Identifying agents of change: Simplification of possessive marking in Abui-Malay bilinguals

Abstract

This paper investigates variation in possessive marking in Abui, a language spoken in a minority bilingual community in eastern Indonesia. Abui youngsters grow up acquiring both Abui (Papuan) and Alor Malay (Austronesian), but only become active speakers of Abui when they reach adolescence. Due to this delay, their Abui is expected to show signs of both imperfect acquisition and contact-induced effects. This language background makes them an interesting population on which to carry out a cross-sectional study on contact-induced variation. Abui distinguishes between a reflexive and non-reflexive possessive marker, while Alor Malay makes no such distinction. Combining methods from descriptive linguistics, bilingualism research, and variationist sociolinguistics, and using both a production and a comprehension task, we study the variation between four age-groups of Abui-Malay bilinguals: (pre-)adolescents, young adults, adults, and elders. Our results reveal that (pre-)adolescent males are the drivers of variation, and generalize the non-reflexive possessive marker to reflexive environments. This suggests that over the next decades the reflexive possessive prefix may be lost in Abui. This paper is a direct answer to a call by Ross (2013) to conduct in-depth variationist studies to establish more synchronically informed approaches to the study of language contact. In addition, by combining production and comprehension studies and applying them to an indigenous minority language, it expands the empirical support for a prominent hypothesis of bilingual processing: the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (Prévost & White 2000b).

Lexical interference in non-native resolution of possessives?

“…Using context-free German sentences like (15a-d) in a speeded acceptability judgment and an implicit reading experiment, they found that (i) the L1-Spanish participants, as expected, showed less sensitivity than the L1-English group towards possessor-possessive mismatch as displayed in (15c-d); 12 (ii) high L2 proficiency may have helped L1-Spanish/L2-English in La-German but did not influence the performance of L1-English/L2-Spanish participants; (iii) contrary to their expectations, gender mismatch between possessive and possessee (Mutter 'mother'), as displayed in (15b,c) did not affect the L1-Spanish learners' performance in any significant way. The observation that L2 learners have difficulties deploying L2 constraints on possessives that are not present in their L1 is corroborated by Helland (2017), Pitz et al (2017) and Saad et al (2019) with respect to the structuresensitive binding constraints (Condition A vs. B) that characterize reflexive vs. irreflexive possessive markers.…”

“…OSLa volume 12(2) 2021 Saad et al (2019) investigated how well multilingual speakers whose first (majority) language (Austronesian Alor Malay) has binding-neutral 3 rd person possessive marking master the distinction between reflexive and irreflexive 3 rd person possessive marking in their second (minority) language (Indonesian Abui). They found that (pre-)adolescents did not fully master the distinction, whether in production or comprehension, and that the tendency was to overgeneralize the irreflexive prefix to reflexive contexts rather than the other way around, arguably because the former, being less restricted, is considerably more frequent in natural discourse.…”

Reduplication in Abui: A case of pattern extension

“…Abui is the largest indigenous Papuan (TAP) language spoken on the islands of Alor and Pantar. The variety studied here is the Takalelang dialect, which is also the most well documented and described one (Delpada 2016:201;Kratochvíl 2007Kratochvíl , 2011Kratochvíl , 2014aPerono Cacciafoco et al 2015;Saad 2020a;Saad et al 2019).…”

Practicalities of language data collection and management in and around Indonesia

“…The variation found in the results of the production task were used to identify four linguistic variables which could potentially differ across age-groups and to study how significant they were. For example, one variable was the use of a dedicated reflexive possessor affix in possessed object NPs, versus using a different, more general possessive affix in such contexts (Saad, Klamer, and Moro 2019;Saad 2020). As a second step, it was investigated whether the production of these variable features differed from their comprehension.…”