Papers by Peter Slomanson
The Oxford Guide to the Malayo-Polynesian Languages, 2024
The Oxford Guide to the Malayo-Polynesian Languages, 2024
The Perfect Volume: papers on the perfect, 2021
Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia, 2021
This article concerns establishing a plausible connection between the word jang(an) in colloquial... more This article concerns establishing a plausible connection between the word jang(an) in colloquial Malay varieties and jang-, a form which negates infinitives, in the diasporic contact variety Sri Lankan Malay. The principal claim is that jang(an) marks irrealis modality in Southeast Asian Malay varieties, in which it is frequently (optionally) deployed in negative subjunctive-like embedded clauses. A related claim, dependent on the first of the two, is that the irrealis interpretation conveyed by jang(an) makes it a semantically plausible bridge from a Malay grammar with clausal symmetry to the grammar of Sri Lankan Malay. In Sri Lankan Malay, embedded clauses are frequently non-finite, with infinitives similarly conveying irrealis meaning. Sri Lankan Malay jang- is in complementary distribution with the affirmative infinitival prefix me-, which is also derived from a marker of irrealis modality (mau) in colloquial Southeast Asian Malay varieties.
Negation and Negative Concord: The view from Creoles, 2018
Sri Lankan contact Malay (SLM) and Portuguese (SLP) share sprachbund-discordant features, includi... more Sri Lankan contact Malay (SLM) and Portuguese (SLP) share sprachbund-discordant features, including pre-verbal functional markers for TMA and negation. Yet their negation strategies also differ. In SLM, negation morphology is a diagnostic for the finiteness status of verbs. SLP verbs are contrastively negated, based on aspectual (not tense/finiteness) contrasts, and participles in adjunct clauses have distinctive non-finite negation. SLM marks finiteness status on matrix auxiliaries in a biclausal periphrastic construction. In the SLP construction, auxiliary and participle cannot be independently negated and the auxiliary cannot be separate from the verbal complex, arguing against biclausal status. SLM marks negative polarity in quantified nominal constituents, but has no negative concord, whereas SLP has negative concord, but relatively little negative polarity marking.
Information Structuring of Spoken Language from a Cross-linguistic Perspective, 2016
MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 1996
The Linguistic Review, 2016
A morphological asymmetry is shared by certain Dravidian (and Finnic) languages. The phonological... more A morphological asymmetry is shared by certain Dravidian (and Finnic) languages. The phonological shape of a negation element is dependent on the finiteness of the verb it negates. Pragmatic factors are identified that could motivate the development of this shared asymmetry, using evidence from the grammar of a Dravidian-influenced contact language. I will show that contrastive finiteness marking (finite and non-finite morphology) can facilitate the development of pragmatically-motivated linear reordering of affirmative clauses and negated clauses in order to accommodate new information structure conventions, extending the contrast to negated verbs by expanding the functional range of a negative imperative marker. Radical contact languages resulting from collective adult second language acquisition in naturalistic social contexts are typically presumed to feature reduced functional morphology, in which only highly salient contrasts, such as temporal contrasts, are formally instantiated. If a formal finiteness contrast and other relatively marked properties ("complexity") could develop in a highly analytic contact language that did not previously have them, this suggests that such a sequence of changes is in fact as plausible among genetically-unrelated languages in a sprachbund as it is over longer periods of time in genetically-related languages. We can observe this by examining grammatical change in a language that previously lacked both a finiteness contrast and a corresponding negation asymmetry, but which developed both the contrast and the asymmetry as a result of contact with a genetically-unrelated language that has analogous properties. Sri Lankan Malay (SLM) has undergone grammatical change due to contact with Dravidian (primarily Sri Lankan Muslim Tamil). Several of these changes involve verb morphology and syntax, and are plausibly motivated by discourse-pragmatic triggers. Consideration of tense and (non-)finiteness phenomena, as well as their reflexes in SLM negation, suggests a discourse-pragmatic motivation for these changes. Two discourse processes could conspire to motivate the development of the new morphology in SLM. The first is a clausal asymmetry, in which the predicate representing the most recent event is ordinarily in focus, indicated by tense morphology and position of the clause relative to clauses referring to subsequent events. The second is the communicative need to reassign focus in certain contexts to a temporally non-primary clause, one referring to an event that did not take place first. In spite of a constraint in Dravidian languages blocking the marking of functional contrasts under negation (so that only a negation morpheme can be prefixed to the verb), negation morphology encodes an obligatory finiteness contrast, optimally supporting these information-structuring processes. The clause describing the most recent event in a sentence remains visibly finite under negation, when a temporally secondary clause is focused.
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA)
Changing Structures: Studies in constructions and complementation, 2018
Certain contact languages previously lacking a finiteness contrast have developed infinitival com... more Certain contact languages previously lacking a finiteness contrast have developed infinitival complementation. The late Old English and Sri Lankan Malay (SLM) constructions both involve to-infinitives seemingly based on prepositional phrases, specifically infinitival to + lexical verb in Old English and infinitival nang + lexical verb in SLM. There is no evidence, however, that these verbs were ever nominalized in SLM, and Los (2005) has argued that the apparently dativized forms we find in Old English belie the fact that their syntactic status was verbal and the constituents containing them clausal. The SLM infinitival prefix is etymologically irrealis, paralleling the subjunctives that the English to-infinitive progressively replaced. Identifying cross-linguistically parallel changes that are explainable based on textual attestations in one of the languages examined will aid in reconstructing the development of underattested languages that lack diachronic corpora.
The Genesis of Sri Lanka Malay: A Case of Extreme Language Contact, 2012
The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online, 2013
The Rest is Silence: Paradigms of the Unspoken in Irish Studies, 2012
The Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online , 2013
Sri Lankan Malay (SLM) is spoken by approximately 40,000 people. There has so far been no attempt... more Sri Lankan Malay (SLM) is spoken by approximately 40,000 people. There has so far been no attempt to establish the precise numbers of speakers. In urban areas, it has become increasingly common over the last (approximately) forty years for many younger native speakers to be less fluent and less expressive in SLM than in other languages that they may have acquired as second languages in childhood or simultaneously with SLM, including Sinhala, English, and in a number of areas, Tamil/Shonam. This intergenerational decline in fluency is less evident in several smaller up-country (highland) communities. By contrast, the Malay residents of the southeastern coastal village of Kirinda, consisting of four hundred families, have thus far experienced no intergenerational decline whatsoever, and are effectively SLM-dominant from earliest childhood. There is strong dialect differentiation between (1) the western coastal area including Colombo, (2) the up-country area including Kandy, and (3) the southeastern area including Kirinda and Hambantota. Most of the data I have used in this APiCS contribution, with the exception of a small number of references to Colombo Malay, come from the variety of SLM spoken daily by all generations in Kirinda. This variety is ordinarily referred to by its speakers as Java ("Javanese"). It is the default lect in APiCS. While speakers of the Kirinda variety understand SLM varieties spoken elsewhere on the island, speakers from outside the southeastern region will find some of its vocabulary, functional morphology, and constructions to be unfamiliar or opaque, although rarely to the point of communicative breakdown.
Creoles, their Substrates, and Language Typology, 2011
The variety of Malay brought to Sri Lanka from Indonesia beginning in the mid-seventeenth century... more The variety of Malay brought to Sri Lanka from Indonesia beginning in the mid-seventeenth century was a largely isolating SVO language, whose grammar has changed radically over time. Modern Sri Lankan Malay (SLM) remains a language of predominantly Austronesian lexical inventory, but its grammar is now highly Dravidianised. This development is plausibly accounted for by postulating the convergence of L1 and L2 varieties in the many Muslim communities in which the interaction of Malay speakers and speakers of the Dravidian language Shonam (Sri Lankan Muslim Tamil) was intensive and the communal and cultural role of Shonam in the life of the Malay communities significant. This is influence if noticeable from the diffusion of a number of Dravidian morphosyntactic features into SLM, including inter alia the accretion of a three-way morphological tense contrast where none was previously present, its suppression in negated clauses, and a robust finiteness contrast that marks the divergent status of matrix and non-matrix clauses. The SLM verb, conservative in linear order, nevertheless strongly reflects a Shonam morphosyntactic model.
Structure and Variation in Language Contact, 2006
Complex Processes in New Languages, 2009
Global Legacies of the Great Irish Famine: Transnational and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 2014
The starting point for this essay is the observation that the dislocations and destabilization ca... more The starting point for this essay is the observation that the dislocations and destabilization caused by cataclysm, natural or man+made, facilitate the spontaneous or planned introduction of profound social and cultural changes, once a semblance of normalcy returns to the affected society. In the case I will discuss, the change in question was mass rejection, by a major section of the Irish population, of the Irish language, immediately following the Great Famine. This is a process that is unlikely to have taken place at the same speed or on the same scale in the absence of such a collective trauma. The specific role of the Great Famine in this rejection and the extent of that role, as well as the collective significance and cultural consequences of the rejection, particularly from the perspective of those Irish speakers who watched it unfold all around them, have not yet been sufficiently investigated and examined. Rather, the language shift itself, as opposed to the revival movement that would eventually follow, continues to be treated in much of general Irish historiography as a kind of footnote, and the role of the Famine is taken for granted, without further examination of its specific effects. Instead, the enormity of the shift and the speed with which it took place should help us to see this historical case as a rich potential source of knowledge and insight into what such a linguistic revolution entails and what it yields, not just with respect to the Irish historical past, but cross-culturally as well.
Afrikaans: Een drieluik/Ein Tryptichon, 2009
This paper is a contribution to the literature on the role and nature of language contact in the ... more This paper is a contribution to the literature on the role and nature of language contact in the history of Afrikaans, emphasizing the influence of syntactic reanalysis by Malay-Dutch bilinguals at the eighteenth-century Cape of Good Hope. Typologically the major substrate languages for Afrikaans, including Khoekhoegowab (Khoesan, SOV) and Malay (Austronesian, SVO), differ from each other radically. The primary influence of Khoekhoegowab in the divergence of varieties of African Dutch from European Dutch dialect models has been discussed by Hans den Besten based on historical evidence and analysis of attested sentences. Den Besten and others have also observed significant parallels with Malay in Afrikaans generally. In this paper, new linguistic arguments are presented for the importance of Malay influence in the creation of varieties of Afrikaans. The goal pursued in hypothesizing L2 reanalysis strategies is not only to explain properties of Afrikaans grammars that differ strikingly from properties associated with European (Germanic) models, but also to offer potential substrate explanations for grammatical proximity to European target models (as in SOV string orders and verb-second phenomena). I argue that grammatical mechanisms for marking contrasts in information structure on Malay verbs bootstrapped the acquisition of superficially similar phenomena in Cape Dutch, leading to lasting changes in contact Dutch grammars.
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Papers by Peter Slomanson
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA)
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA)