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Lecture: "Looking for Contact-Induced Change in Heritage Languages"

Lecture: "Looking for Contact-Induced Change in Heritage Languages" - Naomi Nagy '89, University of Toronto

10/17/2011
4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
REED 104
Intended Audience(s): Public
Categories: Lectures & Seminars
Toronto's Heritage Language Variation and Change Project is developing a multilingual corpus to allow inter-generational, cross-linguistic, and diatopic (heritage vs. homeland varieties) comparisons in order to develop generalizations about the types of variable features, structures or rules that are borrowed earlier and more often in contact contexts, using a consistent methodology across studies of different languages (Cantonese, Faetar, Korean, Italian, Russian, Ukrainian) and variables.

Analyses of two linguistic variables, incorporating social and linguistic constraints, will be contrasted. The first is subject pronoun presence ("pro-drop"). Multivariate regression analyses contrasting three generations of speakers of Cantonese, Italian and Russian, show cross-generational stability both in rates of pronoun use (which are much higher than in English) and in the linguistic factors constraining the variation, and we see no effect of ethnic orientation or language use.

The second variable is Voice Onset Time (VOT) in voiceless stops. The VOT in the HL drifts away from the monolingual short lag of Russian and Ukrainian, and the much longer lag of Cantonese, toward the long lag of English. Ethnic orientation correlates to VOT, though in an unexpected direction for Italian.

The contrast between inter-generational change for VOT and stability for pro-drop confirms the expectation that phonetics is more susceptible than morphosyntax to contact effects and underscores the importance of examining multiple variables in multiple languages, and examining multiple facets of multilinguals' performance.
Program in Linguistics and Cognitive Science
Professor Naomi Nagy

For more information, contact:
Program in Linguistics & Cognitive Science
603-646-0332
Permanent URL to this event: https://linguistics.dartmouth.edu/events/event?event=21618

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