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- Thank you, and thank you very much for the invitation to join you today.
As speakers of English when we hear constructions like, "Get 'em, bring 'em,
take 'em," we analyze those as a verb and a pronoun. Get them or get him, bring them
or bring him. This analysis is supported by the fact that we read and write. We
rarely see the informal forms written it's usually the formal forms and through
schooling which generally tell us to use the formal forms and to leave the others
alone but we also know when it's appropriate to use which style in which
context. We're now going to move to a different context where speakers heard
those constructions but analyze them differently. When Australia was colonized,
there were about 250 languages spoken by indigenous people. The speakers of the
Australian languages and the English speakers had to learn to communicate with
each other very quickly. Usually the English speakers didn't learn much of the
Australian languages. The earnest was on the indigenous people to learn as much
English as they could to get by with.
So let's imagine that the English speakers we're using the informal constructions a
lot when they were speaking. "Take 'em over there, bring 'em back," constructions
like that that we use all the time without thinking about it. The speakers of the
Australian languages who hadn't yet learned English identified a pattern in
what they were hearing. When they heard verbs like get, bring, take they
frequently heard something like, "'-im" occurring after the verb but they didn't
hear that when the verb was something like walk which doesn't have a direct object.
So they came to analyze the "'-im" that we would think of as a pronoun as being a
grammatical element that attaches to a transitive verb. It's a verb with an
object but not to verbs like walk and run.
They didn't have literacy or schooling to influence their analysis. They just made
this analysis from identifying patterns in the language being spoken to them and what
they heard around them. So the transitive "-im," or the transitive marker is a new
structure that came in to that system that was not the same as a structure that was
already in English and it was not in the Australian languages either but we can
see where it came from but the Australian languages did influence that structure in
abstract ways. The form of "-im" is clearly from English but there are other
influences from the Australian languages. I've just listed a few of them here. One
is for example that in those languages when you have a transitive verb
construction it's a different construction from an intransitive verb. So
those speakers learned to pay attention to the transitivity of the verb in every
clause because that was required by their grammar. So it made sense to them based on
the first languages to have a different construction for a transitive
versus an intransitive verb.
In addition, there were rules for words and the sound systems within the language
that the Australian verbs didn't suit very well and the new analysis suited them
better. So for example words in Australian languages are often at least
two syllables long. If you have a short verb, adding the transitive marker made it
longer and conformed more to the rules of the first languages. So normally words in
Australian languages in that area didn't usually end with a cluster of consonants
at the end of the word. So again, adding that marker made the word shape conform
more to the type of verb that speakers of those languages were used to.
The "-im" structure is a good example of some characteristics of a pidgin. The word
forms come mostly from the language that was spoken by the socially dominant group
which we call the lexifier language but a lot of the structure and word meanings
come from the other multiple languages that were being spoken by the creators. In
addition, reanalysis take place such as what we've just seen through pattern
finding processes and second language learning processes. A pidgin is a means of
inter-group communication. You use it to speak to people who's
language you don't know and all of those speakers were still using their own first
languages when they spoke to people within their same group. The pidgin spread
throughout Australia as English speakers spread throughout Autralia and in each
place there were Australian languages and those speakers were contributing features
to the new system. Indigenous people where brought together in groups and needed to
interact with speakers of many other languages with whom traditionally they
wouldn't have interacted much or at all. So they all needed a way to speak to each
other and this system was a good system to build on in order to do that.
As speakers needed to talk about more and more topics with each other more and more
elements were added from English and also from the Australian languages. Varieties
of northern territory Kriol were derived from interactions of this kind.
Here's an example.
- [recording] Det mami-wan en det tu pikanini bin trai stop-im im bat
det debil-debil bin gwei garra det tu dog.
- And you can see there the transitive marker on the verb, which came
in via the pidgin. There's another interesting element there
which is, "bin" meaning past tense. Again, the form is from English have been, had
been but there's another reanalysis there so it just means simple past tense. It's
not part of the have been or had been construction. Reasearch
suggests that there's more than one developmental path for a Kriol language
but this has won a tested path. Again, the word forms come mostly from the socially
dominant language English but much of the structure and the word meanings come from
the other input languages. In this case, there was an earlier pidgin that fed in to
the Kriol. Reanalysis took place through pattern finding and second language
learning processes and the system expanded and developed. There was a prior
pidgin that was used for inter-group communication.
A Kriol is the first language of its speakers and is a full language. This
variety of Kriol continued to develop and stabilize probably up until about the
1940s and '50s and it currently has several varieties.
We'll turn now to another kind of contact language in another setting in Australia.
This is in a small Warlpiri community in the northern territory. In this community,
speakers over about the age of 35 mostly speak Warlpiri their traditional
language but they also code switch into varieties of English and Kriol. Code
switching is switching between languages in a single conversation and by Aboriginal
English there I mean English with elements of the indigenous languages and elements
of Kriol in it. Younger speakers, younger adults and children speak in a new way
which systematically combines elements from those sources in which we call Light
Warlpiri. Children learn to speak this language from when they first begin to
talk now. As they grow older, they also produce Walpiri and they code switch into
the English based varieties. The Children now learn Light Warlpiri and Walpiri from
birth. We'll look at a little background structure of the contributing languages
before we look at the structure of Light Warlpiri.
- [recording] Nyina-ja-lku-lpa-lu warlu-ngka jarntu-kurlu palka-kurlu.
- [recording] Puta wajili-pu-ngu kurdu-ngku-ju jarntu-ju ngula ka-ngu
kuuku-ngku. - As you can see there,
Warlpiri is a suffixing language. A lot of the
grammatical functions are indicated through suffixes on words. We can also see
here the difference between the transitive and intransitive construction that I
mentioned earlier that the pidgin creators paid attention to. The word there for
for child who's doing the chasing, and the monster who's doing the taking
have a suffix on them that doesn't occur on nouns when there's an intransitive verb
like walk. So it's in that way that these constructions are quite different and in
contrast varieties of English and Kriol indicate grammatical functions mostly
through separate words and with fairly fixed word order.
So how do this languages combine in this new system, light Warlpiri?
- [recording] Ngalipa jalangwi-m kam ka-kurl nyampu-kurra ngurra-kurra.
- [recording] Junga mayi nyuntu yu-m go karnta-kurl?
- [recording] Botul-ing i-m panturn-um taya.
- You might notice that their
English verbs there come and go. Much of the verb system of Light Warlpiri is from
Aboriginal English and Kriol verb structure but not entirely.
If you look at example three, there's actually a Warlpiri verb stem but it has
the Kriol transitive marker on it. So the over all structure is derived from those
languages. You can see there the Warlpiri suffixing. So we have the verbal structure
mostly from Aboriginal English and Kriol but we have all of the noun structure
retained from Warlpiri but in the verbal structure there are also innovations
which indicated in green, the "wi-m" and the "yu-m" and they're what we most
interested in today. This pattern of verbal structure from one source and noun
structure from another source is fairly unusual in the world's languages. The
differences between Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri are in the verb and auxiliary
structure, which have these clearly different forms but the underlying
abstract structure is more complicated. So the "wi-m" and "yu-m" constructions which
are the innovations are part of an overall system much of which already existed
in Kriol and Aboriginal English. You can see there that for each word there's a
pronoun element like we, you, a-rra which is from I and then there's another element
which mostly means time. So where did this wi-m and yu-m construction come from. We
know that it's not something that comes from English. Well, it seems that the -im
came from English I'm like the form but there's also an -im in the aboriginal
English in Kriol pronouns i-m and de-m. Through this process of creating the
structure they were reanalyzed so that instead of being a pronoun i-m or de-m
there were a new structure where they were divided into two parts.
Aboriginal English and Kriol has this past marker "bin" and that rarely occurs in
Light Warlpiri. So instead of using that what has happened is that the speakers
have taken the past meaning from bin and overlaid it on the -m element from English
and aboriginal English and Kriol such that they have this new structure where the -m
is a separate morphing with it's own meaning that means present or past or
non-future and then that is regularized across the system and you have a new
paradigm. Another example.
- [recording]"Ngaju-ng na a-rra ged-im ma kard. "
- [recording] "Yu-m ged-im nyurru first waya ngaju-janga. "
- There were some kids playing a card game for me and using that structure
there. So what are the influences on the new structure? Again, we see that the word
shape or form comes from the varieties of English or Kriol but the structure and
the meaning comes from multiple sources. In Warlpiri, the auxiliary has a structure
where there's a time element which is the "ka-" there meaning present and a pronoun
element and you can see that all through the system these are affixes. They're not
separate words. So I think that this underlying structure of wanting a time
element and a pronoun element affixed together was part of the influence that
fed into the new system. In Warlpiri, the verb and the auxiliary forms combine in
different kinds of contructions to give the same kinds of semantic readings as we
find in Light Warlpiri. So in the final column those three
meanings of non-future, future and desiderative or one, two are exactly the
categories that we find in Light Walpiri but they're not structural categories in
Warlpiri they're semantic categories and again they've been overlaid onto the
forms in Light Warlpiri. So how did the whole language come to be? It was through
a two-step process when the adult groups who are now about 35 years old with
children I think that other adults spoke to them in what is known as a baby talk
register and in that register they code switched a lot and they code switched in a
particular pattern. So it would be something like this where there would be a
Walpiri sentence but they would insert a Kriol pronoun and verb into that
sentence and that is the pattern that the children then conventionalized by
analyzing it as a single system. At the same time, they added the innovations that
we've just been talking about. That group of children who I think did this
maybe when they were three, four or five certainly before they were teenagers. They
then grew up had children of their own and so now those children learned that
language as one of their first languages along with Warlpiri and it's their
primary language. So the path to this language is a little different. It wasn't
created for inter-group communication. It was created within one group of people in
one community and it's only spoken within that group of people in that community.
The speakers were multilingual there was a lot of code switching. It was directed to
children, very young children in a particular pattern. They then
conventionalized it and reanalyzed some of the input they were hearing and then
regularized their analysis to create new paradigms.
From English and Kriol we get words and a lot of verb structure. From Warlpiri we
get words, the noun structure and also abstract verbal structure and this new
system is the first language of the current generations. So what we've been
able to see almost in real time is a new language developed and an innovative
structure in that language through a two-step process. Adults had fairly
systematic code switching in the speech that they were directing to children and
then the children had a very creative role in conventionalizing that input and adding
the innovations. The overall structure is unusual because it combines the noun
structure from one type of language with the verb structure for another and there
are these innovations which are interesting in that we can see exactly
where they've come from. We can see exactly the reanalysis that have taken
place and we can see that at the end of that reanalysis there is a new
construction. Thank you.