Linguistic Epidemiology: Semantics and Grammar of Language Contact in Mainland Southeast Asia (review)

A ‘must read’ for students of language contact and language change, the title of Linguistic epidemiology captures the idea of linguistic items as potential replicators with which speakers can ‘infect’ their listeners (10).

Ch. 1, ‘Introduction’ (1–44), is a brilliantly erudite summary of the author’s view of language and language change. N. J. Enfield has what he calls a nonmetaphorical view of language: ‘ “languages” are idealisations, drawn from observations of fashions in linguistic behaviour’ (10). E relates this perspective to the reproduction of linguistic innovations across social networks so that they become public conventions and to the observation that language contact is between speaker and signifier. As the book concerns lexical polyfunctionality, E carefully distinguishes the roles of semantics and pragmatics in language change, then briefly relates this analysis to grammaticalization. Ch. 2, ‘Background—mainland Southeast Asia’ (45–57),introduces the geography and history of SE Asia, its language families, and some areal linguistic features.

Part 2 (Ch. 3,75 –162), the centerpiece of the book, focuses on the Lao verb daj⁴ ‘acquire’ and its four major manifestations: as a main verb (a nonagentive achievement verb meaning ‘come to have’), postverbally as a modal or a resultative, as the introducer of a descriptive complement, and as a preverbal aspectual marker. E emphasizes that precise and discriminating accounts of the semantic values of a linguistic item, of its pragmatic implicatures, and of its grammatical behaviors are essential in order to explain grammaticalization. Such precision, he says, is possible for an isolating language like Lao, and this chapter demonstrates his conviction with its detailed analysis of daj⁴. E shows, for example, that postverbal modal daj⁴ ‘can’ is distinct from postverbal resultative daj⁴ ‘succeed’, and that daj⁴ ‘can’ occurs in two constituent structures with different meanings. When daj⁴ introduces a descriptive complement, these structures are related to the other postverbal meanings and represent at most an emergent construction.

Lao is a Tai language, and Part 3 compares the polyfunctionality of Lao daj⁴ with that of the corresponding morphemes in Khmer and Vietnamese (both E Mon-Khmer, but not closely related), Kmhmu Cwang (N Mon-Khmer), White Hmong (Hmong-Mien), Modern Standard Chinese, and other SE Asian languages. Chs. 4–7 (164–319) each give an account of one of the four manifestations of ‘acquire’ across these languages. There are differences among the languages (for example, the descriptive complement construction is emergent in Lao but entrenched in Khmer and Sinitic languages),but these are overwhelmed by the striking similarities in the functions of ‘acquire’ across the languages of the region. Ch. 8 (320–50) briefly shows that these similaries include additional languages of SE Asia and Southern China, but emphasizes that the words for ‘acquire’ are cognate only within certain constrained genealogical groups.

This leads to the question with which Part 4 (Ch. 9, 353 –69) is concerned: are the similarities that have been described due to shared inheritance (in some instances), calquing, independent parallel development, or a mixture of these? E argues that these dichotomies are due to the conventional metaphorical view of language and ‘that the differences between [them] are much less qualitatively significant than usually claimed’ (368): in each case a speaker or some speakers began habitually to perform a new linguistic act which was replicated across a social network.

This is an important book—a major contribution to an alternative historical linguistics that has been emerging since the publication of R. B. Le Page and Andrée Tabouret-Keller’s Acts of identity: Creole-based approaches to language and ethnicity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Its fine prose makes it a pleasure to read, and it offers a fascinating insight into the syntax and semantics of SE Asian languages.