Generations Of Speakers Research Articles

From One Bilingual to the Next: An Iterated Learning Study on Language Evolution in Bilingual Societies.

Studies of language evolution in the lab have used the iterated learning paradigm to show how linguistic structure emerges through cultural transmission-repeated cycles of learning and use across generations of speakers . However, agent-based simulations suggest that prior biases crucially impact the outcome of cultural transmission. Here, we explored this notion through an iterated learning study of English-French bilingual adults (mostly sequential bilinguals dominant in English). Each participant learned two unstructured artificial languages in a counterbalanced fashion, one resembling English, another resembling French at the phono-orthographic level. The output of each participant was passed down to the next participant, forming diffusion chains of 10 generations per language. We hypothesized that artificial languages would become easier to learn and exhibit greater structure when they were aligned with participants' bilingual experience (i.e., English languages being easier to learn overall), or as a function of practice (i.e., languages learned second being easier to learn overall). Instead, we found that English-like languages became more structured over generations, but only when they were learned first. In contrast, French-like languages became more structured regardless of the order of learning, suggesting the presence of an asymmetric switch cost during artificial language learning. Moreover, individual differences in language usage modulated the amount of structure produced by the participants. Overall, these data suggest that bilingual experience impacts how novel languages are learned at an individual level, which can then scale up to cultural transmission of novel language at a group level.

Phonological neighborhood complexity and sound change

Abstract The significance of the phonological neighborhood on lexical processing has been documented by decades of studies in the field, and it has become clear that the phonological connectivity of the mental lexicon is a crucial facilitator for word learning in both the production and perception domains. What has remained underrepresented in the literature to date is the question of how phonological or phonetic changes are accommodated by phonological neighborhoods, or put differently, what the implications of language processing are for language change. The present study investigates how two changes in voice onset time (VOT) in Austrian German onset plosives have appeared in certain types of phonological neighborhoods. Inferences about which phonological neighborhood characteristics are most conducive to sound change are drawn. Results vary by fortis/lenis articulation, with changes in lenis VOT shortening and fortis VOT lengthening being linked to different types of neighborhoods in two different generations of speakers.

Sound change or community change? The speech community in sound change studies: a case study of Scottish Gaelic

AbstractThis paper considers the typical focus of analysis in a sound change study across generations: the speech community. I argue that changes in social practices across generations may mean that generational comparisons can be problematic, and these issues are particularly pertinent in small and endangered language communities. Using data from Scottish Gaelic (Celtic, ISO = gla), a minority endangered language of Scotland, I exemplify the challenges posed by the speech community construct via an examination of lateral production across generations of speakers. Gaelic traditionally contrasts three phonemic laterals, but analysis shows that this might be changing. There are two possible directions for sound change in the Gaelic lateral system: results show that younger speakers produce some palatalised laterals as palatal glides without laterality. Meanwhile, the remaining laterals are less acoustically distinct among younger generations, suggesting the possibility of future merger. The construct upon which any apparent- or real-time study of sound change relies is the speech community as a unit of analysis for change. While there are differences among the groups of speakers analysed here, I argue it is potentially problematic to consider this to be a form of sound change due to differences in social practices among generations surrounding Gaelic usage and socialisation. Ultimately, I advocate for a socially-informed approach to sound change study which sympathetically takes local social structure into account.

CONDITIONAL CONVERB IN FOREST ENETS: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF ITS SYSTEM OF USES

This corpus-based study examines the functions of the conditional converb in Forest Enets and investigates the differences in its use between two generations of Enets speakers. In line with the previous descriptions, independent clauses with conditional converbs are used as self-addressed questions (yes/no, special, and alternative questions). The conditional converb of the verb ɛ ‘be’ when used with numerals is developing into a marker of approximation. Dependent clauses with conditional converbs include protases of conditional and concessive conditional constructions as well as complement clauses. This study discusses the diachronic relation between independent clauses with conditional converbs and the protasis of conditional constructions and concludes that either of the two directions of development is possible. Complement clauses with conditional converbs include, first, irrealis complements to negative propositional attitude predicates (dʲɔxara ‘not know’, dʲurta ‘forget’), which, showing signs of relatively recent grammaticalization, have hitherto received scant attention by scholars, and, second, sentential subjects in modal constructions with such predicates as sɔjza ‘good’, bɔɔ ‘bad’ etc. To compare the use of the Enets conditional converb across types of clauses and generations of speakers, this paper analyses the occurrence of the future tense marker on the converb, the order of clauses in multi-clause constructions, the range of verbs in the main and in the dependent clauses. Many of these parameters can be interpreted as the signs of the growing level of clause integration in the process of grammaticalization of polypredicative constructions.

Conservation or change? Exploring trends in Modern Hebrew in light of new spoken corpora of the first two generations of speakers

Abstract This paper presents a diachronic study of Modern Hebrew agreement between numerals and their quantified nouns. This research is possible thanks to the discovery of two rare collections of recordings from the 1950s and 1960s, which document four generations of speakers and have become important sources of spoken Early Modern Hebrew. On the basis of these two corpora, I compare numeral agreement in the first two generations of speakers with present-day usage and analyze trends of change and conversation in Modern Hebrew. The study shows that the first generation of speakers (“Gen1”) largely acquired the gender distinction of cardinals. However, in contrast to other agreement issues that educated Gen1 speakers realized fully, numeral use showed variation and absence of agreement in a small set of cases. Moreover, some linguistic features of Gen1 Hebrew found in this study no longer characterize Present-Day Hebrew; among these features is prosodic conditioning, which led to a Gen1 tendency to use the feminine form of the numeral ‘four’ with masculine nouns more frequently than was the case with other numerals.

Linguistic Profiling of Heritage Speakers of an Endangered Language: The Case of Vlach Aromanian–Greek Bilinguals

AbstractThis is the first attempt to profile the heritage speakers of an endangered spoken-only variety of Vlach Aromanian in Greece. Neither the variety nor its speakers has been investigated before; hence, the study also aims at evaluating the exact state of endangerment of the Sirrako variety, as this is revealed by the language practices and skills of its bilingual speakers. To this aim, a background questionnaire was developed and administered to 60 bilingual speakers of Vlach Aromanian and Greek including questions on the age of onset of exposure to both languages, early home language practices, current language practices (orality and literacy) and attitudes toward the heritage and majority language. Significant variation in language practices, literacy skills, oral input and current competence across three generations of speakers was identified with a substantial decline in heritage language competence in younger bilinguals, verifying our claim of the endangered state of Vlach Aromanian.

Factors Constraining Subject Expression in European Portuguese Spoken in Hamburg. A Bi-Generational Corpus Investigation

The present study investigates subject expression in two generations of Portuguese migrants living in Hamburg, Germany. Based on a corpus of oral speech, we aim to assess whether second generation heritage speakers (HSs) differ from first generation migrants with respect to the factors constraining subject realisation/omission in European Portuguese (EP), a null subject language, in contact with German, a non-null subject language. The results do not reveal evidence in favour of ongoing language change, given that there are neither quantitative nor qualitative differences between the two generations of speakers. They show very similar overall rates of subject omission (around 67%) and they reveal sensitivity to the very same determining factors of subject pronoun realisation/omission, namely person and number, verb type, switch reference (topic continuity [TC]/topic shift [TS]) and distance. This finding is in line with previous corpus studies investigating the spontaneous speech of different generations of bilingual speakers or comparing monolingual and bilingual speakers of the same null subject language (e.g., Flores-Ferrán, 2004; Nagy, 2015). We conclude that language contact per se does not necessarily lead to a diverging grammar at an inter-generational level, as long as stable input conditions allow for the acquisition of the constraints that are valid for null subject languages.

Pragmatic markers: the missing link between language and Theory of Mind

Language and Theory of Mind come together in communication, but their relationship has been intensely contested. I hypothesize that pragmatic markers connect language and Theory of Mind and enable their co-development and co-evolution through a positive feedback loop, whereby the development of one skill boosts the development of the other. I propose to test this hypothesis by investigating two types of pragmatic markers: demonstratives (e.g., ‘this’ vs. ‘that’ in English) and articles (e.g., ‘a’ vs. ‘the’). Pragmatic markers are closed-class words that encode non-representational information that is unavailable to consciousness, but accessed automatically in processing. These markers have been associated with implicit Theory of Mind because they are used to establish joint attention (e.g., ‘I prefer that one’) and mark shared knowledge (e.g., ‘We bought the house’ vs. ‘We bought a house’). Here I develop a theoretical account of how joint attention (as driven by the use of demonstratives) is the basis for children’s later tracking of common ground (as marked by definite articles). The developmental path from joint attention to common ground parallels language change, with demonstrative forms giving rise to definite articles. This parallel opens the possibility of modelling the emergence of Theory of Mind in human development in tandem with its routinization across language communities and generations of speakers. I therefore propose that, in order to understand the relationship between language and Theory of Mind, we should study pragmatics at three parallel timescales: during language acquisition, language use, and language change.

The road to fusion: The evolution of bilingual speech across three generations of speakers in Gibraltar

Aims and objectives: This article analyses English–Spanish code-mixing in Gibraltar. I describe the distribution of clause-peripheral alternation patterns in order to demonstrate that there is a correlation between single age-groups and particular types of bilingual patterns. This is interpreted as a case of fusion. Methodology: By seeking a correlation between age groups and particular instances of bilingual speech, this study adopts an apparent-time perspective. Furthermore, it tries to combine the quantitative methodology adopted in sociolinguistic studies with the theoretical tools of the sociology of language that are involved in the description of linguistic repertoires. This provides an important key for the interpretation of fusion in this scenario. Data and analysis: The study was based on a corpus of nearly 20 h of interviews with bilingual speakers belonging to three age-groups. After identifying three qualitatively different bilingual patterns, which mainly differed in the presence or absence of pragmatic functions, I took into account their distribution across age groups. Findings and conclusions: The results showed that elderly speakers were associated with pragmatically motivated code-switching, while younger speakers were associated with cases of single-word peripheral switches that were not related to any discourse- or participant-related function. This may be interpreted as incipient fusion in the periphery of the clause, possibly determined by recent changes in the linguistic repertoire. Originality: This is the first study to have applied the fusion framework to the case of Gibraltar and is also one of the few that has analysed code-mixing in this scenario from a quantitative corpus-based perspective. Significance: The data presented here shed new light on the early stages of the fusion process, highlighting the correlation between the onset of this phenomenon and macro-sociolinguistic processes involving the community.

Intergenerational Transmission of Ladino: Three Generations of Speakers in the Twenty-First Century

This study examines language socialization among five women of a single family who all speak Ladino, an endangered language spoken by Sephardic Jews. These women, ranging from 32-88 years of age, represent three generations raised in different countries and exposed to a number of languages, including Turkish, Hebrew, Ladino, Spanish, and English. Given the rarity of intergenerational transmission of Ladino over the past century, this study asks the following research questions: 1) how the women in this study have been able to preserve their heritage language, Ladino, in spite of contact with other languages, and 2) how said contact with other languages has affected their production of Ladino. To address these questions, each informant participated in a sociolinguistic interview and a lexical elicitation task. An analysis of data reveals the unique circumstances that have allowed for the grandmother’s relative monolingualism in Ladino, and the different trajectories the language has taken among subsequent generations. Despite relative stability vis-à-vis proficiency in Ladino, data indicate points of contact between Spanish and Ladino among the youngest informants who acquired both varieties simultaneously during childhood. This research was conducted in 2018 among informants in both (Florida) United States and (Bat Yam) Israel.

Grammatical features of a moribund coalminers’ language in a Belgian cité

AbstractThis article investigates grammatical features ofCité Duits, a moribund in-group coalminers’ language spoken in the town of Eisden in Belgian Limburg. Based on audio data from eight multilingual speakers collected through a method of sociolinguistic interviews in 2015, I show that certain features are a fusion of Belgian Dutch, German and the Maaslands dialect spoken in this area, in addition to ‘well-known’ and ‘new’ features. Since grammatical properties of this contact variety have hardly been researched yet, this contribution aims at filling this gap by providing a first analysis of selected morphosyntactic features including negation, bare NPs, non-inverted V3s and participle formation. Building on Aboh’s hybridity approach to the emergence of grammar (2017), I suggest that Cité Duits displays a recombination of linguistic features that have become part of a stable system over the decades. The basic idea is that speakers are capable of weaving together abstract properties of different varieties present in the input. Research on this mining language is therefore an extraordinary opportunity to investigate language and dialect contact, largely because of its recent emergence and direct information about the first generation of speakers and their social ties.

Sherzer's Discourse‐Centered Approach Applied to Cultural Change Across Generations of Speakers

This paper considers Sherzer's Discourse‐Centered Approach with respect to language and cultural change within Arab immigrant‐heritage communities in France. Using data pertaining to an Arabic politeness formula, I apply Sherzer's model to situations of grammatical creativity across generations of speakers. I argue that Sherzer's model can enhance our understandings of how speakers living in diaspora transform “traditional” or codified linguistic forms to create reflexive cultural meanings that link and distinguish generations of speakers. Specifically, French‐born, French‐speaking adolescents transform the Arabic speech act Hashek, that their immigration parents use as a term of “formal politeness,” into a means of facilitating face‐threatening acts for their peer group. In so doing, they actively negotiate a set of shifting stances that involves their complicated positioning between teenaged irreverence and cultural continuity. The grammatical creativity of such speech play illustrates the applicability of Sherzer's model for discourse as the nexus of language and culture to contexts of social change.

PERFORMANSI UJUB: DOA DAN KOMUNIKASI TIGA ALAM DALAM TRADISI BERSIH DESA KRISIK DI BLITAR PROVINSI JAWA TIMUR

Slametan Bersih Desa is a Javanese folklore in Krisik village. Ujub as oral literature is the richness of Indonesian culture. In facing challenges of the modern era, speakers of ujub are less from the young generation. Most of them are from the old generation. This research is qualitative research with structural and ethnographic approaches. The focuses of the problem are (1) the performance of orality ujub in the tradition of Bersih Desa, (2) the object and the theme of prayer in ujub Bersih desa, and (3) the communication of the three worlds in ujub Bersih desa. This research aims to describe the performance of ujub orality, objects, and themes of prayer, and communication of the three worlds which become the function of ujub orality in order to increase documentation and interpretation of the richness of oral literature as Indonesian folklore. By knowing the performance and the formulas of the ujub orality, it is easier for the younger generation of speakers to formulate the memory of ujub orality. The research shows that performance of ujub presented at the main ritual of slametan has a pattern of matra free text, has a rhyme of asonasi, desonasi, and alliteration, the rhythm of efony, and contains the formulaic pattern and formulaic expressions. The content of the prayer in ujub got influences from Islam and it has syncretism between the religion of Islam and the traditions of Java. The text of ujub has a function to communicate the three worlds which are between the humans’ world, the spirits world, and the God world.

Variations in the Lexicon of the Three Generations of Inabaknon Speakers

This study investigated the lexical variations in Inabaknon as used by three generations of speakers, the old, middle-aged and young. The ethnolinguistic type of investigation was employed using Speech Elicitation Guide and a Word Checklist to collect the language data needed in the study. The most number of words collected were common to all the three generations of informants. The old generation had more unique words or words that they alone used than the other two generations. Some of the words were of Spanish and Samarnon origin and Catholicism had a great influence on the language. The middle generation shared most of their vocabularies with the old and the young generations. The language of the young generation is influenced by their exposure to the different technological media. They had also the most number of absent Inabaknon lexicon. Some of these are words they can understand but are no longer active in their vocabulary. Some words are already unintelligible to the youth.

INTRODUCTION: Recent developments in early bilingualism

This Special Issue (SI) is dedicated to early bilinguals, who acquire two languages during early childhood, before age 6,simultaneously (2L1 bilinguals)orsequentially (cL2 bilinguals). Recently, the notion ofheritage speakers(HSs) − bilinguals who grow up speaking a minority language at home − has become prominent in this context. HS research has typically targeted bilinguals at a mature (adult) state, but early developing bilinguals may of course be HSs too, though not uniformly labelled as such. HSs of a moribund language or variety are another type of early bilingual, representing the final or penultimate, often 4thor 5th, generation of speakers. Unfortunately, ‘deficiency’ or ‘incompleteness’ is a common thread linking much HS research − despite a wealth of evidence demonstrating HSs’ maintenance of complexity in many grammatical domains along with differences to monolinguals (see, e.g., Kupisch & Rothman, 2016; Putnam & Sánchez, 2013). This SI brings together studies on how and why the morphosyntax and phonology of early bilinguals might differ from that of monolinguals.

Dressing down up north: DRESS-lowering and /l/ allophony in a Scottish dialect

AbstractThis study reports on a sociophonetic investigation ofdress-lowering in a rural dialect in northeast Scotland. Previous analyses have indicated that this change is ongoing in a number of varieties worldwide, propelled by a combination of linguistic constraints and favorable associations with Anglo urban Californian varieties. In this paper we examine whether these influences play out in a relic dialect previously resistant to more supralocal changes. Through an analysis of a range of acoustic correlates, we track the progress of this change across three generations of speakers. Analysis of the constraints suggests that in this variety the change is driven by internal pressures, where it is significantly constrained by phonetic environment, specifically, following laterals. Further analysis of this environment reveals increasing distinction on the F2-F1 spectrum, where /l/s have become lighter in onsets and darker in codas. Our analyses reveal that these changes may be viewed as complementary, as they share the same acoustic correlates, suggesting that system-internal pressures are the primary driving force ofdress-lowering in this variety.

What Is a Ruin? The Western Definition

What Is a Ruin? The Western Definition

Documenting Unserdeutsch

Unserdeutsch, also known as Rabaul Creole German, is the only known German-lexifier creole. This critically endangered language has its origins in an orphanage in German New Guinea for mixed-race children, where Standard German was taught by mission personnel. Unserdeutsch was creolised in one generation, and became the in-group language of a small mixed-race community. It is now spoken by around 100 elderly speakers, nearly all immigrants to Australia. The current project is only the second documentation based on actual fieldwork and has a specific focus on the use and vitality of the language as used by the last generation of speakers. It has the aim of producing an Unserdeutsch corpus that will facilitate both future linguistic research and contact with the language for the descendants of Unserdeutsch speakers. Preliminary findings show variation among speakers along a continuum from heavily creolised basilect to an almost European German acrolect. Most of the lexicon is derived from German, while a number of basilectal grammatical constructions are the result of the loss of marked features in German and possible imperfect second language learning as well as relexification of Tok Pisin, the presumed substrate language.

Welsh English intonation and social identity

This paper is a sociophonetic study concerned with state-of-the-art description of Welsh English (WE) pitch patterns which may serve as WE regional and social markers. WE pitch patterns in authentic spontaneous conversations are correlated with social factors of regional and cultural background (North Wales, South Wales, Cardiff), generation of speakers (young, middle-aged, old), gender (men, women) and social class (middle, working). The data are compared to Received Pronunciation (RP) tone nomenclature (Crystal, 1969) in search of systemic (i.e. concerned with the total repertoire of tones in each variety), distributional and realisational differences. Within the identical tone systems a considerable difference in the distribution of certain WE pitch configurations is interpreted as the impact of the Welsh language. The data are further specified to the dominant pattern frequency in each region, age, gender and social class. Special reference is made to the acoustic structure of rise-falls in North Wales, which is a new subject of research.

Variation and change in Toronto heritage Cantonese

Abstract This paper presents the first sociophonetic study of Cantonese vowels using sociolinguistic interview data from the Heritage Language Variation and Change in Toronto Corpus. It focuses on four allophones [iː], [ɪk/ɪŋ], [uː], and [ʊk/ʊŋ] of two contrastive vowels /iː/ and /uː/ across two generations of speakers. The F1 and F2 of 30 vowel tokens were analyzed for these four allophones from each of 20 speakers (N = 600 vowel tokens). Results show inter-generational maintenance of allophonic conditioning for /iː/ and /uː/ as well as an interaction between generation and sex such that second-generation female speakers have the most retracted variants of [ɪk/ɪŋ] and the most fronted variants of [iː]. This paper will discuss three possible explanations based on internal motivation, phonetic assimilation, and phonological influence. This will illustrate the importance of multiple comparisons (including inter-generational, cross-linguistic, and cross-community) in the relatively new field of heritage language phonology research.