Salikoko S. Mufwene

African-American English : structure, history, and use

Introduction 1. Some Aspects of African-American Vernacular English Guy Bailey and Erik Thomas 2. The Sentence in African-American Vernacular English Stefan Martin and Walt Wolfram 3. Aspect and Predicate Phrases in African-American Vernacular English Lisa Green 4. The Structure of the Noun Phrase in African-American English Salikoko S. Mufwene 5. Coexistent Systems in African-American English William Labov 6. The Development of African-American Vernacular English, Focusing on the Creole Origin Issue John R. Rickford 7. Word from the Hood: The Lexicon of African-American Vernacular English Geneva Smitherman 8. African-American Language Use: Ideology and So-Called Obscenity Arthur K. Spears 9. More than a Mood or an Attitude: Discourse and Verbal Genres in African-American Culture Marcyliena Morgan 10. Linguistics, Education, and the Law: Education Reform for African-American Language Minority Students John Baugh

Africanisms in Afro-American language varieties

This collection of papers, based upon a Round Table meeting sponsored by the National Science Foundation, deals with creole and Afro-American linguistics. In particular, it emphasises the way in which African substrate languages contribute to the structure of creoles and semi-creoles.

Building social cognitive models of language change

Studies of language change have begun to contribute to answering several pressing questions in cognitive sciences, including the origins of human language capacity, the social construction of cognition and the mechanisms underlying culture change in general. Here, we describe recent advances within a new emerging framework for the study of language change, one that models such change as an evolutionary process among competing linguistic variants. We argue that a crucial and unifying element of this framework is the use of probabilistic, data-driven models both to infer change and to compare competing claims about social and cognitive influences on language change.

Colonization, globalization and the plight of 'weak' languages"

. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. x›241.1.PreliminariesThe title of this article is in part intended to capture the essence of Nettle &Romaine’s very informative book about the ongoing or anticipatedextinction of several languages around the world. It reflects two factorscentral to the authors’ arguments: colonization and globalization as causesof language endangerment and death. I recast the general scenario in termsof language contact marked by a competition for prevalence. According totheauthors,thisstateofaffairshastypically,thoughnotalways,favoredthesocio-economically powerful at the expense of the powerless. The presenttitle also avoids the melodrama that pervades Nettle & Romaine’s otherwiseimpressive documentation of facts, which sometimes sounds like a politicalmanifesto.# I show below that this rhetoric, which is also evident in much ofthe related literature in linguistics, from Krauss (1992) to Crystal (2000) andHage’ge (2000) and Maffi (2001), has typically not shed adequate light eitheron why the imminence of language extinction has not really been the samefrom one part of the world to another, or on what it really takes to keep alanguage alive.I cannot follow the tradition of shorter reviews, which start withcomprehensive summaries of the contents of books and then use some space

ON THE SO-CALLED 'INFINITIVE' IN ATLANTIC CREOLES*

Abstract This paper defends the position that there is no finite/non-finite distinction, hence no infinitive, in the basilects of Atlantic pidgins and creoles (PC). It argues that in languages where it is attested the infinitive is a morphologically-based distinction, and that, cross-linguistically, there is no constant syntactic or semantic characteristic that can be associated with it. Syntactic criteria commonly invoked to justify the infinitive are reviewed and shown to argue generally against assuming the distinction in Atlantic PCs. Parallel diachronic evidence is adduced from the development and partial loss of the infinitive in, respectively, Yoruba and Kituba to support the conclusion.

SLA AND THE EMERGENCE OF CREOLES

Although the emergence of creoles presupposes naturalistic SLA, current SLA scholarship does not shed much light on the development of creoles with regard to the population-internal mechanisms that produce normalization and autonomization from the creoles’ lexifiers. This is largely due to the fact that research on SLA is focused on individuals rather than on communities of speakers producing their own separate norms, whereas genetic creolistics deals precisely with this particular aspect of language change and speciation. It is not enough to prove that transfer from the first to the second language is possible and can evolve into substrate influence on the emergent vernaculars—transfer is not ineluctable and varies from one learner to another. Additionally, how and why particular features of some speakers spread to a whole population (or to parts thereof), whereas others do not, must be accounted for. Consistent with colonial socioeconomic history, the gradual emergence of creoles suggests a complex evolution that cannot be accounted for with simplistic invocations of either interlanguage or relexification. This article presents limitations in the cross-pollination that has been expected from genetic creolistics and research on SLA.

Equivocal Structures in Some Gullah Complex Sentences

complementizer, which has been suffixed to the verb by a transformation. While this abstract analysis has had a certain appeal (note the treatment of the English gerundive -ing in transformational grammar), it could also be counterargued that in the case of Latin the infinitive is governed by the presence of the higher verb (which calls for this particular construction), just as the subjunctive is governed by the presence of ut(i)lne (or the higher verb). Thus, the infinitival marker need not be a complementizer. 30. This is an interesting reversal of the situation in its lexifier, English, where the general nonpurposive complementizer is that, which also occurs in relative clauses.

Colonization, population contacts, and the emergence of new language varieties: A response to Peter Trudgill

Peter Trudgills account of new-dialect formation is uniformitarian, a position I have embraced explicitly since Mufwene 2001 . In Mufwene 2006 , I show how similar the mechanisms involved are to those that account for the emergence of creoles, the basic difference lying in the composition of the contact settings feature pool (see also below). The position I defend is even less moderate, as I argue that in the history of humankind language speciation has basically been a consequence of how internal variation within a language has been affected by migrations of its speakers and additionally by the different contacts the relevant populations have had among themselves (Trudgills position) and with speakers of other languages in their new, colonial ecologies (Mufwene 2005 , 2007 , 2008 ). The reader should not be surprised to see in this response comments that are primarily intended to support and complement the position of the target article.

Modeling the Emergence of Contact Languages

Contact languages are born out of the non-trivial interaction of two (or more) parent languages. Nowadays, the enhanced possibility of mobility and communication allows for a strong mixing of languages and cultures, thus raising the issue of whether there are any pure languages or cultures that are unaffected by contact with others. As with bacteria or viruses in biological evolution, the evolution of languages is marked by horizontal transmission; but to date no reliable quantitative tools to investigate these phenomena have been available. An interesting and well documented example of contact language is the emergence of creole languages, which originated in the contacts of European colonists and slaves during the 17th and 18th centuries in exogenous plantation colonies of especially the Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Here, we focus on the emergence of creole languages to demonstrate a dynamical process that mimics the process of creole formation in American and Caribbean plantation ecologies. Inspired by the Naming Game (NG), our modeling scheme incorporates demographic information about the colonial population in the framework of a non-trivial interaction network including three populations: Europeans, Mulattos/Creoles, and Bozal slaves. We show how this sole information makes it possible to discriminate territories that produced modern creoles from those that did not, with a surprising accuracy. The generality of our approach provides valuable insights for further studies on the emergence of languages in contact ecologies as well as to test specific hypotheses about the peopling and the population structures of the relevant territories. We submit that these tools could be relevant to addressing problems related to contact phenomena in many cultural domains: e.g., emergence of dialects, language competition and hybridization, globalization phenomena.

The ET Column: Globalization and the spread of English: what does it mean to be Anglophone?

The author wonders whether English is becoming as universal as is often claimed? Demand for English and American language centers has increased around the world, and TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) is now administered regularly in many metropolises. To ensure that their students are competitive, economically affluent countries have invested lots of money in the latest audio-visual technology while also recruiting the most competent teachers of English as a second or foreign language. South Korea has stood out in contracting American and British teachers to provide interaction-with-native-speaker experience to its students via satellite while European countries have benefited greatly from student exchange programs that enable their students to improve their competence by immersion in native socio-economic ecologies. Equally noteworthy are financial and emotional sacrifices endured by many, chiefly Korean, families whose mothers/wives and school-age children live in Anglophone countries so that the children can develop native competence in English. The relevant parents assume that as the world-wide market value of English continues to rise, every young person anywhere will need it, at least as a lingua franca, and the more fluent ones will have a competitive edge over their peers. Pop culture will undoubtedly have contributed its share to this rise of its market value.