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This dissertation uses a common grammatical phenomenon, light verb constructions (LVCs) in English and German, to investigate how syntax-semantics mapping defaults influence the relationships between language processing, representation and conceptualization. LVCs are analyzed as a phenomenon of mismatch in the argument structure. The processing implication of this mismatch are experimentally investigated, using ERPs and a dual task. Data from these experiments point to an increase in working memory. Representational questions are investigated using structural priming. Data from this study suggest that while the syntax of LVCs is not different from other structures’, the semantics and mapping are represented differently. This hypothesis is tested with a new categorization paradigm, which reveals that the conceptual structure that LVC evoke differ in interesting, and predictable, ways from non-mismatching structures’.
Since the 1960ies, Germany has been host to a large Turkish immigrant community. While migrant communities often shift to the majority language over the course of time, Turkish is a very vital minority language in Germany and bilingualism in this community is an obvious fact which has been subject to several studies. The main focus usually is on German, the second language (L2) of these speakers (e.g. Hinnenkamp 2000, Keim 2001, Auer 2003, Cindark & Aslan (2004), Kern & Selting 2006, Selting 2009, Kern 2013). Research on the Turkish spoken by Turkish bilinguals has also attracted attention although to a lesser extend mainly in the framework of so called heritage language research (cf. Polinski 2011). Bilingual Turkish has been investigated under the perspective of code-switching and codemixing (e.g. Kallmeyer & Keim 2003, Keim 2003, 2004, Keim & Cindark 2003, Hinnenkamp 2003, 2005, 2008, Dirim & Auer 2004), and with respect to changes in the morphologic, the syntactic and the orthographic system (e.g. Rehbein & Karakoç 2004, Schroeder 2007). Attention to the changes in the prosodic system of bilingual Turkish on the other side has been exceptional so far (Queen 2001, 2006).
With the present dissertation, I provide a study on contact induced linguistic changes on the prosodic level in the Turkish heritage language of adult early German-Turkish bilinguals. It describes structural changes in the L1 Turkish intonation of yes/no questions of a representative sample of bilingual Turkish speakers. All speakers share a similar sociolinguistic background. All acquired Turkish as their first language from their families and the majority language German as an early L2 at latest in the kinder garden by the age of 3.
A study of changes in bilingual varieties requires a previous cross-linguistic comparison of both of the involved languages in language contact in order to draw conclusions on the contact-induced language change in delimitation to language-internal development.
While German is one of the best investigated languages with respect to its prosodic system, research on Turkish intonational phonology is not as progressed. To this effect, the analysis of bilingual Turkish, as elicited for the present dissertation, is preceded by an experimental study on monolingual Turkish. In this regard an additional experiment with 11 monolingual university students of non-linguistic subjects was conducted at the Ege University in Izmir in 2013. On these grounds the present dissertation additionally contributes new insights with respect to Turkish intonational phonology and typology. The results of the contrastive analysis of German and Turkish bring to light that the prosodic systems of both languages differ with respect to the use of prosodic cues in the marking of information structure (IS) and sentence type. Whereas German distinguishes in the prosodic marking between explicit categories for focus and givenness, Turkish uses only one prosodic cue to mark IS. Furthermore it is shown that Turkish in contrast to German does not use a prosodic correlate to mark yes/no questions, but a morphological question marker.
To elicit Turkish yes/no questions in a bilingual context which differ with respect to their information structure in a further step the methodology of Xu (1999) to elicit in-situ focus on different constituents was adapted in the experimental study. A data set of 400 Turkish yes/no questions of 20 bilingual Turkish speakers was compiled at the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin and at the University of Potsdam in 2013. The prosodic structure of the yes/no questions was phonologically and phonetically analyzed with respect to changes in the f0 contour according to IS modifications and the use of prosodic cues to indicate sentence type.
The results of the analyses contribute surprising observations to the research of bilingual prosody. Studies on bilingual language change and language acquisition have repeatedly shown that the use of prosodic features that are considered as marked by means of lower and implicational use across and within a language cause difficulties in language contact and second language acquisition. Especially, they are not expected to pass from one language to another through language contact. However, this structurally determined expectation on language development is refuted by the results of the present study. Functionally related prosody, such as the cues to indicate IS, are transferred from German L2 to the Turkish L1 of German-Turkish bilingual speakers. This astonishing observation provides the base for an approach to language change centered on functional motivation. Based on Matras’ (2007, 2010) assumption of functionality in language change, Paradis’ (1993, 2004, 2008) approach of Language Activation and the Subsystem Theory and the Theory of Language as a Dynamic System (Heredina & Jessner 2002), it will be shown that prosodic features which are absent in one of the languages of bilingual speech communities are transferred from the respective language to the other when they contribute to the contextualization of a pragmatic concept which is not expressed by other linguistic means in the target language. To this effect language interaction is based on language activation and inhibition mechanisms dealing with differences in the implicit pragmatic knowledge between bilinguals and monolinguals. The motivator for this process of language change is the contextualization of the message itself and not the structure of the respective feature on the surface. It is shown that structural consideration may influence language change but that bilingual language change does not depend on structural restrictions nor does the structure cause a change. The conclusions drawn on the basis of empirical facts can especially contribute to a better understanding of the processes of bilingual language development as it combines methodologies and theoretical aspects of different linguistic subfields.
This paper investigates evidence for linguistic coherence in new urban dialects that evolved in multiethnic and multilingual urban neighbourhoods. We propose a view of coherence as an interpretation of empirical observations rather than something that would be "out there in the data", and argue that this interpretation should be based on evidence of systematic links between linguistic phenomena, as established by patterns of covariation between phenomena that can be shown to be related at linguistic levels. In a case study, we present results from qualitative and quantitative analyses for a set of phenomena that have been described for Kiezdeutsch, a new dialect from multilingual urban Germany. Qualitative analyses point to linguistic relationships between different phenomena and between pragmatic and linguistic levels. Quantitative analyses, based on corpus data from KiDKo (www.kiezdeutschkorpus.de), point to systematic advantages for the Kiezdeutsch data from a multiethnic and multilingual context provided by the main corpus (KiDKo/Mu), compared to complementary corpus data from a mostly monoethnic and monolingual (German) context (KiDKo/Mo). Taken together, this indicates patterns of covariation that support an interpretation of coherence for this new dialect: ourfindings point to an interconnected linguistic system, rather than to a mere accumulation of individual features. In addition to this internal coherence, the data also points to external coherence: Kiezdeutsch is not disconnected on the outside either, but fully integrated within the general domain of German, an integration that defies a distinction of "autochthonous" and "allochthonous" German, not only at the level of speakers, but also at the level of linguistic systems. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.