Vernacular Universals and Language Contacts

Evidence from Varieties of English and Beyond

Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, Heli Paulasto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135850654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

In this book, contributors have been brought together to discuss the role of two major factors shaping the grammars of different varieties of English (and of other languages) all over the world: so-called vernacular universals and contact-induced change. Rather than assuming a general typological perspective, the studies in this volume focus on putative universal vernacular features – significant phonological or (morpho-) syntactic parallels found in non-standard varieties of English, English-based Creoles, and also varieties of other languages, all of which represent widely differing sociolinguistic and historical backgrounds. These universals are then set against the other major explanatory factor: contact-induced change, by which we understand both the possibility of dialect contact (or dialect diffusion) and language contact (including superstratal, substratal and adstratal influences).

1
Cognition and the Linguistic Continuum from Vernacular to Standard

J.K. Chambers

1. INTRODUCTION

The theory of Vernacular Roots begins with the hitherto unexploited observation that dialects become more complex as they become more standard or literary. The continuum from vernacular to standard is marked by definable layers of increasing structure-dependent grammatical devices and articulated phonological contrasts.

One of the fundamental tenets is that structure-dependent grammatical devices and articulated phonological contrasts carry cognitive cost. They are excrescences upon more natural systems, or, in the terms I have used elsewhere, they are learned rather than primitive processes (Chambers 2003:271–3). For example, the principle driving conjugation regularization—“Make past tense and past participle the same”—reduces irregular forms, and irregular forms have to be memorized rather than generated, potentially creating cognitive overload (Chambers 2003:260).

Pinker and Prince (1999:236–7) explicitly relate regular and irregular verbs to human conceptualization. Regular verbs form classical (Aristotelian) categories defined by necessary and sufficient criteria. Irregular verbs form prototype categories sometimes marked by family resemblances. “The classical category consisting of regular verbs,” they say, “is defined completely and explicitly by the nature of a rule in the context of a formal system, in this case, a rule within English grammar that applies to any word bearing the part-of-speech symbol ‘verb’ (unless it has an irregular root)” (Pinker and Prince 1999:236). “Family resemblance categories, in contrast,” in their terms (Pinker and Prince 1999:236), “are generalization of patterns of property correlations within a set of memorized exemplars.” Viewed from a cognitive perspective, they say, “[T]he properties of the regular and irregular classes of verbs in English show that classical categories and family resemblance categories …. are products of two different kinds of psychological processes: a formal rule system and a memorized, partially structured list of exemplars” (Pinker and Prince 1999:237).

It follows that formal rule systems carry less cognitive cost than retrieval of memorized exemplars. From this perspective, certain grammatical tendencies take on cognitive motivation. For instance, the age-old tendency toward conjugation regularization in English grammar is driven by the need to limit the cognitive cost of retrieving memorized exemplars from the lexicon. From the earliest historical records of the English language, there has been a tendency to reduce unique forms in verb paradigms by making them the same as other forms in the same paradigm. For example, Modern English helped is both past tense and past participle, whereas Old English had healp (past tense singular), hulpon (past tense plural), and holpen (past participle). The tendency continues to this day with, for instance, contemporary regularization of past participles proved and mowed, identical to the past-tense forms, replacing obsolescent proven and mown.

Vernacular dialects are ahead of standard dialects in conjugation regularization, as I have shown elsewhere (Chambers 2003:260–5). Vernaculars appear to be cognitively more efficacious than standard dialects, or perhaps it is more precise to view the continuum from the other end. Standard dialects may codify grammatical and phonological complexities partly as markers of social rank. As Kroch (1978:18) says, “Dominant social groups tend to mark themselves off symbolically as distinct from the groups they dominate and to interpret their symbols of distinctiveness as evidence of superior moral and intellectual qualities.”

For Kroch and for Pinker and Prince (and for me), the idea that cognitive cost is involved in some kinds of linguistic complexity, however cogently based on common sense, remains an inference. In what follows, I demonstrate that it has empirical content by looking at the typological limits of one form of structure-dependent grammatical processing.

2. STRUCTURAL LAYERS OF SUBJECT–VERB AGREEMENT

In an earlier study in sociolinguistic typology, I assembled evidence from several studies showing that dialects add variable number agreement hierarchically according to a universal (English) progression based on person of subjects (Chambers 2004). By way of illustration, here is an AfricanAmerican Vernacular sentence from a blues recording made in Hollywood in 1947, written and sung by Chas Q. Price:

(1)	The things you done for me, baby, is too good to ever be told …

By comparison to standard dialects, the sentence holds a couple of basilectal features, including is with plural subject (default singular) and done as past tense (conjugation regularization), not to mention the split infinitive. However, it is worth noting in passing that the subgenre is urban blues, not country blues, and other lines of the lyric are linguistically sophisticated. For instance, the resolution of this verse (the third line) is stated as a modal past perfect passive VP—

(2)	The things you done for me, baby, is too good to ever be told. The things you done for me, baby, is too good to ever be told. You must have been sent from heaven to satisfy my soul.

For my purposes, the main interest is the subject–verb nonagreement in the first two lines...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Germanic Linguistics
• Contents
• Vernacular Universals and Language Contacts
• I The Theory of Vernacular Universals
• 1 Cognition and the Linguistic Continuum from Vernacular to Standard
• 2 Vernacular Universals and Angloversals in a Typological Perspective
• II Consonant Cluster Reduction and Default Singulars
• 3 How Diagnostic Are English Universals?
• 4 Number Agreement in Existential Constructions
• 5 There Was Universals; Then There Weren’t
• III Universals and Contact in Varieties of English
• 6 Irish Daughters of Northern British Relatives
• 7 The Case of Bungi
• 8 The Regularisation of the Hiatus Resolution System in British English
• 9 The Interplay of ‘Universals’ and Contact-Induced Change in the Emergence of New Englishes
• 10 Digging for Roots
• IV Methodological and Theoretical Perspectives
• 11 Methods and Inferences in the Study of Substrate Influence
• 12 Some Offspring of Colonial English Are Creole
• 13 Vernacular Universals and the Sociolinguistic Typology of English Dialects
• 14 Linguistic Universals and Vernacular Data
• 15 Why Universals VERSUS Contact-Induced Change?
• Contributors
• Name Index
• Subject Index