Reduplication in Abui: A case of pattern extension
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Reduplication in Abui: A case of pattern extension Marian Klamer1
· George Saad1,2
Received: 13 August 2018 / Accepted: 10 October 2020 / Published online: 30 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This paper studies the effect of ongoing contact on the Abui reduplication system. Abui, a Papuan indigenous minority language of eastern Indonesia, has been in contact with the regional lingua franca, Alor Malay (Austronesian), for around 50– 60 years. Throughout this period, contact with Alor Malay has affected different age groups in different ways across various levels of grammar. Here we compare Abui reduplication across four age groups: (pre)adolescents, young adults, adults, and elders, and show how the function and distribution of reduplication in the Abui spoken by younger speakers is affected by a combination of morphological PAT borrowing and lexical borrowing from Alor Malay. The changing patterns are first applied to the domain in which the two languages overlap: existing Abui verb reduplications become more Alor Malay-like with respect to their function, form, and productivity. The borrowing of an additional function of reduplication is analyzed as a type of complexification in Abui, while at the same time, Abui reduplication itself is demonstrated to also show simplification in terms of form. We argue that this change is induced by decades of stable bilingualism, and is further enhanced by the fact that reduplication is a universal morphological operation and can emerge spontaneously in language contact situations. Thus, the emerging trends reported here are explained by both borrowing from Alor Malay as well as incomplete acquisition of Abui. Keywords Papuan · Austronesian · Reduplication · Pattern extension · Pattern borrowing
B M. Klamer
[email protected] G. Saad [email protected]
1
Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands
2
University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
312
M. Klamer, G. Saad
Fig. 1 Map of indigenous languages of Alor and Pantar (Color figure online)
1 Introduction This paper investigates the effect of on-going contact on the Abui reduplication system by Alor Malay. Abui is a Papuan language (of the Timor-Alor-Pantar family, henceforth TAP), spoken on Alor island in eastern Indonesia, see Fig. 1. It is an indigenous minority language which has been in contact with the regional lingua franca, Alor Malay (Austronesian), for around 50–60 years (Kratochvíl 2007; Saad 2020a). Throughout this period, contact with Alor Malay has affected different age groups in different ways across various levels of grammar. In this paper, we compare Abui reduplication across four age groups: (pre)adolescents, young adults, adults, and elders; and show how contact with Alor Malay has led to the extension of a pattern (henceforth PAT extension), namely the reduplication system, in Abui. In many languages, clear-cut instances of PAT borrowing have been attested (cf. Gardani 2020 and references therein). However, fewer studies have focused on the effects of contact on morpholog
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