Contact Linguistics. Chap

Exercise: Compare the morphological influence from Russian on Copper Island Aleut with that from Ritharngu on Ngandi. To what extent are the patterns similar? To what extent does typological similarity between the languages involved in each case account for the patterns?

In other cases, as Golovko (1996:116) observes, the typological differences between Aleut and Russian block certain kinds of influence from the latter. For example, the absence of prefixes in Aleut may explain why practically no Russian prefixes were incorporated into CIA.

In several cases, the typological differences between the two source languages are resolved in favor of selections that achieve greater transparency. Examples include the substitution of much Aleut suffixal morphology by Russian-derived analytic strategies such as pronouns, negation and future marking. Such changes seem to result from processes of convergence similar to those we found in the contact between Urdu and other languages in Kupwar (Chapter 3, section 7.3). In all these cases, bilinguals create compromises by replacing certain syntactic strategies with others that are simpler or more transparent.
The pervasive mixture of elements from two sources in every component of CIA grammar, led to a new creation that appears to have few parallels elsewhere. Apart from the cases of convergence we just mentioned, similar patterns of mixture can be found in languages like Asia Minor Greek and Wutun. In both these cases, elements and structures from the respective sources have combined to produce composite systems of phonology, morphology and syntax. All of these contact languages are clearly the work of skilled bilinguals who recombine structures from their two languages to create a new composite language. The chief difference between intertwined languages like CIA and composites like Asia Minor Greek is that the former outcomes seem to arise relatively quickly, and achieve stability and autonomy as new norms. By contrast, as we saw in Chapter 3, section 7.2, Asia Minor Greek is the result of gradual intrusion of Turkish elements over a long period, and continues to be in a state of flux. Moreover, intertwined languages display neater patterns of mixture than languages like Asia Minor Greek, perhaps because they involve more deliberate acts of creation. There are also some differences in the types of diffusion characteristic of each case. For instance, EL elements incorporated into intertwined languages are usually overt and identifiable surface forms. In addition to such forms, however, languages like Asia Minor Greek display evidence of “pattern transfer”, that is, diffusion of abstract structural patterns from the source language. These kinds of diffusion do not seem to be typical of intertwined languages. On the whole, however, there is no reason to suppose that the actual processes of mixture involved in the creation of intertwined languages were unique to these languages.