Syntactic change in World Englishes: Testing substrate and input effects

All are welcome at this Linguistics and Phonetics guest talk by Devyani Sharma, Queen Mary (London). Venue: Michael Sadler LG19, with coffee/tea and cake in the Linguistics foyer after the talk. The talk is organized by Diane Nelson

The birth of new syntactic features in situations of contact has fostered a long-standing debate over the relative role of universals (e.g. Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi 2004) or language transfer (e.g. Bao 2015) in shaping these new systems. This articles addresses two shortcomings in this debate: a failure to ask why only certain syntactic structures stabilise over time out of a wider pool of variation, and a tendency to look at abstracted linguistic systems rather than sequential acquisitional states in contact settings. The study compares dialect outcomes for seven different syntactic traits in Indian English (IndE) and Singapore English (SgE): past tense marking, progressive –ing, copula be, definite articles, indefinite articles, subject-verb agreement, modals. Substrate sources account for variation in nearly all cases. However, a meta-analysis shows that only some of this variation triggered by substrates stabilises as new dialect traits, used across the population and recognised as characteristic of the variety. Substrates appear to over-predict long-term dialect outcomes. I then factor in a sociohistorical hallmark of World Englishes: diminishing input from the original target variety over time. In order to reconsider the dataset as dynamic input-sensitive phases of L2 development, rather than as static semiotic systems in contact, I turn to models from Second Language Acquisition—the Subset Principle (Wexler & Manzini 1987) and the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace and Filiaci 2006). These allow a consideration of not just substrate contrasts, but also how rich the input required for acquisition is. I show that input-sensitivity enhances our ability to account for outcomes, although substrates nevertheless emerge as an extremely strong, possibly stronger, basis for change. In concluding, I explore a four-way typology for testing the relative strength of these two dimensions of contact across settings.