Title: Towards a typology of language shift: Contact-induced variation in derivational morphology
Abstract:
Morphosyntactic variation and change among heritage speakers of majority languages has received considerable attention (Montrul 2016, Polinsky 2018). However, complementary research on heritage and shifting speakers of endangered languages has lagged far behind, with these speakers generally being excluded from the otherwise robust efforts to document endangered languages. Recent work has only begun to uncover the wealth of variation among such speakers (Mansfield & Stanford 2017, Nagy 2017, Kasstan 2019), who continue to make use of (highly multilingual) linguistic systems and stand to inform our understanding of how language change proceeds under intense language contact. In particular, these scenarios can serve as valuable testing sites for typological predictions, such as implicational hierarchies and their associated clines of change, and other generalizations that have been made about morphological typology in contact. My work examines incipient changes to derivational morphology in the language shift context, using the verbal morphology of the highly endangered Indigenous Siberian language Chukchi as a case study.
This study reports on an empirical investigation of the predictions made by Mithun (1984), who anticipated a cline of loss of productive noun incorporation in which the most grammaticalized uses are lost first. Based on experimental fieldwork in Chukotka and the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) with 23 speakers of Chukchi in 2018 and 2019, I find that this prediction is borne out and that, more significantly, the generalizations about NI can be extended to all of the attested types of productive voice morphology in Chukchi (antipassives, applicatives, and causatives).
These predictions are further informed by preliminary data from my 2022 fieldwork in Greenland, on the Inuit language Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic), another polysynthetic language with highly productive noun incorporation and other valency-changing morphosyntax. Though not endangered, Kalaallisut is also embedded in a long-term bilingual context (following Danish colonization), and local language experts report similar patterns of declining productivity of these phenomena.
These results point to the predictive value of implicational hierarchies in situations of language contact: by targeting the same morphological phenomena across different generations of speakers in a contact setting, we can empirically map change in progress. The Chukchi case is especially useful in shedding light on the mechanisms of change in these settings. It has long been reported that synthetic and polysynthetic languages tend to become more analytic in situations of contact (Trudgill 2011); however, these observations have generally been made of synthetic languages in contact with highly analytic. In Chukchi, we find a reduction in the degree of synthesis in the verb even though speakers are dominant in another highly synthetic language (Russian). Thus, we can conclude that reduction in synthetic morphology is not straightforwardly due to interference from the contact language, but may instead point to general cognitive constraints on the acquisition of language.
