Contact and Language Convergence

Grant, Anthony P.

doi:10.1002/9781119485094.ch5

Cited by 14 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Now that some basic characteristics of passives in Yucatec Maya have been presented, we can see that there are two properties that are shared between them and A-P hybrids: (i) they are both synthetic, expressed without the need for an auxiliary and (ii) both have person restrictions on the initiator argument (at least for some speakers). Given these similarities, one possible proposal is that Yucatec Maya acts as a model for the transfer of a pattern into Spanish in which a set of morphosyntactic features correlate with a particular meaning (see Heine and Kuteva (2005), (Matras 2009), Grant (2020) for different ways of conceptualizing transfers of patterns). Further investigation of this idea should look into the frequency of A-P hybrids with respect to other ways of expressing impersonals and passives across Spanish varieties.…”

Section: A Case Of Contact-induced Change?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The last potential explanation for the development of A-P hybrids that will be mentioned here is that of convergence. As discussed in Grant (2020), convergence is used in a variety of ways in the contact linguistics literature. I will follow one of the more narrow definitions of convergence, whereby an innovation in a particular language develops as a result of a combination of internal changes and contact-induced influence from another language (see Pato Maldonado (2002) for a detailed study of possessive constructions that have arisen through convergence in Guatemalan Spanish).…”

Section: A Case Of Convergence?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Grammatical Object Passives in Yucatec Spanish

Armstrong

2024

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Yucatec Spanish displays a type of sentence that appears to mix elements of an active impersonal and a passive. For example, “te castigaron por mi tío” may be interpreted as “you were punished by my uncle”, where a by-phrase headed by the preposition por introduces an agent rather than a cause or reason. The verb has active morphology—it is always third-person plural, and accusative clitics (e.g., te) and DOM-marked objects are possible. This type of sentence, which I descriptively label an active–passive (A-P) hybrid, has been mentioned in previous literature on contact varieties in Mayan-speaking regions of Mexico and Guatemala, but it has not been precisely described or analyzed formally. I argue that A-P hybrid constructions are instances of grammatical object passives. Grammatical object passives have certain active properties—accusative case is assigned to a theme argument and the morphology of the verb is active, but like passives, they require that the expression of the agent be a by-phrase rather than a grammatical subject. I claim that this is possible in this variety of Spanish due to the emergence of a null pronoun, absent in other varieties of Spanish, that can merge in the specifier of Voice and restrict, rather than saturate, an agent argument, permitting the subsequent addition of a third-person by-phrase. I demonstrate that this analysis is able to explain its hybrid properties as well as other person restrictions on the by-phrases that express the agent. Finally, I describe avenues of future research that will help discern the role that language contact may have played in the emergence of A-P hybrids.

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Section: A Case Of Contact-induced Change?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Case Of Convergence?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Grammatical Object Passives in Yucatec Spanish

Armstrong

2024

Languages

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Germanic Phylogeny

Hartmann

2023

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This book is a computational re-evaluation and concluding examination of the genealogical relations between the early Germanic languages and their diversification from their most recent common ancestor Proto-Germanic. Further, this book presents a novel computational approach to the problem of linguistic diversification based on agent-based simulation of speech communities over time. This approach, presented alongside traditional phylogenetic inference, is based on wave-like linguistic diversification processes in geographically defined areas and can be modelled with agent-based approaches. The results of this study validate findings by previous research, generate new insights and shed light on debated issues. It further argues that the break-up of Germanic can be understood as a gradual disintegration process in which tree-like branching events are rare. Above all this is true for the eastern part of the Germanic-speaking area and West Germanic.

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2023

Germanic Phylogeny

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Contact and Language Convergence

Cited by 14 publications

References 26 publications

Grammatical Object Passives in Yucatec Spanish

Grammatical Object Passives in Yucatec Spanish

Germanic Phylogeny

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