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Language contact – what are some testable theories?| old_uid | 20254 |
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| title | Language contact – what are some testable theories? |
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| start_date | 2022/04/15 |
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| schedule | 15h30-17h30 |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle 153 |
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| details | Chaire Internationale 2022 : What can heritage languages tell sociolinguists.
We will explore recent findings from variationist sociolinguistics, a quantitatively-grounded empirical approach to understanding connections between synchronic variation and diachronic change in spoken language. We will examine outcomes from a comparative study of ten heritage languages (unofficial languages acquired at home in immigrant-based communities). These languages, all spoken in Toronto, Canada, differ typologically, culturally and demographically. Thus, comparison provides insight into how the linguistic ecology affects languages. Unlike many experimental studies of heritage languages that show them to be deficient or “attrited” in comparison to homeland (monolingual) varieties, this approach shows the phonetic and grammatical production of heritage-language speakers to be quite similar, in terms of both the rate of use of competing variants and the factors which condition the variation. |
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| summary | Recent responses to two questions will be examined: (1) How do we recognize change due to contact (vs. internal change or universal tendencies)? (2) What parts of language are more susceptible to change? what levels? similar parts? salient/marked parts? different types of morphology? different phonetic features?... Students will be asked to design a thought-experiment to test some specific hypothesis in this domain, using data from spontaneous speech corpora. |
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| responsibles | Isel |
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