31.976, Review: Historical Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Sociolinguistics: Aboh (2019)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-31-976. Wed Mar 11 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.976, Review: Historical Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Sociolinguistics: Aboh (2019)

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Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2020 21:29:44
From: David Robertson [ddr11 at columbia.edu]
Subject: The Emergence of Hybrid Grammars

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36572217


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-3039.html

AUTHOR: Enoch Oladé Aboh
TITLE: The Emergence of Hybrid Grammars
SUBTITLE: Language Contact and Change
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: David Douglas Robertson, University of Victoria

SUMMARY

(xviii + 346 pp.) Enoch Aboh proposes to enlist Chomsky-inspired Universal
Grammar (UG) in the service of explaining the mechanisms by which new
languages, particularly creoles, come into being.The central thesis is thus
that contact-induced change is an instance of language learning like any
other, albeit under unusual social circumstances.  

This study is launched with a Foreword (ix-xiv) by Salikoko Mufwene, whose
“language ecology” metaphor of recombining elements from languages in contact
has inspired Aboh. Acknowledgments (xv-xvi) and Abbreviations (xvii-xviii)
follow, and Chapter 1 “Introduction” (1-15) introduces the basic observation
that languages perpetually change and proposes UG terms in which to view that
fact. He notes creoles as a longstanding arena for theorizing diachronic
change, foreshadowing later chapters by discussing all language learning as
resulting in “variants”, not “imperfection” nor simplification. 

Chapter 2 “The Agents of Creole Formation: Geopolitics and Cultural Aspects of
the Slave Coast” (16-59) investigates the historical political, economic,
ethnographic, and linguistic situation in the part of West Africa that
supplied such a significant portion of the enslaved people sent to the New
World. The fairly homogeneous Gbe-(Kwa-)speaking Allada Kingdom is argued as
their main place of origin, with strong linguistic implications for the young
colonies of Suriname and Haiti. 

Chapter 3 “The Emergence of Creoles: A Review of Some Current Hypotheses”
(60-112) reviews the contentious previous creolist literature on “genesis”,
according a section of its own to each of four schools of thought, viz. that
creoles are (1) effectively distant sisters, not stray daughters, of their
lexifiers; (2) their substrate languages in superstrate garb; (3) the result
of genetically innate processes unfettered by historical inheritance; and (4)
L2 interlanguages become community lects. Each is critiqued and rejected as
inadequate. 

Chapter 4 “Competition and Selection” (113-170), accordingly, introduces
Aboh's view that creoles are formed out of situation-specific competition
among, and recombination of, all syntactic and semantic features of all
languages in contact as of their origin. He presents this in a metaphor of
UG-style  heads, nodes, movement, etc. as genes involved in biological
reproduction. 

Chapter 5 “The Role of Vulnerable Interfaces in Language Change: The Case of
the D-System” (171-221) proposes that it is precisely where UG's “modules”
interact with one another, e.g. in determiner systems, that contact-induced
change (“transfer”) is most likely to alter the properties of a language,
decoupling previous syntax-semantics interactions. Various details of Haitian
and Sranan noun phrases vis-à-vis their source languages' are compared as
evidence. 

Chapter 6 “The Emergence of the Left Clause Periphery” (222-268) moves on to
the clausal and sentential domains with a look at features such as
complementizers, focus, and interrogation, again examining creole data in
contrast with corresponding lexifier-language features. 

Chapter 7 “The Emergence of Serial Verb Constructions” (269-303) makes the
case, contra much previous creolist literature, that there is in fact no
serialization “parameter”. SVC's are instead presented as yet another instance
of feature competition and selection, in regard to clause-combination
phenomena. 

Chapter 8 “Conclusions: Some Final Remarks on Hybrid Grammars, the Creole
Prototype, and Language Acquisition and Change” (304-316) briefly elaborates
on the broader implications of the book's feature-recombination model. All
human grammars, Aboh notes, should be seen as hybrid, in that all language
learning involves change. And he reiterates that there is no strong a priori
reason for creoles to be expected to be simple grammars. 

The book is rounded out with References (317-336), followed by an Author Index
(337-339), Language Index (340-342), and Subject Index (343-346). 

EVALUATION

Aboh's study stands out for its focus on his astute observation that
contact-language genesis, far from being the sudden coming into existence of a
wholly new entity that the entrenched idealizations of previous creolist
models have found convenient, can be more accurately captured as a
fine-grained process of recombination. The elements being selected among are
for him, as an adherent of Chomskyan Universal Grammar (UG) theory, the
respective arrays of parametric settings in the human language capacity for
each language variety in the speech environment -- as well as the presumably
unmarked settings to which any parameter might revert for whatever reason
under contact conditions. The author makes the superbly cogent point that all
language learning, including that by L1-speaking children, leads both to
diachronic change and to synchronic variation; thus creole (and by inference
pidgin and mixed-language) formation is an unremarkable outcome given its
particular social circumstances. This hypothesis of Aboh's carries the welcome
implication that instead of the so-called “creole exceptionalist” theories he
argues against, our discipline's understanding of phenomena leading to such
new languages is better served by a single unified account of language change
dynamics as being due to propensities of the human mind. It also happens to
accord fairly compatibly with the ever-developing creolist consensus that it
is only their rather unusual constellation of social factors – e.g. two or
more languages previously in isolation from one other contributing to the
sudden formation of a new community – that sets a contact language apart from
a variety handed down within a community over a greater timespan. For these
reasons, it seems to me that this book's central ideas should be
enthusiastically received by the contact linguistics community, and are likely
to be both implemented and elaborated upon with rewarding results. 

What struck me in reading Aboh's study was that his stimulating insight need
not be formulated in UG specialist terminology, as it is in great detail in
this volume, to be understood by and useful to other scholars. Indeed I dare
say that creolistics as a whole, being as concerned as it is with history,
demography and descriptive documentation, makes relatively little use of UG.
The typical contact linguist might be impressed but not a little mystified by
many of the formalisms and terminology in this book, so that it would be
helpful if the Table of Abbreviations were expanded to also explain notations
such as “v” and “V”, “COMP”, and perhaps also unabbreviated terms like
“module” (page 15) and “merge” (14). Similarly, Aboh invests a good deal of
energy in detailed UG proofs of ideas that contribute to his overall thesis,
for example that “vulnerable interfaces” are a particularly likely locus of
contact-induced change (§5.2). Such expositions may feel impenetrable to the
non-UG reader, which is unfortunate because the same insight can be expressed
in more widely accessible terminology that is less prone to viewing all
language as “syntax”, such as, perhaps, “less-bound (thus non-inflectional)
material is more susceptible to attrition and change”. 

Continuing in the vein of reflection on this volume's likely response among
creolists, one section that is virtually guaranteed an enthusiastic reception
is Chapter 2, a tour de force of wide-ranging historical research into the
sociological conditions that must have obtained in the era when Haitian and
Surinamese colonies were being launched with the help of large-scale West
African slave importation. With maps, graphics, demographic statistics,
comparative tables of representative lexicon in Gbe languages, and ample
citation of contemporaneous witnesses, Aboh builds a highly compelling case
for the probability that those languages' speakers played a large and crucial
role in the development of the resulting creoles. This chapter is really
exemplary for its painstaking scholarship. 

Also to be lauded is Chapter 3's wide-ranging literature review and its
systematization of existing creole genesis theories into four main strands,
which Aboh proceeds to interrogate in a very well-informed fashion. He finds,
for example, that the concept of relexification (the replacement of
“substrate” language lexicon with that of a “superstrate” language, such that
e.g. much of Haitian Creole correlates beyond chance probability with patterns
in Gbe) is compelling but simply cannot fully explain creole formation (§3.2).
Equally incisive critiques by Aboh of the scholarship to date appear in other
chapters, including his points that “the emergence of a 'macaronic pidgin'
prior to the creole (as has been postulated by some authors) would simply
cause the relevant socio-economic system to collapse, probably hindering the
success of the plantation industry itself” (§4.1.2), and that previous
creolists have erred in “assum[ing] that the loss of inflectional
morphology...systematically corresponds to loss of structure” (page 170).  

One point on which non-UG linguists are bound to experience some confusion is
Aboh's unconventional, and undefined, use of the word “typological”; for
example it is surprising when he describes the southern and northern varieties
of Middle English as “typologically” distinct on page 5. Two more closely
related, and syntactically similar, varieties can scarcely be imagined, so his
intended meaning is opaque to me here. In this light I found it hard to parse
what was meant (also on page 5) by the phrasing, “Simultaneous
bilingualism...must involve...two distinct languages that may not be related
genetically or typologically.” 

Consistently, however, the author brings detailed understanding and
penetrating analysis to bear on his overall thesis and on the specific
features of creole, Gbe, and Indo-European grammar with which he illustrates
it. I believe readers concerned with the question of how contact languages
come to be will find this volume rewards a close reading, and will come away
with numerous ideas for their own research. As I have suggested, those with a
good grounding in current Generativist theory, and those with sufficiently
advanced acquaintance with creolistics to see Aboh's points without that
training, will be the primary audience.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

David Douglas Robertson, PhD, is a consulting linguist specializing in
historical language contact in the Pacific Northwest, working to analyze and
describe Chinuk Wawa (Chinook Jargon), its unique ''Chinuk Pipa'' alphabet,
and its main input languages: Lower Chinookan, Tsamosan Salish,
Canadian/Métis French, Nuučaan'uł, and colloquial 19th century English.





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