Abstract
This paper focuses on structural priming, levels of awareness, and agency in contact-induced language change, bringing insights from historical and anthropological linguistics together with psycholinguistic, processing-based approaches. We begin with a discussion of the relation between levels of awareness and agency in the linguistic literature, focusing on the work of Von Humboldt, Silverstein, Van Coetsem, and Trudgill. Then we turn to the psycholinguistic notion of structural priming, aiming to show that cross-linguistic structural priming is a plausible mechanism driving contact-induced language change, and explore the properties of priming and its relation to the levels of awareness discussion in the linguistic literature. We end with suggestions for future research to further elucidate the relation between structural priming, levels of awareness, and agency in contact-induced language change.
Highlights
A question that remains unresolved is to what extent language change can be conscious, and subject to human agency, and to what extent it takes place below the level of human awareness
Another way in which linguistic elements can be related to processes of awareness in structural priming is in the finding that priming turns out to be relatively strong when the prime is unusual, infrequent or surprising (e.g., Bernolet and Hartsuiker 2010; Jaeger and Snider 2007, 2013; this effect is related to the inverse frequency effect in priming)
Attempts are made to establish classifications or hierarchies regarding linguistic features or components that may be involved in conscious linguistic change, ‘above the level of awareness’
Summary
A question that remains unresolved is to what extent language change can be conscious, and subject to human agency, and to what extent it takes place below the level of human awareness. The question of the way in which awareness and human agency play a role in contact-induced language change, and which parts of language are involved, is clearly not a settled matter We explore this issue by bringing psycholinguistic approaches on cross-language activation and priming together with insights from historical, anthropological, and sociolinguistics. We start off with a brief discussion on levels of awareness in the linguistic literature, focusing on the work of Humboldt, Silverstein, Van Coetsem and Trudgill (Section 2) We relate this to the psychological notion of (cross-linguistic) structural priming, which has recently been proposed as a potential mechanism of (contact-induced) language change, and which at first sight involves ‘unaware’ language behavior, and appears to be influenced by conscious aspects of language processing. That many of the generated linguistic hypotheses appear to converge with findings in the psycholinguistic literature, and that the priming paradigm offers a fruitful methodology to test these hypotheses
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