Phonotactic mechanisms behind contact-induced morphological simplification in Alorese

What is it about?

Research has shown that languages which are in contact with other languages and learned by speakers of these languages, tend to become simpler in their ‘morphology’, the way that words are built up. They lose for example their verb endings, expressing every person with the same form. But what are the factors that make one language in contact simplify and the other not? In this article, we suggest that the phonotactics of that language, the permitted sequences of sounds, may play a role. We think adult learners may overgeneralize the dispreference for certain sequences of sounds in a language and simplify the pronunciation, which over time leads to loss of the verb ending._x000D_ To test this hypothesis, we built a computer model of the linguistic situation of one specific language, Alorese, in Eastern Indonesia. Alorese has had a large proportion of adult language learners for a long time and underwent massive simplification of its morphology. Our simulation, which stays close to the real word forms in Alorese, consists of multiple generations, where adult language learners have to learn the language from the previous generation. We found that indeed, if we add a mechanism of simplification based on the phonotactics of the language, the morphology of the language simplifies. This gives evidence for a role of phonotactics in morphological simplification in contact situations.

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