The (North) American English Mandative Subjunctive in the 21st Century: Revival or Remnant?

The English mandative subjunctive has had a checkered history, ranging from extensive use in Old English to near extinction by Late Modern English. Then, in a dramatic (if still unexplained) reversal, it was reported to have revived, notably in American English, a scenario which is now widely endorsed. Observing that most references to this revival are based on the written language, we sought to replicate this result in contemporary North American English speech. Finding little evidence of the mandative subjunctive in contexts where revivalist claims would predict it, we next attempted to contextualize the current situation by tracing the trajectory of the mandative subjunctive back to the 16th century via the speech-like portions of two major corpora of English. Adopting a variationist perspective, we carried out systematic quantitative analyses of the morphological form of verbs embedded under large numbers of mandative subjunctive triggers. Results show that selection of the subjunctive was already both sparse in terms of rate and sporadic in terms of triggers as far back as the Early Modern English speech surrogates investigated, and far from reviving over the course of the 20th century, has remained that way ever since. We implicate methodological inconsistencies, in particular violations of the principle of accountability, in the disparities between the findings reported here and the consensus in the literature with respect to the evolution and current status of the mandative subjunctive in North American English

Viewing Romance through a variationist lens

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NOTHING IN CONTEXT: VARIATION, GRAMMATICIZATION AND PAST TIME MARKING IN NIGERIAN PIDGIN ENGLISH

Assessment of form/function relationships is notoriously contentious in creole grammars since overt grammatical markers typically alternate with Zero in a number of subsystems of the grammar, Categorical perception coupled with the structuralist tendency to ascribe a single function to each form together conspire in promoting the widespread notion that both overt and Zero forms are grammatical markers of specific meanings. Exemplifying with the past temporal reference sector of Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE), an extended pidgin said to exhibit prototypical creole features, this paper shows that only a small minority of NPE contexts with a particular semantic reference co-occur with an overt form claimed to encode this reference . Indeed, the overt forms typically appear in a number of diverse contexts. Thus despite considerable grammaticization over the past couple of centuries, none of the overt NPE past temporal reference forms have as vet attained the status of grammatical market. It follows that the selection of Zero cannot be inferred to unambiguosly signal the absence of a specific associated meaning, pace yhe Bickertonian scenario whereby each and null has a unique semantic interpretationLa evaluación de las relaciones forma/función es de notoria controversia en el caso de las gramáticas criollas desde que marcadores gramaticales explícitos alternan normalmente con flexiones cero en numerosos subsistemas de la gramática. La tendencia categórica estructuralista o atribuir una función individual para cada forma contribuye a fomentar la noción tan generalizada de que tanto las formas explícitas como las implícitas (cero) son marcadores gramaticales de significados específicos. Al ejemplificar con la categoría de referencia temporal de pasado en el inglés pidgin nigeriano (Nigerian Pidgin Emglish, NPE), un Pidgin extendido que parece ser que exhibe rasgos criollos prototípicos. El presente artículo muestra como sólo el número reducido de colirextos NPE con una referencia semántica específica convive con una forma explícita a la que se le atribuye la codificación de esa referencia. De hecho, las formas explícitas normalmente se dan en una serie de contextos diversos. Por tanto, a pesar de la considerable gramaticalización durante los últimos dos siglos, ninguna de las formas NPE de referencia temporal de pasado ha logrado aún el estatus de marcador gramatical. De lo que se desprende que no se puede suponer que la selección de la forma cero indique inequívocamente la ausencia de un significado específico, con el debido respeto para la perspectiva bickertoniana, en el que cada forma, tanto la explícita como la cero tiene una única interpretación semántica

O FUTUR TEM FUTURO NO FRANCÊS (CANADENSE)?

The hospitality of the future temporal reference sector to multiple exponents is well exemplified by French, where the inflected future (IF) currently competes with both periphrastic future (PF) and futurate present (P) forms. Most scholars contend that the variant expressions are selected according to distinctions in the way the speaker envisions the future eventuality and/or the semantic and/or pragmatic import s/he wishes to convey. Curiously, however, there is little agreement as to what that import is nor which of the variants is capable of expressing it. Making use of a variationist approach, in this paper we return to the question of the function and meaning of the major exponents of futurity in spoken French through systematic analysis of thousands of contexts of future temporal reference in natural speech. We show that although the variant forms continue to divide up the work of expressing posteriority, they are rarely selected by speakers in accordance with the values commonly attributed to them in either the descriptive or prescriptive literature. This is because basically all reference to future states or events is made by PF, which has ousted IF from virtually all contexts of productive usage but one, while P has made only incipient incursions into another. We suggest that failure to attain consensus on the set of meanings or functions distinguishing the variants is the product of an epistemological problem stemming from difficulty in reconciling the form-function polyvalence characteristic of inherent variability with the (distributional) linguistic enterprise of ascribing a unique function to every form

An Exception to the Rule? Lone French Nouns in Tunisian Arabic

Reports on language mixing involving Arabic often qualify that language as resistant to constraints operating on other language pairs. But many fail to situate the purported violations with respect to recipient and donor languages, making it impossible to ascertain whether these are exceptional code-switches or (nonce) borrowings; isolated cases or robust patterns. We address these issues through variationist analysis of Tunisian Arabic/French bilingual discourse. Focusing on conflict sites that reveal which grammar is operative when the other language is accessed, we compare quantitatively the behavior of lone French-origin nouns in Arabic with their counterparts in both donor and recipient languages. Despite a higher order community resistance to morphological inflection of other-language items, results show treatment of French nouns to be consistent with the (variable) grammar of Arabic and different from that of French. Applying the same accountable methodology to the contentious French det+n sequences (“constituent insertions”) shows that most are integrated in the same way as their lone counterparts. These too are treated as (compound) borrowings, largely motivated by the semantic imperative of expressing plurality while eschewing inflection. As borrowings, they do not constitute exceptions to code-switching constraints, confirming that the status of mixed items cannot be determined in isolation; they must be contextualized with respect to the remainder of the bilingual system, including donor, recipient, and other mixed-language elements