The verbal morphosyntax of non-canonical contact languages: Malay-derived constraints and the inflectional domain in Afrikaans and Sri Lankan Malay

This dissertation deals with selected morphosyntactic processes in the grammars of two non-canonical contact languages, Afrikaans and Sri Lankan Malay. The parallel between the two languages lies in the fact that their respective lexica and morphosyntax diverge in ways which suggest the influence of other (unrelated) languages, leading to the creation of new contact grammars. Although both Afrikaans and Sri Lankan Malay are known to have creole antecedent languages, neither modern language can be characterized as a creole. One linguistic property which the two language share is the fact that they both display grammatical constraints which can be accounted for by reference to a history of language contact and the collective influence of bilingual speakers. In the case of Afrikaans, the syntactic properties of its input languages have conspired to produce productive verb compounding and robust movement of lexically-incorporated verbs. I argue that substrate effects based on the syntactic properties of Malay modals and verbs mitigate against modal-verb incorporation in Afrikaans. In Sri Lankan Malay, phonological verbs display contrasts such as contrastive tense that cannot be marked on verbs in antecedent varieties of Malay such as Ambonese Malay and Jakarta Malay, and this seems to follow in part from semantic influence from Sri Lankan Muslim Tamil. Yet the weak morphosyntactic features associated with the Malay verb have blocked the development of the kind of robust verb movement and agglutinative morphology that we associate with the Tamil verb. The limited verb movement that we do find in Sri Lankan Malay is attributed to a finiteness contrast which is unknown in antecedent Malay varieties, and which is located just above an aspectual projection in the inflectional domain. I conclude that both Afrikaans and Sri Lankan Malay feature distinctive morphosyntactic systems which represent a level of compromise between their component grammars which are significant for our understanding of the development of syntactic and morphological systems by bilinguals in social configurations conducive to the creation of new grammars.