Acceso usuarios
M. MacLagan, Gillian Lewis, E. Gordon, Peter Trudgill
Similarities between different geographically separated varieties of a single language may in some cases be due not to characteristics inherited directly from some parent variety, nor to any diffusion or direct contact between them, but to processes of the type which Sapir labelled "drift". We argue that there are clear examples of drift phenomena in modern English and that it is possible in the case of recently formed colonial Englishes to confirm that drift occurs, and to produce contemporary illustrations of how it operates. Sapir's argument was that language varieties may resemble one another because, having derived from some common source, they continue to evolve linguistically in similar directions by undergoing similar linguistic changes. We amplify Sapir's approach by showing that drift in our data is of two major types. In the first, linguistic changes that are already in progress in the common source may be continued even after separation. In the second, varieties with a common source inherit shared tendencies or propensities which may lead to the development of similar but new changes and hence similar but new characteristics, even after separation. These propensities lie in that fact that the related varieities inherit the same general structural properties which can interact with one another in a way which involves tensions which are the "seeds" which can bring about parallel changes in the distinct languages.
