Metatypy

Metatypy is a type of morphosyntactic and semantic language change brought about by language contact involving multilingual speakers. The term was coined by linguist Malcolm Ross.

Description

Ross (1999: 7, 1) gives the following definition:

etatypy is a''change in morphosyntactic type and grammatical organisation'' nd also semantic patterns''which a language undergoes as a result of its speakers’ bilingualism in another language. This change is driven by grammatical calquing, i.e. the copying of constructional meanings from the modified language and the innovation of new structures using inherited material to express them. A concomitant of this reorganisation of grammatical constructions is often the reorganisation or creation of paradigms of grammatical functors.... Usually, the language undergoing metatypy (the modified language) is emblematic of its speakers’ identity, whilst the language which provides the metatypic model is an inter-community language. Speakers of the modified language form a sufficiently tightknit community to be well aware of their separate identity and of their language as a marker of that identity, but some bilingual speakers, at least, use the inter-community language so extensively that they are more at home in it than in the emblematic language of the community.''

Ross (2002) identifies the following metatypic changes:

# "reorganization of the language's semantic patterns and 'ways of saying things'"
# restructuring of its syntax, the patterns of morphemes being concatenated to form
#* (i) sentences and clauses,
#* (ii) phrases
#* (iii) words

Ross finds that semantic reorganization occurs before syntactic restructuring. The syntactic changes occur in the order of (i) sentence/clause, (ii) phrase, and (iii) words.

Here are some languages that have undergone metatypy:

:

Example

The example given by Ross (1999) is the "Papuanisation" of the Takia language (of the Oceanic family, western branch) because of influence from the neighbouring Waskia language (of the Madang family, Trans–New Guinea). In Ross' terminology, Takia is the ''modified language'' and Waskia is the ''inter-community language''. Waskia, however, does not seem to have been significantly influenced by Takia. Both languages are spoken on Karkar Island.

The end result of the metatypic change leaves Takia usually having a word-for-word Waskia translation such as the following:

:

The pairing of syntactic and semantic structures makes this word-for-word translation possible. Some of the grammatical changes that Takia has undergone include the following:

:

The diffusional changes of Takia are only in terms of metatypy: Takia has not altered its phonology and has virtually no loanwords borrowed from Waskia.

See also

* Calque
* Mixed language
* Language change
* Language contact
* Loanword
* Multilingualism
* Language transfer
* Relexification
* Hybrid language (disambiguation)

Sources

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Historical linguistics
Language contact