LOCATING THE BASELINE OF LINGUISTIC INNOVATIONS: DIALECT CONTACT, THE FOUNDER PRINCIPLE AND THE SO-CALLED (-OWN) SPLIT IN NEW ZEALAND ENGLISH

Abstract

Recent sociolinguistic approaches to language change have been extremely succesful in their investigations of changes in progress, but are only recently beginning to get to grips with tracking the origins of changes. Here, I investigate one case from New Zealand English (NZE), where a close sociolinguistic and socio-demographic study of the origins of a supposed innovation demonstrates a number of problems with past orthodoxy about the “new” feature. The literature to date often assumes that disyllabic forms of –own past participles evolved from the split of, which, historically, had supposed been formed by the merger of me ou and O: I Show here that this is very unlikely to be the case for a number of linguistic and socio-historical reasons, including the unsplittability of mergers and nature of the dialect mix brought by British and Irish settlers to New Zeland. A failure to pay close attention both to internal linguistic and external social factors can lead to inaccurate and implausible conclusions about the course and nature of language change and it is highlighted how the NZE example is a case in point.