Contact vs. internal dynamics in the typological shift of English

Abstract

The shift of the English language from synthetic to analytic is still often attributed to contact: with Scandinavian – e.g., Poussa (1982) – or with early Brittonic – e.g., Tristram (2002); on the other hand, others – e.g., Diensberg (1998) and Mufwene (2000) – point to the Norman Conquest as the turning point in the history of the language. Both assumptions, however, seem to be basically unwarranted, because (i) ‘attrition’ was definitely very limited, and (ii) because natural phonological processes had dramatic consequences on morphology. West Saxon itself was already weakly inflecting, and a considerable number of endings were absolutely ambiguous and, therefore, practically useless. Moreover, a considerable reduction in the number and type of inflectional categories had been a feature of Proto-Germanic in comparison with Indo-European. What is argued here is that Old English was in a very unstable equilibrium, and contact (especially with Norman French) can at best have accelerated its progress towards analyticity, but certainly did not trigger it. In terms of Complexity Theory, English did not undergo ‘sudden ignition’ (Nicolis & Prigogine 1989: 175), but rather a steady loss of systemic stability. All these changes can be explained if we apply Naturalness Theory, and the Theory of Complex systems, and that is the main purpose of my paper.