[lg policy] book notice: Language Contact

[Harold Schiffman]

Language Contact


Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/21/21-1725.html

EDITORS: Muriel Norde, Bob de Jonge, Cornelius Hasselblatt
TITLE: Language Contact
SUBTITLE: New perspectives
SERIES TITLE: IMPACT: Studies in Language and Society 28
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2010

Jessamyn Schertz, Department of Linguistics, University of Arizona

SUMMARY

The articles in this volume are based on presentations at ''Language Contact in
Times of Globalization'', held at the University of Groningen in September 2006.
In their introduction, the editors emphasize the widening scope of language
contact studies, which ranges from the detailed investigation of a single
contact situation to cross-linguistic comparison of contact phenomena, and which
extends to the social effects that language contact can trigger in communities.
These ten articles, which span a variety of language families, research
methodologies, and subfields of linguistics, give the reader a taste of the
diversity of the work being done on contact phenomena and at the same time raise
many questions for future research.

1. Pieter Muysken: Ethnolects as a multidimensional phenomenon

In the opening paper, Muysken proposes a broad framework for the
'multidimensional' study of ethnolects, varieties of a language spoken by
particular ethnic groups. Using primarily examples from the Dutch 'Roots of
Ethnolects' project, he provides examples demonstrating that ethnolects are
affected by properties of second language acquisition, linguistic marking of
identity, language mixing, and properties of the ''original'' language of the
ethnic group, but that ethnolects cannot be sufficiently defined by any of these
individually. While much work on ethnolects focuses on direct comparison of the
ethnic variety with the 'standard' variety of the dominant language, Muysken
proposes complementing these studies with a framework that takes into
consideration the following factors: the local variety of the 'original'
language of an ethnic group (L1); crossing or mixing between the original and
the ambient language (L1/L2); 'universal principles' of simplification of
grammatical elements (UP); and approximation to the ambient language (L2). It is
not clear where sociolinguistic factors might fit into this framework, and in
particular which dimensions would be relevant for speakers of ethnolects who are
not necessarily speakers of the ''original'' language but who still are speakers
of a pronounced ethnic dialect, and whose stylistic choices may even drive
dialect change (cf. Mendoza-Denton 1997 on 'Chicano English'). Nevertheless,
Muysken's framework definitely allows for more nuance than a single-dimension
comparison with the ambient language and can be extended beyond ethnolects to
practically any contact language situation.

2. John Nerbonne, Timo Lauttamus, Wybo Wiersma, Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen:
Applying language technology to detect shift effects

Nerbonne et al. present the results of a computational project comparing the
surface syntax of first and second generation Finnish Australian English
speakers. Using automated coding of parts of speech of transcribed
conversational corpora, the program extracted groups of three words and their
corresponding parts of speech for the two groups, allowing the authors to
identify and quantify patterns of deviation in the distribution of parts of
speech. The automated technique has the additional advantage that it not only
reveals the speech errors of L2 speakers, but also identifies and gives a
reliable measure of overuse of certain (correct) constructions
disproportionately favored by L2 speakers, a phenomenon not easily addressed
using traditional linguistic analysis. The authors go on to discuss the results
in the context of language contact, showing that some, but not all, of the
discrepancies are attributable to the speakers' L1 (Finnish). The presentation
is very non-technical, the focus being to present discussion of the results to a
linguistic audience and, perhaps more importantly, to show how techniques from
speech technology can be used to answer linguistic questions not usually
addressed with computational methodologies.

3. Ricardo Otheguy, Ana Celia Zentella and David Livert: Generational
differences in pronominal usage in Spanish reflecting language and dialect
contact in a bilingual setting

The volume continues with another article comparing syntactic structures in
first and second generation immigrants, this time focusing on null vs. overt
subject pronoun use in the Spanish spoken by newcomers to New York City. Using
as a data source the Otheguy-Zentella corpus of NYC conversational Spanish, the
authors find that overt pronoun use is higher among second-generation immigrants
than it is among newcomers. Furthermore, speakers from the Caribbean showed
slightly different manifestations of this pattern than those from the mainland:
while for Caribbean Spanish speakers there is a larger increase in 1st and 3rd
person than there is for second person, for mainland speakers it is reversed:
there is a larger increase for 2nd person than there is for 1st and 3rd person.
The authors attribute the global increase in pronouns to influence from English,
which almost always require overt subject pronouns, but which otherwise shows
general surface syntactic similarity to Spanish pronoun/verb use. This idea is
supported by the fact that time spent in the city and knowledge of English
correlate positively with higher overt pronoun use, while age of arrival and
knowledge of Spanish correlate positively with higher null pronoun use. The
'mirror image' effect of second-person pronouns is attributed to leveling of the
Caribbean and Mainland dialects. Thus Spanish speakers in New York are adapting
not only to English, but also to other dialects of Spanish.

4. Piibi-Kai Kivik: Personal pronoun variation in language contact: Estonian in
the United States

This paper again focuses on variation of pronoun use by immigrants to the United
States, this time looking at Estonian, which has two sets of personal pronouns,
'long' and 'short,' and allows null subjects in the first and second persons.
Data was collected via sociolinguistic interviews from three groups: two groups
of late bilinguals (World War II refugees who came over after secondary school
and new immigrants), and ''early bilinguals,'' WWII refugees who had typically
arrived in the United States before secondary school. Reasons for variation
between long and short pronouns were globally the same for American Estonian
speakers as for monolingual Estonian speakers; that is, determined by prominence
(focus or contrast) and case. However, specific patterns of variation differed
between the groups. As in Otheguy et al.'s study, early bilinguals showed
greater use of overt subject pronouns, perhaps again because of greater
accommodation to English. Some other interesting results were noted; for
example, group members who diverged from the pattern of their group often had
speech closer to that of another group with whom they were in close contact.

5. A. Seza Doğruöz and Ad Backus: Turkish in the Netherlands: Development of a
new variety?

This article focuses on potential effects of contact on conversational Turkish
spoken by second-generation immigrants to the Netherlands. Working in the
framework of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 2005), the authors present examples
from conversations that are considered to be unconventional and show how some of
the deviations from the standard variety appear to be able to be attributable to
structural influence from Dutch. For example, Turkish speakers in the
Netherlands sometimes omitted case-markers on nouns that are case-marked in
standard Turkish, which could be explained by the fact that Dutch does not mark
case. However, when conversations with native Turkish speakers from Turkey were
analyzed, similar unconventional constructions occurred, albeit less frequently,
suggesting that the unconventional structures cannot be completely attributed to
Dutch influence. There are several types of structures that only occur in
Netherlands Turkish speakers (word order patterns, addition of a lexical item,
omission of possessives, and unconventional derivational morphemes), but as
these do not appear to be systematic, the authors conclude that there is not
sufficient evidence to posit Dutch-influenced structural change in Netherlands
Turkish. Instead, they claim that the influence of Dutch is item-based, with
unconventional constructions resulting from translations of equivalent Dutch
expressions.

6. Charlotte Gooskens, Renée van Bezooijen and Sebastian Kürschner: The
reflection of historical language contact in present-day Dutch and Swedish

The authors of this paper discuss how the distribution of loanwords in the Dutch
and Swedish lexicons reflects the similarities and differences in the linguistic
contact situations of the languages throughout history. Based on carefully
controlled corpora of speeches made in the European Parliament, words were coded
for loanword status and language of origin. The authors then analyze the data
based on a combination of linguistic and historical facts: for example, the
prevalence of French loanwords in Dutch reflects the greater extent of contact
between Dutch and French populations than Swedish and French. On the other hand,
Swedish has a large number of loanwords from Low German, while Dutch has almost
none, even though the two language communities had a similar amount of contact
with Low German-speaking communities in the Middle Ages. The authors argue that
the reason for this is that the lexicons of Low German and Dutch were very
similar, leaving little room for borrowing, while those of Low German and
Swedish were considerably different.

7. Hélène B. Brijnen: The impact of German on Schleife Sorbian: the use of 'gor'
in the Eastern Sorbian border dialect

This short article focuses on the use of the particle 'gor' in the Schleife
dialect of Sorbian, a Slavic language which is spoken in a small patch of
Eastern Germany and which has been surrounded by the German speakers since the
Middle Ages. After a summary of the sociolinguistic context of the language and
its speakers, the author discusses the geographical distribution of 'gor,' a
borrowing from the German 'gar,' pointing out that the particle occurs in Lower
Sorbian but is rare in Upper Sorbian. The fact that there are other German
borrowings in Upper Sorbian dialects leads her to suggest that 'gor' was not
borrowed because it did not fit with the phonological system of Upper Sorbian,
which had no /g/. She also notes that while the German equivalent 'gar' can be
used in both positive and negative contexts, in this dialect of Sorbian it is
almost always used in a negative context. Brijnen goes on to compare the
contemporary dialect to that of a nineteenth century writer, claiming that
comparative study can shed light on the history of German as well as Sorbian,
but leaves the details for future work.

8. Wilbert Heeringa, John Nerbonne and Petya Osenova: Detecting contact effects
in pronunciation

Taking a quantitative approach to the relationship between linguistic and
geographic proximity, this article examines whether the dialects of Bulgarian
which are closer to neighboring countries (Macedonia, Serbia, Romania, Greece,
and Turkey) are phonologically more similar to the languages of these countries.
The article is valuable not only for its analysis of the data, but also for its
comparison of three computational techniques for measuring phonological
similarity. Each step of the analysis was carried out using 1) Levenshtein
distance (the number of modifications necessary to change one string of sounds
to another); 2) phone frequency method (PFM), which compares the frequency of
each phone in comparable corpora (Hoppenbrouwers & Hoppenbrouwers 2001), and 3)
feature frequency method (FFM), which compares the frequency of each
phonological feature in comparable corpora (Hoppenbrouwers & Hoppenbrouwers
2001). Although the three techniques produced slightly different results,
indicating the need for further examination, they generally concurred, showing a
correlation between linguistic similarity and geographic proximity with respect
to Macedonian, Serbian and Romanian, while for Greek and Turkish there were
negative trends and correlations. The authors offer possible historical and
sociolinguistic explanations for the lack of correlation for Greek and Turkish.

9. Jason Shaw and Rahul Balusu: Language contact and phonological contrast: the
case of coronal affricates in Japanese loans

Shaw and Balusu present an in-depth report on the results of a study on the
[ti]-[tʃi] distinction in Japanese loanwords in two generations of speakers.
Analysis of target loanwords including the two sequences found that both younger
(age 20-23) and older (50-56) speakers distinguish orthographic 'chi' from 'ti'
(which occurs only in loanwords), with longer frication on 'chi' tokens and
shorter frication on 'ti' tokens. The authors also found that the duration of
frication in both categories is conditioned by prosody: for instance, accented
syllables have longer frication than unaccented syllables. Although there is a
contrast between [ti] and [tʃi] in each prosodic position, the older speakers
show overlap between the two categories when collapsed over all prosodic
positions: that is to say that a stressed [ti] could have more frication than an
unstressed [tʃi]. However, for younger speakers, although prosodic effects are
still present in each category, [ti] and [tʃi] do not overlap. Interestingly, in
the older speakers, two [ti] categories seemed to emerge: loanwords which had
been introduced after the speaker had reached adulthood were more [ti]-like
(less frication). The authors conclude that older speakers had acquired the
[ti]-[tʃi] contrast later in life, while younger speakers learned it while
learning their first language. Finally, the authors address the question of why
this particular non-native contrast might be preserved, while others (i.e. [r]
vs. [l]) are not. They propose that there must be non-contrastive variation
within a native category, such as the prosodic conditioning that occurs in this
case, in order for non-native categories to form.

10. Nicola Borrelli: Translating cultures within the EU

Turning to a very different perspective on language contact, the final article
in the collection deals with the translation of European Union documents into
different member languages, in an attempt to understand ''to what extent the
translations of Brussels' official documents mirror the specific national
perspectives of their translators and how these localising spurs interact with
the general policies of the European Union'' (182). Borrelli focuses on the
English and Italian translations of an originally French video meant to promote
the European Constitution to the public. Citing specific examples of non-literal
translations, the author concludes that the contrast between Italian
'Euro-optimism' and UK 'Euro-scepticism,' as well as national cultural values
(based on Hofstede's (2001) 'dimensions of cultural differences') is reflected
in the choices made by the translators. Some of the discrepancies are indeed
interesting; using texts from more than one translator in each language would
provide even more convincing evidence that the choices of wording are an
indication of the cultural values of a nation, as claimed by the author, rather
than the stylistic choices of an individual writer.

EVALUATION

In his opening article, Muysken proposes that ethnolects need to be analyzed
from many perspectives, and the findings in this book attest to the need for
multidimensional perspectives on language contact in general. The main strengths
of the volume are its broad coverage of many different facets of language
contact, demonstrating effects that a first language can have on a second
(Nerbonne et al.), a second language on a first (Otheguy et al., Kivik et al.,
Doğruöz and Backus), areal effects that are not necessarily attributable to
knowledge of a second language (Brijnen, Heeringa et al.), loanword phenomena
(Gooskens et al., Shaw and Balusu), and translation studies (Borrelli). This
diversity gives the reader an idea of the many paths that the study of contact
linguistics can take (and points towards many more yet untraveled), even though
the lack of discourse between the papers causes it to read more as a sampling of
the field than as a unified volume.

Although most of the studies are corpus-based, there is a nice breadth of
methodology as well; for example, the two computational studies demonstrate that
automated quantitative techniques can reveal previously undiscovered patterns
about both the syntax (Nerbonne et al.) and the sound systems (Heeringa et al.)
of languages in contact, while detailed examinations of specific constructions
uncover processes not apparent on the surface (such as the sub-categorization of
Japanese /ti/ presented by Shaw and Balusu). Although some work is set within a
theoretical framework (i.e. Construction Grammar), the focus of the majority of
the articles is largely descriptive, followed by possible implications of the
findings for the language contact processes. As most of these articles are quite
self-contained, however, the reader is often left without sufficient evidence to
evaluate the larger-scale claims. This is especially striking in light of the
work of Doğruöz and Backus, who highlight the importance of control groups in
corpus work: after presenting seemingly plausible speculation about contact
effects, they then show how these ideas are refuted by the fact that speakers
without exposure to the ''contact'' language produce the same patterns.

The articles in this volume provide a rich source of interesting contact
phenomena, too specific and nuanced to be encompassed by the blanket term
''accommodation.'' The next step is to explore whether these patterns have
parallels across languages. In a field with such extraordinary breadth and
diversity, it is only by cross-linguistic comparison and extensive dialogue
between researchers that it will be possible to begin to answer some of the
big-picture questions posed by many of the authors as areas for future research:
for instance, which sorts of patterns or constructions are most susceptible to
change, and which are more resistant to contact influence. Addressing these
questions will lead to a better understanding not only of language contact, but
also of first and second language acquisition, and this volume provides an
excellent starting point for exploring them in a systematic manner.

REFERENCES

Goldberg, A. 2005. Constructions at work. The nature of generalization in
language. Oxford: OUP.

Hofstede, G. 2001. Culture's consequences: comparing values, behaviors,
institutions, and organisations across nations. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage.

Hoppenbrouwers, C. and G. Hoppenbrouwers. 2001. De Indeling van de Nederlandse
Streektalen. Dialecten van 156 Steden en Dorpen Geklasseerd Volgens de FFM.
Assen: Koninklijke van Gorkum.

Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 1997. Chicana/Mexicana identity and linguistic variation:
an ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of gang affiliation in an urban high
school. PhD dissertation, Stanford University.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Jessamyn Schertz is a graduate student at the University of Arizona, on
leave this year for a research position with the European Union Sound to
Sense project at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her main
research interests lie in sociophonetics, the phonetics/phonology
interface, and the effect of language contact on sound systems.

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