29.2619, Review: Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Drechsel (2017)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-29-2619. Wed Jun 20 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.2619, Review: Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Drechsel (2017)

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Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2018 13:41:56
From: David Robertson [ddr11 at columbia.edu]
Subject: Language Contact in the Early Colonial Pacific

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-1652.html

AUTHOR: Emanuel J.  Drechsel
TITLE: Language Contact in the Early Colonial Pacific
SUBTITLE: Maritime Polynesian Pidgin before Pidgin English
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: David Douglas Robertson, University of Victoria

SUMMARY

Emanuel J. Drechsel, a pathfinder in serious research on non-European-based
contact languages of North America (cf. Drechsel and Makuakāne 1982, Drechsel
1997), now trains that focus on the Eastern Pacific Ocean. In Language Contact
in the Early Colonial Pacific (xviii + 333 pp.),
 he makes the case that the first seed for the Pacific's rampant crop of
pidgins was an Eastern Polynesian-lexified idiom, “Maritime Polynesian Pidgin”
(herein MPP). The ethnohistorical interpretation of early records is a
fundamental and productive strategy in this study. 

Part I of three, “Questions, theories, and methods of historical
sociolinguistics”, includes helpful maps of the scattered locales concerned
(pages 2-5). Chapter 1 “Introduction”, suggests that certain ethnocentric
blinders have handicapped previous research on Pacific contact linguistics,
leaving unaddressed the need for a longitudinal study such as this one that
takes indigenous people's agency into account. Chapter 2 “MPP and pidgin and
creole linguistics”, dilates on these themes, specifying strengths and
weaknesses in this subdiscipline's previous theoretical approaches, thus
identifying opportune components of a strategy for investigating MPP. Chapter
3 “Ethnohistory of speaking as a historical-sociolinguistic methodology”
sketches a program for evaluating data sources from multiple perspectives and
along several dimensions.

Part II “Historical attestations of MPP” is the book's core; for most of its
readers this will be their first exposure to MPP data, which here is
assiduously contextualized and is presented in rough chronological and
developmental stages, arranged by documentor within each chapter. Chapter 4
“Emergence, stabilization, and expansion” spans the earliest decades of
contacts (1760s-circa 1810). Chapter 5 “Resilience against depidginization and
relexification” takes us forward to the early 1830s. Chapter 6 “Survival in
niches” finds relevant material as late as the 1880s, by which time Pidgin
English and European languages dominated intercultural communication. 

Part III “Structure, function, and history of MPP” is devoted to a detailed
analysis of the data from Part II, essentially synchronic in Chapter 7
“Linguistic patterns” and diachronic in Chapter 8 “History and social
functions”; Chapter 9 “Conclusions: linguistic, sociohistorical, and
theoretical implications” summarizes both findings and research desiderata.
References take up 21 further pages; an 11-page Index includes proper names,
some individual MPP words, and technical concepts. 

EVALUATION

Drechsel's book makes a uniquely valuable contribution to contact linguistics.
Pidgin languages typically get short shrift, even from specialists, so a
book-length treatment introducing a previously obscure one constitutes a
landmark. This case study makes a number of stimulating points that challenge
typical presuppositions about pidgins, a classic instance being the claim that
these languages lack grammars and vary chaotically. Drechsel gently points out
that pidgins' definitional lack of L1 speakers doesn't entail the grammatical
amorphousness posited by Silverstein (1972), noting that speakers' potentially
different understandings of e.g. MPP's workings are not inconsistent with its
having a grammar of its own (cf. pp. 26-27, 59, 188, et al.).

I found Part I to be a decent review of the primary ideas animating contact
linguistics, useful if e.g. this book were turned into the
historical/philological equivalent of a fieldwork course. Chapter 2 relies
almost exclusively on Mühlhäuser (1997), a superb and innovative summation by
Drechsel's fellow Pacific specialist, but one that could well have been
augmented with subsequent contributions in pidginistics, preeminently those of
Peter Bakker and associates. Thus Drechsel (e.g. pp. 237-239) does not
highlight the importance of MPP's evidently productive reduplicative
morphology as an exception to Bakker's disproof of this as a typical pidgin
structure (2003). Certain key topics might stand deeper discussion, such as
the notion that “jargons” (ostensibly structureless yet somehow
conventionalized pre-pidgin intercultural speech forms) rely on “pragmatic
rules rather than grammatical ones” (p. 29, cf. p. 26). A difficulty with this
putative metric for distinguishing actual pidgins from nonlanguages is the
lack of examples of jargons. Another is that these supposed pragmatic rules
are defined here as categorial multifunctionality, which is famously a trait
of pidgins and creoles, but also of English (and perhaps conceivably of the
many languages which, like the Salish family, extensively exploit
nominalization of verbs). Thus “jargons” would appear to be a straw man, as I
have observed in reviewing Velupillai's contact-linguistics handbook
(Robertson 2016). A separate claim to unpack is that the “parts of pidgin
grammar that exhibit the greatest range of variation...are articulation and
phonology, due to ample structural and contextual redundancy” (p. 30), because
as formulated, the same observation surely applies to all human languages.
Chapter 3's explicit program for bringing an ethnography-of-speaking approach
to historical linguistic work should help contact linguists in grappling with
notions that pidgins and creoles are defined as much by sociolinguistic as
structural factors. 

Part II is the data-heavy section, robustly augmented by a comprehensive
online Vocabulary; the reader can easily weigh Drechsel's evaluations and
claims against this quantity of MPP attestations. Large numbers of early
colonial sources have been painstakingly examined for what they tell about
intercultural communication. Drechsel is evenhanded in noting not only the
data that with varying degrees of clearness suggest a Polynesian pidgin but
also the co-occurrence of English words, hand gestures, facial expressions,
and more. The picture presented of a structurally consistent pidgin becomes
all the more solid for its recognition of the full range of strategies people
used in early contacts. This said, I feel that a detailed numbering and a
strict conventional interlinearization format would have made all this data
more wieldy for the reader who is being exposed to it for the first time. As
given, the examples tend to e.g. blend French and English in a single line and
leave morphosyntactic parses vague. Related to this point, the many lengthy
non-English European quotations could be relegated to footnotes, limiting the
main text to the English translations of them. The interpolation of
explanatory English glosses within the foreign-language text also could be
left for the footnotes. Generalizations about MPP morphosyntax are already
introduced in Section II, which tends to render Section III unfortunately
redundant to some extent. It seems to me that Drechsel's consistent reduction
of the pidgin's constituency pattern to SVO throughout this section would only
be strengthened by an acknowledgment that the data include frequent SV and
copular formations.

By the time we reach Part III, Drechsel has laid out a good deal of data from
which to describe MPP's phonology, lexis, and morphosyntax; as I note, he has
also revealed a number of his key ideas about the language's structure.
Chapter 7 is then partially a refresher, but it serves well as a reference
sketch of the pidgin. It could in my view have been much enriched in terms of
topics addressed, since the data in Part II allow useful generalizations about
these additional undiscussed topics: 

- Voice (transitive, intransitive, ditransitives)
- Mood (indicative, imperative, interrogative)
- “Modification”: a finer-grained view, e.g. quantification and adverbs
- Copular constructions
- Serial-verb constructions
- Compounding
- Possession
- Conjunctions
- Vocatives
- Grammatical number (in the pronoun system as well as noun pluralization
strategies)
- Patterns in the putative multifunctionality of MPP words

Several of these topics would be welcome expansions of the typical description
of pidgins. Perhaps a second edition could address them.

Chapter 8 is a particularly stimulating read; in the course of summarizing
MPP's place in both history and linguistic typology, it makes quite a number
of creative claims. For example on pages 288-290 Drechsel engages with a
hypothesis that this pidgin was especially heavily influenced by language
universals as opposed to “substrate” Polynesian structures; the predominant
Subject-initial pattern that he sees in MPP, so saliently distinct from the
Verb-initial pattern of Polynesian, is presented as key evidence for this. It
would be fascinating to read an entire article expanding on this idea. Another
compelling subject for future research is implied by Drechsel's observation
that “the accumulated linguistic and sociohistorical evidence clearly points
to a widely recognized, established medium between Pacific Islanders of the
eastern Pacific and foreigners, even if the available historical attestations
give no indication for a distinct regional name of its own” (page 293). This
caused me to reflect that pidgins of which I am aware typically lack autonyms,
as perhaps do most human languages – but investigation of this onomastic point
remains to be performed if the idea is to be proved. I found myself quibbling
with the claim that MPP “differed from better-known non-European-based
instances [of pidgins] such as Police/Hiri Motu...and Chinook Jargon...in that
currently we cannot raise any sociolinguistic arguments for a pre-European
origin” (p. 295). In my understanding, despite the published thought pieces on
Chinook Jargon duly recognized by Drechsel (Hymes 1980, Thomason 1983), we
cannot strictly speaking make any strong argument for CJ's precontact
existence, since there exists no ethnohistorical testimony for such relatively
ancient usage. I will finish by noting the appropriateness of Drechsel's
admonishment that “[w]hereas some records suggest a gradual relexification of
MPP with Pidgin English during the second half of the nineteenth century, this
process still requires a more systematic description and analysis by
variationist means such as distributional data and implicational screening”
(p. 300). It has been extraordinarily easy in contact linguistics to claim
“relexification”, in effect wholesale calquing, from some “substrate” language
to some pidgin or creole, but quite hard to rule out multiple competing
explanations. Future work firming up diagnostic criteria for this presumed
process of linguistic change should be well worth our efforts, but as I find
in a current project examining pidgin-creole Chinook Jargon's presumed
preservation of Indigenous North American metaphors (ChinookJargon.org 2017),
it demands a working facility both with numbers of unrelated languages and
with masses of historical evidence. 

In summary, I found Drechsel's treatment of MPP in this book and online an
exemplary demonstration of scholarly transparency and a respectful invitation
to the reader to weigh the evidence independently. I hope to see many more
such exciting presentations of under-researched languages following in his
footsteps.

REFERENCES

Bakker, P. (2003). The absence of reduplication in pidgins. In Kouwenberg,
Silvia (ed.). Twice as meaningful: Reduplication in pidgins, creoles, and
other contact languages (pp. 37-46). London: Battlebridge.

ChinookJargon.org. 2017. Metaphor sources in Chinuk Wawa.
https://chinookjargon.com/?s=metaphor, accessed December 9, 2017. 

Drechsel, Emanuel J. 1997. Mobilian Jargon: Linguistic and sociohistorical
aspects of a Native American pidgin. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (Oxford Studies
in Language Contact.) 

Drechsel, Emanuel J. and T. Haunani Makuakāne. 1982. Hawaiian loanwords in two
Native American pidgins. International Journal of American Linguistics
48:460-468. 

Hymes, Dell H. 1980. Commentary. In Valdman, Albert and Arnold Highfield
(eds.). Theoretical orientations in creole studies, pages 389-423. New York:
Academic Press. 

Mühlhäuser, Peter. 1997. Pidgin and creole linguistics. London: University of
Westminster Press. (Westminster Creolistics Series 3.)

Robertson, David Douglas. 2016. Book review of Velupillai, Viveka. 2015. 
Pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages.  Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
LinguistList.

Silverstein, Michael. 1972. Chinook Jargon: Language contact and the problem
of multi-level generative systems. Language 48:378-406, 596-625.

Thomason, Sarah Grey. 1983. Chinook Jargon in areal and historical context.
Language 59:820-870.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

David Douglas Robertson, PhD, is a consulting linguist specializing in
repatriating older underresearched language data in Pacific Northwest
languages, including the Salish family and the Chinook Jargon pidgin-creole
together with its endangered Chinook Writing alphabet. He is the American Name
Society's 2015 Emerging Scholar, and blogs daily at http://chinookjargon.com.





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