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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 810

Part of General Poster Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Language as a city. On the emergence of bilingual constructions.

Authors: Frick, Maria (1); Riionheimo, Helka (2)
Submitted by: Frick, Maria Kristiina (University of Helsinki, Finland)

Our language can be seen as an ancient city:

a maze of little streets and squares, of old and

new houses, and of houses with additions ---

(L. Wittgenstein 'Philosophical Investigations' #18)

 

This paper presents an investigation of how new constructions emerge at the construction site (cf. Leino 2008) - or city - of language. The focus is on bilingual morphological and morphosyntactic constructions that are found in spontaneous speech and writing of first generation Finnish immigrants to Estonia. Emergence is viewed both as a diachronic process of establishing new constructions, and as their synchronic, on-line creation as speech unfolds in time (Hopper 2011, Auer & Pfänder 2011). A diachronic perspective is achieved in the current study by comparing recordings from two different decades from two immigrant communities born ca. 50-60 years apart. Emergence of bilingual constructions manifests itself on different levels of language, for example as blended word stems, inflection or derivation of words with morphemes from the other language, and blending the morphosyntax of clausal constructions from the two languages.  

                      Many of the older speakers present all of these phenomena, including morphophonological blends and L2 (Estonian) influence in L1 (Finnish) inflectional paradigms. The older speakers' usage of bilingual constructions is frequent and shows a great amount of variation. We propose that this is an indication of diachronic processes of emergence that are further on their way than would be expected of first generation speakers. These changes are motivated with the considerable social pressure and intensity of L1-L2-contact experienced by the older speakers during Soviet rule in Estonia.

                      In comparison, the data from younger immigrants does not contain morphophonological or inflectional L2 -> L1 influence, and shows only occasional blending of multi-word constructions and derivational morphology. In both the groups' speech the synchronic emergence of bilingual constructions manifests itself as 1) incorporation of smaller L2 constructions into L1 constructions, 2) switching from an L1 to an L2 construction halfway through the production of it and 3) borrowing semantics of an L2 construction. On some occasions, the switch to an L2 (morpho)syntactic construction triggers codeswitching, but often only L1 lexemes are used. Comparison to the monolingual native varieties show that since Finnish and Estonian are closely related languages, the emergent bilingual constructions have corresponding constructions in both languages that may serve as a source of analogy for their emergence.

 

References:

Auer, Peter & Stefan Pfänder 2011: Constructions: Emergent or emerging. In Auer & Pfänder (eds) Constructions: Emergent and Emerging. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1-21.

Hopper, Paul 2011: Emergent grammar and temporality in interactional linguistics. In Auer & Pfänder (eds): Constructions: Emergent and Emerging. Berlin: Mouton & Gruyter, 22-43.

Leino, Jaakko 2008: Grammar as a construction site. In Leino (ed.) Constructional Reorganization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1-10.