Outcomes of the Contact between Luganda and English Pragmatic Markers

Abstract

Cross-linguistic studies on language contact have established  that when pragmatic marker (PM) systems are in contact,  three outcomes may occur: (i) the PM sets of the languages in  contact may coexist, (ii) the PMs in contact may acquire  differentiated meanings, and (iii) PMs from one language may  be replaced wholly or partially by markers of another  language. Using LugandaEnglish bilingual data of 190,580  words, this paper examines the contact between Luganda and  English PMs to establish whether the outcomes reported in  crosslinguistic studies are evident in the data at hand or not and whether there are any other observable outcomes peculiar to the Luganda-English data. The findings point to the  coexistence between Luganda and English PMs and the  partial replacement of some Luganda PMs by English  functional equivalents. However, there was no evidence to  support the outcome of the acquisition of differentiated  meaning. In addition, the data points to the possibility of a  new contact outcome, which we describe as calquing/loan  translating. The analysis is informed by cross-linguistic  findings and Blakemore’s relevancetheoretic notion of  procedural encoding.