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Light verbs make heavy work
(2011)
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 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.