Contact-Induced Change in Alorese Give-Constructions

Abstract

This article describes and compares give-constructions in three languages of eastern Indonesia, Lamaholot (Austronesian), Alorese (Austronesian), and Adang (Papuan), with the aim of detecting structural convergence in Alorese. Lamaholot and Alorese are closely related, while Alorese has undergone contact-induced change due to contact with Papuan languages spoken in close proximity, such as Adang. To investigate structural convergence, we systematically compare the types and frequencies of give-constructions in these three languages. The data were obtained by using a common set of eight visual stimuli. The results show that Alorese and Adang share a preference for encoding 'give' events in serial verb constructions, while Lamaholot uses prepositional object constructions or multiverb constructions. We conclude that, in the domain of give-constructions, there is a higher degree of structural isomorphism between Alorese and Adang than there is between Alorese and its sister language Lamaholot. Such structural isomorphism is the outcome of contactinduced convergence; more specifically, we propose that convergence took place by a process of grammatical calquing carried out by children and preadolescents who were bilingual in Alorese and one or more Papuan languages.

Phonological Innovation and Lexical Retention in the History of Rote-Meto

“…Rote-Meto has undergone significant contact effects with substrate languages which have transformed the segmental inventory and introduced a large amount of vocabulary. Other analysts have similarly pro-posed contact to account for grammatical properties of languages in this region (Schapper and Hammarström 2013, Moro 2018, Fricke 2019, Moro and Fricke 2020. The investigation of Rote-Meto builds upon this work and shows that it is not only morpho-syntactic properties, but also phonology and lexicon which have been affected by contact.…”

Traces of Pre-modern Contacts between Timor-Alor-Pantar and Austronesian Speakers

“…An example of this situation is mp Alorese, spoken in communities consisting of bilinguals whose first language is non-mp Adang and second language is Alorese as described by Moro (2021Moro ( , 2018Moro ( , 2019. After a short period of complexification which likely involved young speakers (Moro 2018;Moro & Fricke 2020), Alorese underwent severe simplification of morphology (Klamer 2011;To appear;Moro 2019), and these simplified patterns remained stable over many generations. This implies that the contact must be long-term, intense, and multi-purpose involving a community of bilinguals with a large number of second language speakers (Kusters 2003;Trudgill 2011;Moro 2018).…”

Multilingualism in eastern Indonesia: linguistic evidence of a shift from symmetric to asymmetric multilingualism

“…This is yet another change that led to an increase in complexity, as a new construction was innovated in the language. Again, the description here will remain brief due to space limitations; for more information, the reader is referred to Moro & Fricke (2019, 2020), which presents a detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis.…”

“…Previous research conducted by the author on contact-induced language changes in Alorese (Moro, 2018, 2019a; Moro & Fricke, 2019, 2020) point to an apparent paradox, namely that language contact with the neighbouring Papuan languages has led to both complexification and simplification of the Alorese grammar. Note that this apparent paradox is an interesting instance of ‘Trudgill’s conundrum’, the observation that ‘identical (or seemingly identical) social settings can have opposite outcomes in terms of language structure’ (Lüpke, 2016, p. 36).…”

“… 8. The total does not add up to 100% because there are other marginal constructions (such as double object, or constructions with missing arguments) that are not discussed here. For a detailed discussion the reader is referred to Moro & Fricke (2019, forthcoming). …”