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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1243

Part of Session 188: Relating the Productions of Multilingual Children and Adolescents in their Languages (Other abstracts in this session)

Continuity and contact-induced-change in varieties of Turkish in Berlin Turkish: grammatical judgments and production of demonstrative pronouns of Turkish/German bilinguals

Authors: Hayasi, Tooru (1); Pfaff, Carol W. (2); Dollnick, Meral (3)
Submitted by: Hayasi, Tooru (Tokyo University, Japan)

The demonstrative is one of the universal categories, though it varies considerably in the usage as well as in the form (Anderson and Keenan 1985, and Dixon 2003). It may thus be expected to be a criterion for similarity and difference between linguistic varieties.

In this paper we compare the results of two studies of the same bilingual population, Turkish/German bilingual pupils at a Gymnasium in Berlin. Pfaff 2009 reports on the investigation of parallel oral and written production in Turkish and German, comparing these results with Turkish monolinguals in Denizli and Istanbul which has continued as the MULTILIT Project (Schroeder, Akıncı, Pfaff) now encompassing data from children and adolescents aged 9-20. Hayasi 2010 reports on the judgments of appropriateness of a choice of Turkish demonstrative pronouns (bu, şu, o and their morphologically derived forms) by bilinguals in Berlin and monolinguals in Istanbul. The data is from a questionnaire survey of 32 pupils between the ages from 15 to 18 in Berlin and 59 pupils from 14 to 17 in Istanbul.

In this paper we analyze the bilinguals’ and monolinguals’ production of demonstratives in both German and Turkish, focusing on the parallelism (or not) of usage in the bilinguals’ their two languages, and compare the findings for Turkish with the patterns of appropriateness judgments of bilinguals and monolinguals.

We find differences in bilingual and monolingual production with respect to their choice of the three sets of demonstratives (bu-, şu- and o-) but close similarity in their judgment about which set of demonstratives is pragmatically most suitable.

The comparison of the two data sets suggests that Berlin pupils are developing innovative usages of demonstratives, by using linguistic resources available to them, and yet they maintain the same grammatical and pragmatic knowledge as that of monolingual pupils of Istanbul.

References:

Anderson, Stephen R. and Edward L. Keenan. 1985. “Deixis”. In Timothy Shopen (ed.) Language typology and syntactic description, Volume 3, 259-308. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 Dixon, R. M. W. 2003. “Demonstratives: A cross-linguistic typology“. Studies in Language 27:1, 61-112.

 Hayasi Tooru 2010. “Variability in linguistic judgment: An analysis of a questionnaire survey data on the usage of Turkish demonstratives carried out in Istanbul and Berlin”

 Pfaff, Carol W. 2009. “Parallel assessment of oral and written text production of multilinguals: Methodological and analytical issues”. In B. Ahrenholz (ed.) DaZ-Forschung. Empirische Befunde zum Deutsch-als-Zweitsprache-Erwerb und zur Sprachförderung. Beiträge aus dem 3. Workshop Kinder mit Migrationshintergrund.’ Freiburg in Breisgau: Fillibach Verlag. pp. 213-233.