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Language can strongly influence the emotional state of the recipient. In contrast to the broad body of experimental and neuroscientific research on semantic information and prosodic speech, the emotional impact of grammatical structure has rarely been investigated. One reason for this might be, that measuring effects of syntactic structure involves the use of complex stimuli, for which the emotional impact of grammar is difficult to isolate. In the present experiment we examined the emotional impact of structural parallelisms, that is, repetitions of syntactic features, on the emotion-sensitive "late positive potential" (LPP) with a cross-modal priming paradigm. Primes were auditory presented nonsense sentences which included grammatical-syntactic parallelisms. Visual targets were positive, neutral, and negative faces, to be classified as emotional or non-emotional by the participants. Electrophysiology revealed diminished LPP amplitudes for positive faces following parallel primes. Thus, our findings suggest that grammatical structure creates an emotional context that facilitates processing of positive emotional information.
We discuss an intervention programme for kindergarten and school teachers' continuing education in Germany that targets biases against language outside a perceived monolingual ‘standard’ and its speakers. The programme combines anti-bias methods relating to linguistic diversity with objectives of raising critical language awareness. Evaluation through teachers' workshops in Berlin and Brandenburg points to positive and enduring attitudinal changes in participants, but not in control groups that did not attend workshops, and effects were independent of personal variables gender and teaching subject and only weakly associated with age. We relate these effects to such programme features as indirect and inclusive methods that foster active engagement, and the combination of ‘safer’ topics targeting attitudes towards linguistic structures with more challenging ones dealing with the discrimination of speakers.
This paper discusses a hitherto undescribed usage of the particle so as a dedicated focus marker in contemporary German. I discuss grammatical and pragmatic characteristics of this focus marker, supporting my account with natural linguistic data and with controlled experimental evidence showing that so has a significant influence on speakers’ understanding of what the focus expression in a sentence is. Against this background, I sketch a possible pragmaticalization path from referential usages of so via hedging to a semantically bleached focus marker, which, unlike particles such as auch ‘also’/‘too’ or nur ‘only’, does not contribute any additional meaning.
Grammatical innovation in multiethnic urban Europe : new linguistic practices among adolescents
(2009)
This paper discusses a phenomenon that has recently been observed in areas with a large migrant population in European cities: the rise of new linguistic practices among adolescents in multiethnic contexts. The main grammatical characteristics that have been described for them are (1) phonological/phonctic and lexical influences from migrant languages and (2) morpho-syntactic reductions and simplifications. In this paper, I show that from a grammatical point of view, morpho-syntactic reductions are only part of the story. Using 'Kiezdeutsch' as an example. the German instance of such a youth language (which may be the one with most speakers), I discuss several phenomena that provide evidence for linguistic productivity and show that they evolve from a specific interplay of grammatical and pragmatic features that is typical for contact languages: grammatical reductions go hand-in-hand with productive elaborations that display a systematicity that can lead to the emergence of new constructions, indicating the innovative grammatical power of these muitiethnolects.
This article investigates a public debate in Germany that put a special spotlight on the interaction of standard language ideologies with social dichotomies, centering on the question of whether Kiezdeutsch, a new way of speaking in multilingual urban neighbourhoods, is a legitimate German dialect. Based on a corpus of emails and postings to media websites, I analyse central topoi in this debate and an underlying narrative on language and identity. Central elements of this narrative are claims of cultural elevation and cultural unity for an idealised standard language High German', a view of German dialects as part of a national folk culture, and the construction of an exclusive in-group of German' speakers who own this language and its dialects. The narrative provides a potent conceptual frame for the Othering of Kiezdeutsch and its speakers, and for the projection of social and sometimes racist deliminations onto the linguistic plane.
This paper discusses a hitherto undescribed usage of the particle so as a dedicated focus marker in contemporary German. I discuss grammatical and pragmatic characteristics of this focus marker, supporting my account with natural linguistic data and with controlled experimental evidence showing that so has a significant influence on speakers' understanding of what the focus expression in a sentence is. Against this background, I sketch a possible pragmaticalization path from referential usages of so via hedging to a semantically bleached focus marker, which, unlike particles such as auch 'also'/'too' or nur 'only', does not contribute any additional meaning.
This article investigates a public debate in Germany that put a special spotlight on the interaction of standard language ideologies with social dichotomies, centering on the question of whether Kiezdeutsch, a new way of speaking in multilingual urban neighbourhoods, is a legitimate German dialect. Based on a corpus of emails and postings to media websites, I analyse central topoi in this debate and an underlying narrative on language and identity. Central elements of this narrative are claims of cultural elevation and cultural unity for an idealised standard language High German', a view of German dialects as part of a national folk culture, and the construction of an exclusive in-group of German' speakers who own this language and its dialects. The narrative provides a potent conceptual frame for the Othering of Kiezdeutsch and its speakers, and for the projection of social and sometimes racist deliminations onto the linguistic plane.
We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on equal grounds.
We targeted comparable language use in bilingual and monolingual speakers, crucially covering broader repertoires than just formal language. A main database was the open-access RUEG corpus, which covers comparable informal vs. formal and spoken vs. written productions by adolescent and adult bilinguals with heritage-Greek, -Russian, and -Turkish in Germany and the United States and with heritage-German in the United States, and matching data from monolinguals in Germany, the United States, Greece, Russia, and Turkey. Our main results lie in three areas.
(1) We found non-canonical patterns not only in bilingual, but also in monolingual speakers, including patterns that have so far been considered absent from native grammars, in domains of morphology, syntax, intonation, and pragmatics.
(2) We found a degree of lexical and morphosyntactic inter-speaker variability in monolinguals that was sometimes higher than that of bilinguals, further challenging the model of the streamlined native speaker.
(3) In majority language use, non-canonical patterns were dominant in spoken and/or informal registers, and this was true for monolinguals and bilinguals. In some cases, bilingual speakers were leading quantitatively. In heritage settings where the language was not part of formal schooling, we found tendencies of register leveling, presumably due to the fact that speakers had limited access to formal registers of the heritage language.
Our findings thus indicate possible quantitative differences and different register distributions rather than distinct grammatical patterns in bilingual and monolingual speakers. This supports the integration of heritage speakers into the native-speaker continuum. Approaching heritage speakers from this perspective helps us to better understand the empirical data and can shed light on language variation and change in native grammars.
Furthermore, our findings for monolinguals lead us to reconsider the state-of-the art on majority languages, given recurring evidence for non-canonical patterns that deviate from what has been assumed in the literature so far, and might have been attributed to bilingualism had we not included informal and spoken registers in monolinguals and bilinguals alike.
This paper deals with Kiezdeutsch, a way of speaking that emerged among adolescents in multiethnic urban neighbourhoods of Germany. We show that, in Kiezdeutsch, we find evidence for both grammatical reduction and new developments in the domain of information structure, and hypothesise that this points to a systematic interaction between grammar and information structure, between weakened grammatical constraints and a more liberal realisation of information-structural preferences. We show that Kiezdeutsch can serve as an interesting test case for such an interaction, that this youth language is a multiethnolect, that is, a new variety that is spoken by speakers from a multitude of ethnic backgrounds, including German, and forms a dynamic linguistic system of its own, thus allowing for systematic developments on grammatical levels and their interfaces with extragrammatical domains.
We discuss an intervention programme for kindergarten and school teachers' continuing education in Germany that targets biases against language outside a perceived monolingual ‘standard’ and its speakers. The programme combines anti-bias methods relating to linguistic diversity with objectives of raising critical language awareness. Evaluation through teachers' workshops in Berlin and Brandenburg points to positive and enduring attitudinal changes in participants, but not in control groups that did not attend workshops, and effects were independent of personal variables gender and teaching subject and only weakly associated with age. We relate these effects to such programme features as indirect and inclusive methods that foster active engagement, and the combination of ‘safer’ topics targeting attitudes towards linguistic structures with more challenging ones dealing with the discrimination of speakers.
In present-day German we find new word order options, particularly well-known from Turkish-German bilingual speakers in the contexts of new urban dialects, which allow violations of the canonical verb-second position in independent declarative clauses. In these cases, two positions are occupied in the forefield in front of the finite verb, usually by an adverbial and a subject, which identify, at the level of information structure, frame-setter and topic, respectively. Our study investigates the influence of verbal versus language -independent information-structural preferences for this linearisation, comparing Turkish-German multilingual speakers who have grown up in Germany with monolingual German and Turkish speakers. For tasks, in which grammatical restrictions were largely minimised, the results indicate a general tendency to place verbs in a position after the frame-setter and the topic; in addition, we found language-specific influences that distinguish Turkish-German and monolingual German speakers from monolingual Turkish ones. We interpret this as evidence for an information-structural motivation for verb-third, and for a clear dominance of German for Turkish-German speakers in Germany.
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.
Light verbs make heavy work
(2011)
We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the neurocognitive mechanisms associated with processing light verb constructions such as "give a kiss". These constructions consist of a semantically underspecified light verb ("give") and an event nominal that contributes most of the meaning and also activates an argument structure of its own ("kiss"). This creates a mismatch between the syntactic constituents and the semantic roles of a sentence. Native speakers read German verb-final sentences that contained light verb constructions (e.g., "Julius gave Anne a kiss"), non-light constructions (e.g., "Julius gave Anne a rose"), and semantically anomalous constructions (e.g., 'Julius gave Anne a conversation"). ERPs were measured at the critical verb, which appeared after all its arguments. Compared to non-light constructions, the light verb constructions evoked a widely distributed, frontally focused, sustained negative-going effect between 500 and 900 ms after verb onset. We interpret this effect as reflecting working memory costs associated with complex semantic processes that establish a shared argument structure in the light verb constructions.