Aboriginal English on Croker Island: Morphosyntactic variation between input and innovation in a new variety of English

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Stephanie Hackert
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 556482783

Our general aim in this project is to tease apart the effects of input and innovation in the development of Australian Aboriginal English on Croker Island, Northern Territory. The English spoken on this island is phenotypically similar to other varieties of Aboriginal English, yet noticeably distinct on several features. Moreover, it is characterized by such a high degree of inter- and intra-speaker variability that it is difficult to describe it as a homogenous variety or a linearly ordered continuum of features (Mailhammer 2021). Building on these findings, this project specifically aims at answering the following research questions, which have impact beyond the description of another "lesser-known variety of English" (Schreier et al. 2010): (1) How has the interplay of contact-induced language change and variety-internal innovation been shaping English on Croker Island? (2) Are patterns of morphosyntactic variation unique to the variety or does it share (some of) them with other high-contact Englishes? If so, are these patterns owed to substrate influence or presumedly typical creole effects, or are they describable in terms of more general structural, discourse-pragmatic, or cognitive constraints on language use? (3) Why has Croker Island not (yet) stabilized into a coherent variety (Mailhammer 2021), as is generally assumed for New Englishes? Is the observed variation in an artefact of the investigative tools used so far? Can it be captured in terms of a set of probabilistic grammars with a more sophisticated and cutting-edge toolkit? To address these questions, we will conduct an apparent-time study based on both sociolinguistic interviews and data elicited by means of a typological tense-aspect questionnaire, enriching the existing corpus described in Mailhammer (2021). We will focus on morphosyntactic features that (1) are well-studied in other high-contact varieties of English and (2) have diagnostic status in the field of World Englishes, such as copula structures or 3rd-person present-tense marking. We will follow the theoretical and methodological principles of variationist sociolinguistics, employing state-of-the-art techniques of statistical modeling and engaging with the latest findings from creole studies and World Englishes as well as from typological and cognitive-linguistic research.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants