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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 795

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

Semantic change and variation in the context of early second language acquisition and their sociolinguistic implications.

Authors: Woerfel, Till
Submitted by: Woerfel, Till J. Nesta (LMU München, Germany)

The paper presents semantic change and variation in the context of early second language acquisition, where the languages involved can be distinguished as either a satellite-framed (sf) or verb-framed (vf) language (cf. Talmy 2008) in the domain of motion encoding.

This study investigates whether distinctive preferences of mapping semantic units (MANNER, PATH) into lexical items are found in the speech of early consecutive bilinguals who acquired Turkish (vf) as L1 and German (sf) as cL2. I aim to show the role of cross-linguistic influences (transfer, innovation, semantic change, syntactic variation) and the occurrence of any intratypological change as well as how this can be related with sociolinguistic variables in the language contact situation.

The data analyzed consists of oral narrations by third generation early consecutive bilinguals as well as German and Turkish monolinguals. The oral narrations were elicited by showing an animated cartoon in Turkish and German to the subjects. The coded data was analyzed with regard to verb conflation, syntactic packaging and semantic complexity. Information about speaker’s initial contact with the L2, language use, choice and preferences, cultural and literal practices of L1 and L2 were gathered through questionnaires and included as sociolinguistic effects on the language development and variation of German and Turkish in Germany.

Preliminary results show that the basic typological structures have been mastered in both languages (path encoding in the main verb in L1 Turkish and in satellites in L2 German). However, linguistic variation is found in the usage of path, manner and neutral verbs and certain syntactic constructions in L1 and L2. The preference for path or neutral verbs, subordinations and less semantic complexity in German texts can be determined by specific typological constraints (cf. Goschler et al. 2010), which have an impact on the L1. Turkish texts of German-Turkish bilinguals provide certain constructions and uses of manner verbs that are less frequent in the speech of monolinguals. Qualitative sociolinguistic results tend to show correlations between linguistic preferences and specific language practices in the Turkish and the German of the multilinguals. In some cases this might be a result of the Turkish Diaspora and the linguistic input in Germany, in other cases a result of the role of German as an educational and surrounding language.

If the ongoing analysis supports the expectations raised by the preliminary results, this study will provide new insights about the influence of the typological background on (early) second language acquisition. Multilinguals demonstrate a broader scope of typologically specific structures reflected in the semantic change of motion verbs and in syntactic variation.

 References:

Goschler, J.; T. Woerfel & Ch. Schroeder (2010), Beyond conflation patterns: A corpus study on the encoding of motion in multilingual urban areas, Poster presented at the Fourth Conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association, University of Bremen.

Talmy, L. (2008), Lexical typologies. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Grammatical categories and the lexicon (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., pp. 66–168.