Petar Kehayov (Universität Regensburg): On the behavior of Mood-and-Modality in language death: evidence from minor Finnic

The existing research on language death is mostly concerned with processes and phenomena applying to several areas of grammar at once; e.g. reduction (Campbell & Muntzel 1989), generalization and paradigmatic levelling (Campbell & Muntzel 1989), morphotactic transparency and constructional iconicity (Dressler 1981), suppression of marked features in favour of unmarked features (Dimmendaal 1992; Campbell & Muntzel 1989), innovativeness (Gal 1989: 326), loss of redundancy (Dressler 1981), preference for analytic/isolational structures (Dorian 1977: 27; Schmidt 1985: 61; Dimmendaal 1992: 130), and loss of suppletive forms (Sasse 1992).

This circumscription to general (cross-categorial) phenomena is understandable, as language decay is usually a rapid process affecting different domains of grammar simultaneously and not consecutively. The lack of research focusing on the behaviour of specific grammatical categories in language death has, however, limitative consequences for our understanding of language change in general. For example, I am not aware of any explicit hypotheses with regard to the relative susceptibility of grammatical categories (e.g. tense or aspect) or their values (e.g. pluperfect or progressive) to loss, change and innovation in language decay. This poverty of research is striking when compared to the wealth of studies that examine the behaviour of grammatical categories in “normal” language contact and propose explicit universals (e.g. in the form of borrowing hierarchies; Matras 2009: 153–165).

In this talk, I report some preliminary results of an on-going study on the behaviour of mood and modality (MM) in certain obsolescent Finnic varieties (such as Ingrian, Votic and Lude). My method involves a comparison of earlier MM systems (as documented in text collections and reference grammars) with fluent speaker and narrow-speaker systems. My focus is on phenomena which cannot be straightforwardly explained as replicas from dominant languages of the area.

The findings of the study could be formulated as probabilistic hierarchies showing the relative susceptibility to loss, change and innovation in MM systems. In this form they are easily comparable with data from other transitional stages of human language, where the linguistic competence of an individual is at stake (e.g. acquisition hierarchies). 

References

Campbell, Lyle, Martha C. Muntzel 1989. The structural consequences of language death. In Nancy Dorian, (ed.), Investigating obsolescence. Studies in language contraction and death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 181–196.

Mere information om Petar Kehayov på hans hjemmeside: http://www.uni-regensburg.de/sprache-literatur-kultur/slavistik/institut/sprach-und-kulturwissenschaft/petar-kehayov/index.html.