Contact Linguistics. Chap

Exercise: The following are some more examples of changes in LA Spanish under English influence, provided by Silva-Corvalán. What exactly has changed in these cases, and to what extent do they support the view that no new syntactic structure has been “borrowed” from English?

a. LA Span. Mi padre es seis pies [de altura] (2000:13).

English My father is six feet [tall]
Gen. Span. Mi padre mide seis pies
My father measures six feet.

b. LA Span. Y tu carro que compraste, ¿cómo te gusta? (1998:232)

And your car that you-bought, how to-you it-pleases
English. And the car that you bought, how do you like it?
Gen. Span. Y el carro que compraste, te gusta?

Compare:
c. Gen. Span. ¿Cómo te gusta el café?

“How do you like coffee?”
Me gusta cargado.
“I like it strong.”


4.2. A situation of unstable bilingualism: French/English contact on Prince Edward Island.

One such situation involves contact between English and Acadian French on Prince Edward Island, one of the three Maritime provinces of Atlantic Canada. The Acadian variety spoken here has been subjected to heavy lexical borrowing from English, as have all varieties of French in Canada. But, unlike other varieties, Prince Edward Island (henceforth PEI) French has also borrowed a number of function items, including prepositions, wh-words and the adverbial particle back. Each of these has led to certain structural changes in PEI French. Space permits only a brief look at the borrowing of prepositions and its structural consequences.

King (2000:142) informs us that borrowed verb+preposition combinations like ender up, finder out, hanger around, etc., make up no fewer than 17.6% of all English-origin verbs in her corpus of PEI French. In addition, a variety of English-origin prepositions occur with verbs of French origin, for example, parler about ‘talk about’, aller on ‘go on’, faire up ‘make up’, etc. Similarly, French prepositions occur with verbs of English origin, for example, crasher dans ‘crash into’, picker su ‘pick on’, lander su ‘land on’, etc. (2000:143). The result of this mixture in the prepositional system is that a property peculiar to English prepositions, viz. preposition stranding, has been transferred to PEI French prepositions. Thus, wh-interrogative strategies like that in (5) are quite acceptable in this and some other Acadian French varieties, though they are ungrammatical in other varieties of French, both in Canada and elsewhere.

(5) a. Quoi ce-qu’ils parlont about?

what that they are-talking about
“What are they talking about?”

b. Où ce-qu’elle vient de?

“Where does she come from?”

In addition, preposition stranding is allowed in relatives and passives, as in the following examples:

(6) a. Je cherche une fille à avoir confiance en.

I am-looking-for a girl to to-have confidence in.
“I’m looking for a girl to trust.”

2. 
   Ce lit-là-a été couché dedans.
   

This bed has been slept in”

By contrast, other varieties of Canadian French have borrowed few, if any, prepositions, and do not permit preposition stranding.⁹ King concludes, justifiably, that “there is a close relationship between borrowing prepositions and having preposition stranding” (145). Crucially, though, she argues that the structural change is not the result of direct syntactic borrowing, however much it may seem that way. Rather, “lexical borrowing has triggered reanalysis of the PEI French prepositional system” (136). Once more we have evidence that an apparent case of structural “borrowing” is actually mediated by lexical borrowing, this time of function words.

It would appear that the agents of this change were fluent bilinguals who practiced frequent code-mixing. Their practice of freely mixing French verbs with English prepositions and vice-versa appears to have promoted a gradual change in which French prepositions assumed the syntactic properties of their English counterparts. This kind of agentivity seems to be one of the factors that promote structural change in an ancestral language. Another important factor appears to be ongoing shift in the community. It turns out that, while all varieties of Acadian French are under intense pressure from English, PEI French is particularly at risk, and some communities there are undergoing more rapid language attrition. Mougeon & Beniak (1991:180) suggest that situations of unstable bilingualism promote structural influence from the dominant language on the minority language. This is certainly borne out by the PEI French situation. It turns out that other cases of contact conform to this pattern.