Re: Evolving a Pidgin (was Re: Reduction and Grammaticalization)

Chris Bates wrote:
> It seems to me that sound changes starting off
> in a few words (usually the most common) and spreading outwards by
> analogy, much as in the book "grammaticalization" it talks of usage
> spreading outwards by analogy, contradicts the impression that a lot of
> linguistics books seem to give that somehow grammar and pronunciation
> changes happen fast and are applied to pretty much the whole lexicon (in
> the case of sound changes) at the same time. This view seems to be
> especially common in the parametric ideas of people arguing for a
> universal grammar, in whose arguments apparently grammar is changed by a
> setting suddenly changing... I don't see how you can hold such a view
> unless you argue that any evidence in favour of new grammatical forms
> slowly evolving and spreading by analogy is false.
Yes, we are in basic agreement on this fact.  The analogical thesis also
fits in well with lexicalist theories of grammar, to which I am somewhat
partial.

> I hadn't thought of that. :) I guess "gonna" is explained by borrowing
> from american english, so it's not a good example since it might not
> have been an irregular change.
I wouldn't bet on that.  Most of the oddities often attributed to
American English have some original source in the British Isles.

> Just out of interest, I'm thinking about designing a pidgin-style
> language (I need to research more how pidgins tend to be deficient as
> compared to creoles and other languages) and then trying to do a massive
> amount of grammaticalization + sound changes [...] It would be a more
> interesting project than most "evolve a language from a proto-language"
> project where the proto-language tend to already be "complete".
I should probably warn you that most Creolists no longer believe
in this view of creoles and pidgins.  It's been fairly clearly
shown by the likes of Michel Degraff and Salikoko Mufwene that
creoles do not evolve out of pidgins, and that languages often
called pidgins are often every bit as complete as regular languages.
But otherwise, I think the project is an interesting one.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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