2004, Siegel, Jeff

Hawai'i Creole English (HCE) has been a key language in theoretical debates about the origins of creole languages. Bickerton (1977, 1981, 1984) pointed out that many grammatical features of HCE are similar to those of creoles that developed on plantations in other parts of the world, despite the fact that very different substrate languages were involved (e.g. African languages in the Atlantic region as opposed to Hawaiian, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese and Filipino languages in Hawai'i). However, the contact situations were similar in that children learning their first language on the plantations were exposed to a highly variable and undeveloped pre-pidgin. As this was not a fully developed language, the children had to fall back on their innate linguistic capacity to turn it into one. The similarity among HCE and other creoles is thus explained by universal characteristics of human linguistic endowment – Bickerton's Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (LBH). Since the most comprehensive descriptions of important grammatical features of HCE have been from Bickerton himself, this new study of the language is a welcome contribution to the field.

2008, Siegel, Jeff

When people who speak different languages come into sustained contact, new varieties of language sometimes emerge. These are called 'contact varieties. This book deals primarily with contact varieties that have emerged in the Australia-Pacific region within the last 150 years as the result of colonialism. Although the focus is on two particular types of contact varieties, pidgins and creoles, other types are mentioned as well, including cindigenized varieties' and 'language shift varieties. Since all these terms are used in a variety of ways in the literature on language contact, I begin with some definitions.

2013, Conroy, Mark Andrew, Siegel, Jeff, Anton-Mendez, Ines

This thesis investigates L2 structural priming in learners of English and the possible role of structural priming in second language acquisition. Three picture description production priming experiments were carried out in which speakers were exposed to prime sentences exhibiting a specific target structure. A pre- and post-test design was deployed to measure learning effects. In Experiment 1, fifty two L2 English speakers took part in a structural priming experiment targeting the production of get passives (e.g., the woman got arrested). Priming and learning effects were weak and were manifested in production of non-get passives. In contrast, in Experiment 2, where thirty eight L2 English speakers took part in another structural priming experiment targeting the production of stranded prepositions in relative clauses (e.g., a bed is something you sleep on), priming and learning effects were strong. The findings of learning through structural priming are interpreted as evidence of implicit learning of L2 structure. However, when the stranded preposition structure was primed in a different sentential context (i.e., the bed was too uncomfortable to sleep on) in a third experiment (n=40) only a weak priming effect emerged and there appeared to be no significant learning effect. These disparate findings suggest that the strength of L2 structural priming and subsequent learning effects might be modulated by the target structure. Implications for second language teaching and learning and theories of second language acquisition are discussed.

2010, Siegel, Jeff

Pidgins and creoles are new varieties of language that emerge when people speaking different languages come into contact with each other. The study of these 'contact languages' falls mainly under the heading of sociolinguistics, but also intersects with many other subdisciplines, such as contact linguistics and applied linguistics. This chapter begins by providing some background: definitions of key terms and information about the current status and use of these languages. Then it describes four areas of research in pidgin and creole studies (sometimes called 'creolistics'). The next section concentrates on educational policy and practice. It discusses the use of pidgins and creoles for classroom instruction and special programmes aimed at speakers of these languages.

2008, Sakoda, Kent, Siegel, Jeff

Hawai'i Creole is a creole language lexified predominantly by English but also by other languages such as Hawaiian and Japanese. It is spoken by approximately 600,000 people in the American state of Hawai'i. For details on its lexicon and origins (including an account of the influence of other languages on its morphosyntax), see section I of the chapter on the phonology of Hawai'i Creole (Sakoda and Siegel, this volume). Although the lexicon of Hawai'i Creole is closely related to English, its morphology and syntax are quite distinct. In general, like other creole languages, the amount of bound morphology is less than that of the lexifier language and there are quite different morphosyntactic rules for expressing tense, aspect, modality and negation, as well as for relativization, complementation and focusing.

2005, Siegel, Jeff

This paper examines possessive marking in Pidgin Fijian as an example of morphological simplicity in a restricted pidgin. This is attributed to a process of simplification or lack of development in early second language acquisition. Here the only effect of the substrate languages appears to be in constituent ordering. The paper then goes on to look at morphological expansion in possessive marking in an expanded pidgin (or according to some, a creole): Melanesian Pidgin (MP). This is attributed to functional transfer from the substrate languages in extended second language use. While many core features of the Central Eastern Oceanic substrate are found in MP, the overt marking of alienable versus inalienable possession is not. One explanation is that this feature is "functionally expendable" or "inessential" in language (McWhorter 2002). However, the paper argues that the absence of formal marking of the alienable-inalienable distinction in MP can be best accounted for by availability constraints that prevented transfer of this feature at an earlier stage of development.

2009, Siegel, Jeff

Languages are said to come into contact when their speakers interact with one another. The linguistic and sociolinguistic consequences of long-term contact between languages arc studied in the subfield of linguistics called 'contact linguistics'. Two of the major concerns of contact linguistics are contact-induced language change and the formation of new contact varieties such as new dialects, pidgins and creoles. However, the actual site of language contact is in the minds of individuals using more than one language (Weinreich (1970) [1953]). Thus, second language acquisition (SLA), an individual psycholinguistic process involving two languages is by definition a kind of language contact. Changes that occur in languages, or the new varieties that emerge, must have originated in individuals' ways of speaking. This chapter examines the role of processes of SLA in individuals that may ultimately lead to the outcomes of language change or the emergence of new contact varieties in communities of speakers.

2020-04-02, Quinn, Padraic Michael, Ellis, Elizabeth, Siegel, Jeffrey Alan

Linguistically, Colombia is divided into two macrodialects: cachaco (interior), which includes the hegemonic dialect group from the capital Bogotá, and costeño (coastal), a stigmatised dialect group. This dichotomy is also prominent in the Colombian social imaginary, and it is reflected in popular folk discourse on language, which in turn manifests itself in Colombian telenovelas, ‘soap operas’. This thesis builds on recent scholarship on the sociolinguistics of fiction (Stamou, 2018a) which centralises fictional discourse as being the principal object of study whilst also attempting to move beyond fidelity checks in television dialect representation, labelled the reflection fallacy (Androutsopoulos, 2010). Nevertheless, authenticity and how it is linguistically indexed are central, and I adopt the position that authenticity matters because my participants believe it does. I therefore explored the language ideologies behind how linguistic variation is indexed in Colombian telenovelas using the semiotic processes of iconisation, fractal recursivity, and erasure (Irvine & Gal, 2000), with the aim of identifying and examining the signature linguistic features (SLF), a sub-set of stereotypical linguistic markers that are higher-order indices of costeño (Johnstone, Andrus, & Danielson, 2006; Silverstein, 2003). Thirty extended interviews were held with actors, producers, directors, script writers, and voice coaches to determine perceptions, with costeño participants feeling their dialect is misrepresented. I also developed a corpus of telenovela data, consisting of 40 episodes taken from ten telenovelas. Whilst wary of “measuring authenticity”, I analyse if the perceived misrepresentation is reflected in telenovelas, as well as investigating how it is constructed, and more importantly, who decides on this depiction of variation. Findings show that the link between perceptions of misrepresentation and actual portrayal is complex and inconsistent; however, storytellers tend to reproduce these SLF, which are “hyperused” to index costeño identity, contributing to perceptions of misrepresentation. Importantly, these storytellers are often cachacos, raising complex questions of authenticity, identity, and representation. Broadly, this thesis contributes to the emerging sociolinguistics of fiction through the present investigation of the understudied Colombian sociolinguistic and telenovela contexts.

2007, Siegel, Jeff, Lynch, T, Eades, Diana

Our close friend and colleague Terry Crowley died suddenly at the age of 51 in January 2005 in his home in Hamilton, New Zealand, cutting short a brilliant and prolific career in linguistics. One common theme among the many tributes to Terry and the bittersweet reminiscing of his many friends around the world was that Terry never did things half way whether it was enjoying good food, going bush-walking, or doing linguistics. Just as he would eat a box of chocolates in one go, when he got the urge, he would sit down and write a journal article in a day or two. Just as he loved to visit friends in different countries, he revelled in doing linguistic fieldwork (and each year went off for a few months to Malakula in Vanuatu). To Terry, doing linguistics was another indulgence — even more important than eating "mega-disgusting desserts", as he called them. Therefore, we have tried to make this memorial volume for Terry a "linguistic indulgence" — including 35 studies by Terry's friends, colleagues and admirers, covering all of the types of languages he worked on: Australian, Oceanic, pidgins and creoles, and varieties of English.

2010, Siegel, Jeff

This book is about learning a new dialect, and how it is different from learning a new language. In this introductory chapter, I start by describing the contexts where this kind of learning occurs and some of the questions the book aims to answer. As I have tried to make the content accessible not just to linguists, I have also included some basic information for readers without a strong background in linguistics. This is about differentiating dialects, describing speech sounds and studying variation in language. The final section presents a brief outline of the book. The study of second language acquisition (often abbreviated as SLA) examines how people who already speak a first language (L1) subsequently acquire a second or additional language (L2). This book focuses on a special type of SLA – when the relationship between the L1 and the L2 is close enough for them to be considered by their speakers to be varieties of the same language, or different dialects, rather than different languages. In this situation, the term "second dialect acquisition" (SDA) can be used. The study of SDA examines how people who already speak one dialect (D1) acquire a different dialect (D2) of what they or their community perceive to be the same language.