11/03/2020
You are invited to a “Lunchtime Linguistics” lecture by Prof. Theresa Biberauer (Cambridge University and Stellenbosch University)
Title of the talk: “In contact, 1+1≠2: Evidence from Afrikaans Differential Object Marking”
Date: Wednesday 18 March 2020.
Time: 13h00-14h00
Venue: Room 501, Arts and Social Science building
Abstract:
Language contact scenarios are very frequently approached as situations where one language can borrow/adopt items and/or patterns found in another. Where languages are viewed as what Chomsky (1986) calls E-languages - i.e. external entities rather than individual, internal languages (I-languages) which are necessarily shaped by human cognition - it is very easy to think of language contact as involving, essentially, the importing of a “foreign” structure from one system into another (a phenomenon that language purists then feel justified in condemning). The purpose of my talk will be to underline a growing understanding in contemporary language contact studies of the significance of the fact that language contact is not, at base, contact between languages, but, instead, contact between speakers and, importantly, acquirers of languages. From this perspective, the incorporation of new items/structures into a language is necessarily shaped by the organisation of the speaker/acquirer’s existing language system(s), becoming something different in the context of the new host language. I will demonstrate this “more-than” perspective on language contact on the basis of an initially contact-driven property of spoken varieties of Afrikaans that makes them unique in the Germanic context, so-called Differential Object Marking (DOM). DOM systems differentiate between direct objects of different kinds, with “more salient” objects attracting a marking that “less salient” objects lack. Malay varieties feature DOM (den Besten 2000) and seem a plausible source for the spoken Afrikaans DOM-marking use of vir (e.g. Ek sien vir jou.). Crucially, however, the Afrikaans DOM system has distinctive properties that show very clearly that the initial 17th century and subsequent contact led to much more than just the addition of a “foreign” element: Afrikaans DOM is very specifically adapted to the specifications of Afrikaans.
