Phoneme inventories, language contact, and grammatical complexity: A critique of Trudgill
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Peter Bakker
Abstract
There is no support for Trudgill's thesis. There are languages with exceptionally high numbers of consonants that are spoken by large groups, sometimes by millions as a second language. A pilot survey of contact languages (pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages) does not reveal unusual numbers of phonemes. Non-creole languages that have simplified their verbal infliection due to contact and second language learning appear not to decrease phoneme numbers either. Even most mixed languages that arose among fully bilingual groups fail to show exceptionally high numbers of consonants, even though some may display more complicated structures than their component languages. There is no correlation between language contact and phoneme inventories.
© Walter de Gruyter
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Linguistic and social typology: The Austronesian migrations and phoneme inventories
- Language contact, phonemic inventories, and the Athapaskan language family
- Consonant inventories as an areal feature of the New Guinea-Pacific region: Testing Trudgill's hypotheses
- Acquiring phonology is not acquiring inventories but contrasts: The loss of Turkic and Korean primary long vowels
- Phoneme inventories, language contact, and grammatical complexity: A critique of Trudgill
- There is no correlation between the size of a community speaking a language and the size of the phonological inventory of that language
- On the complexity of simplification
- Yan Huang, Anaphora: A Cross-linguistic Study
- Nicholas Evans & Hans-Jürgen Sasse, Problems of Polysynthesis
- Walter Bisang, Aspects of Typology and Universals
- Contents of Linguistic Typology Volume 8 (2004)
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Linguistic and social typology: The Austronesian migrations and phoneme inventories
- Language contact, phonemic inventories, and the Athapaskan language family
- Consonant inventories as an areal feature of the New Guinea-Pacific region: Testing Trudgill's hypotheses
- Acquiring phonology is not acquiring inventories but contrasts: The loss of Turkic and Korean primary long vowels
- Phoneme inventories, language contact, and grammatical complexity: A critique of Trudgill
- There is no correlation between the size of a community speaking a language and the size of the phonological inventory of that language
- On the complexity of simplification
- Yan Huang, Anaphora: A Cross-linguistic Study
- Nicholas Evans & Hans-Jürgen Sasse, Problems of Polysynthesis
- Walter Bisang, Aspects of Typology and Universals
- Contents of Linguistic Typology Volume 8 (2004)
