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  • - [Narrator] We are the paradoxical ape, bipedal, naked, large brain, long the

  • master of fire, tools and language but still trying to understand ourselves.

  • Aware that death is inevitable yet filled with optimism. We grow up slowly. We hand

  • down knowledge. We empathize and deceive. We shape the future from our shared

  • understanding of the past. Carta brings together experts from diverse disciplines

  • to exchange insights on who we are and how we got here. An exploration made

  • possible by the generosity of humans like you.

  • ♪ [music] ♪

  • - Thank you, and thank you very much for the invitation to join you today.

  • As speakers of English when we hear constructions like, "Get 'em, bring 'em,

  • take 'em," we analyze those as a verb and a pronoun. Get them or get him, bring them

  • or bring him. This analysis is supported by the fact that we read and write. We

  • rarely see the informal forms written it's usually the formal forms and through

  • schooling which generally tell us to use the formal forms and to leave the others

  • alone but we also know when it's appropriate to use which style in which

  • context. We're now going to move to a different context where speakers heard

  • those constructions but analyze them differently. When Australia was colonized,

  • there were about 250 languages spoken by indigenous people. The speakers of the

  • Australian languages and the English speakers had to learn to communicate with

  • each other very quickly. Usually the English speakers didn't learn much of the

  • Australian languages. The earnest was on the indigenous people to learn as much

  • English as they could to get by with.

  • So let's imagine that the English speakers we're using the informal constructions a

  • lot when they were speaking. "Take 'em over there, bring 'em back," constructions

  • like that that we use all the time without thinking about it. The speakers of the

  • Australian languages who hadn't yet learned English identified a pattern in

  • what they were hearing. When they heard verbs like get, bring, take they

  • frequently heard something like, "'-im" occurring after the verb but they didn't

  • hear that when the verb was something like walk which doesn't have a direct object.

  • So they came to analyze the "'-im" that we would think of as a pronoun as being a

  • grammatical element that attaches to a transitive verb. It's a verb with an

  • object but not to verbs like walk and run.

  • They didn't have literacy or schooling to influence their analysis. They just made

  • this analysis from identifying patterns in the language being spoken to them and what

  • they heard around them. So the transitive "-im," or the transitive marker is a new

  • structure that came in to that system that was not the same as a structure that was

  • already in English and it was not in the Australian languages either but we can

  • see where it came from but the Australian languages did influence that structure in

  • abstract ways. The form of "-im" is clearly from English but there are other

  • influences from the Australian languages. I've just listed a few of them here. One

  • is for example that in those languages when you have a transitive verb

  • construction it's a different construction from an intransitive verb. So

  • those speakers learned to pay attention to the transitivity of the verb in every

  • clause because that was required by their grammar. So it made sense to them based on

  • the first languages to have a different construction for a transitive

  • versus an intransitive verb.

  • In addition, there were rules for words and the sound systems within the language

  • that the Australian verbs didn't suit very well and the new analysis suited them

  • better. So for example words in Australian languages are often at least

  • two syllables long. If you have a short verb, adding the transitive marker made it

  • longer and conformed more to the rules of the first languages. So normally words in

  • Australian languages in that area didn't usually end with a cluster of consonants

  • at the end of the word. So again, adding that marker made the word shape conform

  • more to the type of verb that speakers of those languages were used to.

  • The "-im" structure is a good example of some characteristics of a pidgin. The word

  • forms come mostly from the language that was spoken by the socially dominant group

  • which we call the lexifier language but a lot of the structure and word meanings

  • come from the other multiple languages that were being spoken by the creators. In

  • addition, reanalysis take place such as what we've just seen through pattern

  • finding processes and second language learning processes. A pidgin is a means of

  • inter-group communication. You use it to speak to people who's

  • language you don't know and all of those speakers were still using their own first

  • languages when they spoke to people within their same group. The pidgin spread

  • throughout Australia as English speakers spread throughout Autralia and in each

  • place there were Australian languages and those speakers were contributing features

  • to the new system. Indigenous people where brought together in groups and needed to

  • interact with speakers of many other languages with whom traditionally they

  • wouldn't have interacted much or at all. So they all needed a way to speak to each

  • other and this system was a good system to build on in order to do that.

  • As speakers needed to talk about more and more topics with each other more and more

  • elements were added from English and also from the Australian languages. Varieties

  • of northern territory Kriol were derived from interactions of this kind.

  • Here's an example.

  • - [recording] Det mami-wan en det tu pikanini bin trai stop-im im bat

  • det debil-debil bin gwei garra det tu dog.

  • - And you can see there the transitive marker on the verb, which came

  • in via the pidgin. There's another interesting element there

  • which is, "bin" meaning past tense. Again, the form is from English have been, had

  • been but there's another reanalysis there so it just means simple past tense. It's

  • not part of the have been or had been construction. Reasearch

  • suggests that there's more than one developmental path for a Kriol language

  • but this has won a tested path. Again, the word forms come mostly from the socially

  • dominant language English but much of the structure and the word meanings come from

  • the other input languages. In this case, there was an earlier pidgin that fed in to

  • the Kriol. Reanalysis took place through pattern finding and second language

  • learning processes and the system expanded and developed. There was a prior

  • pidgin that was used for inter-group communication.

  • A Kriol is the first language of its speakers and is a full language. This

  • variety of Kriol continued to develop and stabilize probably up until about the

  • 1940s and '50s and it currently has several varieties.

  • We'll turn now to another kind of contact language in another setting in Australia.

  • This is in a small Warlpiri community in the northern territory. In this community,

  • speakers over about the age of 35 mostly speak Warlpiri their traditional

  • language but they also code switch into varieties of English and Kriol. Code

  • switching is switching between languages in a single conversation and by Aboriginal

  • English there I mean English with elements of the indigenous languages and elements

  • of Kriol in it. Younger speakers, younger adults and children speak in a new way

  • which systematically combines elements from those sources in which we call Light

  • Warlpiri. Children learn to speak this language from when they first begin to

  • talk now. As they grow older, they also produce Walpiri and they code switch into

  • the English based varieties. The Children now learn Light Warlpiri and Walpiri from

  • birth. We'll look at a little background structure of the contributing languages

  • before we look at the structure of Light Warlpiri.

  • - [recording] Nyina-ja-lku-lpa-lu warlu-ngka jarntu-kurlu palka-kurlu.

  • - [recording] Puta wajili-pu-ngu kurdu-ngku-ju jarntu-ju ngula ka-ngu

  • kuuku-ngku. - As you can see there,

  • Warlpiri is a suffixing language. A lot of the

  • grammatical functions are indicated through suffixes on words. We can also see

  • here the difference between the transitive and intransitive construction that I

  • mentioned earlier that the pidgin creators paid attention to. The word there for

  • for child who's doing the chasing, and the monster who's doing the taking

  • have a suffix on them that doesn't occur on nouns when there's an intransitive verb

  • like walk. So it's in that way that these constructions are quite different and in

  • contrast varieties of English and Kriol indicate grammatical functions mostly

  • through separate words and with fairly fixed word order.

  • So how do this languages combine in this new system, light Warlpiri?

  • - [recording] Ngalipa jalangwi-m kam ka-kurl nyampu-kurra ngurra-kurra.

  • - [recording] Junga mayi nyuntu yu-m go karnta-kurl?

  • - [recording] Botul-ing i-m panturn-um taya.

  • - You might notice that their

  • English verbs there come and go. Much of the verb system of Light Warlpiri is from

  • Aboriginal English and Kriol verb structure but not entirely.

  • If you look at example three, there's actually a Warlpiri verb stem but it has

  • the Kriol transitive marker on it. So the over all structure is derived from those

  • languages. You can see there the Warlpiri suffixing. So we have the verbal structure

  • mostly from Aboriginal English and Kriol but we have all of the noun structure

  • retained from Warlpiri but in the verbal structure there are also innovations

  • which indicated in green, the "wi-m" and the "yu-m" and they're what we most

  • interested in today. This pattern of verbal structure from one source and noun

  • structure from another source is fairly unusual in the world's languages. The

  • differences between Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri are in the verb and auxiliary

  • structure, which have these clearly different forms but the underlying

  • abstract structure is more complicated. So the "wi-m" and "yu-m" constructions which

  • are the innovations are part of an overall system much of which already existed

  • in Kriol and Aboriginal English. You can see there that for each word there's a

  • pronoun element like we, you, a-rra which is from I and then there's another element

  • which mostly means time. So where did this wi-m and yu-m construction come from. We

  • know that it's not something that comes from English. Well, it seems that the -im

  • came from English I'm like the form but there's also an -im in the aboriginal

  • English in Kriol pronouns i-m and de-m. Through this process of creating the

  • structure they were reanalyzed so that instead of being a pronoun i-m or de-m

  • there were a new structure where they were divided into two parts.

  • Aboriginal English and Kriol has this past marker "bin" and that rarely occurs in

  • Light Warlpiri. So instead of using that what has happened is that the speakers

  • have taken the past meaning from bin and overlaid it on the -m element from English

  • and aboriginal English and Kriol such that they have this new structure where the -m

  • is a separate morphing with it's own meaning that means present or past or

  • non-future and then that is regularized across the system and you have a new

  • paradigm. Another example.

  • - [recording]"Ngaju-ng na a-rra ged-im ma kard. "

  • - [recording] "Yu-m ged-im nyurru first waya ngaju-janga. "

  • - There were some kids playing a card game for me and using that structure

  • there. So what are the influences on the new structure? Again, we see that the word

  • shape or form comes from the varieties of English or Kriol but the structure and

  • the meaning comes from multiple sources. In Warlpiri, the auxiliary has a structure

  • where there's a time element which is the "ka-" there meaning present and a pronoun

  • element and you can see that all through the system these are affixes. They're not

  • separate words. So I think that this underlying structure of wanting a time

  • element and a pronoun element affixed together was part of the influence that

  • fed into the new system. In Warlpiri, the verb and the auxiliary forms combine in

  • different kinds of contructions to give the same kinds of semantic readings as we

  • find in Light Warlpiri. So in the final column those three

  • meanings of non-future, future and desiderative or one, two are exactly the

  • categories that we find in Light Walpiri but they're not structural categories in

  • Warlpiri they're semantic categories and again they've been overlaid onto the

  • forms in Light Warlpiri. So how did the whole language come to be? It was through

  • a two-step process when the adult groups who are now about 35 years old with

  • children I think that other adults spoke to them in what is known as a baby talk

  • register and in that register they code switched a lot and they code switched in a

  • particular pattern. So it would be something like this where there would be a

  • Walpiri sentence but they would insert a Kriol pronoun and verb into that

  • sentence and that is the pattern that the children then conventionalized by

  • analyzing it as a single system. At the same time, they added the innovations that

  • we've just been talking about. That group of children who I think did this

  • maybe when they were three, four or five certainly before they were teenagers. They

  • then grew up had children of their own and so now those children learned that

  • language as one of their first languages along with Warlpiri and it's their

  • primary language. So the path to this language is a little different. It wasn't

  • created for inter-group communication. It was created within one group of people in

  • one community and it's only spoken within that group of people in that community.

  • The speakers were multilingual there was a lot of code switching. It was directed to

  • children, very young children in a particular pattern. They then

  • conventionalized it and reanalyzed some of the input they were hearing and then

  • regularized their analysis to create new paradigms.

  • From English and Kriol we get words and a lot of verb structure. From Warlpiri we

  • get words, the noun structure and also abstract verbal structure and this new

  • system is the first language of the current generations. So what we've been

  • able to see almost in real time is a new language developed and an innovative

  • structure in that language through a two-step process. Adults had fairly

  • systematic code switching in the speech that they were directing to children and

  • then the children had a very creative role in conventionalizing that input and adding

  • the innovations. The overall structure is unusual because it combines the noun

  • structure from one type of language with the verb structure for another and there

  • are these innovations which are interesting in that we can see exactly

  • where they've come from. We can see exactly the reanalysis that have taken

  • place and we can see that at the end of that reanalysis there is a new

  • construction. Thank you.

- [Narrator] We are the paradoxical ape, bipedal, naked, large brain, long the

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