Aboriginal English on Croker Island
Morphosyntactic variation between input and innovation in a new variety of English (DFG Mercator project, project number 556482783)
- Duration
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- Description
- Our general aim in this project is to tease apart the effects of input
and innovation in the development of Australian Aboriginal English on
Croker Island, Northern Territory. The English spoken on this island is
phenotypically similar to other varieties of Aboriginal English, yet
noticeably distinct on several features. Moreover, it is characterized
by such a high degree of inter- and intra-speaker variability that it is
difficult to describe it as a homogenous variety or a linearly ordered
continuum of features (Mailhammer 2021). Building on these findings,
this project specifically aims at answering the following research
questions, which have impact beyond the description of another
"lesser-known variety of English" (Schreier et al. 2010): (1) How has
the interplay of contact-induced language change and variety-internal
innovation been shaping English on Croker Island? (2) Are patterns of
morphosyntactic variation unique to the variety or does it share (some
of) them with other high-contact Englishes? If so, are these patterns
owed to substrate influence or presumedly typical creole effects, or are
they describable in terms of more general structural,
discourse-pragmatic, or cognitive constraints on language use? (3) Why
has Croker Island not (yet) stabilized into a coherent variety
(Mailhammer 2021), as is generally assumed for New Englishes? Is the
observed variation in an artefact of the investigative tools used so
far? Can it be captured in terms of a set of probabilistic grammars with
a more sophisticated and cutting-edge toolkit? To address these
questions, we will conduct an apparent-time study based on both
sociolinguistic interviews and data elicited by means of a typological
tense-aspect questionnaire, enriching the existing corpus described in
Mailhammer (2021). We will focus on morphosyntactic features that (1)
are well-studied in other high-contact varieties of English and (2) have
diagnostic status in the field of World Englishes, such as copula
structures or 3rd-person present-tense marking. We will follow the
theoretical and methodological principles of variationist
sociolinguistics, employing state-of-the-art techniques of statistical
modeling and engaging with the latest findings from creole studies and
World Englishes as well as from typological and cognitive-linguistic
research. - Funding
- DFG Mercator project, project number 556482783
- Publications
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- Events
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