Keeping it in the family: disentangling contact and inheritance in closely related languages
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Date
03/07/2017Author
Colleran, Rebecca Anne Bills
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Abstract
The striking similarities between Old English (OE) and its neighbour Old Frisian
(OFris)—including aspects of phonology, morphology, and alliterative phrases—have
long been cause for comment, and often for controversy. The question of whether
the resemblance was caused by an immediate common ancestor (Anglo-Frisian) or
by neighboring positions in a dialect continuum/Sprachkreis has been hotly
disputed using phonological and toponymic evidence, but not in recent years.
Consensus in the nineties fell in favour of the dialect continuum, and there the issue
has largely rested.
However, recent finds in archaeology, history, and genetics argue that the
case requires a second look. Developments in grammaticalization theory and contact
linguistics give us new tools with which to investigate. Are the similarities between
OE and OFris due to an exclusive shared ancestor, or are those languages merely
part of a dialect continuum, with no closer relationship than that shared with the
other early West Germanic dialects? And are there any reliable criteria to separate
out inheritance-based similarities from those that are spread by contact? Shared
developments seem, primo facie, to be evidence of shared inheritance, but there are
other possible explanations. Parallel drift after separation, convergent development,
or coincidence might be the cause of any shared feature.
In this paper, I discuss recently proposed methods of distinguishing
inheritance from drift and contact, focusing on how morphosyntax can help explore
the shared history of OE and OFris. While grammaticalization processes often lead
to cross-linguistic similarities, the fact that OE and OFris display a cluster of
grammaticalizations not found in other early West Germanic dialects may be
significant. The exclusive developments under investigation include aga(n) ‘have’ >
‘have to’ and the present participle as verbal complement. By comparing the forms,
meanings, and distribution of these grammaticalized forms in the OFris corpus to
that of their cognate forms in OE, I show that the two languages probably diverged
from one another substantially later than they diverged from Old Saxon and Old
Low Franconian.
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