34.512, Review: Historical Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Typology: Operstein (2021)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-34-512. Thu Feb 09 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.512, Review: Historical Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Typology: Operstein (2021)

Moderator: Malgorzata E. Cavar, Francis Tyers (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Lauren Perkins
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Steven Franks, Everett Green, Sarah Robinson,
      Joshua Sims, Jeremy Coburn, Daniel Swanson, Matthew Fort,
      Maria Lucero Guillen Puon, Billy Dickson
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Hosted by Indiana University

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Maria Lucero Guillen Puon <luceroguillen at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Thu, 09 Feb 2023 19:43:31
From: David Robertson [ddr11 at columbia.edu]
Subject: The Lingua Franca

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36792437


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/33/33-363.html

AUTHOR: Natalie  Operstein
TITLE: The Lingua Franca
SUBTITLE: Contact-Induced Language Change in the Mediterranean
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2021

REVIEWER: David Douglas Robertson, University of Victoria

SUMMARY

Natalie Operstein begins this study (1-2) by stating two goals. The first is
descriptive, to examine one major document’s provenance – this is the
“Dictionnaire de la langue franque ou petit mauresque” (Anonymous, 1830) – and
the structures discoverable in its data. Second is a theoretical assessment of
the Lingua Franca’s (LF’s) status in relation to genetically and
non-genetically descended languages. This book methodically approaches both
questions. Chapter 1, “Introduction”, gives a sociohistorical introduction to
this “Frank [i.e. European] language” of the Middle East, and previews
succeeding chapters. 

“The Author” of the 1830 Dictionnaire is investigated in Chapter 2. Evidence
shows that the hitherto unnamed lexicographer was a US State Department
staffer in Algiers, William Brown Hodgson, but that the book was composed by
someone else, in France. Proof includes published biographies of Hodgson,
official correspondence, and his own writings. He was explicitly charged by
the American government with learning LF and other North African coast
languages, and he energetically carried out and reported on this duty.
Specific features of the Dictionnaire traceable to Hodgson include its
illustrative dialogues and the French-LF and French-Arabic vocabularies. He
donated or sold these to the French circa 1829, as they prepared to invade
Algiers. 

Other sources of “The Dictionnaire” emerge in Chapter 3. Two influential
French grammars of Italian seem to have supplied models for Hodgson’s LF
exposition. Both were in recent editions when he was posted to North Africa:
Giovanni Veneroni’s “Maître italien” (1800) and Angelo Vergani’s “Grammaire
italien” (1823). Vergani’s learner’s dialogues, Veneroni’s selection of
commonly used nouns, their formats, their didactic orthographies, and the
semantics of their head entries all appear to have strongly influenced the
Dictionnaire’s presentation.

Chapter 4 looks in depth at “The Orthography”, with examinations of how vowels
and consonants are represented. A five-vowel, 22-consonant LF inventory is
found, similar to modern Romance languages. It is argued the orthography was
optimized for use by literate francophones familiar with “Oriental” loanwords.
Here evidence is propounded that LF shows much “inter-Romance hybridization”,
e.g., because its phonology is distinct from any one genetically descended
Romance language. 

Chapter 5, “The Lexicon”, examines lexical source languages of LF, which is
~95% Romance, much of these words having multiple likely etymologies. While
this component is syntactically varied, the ~5% from non-Indo-European
languages (Arabic, Turkish) is mostly that easily borrowed category, nouns.
“Core vocabulary”, measured by 100- and 200-item Swadesh lists, indicates
~57.5% of (geographically) “Italian” origin, ~13% “Spanish”, ~24% compatible
with both sources, and the remainder mostly inter-Romance hybrids and
Gallicisms. The latter are the most recent lexical layer; comparison with
Haedo’s 1612 lexicon indicates Hispanicisms are the oldest. LF is apparently
not a pidgin, as (1) its lexicon has many sources and is unusually large; (2)
its Type-Token Ratio is nearly as high as in modern Romance, far higher than
in contact languages; (3) it contains many synonyms; (4) its lexical structure
resembles Romance (e.g., its color terms, kinship terms, transitive
predicative possession); (5) numerous Romance suppletion patterns recur in LF;
and (6) LF calques many Romance idioms. 

“The Word Formation” occupies Chapter 6. LF morphology and compounding are
compared with modern Romance “lexifier” languages and pidgins. Derivational
morphology is the most productive mechanism in LF—primarily suffixation
creating nouns—but the most common LF pattern (N and V sharing a root) is less
dominant in the lexifiers. Some prefixation occurs, mainly deriving verbs.
Multiword lexemes are common. Valency alternates via lexical, morphological,
and analytic strategies, as in Romance. Overall, LF morphology is
typologically closer to Romance than to pidgins. 

Chapter 7, “The Inflection”, contrasts pidgins with lexifiers; LF retains more
Romance morphosyntax than is typical of pidgins, and continues diachronic
trends characterizing Latin’s development into Romance. Trends increasing
analyticity, reducing inflection classes, “hypercharacterizing” gender, and
using (etymologically) Latin “stare” as copula occur in LF. 

Analysis of “The Syntax” occupies Chapter 8. Gender agreement, preposed
determiners, attributive adjectives, and possession follow Romance patterns.
So do copular expressions and the SVO constituent order (including Helping
Verb + Main Verb). LF differential object marking resembles Romance.
Imperatives (retaining subject pronouns) and complex sentences
(juxtapositions) differ from lexifiers. “Syntactic innovations in LF are
motivated by contact-induced reduction in lexifier structural categories
and/or their exponence” (283), not reaching a degree matching the typological
tendencies of pidgins or creoles.

The final chapter, “The Lingua Franca”, restates and summarizes the findings.
LF shares features with pidgins and with Romance; there is high LF-Romance
mutual intelligibility; LF lexicon derives from many source languages; and
LF’s transmission to new speakers involved two kinds of contact simultaneously
– between closely related languages, and with non-Romance languages. This
chapter dichotomizes representative LF features: those typical of native
Romance interaction with outsiders versus those attributable to pidginization.
LF is extensively typologically continuous with Romance, but discernibly
impacted by SLA; distinct LF lects coexisted, with varying reconstruction
found, but ultimately, this language is best considered a koiné. 

Bracketing these chapters are a Table of Contents (vii-x), Tables list
(xi-xii), Series Editor’s Foreword (xiv-xvi), Abbreviations guide
(xvii-xviii), and “Appendix A: Swadesh Wordlists” (337-349), “Appendix B:
Doublets” (350-359), “Appendix C: Type-Token Ratios” (360-364), and “Appendix
D: Clark-Bonaparte (1877) Exchange” (365-369), plus “References” (370-400) and
“Index” (401-405). 

EVALUATION

With this volume, the rather theoretically-oriented “Cambridge Approaches to
Language Contact” series adds a study of a single contact language. But
because the Lingua Franca’s origins and status have long attracted linguists’
special attention – well surveyed and situated into current debates by
Operstein – this volume ultimately adds its own contribution to the
understanding of the typology of linguistic contact outcomes in general. 

This book’s focus, as already noted, is narrower still; it is essentially an
analysis of a single smallish publication representing the Lingua Franca of a
single speaker. A strength of this study is thus the coherence of its data
set, but the constrained source material exacts a price in the frequent
repurposing of individual examples to illustrate various features of the
language. Additional data and a diachronic perspective are supplied by the
other most important LF source, Haedo’s 1612 description of Algiers. 

Operstein’s typologically-informed approach to analyzing LF pays dividends
pleasantly out of proportion to the seemingly small source data, allowing her
to discern meaningful patterns that might have escaped the notice of a more
traditional Romance linguistics approach. An example of this is her excellent
characterization of LF’s two forms for each verb, which are etymologically the
Romance infinitive and the past participle, as the distinctly non-Romance
distinction between imperfective and perfective aspects, respectively. 

An equally refreshing facet of the author’s treatment of her subject in a way
that contributes new insights to the centuries of Lingua Franca scholarship is
her description of Hodgson’s 1820s research as “fieldwork” (11 ff). Too often,
that label has been restricted to the efforts of 19th-century philological
researchers of European dialects and, after circa 1880, those who had come to
call themselves ethnographers or linguists seeking to document tribal
languages. It is valuable to learn that Hodgson was one of the first to
purposely conduct a thorough documentation of an essentially unwritten and
unstandardized language variety in actual use, and, moreover, that this
variety was a non-genetically descended language. Thus we learn of a hitherto
obscure pioneer of contact linguistics. 

The second, third, and fourth chapters in this volume will be something of an
education for most linguist readers, in that they conduct a textual analysis
of the linguistic description itself. As consistently as we modern linguists
are admonished that the best practice is to personally re-evaluate the
provenance and quality of the data we use, far too many of us experience a
lack of time to accomplish this goal. Operstein takes us through a smart and
concise demonstration of how a judicious search of historical documents can
open insights into a previous researcher’s methodology and motivations. This
empowers us to more intelligently use another scholar’s data and findings, and
it is a service to the linguistics community. These three chapters might also
make for a useful installment in a course on the history of linguistics. 

It would be easy to raise minor quibbles with the inarguably successful
Chapter 5. Its use of Swadesh lists is open to criticism, firstly on the
grounds that that tool is far from an objective measure of what serves as
“core vocabulary” in a given language, yet the fact remains that this is a
widely known and thus broadly useful gauge of lexicon structure. Secondarily,
we can note that the “hundred-word” list used is actually 102 items, and the
“two-hundred-word” list is 181, not crucial facts but ones which could have
been highlighted by the author. Keen-eyed readers will see the
counterintuitive fact that, e.g., the word “roundo” from the 100-word is
missing in the 200-word set, again a detail that would merit explanation. In
addition, Chapter 5 is the first of several in which fairly important new
information is presented only in the Chapter Summary, when it ought to appear
earlier, in the chapter body; the most awkward instance of this is Chapter 7’s
note (207), “This observation, and this example, will be revisited in Section
7.7” – which does not exist, though §7.6 is the Chapter Summary, where again
discussion is put forth which would have been appropriate on page 207. Most of
these points amount more to editorial concerns than to reflections on the
author’s expertise. 

Further overt comparison and contrast of Operstein’s LF work with contact
linguistics’s usual understandings would add value to this book. For example,
her totally sound observation (146) that LF can be seen as “a Spanish-based
contact vernacular [that] is being relexified by Italian” might be reinforced
if she added that relexification is a hotly contested hypothesis in connection
with other contact idioms, especially creole languages. I would strongly urge
replacing Cameroon Pidgin English (157), a creole language, as an example of
pidgin type-token ratios. In Chapter 6, reference is made to the “predictions
regarding word formation patterns in creoles” by Plag (2009), from a 2008-2009
series of journal columns that were more theoretical than data-grounded,
making Operstein’s comparison with Parkvall and Bakker’s (2013) and Parkvall’s
(2019) empirically based pidgin surveys tenuous. 

One highly compelling observation that Operstein cites from her extensive
survey of the scholarly literature on LF is of a rare instance of potential
direct Arabic influence, from the latter’s “verb system, in which the
perfective is used for punctual or perfective events in the past and
imperfective for present, future, or imperfective past events” (228). We can
wish that this comment had been accompanied by substantial discussion, as,
aside from certain features of its phonology and lexicon, LF shows
surprisingly scant trace of the language that is native throughout most of its
speech territory. 

Passing reference is made to “DOM” without explanation on page 241, while its
referent, Differential Object Marking via the LF preposition “per”, is not
discussed until pages 273ff. That discussion is a compelling element of this
book’s argument for understanding LF as a koiné rather than as a pidgin. It
seems to me that Operstein is correct in concluding (274), “The Dictionnaire’s
data capture DOM at an incipient evolutionary stage in that it is confined to
the marking of objects expressed by personal pronouns”. She characterizes that
syntactic class as “occupy[ing] the highest slots in the animacy and
definiteness hierarchies”, but I would point out that the book documents
something slightly broader, examples of “per” + a pronoun having an inanimate
referent, as on page 247: “mi tenir thé mouchou bonou; mi quérir ti goustar
per ellou”, translated as ‘I’ve got some delicious tea; I want you to try it.’

A related detail is page 273’s citation of a previous scholar’s summary that
“per” flags speech-act participants as either direct or indirect objects, but
third persons as direct objects only, which could indicate a stronger degree
of DOM grammaticalization than just claimed. However, this may merely reflect
the infrequency of indirect objects and especially of third-person ones; there
is at least one counterexample, “mi poudir servir per ti per quoalké cosa?”,
‘Can I do anything for you?’ (270). This appears to be literally ‘Can I serve
you to/with anything?’. I understand the final three LF words as a “per”-
marked third person (and again an inanimate) indirect/oblique object pronoun.
It appears to me that the appropriate generalization is that LF third-person
pronouns reflect any non-subject argument, another finding completely in line
with typical DOM crosslinguistically. 

Personal pronominal systems in contact languages very often turn out, on
typologically informed analysis, to be more complex than they have
historically been described, as I have reported for Chinuk Wawa (Robertson
2007 and 2012), Cameroon Pidgin English (Robertson 2016), and Juba Arabic
(Robertson 2017). An extremely robust pattern, not mentioned but prominent in
this book, is of non-speech act participants being realized pronominally as
null (Ø) in subject position. (Operstein does note the optionality of
(speech-act participant) pronouns in polar questions, 276.) To randomly pick
three examples:

- “Ø dispiacher mouchou per mi” (272), translated ‘I am very sorry’ (literally
‘it displeases me much’)
- “Ø star acoussi” (156), translated as ‘It is so.’
- “Ø ténir fébra” (235), translated as ‘He’s got fever.’

This finding in actual example sentences contrasts with, and contradicts, the
Dictionnaire’s obviously artificial subject-pronoun paradigmatic forms (240)
“ellou andar” ‘he goes’, “ella andar” ‘she goes’, and “elli andar” ‘they go’. 

In focusing especially on the Lingua Franca pronouns, I hope to have given the
reader a sense of Operstein’s acuity and clarity of exposition. This book is a
very good example of a concise full-language description along diachronic and
synchronic axes. Plenty of data is provided, as should be the case with this
type of study; the most interested readers will find that they can make
additional discoveries about LF by proceeding from the author’s solid sketch.
“The Lingua Franca” is the most useful reference work in the history of
research on this language. 

REFERENCES

Parkvall, Mikael. 2019. Pidgins. In the Oxford Handbook of Language Contact,
Anthony P. Grant (ed.), 261-281. New York: Oxford University Press. 

Parkvall, Mikael and Peter Bakker. 2013. Pidgins. In Contact Languages: A
Comprehensive Guide, Peter Bakker and Yaron Matras (eds.), 15-64. Berlin: De
Gruyter Mouton.   

Plag, Ingo. 2008-2009. Creoles as interlanguages. Journal of Pidgin and Creole
Languages 23:109-130, 23:307-328, 24:119-138, 24:339-362. 

Robertson, David D. 2007. An Additional Pronoun and Hierarchies in Creolized
Chinuk Wawa. In Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives on Contact Languages,
Magnus Huber and Viveka Velupillai (eds.), 129-158. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Robertson, David D. 2012. Kamloops Chinuk Wawa, Chinuk Pipa, and the Vitality
of Pidgins. PhD dissertation (Linguistics), University of Victoria.  

Robertson, David D. 2016. (Book review of Nkengasong, Nkemngong. 2016.  A
grammar of Cameroonian Pidgin. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing.) LinguistList.

Robertson, David D. 2017. (Book review of Watson, Richard L. 2015.  Juba
Arabic for Beginners. [No location]: SIL International.) LinguistList.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

David Douglas Robertson PhD is a consulting linguist who specializes in
typologically informed documentation, description, and analysis of Pacific
Northwest contact languages (Chinuk Wawa, Métis French) and Indigenous
languages (Lower Chehalis, Lower Chinookan).<br /><br />He blogs daily at his
website, <br /><br />http://chinookjargon.com





------------------------------------------------------------------------------

***************************    LINGUIST List Support    ***************************
 The 2019 Fund Drive is under way! Please visit https://funddrive.linguistlist.org
  to find out how to donate and check how your university, country or discipline
     ranks in the fund drive challenges. Or go directly to the donation site:
               https://iufoundation.fundly.com/the-linguist-list-2019

                        Let's make this a short fund drive!
                Please feel free to share the link to our campaign:
                    https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-34-512	
----------------------------------------------------------