Voice Syncretism in Bedouin Hijazi Arabic: The Interplay of Language Acquisition and Contact

Abstract

Explanations of linguistic change have long been regarded as a part of language acquisition. The connection between linguistic change and language acquisition stems from the assumption that children can cause change when they acquire a grammar that is divergent from that of adult speakers. Acquisition-based explanations of linguistic change put emphasis on exploring the internal causes of linguistic change that are triggered from inside the linguistic system. However, internal change through acquisition is also seen as the result of contact, that can change children’s input. Building on these views, the present thesis maintains that internal and external factors are not independent in linguistic change. In light of this, the thesis is concerned with how acquisition and contact can interplay in driving the emergence and spread of linguistic change. The present thesis suggests two scenarios for this interplay, through the investigation of generational variation that reflects a change in progress in the morphological marking of passive constructions among speakers of Bedouin Hijazi Arabic (BHA), a dialect spoken in the west of Saudi Arabia. The speakers belong to three age groups: old, middle-aged, and young. Data were collected from responses of 294 BHA speakers to an online questionnaire that was designed to assess their ability to distinguish morphosyntactically similar grammatical constructions in BHA that occur in different linguistic contexts, along with other questions that aim to elicit information about speakers’ intra- and inter-dialectal contact. The change in question is the replacement of the traditional internal passive by an affixed form. In the first scenario for explaining the emergence and spread of the affixed passive in BHA, the change is internally driven by the similarity in the surface structures between anticausative and passive constructions. This similarity can be a source of ambiguity that may motivate individuals during the language acquisition process to reanalyse anticausative structures as passives. This reanalysis process is affected by the type of the verb that surfaces with these structures and the type (i.e., animate or inanimate) of its grammatical subject. The findings of the present thesis demonstrate that anticausative structures that contain externally-caused verbs with inanimate subjects are very likely to be reanalysed as passive structures. This reanalysis is affected by the frequency of anticausative structures in comparison to the infrequency of passive structures among speakers of BHA. It is also very likely that the emergence of the affixed passive has been triggered by a process of analogical extension whereby the passive has become morphologically syncretic with in-morpheme structures in BHA. Contact with the adjoining Urban Hijazi Arabic (UHA), in which only the affixed passive is used, is believed to have played a role in accelerating the eventual acquisition and spread of the affixed passive that has been internally motivated by the verbal system of BHA. Contact with UHA has also functioned as a catalyst of change when the affixed passive is incorporated into children’s acquisition input. This has probably taken place through the middle-aged generation that started to use the affixed passive in their speech to their children. This is the second scenario for explaining the emergence and spread of the affixed passive in BHA. The findings of this thesis show that the middle-aged generation accepted both the internal passive and the affixed passive as acceptable forms of the passive voice. The acceptance of these variable forms among this generation is assumed to be due to their moderate contact with speakers of UHA. This contact has created a situation in which both internal and affixed passive forms coexist in BHA. Consequently, the acquisition input for the next generations has contained the local BHA internal passive and the non-local UHA affixed passive. Speakers who have more contact with UHA are likely to only acquire the affixed passive. The findings of this thesis show that the young generation of BHA had less exposure to the local internal passive form as a result of their low contact with the old generation of BHA. On the other hand, they had more exposure to the affixed passive through the variable input that they have received from their parents and through their moderate contact with UHA. The thesis assumes that the eventual change towards the complete loss of the internal passive will take place through language acquisition when the internal passive form disappears from the input which children are exposed to. This outcome will be the result of community-based acquisition, in which only one of the coexisting forms prevails in the community and eventually becomes the only form that is acquired by children. Therefore, a possible explanatory framework for linguistic change can be found in the interplay of contact and acquisition. The thesis is a contribution to the study of variation and change in dialects. It also hopes to provide an explanation for an aspect of Arabic studies that has received little attention in the literature up to now.