Intra-system variability and change in nominal and verbal morphology
Barbara E. Bullock and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio
The Pennsylvania State University
It is a relatively uncontroversial assumption in studies of language variation that
contact between languages, particularly contact defined by extensive bilingualism, may
both enhance linguistic variation and accelerate linguistic change at all levels of the
grammar (see Dorian 1986, Silva-Corvalán 1986, 1991, 1994/2000, Thomason 2001). If
it can reasonably be argued that individual bilingualism hastens inherent grammatical
evolution, then it follows that the changes witnessed at the individual level should
parallel internal diachronic developments. In this work, we draw on data from FrenchEnglish and Spanish-English bilinguals to demonstrate how the fluctuations in the
expression of nominal and verbal features in bilingual speech are indeed reminiscent of
common processes of historical linguistic development in that change in the specification
of grammatical features need not signal any fundamental loss of formal linguistic
properties. In essence, in both historical and bilingual contexts, the grammar remains
unchanged. However, since a ‘new grammar’ could conceivably arise from external
influence, our analysis considers the extent and the limits of structural convergence, a
vehicle of language change that is unique to bilingual contexts. It has been suggested that
language loss via convergence is selective and does not affect all linguistic domains
equally. Thus, phonology may be affected in convergence (Paradis 2000, Bullock &
Gerfen forthcoming a) while syntax may remain unchanged, and within syntax proper,
the computational core may be impervious to change while the periphery may be
vulnerable to external influence.
Our inquiry is similar to that of others: “If bilinguals display patterns of language
loss, of particular interest for linguistic theory is to identify potential vulnerable areas of
grammatical knowledge, and to seek reasons to explain why systematic patterns of
erosion or incompleteness, if they exist, look the way they do” (Montrul forthcoming). In
this paper, we seek an explanation for why the patterns of loss in bilingual speech mirror
those of diachronic change. Ultimately, we propose that language change over time is not
the immediate result of incomplete acquisition or faulty transmission rather change is the
result of the acquisition of a system that is not a complete replication (Bullock & Gerfen
forthcoming a), a transmission pattern that is especially accelerated in a bilingual
contexts. Our work adds to the literature in historical Romance linguistics in both
concrete and theoretical ways. First, we provide new empirical evidence from unique
sources that speak to the issue of change in progress in a naturalistic bilingual context.
And by interpreting our evidence in light of theoretical advances in the study of
bilingualism, we are able to probe directly the longstanding problem of the role of
external convergence in language change.
The paper is organized as follows: in §1, we provide an overview of the structural
variability and convergence that may be observed in language contact situations. It will
be demonstrated that the components of the grammar of contact varieties of French and
Spanish may be differentially affected by external influence; that is, phonology may be
subject to inter-systemic convergence (Paradis 2000, Bullock & Gerfen, forthcoming a,
b), whereas the formal computational syntax may be impervious to external influence
(Schwartz & Sprouse 1996, Gavruseva & Lardière 1996, Lardière 1998a, 1988b, 2000,
Sorace 2000, Haznedar 2001, Toribio 2001, Montrul 2003). In §2, we consider extant
evidence from studies of heritage and second-language bilinguals whose non-target forms
may be variously ascribed to deficiencies in morphological spell-out or to convergence at
the syntax-pragmatic interface (Sorace 1990, 1993, Silva Corválan 1991, 1994/2000,
Paradis & Navarro 2003, Montrul forthcoming, Toribio forthcoming). §3 introduces
empirical evidence from two case studies of bilinguals—one French-English and one
Spanish-English– in which the speakers present ample evidence of morphological
reduction and of apparent syntactic convergence in the absence of standardized norms. In
§4, the patterns observed in those data are likened to general diachronic changes that
cannot be unequivocally accredited to language contact. In situations similar to the cases
under study, eventual syntactic change may arise from intergenerational transmission of
reanalyzed morph-syntactic mappings (or from morphological reanalysis (King
2000)).That is, external contact does not directly induce formal linguistic change; rather,
novel structures are inferred from non-target, though licit, native language forms (Meisel
2001).
1. Variability and convergence in language contact situations
It is well-established by linguistic research that a decline in the pattern or the
frequency of use of a language in a bilingual setting may lead to significant variability
and linguistic change, sometimes compressed into a small amount of time. The rapidity
of change is documented most fully by Schmidt (1985) and that of variation in a
homogeneous bilingual community by Dorian (1994). As these authors have shown,
variability may be particularly manifest in communities or contexts where normative
linguistic pressures are lacking. Especially salient in such situations is the inconsistency
of the expression of morphological features. The exponents of gender, number and
person, or of tense-mood-aspect can be subject to both inter-speaker and intra-speaker
variation. For example, in the French-English data to be discussed more fully in §3, the
past participle of the verb mourir ‘to die’ is produced by one speaker as mort and by
another as meuru. The former is the standard participle form although it has become
syncretic with respect to gender, which can be phonologically signaled for this verb
(mor(t), MASC. versus mor[t]e , FEM.). The latter is an analogical reformation, composed
of the stem of the indicative singular, meur-, and an overgeneralization of the –u
participle marker. These forms were produced in the same stretch of discourse when the
study participants were conversing with one another. Especially revealing is the fact that
these speakers are generally one another’s sole interlocutors yet they apparently have no
consensus about which form is the correct one. Thus, in the absence of social pressure,
variation persists.
Thomason (1997: 12) reminds us that “any and all contact-induced changes are
possible,” yet much of the variation and change seen in the bilingual data under
discussion in the present work and in the extant bilingual literature nonetheless follows a
relatively unexceptional path. That is to say, the various kinds of neutralization revealed
in bilingual studies —such as syncretism (shown above), analogical extensions, and
paradigm leveling (also shown above)—occur regularly cross-dialectally and
diachronically and are generally accompanied by competition, perhaps even free
variation, between conservative and innovative forms. It is important to note that variable
feature realization, including the absence of any exponent for a given feature, need not
signal a concomitant loss of a grammatical category. Thus, the lack of gender realization
on the past participle of mourir among our French-English bilinguals does not imply that
the category of gender or its attendant agreement properties have been lost. Instead,
variability of this sort may represent a deficiency in the mapping between morphology
and syntax (i.e., morphological Spell-out) such as that which is frequently attested in L2
acquisition (Gavruseva & Lardière 1996, Schwartz and Sprouse 1996, Meisel 1997,
Lardière 1998a, 1988b, 2000, Haznedar 2001, Prévost and White 1999, 2000,
Herschensohn 2001).
Attendant to internally-induced changes, languages in contact situations often
manifest transparent properties of inter-linguistic influence such as borrowings, semantic
extensions, or syntactic calquing. It is, of course, possible to over-attribute change in
bilingual speech to externally-induced interference. While contact may hasten change, it
does not automatically follow that change is the result of external influence (SilvaCorvalán 1994/2000). Instead, the linguistic restructuring that occurs in bilingual contexts
often parallels that which is attested in monolingual communities. However, structural
similarity or overlap between languages may reveal areas of the grammatical system that
are especially vulnerable to external interference. In such cases, language change may
reasonably be imputed to external linguistic influence, or convergence. Much recent
research on language variation and change in a bilinguals’ grammar suggests that the
convergence of grammatical properties is either of a lexical nature (King 2000, Montrul
2003) or it occurs primarily at the interface of syntax and pragmatics/semantics (Silva
Corválan 1991, 1994, Montrul forthcoming, Toribio forthcoming). In essence, while
lexical and pragmatic aspects of a language may be borrowed, the purely formal aspects
of a linguistic system appear to remain intact. This implies that within the syntax, at least,
only the peripheral features are affected by convergence, not the core.
While syntax proper (i.e., the purely formal system) is arguably immune to
convergence, there is evidence that the phonological system may be vulnerable to
external influence. The impact of external influence on the phonology but not the syntax
of bilingual children has been demonstrated by Paradis (2000) who suggests that her
results may be merely an artifact of her methodology. However, Bullock & Gerfen
(forthcoming a, b) similarly argue that the introduction of the American rhoticized schwa,
as in sir, as a replacement for the mid front rounded vowels in the French vocalic system
of Frenchville bilinguals is a change that can only be understood as externally-induced.
That the phonetic system of bilinguals reflects convergence in measurable ways has been
amply demonstrated (see Piske, Flege & MacKay 2001 for an overview). However,
linguists generally assume that the phonological system is more abstract and formally
organized than the phonetic system and thus, like syntax, probably resistant to
systemically disruptive external influence (on phonology, see Cook 1989, 1991). In the
case of Frenchville French, the “borrowed” rhoticized schwa has a number of direct
formal reflexes; it has resulted in the loss of allophonic variation, a loss of possible
functional contrasts, it has possibly increased phonological markedness, and perhaps
most important, it has established a phonological contrast between the new rhoticized
schwa and a French schwa that was not preexistent.
The differential impact of convergence over various domains of the grammar is not at
issue in this analysis. However, we would like to tentatively suggest, following Bullock
& Gerfen (forthcoming a), that the categorical separation of phonology and phonetics can
probably not be maintained (Ohala 1981). As the phonetic system is open to
convergence, so too is the phonology. What then distinguishes phonology from syntax
with regard to convergence is that the surface realization of a formal syntactic feature is
entirely incidental and dependent on the lexicon; in fact, features like case may have no
concrete expression at all. Aspects of formal syntax have no necessary overt
correspondents but even in its most formal aspects, phonology is dependent upon and, in
very large part, cannot be divorced from phonetic features.
2. Target-deviant morpho-syntax
Numerous authors have examined non-target nominal and verbal forms on the part of
second language bilinguals. While early research had sought to draw direct parallels
between morphological inflections and their structural correlates (cf., Eubank 1993/1994;
Vainikka and Young-Scholten 1998), more recent work converges on the dissociation
between the exponents of inflection and the presence of higher functional categories (cf.,
Schwartz and Sprouse 1996, Lardière, 1998a, 1998b; Haznedar, 2001; Herschensohn
2001). Thus, for example, Herschensohn (2001) reports on a longitudinal study of two
second-language learners of French who demonstrate knowledge of verb raising
independently of the acquisition of paradigms associated with agreement; indeed, as
shown in (1), the development of higher functional categories TP, AgrP, and CP precedes
accuracy in TP-related morphology (cf., Haznedar 2001).
(1)
A quelle heure est-ce que le musée ouvrer?
At what hour is it that the museum open-INF.
“At what time does the museum open ? ”
Cf., A quelle heure est-ce que le musée ouvre ? (Herschensohn 2001, Emma III)
Analogous findings from Lardière’s (1998a, 1998b) examination of the naturalistic
fossilized English-language productions of a native Chinese speaker lead her to conclude
that areas of divergence from the target system reside in “precisely those PF areas
increasingly seen as ‘external’ or ‘extraneous’ to the computational (CHL) component of
the grammar (1998b: 370).”
The impoverished forms examined by researchers in first language attrition and
convergence also fall outside the scope of the computational system, which is regulated
by purely syntactic/formal properties such as Agreement and Case, and into the
interpretive module, which is subject to properties of meaning such as Tense/Mood,
Topic, and Focus (cf., Silva-Corvalán 1989, 1994/2000; Sánchez 1997; Toribio
forthcoming; Zapata et al. 2002; Montrul 2003, forthcoming; Paradis and Navarro 2003).
For instance, Montrul’s studies of heritage speakers of Spanish reveal variable behavior
in the production and interpretation of tense, mood and aspect morphology (Montrul
2002), as in (2a), in lexical selection and expression of unaccusativity and unergativity
(Montrul, in press), and in the distribution of subject and object arguments and
semantically conditioned clitic-doubling (Montrul forthcoming), as in (2b).
(2)
a. Cuando *caminó [PRET.] por el bosque se encontró con el lobo. (Cf.,
caminaba [IMP] ‘walked’)
‘When she walked through the forest she met up with the wolf.’ (Montrul
2002; early child L2)
El llegó a la casa de la abuela antes que ella llegó [PRET.] (Cf., llegara [PAST
SUBJ] arrived’)
“He arrived at the grandmother’s house before she arrived.” (Montrul 2002;
simultaneous bilingual)
b. Y lo que hizo el lobo era también *comió la Caperucita. Lo que hizo el
cazador para dar un lección al lobo fue cortar el estómago del lobo y *quitar la
abuela y la Caperucita. (Cf., comer a la Caperucita… cortarle el estómago… y
quirtar a la abuelita)
“And what the wolf did was also eat the Little Riding Hood. What the hunter
did to teach a lesson to the wolf was to cut the wolf’s stomach and take out the
grandmother and the Little Riding Hood.” (Montrul forthcoming, subject #
210, advanced)
Sánchez offers similar conclusions in her studies of bilinguals residing in a QuechuaSpanish contact situation: bilinguals evince convergent, non-target semantic features of
definiteness and specificity in the use of Spanish null object pronouns (Sánchez 1997), in
(3a), and convergent aspectual and discourse-oriented features in verbal selection and
morphological specification (Sánchez forthcoming), in (3b).
(3)
a. Nomás sacas [todas las yerbas]i y después que sacas [proi] echas abono.
“You just pull out all the herbs and after you pull them out you put fertilizer.”
(Sánchez 1997)
b. Había una abuelita…no…una viejeta…vieja. Ya había…estaba sembrando y
habé…ha encontrado un pájaro. De(s)pués el pajáro estaba enfermo... y
después se llevó a su casa. Eso hizo, después, daba alimento.
“There was a granny, no an old woman. (She) was sowing and she found a
bird. Then the bird was ill and then (she) took it to her house. She did that and
she later gave (it) food.” Sánchez forthcoming).
The core linguistic system of all of these Spanish-English and Spanish-Quechua
bilinguals approximates that of the full variety spoken by their Spanish monolingual
counterparts, but those areas where the syntax interfaces with other cognitive or extragrammatical areas are vulnerable to underspecification or respecification.
From the foregoing discussion, it should be evident that morphological errors and
target-deviant semantic and pragmatic performance are to be attributed to deficiencies in
mapping at Spell-out and the interface levels of lexical-semantics, syntax-semantics and
discourse-pragmatics, rather than to discrepancies in formal (i.e., [-interpretable])
morpho-syntactic features. The ensuing paragraphs turn to the examination of data from
two bilingual case studies that, despite their different natures, reveal strikingly similar
morpho-syntactic properties, further confirming that variability and loss in the PF and
interpretative interfaces are not necessarily accompanied by a similar fluctuation or
degradation in core syntax.
3. Two Case Studies
Our study references two naturalistic language samples. One data set consists of the
transcripts of audio-taped interviews with two brothers who reside in the formerlyFrench-speaking enclave community of Frenchville in Pennsylvania. The other set is a
record of journal entries that depict the life of a Spanish-speaking agricultural worker as
her family follows the ripening beet crops in south- and mid-western States. The Frenchspeaking participants in the present analysis are two brothers, aged 69 and 72 years old at
the time of the recordings. They are not literate in French. However, unlike other
residents of the area, they have continued to speak French either occasionally with one
another or with the first author of this article. Both have lived in Frenchville all of their
lives, and both spoke French at home exclusively until they married and moved out of
their parents’ home in their early twenties. Because their wives do not speak French,
English is now the language of their homes. Both brothers terminated their formal
educations by the age of 14. The data referred to in this paper were collected in structured
but naturalistic field interviews with the first author in 2002. The interviews represent
structured discourse in that they are monitored and recorded, however, the participants
are comfortable and familiar with the interviewer with whom they have little trouble
producing or comprehending French. Often, they do not hesitate to go beyond the
questions asked, as in the following citation where one of the brothers offers, unsolicited,
his view of language loss.
(4)
Ça prend pas trop de temps pour le perdre si tu ne parler [sic] pas. Je parler [sic]
avec lui de temps en temps un mot ou deux ou trios et c’est tout. C’est peut-êre
quelque chose qu’on dit l’un l’autre qu’on ne peut pas dire à personne d’autre.
‘It doesn’t take much time to lose it if you don’t speak it. I speak with him from
time to time a word, or two, or three but that’s all. It’s perhaps something that we
say to one another that we can’t say to anyone else.’
As with the transcriptions of the Frenchville interviews, the language samples
contained in the diary of the migrant worker are very revealing of the author. The diary
entries in general demonstrate that the author has had insufficient training to instruct her
in the normative conventions of Spanish orthography; it represents a simplification of the
complex mapping between sound and graphemes to a few known values, and reproduces
many of the phonological characteristics of her rural dialect. The lexicon of the text
speaks to her occupational segregation in agricultural communities with other speakers of
colloquial Mexican Spanish, as well as to contact with English. For example, there appear
phonetically unincorporated forms such as stand by and workshop, and others that follow
the structural organization of the Spanish language, e.g., fil ‘field’ and files ‘fields,’
which are phonologically and morphologically well-formed in Spanish, semantic
extensions, e.g., atender for ‘to attend,’ rather than ‘attend to,’ registrar for ‘to register’
rather than ‘to check,’ and loan translations, such as pero ya mero no la hacía ‘I nearly
didn’t make it (lit. trans.), which may be uninterpretable to the reader who has no
knowledge of English.
(5)
Sali para D. en avion a las 2 de la tarde, pero ya mero no la hacía como antes de
llegar al aero-puerto se nos fletio la llanta de la troca de J. Estuve en D. por cerca
de 4 horas. estaba en “stand by.” [sic]
“I left for D. by plane at 2 in the afternoon, but I almost didn’t make it since
before arriving to the airport we got a flat tire on J’s truck. I was in D. for close to
4 hours. I was on ‘stand by.’”
With respect to morphology and syntax, both data sets are replete with evidence of
language impoverishment (relative to the full variety). Widespread is gender and number
overgeneralization in nouns and adjectives, as in (6). Witness the Spanish words that end
in –a, identified with feminine gender (6g), and the overgeneralization of the plural
chevaux into singular paradigms in the Frenchville data (6c).
(6)
Alterations in nominal gender and number agreement
a. Il fume un pipe (cf., une [FEM])
“He smokes a pipe”
b. un bête français (cf., une bête française [FEM])
“a French beast” (idiomatic, “a French idiot”)
c. deux chevaux ... le chevau noir...le chevau blanc (cf., cheval [SG])
“two horses...the black horse...the white horse”
d. un bouteille de bière (cf., une [FEM])
“a bottle of beer”
e. à la moulin (cf., au=a le [MASC])
“to the mill”
f. notre premier cousin [sic] (cf., cousine [FEM]))
“our first cousin”
g. Nosotros en la medio dia vinimos comer. [sic]
“In the morning we came to eat.” (cf., el medio día])
h. Que diferencia no tener ninguna problema. [sic]
“What a difference not to have any problems.” (self-correction)
i. Fuimos a dejar el televición viejo a la casa. [sic]
“We went to leave the old television at the house.” (cf., el televisor viejo
[MASC]/la televición vieja [FEM])
j. Nomás los muchachos de mí tios…[sic]
“Only my uncles’ kids…” (cf., mis tíos [PL])
k. Le vamos a llamar al Viejo otra vez, al del Betavel para ver cuando esta listos
para irnos. [sic]
“We’re going to call the old man again, the one of the Beet crop/s to see when
it/they are ready so that we can go.” (cf., están listos [PL] or está listo [SG])
Perhaps the most immediately outstanding features of the French data set are the
abundance of infinitival verbal forms in finite clauses (7a-c), overextension of auxiliary
avoir (7d), and analogical stem forms such as (e-i).1
(7)
Alterations in verbal morphology: French
a. Ma femme ne parler pas; sa femme ne parler [INF] pas. (cf., parle)
“My wife doesn’t speak; his wife doesn’t speak.”
b. Ça prend pas trop de temps pour le perdre si tu ne parler pas. Je parler avec
lui de temps en temp...(cf., parles, parle)
“It doesn’t take a long time to lose it if you don’t speak it. I speak with him
from time to time.”
c. Eux allaient à l’école parler français i pourraient pas parler anglais (cf.,
parlant)
“They went to school speaking French ; they couldn’t speak English.
d. ...il s’a fait tuer dans une accident (cf., s’est fait)
“he got himself killed in an accident”
e. Un a meuru .... (cf., une est morte)
“One (fem.) died”
f. Une est mort (cf., une est morte)
“One (fem.) died”
g. Notre soeur qui viver va être septante huit le sept de mars [sic] (cf., vit)
“Our sister who is still living will be seventy eight the seventh of March”
h. Pourquoi que disez soixante quinze... (cf. dîtes)
“Why say seventy five...”
i. Oui, il peurrait. (cf. pouvait)
“Yes, he could”
In the Spanish data, the result of erosion, made more transparent since verbal
morphology is more robust, is a number of verbs that follow the regular conjugation. We
observe that in the preterit tense, the second person singular form may contain an
epenthetic final -s by analogy with other forms, as in hablastes for hablaste ‘you spoke;’
two patterns of regularization of irregular stem-changing verbs such as venir ‘to come’
and quebrar ‘to break’—either the full paradigm is made to include the diphthong, or
1
In Frenchville French, the infinitival suffix of the first conjugation is homophonous with the
second person plural and with the imperfect of the singular paradigms. The first author has erred
on the side of caution in transcribing as imperfect only those forms that entail past reference.
none of them do (i.e., the stem-change in -ie is present in various forms of the present
tense of venir: viene, vienieron ‘s/he comes, they come;’ but we also note the
simplification of the stem-changing verb quebrar [cf., quiebra]); also noteworthy are
forms such as trajieron ‘they brought’ [cf., trajeron] and poné ‘I put’ [cf., puse] both
illustrative of the general process of regularization, and the shift in the first person plural
personal ending -mos, which often becomes -nos, by analogy with the subject and object
pronouns nosotros and nos.
(8)
Alterations in verbal morphology: Spanish
a. Si la sierras se quebra… [sic]
“If you close it it breaks…” [cf., quiebra]
b. Sabes salemos todos negríos de la labor. [sic]
“We come out all black from the field.” [cf., salimos]
c. Para los muchachos cuando vienieran a medio dia. [sic]
“For the boys when they would come at mid-day.” [cf., vinieran]
d. Ama me digo que le poniera un bote de agua… [sic]
“Ama told me to put a bottle of water…” [cf., pusiera]
e. Casi simpre oyemos la estancíon… [sic]
“We always listen to the station…” [cf., oímos]
f. Es nativo de C. donde vivamos nosotros. [sic]
“He is a native of C. where we live.” [cf., vivimos]
g. Nadie me ha escribido. [sic]
“No one has written to me.” [cf., escrito]
h. Pues digo que si esperáranos… [sic]
“Well I say that if we wait…” [cf., esperáramos]
As noted, the overt syntax is the part of the language that appears most resistant to
internally motivated change. Of course, linguistic change is accelerated as a consequence
of direct interlingual influence. Attested in the interviews and the journal are a number of
patterns that may be attributed to contact with English models. Although some of these
patterns may appear to induce syntactic change—e.g., the ordering of pas relative to
justement in (9b)—they may be more reasonably analyzed as semantic extensions (cf.,
Otheguy 1995).
(9)
Lexico-semantic calquing:
a. Fred, il est 25 puis et ma fille elle est 40. (cf., il a 25 ans; elle en a 40)
“Fred, he is 25 (years old) and my daughter, she is 40.”
b. b. C’est pas justement la même chose aussi. (cf., c’est pas du tout la même
chose)
“It’s just not the same thing.”
c.
...deux ans plus vieux que moi ...elle a cinq ans, cinq ans plus vieille que moi.
(cf., deux an plus âgée )
“…Two years older than me… she is five years older than me.”
d. Combien vieux que croyez que j’ai ? (cf., Vous croyez que j’ai quel âge?)
“How old do you think I am?”
e. Estuve en D. por cerca de 4 horas. [sic]
“I was in D. for close to 4 hours.” [cf., casi]
f. A la noche vamos al “chancleo” [sic]
“At night we’re going to a party.” [cf., en]
g. Nos fuimos para L., como 9 millas de allí. [sic]
“We went to L., about 9 miles from there” [cf., como a 9 millas]
h. Pos yo digo a uno le hace sentirse… [sic]
“Well I say it makes one feel…” [cf., digo que a uno]
i. Ama digo que no movíeramos nada hasta sepamos de verdad. [sic]
“Ama told us not to move anything until we know for sure.” [cf., hasta que
sepamos]
j. Bueno las tengo que contestar pronto para salgan el Lunes. [sic]
“Well I have to respond to them quickly so that they go out on Monday.” [cf.,
para que salgan]
The patterns exemplified in (10) are also possibly due to contact with English, although
they are already extant in French and Spanish. Included among these examples are the
extension of possessive pronouns in the expression of inalienable possession, as in (10a,
f), preposition stranding (10b), the licensing of null objects (10b, d, e, g), object pronouns
in situ (10c), and non-contrastive use of subject pronouns (10h).
(10)
Non-target syntax-pragmatic features:
a. botter son derrier (cf., le derrière)
“kick his behind”
b. ...il y a personne là où elle vit pour parler avec (cf., à qui elle peut parler )
“...there is no one there where she lives for her to speak with”
c. Aussi mo’ garçon ... il est avec nous, il parle pas français, parle pas à lui. (cf.,
lui parle pas)
“Also my son, he’s with us, he doesn’t speak French, [we] don’t speak to him
[in French].”
d. Et lui, il y a peut-être une semaine ou deux semaines que je vois pas du tout.
(cf., je le vois pas)
“And him, there’s maybe a week or two weeks when I don’t seem [him] at
all.”
e. ...son père a vendu à un autre homme (cf., l’a vendue)
“...his father sold [it] to another man”
f. Las flores que estan en un lado de mi ventana se fueron cayendo las ramas.
[sic]
“The stems on the flowers that are on one side of my windows started falling.”
(cf., a las flores…se le fueron cayendo)
g. Siempre había sábido que el doctor B. era muy buena jente yo le dije era. [sic]
“She had always known Dr. B. to be a good person. I said he was that.” (cf., le
dije que lo era]
h. yo le dije era, pero lo que yo no entiendo es porque ni una receta le dieron.
(cf., le dije ue lo era, pero lo que no entiendo)
“I said he was, but what I don’t understand is why they didn’t even give him a
prescription.”
It is clear that in surviving largely as an oral language, the French of the Frenchville
brothers and the Spanish of the Mexican migrant worker have been altered in isolation
from the codified norm and have adapted in contact with English. Significantly, however,
while specific morphological manifestations and syntactic options may be prone to
erosion and variability, underlying formal features seem resistant to deterioration or respecification. Thus, mistakes in verbal affixation need not signal a lack of knowledge of
the formal morphological features that motivate and license specific derivations. For
example, even a cursory review of both data sets sampled attests to the availability of
abstract functional features and projections that require verb raising. Consider in this
respect the correct placement of the inflected (or infinitival) verb relative to the negative
pas, in (11).
(11)
a. Je ne peux pas me rappeler.
“I can’t remember.”
b. AgrP
3
Spec
Agr’
Jei /Ellei
3
Agr
TP
ne + V
3
Spec
T’
ti
3
T
NegP
tneg+v
3
Spec
Neg’
pas
3
Neg
VP
tv
3
Spec
proi
V’
g
V
tv
Also noteworthy in the French data is the preverbal positioning of the object clitic (12a),
which is assumed to be licensed in AgrO (12b). Although the data demonstrate frequent
correct use of direct object clitic, and occasionally of indirect object clitics as well (as in
12a), it merits pointing out, however, that there is a preference for in-situ indirect object
pronouns, as shown above in (10c).
(12)
a. Elle m’a dit qu’elle ne peut pas le parler.
“She told me that she can not speak it.”
b.
TP
3
Spec
T’
3
T
AgrOP
3
Spec
AgrO’
3
AgrO
AgrIOP
le
3
Spec
AgrIO’
3
AgrIO
VP
(lui)
Similarly, the Spanish data exemplify the presence and projection of uninterpretable
features and functional projections that license postverbal and null referential subjects, as
in (13), though these options may not be fully exploited (see 10h).
(13)
a. pero no estaban saliendo los aviones por la tempestad que [pro] había. [pro]
estaba llovisnando bien recío. [pro] llegamos a T. a las doce de la noche.
“But the planes weren’t leaving because of the storm there was. It was raining
real hard. We arrived in T. at midnight.”
b. AgrP
3
Spec
Agr’
3
Agr
TP
V
3
Spec
T’
[pro]/DPi
3
T
VP
tv
3
Spec
V’
ti
g
V
tv
In similar fashion, there is evidence of the articulation of structure of the left periphery
(14), but there is no contingency between the availability of these functional projections
and their selection for particular interpretive options.
(14) a.
todos mis gastos A.C. pago por ellos. yo ni dinero traíba. [sic]
“All of my expenses A.C. paid for them. I didn’t even carry any money.”
b.
Top
3
todos mis gastos Top’
3
Top
FocP
3
Spec
Foc’
A.C. i
3
Foc
AgrP
3
Spec
Agr’
ti
3
Agr
TP
As shown, our speakers exhibit all of the characteristics of the full variety spoken by
monolinguals as regards core grammatical phenomena. Hence, the morpho-syntactic
features that subserve French- and Spanish-language constructs do not appear to be lost
although their exponents (in morphological Spell-out in the selection of specific syntactic
options) may be target-deviant.
4. Analysis and Synthesis
The evidence from the Spanish-English and French-English bilinguals studied in §3,
coupled with similar findings from different bilingual language pairings (Hulk & Müller
2000, Sanchez 2004) from L2 acquisition data (Herschensohn 2001, Montrul 2002), and
from studies of attrition (Silva-Corvalán 1991, 1994/2000, Toribio 2001) all point toward
similar conclusions. That is, deficiencies in morphological inflections do not entail
syntactic erosion in bilingual speech nor does the presence of non-target syntactic
structures. The latter can arguably be attributed to the dual effects of lexico-semantic
calquing and the over-extension of native-language syntactic options into new pragmatic
contexts. As we have argued, while showing all these non-target-like features, the
Spanish diary entries and the speech of the Frenchville residents manifest the properties
diagnostic of a complete syntactic system with intact functional projections.
We believe that these data are of particular interest to the issue of diachronic language
change for several reasons. First, the inflectional deficits that occur in these data are quite
similar to, if not identical with, normal processes of language change. Thus, our speakers
deploy mechanisms of analogy, paradigm leveling and, semantic extension, which are
often characterized as ‘impoverishments’ in the linguistic systems of contemporary
bilinguals but which, in fact, reflect quite unexceptional diachronic developments. On the
other hand, these data do not appear to speak at all to the issue of structural changes over
time because, as we have argued, despite the occasional selection of contextually
inappropriate syntactic options, the core syntactic systems of bilinguals remain
unchanged. In essence, we have said that our speakers demonstrate unique structural
properties but none that indicate any parametric shifts in the formal grammar. If it is
indeed the case that leakage between the two grammars of a bilingual does not impact the
formal syntax then how can we account for parametric structural change through time
and how do we reconcile this with the argument that “bilingualism is also a crucial, and
possibly necessary, condition for grammatical change to become possible” (Meisel
2001:3).
We maintain that bilingual data such as ours point to the possibility of observing
grammatical change in progress. For our speakers, variation is not confined to inflectional
morphology but extends as well into particular syntactic properties of grammar. We
propose that bilinguals, particularly those for whom one language has become relatively
‘weaker’ than the other, tend to reduce the syntactic options available for expressing
pragmatic differences in a language and to fix on the structure that is the most congruent
across languages (Muysken 2000). There is, then, at least the possibility that a child
acquiring French or Spanish from speakers like those examined here may reinterpret the
preference for certain structures as the syntactic rule, leading them to eliminate options
since the pragmatic contrast that originally guided the variation in syntactic expression
has been neutralized.
Imagine, for instance, that a child were acquiring the Spanish of the diary writer that
is described above. Provided that the social conditions were available for the compete
acquisition of this variety of the language, from the input, the child could be led to
reanalyze the grammar of this language as one with overt subject pronouns and fixed
SVO word order. That is, what was once a pragmatic option would become a permanent
syntactic change. Similarly, acquiring French under the same conditions from our
Frenchville study participants might lead a child to construct a new grammar in which
only direct object clitics were placed pre-verbally but indirect objects clitics remained in
situ in their tonic form. In both cases, the child would be led to infer a new grammar on
the basis of the available input, which was syntactically well-formed in the source variety
although subject to selection only under a restricted set of pragmatic conditions.
Importantly, the original syntactic options were transmitted to the child yet also with a
strong bias toward one of them. This is not a transmission failure and it need not even
reflect a case of incomplete acquisition. Instead these processes can be viewed as cases of
incomplete replication. In sum, we follow Meisel (2001), in suggesting that changes
witnessed at the level of the individual bilingual speaker may provide insights and,
ultimately, perhaps some answers about how languages change through time. It is our
position that external influence does not directly induce formal linguistic change in a
bilingual grammar but, given the right social conditions, it may do so indirectly when the
converged bilingual grammar comes to serve as the input for a new generation.
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