Conjunction Function: How Grammatical Categories are Organized in Language

The purpose of my talk is to discuss how conjunctions function in different languages and to show how they contribute to a better understanding of the implicit knowledge we have as speakers of a language. In English, coordinating conjunctions such as ‘and’ can link a diverse range of grammatical categories: noun phrases (NP), verb phrases (VP), adjective and adverb phrases (AP), clauses, etc. Cross-linguistically, however, there are many languages that have category specific coordinating conjunctions, and such languages show that the function of coordinating conjunctions extends beyond organizing discourse. Matras (1996:178), for example, points out that “(…) coordinating conjunctions assume functions which have to do with the categorization of pieces of knowledge in discourse.” I present data from languages such as Turkish, Korean, and Cape Verdean Creole to show that conjunctions will most commonly differentiate between nominal and verbal (or clausal) conjunctions, i.e. between nouns and verbs. Evidence from such languages, shows that speakers discriminate between different types of grammatical categories in their mental grammar without being explicitly taught how to do so. This is reinforced with evidence from non-standardized languages, that lack prescriptive grammars and an orthography. I present data from my own research on Transylvanian Saxon (TrSax), an endangered Germanic language spoken in Romania. TrSax is a minority language that has been transmitted orally over 8 centuries and is used along German and Romanian, both socially dominant languages. The analyzed data come from a corpus of TrSax dialects from 120 localities in Romania, and recordings I conducted with 14 TrSax native speakers from Viscri, Romania (ages 30-78)

Word Order Variation and Change in Transylvanian Saxon

This study analyzes variation and change in Transylvanian Saxon (TrSax), an endangered language spoken in Romania. In an intense contact situation featuring TrSax, German, and Romanian, syntactic transfer is observable in TrSax verb clusters, resulting in word order variation between TrSax and German-influenced structures, and a new particle verb structure in TrSax. I compare current data collected through sociolinguistic interviews to data from other TrSax dialects, and to ancestors of TrSax (e.g. Middle High German, Luxembourgish) and show that subordinate clause verb clusters pattern differently in TrSax than in related varieties, displaying flexible distribution between available structures. The transfer of new structures from German into TrSax is facilitated by the typological similarity between the two languages (c.f. Thomason, 2003), however a complete change towards German is prevented by Romanian, which shares similar structures with TrSax. Speakers who use Romanian regularly display different patterns than speakers who do not use Romanian

Two case studies on structural variation in multilingual settings

In this article, I report on two analyses of variation in Transylvanian Saxon (TrSax), an endangered Germanic language in contact with German and Romanian, used in settings predictive of structural influences among languages. My goals are to document the structural properties of the target variables and to evaluate if processes of language contact have an effect on synchronic variation in TrSax. I identified two areas of TrSax that display variation at the morphosyntactic level, and in each case one of the variants has a corresponding structure in German, while the other variant has a corresponding structure in Romanian. To tease apart contact-induced variation from internally motivated variation, I compare data from multilingual speakers with different linguistic profiles and assess the effect of sociolinguistic factors on variation through mixed effects analyses. Variation that patterns similarly across these two groups can provide a clearer account of the structure of TrSax, while differences between the groups can shed light on trajectories of change in TrSax. Furthermore, results of this study have implications for borrowing hierarchies in language contact

A comparative analysis of Romanian-English and Romanian-Spanish code-switching patterns

The present study compares Romanian-Spanish and Romanian-English code-switch patterns at a morpho-syntactic level. Spanish and Romanian have similar grammatical features and share many structural and phonological properties, while Romanian and English differ in most of these aspects. In comparing 240 code-switches from both language pairs, I address whether these differences and similarities in code-switch patterns can be explained by typological factors. The results show that switch points in both language pairs are the same at phrase level. However, different CS patterns occur at morpheme-level, with Romanian-Spanish switches showing more complex combinations between Spanish stems and Romanian inflectional or function morphemes, than in the Romanian-English data. These findings shed light on the role of feature matching between switched categories and the effect of typological similarity

Language profile and syntactic change in two multilingual communities

This paper explores variables that can explain contact-induced linguistic variation and change in a situation where diachronic data is lacking and number of speakers is small. For example, in contexts involving language endangerment traditional sociolinguistic variables such as age, gender, and social class will not apply due to small number of participants. Furthermore, additional sociolinguistic variables such as degree of language use, language attitudes, etc. are needed to explaining contact-induced variation. The target language is Transylvanian Saxon (hereafter TrSax), an endangered language that coexists with German and Romanian in Romania and in émigré communities in Germany. I collected sociolinguistic and questionnaire data from two groups of trilingual speakers of TrSax, German, and Romanian. Six participants are from Viscri, Romania and six participants are part of a community of Transylvanian Saxons from Viscri, who moved to Nuremberg, Germany approximately 30 years ago. I illustrate the methodology I used for identifying the variables that distinguish the two groups and I discuss how these variables can be applied to analyze contact-induced variation in TrSax on hand of preliminary production data

Dynamics Of Language Contact And Language Variation : The Case Of Transylvanian Saxon In The Homeland And The Diaspora / by Ariana Bancu

Tesis de University of Michigan. Se menciona el euskeraA driving concern of this dissertation is to explore morpho-syntactic variation in Viscri Saxon, a dialect of Transylvanian Saxon (TrSax), originating in Viscri, Romania. I aim to determine if/how German and Romanian, the languages in contact with Viscri Saxon, affect the structure of the language. If contact effects are observable, are some domains of Viscri Saxon morpho-syntax more affected by contact effects than others? Do German and Romanian affect Viscri Saxon to different degrees? Can contact effects on Viscri Saxon be identified by comparing a variety from Romania to a variety from Germany? I address these questions by combining methods from language contact (focusing on factors that facilitate morpho-syntactic transfer) with methods from sociolinguistics (focusing on quantitative analyses that explore the effects of sociolinguistic factors on variation). The two grammatical domains of Viscri Saxon under consideration are two-verb clusters, i.e. auxiliary/modal + verb constructions in the right periphery of a clause, and conjunctions. The first analysis targets word-order variation in two-verb clusters. Viscri Saxon allows both Aux/M-V and V-Aux/M orders, German requires V-Aux/M order, while Romanian requires Aux/M-V order. A preference for V-Aux/M in German-dominant speakers would indicate that German has an effect on TrSax; conversely, Romanian-dominant speakers would prefer Aux/M-V (cf. Kootstra and Şahin 2018). Inter-speaker patterns of variation show that distributions of each order range from exclusive use of Aux/M-V to exclusive use of V-Aux/M and variants are in free variation. Language dominance has an effect on word-order choice. For example, German-dominant speakers prefer V- Aux/M constructions. The second analysis targets two coordinating conjunctions, end and och; both fulfill the grammatical function of ‘and’ in Viscri Saxon. Viscri Saxon end and German und are cognates. Viscri Saxon och and Romanian și are similar – both function as the conjunction ‘and’ or the additive particle ‘also’. I predicted that German-dominant speakers would use end more than och, while Romanian-dominant speakers would use och more than end. However, variation in conjunction choice is conditioned by linguistic factors and patterns similarly across all speakers: end is used to conjoin clauses, och is used to conjoin categories such as NPs, PPs, and APs, and clauses. Both end and och can conjoin clauses, but end is strongly preferred, and no dominant language effects on conjunction choice were present. The dissertation has implications for processes of language contact: Matras (2011) suggests that items that are more tightly bound in their structural domain, i.e. more connected to a specific environment may be less susceptible to contact effects. Because each TrSax conjunction is connected to a specific environment, conjunctions might be less structurally autonomous than verbs in verb clusters, and, thus, variation is not affected by the contact languages in this domain. Thus, results of the two case studies shed light on structural factors that facilitate transfer. This work also contributes to the documentation of TrSax verb clusters and coordinating conjunctions, and to the discussion of such phenomena in Germanic languages, by reviewing the scarcely available evidence from previous work, exemplifying similar phenomena in other related languages and dialects, and providing evidence from data gathered through my own fieldwork

Dynamics Of Language Contact And Language Variation: The Case Of Transylvanian Saxon In The Homeland And The Diaspora

A driving concern of this dissertation is to explore morpho-syntactic variation in Viscri Saxon, a dialect of Transylvanian Saxon (TrSax), originating in Viscri, Romania. I aim to determine if/how German and Romanian, the languages in contact with Viscri Saxon, affect the structure of the language. If contact effects are observable, are some domains of Viscri Saxon morpho-syntax more affected by contact effects than others? Do German and Romanian affect Viscri Saxon to different degrees? Can contact effects on Viscri Saxon be identified by comparing a variety from Romania to a variety from Germany? I address these questions by combining methods from language contact (focusing on factors that facilitate morpho-syntactic transfer) with methods from sociolinguistics (focusing on quantitative analyses that explore the effects of sociolinguistic factors on variation). The two grammatical domains of Viscri Saxon under consideration are two-verb clusters, i.e. auxiliary/modal + verb constructions in the right periphery of a clause, and conjunctions. The first analysis targets word-order variation in two-verb clusters. Viscri Saxon allows both Aux/M-V and V-Aux/M orders, German requires V-Aux/M order, while Romanian requires Aux/M-V order. A preference for V-Aux/M in German-dominant speakers would indicate that German has an effect on TrSax; conversely, Romanian-dominant speakers would prefer Aux/M-V (cf. Kootstra and Şahin 2018). Inter-speaker patterns of variation show that distributions of each order range from exclusive use of Aux/M-V to exclusive use of V-Aux/M and variants are in free variation. Language dominance has an effect on word-order choice. For example, German-dominant speakers prefer V- Aux/M constructions. The second analysis targets two coordinating conjunctions, end and och; both fulfill the grammatical function of ‘and’ in Viscri Saxon. Viscri Saxon end and German und are cognates. Viscri Saxon och and Romanian și are similar – both function as the conjunction ‘and’ or the additive particle ‘also’. I predicted that German-dominant speakers would use end more than och, while Romanian-dominant speakers would use och more than end. However, variation in conjunction choice is conditioned by linguistic factors and patterns similarly across all speakers: end is used to conjoin clauses, och is used to conjoin categories such as NPs, PPs, and APs, and clauses. Both end and och can conjoin clauses, but end is strongly preferred, and no dominant language effects on conjunction choice were present. The dissertation has implications for processes of language contact: Matras (2011) suggests that items that are more tightly bound in their structural domain, i.e. more connected to a specific environment may be less susceptible to contact effects. Because each TrSax conjunction is connected to a specific environment, conjunctions might be less structurally autonomous than verbs in verb clusters, and, thus, variation is not affected by the contact languages in this domain. Thus, results of the two case studies shed light on structural factors that facilitate transfer. This work also contributes to the documentation of TrSax verb clusters and coordinating conjunctions, and to the discussion of such phenomena in Germanic languages, by reviewing the scarcely available evidence from previous work, exemplifying similar phenomena in other related languages and dialects, and providing evidence from data gathered through my own fieldwork.PHDLinguisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/153360/1/abancu_1.pd

A comparative analysis of Romanian-English and Romanian-Spanish code-switching patterns

The present study compares Romanian-Spanish and Romanian-English code-switch patterns at a morpho-syntactic level. Spanish and Romanian have similar grammatical features and share many structural and phonological properties, while Romanian and English differ in most of these aspects. In comparing 240 code-switches from both language pairs, I address whether these differences and similarities in code-switch patterns can be explained by typological factors. The results show that switch points in both language pairs are the same at phrase level. However, different CS patterns occur at morpheme-level, with Romanian-Spanish switches showing more complex combinations between Spanish stems and Romanian inflectional or function morphemes, than in the Romanian-English data. These findings shed light on the role of feature matching between switched categories and the effect of typological similarity.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe