Rethinking Languages in Contact

The Case of Italian

Anna-Laura Lepschy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351195492
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Syntax in Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Taking as its theme the interaction between Italian and other languages, and marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of Weinreich's seminal Languages in Contact, this volume provides an up-to-date survey of the role of linguistic and cultural interaction in the process of language change. The range of contributions covers: theoretical issues; different forms of language contact in Medieval and Renaissance Italy; dialect transition and diversity in the North and South of Italy; lexical and morphological borrowings; register and syntactic loans in the Romance area; old and new contact varieties of Italian in the Mediterranean, including Malta and North Africa; and, finally, Italian under pressure from English in EU institutions. The volume is published in memory of Joseph Cremona (1922-2003), and includes a bibliography of his work. Anna Laura Lepschy is Visiting Professor at the Universities of Reading and Toronto, and Emeritus Professor at University College London. Arturo Tosi is Professor of Italian at Royal Holloway, University of London. With the contributions: Peter Matthews - On Re-reading Weinreich's Languages in Contact; Nigel Vincent; Languages in Contact in Medieval Italy; Brian Richardson - Latin and Italian in Contact in Some Renaissance Grammars; Cecilia Robustelli - Latin and Vernacular in Contact in the Sixteenth Century: The Latin Model of Giambullari's Grammar; and, Mair Parry - Markedness, Salience and Language Change: Exploring an Italo-Romance Transition Area. It also includes: John Green - The North-South Axis of Romance: Contact Reinforcing Typology? Martin Maiden - Accommodating Synonymy: How Some Italo-Romance Verbs React to Lexical and Morphological Borrowing; Chris Pountain - Syntactical Borrowing as a Function of Register; Adam Ledgeway - The Dual Complementizer System in Southern Italy: Spirito Greco, Materia Romanza? Rosanna Sornicola - Dialectology and History: The Problem of the Adriatic-Tyrrhenian Dialect Corridor; Alberto Varvaro - The Maghreb Papers in Italian Discovered by Joe Cremona; Joseph Brincat - Languages and Varieties in Use in Malta Today: Maltese, English, Italian, Maltese English and Maltaliano; and, Arturo Tosi - Languages in Contact with and without Speaker Interaction."

Chapter 1
On Re-reading Weinreich’s Languages in Contact

Peter Matthews

Uriel Weinreich's pioneering monograph on Languages in Contact is now more than fifty years old.¹ It is so justly famous that I have heard a speaker at a conference upbraided, after a talk that merely happened to have words like 'languages' and 'contact' in its title, for not referring to it. But like any other book, it is of its day, and it merits critical re-reading in the light both of the problems that have arisen since the 1950s and of what was known, or was believed, then.

Let us start with the preface by André Martinet, who, in years when he was publishing important contributions² to the theory of change in phonology, had been Weinreich's supervisor at Columbia University (p. x). It is not surprising, therefore, that he casts doubt on the 'autarkic situation' of a language or a speech community. 'There was a time', he begins, 'when the process of research required that each community should be considered linguistically self-contained and homogeneous.' Whether seen as 'a fact' or 'conceived as a working hypothesis', this 'certainly was a useful assumption'. Against it, however, he stresses that 'a linguistic community is never homogeneous and hardly ever self-contained'. 'Linguistic diversity' begins instead 'next door, nay, at home and within one and the same man' (p. vii). This has the ring, in large part, of the way Labov, who in turn had been supervised by Weinreich, was to speak fifteen or more years later. But, as Martinet saw, the notion of 'a language' itself is then called into question:

It is not enough to point out that each individual is a battle-field for conflicting linguistic types and habits [...]. What we heedlessly and somewhat rashly call 'a language' is the aggregate of millions of such microcosms many of which evince such aberrant linguistic comportment that the question arises whether they should not be grouped into other 'languages'.

Martinet then turns to bilingualism, and to the specific importance of Weinreich's contribution (p. ix). This, however, was the context in which readers of the 1950s were invited to assess it.

It is not unusual, of course, for brilliant doctoral students to have preoccupations that are not quite — sometimes not at all — those of their supervisors. Nevertheless, it is instructive to read Weinreich's work in the spirit in which Martinet introduced it. The 'useful assumption', as Martinet put it, is one that Bloomfield had presented as such in the 1920s. Crucially, what is assumed is that there are communities of people within which 'successive utterances are alike or partly alike'. Such a community is by definition a 'speech community', and its 'language' is defined in turn as the totality of the utterances that can be made within it.³ For Saussure, too, a language ('langue') had its existence in the community whose language it would be. But it was conceived directly as a system in abstraction from speech, and the processes of speaking, on specific occasions ('parole'). If it changed, it changed also as a system, from one 'état de langue'⁴ to another. These, too, were assumptions; and Firth, in England, was one older contemporary of Martinet who rejected Saussure's reification of a language, as he saw it.⁵ But for many structural linguists such assumptions were scarcely controversial, and in New York, when Weinreich was a student, Martinet and Jakobson were leading structuralists of the Saussurean school. If a language, then, is an abstraction of this order, contact between languages does not simply consist in interaction among individuals and change in individuals' speech. It involves relations between systems; and, if it leads to change in either language, influence of one system on another.

How can such influence be exerted? A natural answer is to posit two distinct and logically successive stages. In the first, the influence is simply at the level of 'parole'. Thus, for example, a speaker of language A, who as such is a member of one speech community, may, in speaking it on a specific occasion, use a word belonging to another language B, which is spoken by the members of another speech community. But this is merely, in a strict sense, 'borrowing'. The word does not belong to the system of A. Even if the same speaker uses the word again on another occasion, or other speakers of A also use it, these are different, independent instances where the behaviour of an individual is influenced by that person's knowledge, as an individual, of the language B of which it is a unit. At this first stage, therefore, only speech in A will be affected. A itself— the system of A — is not affected.

Such speakers may be heard, however, by other speakers of A, who themselves have no knowledge of B. Therefore, they may use this word too; and, in the second stage, it may come to be 'borrowed', in the more familiar, strictly catachrestic sense of this term. Thus, A itself— the 'langue' in the Saussurean sense — changes from an earlier system or 'state' of its system, of which the 'borrowed' word was not an element, to a new 'state' or new system, of which it will be.

Forty years on, other theorists were to talk of changes in 'externalized language' (that is, in the way some group of people speak) that 'trigger' changes in 'internalized languages' developed in the minds of a new generation.⁶ Classic illustrations are of change in syntax, and not due specifically to contact. It is instructive, however, to compare the way in which this two-stage model applies to convergence in phonology. In the first stage, we are again concerned with changes in speech, at an overlap (as we might represent it) of speech communities. At the point where they overlap, there will be individuals whose native language — what Weinreich calls their 'primary language' (p. 14) — is A. Nevertheless, such individuals may also speak B; and, when they do so, we are likely to find evidence of interference from the system of their primary language. 'Phonic interference', in particular, 'arises when a bilingual' (that is, any individual who to any degree has knowledge of two languages or more) 'identifies a phoneme of the secondary system' (that of B, in this case) 'with one in the primary system and, in reproducing it, subjects it to the phonetic rules of the primary language.' Weinreich's treatment of this topic (Chapter 2.2) was immensely influential, not least on the study of second language learning over the next twenty years. Its attraction, however, was precisely that it seemed to explain the behaviour of individuals, and the errors, as seen from the viewpoint of B, that they make as individuals. We would, of course, expect these errors to be similar from one individual to the next. Thus, for example, any speaker of A might fail to distinguish vowels in B, through identifying both with one vowel in the speaker's own system. But, in principle, they would do so independently. For all of them A is the primary system; hence, whenever they speak B, they will independently make errors of the same kind.

Weinreich's chapter on phonology deals more briefly with the process of 'diffusion', as he calls it, by which changes may ensue in either language generally (pp. 23—24). For the second stage, however, we can turn to studies by his supervisor. Old Spanish, for example, had a consonant system that included pairs of voiced and voiceless sibilants, which merged in the early modern period, as Martinet explained it, following contact with Basque.⁷ We assume that in the Middle Ages, as now, the system of Basque did not have this distinction; hence, when speakers of Basque became bilingual in Spanish, they would identify two sibilants in Spanish with just one in their own language. So, in speaking Spanish, they would not distinguish them. But Spanish was gaining ground; the children of bilingual parents would acquire their knowledge of it from them, and in that way would grow up with an 'internalized language', as conceived by Chomsky, that did not make this distinction either. Their speech would then become part of the 'externalized language', or the language, as Bloomfield defined it, to which other members of the Spanish speech community, including those of a new generation, would be exposed. As that changed, so the 'langue' (in the Saussurean sense: conceived as an abstraction from a set of internalized languages) would change with it.

Martinet's paper on the Spanish sibilants appeared as Weinreich's dissertation was completed, and it makes clear in principle how languages as systems can be changed by contact with a substrate. But, as it changed, was Spanish at all times a single system? We could say that it was; but 'knowledge' of it varied between speakers who, at one extreme, distinguished voiced and voiceless sibilants, and others who did not. 'La langue', in Saussure's words, 'n'existe parfaitement que dans la masse.'⁸ But the variation would not have been random. Another answer, therefore, is that different groups of speakers would form separate speech communities, each with a different system.

Let us return, in this light, to the process of borrowing. 'Nonce-borrowing', as Weinreich calls it, is a case of 'interference in speech' (p. 11). This is again the use by a particular speaker, on a specific occasion, of a word which is foreign to the language being spoken. 'In language', however, 'we find interference phenomena which [...] have become habitualized and established'. 'Their use', he goes on, 'is no longer dependent on bilingualism.' What, then, if a word is borrowed only by a community of bilinguals? Weinreich's illustrations include many examples of the speech of European immigrants to the United States, which, at the level of 'parole' at least, included loans from English that were not part, and have not become part, of their language generally. But many were not simply borrowed, independently, on individual occasions; they had become habitual within the immigrant community. Should we see them, then, as part of a new 'état de langue'? Or do they belong to a new 'langue', of the immigrant community specifically? Or is there indeed another possibility: that changes may become habitualized, yet not at that level?

It is obvious how, from Martinet's perspective at least, the integrity of languages is called into question. But so, it seems, is Weinreich's concept of 'interference'. What exactly, that is, interferes with what?

The term 'interference' is introduced, in capitals, at the very beginning (p. 1). Languages, in Weinreich's definition, are 'IN CONTACT if they are used alternately by the same person'. This 'practice' is 'BILINGUALISM', and the term 'BILINGUAL' is applied to any person who is 'involved' in it. By implication, bilinguals will include all people who speak any language other than their own, with any sufficient degree of competence. Thus,

Those instances of deviation from the norms of either language which occur in the speech of bilinguals as a result of their familiarity with more than one language, i.e. as a result of language contact, will be referred to as INTERFERENCE phenomena. [...]

It is these phenomena of speech and their impact on the norms of either language exposed to contact, that invite the attention of the linguist.

These opening paragraphs are at first sight admirably crisp and clear, and when they were first read fifty years ago, they mapped out a field of study that was only then about to be investigated systematically Nevertheless, a central definition has been sidestepped. Phenomena, including 'interference phenomena', are again of speech; or, as Weinreich puts it, they 'occur in' speech. What is defined, accordingly, is not 'interference' itself, although that term alone is put in capitals, but a class or type of such phenomena that, on the simplest reading, will exhibit or be characterized by interference. Alternatively, perhaps, interference is a process underlying them. But, in either reading, it appears that we are talking simply about speech. Phenomena of interference, seen as individual deviations, can then have an impact on the 'norms', as Weinreich calls them, of a language. A change in norms could thus result from them. But such an impact is not interference itself; or, if it is, no definition of it has been given.

Weinreich then explains why this term has been chosen. 'The term interference implies [.. .] rearrangement of patterns': something more, that is, than 'borrowing, or mere additions to an inventory'. Even when '"borrowing" might more properly be spoken of', 'the possibility of ensuing rearrangements in the patterns, or interference, cannot be excluded'. We are still on the first page, and this insight too was so important, and in the 1950s still sufficiently new, that it is easy not to notice how the ground has shifted. But interference does not merely 'imply' change in patterns; that, it seems, is what it actually consists in. The term would thus refer to something more than the occurrence of an individual deviation in speech, or to a process that gives rise to deviations. These, we have been told, are interference phenomena. Why then did Weinreich not define their impact on 'norms' as, in turn, interference?

One possible answer is that, had he done so, he would have had to make explicit how such impacts should be conceived. His primary concern was with bilingualism, and the many different factors, including those that have to do with the psychology of speakers and with 'socio-cultural settings', that bear in it. Scarcely more than half the book (pp. 7—70) deals with language in abstraction from these. Now for a structural linguist, when two languages come into contact, the effects of contact are observed first in the speech of people who use both. These effects are described in the opening paragraph, although the qualifying term is not itself defined, as 'INTER FERENCE phenomena'. But, through bilingualism, languages themselves could then change. In the extreme case, as Sandfeld had shown in the Balkans,⁹ they could converge to form a 'Sprachbund'. Was this then part of the same process? In one view it could not be: 'langues' in the Saussurean sense could be affected only at a level other than 'parole'. But in Weinreich's definition, or non-definition, the answer was perhaps deliberately left as a mystery.

Certainly, if we look for clarity, we will not find it. What exactly, for example, should we understand by rearrangement of a pattern? The preceding paragraph talks, as we have seen, of impact on the 'norms' of languages. Are these norms, then, patterns? So, in terms now of a two-stage model, first there are individual deviations in speech; then, through their impact, 'norms' are 'rearranged'?

In one natural interpretation, patterns exist in the speech of a community. They are patterns, that is, in a language (as defined by Bloomfield in the 1920s), or in what some linguists would now see as an 'externalized language'. A norm, we might say, is a pattern to which speech across a speech community is in general found to conform. An 'impact' on a norm might then be illustrated, for example, by a change in word order. Language A, say, has a 'pattern' in which objects follow, or will normally follow, verbs. In language B, however, the 'norm' is the opposite. We therefore expect phenomena of interference: thus, if speakers of A speak B, and especially if many speak B to or in the company of other speakers of A, they may be expected, in B as in A, to put the verb first. This was indeed one well-known form of interference, which Weinreich illustrates briefly in its due place (p. 38). Its possible diffusion in B generally is not discussed. But, strictly speaking, the construction of a verb before an object would already be a pattern to be found in B, even if it is only in B spoken by bilinguals. It is possible, therefore, that among such speakers there will be degrees of variation between this interfering pattern and the norm for B in general. Let us suppose that bilinguals form a settled community, whose members often talk, as individuals, with speakers of B who are unilingual. The variation could, for various reasons, spread beyond them, to the extent that, in time, instances of verbs before their object might be found, if they were not found earlier, in all speakers of B. They might then become more common, to the point at which they constitute a new 'norm', which all speakers of B tend to follow.

The term 'interference' would then be appropriate, in the way that Weinreich does quite regularly use it, for the whole of such a process. The first 'phase', in his own words, would be that of interference 'in speech'. This is the phase in which, for example, we observe 'nonce-borrowings'. The second phase, he says, is that of interference 'in language'. At this phase (in a passage partly cited earlier) 'we find interference phenomena which, having frequently occurred in the speech of bilinguals, have become habitualized and established'. Examples would be loan-words that are known to linguists to be 'an effect of interference from another language'; but 'the user of the language' knows them simply as words, whether 'borrowed' or not (p. 11).

This section is headed 'Interference in Speech and in Language', and the distinction has a crucial bearing, Weinreich points out, on 'the questions which the linguist asks' about one phase or the other (p. 12). But the way it is explained deserves closer study. 'In speech', we are told, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• 1 On Re-reading Weinreich's Languages in Contact
• 2 Languages in Contact in Medieval Italy
• 3 Latin and Italian in Contact in Some Renaissance Grammars
• 4 Latin and Vernacular in Contact in the Sixteenth Century: The Latin Model of Giambullari's Grammar
• 5 Markedness, Salience and Language Change: Exploring an Italo-Romance Transition Area
• 6 The North–South Axis of Romance: Contact Reinforcing Typology?
• 7 Accommodating Synonymy: How Some Italo-Romance Verbs React to Lexical and Morphological Borrowing
• 8 Syntactical Borrowing as a Function of Register
• 9 The Dual Complementizer System in Southern Italy: Spirito Greco, Materia Romanza?
• 10 Dialectology and History: The Problem of the Adriatic–Tyrrhenian Dialect Corridor
• 11 The Maghreb Papers in Italian Discovered by Joe Cremona
• 12 Languages and Varieties in Use in Malta Today: Maltese, English, Italian, Maltese English and Maltaliano
• 13 Languages in Contact with and without Speaker Interaction
• Bibliography
• Bibliography of Joseph Cremona
• Index