Notice
"Can co-optation be replicated in contact? English final discourse particles in New Englishes", Debra Ziegeler, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
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Descriptif
The study of New English contact dialects has often referred to extensive borrowings from substrate languages, which include discourse markers, a category that Heine (2018: 43) referred to as amongst the first grammatical items borrowed in situations of intense language contact. What is less often researched in contact English dialects are standard discourse markers from an English lexifier that may have been absent around the time of contact and have only emerged in their source varieties subsequent to colonisation times. These include sentence-final pragmatic particles such as though, an item which was rarely found before the 1990s in standard varieties of English (Lenker (2010: 201), Traugott (2016: 53)), but is frequently used nowadays.
The current investigation looks at four final discourse markers, actually, anyway, then, and though in the spoken sections of the ICE Great Britain and other international English corpora and compares the frequency of such forms with their appearance in the 1780-1850 section of the diachronic CLMETEV corpus which covers the most intensive period of British colonial activity. ICE-India, ICE-Philippines and ICE-Singapore are searched, Indian English being the oldest of the varieties in terms of transmission, and Philippines English being the youngest. The data reveal that the four sentence-final discourse markers appear to be much less frequently used in new, contact varieties of English than in the ICE-GB. In fact, the average frequency scores reveal that the ICE-GB uses the four discourse markers more than twice as frequently as ICE-Singapore, and almost six times more frequently than ICE-India. This raises the question whether the absence of a feature at the time of contact could affect its frequency in the contact dialect at later stages of development, producing a situation of (negative) retentionism of former states of the language at contact time.
However, other possibilities to consider are whether the four discourse markers are grammaticalized in standard varieties or involve co-optation (without grammaticalization) (Kaltenböck et al (2011), a process by which items from the sentence grammar can be shifted and redeployed into the discourse for extra-sentential pragmatic functions. If a case of co-optation, it may be argued that it is precisely because they are not grammaticalized that they are less likely to be replicated in contact Englishes, since their lexical and conceptual sources are not readily accessible in a contact situation of interlingual identification (Ziegeler, in press).
References
Heine, Bernd. 2018. Are there two different ways of approaching grammaticalization? In S. Hancil, T. Breban, & J. Vincente Lozano (eds.), New Trends in Grammaticalization and Language Change, 23-54. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Lenker, Ursula. 2010. Argument and rhetoric: Adverbial connectors in the history of English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2016. On the rise of types of clause-final pragmatic markers in English. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 17, 26-54.
Ziegeler, Debra. In press. The Influence of the Lexifier. Beyond Grammaticalization in Singapore English. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Corpora
ICE = The International Corpus of English: http://ice-corpora.net/ ice/avail.htm.
CLMET(EV): The Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (Extended Version), compiled by Hendrik de Smet. https://perswww.kuleuven.be/~u0044428/clmet.htm.
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