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- 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