Borrowing in Apparent Time: With some comments on attitudes and universals

Borrowing is often seen as a threat by speakers of minority or endangered languages (King 2008, Dubois and Melançons 1997) but linguists may be more likely to see it as a natural, and potentially revealing, resource of bilingual speakers. This paper uses the sociolinguistic construct of apparent time to explore borrowing in an endangered language further. If borrowing is an index of communal language shift, we might expect to find differences in apparent time (cf. Labov 2008, Meakins 2011). Data comes from Hog Harbour, a community in Vanuatu, where the 1000 speakers are concerned about the continued vitality of their local language and point to the borrowing of Bislama words as a sign of its decline. We show that there is no clear sociolinguistic evidence that borrowing is increasing over time in the community: it is possible that younger speakers’ use of Bislama words may be a developmental phenomenon, not communal change in progress. We suggest that Matras’ (2012) analysis of interactional and cognitive pressure points in conversation accounts very well for the patterns observed

Definite Change Taking Place: Determiner Realization in Multiethnic Communities in New Zealand

This paper examines data from three communities in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest and most ethnically diverse city. The purpose is to determine whether some of the surprising sociolinguistic patterns emerging in communities where there has been extensive immigration generalise to other, similar urban areas. We examine the realisation of \u27the\u27 prevocalically (N=747): Standard English prescribes [ði], but [ðə] is generalised for many speakers and this generalization typifies many contact varieties of English. Our research confirms that this variant is a diagnostic of highly mixed communities; it occurs principally in the speech of L1 speakers of English exposed to large numbers of L2 English speakers in the two preceding generations. However, we do not find young men leading the change as they do in London. Our analysis suggests that closer scrutiny of the phonetics of unstressed vowels (usually of little interest in variationist sociolinguistics) is warranted, as the quality of these too and how they interact with other vowels in the system may be subject to intergenerational change

Preface

The University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL) is an occasional series published by the Penn Linguistics Club, the graduate student organization of the Linguistics Department of the University of Pennsylvania. The series has included volumes of previously unpublished work, or work in progress, by linguists with an ongoing affiliation with the Department, as well as volumes of papers from the NWAV conference and the Penn Linguistics Colloquium. We thank the Graduate Students Association Council of the University of Pennsylvania for financial support. This volume is the result of combined efforts of many people. Papers were selected and reviewed for content under the direction of the issue editors. Atissa Banuazizi did most of the legwork for collecting the papers, and the PWPL editors carried out the production of the actual volume. Special thanks are due to Hikyoung Lee for her production help, expert proofreading, and amazing post-its. All remaining errors are the responsibility of the series editors or the authors, as the case may be