Language in a Fijian village : an ethnolinguistic study

This thesis investigates sociolinguistic variation in the Fijian village of Waitabu. The aim is to investigate how particular uses, functions and varieties of language relate to social patterns and modes of interaction. ·The investigation focuses on the various ways of speaking which characterise the Waitabu repertoire, and attempts to explicate basic sociolinguistic principles and norms for contextually appropriate behaviour.The general purpose is to explicate what the outsider needs to know to communicate appropriately in Waitabu community. Chapter one discusses relevant literature and the theoretical perspective of the thesis. I also detail the fieldwork setting, problems and restrictions, and thesis plan. Chapter two provides the necessary background information to this study, describing the geographical, demographical and sociohistorical setting. Description is given of the contemporary language situation, structure of Fijian (Bouma dialect), and Waitabu social structure and organisation. In Chapter 3, the kinship system which lies at the heart of Waitabu social organisation, and kin-based sociolinguistic roles are analysed. This chapter gives detailed description of the kin categories and the established modes of sociolinguistic behaviour which are associated with various kin-based social identities. Chapter 4 focuses on discourse of everyday life, dealing with the general rules and norms by which Waitabu individuals construct their everyday sociolinguistic behaviour including: male and female speech; greetings and leave-taking; deference and politeness markers; and conversational strategies. Chapter 5 provides detailed investigation of the ceremonial speech event. This event is characterised by special rules of speech and nonverbal behaviour, and is distinguishable by clearly defined opening and closing sequences with set sequencing of components in between. The chapter describes the specific principles and norms governing the linguistic, social and kinesic behaviour. In chapter 6, the decline of chiefly respect language is described. First, I detail distinguishing lexical, grammatical and speech act features of the speech style traditionally used towards the village chief. Then, I investigate the loss of these specific rules and norms in contemporary Waitabu, exploring factors in this change. Chapter 7 gives detailed description of dialect levelling evident in Waitabu. The various dialect varieties and their domains are described. Language attitudes and factors conducive to dialect shift are also investigated. Then follows analysis of how individuals creatively use these dialect differences in constructing their sociolinguistic behaviour, to mark certain contexts and role-relationships as distinct. Focus is on the specific rules and norms for sociolinguistic behaviour in the netball peer-group and in interaction with Indians. Chapter 8 investigates the special patterns of language use which characterise two institutionalised modes of communication in Waitabu society - religion and education. Chapter 9 gives a summary of the Waitabu investigation

Explaining Russian-German code-mixing

The study of grammatical variation in language mixing has been at the core of research into bilingual language practices. Although various motivations have been proposed in the literature to account for possible mixing patterns, some of them are either controversial, or remain untested. Little is still known about whether and how frequency of use of linguistic elements can contribute to the patterning of bilingual talk. This book is the first to systematically explore the factor usage frequency in a corpus of bilingual speech. The two aims are (i) to describe and analyze the variation in mixing patterns in the speech of Russia German adolescents and young adults in Germany, and (ii) to propose and test usage-based explanations of variation in mixing patterns in three morphosyntactic contexts: the adjective-modified noun phrase, the prepositional phrase, and the plural marking of German noun insertions in bilingual sentences. In these contexts, German noun insertions combine with either Russian or German words and grammatical markers, thus yielding mixed bilingual and German monolingual constituents in otherwise Russian sentences, the latter also labelled as embedded-language islands. The results suggest that the frequency with which words are used together mediates the distribution of mixing patterns in each of the examined contexts. The differing impacts of co-occurrence frequency are attributed to the distributional and semantic specifics of the analyzed morphosyntactic configurations. Lexical frequency has been found to be another important determinant in this variation. Other factors include recency, or lexical priming, in discourse in the case of prepositional phrases, and phonological and structural similarities and differences in the inflectional systems of the contact languages in the case of plural marking

Heritage Languages and Their Speakers: Opportunities and Challenges for Linguistics

In this paper, we bring to the attention of the linguistic community recent research on heritage languages. Shifting linguistic attention from the model of a monolingual speaker to the model of a multilingual speaker is important for the advancement of our understanding of the language faculty. Native speaker competence is typically the result of normal first language acquisition in an environment where the native language is dominant in various contexts, and learners have extensive and continuous exposure to it and opportunities to use it. Heritage speakers present a different case: they are bilingual speakers of an ethnic or immigrant minority language, whose first language often does not reach native-like attainment in adulthood. We propose a set of connections between heritage language studies and theory construction, underscoring the potential that this population offers for linguistic research. We examine several important grammatical phenomena from the standpoint of their representation in heritage languages, including case, aspect, and other interface phenomena. We discuss how the questions raised by data from heritage speakers could fruitfully shed light on current debates about how language works and how it is acquired under different conditions. We end with a consideration of the potential competing factors that shape a heritage language system in adulthood.Linguistic

Linguistic theory and the analysis of minority languages: native, immigrant and heritage Spanish

In this paper we aim to contribute to the emerging field of heritage studies by investigating whether Spanish heritage speakers in Canada, namely the second or subsequent generation of Spanish speakers who grew up as English-Spanish bilinguals, differ from native Spanish speakers (those who have always lived in a Spanishspeaking country) and from immigrant Spanish speakers (those who immigrated to Canada as adults) with respect to their grammatical competence and to their processing strategies. Taking as a point of departure recent proposals from linguistic theory, we provide a description of Spanish restrictive relative clauses with so-called resumptive pronouns (Es una mujer que nunca LA vimos llorar) in order to determine whether and how our three groups of speakers differ in terms of the grammatical intuitions and processing resources they display when confronted with this type of constructions. We discuss to what extent language attrition, influence from English (in the case of both immigrant and heritage speakers), or incomplete acquisition (in the case of heritage speakers) may be behind the characteristics of the immigrant and the heritage speakers’ linguistic behaviour. We argue that sophisticated experimental tasks provide a better tool than global proficiency tests to compare these three groups of speakers. The ultimate aim of this study is to provide a framework for analyzing the status of the minority languages spoken by immigrant communities.Este artículo quiere contribuir al emergente campo de los estudios de la herencia (heritage), investigando si los hablantes de herencia de español en Canadá (los hablantes de español de segunda o posterior generación que crecieron como bilingües de inglés-español) se diferencian de los hablantes de español nativos (aquellos que han vivido siempre en un país de habla hispana) y de los inmigrantes hablantes de español (los que inmigraron a Canadá como adultos), con respecto a su capacidad gramatical y a sus estrategias de procedimiento. Tomando como punto de partida las propuestas más recientes de la teoría lingüística, presentamos una descripción de las cláusulas relativas restrictivas con pronombres de reasuntivos en español ('Es una mujer que nunca LA vimos llorar') con el fin de determinar las diferencias entre los tres grupos de hablantes en términos de intuiciones gramaticales y de recursos de procesamiento que utilizan al enfrentarse a este tipo de construcciones. Se discute en qué medida la erosión de la lengua, por influencia del inglés (en el caso de los hablantes inmigrantes y de herencia), o una adquisición incompleta (en el caso de los hablantes de herencia) pueden estar detrás del comportamiento lingüístico. Se discute también si las pruebas experimentales sofisticadas son mejores herramientas, para comparar los tres grupos de hablantes, que los tests de dominio global. El objetivo final de este estudio es proporcionar un marco para el análisis del estatus de las lenguas minoritarias habladas por las comunidades de inmigrantes

Linguistic theory and the analysis of minority languages: native, immigrant and heritage Spanish

In this paper we aim to contribute to the emerging field of heritage studies by investigating whether Spanish heritage speakers in Canada, namely the second or subsequent generation of Spanish speakers who grew up as English-Spanish bilinguals, differ from native Spanish speakers (those who have always lived in a Spanishspeaking country) and from immigrant Spanish speakers (those who immigrated to Canada as adults) with respect to their grammatical competence and to their processing strategies. Taking as a point of departure recent proposals from linguistic theory, we provide a description of Spanish restrictive relative clauses with so-called resumptive pronouns (Es una mujer que nunca LA vimos llorar) in order to determine whether and how our three groups of speakers differ in terms of the grammatical intuitions and processing resources they display when confronted with this type of constructions. We discuss to what extent language attrition, influence from English (in the case of both immigrant and heritage speakers), or incomplete acquisition (in the case of heritage speakers) may be behind the characteristics of the immigrant and the heritage speakers’ linguistic behaviour. We argue that sophisticated experimental tasks provide a better tool than global proficiency tests to compare these three groups of speakers. The ultimate aim of this study is to provide a framework for analyzing the status of the minority languages spoken by immigrant communities.Este artículo quiere contribuir al emergente campo de los estudios de la herencia (heritage), investigando si los hablantes de herencia de español en Canadá (los hablantes de español de segunda o posterior generación que crecieron como bilingües de inglés-español) se diferencian de los hablantes de español nativos (aquellos que han vivido siempre en un país de habla hispana) y de los inmigrantes hablantes de español (los que inmigraron a Canadá como adultos), con respecto a su capacidad gramatical y a sus estrategias de procedimiento. Tomando como punto de partida las propuestas más recientes de la teoría lingüística, presentamos una descripción de las cláusulas relativas restrictivas con pronombres de reasuntivos en español ('Es una mujer que nunca LA vimos llorar') con el fin de determinar las diferencias entre los tres grupos de hablantes en términos de intuiciones gramaticales y de recursos de procesamiento que utilizan al enfrentarse a este tipo de construcciones. Se discute en qué medida la erosión de la lengua, por influencia del inglés (en el caso de los hablantes inmigrantes y de herencia), o una adquisición incompleta (en el caso de los hablantes de herencia) pueden estar detrás del comportamiento lingüístico. Se discute también si las pruebas experimentales sofisticadas son mejores herramientas, para comparar los tres grupos de hablantes, que los tests de dominio global. El objetivo final de este estudio es proporcionar un marco para el análisis del estatus de las lenguas minoritarias habladas por las comunidades de inmigrantes

VARIATIONist Linguistics meets CONTACT Linguistics

The current volume is dedicated to the inherently heterogeneous nature of language(s) as seen from the perspective of variationist linguistics and contact linguistics, which became established and internationally recognized sub-disciplines of (socio)linguistics during the latter half of the 20th century. Over the last few years, each paradigm has broadened the spectrum of the topics under investigation considerably, but there has not yet been an extensive and satisfactory exchange between the two scientific fields named. The present volume aims at giving an insight into the complex synergy between occurring linguistic contact constellation, on the one hand, and variation in the parlance, on the other hand

Cross-generational linguistic variation in the Canberra Vietnamese heritage language community: A corpus-centred investigation

This dissertation investigates cross-generational linguistic differences in the Canberra Vietnamese bilingual community, with a particular focus on Vietnamese as the heritage language. Specifically, it documents the vernacular and considers key aspects of this data from different theoretical perspectives. Its main contribution is an insight into a rarely studied heritage language variety in a contact community that has never been examined. The dissertation consists of five core chapters, organised into two parts. In the first part (Chapters 2–3), I describe how I documented the vernacular and created the Canberra Vietnamese English Corpus (CanVEC), an original corpus compiled specifically for this study that is also the first to be freely available for research purposes. The corpus consists of over ten hours of spontaneous speech produced by 45 Vietnamese-English bilingual speakers across two generations living in Canberra. In the second part of the study (Chapters 4–6), I put the corpus to use and investigate aspects of the cross-generational differences in Vietnamese as the heritage language in this community. In particular, I first probe the Vietnamese heritage language via its participation in the code-switching discourse (Chapter 4). In doing so, I focus on the applicability of the Matrix Language Framework (MLF) (Myers-Scotton, 1993, 2002) and its associated Matrix Language (ML) Turnover Hypothesis (Myers-Scotton, 1998) to the code-switching data in CanVEC. Since support for this prominent model has mainly come from language pairs that have different clausal word order or vastly different inventories of inflectional morphology, Vietnamese-English as a pair in which both languages are SVO and essentially isolating offers a tantalising testing ground for its application. Results show that the universal claims of this model do not hold so straight-forwardly. CanVEC data challenges several assumptions of the MLF, with the model ultimately only being able to account for around half of the CanVEC code-switching data. I further demonstrate that even when the ML is putatively identifiable and a cross-generational ML ‘turnover’ is quantitatively observed, the predictions do not reflect the direction of structural influence that we see in CanVEC. The MLF approach therefore sheds only limited light on cross-generational language shift and variation in this community. Given that null elements emerge as a distinct area of difficulty in Chapter 4, I take this aspect as the focal point for the next part of the investigation (Chapter 5), where I use the variationist approach (Labov, 1972 et seq.) to explore three cases where null and overt realisation alternates in Vietnamese: subjects, objects, and copulas. In doing so, I move away from the bilingual portion of CanVEC to examine the monolingual heritage Vietnamese subset directly. Results show that Vietnamese null subjects vary significantly across generations, while null objects and copulas remain stable in terms of use. As speakers also overwhelmingly prefer overt forms over null forms (∼70:30) across all the three of the variables of interest, I appeal to the generative interface-oriented approach (Sorace & Filiaci, 2006 et seq.) to next examine the distribution of overt subjects, objects, copulas (Chapter 6). These results converge with what was found for null forms: cross-generational effects were observed for pronominal subjects, but not pronominal objects and copulas. This finding also supports the importance of a distinction drawn in previous works between internal (syntax-semantics) and external (syntax-discourse/pragmatics) interface phenomena, with the latter being seemingly more susceptible to change. Ultimately, this dissertation highlights the empirical and theoretical value of studying rarely considered contact varieties, while deploying an integrated approach that acknowledges the multi-faceted complexity of the contact communities where these varieties are spoken.Cambridge Trust International Scholarshi

Current issues of the Russian language teaching XIV

Collection of papers “Current issues of the Russian language teaching XIV” is devoted to issues of methodology of teaching Russian as a foreign language, to issues of linguistics and literary science and includes papers related to the use of online tools and resources in teaching Russian. This collection of papers is a result of the international scientific conference “Current issues of the Russian language teaching XIV”, which was scheduled for 8–10 May 2020, but due to the pandemic COVID-19 took place remotely