Give-Constructions in Heritage Ambon Malay in the Netherlands

The domains where languages show variable syntax are often vulnerable in language contact
situations. This paper investigates one such domain in Ambon Malay: the variable
encoding of give-events. We study give-expressions in the Ambon Malay variety spoken by
heritage speakers in the Netherlands, and compare the responses of heritage speakers with
those of homeland speakers in Ambon, Indonesia. We report that heritage Ambon Malay
shows an innovative higher incidence of do constructions compared to the homeland variety,
and a significant decrease in the frequency of ‘two predicate’ constructions. The change
that heritage Ambon Malay is undergoing is thus not categorical, but rather involves a
change in frequency of certain constructions. We argue that this ‘restructuring by changing
frequency’ is due to a combination of factors: influence from Dutch, universal tendencies in
language acquisition, and the language history of individual speakers. Apart from a quantitative
difference, we also observe a qualitative difference between the give-constructions of
heritage and homeland speakers of Ambon Malay: both groups use different prepositions
in the prepositional object construction, a reflection of their different social histories.