Abstract
Even though the weight of this impressive volume comes from the actual data on linguistic innovations, Yaron Matras approaches language contact from a very humanistic viewpoint. Yes, at times, Matras almost drowns the readers in linguistic matter, but he seems most interested in depicting the speaker’s motivations for producing such data. This is clear from the first page, where he notes that the natural expectations of bilinguals may be that “even our dreams should be monolingual” but goes on to point out that these same bilinguals often mix their languages in real conversations. Continuing with this emphasis on the speaker, he points out that “even monolinguals sometimes end up enriching and re-shaping their own form of speech thanks to their interaction with bilingual individuals” (xiii).
Language Contact is a comprehensive survey of the linguistic innovations that arise when circumstances—or personal inclinations—produce speakers who regularly use more than one linguistic variety. Linguists have often attributed such innovations to community bilingualism, calling them contact phenomena as if they occur when close proximity with other bilinguals causes new ways of speaking to occur. But Matras sees the seedbed where contact phenomena grow in the types of communities involved “in concrete, local discourse strategies that individual speakers pursue in conversation” (310). When Matras identifies the critical factors that promote innovations to take hold, he does point to such factors as the directionality of bilingualism (i.e., asymmetry in whose language is learned as a second language and therefore is the more dominant/prestigious language). Still, he emphasizes even more the human factor, indicating that what matters most is “the extent of control and pressure that is exerted on speakers to conform to more established speech norms” (312). Continuing along this line, he suggests that new forms blossom when there is “lax normative control with respect to speakers’ innovative use of new constructions or patterns” (312).
Although the manifest goal of this volume is to detail the lexical or grammatical innovations that have arisen in bilingual communities, Matras places much importance on arguing that these structures occur at all because speakers are actors who use language in conversations to achieve goals. This notion surfaces in many different ways. For example, he concludes a discussion of structural limits in codeswitching by stating, “[D]espite efforts to describe its formal regularities, codeswitching remains to a considerable extent the creative, improvised composition of individual speakers wishing to take advantage of the enormous assortment of nuances that their complex, multilingual repertoire affords” (136, emphasis added). Elsewhere he states, “[W]e view borrowing not merely as a plain modification of an abstract ‘system,’ but as an activity in which speakers engage, and which is goal-oriented” (219, emphasis added). Also, emphasizing the role of conversation, he writes, “The dimension of the ‘hearer’ is therefore crucial to our analysis of linguistic ‘categories’ and their function” (3).
For Matras, contact phenomena happen because “the motivation to communicate overrides the constraint on maintaining contextual separation between the subsets of the linguistic repertoire, or the bilingual’s distinct ‘languages’” (74). For example, rather than view transfer and interference negatively in the second language learning process, he argues, “one might instead view them as enabling factors that allow language users to create bridges . . . to sustain communication” (74).
Still, it is somewhat puzzling that Matras tends to assume the verity of his position more than he offers a basis for it. There are two problems here. First, Matras never gives much detail about the social conditions that motivate speakers to feel comfortable enough to be innovative. Second, Matras leaves readers to speculate about what factors motivate individual bilinguals to innovate. Is the drive to keep the conversation going so foremost in their minds? Or is it just the availability of the expanded repertoire that bilingualism offers? Or what? True, especially this second problem may be a hard nut for any researcher to crack, but Matras owes the reader more of an attempt.
Clearly, Matras gives speakers a good deal of creative latitude, writing that while speakers are aware of context appropriateness of everything from words to “entire sets and clusters of structures,” this appropriateness is “the product of gradual socialization and it is subject to lapses and errors, as well as to conscious intervention and scrambling by speakers themselves” (309, emphasis added). This view of extensive creative license puzzles me because when Matras discusses actual contact data, he identifies over and over similar structural patterns in different types of contact phenomena, but never seems to ask himself this question: Why do these same regularities turn up so often in different types of contact phenomena and in different communities, and obviously across different types of speakers? It must be some sort of a universal that people generally speak because they are motivated to communicate. But language contact phenomena may show other universals of a different nature, universals about a cognitively based abstract template that even creative linguistic production seems to observe.
However, whether or not one agrees with Matras’s convictions about the critical motivations characterizing language contact, this is an important volume because of the implications of the patterns found across different contact phenomena and in specific contact phenomena. Matras writes, “[L]anguage contact can act as a kind of external ‘shock-factor’ which brings to light connections among [grammatical] categories which are otherwise less apparent” (153). At times, he is more specific, especially regarding how explanations for the mixture of languages in contact languages (pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages) require some rethinking of grammatical theories. Consider just one aspect of the case of Copper Island Aleut, a mixed language based on Russian and Aleut. Russian consistently is the source of verb inflection and related categories (e.g., subject and object pronouns) and word order. But Aleut appears in nominal phrases. Matras notes this about those noun phrases: “The fact that nominal inflection accompanies Aleut nouns illustrates that speakers do not necessarily process ‘grammar’ on a wholesale basis, but that functional distinctions are as much a part of the ‘inner’ or ‘intuitive’ part of language processing as is the discrimination of lexical content morphemes from other morphemes. The notion of lexicon-grammar split does not fully capture the complexity of this process” (300).
The view that speakers speak to communicate leads Matras to a related idea: that speakers’ choices are often conscious. Of course, when any writer refers to “conscious choice,” it is not necessarily clear what this means. I take it to mean that speakers—at a mental level that is available for overt reporting—plan what they say. This does seem to be what Matras means. Such a meaning fits with such statements as this: “[I]n pursuit of conversational effects fluent bilingual speakers, even young bilinguals, are able to control their repertoire in such a way as to purposefully defy conventions on both the situational selection of forms and the structural composition of utterances” (289, emphasis added). Elsewhere, he characterizes a variety of Quechua called Media Lengua in this way: “[S]peakers are fluent in Quechua as well as in Spanish, and mixing takes place by conscious and deliberate choice, albeit not in a random but in a conventionalized manner” (298, emphasis added). More generally in regard to mixed languages, Matras refers to a “deliberate creation” hypothesis as a key to understanding the structures they show.
Many researchers would agree that some choices are purposeful (conscious)—word play certainly is, as in some of the examples of Anglo London teenagers who switch to Punjabi at times in their in-group conversation (Rampton 1995). But most researchers would argue that much of codeswitching and of the lexical reanalysis in creole development is not conscious. I myself certainly have argued that speakers can and do make situationally marked choices to satisfy their intentions at a given moment (Myers-Scotton 1993b), but I also argue that the form such choices take is no more consciously controlled than an educated speaker’s choice to make grammatically standard agreements. The ability to make these choices unconsciously grows out of an interaction between innate processes or programs and exposure to a language in use, but the choices are not available for spontaneous report but the choices are not available for spontaneous report, meaning speakers cannot report on the form of what they have just said.
Granted, altering “the footing” of an interaction (to use the term of Goffman 1981) is intentional at a conceptual level, but how the intention is to be realized is not. Most codeswitching researchers agree that much of codeswitching is socially motivated to satisfy certain intentions that arise in the conceptual level of language production, but they still assume that the act of selecting codeswitching to satisfy those intentions is largely unconscious (Myers-Scotton 2005). Also, how conscious is codeswitching in those communities where it is denigrated but frequent and where many individuals who do codeswitch deny that they do so? Elsewhere, many people who codeswitch are just honestly unaware that it happens. In regard to the actual structure codeswitching shows, if switching takes place within a clause, with one language supplying the grammatical frame (the Matrix Language), which morpheme types can come from the other variety (the Embedded Language) is certainly not a choice under the speaker’s conscious control (Myers-Scotton 1993a, 2002).
Because I see Matras as devoting little space to motivating his functional approach to contact phenomena, and not devoting enough space to considering other explanations for outcomes in contact phenomena, especially cognitively based explanations, the obvious question is what I think he accomplishes in this volume. The answer is that he still accomplishes quite a bit. That is, when Matras turns to exemplifying language contact data, he is very thorough. Whether or not the reader already knows a good deal about the types of data that fall under the rubric “contact phenomena,” there is much to be learned here.
Matras divides contact phenomena in several different ways. For example, he divides examples as either showing the transfer of forms from one language to another (“matter replication”) or showing converging structures (“pattern replication”). Matter replication includes lexical borrowing and also grammatical and phonological borrowing. Pattern replication differs from matter replication in that it (the former) rarely includes exact copies.
Here and elsewhere the vast amount of data Matras presents can become daunting to digest. For me, at least, fewer examples, but more examples of targeted elements in a sentence or at least a phrase, with morph-by-morph glosses as well as translations, would have made the point of the examples easier to understand. This is especially the case because the languages he uses, clearly very familiar to Matras, may be little known by many readers. Many of the examples come from Asia Minor languages, such as Turkish and Romani, although English, German, and both Arabic and Hebrew appear often, too. Domari, a language that is new to me, provides many, many examples. But it is identified (181) as an Indo-Aryan language with a history of intense contact with Kurdish, Turkish, and Arabic only after it has already appeared in examples a number of times.
The volume begins with three chapters that introduce the subject matter, followed by a chapter on acquiring a bilingual repertoire (bilingual first and second language acquisition). In addition to lengthy chapters on different types of borrowings (one on lexical borrowing and one on grammatical and phonological borrowing), there are separate chapters on matter replication and form replication. Codeswitching, with an emphasis on conversational codeswitching, has its own chapter. A long chapter titled “Contact Languages” covers pidgins and creoles and then mixed languages. It is no surprise that the discussion on mixed languages is extensive because of Matras’s long-standing interest in these languages. A short chapter titled “Outlook” rounds out the volume.
Under pattern replication, Matras discusses what is usually called convergence, introducing his own model, “pivot matching.” The idea is that “pivot features are identified [in a model language] and replicated in the replica language” (241). Such matching is a twist on grammaticalization, the phenomenon of a sort of equalization of patterns (e.g., meaning patterns in loan translations) or lexical elements or both from a model language to a replica language, often when some similarity already exists. Pivot matching’s relation to grammaticalization is not clear; Matras says pivot matching can include grammaticalization or not. How to identify unambiguously elements that function as pivots is not clear. Matras suggests that convergence happens because “bilingual speakers face particularly strong pressures in coping with distinct procedures in organizing and managing the discourse and the arrangement of propositions in discourse” (244). For this reason and because of the need he sees to reduce the processing load, Matras expects “the pressure to converge the inventory of constructions in the repertoire to begin with those that organize complex propositions” (244).
Matras’s emphasis on innovations in contact situations as means to keep the conversation going is evident in the choices he makes among data to highlight. He pays special attention to elements that are “entrusted with managing the interaction and qualifying the relations between propositions” and are among the most vulnerable to influence from another language (313). Thus, he points to discourse markers, focus articles, and modality markers, which often become established borrowings cross-linguistically or at least appear from one language in discourse framed by another language, as in codeswitching.
Matras also gives the borrowing of verbs and of inflectional morphology a good deal of space—and for good reason: his data show their accessibility to change is less than that of other elements. When he discusses mixed languages, he concludes, “The mixed language prototype is . . . not a lexicon-grammar split, but a split between finite verb inflection or the ‘predication-anchoring language,’ and the bulk of referential lexical vocabulary, or ‘content-reference language’” (304-305). He goes on to say, “This kind of split can be explained in terms of the language processing mechanism and especially the mechanism of selection and inhibition of wholesale components within the repertoire” (305). But no details are given!
As for types of inflections, Matras differentiates derivational inflection from inflectional morphology by noting that “derivational morphology almost always accompanies borrowed lexicon . . . when borrowing a word like government in order to represent its semantic concept, we are also borrowing its entire derivational composition from the source language” (212). In contrast, inflectional morphology operates differently: “Inflectional morphology is applied at the sentence level, not the word level, and so within the framework of the utterance of the recipient language; it does not, by default, accompany individual words, since it is not an inseparable component of the meaning of those words” (212). Matras’s observation shows insight, but because it refers only to the surface level, it does not go far in explaining why certain types of inflectional morphology are rarely borrowed.
I suggest that more explanatory hypotheses are available if one considers differences in morpheme type that consider a more abstract level for analysis. One such idea is my “differential access hypothesis” (see Myers-Scotton 2005, inter alia). It suggests a model of language production in which the lemmas underlying most of the morphemes in nominal phrases (including some inflectional morphemes such as plural affixes, but not case markers) are activated at the level of the mental lexicon. In contrast, those underlying the morphemes that build larger constituents are present in the mental lexicon, but are not activated until the level of the formulator. The notion of a differential access is derived from the 4-M model of morpheme classification (Myers-Scotton & Jake 2009, inter alia), which divides morphemes as conceptually activated (content morphemes and generally their modifiers) and as structurally assigned (those available at the formulator). That is, if we suppose most borrowing takes place when the lemmas underlying content morphemes are activated, inflectional morphemes are not as available for borrowing as derivational morphemes because morphemes that coindex clausal relations are activated only later.
Of course Matras does point out some examples showing cases of inflectional morpheme borrowing, all seemingly in cases of extreme contact. For example, some Romani dialects borrow parts of their person concert set from Turkish. Matras sees this process triggered by two factors: first, the tendency to retain Turkish verb inflection with Turkish derived verbs; and second, by chance similarities between the inherited Romani and Turkish conjugations. “A somewhat similar development is found in Asia Minor Greek,” Matras notes (214). Here, Turkish –iniz is added to some concord endings; its meaning is not established, but it may have been borrowed as a general marker of plurality. But such examples are few and the generalization stands that borrowing of certain types of inflectional morpheme is severely constrained.
Matras does make related distinctions between morpheme types at various points throughout the book. Clearly, he recognizes that differences in frequency of the borrowing of different morpheme types (including lexical elements) indicate what he calls “contextual constraints” (183), but no details are provided. Furthermore, he notes that in most mixed languages nominal inflection patterns differ from those for verbs as far as the source language is concerned. He writes, “It is noteworthy that none of the mixed languages documented so far shows a mixture within the inventory of finite verb inflection. . . . These are always consistent, and also tend to pattern with the word-order rules of the verb phrase and the complex clause” (304).
Matras does note some pervasive asymmetries in contact phenomena. He often notices that much of clause structure can come from one language and the lexicon largely from another (e.g., in mixed languages, but in other phenomena, too). Also, he suggests that, because it is the source of predication, the verb is less susceptible to borrowing of any type. At times, Matras mentions “the cognitive side of language processing,” but only in the most general of terms, for example when he refers to “maintaining control over the language processing mechanism that enables the selection of context-appropriate structures within the repertoire and inhibition of those that are not appropriate” (151). Or, at times, he refers to what speakers do in abstract terms; for example, he refers to what speakers do under grammaticalization or his pivot-matching model as mapping “abstract functions from one language onto word-forms of another language” (241).
Overall, then, Matras does recognize inherent differences between certain morpheme types; he just does not connect the dots into a comprehensive model based on the abstract features underlying distributional differences of contact outcomes that would explain the clearly evident major divisions of labor whose surface features he so well describes.
In conclusion, let me repeat that this is an important book. So who should read this volume? Certainly, any serious students of language contact, from graduate students to experienced researchers in the field, can benefit from it. Also, historical linguists and linguists interested in grammatical theory may have their eyes opened by recognizing the elements and structures that are innovations in contact phenomena. Discourse analysts will be interested in the paramount role that Matras gives to speakers’ intentions in structuring their bilingual discourse.
I repeat that this volume is notable in its comprehensiveness. Early on Matras lists three central themes for the book (8). He certainly succeeds in keeping the first two themes in the reader’s mind: “The constant availability and presence of a complex repertoire, [and] the role of speakers as creative communicators and innovators” (8). However, it is hard to understand what he means by the third theme, as it is stated: “[T]he relevance of the inner stratification of the grammatical processes of speech production and language change in language contact situations” (8). Whatever he intended, this theme that hints at abstract levels in production is not developed. However, the volume is still notable in its scope; this review may be lengthy, but it still leaves out many topics that Matras discusses at length.
I noticed only one missing contact type on the list of contact phenomena: the multilingual urban varieties that are spoken largely by the youth in some major African cities, and surely elsewhere in the urban world, are not mentioned. These varieties straddle the line between heavy borrowing and mixed languages. Their grammatical base comes from another language spoken in the community that is known by many or all of the speakers of the “urban lect” (e.g., Swahili as a base for Sheng in Nairobi and Zulu or other indigenous languages for Isi-cantho in urban South Africa). These lects include lexical elements from this base but also from many other languages; there are also many lexical creations, some with a limited shelf life. Part of their attraction is this limited shelf life and the need for speakers to “keep up” to “stay cool.” Perhaps Matras would say these varieties belong with the “least mixed” contact languages, which he does discuss as semisecret varieties, such as Jenische spoken in southwest Germany and neighboring areas with many words derived from Romani or Hebrew. But in the African-lects speakers tend to parade their performances, not hide them.
I noticed only one error (135). The language of an example is given as Swahili, but Shona is the language identified in the original example (Myers-Scotton 1993a:184).
In sum, Matras deserves congratulations for bringing together such diverse data sources and so much information in this book. Most important, his discussions give us a good deal to think about, making this volume one to return to again and again while we think.