pidgins and lexifiers pretty explicitly in
these terms, but without mentioning pidgincreoles. Adding to §1.3 some
discussion of the burgeoning topic of structural complexity/simplicity (e.g.
Miestamo et al. 2008) might help. Finally, the observation (p.21) that
pidgincreoles have “an—in principle—unlimited use” is trivial since it applies
to all languages.

Chapter 2, “Creoles”, presents these as community L1s emerging from intense
contact, often remaining stigmatized for generations and tending to result in
diglossia with a socially favored language. This compares implicitly with
pidgins' definitional trait (above) as L2s. VV's exogenous/endogenous creole
typology (§2.2) – contrasting languages newcomers create against those formed
by indigenous populations – highlights the wide range of contact contexts. The
tally (§2.3) of features generally assumed typical of creoles, e.g.
less-marked phonemes, CV syllables, simple/regular morphology etc., implicitly
invites discussion about how much these characteristics differ from those of
pidgins at §1.3. Such a classroom debate could proceed from the pithy
Snapshots (§2.4) of Negerhollands, Nengee, and Diu Indo-Portuguese.

Chapter 3, “Mixed Languages”, identifies this more recently established taxon
as resulting from communitywide bilingualism or, VV adds, multilingualism
(§3.1). She adduces no examples of the latter, which would be a compelling
case study of the complex dynamics in this category of contact outcome. Her
discussion of the “intertwined”-structure type (§3.1.1.1) stipulates exactly
two parent languages, so we cannot expect either the “G-L” [grammar from one
parent versus lexicon from the other] nor the “N-V” [nouns versus verbs]
subtypes to provide an example. Likewise, the other type, “converted”/“F-S”
[form versus structure] languages (§3.1.1.2), is illustrated only with
dual-source languages. Students new to contact linguistics ought to be aware,
too, that especially this chapter assumes “grammar” equates to morphology,
“syntax” evidently denoting some undefined abstract structure, yet in most
contact languages it is constituent-order SYNTAX that functions to distinguish
grammatical roles such as agent, patient, subject, focus, etc. Word order is
discussed in this book (later, at §13.2), but only as universal tendencies;
its outsized importance in contact linguistics goes unmentioned. The apt
sociolinguistic typology (§3.1.2) sees some mixed languages marking a new,
versus others expressing a retained, in-group identity; an instructor could
compellingly show that both express the trait of newly CONTRASTIVE identity.
This can be distinguished from genetically descended languages, which are
likewise in-group mediums but not necessarily in contrastive use with another
language; the generalization (p.78) that all but one known mixed language are
“symbiotic” (spoken alongside parent languages) reinforces this suggestion.
The examination (§3.2) of no less than six competing mixed-language formation
theories indicates the newness and vitality of this subfield, fuel for
in-class debates, which again can proceed from the Snapshots. I suspect
students will find this chapter particularly exciting, as it shows that new
languages continue being discovered.

 The sociologically-themed latter half of Part I commences with Chapter 4,
“Sociohistorical Contexts of Pidgins and Creoles”, pointing out (§4.1) that
most known contact languages directly or indirectly trace to European colonial
expansion: from exploration to trading, then homesteads and plantations with
slaves and indentured servants major players. This chapter distills
demography, social factors like prestige, and diffusion of contact mediums to
new locales into a few stimulating pages bound to open students' eyes to why
these languages abound. If anything, the theme of new languages transported to
and used in new situations could stand to be elaborated on; this phenomenon is
probably more frequent and important than the literature has noted. For
example, Chinuk Wawa owes much core structure to the preexisting pidgin
Nuuchahnulth, Métis French, and apparently pidgin Haida. The many theories on
pidgin formation processes (Chapter 5) and creoles (Chapter 6) receive fair
thumbnail representation. The strength of VV's discussion is in
comprehensively surveying the history of the field to date, noting each
theory's merits and weaknesses, while specifying that none suffices to account
for the known facts. This splendidly invites student debate over what type of
synthesis is called for. Had a parallel chapter on mixed-language genesis been
included it would surely be equally compelling, but students must rely on
pages 81-84 of Chapter 3 for an all too tantalizing start on such a
discussion.
 
Two strictly sociolinguistic chapters round out Part I. Chapter 7, “Variation
and change”, introduces us to various social roles a contact language can play
qua form of speech: it can vary internally (lects), or its vary against use of
a wholly different language (diglossia). The standard gradation into basilect,
mesolect, and acrolect is illustrated and examined in §7.1.1, where examples
from Jamaican Creole show the importance of accounting for community-internal
usage differences. The direct variation of overt prestige with (closeness to)
the lexifier is rightly stressed, and covert prestige of nonstandard varieties
is mentioned (pp. 214-215). Following directly upon VV's examination of
language-genesis processes, Chapter 7 may leave students wondering how lects,
too, form; viz. her remark “it does not seem implausible that a continuum of
''lects'' existed from the very beginning” in creoles (p. 223). Other
questions for a future edition is WHICH levels on a continuum a polylectal
speaker is likely to command (surely only adjacent ones?), and whether lects,
like languages, can be code-switched among. An excellent point embracing the
complexity of language use is VV's observation that diglossia and continua can
coexist, again surely material for illuminating class discussions.

In Chapter 8, “Language and Society” turns the focus to a number of compelling
social issues, although this chapter presents the least
contact-language-specific information of any in the book. When considering
official recognition, standardization, orthography choices, education,
planning and so forth, understandably VV says much about creoles and almost
nothing mixed or pidgin languages, as the former probably are in more common
use than the latter. But in the light of both observations just made,
instructors might be well advised to encourage students to extend Chapter 8's
concepts to other types of contact idioms. For example, as noted regarding
Chapter 1, there actually are pidgins for which cultural genres such as songs
are integral to their social context.

 Moving beyond situating contact languages within the several strands of
general linguistic analysis, Part II ''LINGUISTIC FEATURES'' sets itself the
big task of objectively testing many oft-repeated claims, central to the
practice of the subfield, about the typological distinctiveness of
contact-language structures. Based on WALS and APiCS statistics, the student
is invited to determine whether anything besides social factors characterizes
pidgins, mixed languages, and creoles as kinds (or even families) of
languages. As a specialist, I find VV's non-inclusion of Chinuk Wawa in the
category of extended pidgins (a.k.a. pidgincreoles) inexplicable, and I wonder
how many similar cases slipped through the cracks, but she declares she found
too few such to be “able to give meaningful statistics” (p. 289). Likewise,
although VV consistently finds that mixed-language features draw from one or a
compromise among source languages, Part II draws few statistical conclusions
about mixed languages, so that it is mainly – and rewardingly – pidgins and
creoles about which we can draw insights here. (A problematic Key Point
summarizing Chapter 9 is the claim that “extended pidgins...align with creoles
rather than pidgins with respect to phoneme inventory size, syllable structure
and tone” (p. 323), untenable if we truly can't meaningfully generalize about
pidgincreoles.) Part II's data-oriented chapters are set out in a streamlined,
approachable format whose tables of statistics should hardly daunt even the
most math-phobic student, but some will need it pointed out that references to
''chi-squared'' and ''χ2'' are synonymous. The various facets of structure
evaluated are not summarized by chapter, so users of this book must separately
examine e.g. the phoneme-inventory sizes of pidgins and those of creoles in
order to compare and contrast them (§9.2).

 The number-crunching in Chapter 9 ''Phonology'' reaches a conclusion that
pidgins tend toward smallish consonant inventories (p. 297) although students
might take this with a grain of salt since the typical data corpus for a
pidgin is scant and inconsistent. Pidgin prosody too is seldom reliably
documented, and while VV abstains from generalizing in the text, the Key
Points (p. 323) imply “pidgins...lack tone”. An interesting finding on creole
phonologies is their tendency to significantly differ in number of segments
from lexifier languages (p. 301) and to favor complex syllable structures (p.
304); tone systems are underrepresented in creoles (p. 307), but one could add
that recent scholarship, e.g. on Papiamentu by Rivera-Castillo (1998) and
Remijsen and Van Heuven (2005), seems to be changing this picture.

 Chapter 10, ''Morphology'', deviates from the quantitative to an
impressionistic approach in discussing morphological analyticity vs.
synthesis. VV acknowledges these poles of a complexity continuum as difficult
to quantify (p. 326-327). She points to the large literature on that
controversy but opts for a quick survey of contact language morphologies, so
instructors have an opportunity to further engage students via case studies,
perhaps using the Snapshots languages (Turku, Sranan, Media Lengua).
Reduplication is equally under enormous debate in the subfield, and occupies
an entire section (§10.3), which concludes that reduplication is decidedly
underrepresented in pidgins but is neither more nor less common in creoles
than in the world's languages overall.

 Chapter 11, ''The Noun Phrase'', features two issues, nominal plural marking
(§11.2) and articles (§11.3). Most pidgins apparently lack the former. (It is
not quite true that “In [pidgin] Chinuk Wawa...there is no plural” because
some nouns carry optional productive plural marking, cf. Robertson
2011:55-57.) Creoles, however, typically show optional plural morphology for
all nouns. The expected finding that pidgins usually lack articles is
confirmed; however, creoles unexpectedly tend to have articles at a rate well
above the crosslinguistic average. Such a fascinating result would merit a
further thought-question in the Exercises (§11.7), “What might be reasons
creoles so often possess articles?”

 The final word in Chapter 12's title, ''The Verb Phrase and Predication'',
intends to address that most verb-like category: copular constructions.
Throughout the chapter, VV meets terminological stumbles, due possibly to a
reluctance to use the label ''copula'' in distinction from “predication”.
Notably, the Glossary at book's end defines ''predicate'' in the broad
pretheoretical sense – “[t]hat part of the clause which asserts something
about the subject” – but not as copula. Many compelling questions reside
within the fertile ground of tense, mood, and aspect (TMA) marking in contact
languages, but having established that pidgins rarely mark these, VV restricts
the scope to whether creoles match Bickerton's (e.g. 1981) hypothesized
prototype: one each of Tense, Mood, and Aspect (TMA) markers. The statistics
in §12.2.3 starkly contradict that proposal: a large majority of creoles, it
emerges, have multiple marking in each category and especially aspect;
additionally, constituent ordering of these categories is non-predictable. The
one validation of the creole prototype is that unmarked, ''base'', verb forms'
tense reading tends to be affected by their lexical aspect, but as VV remarks
(p. 402), we do not know yet whether this is a difference from other
languages. Her brilliant paragraph suggesting likely sources of TMA marking in
each kind of mixed languages deserves unpacking, at least via an added
question in the Exercises. Section 12.3 on copular constructions, unusually,
separately examines ''predicative noun phrases'' and ''predicative
adjectives''. Thanks to VV's making this extra effort, it becomes evident that
in pidgins overt copulas are somewhat more common with NPs than with
adjectives, but are uncommon and frequent than in other languages. Copulas are
more characteristic of creoles, but the statistics do not suggest significant
differences from noncontact languages.

 Chapter 13, “Simple Sentences” (main clauses), investigates constituent order
(§13.2), and  finds that unlike pidgins, creoles typically hew to their
lexifiers' ordering (pp. 438-439). The following section enters the fraught
topic of passives, with confusing results. The sole exemplar of a claim that
“[p]idgin languages are usually described as lacking any passive
construction”, a Chinuk Wawa example (p. 440), seems to be invented: its first
gloss, ''The dog eats bread'', is conceivable but the second, ''The bread was
eaten by the dog'', is bizarre. In practice, speakers avoid voice ambiguity
thanks to formally distinct (quasi-)passive strategies literally meaning
''become X'', ''catch X'', or ''they do X'' (Vrzić 1999:102-103, Robertson
2011:127-128). More mysterious is the pidgin-language dataset's transformation
from robustly significant in preceding chapters to “too small for any
statistical analyses” about passives! In addition, VV acknowledges that her
criteria for calling any creole construction passive differ substantially from
those of WALS, and finally, no statistically significant findings emerge from
comparison with pidgins. Instructors might lead a class discussion of such
issues, and guide an analysis of some particular contact languages' strategies
for conveying agent-demotion-like meanings.

 Chapter 14, ''Complex Sentences'', (subordinate clauses) praiseworthily takes
on some portion of this vast syntactic area. Although main-verb dependents
(perhaps the most frequent kind of embedded clause) are not investigated, two
types are focused upon: subject relative clauses (§14.2) and directional
serial verb constructions (§14.3). I found the exposition of the former mildly
confusing due to the absence of a concept ''complementizer'' in the
theoretical preliminaries (pp. 464-466), and to the pidgin examples' being
relativized objects. Creoles tend to at least optionally mark relativization;
unlike other languages it seems they never use a ''non-reduction'' strategy
(p.470), though this is undefined in the book and hard to evaluate. The
section on serial verb constructions generates fewer findings than might be
expected, giving figures only for creoles and concluding only that these
languages more commonly have directional SVCs than not.

 Chapter 15, ''Pragmatics'', really looks more at the propositional level than
the utterance or at language in real-world context. VV's statistical analysis
reveals that pidgins and creoles are much more likely than other languages to
use a negative-particle strategy, and to lack any other negation (pp.499-501),
as well as to prefer intonational over segmental marking of polar questions
(pp. 504-507). Data on second-person pronoun politeness distinctions seems
scant, but evidently creoles can be shown to parallel noncontact languages in
using this strategy (pp. 510-512).

 The preceding critique should suggest no fundamental inadequacy, but instead
the promise, of this volume. Few surveys of contact linguistics have been so
committed to remaining based in documentation, and VV covers so much material
that she could not address all possible viewpoints and implications. She
excellently summarizes e.g. the salient points of numerous creole-genesis
theories (in tables on pp.187-188). Her empirical statistical testing in Part
II of traits assumed typical of contact languages is groundbreaking. In many
instances, it provides surprising insights, in others it finally confirms
long-promoted hypotheses, and in the considerable number of cases where VV is
able to demonstrate objectively that we lack sufficient data for
generalization, we are effectively directed to specific questions needing
further research. The latter, if emphasized by an attentive instructor, could
prove a life-changing encounter for budding young contact linguists, and this
in itself is a great reason to highly recommend this book.

REFERENCES

Bickerton, D. 1981. Roots of language. Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma.

Boas, F. 1888. Chinook songs. Journal of American Folklore 1(3):220-226.

Haspelmath, M., M.S. Dryer, D. Gil, B. Comrie (eds.). 2005. The World Atlas of
Language Structures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Miestamo, M., K. Sinnemäki and F. Karlsson (eds.). 2008. Language complexity:
Typology, contact, change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (Studies in Language
Companion Series, volume 94.)

Michaelis, S.M., P. Maurer, M. Haspelmath, and M. Huber (eds.). 2013. The
Atlas and Survey of Pidgin & Creole Languages, 4 vols. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Remijsen, B. and V.J. van Heuven. 2005.  Stress, tone, and discourse
prominence in the Curaçao dialect of Papiamentu.  Phonology 22:205-235.  

Rivera-Castillo, Yolanda.  1998. Tone and stress in Papiamentu: The
contribution of a constraint-based analysis to the problem of creole genesis. 
Journal of Pidgin & Creole Languages 13(2):297-334.  

Robertson, D.D. 2011. Kamloops Chinúk Wawa, Chinuk pipa, and the vitality of
pidgins. PhD dissertation, University of Victoria. Download at
https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/handle/1828/3840.

Thomason, S. and T. Kaufman. 1988. Language contact, creolization, and genetic
linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Vrzić, Z. 1999. Modeling Pidgin / Creole genesis: universals and contact
influence in Chinook jargon syntax. PhD dissertation, New York University.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

DAVID DOUGLAS ROBERTSON is a Pacific Northwest consulting linguist (PhD,
University of Victoria, 2012). He specializes in language contact. (Especially
Chinuk Wawa / Chinook Jargon, and its endangered Chinuk pipa writing system;
also the pidgins French of the Mountains and Heiltsuk Pidgin.) He also works
to rescue the understudied documentation of the region's languages.
(Particularly Salish, for example łəw̓ál̓məš / Lower Chehalis, as well as
eight British Columbia languages' first community literacies.) This work
involves analyzing weatherbeaten 1890s grave markers, blogging frequently at
http://chinookjargon.com, dictionary making, grammar writing, and assisting
community members in becoming speakers of their heritage language.





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