Enoch Aboh

OASIS: Hi Dr. Aboh, we are looking forward to your invited talk at OASIS 6. Can you tell us, what is everyone wrong about? 

EA: I think linguistics and related fields (neuro, psycho), let’s say, the field of the study of language in general, would have taken a different turn, had we not embraced the misguided idea that what distinguishes humans from other species is the knowledge of language, where this knowledge involves one language essentially. The mistake here is the focus on monolingualism which has been adopted in the field by almost everyone as the initial state. It's a fundamental mistake, because if anything makes us unique, it's not the one language we speak or sign, it's our capacity as learners to learn and use more than one language simultaneously from birth. What is it about our learning capacity that is so flexible that a newborn can do this? By the way, there are more multilingual people in the world than monolinguals, so we should assume that we evolved language capacity as multilingual users. 

This isn't just rhetorical— we see in Africa and Southeast Asia, for example, that people navigate 2, 3, or more languages from birth and may continue to add new ones throughout their life. In such learning ecologies, the argument about the poverty of the stimulus suddenly becomes easy, you don't need to argue for years for the community to realise that what children learn in such an ecology cannot result solely from the input, which must be very heterogeneous and in a state of flux. Likewise, they cannot simply learn by instinct, since the form of the input affects what these children can learn and produce.  So there must be a bit of both: Such a consensus would have saved us time, since the late fifties.

The distinction between what's internalized as a system and what can be learned in specific ecologies makes more sense once we acknowledge that the input is by definition (and in reality) too heterogeneous to be formally characterized as “a language”. Multilingual speech in a multilingual ecology cannot be labeled as “language X, Y or Z”. Here, I'm alluding to linguistic behavior that we can observe out there: people navigating smoothly between different languages. In such ecologies, it is hard to say “what this person just produced is Gungbe grammar, French grammar, or English grammar where we conceive of these grammars as collective and often uniform behavior of Gungbe-, French-, English-speakers: the standard language. Very often, what people produce is a combination of the languages they are exposed to. We can make much more progress by looking at multilingualism this way. Looking at multilingualism this way, we can do much better than reducing the human mind to knowledge of a single language (and quite often the spoken modality). The multilingual-multimodal learner is our subject of inquiry, not the presupposed monolingual-monomodal one. 

Taking our field to really be about the multilingual-multimodal learner will likely lead us to change our metrics, which are usually based on a standard, assumed to be mastered by a monolingual learner. There is no community I know in the place I'm from where you can do this! People are different in how they do language. You can track aspects of this behaviour at the population level, but things look very  different at the individual level, relating to different social networks involving different languages, or language uses, different identity features.These ecologies are more complex than what we see in the West or the Global North in general, yet they form the majority of human communities on earth.

So working in the Global South, we will be able to revise our theories and methods, which are now too biased toward the standards  in the Global North. 

OASIS: You believe in syntax/grammar/linguistic structure, right? Why? 

EA: I do believe in structure, but I don't think structure is everything. Language is more than structure. Structure gives us the patterns we see, and it's important for the learner, precisely because of what I was saying—if you have multilingual learners, you want a flexible cognitive system that can navigate these different languages. You need flexibility but also a certain degree of rigidity that constrains the learner to some extent. Structure is important for learning. 

Nobody stresses enough the example I’m about to give, so I repeat this each time there is an opportunity. Since the 80s, there have been many studies about linguistic universals. Some findings turned out to be controversial, but one finding that remains unchallenged today concerns the expression and alignment of tense, mood and aspect. A fascinating observation is that all the human languages we know of have the same ordering: mood-tense-mood-aspect-(mood), a sequence captured by the acronym MTMA. Variations in MTMA exist but often involve a (partial) mirror image of this ordering. There is to my knowledge no language with a completely scrambled or unpredictable order. Why is that? Why does the human mind stick to this ordering only or some variants thereof? This rigid order is one of the most powerful structural constraints imposed on human languages. 

OASIS: And the constraint comes from outside the structure? 

EA: Yes, and that's along with the idea that there is more to language than structure. So let’s say it resulted from semantic hierarchy turned into structural constraints. Would this be a problem? No, it happens all the time that an externally imposed factor results in an inbuilt structural constraint we must obey. I'm happy to agree that some structural constraints may emerge from general semantic biases. It is our task to investigate such cases in an interdisciplinary way. I find it fascinating that this issue is not discussed enough in the field. Most students don’t even seem to know about this robust important finding of the 80s. Here is the point: The human mind is very creative as we can see from other aspects of language, so why is this creativity so limited in the domain of MTMA? 

So I believe in structure, based on these kinds of findings, unless proven wrong. 

OASIS: Tell us how your career trajectory turned out in an unexpected way. 

EA: I wrote my thesis on the morphosyntax of Kwa (Niger-Congo) languages spoken on the West Coast of Africa. It was a comparative syntax study involving a set of Gbe languages. When I finished, I sent the thesis to a number of colleagues in the field and I went to different conferences to present my work. In one of these conferences, I met Norval Smith, a phonologist at the University of Amsterdam, who was working on the creoles of Suriname. His work focused on the structural and phonological contributions of West and Central African languages to Suriname creoles. The West African languages he focused on, included the Gbe languages I was working on too. During this conference I happened to give a talk on focus constructions. His talk was on focus constructions too, but in Saramaccan, one of the Suriname creoles he had shown was influenced by Gbe focus constructions. We chatted a bit and exchanged some papers. After the conference, I sent him a copy of my thesis and informed him that I was looking for a job. He replied back that there was no vacancy at the moment and wished me good luck. Two years on, he submitted, together with the late Pieter Muysken, a project on  the Suriname languages and their structural relations to the Gbe languages spoken in parts of Benin, Togo, and Nigeria. I was not aware of their submission. One day I received a message from him basically saying:  “We have a postdoc for you, you have to come”! 

That’s how I ended up at the University of Amsterdam. This shows how conversations across subfields can broaden one’s perspective and result in career opportunities. I knew nothing about creole languages or phonology, but it turned out we were working on the same stuff, and this changed my career. 

So this is how I came to work on creoles. I soon realised there was a problem,  you know, a mistaken idea that creoles came from pidgins. This view is based on the idea that the enslaved Africans could not communicate with each other in any African language, they were coming from too many different places. They had to create a makeshift language to survive. But we know this cannot be true, since these people were multilingual, and in many cases were coming from the same broad areas. We would therefore expect them to try to use any of their regional vernaculars to communicate rather than engaging in a makeshift language based on lexical items stolen from the colonial European language they couldn’t speak. This is a huge fallacy. You go to any country in West Africa and you realise this hypothesis cannot hold because people there commonly speak several languages. In a recent survey in one of our projects, a consultant mentioned 8 languages! We have no reason to think that this is a modern or postcolonial development. If anything, the postcolonial trend one observes in these countries is a shift toward the official languages (e.g., French, English, Spanish, Portuguese). We must therefore conclude that colonialism precludes multilingualism rather than favoring it. 

So right from the start, I knew there was something wrong about some popular theories of creole genesis. Intuitively, what learners would do in such multilingual contexts would be to use different pieces of the grammars they knew to produce patterns that the people they were interacting with could recognise and understand. That led to the theory of hybrid grammar I’m now working on. Under this view, the computational system that multilingual-multimodal learners rely on cannot be labeled for a particular language. 

To give an example, all the languages I speak (Gungbe, French, English) are rigidly SVO. When I produce an SVO string in any of these languages, how do we know that the underlying system producing the combinatorics belongs to a particular language? I don't think there's any way to know this, experimentally, in particular if we assume that syntax operates primarily on abstract features that are only articulated by lexical items. It seems more likely that what I'm using is an integrated system that can produce these strings with morphology selected from any of these languages. How can we investigate such an integrated system? Questions of this type are out there waiting for an answer. 

So, in a meeting like OASIS, these are the kinds of broad questions we can ask ourselves- we can talk about specific questions relevant to our subfields independently, but we shouldn't do that at the expense of these broad questions. To answer these broad questions, we must collaborate. 

For such a collaboration to be fruitful, we have to invent a common discourse - how do we want to describe the phenomena in general terms? Only after that can we get to more specific issues. At the moment we still don’t have a common discourse about multilingualism, what it is, how it varies across communities and ecologies, and how these might impact the cognitive processes we engage in. We still consider multilingualism an exceptional behaviour. We must change this: monolingualism is the exception.  

OASIS: Thanks for sitting down with us—we're looking forward to seeing you in October. 

EA: Thanks.

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