1 Introduction

This paper investigates contact-induced variation in the use of possessive markers in Abui, a Papuan language spoken in the central part of Alor island, located on the Alor archipelago in eastern Indonesia (Kratochvíl 2007), see Figure 1. Abui is a member of the Timor-Alor-Pantar (TAP) family, which consists of ~25 languages spoken on the islands of Timor, Alor and Pantar and their neighbouring islets.¹

Figure 1

Map of Abui on the Alor archipelago.

Most of the 17,000 Abui speakers on Alor are bilingual in Alor Malay and often also in Indonesian; most speakers consider Alor Malay as a local colloquial variety of Indonesian. Alor Malay (henceforth Malay) is the lingua franca used with speakers of other local vernaculars on Alor (Baird, Klamer & Kratochvíl in prep.). Abui speakers are exposed to Malay in school and at home, as their parents consider it as a language of opportunity. The early exposure to Malay delays their acquisition of Abui, and many speakers display an acquisition path that is in between that of sequential and simultaneous bilinguals. Sequential bilinguals acquire Abui as a second language in childhood, while simultaneous bilinguals acquire Abui and Malay simultaneously from birth. One example of this hybrid acquisition path is what happens in the coastal village of Takalelang, where Abui youngsters grow up being exposed to both Abui and Malay, they acquire passive knowledge of Abui, but only become active speakers of Abui after adolescence and in early adulthood (see Section 2). In other words, their language use goes from being predominantly Malay with a receptive competence of Abui in childhood and adolescence, to a more balanced Malay-Abui in adulthood. In this respect, Abui bilinguals are different from other more widely studied bilinguals, such as speakers of minority languages involved in a prototypical form of language shift to a majority language (Grenoble 2011) or speakers of heritage languages (Montrul 2016). In contrast to the shift and the heritage scenarios, where reaching adulthood means predominantly speaking the majority language, in the Abui case, reaching adulthood means speaking both the majority language, Malay, and the minority language Abui. This dynamic language background makes the Abui an interesting population to carry out a cross-sectional study on contact-induced variation. We will see that the findings from this understudied contact-setting bear theoretical implications for models of contact-induced change (Kusters 2003; Trudgill 2011; Ross 2013) and contribute to the development of hypotheses from the generative paradigm usually applied to more prototypical bilinguals, such as the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (Prévost & White 2000b).

Considering that most languages in small-scale communities, like the Abui, have only recently been investigated and lack historical records, linguists examine certain outcomes of contact and then attempt to reconstruct the processes that lead to these outcomes (Ross 2013). Ross attributes most contact-induced changes in Melanesia to either bilingually-induced change or shift-induced change, while also presenting a number of detailed methods to diagnose them. Bilingually-induced change is change which bilingual speakers introduce into one of their languages on the model of their other language (Ross 2013: 6). It typically leads to lexical calques (loan translations), grammatical calquing which copies grammatical forms but not their syntax, or syntactic restructuring, which copies both the grammatical forms and their syntax (Ross 2013: 27). Shift-induced change is change introduced by speakers who abandon the community language in favour of another language in their repertoire, the language to which they are shifting. Shift-induced changes mentioned in the literature include phonological transfer, constructional transfer, and simplified (morpho)syntax (Ross 2013: 30).² The Abui case presents a more complex scenario, because despite the fact that the community is characterized by bilingualism, the simplified morphosyntactic outcome of contact appears to be more similar to the result of a shift. This observation calls for a more nuanced characterization of the bilingual situation which is sometimes lacking in models of contact-induced change (Kusters 2003; Trudgill 2011; Ross 2013). In a similar vein, Muysken (2010) calls for a scenario approach in the study of language contact, which involves an elaboration of the sociolinguistic setting of the contact, as opposed to developing theories of contact by simply looking at the outcomes of contact, saying if language A and B come into contact, X happens (Muysken 2013).

One of the main rallying calls in Ross (2013) is to collect more variationist studies across age-groups, with a tight focus on the social setting and the relevant variables that might account for this variation. It seems unlikely that there has ever been a change that was not preceded by a period of variability in the norms (Meyerhoff 2000). Ross (2013) believes that investigating the language of pre-adolescents and adolescents will ultimately offer a window into incipient change. Therefore, age is to be considered a crucial factor for the variation that leads to change. The findings of our study confirm this observation, by showing that (pre-)adolescents are the leaders of linguistic change in the Abui community of Takalelang (cf. Foulkes & Vihman 2015).

In addition to age, gender has also been shown to be a crucial variable in explaining linguistic variation (Labov 1990: 205; Dubois & Horvath 1999: 304). Eckert & McConnell-Ginet (1999) point out that in order to make generalizations about language and gender, the social practices and relations of various gender groups in a given speech community must first be studied in detail. This seems particularly relevant for the study of variation in indigenous minority speech communities, as the social practices and relations in these communities are likely to differ from those of speech communities in western, urban, majority communities (Stanford & Preston 2009). For instance, in the rural parts of Indonesia especially, such as in the Abui community of Takalelang, young females have more territorially bounded networks, and they socialize more with the older generations. The present study shows that the language of (pre)-adolescent females is more conservative than that of their male counterparts, whose language shows a higher degree of simplification.

The linguistic feature under investigation here is possessive marking on nouns. Abui has a reflexivity distinction in its possessive system: a reflexive possessive prefix can only appear on the object and is referentially bound by the clausal subject (e.g. ‘He_j hugs his_j child’). A non-reflexive possessive prefix can appear on both the object and the subject, and when it occurs on the object, has referents outside the clause (e.g. ‘He_k hugs his_j child’) (see Section 3). Malay, the dominant language locally, lacks this possessive reflexive distinction. Language contact studies suggest that the reflexivity distinction poses problems to L2 speakers whose L1 lacks such a distinction. For instance, Tingsell (2011), Fabricius-Hansen, Helland & Pitz (2017), and Helland (2017) show that German and French (languages that lack a reflexivity distinction) learners of Norwegian and Swedish (languages with the reflexivity distinction) fail to master the reflexivity distinction, and tend to overgeneralize the possessive form that is phonologically similar to those in their L1. Given that Malay lacks a reflexive distinction in the marking of possession, we expect to find simplification in the Abui possessive marking of, in particular, the younger Malay bilinguals, which is indeed what we find.

In order to test whether this simplification is indeed connected to age, we conducted a cross-sectional study using the apparent time construct (Labov 1963; Bailey et al. 1991), which is based on the assumption that synchronic differences between age-groups reflect diachronic language change. Following this line of argumentation, we take one synchronic sample which consists of four different age groups of Abui-Malay bilinguals: (pre-) adolescents (aged 9–16), young adults (aged 17–25), adults (aged 26–34), and elders (over 40). By combining production data and comprehension data, we tested their active and passive knowledge of the reflexive prefixes. We did so to test the predictions of a prominent hypothesis often proposed to explain the vulnerability of inflectional morphology in bilinguals, the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (MSIH, Prévost & White 2000b). This hypothesis is usually applied to more prototypical bilinguals, especially to L2 learners. There has been an attempt, however, to test the predictions of the MSIH against other bilingual populations, such as heritage speakers (Montrul 2011).

The MSIH states that L2 learners have underlying knowledge of a given inflectional category or feature. However, in online production, they have trouble mapping the abstract feature to the morphological form (Lardiere 1998a; b; Lardiere 2000; Prévost & White 2000a; b). This means that L2 speakers still retain the knowledge; however, they may resort to a default form during oral production. Since it is not possible to test the reflexive possessive in a different grammatical environment (because it only manifests itself in one), a useful way of testing the MSIH is by comparing production and comprehension data. If the MSIH holds, then it follows that despite speakers performing badly in production, good performance in comprehension should be indicative that they retain knowledge of these inflectional categories. Note that the study of Montrul (2011) shows that the predictions of the MSIH do not apply to heritage speakers due to a task effect. Heritage speakers perform worse in comprehension than in production, because they are not familiar with written tasks tapping into metalinguistic knowledge.

The results show that both (pre-)adolescents and young adults have significant difficulty producing the reflexive possessive distinction, while only the (pre-)adolescents also have difficulty in comprehension. Overall, the speakers perform better in comprehension than in production. This indicates that, in general, they retain linguistic knowledge of the reflexivity distinction but have difficulties accessing or applying this knowledge during oral production. Using the apparent time construct, we suggest that the speech patterns of younger speakers will persist and become fully-fledged changes in the grammar of Abui over the next decades.

By comparing the use of possessive markers among four groups of Abui-Malay bilinguals, this study shows that the outcome of contact in a bilingual community can be simplification, and this has implications for the diagnostic criteria proposed in Ross (2013). This study also adds to the growing number of case studies zooming into synchronic language variation, and implements this approach to further our understanding of the processes and outcomes of language contact in indigenous multilingual communities generally, and in Eastern Indonesia in particular.

This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 provides the sociolinguistic background to the Abui speech community. Section 3 describes the expression of third person possession in both Abui and Malay. Section 4 describes the present study. Section 5 discusses and synthesizes the findings, while Section 6 presents the conclusions of the paper and points out directions for future research.

2 Sociolinguistic background

Over the last few decades, Abui speakers have become increasingly bilingual in Malay. In the late 1960s and early 1970s some of their original mountain dwellings, such as Takalelang, have been moved to the coast. There, the availability of better road connections, schooling opportunities, and religious institutions has contributed to increased contact with non-Abui speakers (Kratochvíl 2007). In the 1980s and 1990s, in a rigorous effort to align the Abui population with national educational standards, school teachers began imposing strict rules banning children from using Abui in the school environment. They also began instructing parents during community meetings and church sermons to raise their children exclusively in Malay/Indonesian in preparation for primary school. As a result, presently, most speakers over 40 (who were born before 1975), report having been raised exclusively in Abui. Speakers below the age of 40 report having been raised in Malay. Today, almost all Abui children are raised in Malay. Despite speaking predominantly Malay as children, most children acquire passive knowledge of Abui because adults use the language among themselves and occasionally also address their children in Abui. Most parents are certain that their children will learn Abui as young adults, so early instruction is not necessary. This is often backed up by the observation that, since Abui retains high prestige in the community among adults, even speakers affected by these developments come to learn and speak Abui as they grow older. This language history and language attitudes thus creates a dynamic language community consisting of transitional bilingualism (Grenoble & Whaley 2006). Every age group carries with it a slightly different balance of bilingualism, so bilingualism is better diagnosed based on age-group.

The tendency for children to grow up with a lingua franca and then shift to the local vernacular later in their lives has been reported for other areas of Indonesia (e.g. Nevins 1998; Bowden 2002) and Melanesia, such as Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu (Schokkin 2017: 94). In Abui, there appear to be gender differences in the amount of exposure to, and use of the lingua franca Malay, such that this scenario applies more to males than to females. Females report spending more time at home, carrying out domestic chores with their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers, while males are more likely to own motorbikes, travel to other parts of the island, and have more extensive social networks outside of the Abui community. They therefore have more exposure to Malay and speak it more often.

In the present study, we compare speaker groups that are demarcated by age and language history. We use Abui age-related categories, as presented in Table 1. The elderly speakers (those over 40) have a rather homogeneous language history (discussed below), and are considered as the Abui control group. The language history of the population below 40 is more heterogeneous, and is segmented into three age-groups. The age division uses emic categories that were constructed through in-depth interviews held with ten elder Abui speakers in 2017 about names for the important life-stages of individuals in Abui society: being a child, reaching sexual maturity, getting married, and having children, and the age by which individuals are commonly assumed to reach those stages.

In what follows, we describe each emic age category and present sociolinguistic data, charting the early linguistic exposure of these groups (see Tables 2, 3, 4, 5). We consider the following variables to be indicative of the speaker’s linguistic exposure to Abui and Malay:

1. language(s) spoken to as a child by parents before entering primary school,

2. language(s) spoken to as a child by parents during primary school, and

3. language(s) spoken with friends in the playground.

All participants attended at least a few years of primary school so language choices during primary school present a comparable period across groups. Comparing this usage to preschool exposure also allows us to observe shifts in language behavior.

The (pre-)adolescent group (9–16 years) is derived from the Abui term moqu ‘child’,⁴ a term to denote children and teenagers. The moqu period starts at late childhood, around the age of six, and lasts until late adolescence. The interviews reveal that the end of puberty at around 16 years marks the boundary of a moqu. In the past, a child would be given a loincloth to ritually mark the passage from moqu to sexual maturity (Du Bois 1944). Today, no such ritual exists anymore, but the concept of moqu is still widely used. For this study, the age of nine (not six) was selected as the lower boundary of moqu, because running the task to elicit Abui with children below nine proved to be difficult, as they did not feel comfortable speaking Abui or conducting the task. Today, all members of the (pre-) adolescents group of moqu are Malay-dominant bilinguals. They are addressed in Malay by their parents, and only use Malay with each other. The only times they report using Abui is when they converse with their grandparents. The great majority of (pre-)adolescent speakers (16 out of 19) report being addressed in Malay by their parents in their early childhood, before entering primary school, see Table 2. Six speakers, who report being addressed in Malay before entering primary school, report being addressed in both languages during primary school, indicating that parents adjusted their language patterns. All 19 participants report speaking exclusively Malay in the playground, see Table 2.

The young adults group (17–25 years) consists of young, typically unmarried adults who are in search of a spouse. They are referred to using the Abui terms neeng abet ‘young man’ and maayol maak ‘young lady’. In the interviews, speakers considered the end of puberty to be around the age 16, so we took the age of 17 as the start of adulthood and the lower boundary of the young adult age group. The age of 25 was cited as being the age that a man or woman typically gets married, so that was taken as the upper boundary of this age group. Many young adult speakers who had been living away from the Abui home community for a certain period of time (e.g. for educational and career purposes), report having made conscious efforts to resettle into the community upon their return, and improving their Abui as they take on more important “adult” roles in the community. The young adults are also Malay-dominant bilinguals. Their early exposure as indicated in Table 3 resembles that of the (pre-) adolescents, although young adults have had slightly more exposure to Abui. For example, four young adults report being addressed equally in both languages, while two report mostly being addressed in Abui. Similarly to the (pre-)adolescents, we see an increase in exposure to Abui (besides Malay) when the young adults entered primary school.

The group of adults (26–34 years) consists of mostly married adults who have children. The Abui term for this age group is kalieta ‘adult(s) with child(ren)’. The interviews reveal that speakers over 25 are expected to be self-sufficient, have a good job, know how to work in the fields, and have a spouse. More than half of the members of this group (12 out of 19), are married and/or have one or more children. As kalieta ‘adults’, their social networks branch out to the older members of the community. In terms of language exposure, the adults group was the first to undergo a change in parental linguistic strategies: not all parents unequivocally raised them in Malay; they often mixed Abui and Malay. This is shown in Table 4, which presents a more balanced distribution compared to the two younger groups. Before and during primary school, a considerable number of speakers in this age group are raised either exclusively in Abui, or in both Abui and Malay. Similarly to the (pre-) adolescents and young adults, we see a rise in exposure to Abui as the speakers entered primary school. As regards the language used to communicate with friends in the playground, we see that half of the speakers reported using mostly Abui. This number is considerably higher than in the other two groups.

The elders group (range: 40–75 years) is the control group in this study. This group is the speaker group from which we assume that the patterns and rules of Abui grammar are derived (as reported in e.g. Kratochvil 2007), and which we take to represent the grammatical norm. The elders use Abui to communicate with other adults, and speak Malay only to children and non-Abui speakers. As shown in Table 5, all speakers over 40 grew up acquiring exclusively Abui, and were addressed in Abui by their parents before and during primary school. They typically only learned Malay in primary school from the age of seven onwards, and often dropped out school after a few years. The elders that did (partially) attend school all report using Abui in the playground. Most parents of the members of this group did not receive any formal education; however, some of their fathers received some Malay literacy training by foreign (Dutch) administrators, learning to write on stone tablets.

To sum up the key differences between the age-related categories of Abui speakers, all groups except the elders had more exposure to Malay than Abui in their pre-school early childhood years. They all had an increased exposure to Abui during primary school. The (pre-)adolescents had little early exposure to Abui and currently continue to have little exposure. Young adults had little early exposure to Abui but experience moderate current exposure. Adults had moderate early exposure to Abui and have moderate to high current exposure. The control group of elders had a high early exposure to Abui and has a high current exposure. They continue to use the language in everyday life, except when they speak to children and members of other ethnic groups.

3 The expression of possession in Abui and Malay

This section describes how nominal possession is marked in Abui (3.1) and Malay (3.2). The examples provided are from Saad (2015–2017), unless indicated otherwise.

4 The present study

4.2 Study 1: Production data

The aim of the production data study is to compare the use of possessive prefixes in semi-spontaneous speech across the four Abui age groups. The methodology of this study is discussed in Section 4.2.1, while the results are presented in Section 4.2.2. In the general discussion in Section 5, we will elaborate on the results in more detail and connect them to the results of the study on comprehension data presented in Section 4.3.

4.2.1 Methodology

Data were obtained from a total of 66 participants, divided into four groups according to age (see Section 2). Information about the participants is laid out in Table 7.

Table 7

Abui-Malay bilingual participants in Study 1 (production).

Group	Age range	M	F	Total
(pre-)adolescents	9-16 (mean 13.47)	9	10	19
young adults	17-25 (mean 21.24)	10	9	19
adults	26-34 (mean 30.29)	10	9	19
elders	40-75 (mean 50.44)	4	5	9

Oral production data were obtained using visual elicitation material. The elicitation material consists of a set of 40¹² short video clips referred to as the Surrey stimuli, which are specifically designed to elicit pronominal markers on verbs in the Alor-Pantar languages (see Fedden & Brown 2014; Fedden et al. 2014). The Surrey clips show a wide range of transitive events, and a smaller number of intransitive events. The full set of video clips with a brief description of their content is presented in Table 8. The Surrey stimuli were played on a laptop in front of the participant. As we were interested in the effects of language contact, we set up a bilingual test situation by giving instructions in Malay to describe in Abui “what is going on”, accompanied by the instruction that they could resort to Malay should they struggle to find the right Abui words to describe the clips. Participants were video-taped while performing the task. For the (pre-) adolescent group, the instructions were given in Malay by a school teacher, as an authority from whom the children were used to following instructions. All the responses to all the clips were transcribed and annotated, and then double checked by older, native speakers for grammaticality and felicitousness.

Table 8

The Surrey stimuli video clips.

Code	Description of clip	Code	Description of clip
C01	man pulls other man	C21	man standing and leaning on house
C02	girl leans on man	P01	man smells other man
C03	people dancing	P02	man smells cheese
C04	boy steps on sleeping man	P03	a burning match goes out
C05	man sleeping on bed	P04	man sitting, leaning against wall and waking up
C06	man sitting against wall and dozing off	P05	a short man and tall man are standing
C07	woman sitting and laughing	P06	boy hears noise and is startled
C08	man holds snake, gives it to girl who is afraid	P07	boy is sleeping; man comes and wakes him up
C09	water being poured into glass	P08	bent person on all fours with rock on back
C10	man lying down, talking to himself	P09	man walks over and trips on log
C11	man sitting against house and eating banana	P11	banana falls on log
C12	man is standing, boy runs over to him	P12	man hears other man
C13	one man is standing, another walks into him	P13	man holds tree
C14	man walks over to a wall and sits down	P14	small log placed on big bent plank
C15	coconut tree; one coconut falls	P15	man holding girl
C16	man walking, bumps into, and then hugs tree	P17	man standing
C17	4 pieces of wood of different size	P18	three stones of different sizes
C18	girl pulling log	P19	banana falls on stomach of man lying down
C19	man walks over and sees axe with blood	P20	man running
C20	man walks and steps on banana	P21	man leaning on wall, gets up, and walks away

For the present study, all the object NPs in all the utterances were tagged as either unpossessed or possessed. The unpossessed NPs were excluded from this study.¹³ The possessed object NPs were subsequently coded as matches or mismatches according to whether or not the possessive prefix matched the type of environment. For instance, if the participant used the reflexive prefix dV- in a reflexive environment, or the non-reflexive prefix hV- in a non-reflexive environment, these were coded as “reflexive match” and “non-reflexive match”, respectively (Table 9, coding categories (a) and (c)). In contrast, the possessed NPs were coded as “reflexive mismatch” or “non-reflexive mismatch” if the participant used the default non-reflexive prefix in a reflexive environment and vice versa (Table 9, coding categories (b) and (d)).

Table 9

Categories used to code the possessed NPs in the oral production data.

Coding categories
(a) REFLEXIVE MATCH:	reflexive prefix	reflexive environment	✔
(b) REFLEXIVE MISMATCH:	non-reflexive prefix	reflexive environment	✘
(c) NON-REFLEXIVE MATCH:	non-reflexive prefix	non-reflexive environment	✔
(d) NON-REFLEXIVE MISMATCH:	reflexive prefix	non-reflexive environment	✘

It is important to underline that the elicitation task with the 40 Surrey clips was not hypothesis-driven, but rather served to collect a corpus in which variable grammatical patterns could be identified. As a result, it was not a completely controlled production task, and did not have a pre-determined amount of reflexive or non-reflexive targets in the responses that were elicited: these were coded as such per utterance and per speaker after the recording had been done. The (non-)reflexive environments were determined on the basis of linguistic and extra-linguistic information, and corroborated by feedback from older speakers.

Using video elicitation stimuli, both the referents and their real world context are known and kept constant, so that it is possible to reliably interpret the target of the possessed object NPs used in the utterances. For example, the responses to clip C11 (man sitting against a wall of a house eating a banana) would for some speakers be ‘A man is eating a banana’, while others would respond with a possessed object, ‘A man is eating his banana’. In this particular instance, the utterance would be considered to have a reflexive environment based on the context of the depicted event. The clip shows a context with only a man and a banana present, which favours the interpretation that the banana is possessed by the man who is present in the clip, not by someone else who is not visible in the clip. The same reasoning was applied to clips depicting prototypical non-reflexive environments. For example, clip P19 (banana falls on stomach of man lying down) was described by most speakers as ‘A banana falls on his stomach’. Is ‘his stomach’ used in a reflexive or a non-reflexive context? Although ‘banana’ is the subject of the clause it can never be coreferential with the possessor of ‘stomach’, so this utterance was coded as a non-reflexive target. In all cases, feedback from older speakers who were asked to comment on the felicitousness of utterances supported the (extra)-linguistic interpretations.

At the same time, many clips allow more than one possible interpretation. For example, clip C01 (man pulls other man), one speaker responded ‘a man is pulling his friend’, in which case ‘his friend’ would be coded as a reflexive target; whereas another speaker responded ‘a man is pulling another man’s hand’, in which case the utterance was tagged as a non-reflexive target, because the subject of the clause ‘a man’ is not the possessor of the other man’s hand. In other words, different speakers may have different targets responding to the same clip. This is why we determined the target for every utterance of every speaker, as opposed to only one possible target per clip.

4.2.2 Results

This section presents the results regarding the use of reflexive and the non-reflexive prefixes in the semi-spontaneous speech of four groups of Abui speakers. We also test whether gender plays a role in the selection of the appropriate prefix.

First, we report the results of reflexive prefix mismatches. An example of a reflexive match and mismatch is provided in (16). The utterances in (16) are produced in response to Surrey stimulus P15 (a man holding a girl). In their responses, speakers refer to the girl as wil ‘child’ (in the sense of offspring).¹⁴ The target form is the reflexive prefix de-: the scene depicted in the video clip gives no reason to suggest that the child held by the man is another person’s child. To describe the clip, the elder speaker uses the reflexive form de- (16a), whereas the (pre-) adolescent speaker uses the non-reflexive he- (16b).

1. (16)

1. Responses to P15 (a man holding a girl)

1.  
1. a.

1. 40-year-old female (Group: elders)
1. Neeng
2. man
1. kalieta
2. old
1. nuku
2. one
1. oro
2. DST
1. de-wil
2. 3.REFL.INAL-child
1. ha-buk-e.
2. 3.PAT-cradle-IPFV
1. ‘A man cradles his (own) child (there).’

1.  
1. b.

1. 9-year-old female (Group: (pre-)adolescents)
1. Neeng
2. man
1. nuku
2. one
1. he-wil
2. 3.NONREFL.INAL-child
1. ha-buk-e.
2. 3.PAT-cradle-IPFV
1. ? ‘A man cradles his (someone else’s) child.’
2. Intended: ‘A man cradles his (own) child.’

Table 10 displays the proportion of reflexive mismatches such as the one in (16b) averaged over the speakers. The higher the mean, the more frequently the participants used the non-reflexive prefix hV- instead of the reflexive prefix dV-.

Table 10

Reflexive prefix mismatches in semi-spontaneous speech production.

Group	Speakers	Tokens	Mean	SD
(pre-)adolescents	19	52/90	58%	.49
young adults	19	31/198	16%	.36
adults	19	2/202	1%	.09
elders	9	0/66	0	.0

• Note: Tokens refers to the global count of mismatches and instances, Mean and (S)tandard (D)eviation are of the individual speakers’ proportions.

A non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis test¹⁵ shows a statistically significant difference between the proportion of mismatches in the four groups (H(3) = 168.978, p < .001). A post-hoc pairwise comparison shows that (pre-) adolescents produce mismatches significantly more often than the other three groups (p’s < .001), using the unexpected prefix in 58% of the cases. They are followed by the young adults, who produce significantly fewer mismatches than the (pre-) adolescents, but significantly more than adults and elders. No statistical difference was found between adults and elders (p = .996). The graph in Figure 2 visualises the results, highlighting a striking increase in reflexive mismatches in the younger age groups.

Figure 2

Mean and 95% (C)onfidence (I)nterval of reflexive mismatches across the four Abui-Malay age groups.

In Section 2, we saw that young females spend more time with elder speakers and have more territorially bounded networks than male speakers, hence are expected to be more conservative than their male peers. As such, we examined the relationship between reflexive mismatches and gender using a chi-square test. We investigated such a relationship in the (pre-)adolescent and young adult groups, as these are the two groups that significantly differ from the control group of elders. These results are summarized in Table 11.

Table 11

Reflexive matches and mismatches between males and females in the (pre-) adolescent and young adult groups in semi-spontaneous speech production.

Group	Gender	Reflexive match	Reflexive mismatch	Total
(pre-)adolescents	male	13	32	45
		28.9%	71.1%
	female	25	20	45
		55.6%	44.4%
young adults	male	87	18	105
		82.9%	17.1%
	female	80	13	93
		86.0%	14.0%

The relationship between mismatches and gender was significant in the (pre-)adolescent group, X² (1, N = 90) = 6.55, p <.01. Among the females in this age group the proportion of mismatches is about 44%, as opposed to 71% among their male peers. For the young adult group no relationship was found between gender and reflexive mismatches, X² (1, N = 198) = .37, p = .34.

Table 12 displays the proportion of non-reflexive mismatches, namely the use of a reflexive prefix in a non-reflexive environment. This type of mismatch is virtually absent in the dataset. A non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis test showed no significant difference between the age groups (H(3) = 3.753, p = .289).¹⁶

Table 12

Non-reflexive prefix mismatches in semi-spontaneous speech production.

Groups	Speakers	Tokens	Mean	SD
(pre-)adolescents	19	1/39	3%	.16
young adults	19	3/104	3%	.16
adults	19	0/91	0	.0
elders	9	0/41	0	.0

• Note: Tokens refers to the global count of mismatches and instances, Mean and (S)tandard (D)eviation are of the individual speakers’ proportions.

In sum, speakers are far more likely to overgeneralize the non-reflexive hV – prefix to reflexive environments rather than using the reflexive dV- prefix for non-reflexive environments. (Pre-) adolescent and young adult speakers are simplifying the system by extending the use of the non-reflexive prefix hV- to reflexive contexts. Within the (pre)adolescent group, gender has an effect such that males overgeneralize the hV- prefix more frequently than their female peers.

5 Discussion

We investigated how Abui-Malay bilingual speakers use possessive constructions, addressing three major questions: (i) Is there variation in third person possessive constructions across the four age groups of Abui-Malay bilinguals? (ii) If there are any significant differences in their use of possessive constructions, how are age and gender linked to the variation? (iii) What do differences in production and comprehension tell us about speakers’ knowledge of the reflexivity distinction?

As predicted, pre-adolescents (age 9–16 years) showed the most variation of the four groups in overgeneralizing the non-reflexive possessive prefix to reflexive contexts. This confirms that speakers consider the non-reflexive hV- prefix as the default to mark possession on nouns, while the reflexive dV- prefix is seen as the marked form. The simplification mechanism attested is overgeneralization of the semantically least specified form, interpreted here as the default form. Young adults (17–25 years) also differed significantly from adults (26–34 years) and elders (40–75 years), although they showed less variation than the younger group of pre-adolescents. This distribution suggests that (pre-)adolescents and to some extent young adults are losing the reflexivity distinction, while for adults and elders, the reflexivity distinction is still obligatory.

Gender was found to be linked to the variation in the group of (pre)-adolescents, where females were more conservative while males accounted for most of the variation. The gender differences are argued to relate to the differences in social networks of Abui (pre-)adolescent females and males. Abui girls have territorially bounded social networks (Milroy & Milroy 1985), spending more time with other female relatives (mother, grandmother, aunts) attending to domestic chores such as fetching pig food and firewood, cooking, and cleaning. In a lot of these activities, despite often being directly addressed in Malay, they obtain passive knowledge of Abui because they are surrounded by Abui speaking adults. In addition, sometimes they are addressed directly in Abui as many older women do not always feel comfortable speaking Malay. Boys, on the other hand, spend a considerable amount of time away from their hamlet, playing with other boys. Typically, they speak Malay with their peers, as Malay has very high prestige among adolescents. This strongly suggests that young girls must have more exposure to Abui relative to boys.

The finding that social networks are different among younger generations and thus yield gender differences has also been reported in the Cajun English speech community (Dubois & Horvath 1999). However, the observation that (pre-)adolescent males are the agents of linguistic change stands in contrast to studies reporting that role for females instead. This was found to be the case for urban communities (Labov 1990; Campbell 2013) but also for indigenous minority communities such as the K’iche’ of Guatemala (Romero 2008) and the Garifura of Belize (Ravindranath 2008) (cited in Stanford & Preston 2009: 10). It seems that people of either gender can be the agents of change, depending on the specific social practices and roles that females and males carry out in a given community, and the type of social networks they have (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1999). In language change, the factor of gender appears to be culture-specific (Labov 1989; Sankoff 1994; Dubois & Horvath 1999). Before turning to the next point of discussion, it is important to note that there were no gender effects for any of the other groups. This means that (in Abui) the social network has an effect only for (pre)adolescents.

Age and gender of speakers are thus relevant variables in explaining the observed variation, and they are also crucial characteristics of the type of bilingualism studied here. In fact, exposure to and use of Abui are variable, and increase as an individual’s age increases: as many parents put it, “We need to raise our children in Malay so that they do well at school. When they grow up, they will learn Abui from their peers, simply by living in the community”. This implies that the acquisition of Abui in Takalelang involves a prolonged period of passive knowledge up until adolescence when speakers gradually begin developing active knowledge.

To test the implications this type of bilingualism might have on outcomes of contact, we compared speakers’ (i) (pre)-school exposure to Abui, and (ii) current exposure to Abui. Since (pre-)adolescents were raised mostly in Malay and still speak predominantly Malay with their peers, they have low (pre)-school exposure and also low current exposure to Abui. As such, they may be characterized as active-passive bilinguals (Kulick & Terrill to appear): they have passive knowledge of Abui, can speak it if called upon, yet rarely ever do. As Malay-dominant speakers, the (pre-)adolescents appear to be losing the reflexivity distinction in their speech.

Young adults share with (pre-)adolescents a similar low level of (pre)-school exposure to Abui, yet have higher current exposure. They presumably also had passive knowledge growing up, as they claim they spoke mostly Malay during childhood, but now speak Abui more as their prominence in the community rises and they have more direct contact with elders. This low quantity of Abui input in their (pre)school years explains why some young adult speakers have problems with the reflexivity distinction, while their current increased quantity of Abui input may explain why they have fewer problems than (pre-)adolescents.

In addition, while the quantity of input that the (pre-)adolescents and the young adults received in (pre)school years may have been roughly similar, as depicted in Table 2 and Table 3, the quality of the input they received is likely to have been different. The reason for this lies in the adjacent age groups: (pre-)adolescents receive some input from young adults, who already show some variation. It has been observed that variation in children and teenagers is likely to be enhanced by variable input received from older peers, as opposed to input received from the parental generation (McConvell 2008), while children are also known to increase the frequency of an innovative form (Labov 1989; Sankoff 1994). Young adults, on other hand, receive input from adults and elders, who as the results show, retain active and passive knowledge of the possessive prefixes.

Considering the type of bilingualism found among the four age-groups with varying amounts of passive and active knowledge of Abui, we tested differences in their production and comprehension. We predicted that (pre-)adolescent and young adults would perform better in the comprehension task than in the production task, because we still expect them to retain knowledge of the reflexivity distinction, despite the fact that it poses problems in production. Passive comprehension of language requires less processing effort than active production (Onar Valk 2015). In addition, a number of studies show that while speakers appear to have trouble producing inflectional forms on the surface, they actually retain knowledge of the underlying rule (Prévost & White 2000a; b).

This prediction was borne out: (pre-)adolescents selected the target sentence significantly more often in the comprehension task than in the production task. This fits in neatly with self-reports from members of the community, suggesting that children and adolescents can understand the language but struggle to speak it. A similar but less significant difference between comprehension and production was observed in the young adults, while adults and elders performed at ceiling in both comprehension and production. Within the (pre-)adolescent group, we found that there were significant differences between males and females, with males attaining the reflexive target much less frequently – in line with the production data, for reasons discussed above.

That (pre-)adolescents and young adults performed better in comprehension than in production tells us that both groups have knowledge of the grammatical distinction of reflexivity, but that this knowledge is not always applied during oral production. This provides evidence in support of the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (Prévost & White 2000a), which states that L2 learners have underlying knowledge of a given inflection category or feature, but fail to instantiate it during oral production (Lardiere 1998a; b; Lardiere 2000; Prévost & White 2000a). This will lead speakers to resort to a default form, which is indeed what we observe in the present study, where speakers resort to the more general, non-reflexive possessor prefix. Ideally, evidence for the MSIH arises by examining multiple grammatical environments in which a given feature manifests itself (e.g. by examining how gender in Dutch manifests itself in articles, demonstratives, pronouns, adjectives, etc.). However, since it is not possible to test the Abui reflexive possessive in a different grammatical environment (because it only manifests itself in one), we tested whether speakers retain knowledge of the feature by comparing production and comprehension data.

One unexpected result in our study was that, in the forced-choice task targeting the non-reflexive prefix hV-, (pre)-adolescents performed worse in comprehension than they did in production. We propose that this might be due to a task effect for several reasons. First, Abui bilingual speakers may perform poorly in comprehension tasks, because their mode of Abui acquisition is oral, and they do not receive any kind of formal instruction in Abui. Therefore, they might have little metalinguistic awareness of their language and little experience in being tested in Abui. This observation is in line with the results of a study conducted by Montrul (2011) on L2 and heritage speakers. According to Montrul (2011: 189), there is a direct relationship between mode of acquisition and type of task, such that heritage language speakers are better at oral tasks that minimize metalinguistic knowledge, while L2 speakers are better at tasks that are more explicit and metalinguistic. Although Abui bilinguals are different from the prototypical heritage speakers in Montrul’s study, they may share with them the unfamiliarity with certain type of tasks. Secondly, another possible task-effect is the length of the sentences in the forced-choice task. The sentences developed for these stimuli involved a higher processing load than for the reflexive target set: two out of the three trials used a combination of two sentences in order to elicit a non-reflexive meaning, while all three trials of the reflexive target consisted of only one sentence. The reason for this is that in the non-reflexive targets the possessor referred to by the prefix is outside the clause, so an additional clause introducing the possessor was necessary in two of the trials. In the reflexive targets, the possessor is simply the subject of the clause, so adding an extra clause was not necessary. Thirdly, one reviewer suggested that another effect may be related to the interpretation of the reflexive possessive inflection as a marker of age by younger speakers (i.e. “older people say this”), as the person recorded reading the two sentences was a lady aged 40 years old of the kalieta ‘elders’ group. Finally, considering that we observed gender differences in the reflexive target in both production and comprehension, the fact that there were no gender differences in the comprehension part of the non-reflexive target may be another indicator that the results in this part of the comprehension task are more likely due to task effects. Taken together, these results lay the platform for further research, and we suggest that a follow-up forced- choice study would need to control for sentence length, as well as for acoustic properties. Specifically, we would need to also record a young speaker to see whether the voice reading the two alternatives affects the acceptability of reflexive forms.

The methods and findings of this study are a direct answer to the call by Ross (2013) that, in order to develop models of contact-induced change which allow us to reconstruct the processes that brought about these outcomes, we need to collect more studies examining a linguistic variable across age-groups. These studies should focus on the social setting and the relevant variables that might account for the variation. Two findings from the current paper directly contribute to Ross’s approach.

First, as Ross suggests, in studying language contact and change, it is imperative to focus not only on the language of children or adults, but to pay particular attention to the language of (pre-)adolescents as they are the most likely agents of change. Our study shows that the (pre-) adolescents of the Takalelang community indeed show the most variation when compared to adult Abui L1 speakers.

Second, our study offers somewhat diverging evidence from the two types of contact-induced processes of change presented in Ross (2013): bilingually-induced change and shift-induced change. While on the one hand, the Abui setting is more characteristic of relatively stable bilingualism, the outcome of the contact, simplification, is more similar to what happens after a shift (Ross 2013: 30). We suggest that the explanation lies in the type of bilingualism found in the Abui community. It is well known that different types of bilingualism have different outcomes of contact (O’Shannessy & Meakins 2012) and that outcomes from one type may not necessarily be applied to others (Ameel et al. 2009; Ross 2013). For example, simultaneous bilingual child learners have been shown to converge on monolingual-like targets (Döpke 2000) while later sequential bilinguals do not (MacWhinney 1987; Cook et al. 2003; O’Shannessy & Meakins 2012). However, many Abui speakers are a hybrid between sequential and simultaneous bilinguals: they acquire receptive competence in the language during childhood, but become active speakers post-adolescence. This type of bilinguals is highly underrepresented in the bilingualism and variationist literature, but we expect it to be much more widespread in Indonesia and Melanesia (Nevins 1998; Bowden 2002; Schokkin 2017).

Before concluding the paper, one question that was not empirically addressed in this paper but was often alluded to is whether the variation observed in the (pre-)adolescent group will lead to a fully-fledged change (following the apparent-time construct) or whether this group will learn the reflexivity distinction as it grows older (age-grading). At this point, without a real-time study, it is impossible to ascertain whether age-grading will nullify the observed variation in the young speakers, or whether they will continue to show it when they become adults. A recent review by Sankoff (2006) suggests that age-grading is much less widespread than previously thought, and that changes detected in younger groups often carry through as speakers grow older. In addition, Kerswill (1996: 198) points out that during the period of adolescence (age 16 at the latest), speakers “no longer have the ability to acquire lexically complex rules [or] new oppositions”. This would suggest that the reflexive dV- prefix and thus the reflexivity distinction may become lost in the Abui community of Takalelang over the next decades.

6 Conclusion

This case study of variation combined methods from descriptive linguistics, bilingualism research, and variationist sociolinguistics to investigate the causes and distribution of contact-induced variation in possession marking in an underdescribed type of bilingual speech community in Eastern Indonesia. It was shown how inflectional morphology is simplified due to limited language input and cross-linguistic influence. Age and gender are crucial variables in explaining the variation among the Abui-Malay bilingual groups. Younger bilinguals overgeneralize the default, non-reflexive possessive prefix hV- to reflexive contexts significantly more than older Abui speakers. In particular, (pre-) adolescent males could be the main drivers of the change, should this change grammaticalize. Our results lend support to the Missing Surface Inflectional Hypothesis, with comprehension data revealing that speakers still retain much knowledge of the reflexivity distinction but fail to produce the forms in production.

While showing that simplification is underway, this study has also laid the platform for future studies. Firstly, a follow-up panel study in at least eight years’ time would enable us to answer the question of whether the currently observed variation will persist and lead to fully-fledged language change. Secondly, a follow-up to this study could involve the investigation of the alienability distinction which, alongside the reflexivity distinction, is also encoded in third person possessive prefixes. Comparing alienability and reflexivity, two features which Malay lacks, can offer valuable insights with regards to the vulnerability of possessive inflection referring to semantic noun classes vis-a-vis syntactic binding relations.

Abbreviations

AG = agentive, AL = alienable, DST = distal, GOAL = goal, SG = singular, PAT = patient, IPFV = imperfective, INAL = inalienable, LOC = locative, NONREFL = non-reflexive, PFV = perfective, POSS = possessive, PROG = progressive, REC = recipient inflectional paradigm, REFL = reflexive, SPC = specific demonstrative

Funding Information

This research was supported by the VICI research project “Reconstructing the past through languages of the present: The Lesser Sunda Islands” awarded to Marian Klamer by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), project number 277-70-012.

Competing Interests

The authors have no competing interests to declare.