Language Contacts at the Crossroads of Disciplines [1 ed.] 9781443873482, 9781443866248

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Language Contacts at the Crossroads of Disciplines

Language Contacts at the Crossroads of Disciplines

Edited by

Heli Paulasto, Lea Meriläinen, Helka Riionheimo and Maria Kok

Language Contacts at the Crossroads of Disciplines, Edited by Heli Paulasto, Lea Meriläinen, Helka Riionheimo and Maria Kok This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Heli Paulasto, Lea Meriläinen, Helka Riionheimo, Maria Kok and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-6624-5, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6624-8

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Language Contacts at the Crossroads of Disciplines: Introduction ............ ix Heli Paulasto, Lea Meriläinen, Helka Riionheimo and Maria Kok Part I: Crossing the Borders Chapter One ................................................................................................. 3 Interlingual Reduction: Evidence from Language Contacts, Translation and Second Language Acquisition Leena Kolehmainen, Lea Meriläinen and Helka Riionheimo Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 33 Conjunctions in Early Yiddish-Lithuanian Bilingualism: Heritage Language and Contact Linguistic Perspectives Anna Verschik Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 59 Inflectional Morphology in Interlanguages: Evidence from Decreolization and Second Language Acquisition Custódio Martins and Mário Pinharanda Nunes Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 89 Languaging: Ways-of-Being-with-Words across Disciplinary Boundaries and Empirical Sites Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta Part II: Translation as Language Contact Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 131 The Case for a Common Framework for Transfer-Related Phenomena in the Study of Translation and Language Contact Martina Ožbot

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Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 161 Understanding Translated vs. Non-Translated Figurative Idioms: Results of a Questionnaire Survey Esa Penttilä and Pirkko Muikku-Werner Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 191 Dissociation of Linguistic and Cognitive Description in Translation: The Cognitive Figure-Ground Alignment Jukka Mäkisalo and Marjatta Lehtinen Part III: Immigrant and Minority Language Communities Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 215 Contact-Induced Levelling: The Beginning Stages of Koineization of English in Japan Keiko Hirano Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 251 Bilingual Speech in Russian-German Language Contact: Findings Based on an Analysis of Natural Conversations in Russian-Speaking Immigrant Families in Germany Anna Ritter Part IV: Contact Effects in Language Acquisition and Teaching Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 283 Measuring Perceptions of Cross-Linguistic Similarity between Closely Related Languages: Finnish and Estonian Noun Morphology as a Testing Ground Annekatrin Kaivapalu and Maisa Martin Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 319 The Role of Language-External Factors in the Acquisition of English as an Additional Language by Bilingual Children in Germany Simone Lechner and Peter Siemund Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 347 Borrowing Metalanguage: Finnish Past Tense Terminology in Grammar Descriptions and Teaching Maria Kok

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Contributors ............................................................................................. 397 Index ........................................................................................................ 403

INTRODUCTION HELI PAULASTO, LEA MERILÄINEN, HELKA RIIONHEIMO AND MARIA KOK

The present volume offers a cross-disciplinary view into language contact research, bringing together fresh empirical and theoretical studies from various fields concerning different dimensions of language contact and variation, second language acquisition (SLA), and translation. Although many disciplines within linguistics and other sciences share an interest in language contact phenomena, the related processes and their outcomes, they have developed distinct profiles and research traditions which do not often meet. It is the aim of this book to provide such a meeting point for scholars hailing from different fields to explore languages in contact from multiple perspectives. Discussion and crosspollination between these related disciplines is needed in order to widen our horizons, learn from the neighbouring research traditions and examine our own through new sets of lenses. The theme of the proposed book arises from CROSSLING, a cross-disciplinary research network founded in spring 2011 at the University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu. The research articles in the volume are the outcome of the international CROSSLING Symposium: Language Contacts at the Crossroads of Disciplines, held in Joensuu on 28 February–1 March 2013. The juxtaposition of the various disciplines and theoretical viewpoints presented in these articles calls for a re-examination and re-definition of the notion of language contact. This term seems to be mostly understood, at least in the field of contact linguistics, as the encounter of individuals or groups of individuals speaking different languages (see, e.g. Thomason 2001, 1), in other words, as a social phenomenon. Furthermore, language contact is usually approached from a more or less diachronic viewpoint, paying attention to the traces left in the contacting languages. The linguistic effects of contact are manifold and have been referred to by various concepts, such as interference, transfer, borrowing, substrate influence, contact-induced change or, more neutrally, cross-linguistic influence. This kind of view of language contact naturally covers the most

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typical topic of research in contact linguistics, i.e. areal language contacts, but it is still quite narrow and excludes many forms of linguistic encounters that belong to other fields of research, such as SLA research or translation studies. Formal and informal means of language acquisition provide the individual with linguistic resources additional to their L1 (or L1s), and speaking a second or foreign language is therefore an activity inevitably characterized by language contact. In the same way, translating and interpreting are forms of language contact where a multilingual individual acts as a mediator between speakers of different languages. Language contact is an ancient phenomenon: the interactions of people speaking and writing in different languages have moulded nations, ideologies, policies, and—in the process—the structure and lexicon of the languages in question through the ages. In the present-day world of globalization, population mobility and information technology, these themes are as topical as ever, and research on language contacts and crosslinguistic influence has expanded rapidly during the last few decades (for the latest research, see, e.g. Appel and Muysken eds. 2005; Heine & Kuteva 2005; Aikhenvald and Dixon eds. 2006; Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008; Siemund and Kintana eds. 2008; Verschik 2008; Braunmüller and House eds. 2009; Matras 2009; Hickey ed. 2010; Ihemere ed. 2010, 2013; Norde, Jonge and Hasselblatt eds. 2010; Hasselblatt, Houtzagers, and van Pareren eds. 2011; Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi eds. 2012; Braunmüller, Höder and Kühl eds. 2014). Along with the growth of interest, this wider field of research has divided into several branches with very specific foci. In linguistics, language contacts and multilingualism are now being investigated, for example, within historical linguistics, contact linguistics, sociolinguistics, bilingualism research, and second language acquisition research. Furthermore, various forms of language contacts and multilingual encounters are important topics of research in other scientific fields, such as translation studies, sociology, psychology, educational sciences, anthropology, and cultural studies, to name just a few. The research within each discipline is often focused on linguistic phenomena that are shared with other disciplines, but they are viewed from such divergent perspectives that each branch has developed its own tradition and terminology, and hence, dialogue between disciplines tends to be scarce. In consequence of this separation, there are many terminological and even theoretical inconsistencies between fields of research, and methodological knowledge is often not being exchanged. The narrowness of focus has, of course, led to a depth of scientific knowledge within each field which could not have been reached otherwise. However, with the manifold

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linguistic phenomena and the versatile nature of actual language contact situations, it is necessary to join forces to be able to see the forest from the trees and to find where our respective traditions could benefit from each other. Special attention needs to be paid to creating dialogue between researchers from different scientific backgrounds and thus widening our perspectives on language contact phenomena. When language contact is re-defined to include the mental or cognitive level of contact between different languages and varieties in the minds of language learners or translators, salient links are created between the different disciplines dealing with this subject matter. The three most prominent disciplines in this volume are contact linguistics, SLA studies, and translation studies. These disciplines are related to each other through their interest in the encounters of two (or more) languages in the observed communicative behaviour of individuals or in societies, but they have different foci of research. Contact linguistics has traditionally acknowledged that bilingual individuals are at the locus of contact (see Weinreich 1953), but most of the research has nevertheless focused on the social or societal level of language use or on languages as linguistic systems, and what has been investigated most are the contacts of linguistic groups, usually within the same geographical area. The field of SLA research, on the other hand, examines the acquisition of an additional language after the mother tongue. SLA research therefore focuses on the psycholinguistic and cognitive aspects of language contact from the perspective of an individual. Translation and interpreting, then, are special processes of language production which involve the reformulating of a source text in one language into a target text in another language and, consequently, cross-linguistic influence is evident and unavoidable. The focus of translation studies is on the various dimensions of translating and interpreting, e.g. translations and interpretations as texts, translating and interpreting as processes, and the actions or role of translators and interpreters in society. As contact linguistics, SLA research and translation studies have developed separately, their relevance for each other has typically been recognized only in passing. However, when the concept of language contact is approached from a broader perspective, as described above, this compartmentalization makes little sense, because the objects of research in these fields are in practice intertwined. The linguistic consequences of multilingualism are among the central topics of research in contact linguistics, and the means for an individual to become multilingual is by acquiring new languages. The mechanisms of societal language contact and change are inevitably the outcome of individuals’ various means of

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language processing and production, and vice versa: individual speakers are influenced by the languages and contact situations they experience in the community around them. Translating and interpreting, then, can be seen as activities typical of multilingual individuals and societies, either as a professional skill or as a natural ability, needed in many kinds of interactional situations. Furthermore, translation tasks are a common and traditional method in language teaching and testing. The past few years have witnessed an increasing interest in crossing the discipline boundaries and combining different perspectives. For example, in the study of World Englishes and Learner Englishes, the contact-linguistic and SLA aspects have been combined in several studies (e.g. Van Rooy 2006; Nesselhauf 2009; Mukherjee and Hundt eds. 2011; Meriläinen and Paulasto forthc.), and the need for dialogue between disciplines investigating contact phenomena has been expressed repeatedly in SLA-related research (see, e.g. Mesthrie and Bhatt 2008, 156; Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008, 234–235; Treffers-Daller and Sakel ed. 2012). In a similar way, the importance of SLA-related aspects has been acknowledged in contact-linguistic literature (Thomason 2001, 146–149; Matras 2009). Also the idea of translation as a mode of language contact has recently been presented in some of the work on translation studies (e.g. Baumgarten and Özçetin 2008; Steiner 2008; Wurm 2008; Amouzadeh and House 2010; Kranich, Becher and Höder 2011). Interestingly, translation has not been given much notice in contact linguistics, although the influence of translated texts on the standard language of the nation may be remarkable (cf., however, Backus 2010). Despite these signals of rapprochement, systematic comparison of translating and other types of language contacts is scarce. All in all, it is clear that the connections between contact linguistics, SLA studies and translation studies are worth strengthening and deepening, and this is also the aim of this publication. This book is divided into four sections based on contexts of language contact rather than research disciplines, allowing various perspectives to emerge in each section. The first part, Crossing the borders, comprises studies which explicitly cross the boundaries of two or more disciplines. Leena Kolehmainen, Lea Meriläinen and Helka Riionheimo begin this section, providing a theoretical meta-analysis of a language contact effect termed interlingual reduction (i.e. the reduction or the lower frequency of target-language linguistic items or patterns not shared by both of the languages involved in the language contact situation) in translations, second language acquisition and language contact situations. Interlingual reduction is an example of a phenomenon which has attracted the attention of researchers in all these fields, but they have traditionally examined it

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within their own disciplines, separately from one another. The evidence reviewed by the authors shows that all these three contexts of language contact manifest similar reduction phenomena, which may be explained with common underlying bilingual processing effects. Their article demonstrates that a cross-disciplinary approach helps us obtain a more comprehensive view of language contact effects. The next article by Anna Verschik draws from a case study on an early Lithuanian-Yiddish bilingual. The study places itself on the ground shared by contact linguistics and heritage language acquisition studies, acknowledging the interrelationship of incomplete L1 acquisition, attrition, and contact-induced innovation and change in the language use of a multilingual individual. The case study presents a valuable set of data of contemporary spoken Yiddish, focusing on cross-linguistic influences in the use of conjunctions. Verschik shows that borrowing conjunctions from various languages can be explained through a functional-cognitive approach originating from the field of contact linguistics, according to which utterance modifiers tend to arise from the pragmatically dominant language instead of the language that is sociolinguistically dominant in the heritage language setting. The author further suggests that in order to fully understand the language contact phenomena among heritage language speakers, the perspectives of heritage language acquisition studies and contact linguistics should be combined. The study by Custódio Martins and Mário Pinharanda Nunes is located at the interface of creole studies and SLA in that it compares L1 Makista creole (at its decreolization stage) and L1 Chinese learners of L2 Portuguese through data derived from fairly similar sociolinguistic contexts. The authors’ analysis of perfect and imperfect preterite morphology by these two speaker groups contributes to the study of the confluence of SLA studies and creolistics by demonstrating that similar processes operate behind the later stages of the post-creole continuum and advanced second language acquisition. Their study thus testifies of the fruitfulness of exploring the parallels between these two fields that have, apart from some exceptions, been treated as separate. Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta challenges some of the views on multilingualism and code-switching that have been taken for granted. According to the writer, clearly defined boundaries between diverse language varieties and modalities may be interesting and helpful notions to the linguist. In practice, however, in the communication of multilingual individuals, their significance is much less obvious. The data in Bagga-Gupta’s study consist of everyday instances of spoken, written and signed communication in three authentic settings. Each instance involves the use of multiple

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languages and other communicative means, such as diverse orthographies and script systems, pictures and manual signs. The analyses of these situations demonstrate the fluidity of linguistic and discursive boundaries from the user’s point of view. Switches between diverse language varieties and modalities are an indication of the skills of languages users rather than lack thereof. The study calls for new ways of conceptualizing the activities of the multilingual and multi-modally competent individual. Part II of this volume focuses on translation as language contact. Martina Ožbot examines the interface of translation and contact linguistics in the context of a single multilingual society, Slovenia, and the areal contacts of Slovene with the neighbouring languages. Her focus is on interlingual transfer phenomena which manifest themselves in different contexts: On the one hand, historical translated literature in Slovene contains transfer effects from German, leading to potential to language change. On the other hand, the present-day Slovene-German and SloveneItalian bilingual communities display evidence of transfer from the contacting languages which is also echoed in translations by speakers with these language backgrounds. Ožbot finds that the mechanisms of transfer in translation and community-based language contact are similar and should be studied within a joint framework. Esa Penttilä’s and Pirkko Muikku-Werner’s study is part of a larger empirical project on the reception of idioms, with a focus on borrowing as one of the many factors that are involved in the process of understanding and interpreting figurative idioms. As idioms translated from English represent a common mode of language contact in many societies today, special attention is paid to the ways in which translated vs. non-translated figurative idioms are understood by native speakers of Finnish. The results of the questionnaire show that the origin of idioms has some influence on the understanding of idioms, but it is not of critical importance: old, very recent and restrictedly used idioms are understood poorly, regardless of whether they are of English or Finnish origin. Thus, in understanding an idiom, translated vs. non-translated origin seems to be one factor among many. In the processes of interpreting, using and spreading translated idioms, the common people’s use of idiomatic expressions has a significant role. In the third article in this section, Jukka Mäkisalo and Marjatta Lehtinen examine the translation process within the framework of Radical Construction Grammar. Their perspective differs from most other articles in this volume in that they do not examine the linguistic outcomes of language contact but address the issue of retention effects in translation. The authors present evidence for their hypothesis that translations are

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likely to retain cognitive similarity but not syntactic similarity with the source language structure. These findings suggest a disassociation between linguistic and cognitive levels of the translation process, which provides new insights into translation as a gateway of language contact. The theoretical aims of the article are twofold: The authors bring together cognitive linguistics and translation studies, through which they wish to emphasize the importance of knowing the translation process and especially its cognitive basis in all research on language contact. Part III comprises studies which explore situations of language contact in immigrant and minority language communities. The authors pay attention to the sociolinguistic circumstances of language contact and its outcomes. Keiko Hirano adds to the range of topics in this volume with the observation that contact influence also takes place within languages and not only across them. She examines the effects of dialect contact in an expatriate community of English-speakers in Japan and shows that similarly to the early stages of new-dialect formation in settlement communities, this Anglophone community, whose members come to Japan from various English-speaking countries on a temporary basis, is subject to subtle phonological levelling. Diachronic change in the production of intersonorant (t) is observed in terms of regional dialects, linguistic constraints and gender variation. In the following contribution, Anna Ritter examines Russian-speaking immigrants in Germany, with a special focus on the family as a microlevel community where language contact takes place. Her analysis of code-switching and language mixing observed in the speech of bilingual families is combined with sociolinguistic background information on the informants, thus shedding new light on the language choices and linguistic practices within immigrant families. The analysis provides a fresh look into bilingual families’ communicative habits, which may have an impact on the development and maintenance of the heritage language in immigrant communities. Part IV completes the book with a focus on the contexts of SLA and language teaching. Annekatrin Kaivapalu and Maisa Martin explore speaker perceptions of cross-linguistic similarity between closely related languages, Finnish and Estonian. Cross-linguistic similarity as perceived by language users is considered a condition for cross-linguistic influence to occur both in the contexts of second language acquisition and language contact situations, but both the perceptions of similarity and the theoretical nature of the concept are underresearched, especially in the field of contact linguistics. The authors approach the concept by leaning on the previous SLA research on cross-linguistic similarity and drafting a detailed

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taxonomy, which is then tried out in the context of Finnish and Estonian. The definition of similarity provided by the authors helps to clarify the mechanisms of language contact, and the study demonstrates that crosslinguistic similarity deserves to be studied much more closely than has previously been done. Simone Lechner and Peter Siemund combine the perspectives of societal language contact research and second/third language acquisition research. They examine the acquisition of English as an additional language by bilingual children with a migration background in Germany, particularly as regards subject-verb agreement and tense-aspect marking. Their analysis focuses on the influence of language-external factors on the transfer effects, and their findings indicate that although the students’ L1 affects the ease of acquisition, their socioeconomic background is a far more salient factor in explaining the frequency of non-target-like features of English. Lechner and Siemund therefore argue that speaking a language other than German is no disadvantage for the students, but that the outcomes of third language acquisition should be examined in combination with language-external, socioeconomic factors. The article which completes this section and the book takes the concept of “linguistic analysis” on another level by turning research tradition into the object of study. Maria Kok discusses metalanguage (see, e.g. Jakobson 1985, 113–122) as a factor which plays an important role in conscious language contact situations such as the studying and teaching of foreign languages. Metalanguage is required for these forms of language contact, but it is also shaped by them, as in the case of borrowed terms and concepts which are used in constituting grammatical descriptions. In essence, loanwords and loan translations are constructive and useful means of contributing to linguistic metalanguage, but problems may occur if the borrowing process is not monitored. Kok examines two terms in traditional Finnish grammar, imperfekti and perfekti, in order to demonstrate what happens when the meanings of the borrowed items become obscured and the borrowing process is not under conscious control. Close reading of early descriptions of the Finnish tense system illustrates how these two borrowed items gradually lose their informational value and become pseudo-terms which are counterproductive for the very purpose of metalanguage. On a final note, the publication of this book would not have been possible without the contribution of many individuals, communities and institutions to whom we wish to offer our warm thanks. First and foremost, we are deeply grateful to the 29 anonymous peer reviewers for their countless useful suggestions and comments, which significantly

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added to the quality of each individual article and of the publication as a whole. In the editing process we were also lucky enough to have the assistance of Marja Kilpiö, who carried out the indexing and layout work of the book with an incredible combination of skill, care and speed. We would like to thank Cambridge Scholars Publishing for kindly accepting to add this book in their publications and our author liaison Carol Koulikourdi for helping us with the publishing process along the way. As for financial support, we—and the Crossling network as a whole—are indebted to The Kone Foundation for our recent scholarly activities, including this book and the preceding symposium in Joensuu. The publication of this book has also been aided by the Academy of Finland (projects no. 258999 and 137479). If the CROSSLING symposium was a success, it was because of the enthusiasm and the high-quality presentations of the symposium participants, some of which have been selected for the present volume. Thus, last but not least, we wish to thank each author for submitting their articles for this book and working with us towards a common goal. “Cross-linguists”, whether at the University of Eastern Finland or in other parts of the world, share an interest in examining language contact phenomena from wider perspectives and developing this interrelated network of disciplines towards greater synergy. We are very happy and grateful to have had to the opportunity to work and exchange ideas with this community of scholars.

References Aikhenvald, Aleksandra Y., and Robert M. W. Dixon, eds. 2006. Grammars in Contact. A Cross-Linguistic Typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Amouzadeh, Mohammad, and Juliane House. 2010. “Translation as a language contact phenomenon.” Languages in Contrast 10 (1): 54–75. Appel, René, and Pieter Muysken. 2005. Language Contact and Bilingualism. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Backus, Ad. 2010. “The role of codeswitching, loan translation and interference in the emergence of an immigrant variety of Turkish.” Working papers in corpus-based linguistics and language education 5: 225–241. Available online at http://arno.uvt.nl/show.cgi?fid=113451. Baumgarten, Nicole, and Demet Özçetin. 2008. “Linguistic variation through language contact in translation.” In Language Contact and

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Contact Languages, edited by Peter Siemund and Noemi Kintana, 293–316. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Braunmüller, Kurt, and Juliane House, eds. 2009. Convergence and Divergence in Language Contact Situations. Hamburg Studies on Multilingualism 8. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Braunmüller, Kurt, Steffen Höder, and Karoline H. Kühl, eds. 2014. Stability and Divergence in Language Contact: Factors and Mechanisms. Studies in Language Variation 16. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hasselblatt, Cornelius, Peter Houtzagers, Remco van Pareren, eds. 2011. Language Contact in Times of Globalization. Studies in Slavic and general linguistics 38. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Heine, Bernd, and Tania Kuteva, 2005. Language Contact and Grammatical Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hickey, Raymond, ed. 2010. The Handbook of Language Contact. Malden, Oxford, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Ihemere, Kelechukwu, ed. 2010. Language Contact and Language Shift: Grammatical and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. München: LINCOM. Ihemere, Kelechukwu, ed. 2013. Language Contact: A Multidimensional Perspective. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Jacobson, Roman. 1985. “Metalanguage as a linguistic problem.” In Selected writings VII. Contributions to Comparative Mythology. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, 1972–1982, edited by Stephen Rudy, preface by Linda R Waugh, 113–122. Berlin, New York, Amsterdam: Mouton Publishers. Jarvis, Scott, and Aneta Pavlenko. 2008. Crosslinguistic Influence in Language and Cognition. New York: Routledge. Kortmann, Bernd, and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, eds. 2012. Linguistic Complexity: Second Language Acquisition, Indigenization, Contact. Linguae & litterae 13. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Kranich, Svenja, Viktor Becher, and Stefen Höder. 2011. “A tentative typology of translation-induced language change.” In Multilingual Discourse Production. Diachronic and Synchronic Perspectives, edited by Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher, Stefen Höder and Juliane House, 11–43. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Matras, Yaron. 2009. Language Contact. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meriläinen, Lea, and Heli Paulasto. Forthcoming. “Embedded inversion as an angloversal: Evidence from Inner, Outer and Expanding Circle Englishes”. To appear in The Oxford Handbook of World Englishes,

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edited by Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola and Devyani Sharma. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Mesthrie, Rajend, and Rakesh M. Bhatt. 2008. World Englishes: The Study of New Linguistic Varieties. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mukherjee, Joybrato, and Marianne Hundt, eds. 2011. Exploring Secondlanguage Varieties of English and Learner Englishes: Bridging the Paradigm Gap. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Nesselhauf, Nadja. 2009. “Co-selection phenomena across New Englishes: Parallels and differences to foreign (learner) varieties.” English WorldWide 30 (1): 1–26. Norde Muriel, Bob de Jonge, and Cornelius Hasselblatt, eds. 2010. Language Contact: New Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Siemund, Peter, and Noemi Kintana, eds. 2008. Language Contact and Contact Languages. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Steiner, Erich. 2008. “Empirical studies of translations as a mode of language contact. ‘Explicitness’ of lexicogrammatical encoding as a relevant dimension.” In Language Contact and Contact Languages, edited by Peter Siemund and Noemi Kintana, 317–346. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Thomason, Sarah G. 2001. Language Contact. An Introduction. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. Treffers-Daller, Jeanine, and Jeanette Sakel,, eds. 2012. The International Journal of Bilingualism. Special Issue: New Perspectives on Transfer among Bilinguals and L2 Users, 16(1). Van Rooy, Bertus. 2006. “The extension of the progressive aspect in Black South African English”. World Englishes 25 (1): 37–64. Verschik, Anna. 2008. Emerging Bilingual Speech – From Monolingualism to Code-Copying. London: Continuum. Weinreich, Uriel. 1953. Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems. The Hague: Mouton. Wurm, Andrea. 2008. Translatorische Wirkung. Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis von Übersetzungsgeschichte als Kulturgeschichte am Beispiel deutscher Übersetzungen französischer Kochbücher in der Frühen Neuzeit. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang. Available online at: http://scidok.sulb.uni-saarland.de/volltexte/2008/1254/pdf/Wurm_ Translatorische_Wirkung.pdf.

PART I: CROSSING THE BORDERS

CHAPTER ONE INTERLINGUAL REDUCTION: EVIDENCE FROM LANGUAGE CONTACTS, TRANSLATION AND SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION LEENA KOLEHMAINEN, LEA MERILÄINEN AND HELKA RIIONHEIMO Abstract This paper provides a theoretical meta-analysis of a frequency-related language contact effect termed here interlingual reduction, which has previously been examined in the fields of contact linguistics, translation studies and second language acquisition (SLA) research. Interlingual reduction refers to the reduction or the lower frequency of target language linguistic items or patterns not shared by both of the languages involved in the language contact situation. It has been reported in the literature of all the above fields, but it has been examined within different theoretical frameworks and with differing terminology. This paper brings together these different theories and findings and proposes that the interlingual reduction observed in these fields is one and the same phenomenon with a similar cognitive basis. Such reduction occurs not only in attriting languages but also in the process of translating into one’s L1 as well as in L2 speakers’ and bilinguals’ L1, which suggests that contrary to what has been proposed, interlingual reduction does not solely relate to reduced language skills, but it should be seen as a natural part of bilingual and multilingual language processing and use. This paper is a contribution towards bringing together the fields of contact linguistics, SLA and translation studies in order to advance a cross-disciplinary approach into the study of language contact.

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1. Introduction Various types of language contact situations often give rise to linguistic simplification or reduction phenomena in languages involved in the contact situation. Such phenomena have been widely discussed in fields that share an interest in language contact effects, namely contact linguistics, second language acquisition (SLA) research and translation studies. This paper focuses on one such phenomenon which we have termed interlingual reduction, defined here as the reduction or the lower frequency of target language linguistic items or patterns not shared by both of the languages involved in the language contact situation. Similar reduction phenomena have been reported in the literature of all these three fields, but they have been examined within different theoretical frameworks and with differing terminology (e.g. underrepresentation of unique items, underproduction or avoidance, covert interference, interferential reduction and indirect transfer; see Section 2). This theoretical meta-analysis brings together these earlier findings under a single umbrella term, and discusses them by referring to common underlying cognitive processes of L2 speakers and bilinguals. By combining insights from contact linguistics, SLA and translation studies, this paper aims at advancing a cross-disciplinary approach into the study of language contact. While contact linguistics has traditionally focused on encounters between speakers of different languages at the societal and community levels, language contact may also take place without an areal contact or social interaction. This is the case in translation and SLA, which both involve language contact from the point of view of an individual but may nevertheless have wide-reaching impacts on the language of the whole community. As stated in the seminal work by Weinreich (1953, 1), the locus of language contact is the bilingual individual. The interlingual identifications (i.e., the mental associations between the structures, sounds, words or meanings of two languages; see Weinreich 1953, 7–8) that bilinguals make give rise to cross-linguistic influence, which may, in some contexts, result in contact-induced changes in the language system. Crosslinguistic influence (CLI) is generally defined as “the influence of a person’s knowledge of one language on that person’s knowledge or use of another language” (Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008, 1). It may manifest itself in various forms, including, e.g. L2 speakers’ deviance from target language norms, the avoidance or underuse of certain target language forms, the overuse of or preference for other forms, the copying of grammatical patterns or structures from the source language into the recipient language,

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and the borrowing of diverse elements, especially lexical items but also bigger units such as idioms, textual features, text types and genres. The phenomenon of interlingual reduction discussed in this paper represents one of the many manifestations of cross-linguistic influence, which is a central phenomenon in all present fields of study. Despite the interconnectedness of societal and individual levels of language contact, there has been relatively little cross-disciplinary scholarly discussion between contact linguistics, SLA and translation studies. In their seminal work on cross-linguistic influence in L2 learners and bilinguals, Jarvis and Pavlenko (2008, 234–235) call for more dialogue between the fields of language contact, SLA, bilingualism and language attrition research, and there appears to be an increasing interest in exploring these interfaces (e.g. Matras 2009; Treffers-Daller & Sakel 2012). However, translation studies do not feature as prominently in earlier literature examining language contacts. One of the few works that incorporate the perspectives of all three fields is the edited collection by Siemund and Kintana (2008). As pointed out by Siemund (2008, 3–11), the field of language contact studies is shifting away from the description of individual contact situations and contact varieties into the comparison of different types of contact situations and their effects. Some earlier studies have thus pointed out parallels between translation studies and SLA as well as translation studies and contact linguistics. Chesterman (2007) draws attention to similar reduction phenomena observed in translation research and SLA. Kolehmainen (2013), in turn, is the first attempt to combine the viewpoints of translation research and contact linguistics in the study of interlingual reduction. Yet we are not aware of any earlier studies that would have compared the outcomes of language contact across all these three areas of research. This is therefore the aim of the present article: to provide a systematic discussion and comparison of reduction phenomena observed in all three fields. We focus on reviewing earlier empirical evidence obtained from the study of translations, second language learners and language contact situations, and on explaining this evidence with theories of bilingual language processing and use. The goal of this discussion is to build a common theoretical basis for future research involving a systematic empirical analysis of similar linguistic phenomena in the contexts of translation, SLA and language contact. In the following sections we will review earlier empirical evidence of reduction phenomena observed in research into translations, SLA and language contacts, with the aim of pointing out parallels between them. The ensuing discussion summarizes these similarities and attempts to explain them by referring to common underlying bilingual processing

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phenomena. The overall purpose of this article is to demonstrate the benefits of a cross-disciplinary approach into the study of language contact phenomena.

2. Interlingual reduction in translation, SLA and language contacts Interlingual reduction is a phenomenon which has been observed in the fields of contact linguistics, SLA and translation studies, but these disciplines have previously examined it independently from one another, with differing data, terms and theoretical perspectives. The varying terminology that has been used to describe similar reduction phenomena illustrates this very clearly. In translation studies, interlingual reduction has been characterized as underrepresentation of unique items (TirkkonenCondit 2002, 2004, 2005). In SLA and bilingualism research, reduction phenomena have been studied under the labels of underproduction, avoidance or simplification (e.g. R. Ellis 2008; Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008, 100–101, 192–193), as well as conceptual restructuring, conceptual convergence and conceptual attrition (Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008, 156– 171). Language contact and attrition studies have varyingly used the terms negative borrowing (Sasse 1992; Dorian 2006), convergence (Romaine 1995), covert interference (Mougeon and Beniak 1991; King 2000; De Smit 2006), interferential reduction (Smits 1996), indirect transfer (SilvaCorvalán 1994) and restructuring (Pavlenko 2004; Schmid 2011). However, these seemingly differing terms appear to refer to similar underlying phenomena. In the following subsections we will introduce earlier findings based on the study of translations, second language learners and contact varieties in order to point out similarities between them.

2.1. Interlingual reduction in translation Translation, which so far has been somewhat neglected in the study of language contact, is a special contact situation in which the translator moves between two languages and their cultures: on the basis of a text written in one language, the translator produces a new text for a new target audience in another language. Cross-linguistic influence, which in translation studies is usually referred to as interference1, is a natural phenomenon in the process of translation. In this field, interference relates

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mainly to the influence of the source text on the properties of the translated text, and it may be regarded as an inevitable phenomenon in translation. Toury (1995, 275) for example characterizes interference as a “law” of translation, a feature occurring regardless of the language pair in contact through translation. According to him, “phenomena pertaining to the make-up of the source text tend to be transferred to the target text” (ibid.). Cross-linguistic influence in translations has mainly been examined through corpus-linguistic methods. By studying features, uses and frequencies of linguistic items in electronic corpora, researchers have examined translation-mediated contact effects from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. The source texts have been shown to cause synchronic variation in translated texts, making them different from comparable non-translated texts in the same language. Furthermore, in particular circumstances this kind of translation-mediated language contact has led to permanent contact-induced linguistic changes in the target language, e.g. by introducing new stylistic features or affecting the use of native linguistic items (e.g. Amouzadeh & House 2010; Baumgarten & Özçetin 2008; Becher, House & Kranich 2009). One outcome of CLI in translation is a reduction or loss of items which are not shared by the source and the target language. In translation studies, this kind of interlingual reduction was first observed by Tirkkonen-Condit (2002, 2004, 2005), who discovered a tendency in translated texts to under-represent certain linguistic items. In her corpus-based studies, Tirkkonen-Condit compared translated texts with non-translated texts in the same language, and her observations led her to formulate the so-called unique items hypothesis which predicts a lower frequency of unique items in translations compared to non-translated texts in the same language. In this context, the term unique item refers to a linguistic asymmetry between the source and target language in translation: unique items are elements in the target language which lack a direct counterpart in the source language. They can represent any linguistic level, i.e. they can be, e.g. morphological, lexical or syntactic. The attribute unique does not mean that the items would be rare. On the contrary, they can be common, frequently occurring items in the target language. According to TirkkonenCondit (2004), the reason for their lower frequency in translated texts is the lacking stimulus: as they are missing in the source language, they do not occur in the source text, either. There is thus nothing in the source text which would activate the unique item in the translator’s bilingual mental network and trigger her/him to choose the unique item in the target language. Due to the lack of stimulus, the unique item simply does not

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spring to the translator’s mind when producing the text in the target language.2 Translation scholars have found strong empirical evidence to support this kind of interlingual reduction, which Laviosa (2008) characterizes as “negative discourse transfer”—the term negative referring here to the opposite of cross-linguistic transfer, i.e. when nothing is transferred from the source text to the target text. Earlier studies have mainly focused on translations into Finnish, but evidence from translations into other languages, too, has been accumulating in recent years. The following discussion presents some central studies and their results. Tirkkonen-Condit (2004, 2005), who was the first to formulate the unique items hypothesis, compared translations from English into Finnish with non-translated Finnish texts. She found that the frequency of particular enclitic pragmatic particles (-han/-hän ‘you know’, -kin ‘also, too, thus’) and a particular group of verbs expressing possibility and suffiency (such as ehtiä ‘have time to do’, jaksaa ‘have strength to do’, hennoa ‘have heart to do’ and viitsiä ‘have energy to do’) was lower in non-translated Finnish texts. These particles and verbs may be characterized as unique items when compared to English: they do not have direct counterparts in English. A similar research design was applied in the studies by Eskola (2002, 2004) and Mauranen and Tiittula (2005). Eskola (2002, 2004) investigated the use of certain Finnish infinitive constructions in translations from English and Russian, which she compared with non-translated Finnish texts. She focused on two different types of infinitive constructions which behaved differently in her corpus. Those infinitives with a direct source language equivalent in both English and Russian were over-represented and showed higher frequencies in Finnish translations than in Finnish original texts. Those infinitive constructions, on the other hand, which did not have a counterpart in either source language, displayed untypically low frequencies in translations. Mauranen and Tiittula (2005), in turn, investigated a particular Finnish subjectless impersonal construction (Jos tupakoi... [if smokes] ‘if one smokes’) which enables open personal reference and does not have a similar counterpart in Germanic languages. They compared the frequency of this construction in Finnish translations from German and in non-translated Finnish texts, and found support for the unique items hypothesis: the frequency of the impersonal construction was lower in the translated than in the non-translated texts. In addition, Mauranen and Tiittula compared the Finnish translations with the German source texts, which revealed that the translators tended to rely on the

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German source text and, consequently, favor personal expressions instead of the typical Finnish impersonal construction. A somewhat different approach is provided by Cappelle (2012), who studied English translations from German and French. The starting point for this study was the typological difference between the so-called satellite-framed and verb-framed languages (see Talmy 1991), which is reflected in the linguistic expression of motion events. The target language was English, which is a satellite-framed language, that is, the verb typically encodes the manner of motion and the so-called satellite of the verb (e.g. a prepositional phrase or verb particle) conveys the path of the motion (e.g. A bird flew into the room). The source languages in Cappelle’s study were German, another satellite-framed language (cf. Ein Vogel flog in das Zimmer), and French, which, in turn, is a verb-framed language. In French, path is typically expressed by the verb (e.g. sortir, entrer, passer) and the manner of motion is either not expressed (e.g. Un oiseau est entré dans la pièce ‘A bird entered the room’) or is encoded in a separate element (e.g. the gerund). Cappelle’s findings showed that this typological difference between the source languages was reflected in the English translations; the English verbs expressing manner of motion were underrepresented in translations from French, but in translations from German similar underuse was not attested. One might argue that published translations examined in the above described corpus-linguistic studies provide questionable data for the investigation of unique items and interlingual reduction in translations. Published translations are carefully edited and revised, and the editing and revision phases take place after the translation manuscripts have been submitted. In other words, the publication process involves people other than the translator, and thus the published translations do not merely reflect translators’ choices but the choices of other actors as well. In addition, corpus data does not provide direct insight into processing factors that may have given rise to the special properties of translated texts (see Neumann 2011, 242). The study of interlingual reduction in translation would hence benefit from other types of research design, especially experimental process research with professional translators and data from interpreting.3 The interlingual reduction predicted by the unique items hypothesis has nevertheless been tested with a different type of methodology by Kujamäki (2004) and Denver (2009), who provide convincing evidence for interlingual reduction in the translation process. Kujamäki employed backtranslations in order to examine translators’ lexical choices. The starting point in his study was a Finnish text which entailed Finnish-

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specific lexical items describing snow and weather conditions. This text was translated into English and German by native speakers of these languages. In these translations, the Finnish snow and weather lexemes were replaced by less specific English and German words because equally precise translation equivalents do not exist in these languages. In the second stage of the study, Kujamäki asked Finnish translation students to backtranslate these English and German texts into Finnish. The students’ lexical choices followed the English and German model: the snow and weather vocabulary was less specific, and the typical Finnish lexical items for snow and weather conditions were absent. This methodological setting gives us an insight into the translation process and the translator’s mind by showing that the lack of source language stimulus results in lower frequencies of certain target-language specific items. The fact that Kujamäki employed non-professional translators in the second stage of his study does not diminish the validity of the results; a similar CLI effect is plausible in professional translators’ translations in different languages, as shown by the studies discussed above, despite the fact that they relate to published translations and possibly involve other actors in the editing process. Denver (2009) combines product data with process evidence, and in this respect her research setting differs from the studies presented above. Denver analyzes Spanish-Danish translations in order to investigate the use of the Danish cohesive concessive connector ellers ‘else’. Ellers is a unique item in comparison to Spanish, which does not have a comparable connector. In Denver’s data, ellers largely behaves in accordance with the unique items hypothesis: it does not appear in the Danish translations from Spanish. What is new in her study is the combination of product data with process data. In addition to translations, Denver examines keystroke logging (Translog) and tape-recorded think-aloud protocols (TAP). In her view, the keyboard and TAP data contain no evidence of mental processing which could be related to the inferencing of a concessive relation in places where this relation is implicit in the source text and in which the unique connector ellers could appear and make this relation explicit in the target text. In other words, translators’ verbalizations in the TAPs and the keyboard activities (i.e. pauses, reformulations, deletions) reveal no traces of activities which would reflect conscious inferencing of implicit source text relations during the translation process. By shedding light on translators’ cognitive processes this result is in accordance with Tirkkonen-Condit’s (2002, 2004, 2005) original hypothesis: the lacking stimulus in the source text does not lead to conscious cognitive processing

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and the unique element in the target language remains unactivated in translators’ bilingual network. The examples discussed in this section demonstrate a reduction or loss of linguistic items caused by CLI in the translation process. Although the instances of under-representation in the translated texts discussed above may not function as a model for other L1-writers and, hence, spread into the language use of a whole community, they do illustrate one type of source of linguistic variation at the level of an individual. In the case of translations, instead of talking about CLI from the L2 into the L1 it is probably more accurate to state that we are dealing with CLI from a L2text to a L1-text. The fact that all the studies reported above involved interlingual reduction in translations in the direction L2ĺL1 illustrates, in our opinion, an important point about this phenomenon: the evidence demonstrates that interlingual reduction is not necessarily triggered by reduced language skills. We will return to this issue in Section 3, but for now, let us conclude that a bilingual contact situation itself seems to give rise to interlingual reduction. To our knowledge, the unique items hypothesis has not yet been tested on translations in the direction L1ĺL2 and, consequently, empirical evidence is lacking. However, it is very likely that interlingual reduction occurs into this direction as well. This possibility is suggested by evidence from SLA research, which will be discussed in the next section.

2.2. Interlingual reduction in SLA Frequency-related effects of CLI have also been examined in SLA research. Most of this research has focused on CLI from the learner’s L1 into the developing L2 system, but more recent studies have also found compelling evidence for CLI from the L2 into the L1. In studies addressing CLI from L1 into the L2, reduction phenomena have been termed avoidance, underproduction and simplification (e.g. R. Ellis 2008; Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008). It has long been known that learners may avoid or underuse L2 structures which they perceive to be different from the L1 and, hence, difficult to learn, and overuse or prefer those structures that have a counterpart in the L1 because they seem familiar and easy to learn. These frequency-related manifestations of CLI have, nevertheless, received less attention than more conspicuous forms of CLI, such as errors. Avoidance or underuse of certain target language (TL) features was first observed by Schachter (1974), who discovered that Chinese-speaking

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and Japanese-speaking learners avoid using English relative clauses because Chinese and Japanese do not have relative clause patterns similar to English. This results in a lower frequency of relative clauses and a higher frequency of main clauses in their English production. Similarly, Sjöholm (1995) studied the usage of English phrasal verbs by Finnishspeaking and Swedish-speaking learners, and found that L1 Finnish speakers avoid using phrasal verbs in English and prefer equivalent onepart verbs (e.g. disappoint vs. let down) because phrasal verbs are less common in Finnish. Swedish-speaking learners, on the other hand, use phrasal verbs more frequently because phrasal verbs are frequent in Swedish, and they often have a counterpart in English (e.g. break out vs. bryta ut). Still further evidence for underuse may be found in the studies by Ringbom (1987, 2007) on Finnish-speaking learners’ usage of articles in English. For such learners, English articles are difficult to learn because Finnish has no comparable article system. Ringbom’s comparisons of Finnish-speaking and Swedish-speaking learners have shown that the frequency of articles is considerably lower in the written English production of Finnish-speaking students in comparison to Swedishspeaking students, who have an article system in their L1. Ringbom (2011) explains these avoidance and simplification phenomena with the learners’ “opposition to redundancy”, which is a covert form of CLI. This notion maintains that learners regard TL categories that do not exist in or are different from their L1 as redundant and avoid using them. This reflects “a subconscious attempt in learners to reduce their workload in order to facilitate their learning” (Ringbom 2011, 23). Research into CLI has recently expanded into the realm of cognitive linguistics and linguistic relativity (e.g. Han and Cadierno 2010; Jarvis 2011; Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008, 112–152). This line of research addresses CLI as a conceptual phenomenon, maintaining that instances of CLI do not always originate from the linguistic knowledge of L2 users, but they may be influenced by the conceptual categories acquired through another language (for the complex relationship between linguistic and conceptual categories, see, e.g. Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008, 112–152). These studies centrally involve the notion of linguistic relativity in that they examine to what extent the L1 conceptual system affects the development of L2 concepts, and to what extent the restructuring of the L1 conceptual system is possible in the course of SLA (see Han and Cadierno 2010). Accumulated evidence has shown that L1-based concepts exert a great influence on the L2 acquisition of, e.g. object naming and categorization, the conceptualization and categorization of emotions, the perception of count versus non-count distinctions, and conceptualizations of time, space

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and motion (see Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008, 122–152). This can be seen, for example, in the study by Cadierno (2010), who examined L1 German, Russian and Spanish speakers’ expressions of L2 Danish motion events. Drawing on the typology of Talmy (e.g. 1991), the L1s of the examined learner groups were divided into satellite-framed (German, Russian) and verb-framed (Spanish) languages, while the target language, Danish, is a satellite-framed language (see also Section 2.1. of this article). These typological differences were clearly manifested in the learners’ responses to a picture description task and other types of vocabulary tasks, which revealed the tendency for L1 Spanish learners to use the L2 Danish verb gå ‘walk’ to describe various manners of moving which are all expressed with a distinct manner verb in Danish (e.g. kravle ‘crawl’, springe ‘leap’, clatre ‘clamber’), while L1 German and Russian learners produced and recognized a wide variety of such manner verbs. According to Cadierno (2010, 20–27), these findings provide evidence that L1 Spanish predisposes learners to direct their attention to the path of motion instead of the manner of motion, as opposed to L1 German and Russian learners, who are used to encoding manner information in their L1. Although research into conceptual transfer rejects deterministic interpretation of linguistic relativity, it does provide important evidence that L1 influences the way we categorize and verbalize experience and the way we direct our attention to certain non-linguistic stimuli, which may in some cases lead L2 learners to ignore distinctions not present in the L1, thus giving rise to interlingual reduction. Recent research into CLI effects in L2 speakers and bilinguals has also addressed CLI from the L2 into the L1 (so called reverse transfer, see Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008, 21–22). This may be especially common for speakers who are highly proficient in their L2, e.g. in the case of bilinguals who are residing in a TL-speaking environment. Many recent studies addressing CLI from the L2 into the L1 have been conducted in the framework of conceptual transfer (Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008, 112–152; Jarvis 2011), and they have found evidence for this phenomenon, for example, in the areas of lexical choices, color naming patterns, reference to motion events and object naming patterns. In a case study of a Finnishspeaking person who was very advanced in English and had been living in the US for several years, Jarvis (2003) observed CLI from L2 English in many different types of patterns and lexical choices in the speaker’s L1 Finnish. This could be seen, for example, in the occasional confusion of the Finnish verbs pudota (fall from higher to lower level) and kaatua (fall down, fall over, trip over), which only happened in some contexts, while in other contexts the speaker was using the Finnish expressions correctly.

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Chapter One

Athanasopoulos et al. (2011) studied the perception of color categories by speakers of Japanese who had learnt English as a second language, and found that those speakers who were using English more frequently had a weakened sensitivity to distinctions between different shades of the color blue, for which Japanese has distinct color terms whereas English has only one. Their color naming patterns were not similar to monolingual English speakers, either, which suggests that the bilingual subjects were “inbetween” monolingual Japanese speakers and monolingual English speakers. Bylund and Jarvis (2011) examined how Spanish-Swedish bilinguals express aspect in their L1 Spanish, and they found that the bilinguals expressed event endpoints with the grammatical aspect more often than monolingual Spanish speakers did. This reflects patterns in their L2 Swedish, which as a non-aspect language encodes event endpoints. According to a grammaticality judgment task, those bilingual subjects who mentioned event endpoints more often also had weakened sensitivity to aspect errors in their L1 Spanish. Similar findings are presented by Pavlenko and Malt (2011), who in their study of object naming patterns of Russian-English bilinguals found that the subjects’ categorization of different drinking vessels in their L1 Russian resembled the semantic categories of their L2 English (e.g. mug, glass or cup). Pavlenko and Malt (2011) conclude that the object categorization of these bilinguals has changed along with their acquisition of English in that some categories have become broader and some narrower. As illustrated by the studies discussed above, current SLA and bilingualism research views CLI as a bidirectional phenomenon, which may take place from the L1 into the L2 or from the L2 into the L1. It is a well-acknowledged fact that the acquisition of a second language leads to the modification and transformation of previously existing linguistic concepts and categories (see, e.g. Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008, 153–173). In their typology of conceptual change induced by L2 learning, Jarvis and Pavlenko (2008, 156) propose that L2 acquisition may give rise to the following processes: the internalization of new concepts, the restructuring of previously existing concepts, the convergence of L1 and L2 concepts, the shift from L1 into L2 concepts or the attrition of L1 concepts. These processes provide evidence that learners are internalizing new L2 conceptual representations and socializing into L2 community (Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008, 171), and it is noteworthy that conceptual attrition is only one of the many possible processes that operate in L2 speakers’ and bilinguals’ minds. This view is also advanced by Jarvis (2003), who points out that CLI from the L2 into the L1 does not necessarily imply the attrition of L1 skills but, in sociolinguistic settings where the speakers are

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maintaining their L1, the L2 should rather be viewed as an additional resource for bilingual speakers. This state of a bilingual mind has been termed by Cook (2002, 2003) as multicompetence. Multicompetence refers to the knowledge of two or more languages in one mind. In the mind of an individual who knows more than one language, L1 and L2 are not isolated systems but they interact. This entails the assumption that the two languages form an integrated system, at least at some levels, where the two languages accommodate to each other (Cook 2002, 10–17). According to Cook (2002, 4–10), L2 learning changes the individual’s linguistic competence in L1, which means that L2 user’s knowledge of their L1 is different from that of a monolingual individual. Cook (2003, 11–13) argues that L2 users have different minds from monolinguals, based on empirical evidence showing that people who have acquired a second language think more flexibly, have increased language awareness and better communication skills. This view maintains that L2 users do not have a better nor a weaker command of their L1 than monolingual speakers do, but they simply have a different command of their L1 (Cook 2003, 12–13). These findings shed light on the conceptual and cognitive structure of a L2 user, and thus illustrate the cognitive basis for interlingual reduction. However, due to their focus on the cognitive processes of an individual, studies in the fields of SLA and bilingualism seldom discuss the possible effects this individual-level reduction may have on the language or language variety spoken by the whole community. This is addressed in studies from the field of contact linguistics, which will be the focus of the following section.

2.3. Interlingual reduction in language contact situations In the field of contact linguistics, it has long been recognized that cross-linguistic influence may manifest itself not only overtly, as in the transfer of linguistic material or structures from a donor language to a recipient language, but also in more subtle or covert ways, such as in the decreasing use of or, finally, the total loss of such items, structures or practices that are not shared by both the donor and recipient language. This covert influence has been examined under many different labels: more or less similar reduction phenomena have been referred to, e.g. as negative borrowing (Sasse 1992; Dorian 2006), covert interference (Mougeon and Beniak 1991; King 2000; De Smit 2006), indirect transfer (Silva-Corvalàn 1994), convergence (Romaine 1995; Klintborg 2001),

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Chapter One

interferential reduction (van Marle and Smits 1995; Smits 1996) and frequential copying (Johanson 2002). It has been argued that interlingual reduction of this kind is a natural part of the process of borrowing along with “positive” borrowing, i.e. direct transfer of linguistic material or structure (Sasse 1992, 65). Another important point is that interlingual reduction does not necessarily lead to the reduction in the functionality of the language as it is often compensated by, e.g. overt borrowing of alternative expressions from the donor language, or subsequent rise of a synonymous element or pattern in the recipient language that does have an equivalent in the donor language (Rosso 2008). Examples of ongoing interlingual reduction are provided by research concerning the English–French bilingual societies in Ontario, Canada. Several studies have addressed cases of competition between synonymous French expressions, one of which has had a structurally and/or phonologically similar counterpart in English (e.g. Mougeon and Beniak 1991; Rehner and Mougeon 1997; Rosso 2008). One of these instances is the use of prepositional phrases chez (+ personal pronoun) and à la maison, used to express motion to or location at someone’s house or home; of these phrases, the latter bears resemblance to its English counterparts at home and at one’s house. The other case is the usage of restrictive expressions rien que, seulement and juste, the latter having the phonologically close English equivalent just. In studies based on spoken data, it has been discovered that those speakers living in communities with francophones as a small minority tend to use the English-like variants à la maison and juste more often than those living in localities with a francophone majority. These findings imply that a missing cross-linguistic equivalent is one reason for the decreasing use of the French expressions chez, rien que and seulement. Instances of a permanent loss of features that do not have a counterpart in the contacting language(s) are often found in linguistic areas, i.e., the Sprachbund situations, where the long regional coexistence of several different languages with intensive mutual multilingualism among the habitants has led to structural convergence between the languages, partly through overt grammatical influence and partly through the loss of features that are not shared by other languages. A well-known morphosyntactic feature of the famous Balkan Sprachbund among several Romance, Slavic, Albanian and Greek languages is the partial or total loss of the endogenous infinitive constructions (see, e.g. Tomiü 2008, 187). Another example comes from the Amdo Sprachbund, situated in the Gansu and Quinghai provinces of China and involving several languages that belong to Turkic, Mongolic, Sinitic and Bodic language families: in

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this linguistic area, the Turkic languages have lost suffixally marked personal conjugation (Janhunen 2012). It has to be noted that in these cases, interlingual reduction has not led to general simplification of the language structures since the loss of one feature has been compensated by adopting another feature: the Balkan languages have replaced the original infinitive constructions by subjunctive clauses and the Turkic languages in the Amdo Sprachbund have adopted a new category of perspective, which partially overlaps with the category of person. Interlingual reduction may also be found in the variety of the target language spoken by the (shifting) minority. Examples of these may be found in numerous contact varieties of English, which manifest, for example, simplified systems of articles and tag questions.4 The omission of articles is commonly found in several L2 varieties spoken in Asia and Africa, as in the Singapore English phrase I want to buy bag, which some scholars attribute to the fact that the major substrate languages in these regions (e.g. Hindi, Chinese, Zulu) do not have articles (Meshtrie and Bhatt 2008, 47-52). Tag questions represent another feature which has been simplified in Asian and African L2 varieties of English. While tag questions in standard English vary according to the choice of pronoun, auxiliary and negation, L2 varieties use invariant tags, most commonly isn’t it, as in the Indian English you are going tomorrow, isn’t it? (standard English aren’t you?) or he isn’t going there, isn’t it? (standard English is he?) (Meshtrie and Bhatt 2008, 86). A possible explanation for this feature is the invariant tag used in the substrate languages (e.g. the Hindi-Urdu invariant tag na?). As pointed out by Thomason (2001, 148), such phenomena may be explained with strategies used by second language learners in the process of language shift: learners tend to ignore distinctions that do not exist in their L1, which results in the omission of TL features. Although interlingual reduction may be found in language contact situations in which the substrate language is a viable language spoken in the community, most often, and especially in its most drastic form, interlingual reduction is observed in endangered languages, both in indigenous minority languages and in immigrant varieties that are slowly decaying during several generations of speakers. Slow language death is often accompanied by structural shrinking involving, for example, a loss of morphologically marked categories or a tendency towards analytic expressions (for an overview, see, e.g. Sasse 2001 and Romaine 2010). For example, the decay of Nivkh (a Paleosiberian isolate language) in Sakhalin Island and in the Amur region of Russian has led to the simplification and reduction of such linguistics features in particular that

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Chapter One

are not shared with Russian, e.g. initial consonant alternations, the complex system of spatial deixis, and the use of the first person dual forms (Gruzdeva 2002). The immigrant variety of Dutch spoken in Iowa, United States, shows various kinds of disintegration in inflectional morphology through, for example, generalization of uninflected adjectives instead of the inflected ones and present and preterite tense zero forms instead of the overtly inflected ones, thus gradually losing morphological means that do not have an equivalent in English (Smits 1996). However, it is disputable whether all the reduction phenomena observed in decaying varieties can be attributed to interlingual reduction; it is also possible that they are the result of universal simplification tendencies which incidentally coincide with the structure of the dominant language (see, e.g. van Marle and Smits 1995, 183). In language death, reduction seems to be most prominent in the speech of those speakers who are not fully fluent in the minority language, i.e. who have not fully acquired the recessive language due to limited input (Smits 1996) and who accordingly rely on the resources of the dominant language. Interlingual reduction may, however, be observed in a different kind of language degeneration, namely in the attrition of the L1 of individual speakers in situations where a L2 has gained dominance in their lives. As discussed in Section 2.2., recent research acknowledges that acquiring a L2 inevitably influences the L1 of an individual. The changes caused by the acquisition of a L2 are generally fairly subtle and difficult to detect, but in certain situations, such as when migrating to another country, the L2 user may end up using the L2 more often than the L1. In such contexts, the L2 may become more dominant than the L1, and even though once fully acquired, the L1 may start showing signs of degeneration. Attrition is a twofold process which involves not only the overwhelming presence and dominance of the L2 but also severe reduction in the use of L1. In the case of attrition, the L1 of a bilingual speaker starts to decay or disintegrate in a way that often closely follows the structure of the L2. Hence, L1 attrition may be defined as “the restructuring of the L1 linguistic system according to L2 patterns” (Gross 2004, 248). Although studies examining L1 attrition have generally aimed at separating crosslinguistic and language-internal effects in language degeneration, these two effects often get inseparably intertwined. Interlingual reduction represents a case of this intermingling, because many of the reductive changes observed in attrition research generally follow the structure of the dominant language.5 This is also evident in Pavlenko’s (2004) five-part list of processes observable in the interaction between L1 and L2, where a process called “restructuring”, defined as “a deletion of certain L1

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elements or addition of L2 elements into L1”, implies interlingual reduction. In the context of adult first language attrition, a total loss of native language competence seems unlikely; interlingual reduction is rather manifested as decreasing frequencies, instead of a total loss, of certain elements or patterns. An example of this kind of diminishing is provided in the ongoing work of Riionheimo (2013), who studies the use Finnish passives by the Ingrian Finnish immigrants in Estonia. The informants migrated into the Soviet Republic of Estonia as young adults after World War II and, in the extremely severe political climate of the post-war Soviet society, tried to hide their origin and accommodate into the Estonian population, often largely abandoning their native language. The study focuses on a special feature of the Finnish passive, namely, its speakerinclusive reference (i.e. indicating that the speaker is one of the participants of the described action), which is not characteristic of the Estonian passive despite its close similarity to the Finnish one. A pilot study (Riionheimo 2013) suggests that among the informants who have lived several decades in an Estonian-dominant environment, the frequency of the Finnish-like speaker-inclusive passive forms has become lower, most likely due to the lack of a counterpart in Estonian. The studies discussed in this section have provided evidence for areal variation in bilingual societies, reduction in second-language varieties in language shift situations, and finally a permanent loss of linguistic features in Sprachbund-areas, in decaying immigrant varieties or in indigenous minority languages. This discussion shows how contact-induced reduction phenomena first manifest themselves as individual-level synchronic variation and how they may slowly start to accumulate into a communitylevel diachronic language change.

3. Interlingual reduction as a natural outcome of bilingual cognitive processing? What emerges from the previous sections on translation studies, SLA research and contact linguistics is that similar reduction phenomena seem to occur in all these different types of contexts that involve the use of two languages. The following discussion addresses the question of whether interlingual reduction has the same cognitive basis in these different contact settings and whether it can be characterized as a manifestation of cross-linguistic influence natural to bilingual language use.

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The evidence discussed in this article shows that interlingual reduction may affect all linguistic subsystems: phonology (e.g. Gruzdeva 2002), morphology (e.g. Sasse 1992; Tirkkonen-Condit 2004, 2005; Dorian 2006; Janhunen 2012), syntax (e.g. Eskola 2002, 2004; Mauranen and Tiittula 2005; Denver 2009; Tomiü 2008; Bylund and Jarvis 2011; Riionheimo 2013), lexis (e.g. Jarvis 2003; Kujamäki 2004), as well as conceptual representations (e.g. Cadierno 2010; Athanasopoulos et al. 2011; Pavlenko and Malt 2011). What often varies in these studies is the direction of cross-linguistic influence. Translation studies have reported evidence for CLI from L2 texts into L1 texts—CLI in the direction from L1 into the L2 is also plausible but has not been studied so far. SLA research characterizes CLI as a bidirectional phenomenon (cf. Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008), which at the early stages of second language learning typically occurs from L1 into the L2, but as L2 competence develops, the L2 may start influencing the L1. In contact linguistics, evidence for both directions has been found, depending on the status of the languages in society. While interlingual reduction seems to take place in all these different types of language contact situations, it is most clearly manifested in instances of language attrition and language death, where it generally takes place from the L2 into the L16. Table 3-1 summarizes the evidence for different types of reduction phenomena observed in different types of contexts. Table 3-1. Interlingual reduction and the direction of cross-linguistic influence. Context Direction Examples Translation L2text ĺ Enclitic pragmatic particles, verbs of possibility L1text and sufficiency (Tirkkonen-Condit 2004, 2005); infinitive constructions (Eskola 2002, 2004); impersonal constructions (Mauranen and Tiittula 2005); motion verbs (Cappelle 2012); snow and weather vocabulary (Kujamäki 2004); concessive connectors (Denver 2009) L1 ĺ L2 Relative clauses (Schachter 1974); phrasal verbs SLA and (Sjöholm 1995); articles (Ringbom 1987, 2007); bilingualism expression of motion events (Cadierno 2010) L2 ĺ L1 Lexical choices (Jarvis 2003); perception and naming of color categories (Athanasopoulos et al. 2011); aspect marking (Bylund and Jarvis 2011); object naming patterns (Pavlenko and Malt 2011)

Interlingual Reduction

Language contact

Language attrition and language death

21

L2 ĺ L1 Prepositional phrases (Mougeon and Beniak 1991; Rehner and Mougeon 1997; Rosso 2008); infinitive constructions (Tomiü 2008); suffixally marked personal conjugation (Janhunen 2012) L1 ĺ L2 Articles, tag questions (Mesthrie and Bhatt 2008) L2 ĺ L1 Initial consonant alternations, spatial deixis, first person dual forms (Gruzdeva 2002); inflectional morphology (Smits 1996); speaker-inclusive passive form (Riionheimo 2013)

What is common for these different contexts in contact linguistics and SLA is that CLI most often takes place from the dominant language to the less dominant one. This dominance may either arise temporarily in contexts such as second language learning, or it may be a more permanent state for a bilingual individual in situations where the second language has gained dominance in his/her life, as in the case of language attrition and language death. In such contexts, the source language appears to act as a filter that directs and limits the linguistic choices of the bilingual individual. In the context of translation, it is often more difficult to determine which language is dominant for the translator because background information concerning the translators’ bi- or multilingual status may not be available for the researcher. Nevertheless, we may state that translation involves a multilingual setting and the presence of another language, the source text, which may steer, limit and filter the linguistic choices of the translator. Although the dominance of one language over another seems to be an important feature in some contact settings, it does not necessarily imply reduced language skills in the other language. In language attrition and language death, reduced language skills may play a role, but evidence from translation studies and SLA research suggests that a bilingual contact situation alone is a sufficient condition for interlingual reduction to occur. In other words, interlingual reduction is not necessarily triggered by reduced language skills: translation ideally takes place into the translator's first language, and in SLA settings, too, interlingual reduction has been shown to occur in the direction L2ĺL1 as well. We propose that an explanation for interlingual reduction may be found in the cognitive convergence and accommodation processes of the bilingual individual. As discussed in Matras (2009, 151), the challenge of

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maintaining control over the selection of features from one language and the inhibition of features from another creates cognitive pressure to reduce the degree of separation between the two languages, thus resulting in convergence in bilingual speaker’s linguistic repertoire. Similar ideas of convergence have also been proposed by Sasse (1992, 64), who states that bilingual speakers have an ideal goal to develop a one-to-one relationship between the morphosyntactic systems of the two languages (cf. interlingual isomorphism, De Smit 2006, 29). Thus, overt borrowing and interlingual reduction lead to similar outcomes in that they both make the contacting languages converge and become more similar. A notion that centrally connects to this is that of neurolinguistic activation. The role of activation has been formulated by Paradis (2004, 28) as the activation threshold hypothesis, which posits that “an item is activated when a sufficient amount of positive neural impulses have reached its neural substrate”. The activation threshold refers to the number of neural impulses required to activate a given item; the more often an item is activated, the lower its activation threshold becomes. The accessibility of linguistic items in the bilingual neural network is, thus, influenced by the recency and frequency of use. It results from this that the lack of stimulus raises the activation threshold of an item, thus eventually giving rise to language attrition (Paradis 2004, 24). As discussed in Paradis (2004, 29), the production of linguistic items requires a lower activation threshold than comprehension does; consequently, a bilingual person may not actively select certain structures for use, despite being able to comprehend them. This supports our earlier claim that interlingual reduction does not necessarily imply reduced language competence; the bilingual may have solid knowledge of a given feature, but due to a high activation threshold this feature is not selected in language production. The activation threshold hypothesis, thus, helps explain frequency-related effects of cross-linguistic influence in language production, i.e. the underuse or overuse of certain linguistic structures (see Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008, 222–224). The activation threshold hypothesis seems compatible with many cases of interlingual reduction discussed in this article: due to a missing stimulus a certain item is not activated, which consequently results in the selection of another item, the choice of which is strengthened by a counterpart in the second language. The examples we have discussed in this article illustrate two different kinds of reduction phenomena. Firstly, there are instances where the source language has no equivalent for a certain target language structure (e.g. Finnish enclitic pragmatic particles or verbs expressing possibility and sufficiency, Tirkkonen-Condit 2004, 2005). In such cases,

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the target language structure is not activated in the bilingual speaker’s mind, which results in lower frequencies of usage of that structure. Secondly, there are cases where the target language has two (or more) similar structures, only one of which has a counterpart in the source language (e.g. chez vs. à la maison, cf. Eng. at home, Mougeon and Beniak 1991). In this case, the structure that has a counterpart in the target language is the one that is activated because these similar structures are connected to one another through cognitive links which enable the activation to spread or “leak” from one language to another in the bilingual speaker’s mind (Croft 2000, 154). The notion of activation also connects to usage-based models of bilingual language use, which explain why L2 users tend to prefer structures that are shared by both languages. The general tenet of usagebased theories of language acquisition is that high-frequency forms in a language are more strongly represented and thus easier to access in the mind, whereas low-frequency forms have a weaker representation (e.g. Bybee 2008, 2010). L2 users’ previous linguistic knowledge may, however, lead to so-called selective attention when interpreting the L2; L1 entrenchment influences the features the learner focuses his/her attention on, resulting in the perception of features that have a counterpart in the L1 and the overshadowing or blocking of features that are not found in the L1 (see, e.g. N. C. Ellis 2006, 2008). The linguistic input the L2 learner is exposed to is, thus, filtered through the L1. This is in line with Ringbom’s (2011) notion of “opposition to redundancy” (see Section 2.2.); L2 speakers look for similarities, not differences in the TL input, which is likely to make them neglect features that are not shared by both L1 and L2. Although usage-based theories of SLA primarily account for reduction phenomena in L2 learners’ TL production, they may also explain interlingual reduction in the context of language attrition; speakers of an attriting L1 are, in many cases, heritage speakers (e.g. Montrul 2004, 261) of their L1. Studies by Montrul (e.g. 2004) have demonstrated that heritage language learning is in many respects similar to second language learning and, consequently, the cognitive theories explaining SLA may also, at least to some extent, apply to heritage language acquisition. What second language and heritage language acquisition have in common is the direction of cross-linguistic influence; it typically takes place from the individual’s stronger language to the weaker one, regardless of the status of the languages in society. The activation threshold hypothesis and usage-based models may also be applied to translation in that they explain why certain items are selected

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or ignored in the translation process. Translators may be considered highly proficient bilingual speakers who actively use both their languages. However, the translation process itself may cause a higher activation of linguistic items shared by both source and target languages, and a lower activation of those target language items not present in the source language. As pointed out by Mauranen (2005, 76), a major difference between translation and SLA research is that translation research focuses on performance-based manifestations of CLI, that is, CLI effects are assumed to originate from the source text rather than the translator’s linguistic competence. SLA and bilingualism research, on the other hand, view CLI as something that shapes L2 users’ linguistic competence both in their L1 and L2. In the light of the evidence discussed in this article, we would like to propose that the same cognitive mechanisms operating in SLA and bilingual language use may underlie the translation process and shape its linguistic outcome. The issue of whether the reduction phenomena observed in translations can originate from the translator’s changed L1 competence is worthy of further examination.

4. Conclusions The goal of this article was to demonstrate that in order to gain a more comprehensive view of contact-induced variation and change it is beneficial to examine the theories and findings across different disciplines examining language contacts. Cross-disciplinary research enables us to understand the whole range of manifestations and the conditions for contact-induced phenomena. The evidence obtained within one research paradigm only may sometimes provide too narrow a view into complex language contact effects. This has been the case in the study of interlingual reduction within the field of contact linguistics, where reduction phenomena have often been associated with language attrition. However, evidence from SLA and translation research show that similar reduction phenomena can also be observed in the language production of L2 users and translators, who are highly proficient and active users of their L1. Evidence from SLA research shows that CLI from L2 into L1 does not imply the attrition of L1 skills, but it should rather be viewed as the natural outcome of a bilingual mind and a bilingual contact situation. Hence, interlingual reduction should not be viewed as a negative phenomenon which results in “reduced” language. Admittedly, it may have such drastic consequences in certain sociolinguistic contexts, where it may give rise to a gradual erosion of linguistic items and patterns in bilingual speakers’

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linguistic repertoire and eventually result in language change at the community level. However, these social conditions giving rise to more permanent reduction effects in a language need to be separated from the cognitive accommodation and convergence processes that operate behind most of the reduction phenomena discussed in this article. This article7 is a step towards a more comprehensive approach into the study of language contact by pointing out similarities between language contact effects occurring in different contexts and attempted to explain them under a common theoretical framework. We hope that this work will provide a starting point for a systematic empirical investigation of similar reduction phenomena across a range of different language contact situations, and for further explorations into other types of contact-induced phenomena found across different fields of research.

Notes 1. Although the term interference is commonly used in translation studies, we prefer not to use it in this article due to its negative connotations in the field of SLA (see, e.g. Jarvis & Pavlenko 2008, 3). Instead, we adopt the term crosslinguistic influence and use it in the context of translation studies as well. 2. The under-representation of unique items relates to another feature claimed to be typical of translated texts: the simplification of their linguistic properties. According to the simplification hypothesis (see, e.g. Laviosa 2002), translated texts tend to be lexically less varied than non-translated texts, they are less dense, i.e. they have a higher proportion of functional words to lexical words, and the frequency of high-frequency items is higher in translations. The simplified use of target language items and structures may partly be due to the under-use of unique items: the source text steers the translators’ choices and may narrow them down. It has to be stressed, however, that at the same time an opposite process may take place: due to source text influence there may be linguistic innovations as well, and for example new collocational patterns can be introduced into translated texts that deviate from collocations in non-translated texts (Mauranen 2000; Jantunen 2004). 3. In addition, more research is needed into different types of translations. The retention of source text properties may be a conscious choice in so-called overt translations in which the translator follows the patterns of the source text. In socalled covert translations, on the other hand, the norms and conventions of the target language are more important (for the terms overt and covert translation, see House 1997). In other words, in some cases interlingual reduction may be an artefact of an intentional translation strategy. 4. It must be pointed out that non-standard features in indigenized L2 varieties of English are often considered to be the outcome of various processes which cannot always be separated from one another. In the case of article use and invariant tags,

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there is evidence for both language contact effects and universal factors, but these are not mutually exclusive (see, e.g. Mesthrie & Bhatt 2008 for further discussion). 5. As in the case of permanent reduction in the minority contexts, reduction phenomena observed in language attrition may also arise from purely languageinternal or universal simplification tendencies (see, e.g. Seliger & Vago 1991, 10; Schmid & Köpke 2009, 211). 6. We do acknowledge that in contexts of language attrition and language death defining the status of the two languages for a bilingual individual is not without problems; the L2 dominant in the society may be the language that is more fully acquired and more widely used by the bilingual individual, whereas the decaying L1 may rather have the status of a second language for an individual. 7. This study was partly funded by the Academy of Finland (Project 137479, University of Eastern Finland).

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—. 2005. “Häviävätkö uniikkiainekset käännössuomesta?” In Käännössuomeksi. Tutkimuksia suomennosten kielestä, edited by Anna Mauranen and Jarmo H. Jantunen, 123–137. Tampere: Tampere University Press. Tomiü, Olga M. 2008. “An integrated areal-typological approach: Local convergence of morphosyntactic features in the Balkan Sprachbund.” In From Linguistic Areas to Areal Linguistics, edited by Pieter Muysken, 181–219. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Treffers-Daller, Jeanine, and Jeanette Sakel. 2012. The International Journal of Bilingualism. Special Issue: New Perspectives on Transfer among Bilinguals and L2 Users, 16 (1). van Marle, Jaap, and Caroline Smits. 1995. “On the impact of language contact on inflectional systems: the reduction of verb inflection in American Dutch and American Frisian.” In Linguistic Change under Contact Conditions, edited by Jacek Fisiak, 179–206. Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs 8. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Weinreich, Uriel. 1953. Languages in contact: Findings and problems. The Hague: Mouton.

CHAPTER TWO CONJUNCTIONS IN EARLY YIDDISHLITHUANIAN BILINGUALISM: HERITAGE LANGUAGE AND CONTACT LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVES ANNA VERSCHIK Abstract Heritage language research and contact linguistics have developed as separate fields, yet both deal with aspects of L2 impact on the L1 to a considerable extent. Thus, one may ask whether they investigate the same phenomena using different terms or whether they concern only partly overlapping phenomena. In cases where there are very few speakers of a certain heritage language, it is extremely difficult to distinguish between incomplete L1 acquisition, attrition and contact-induced language change. This point will be illustrated by a case-study on conjunctions in the speech of a Yiddish-Lithuanian bilingual. The data display borrowing of conjunctions not only from the dominant language of the heritage language setting, but from other languages as well. Yet, no categorical differences are found between the borrowed conjunctions with regard to the language they originate from. The results can be best explained by observations within the study of language contact, especially in terms of Matras’ (1998) utterance modifiers, which tend to come from the pragmatically dominant language and not necessarily from the sociolinguistically dominant language of the heritage language setting.

1. Introduction The present article reports a case study of a heritage speaker (early Yiddish-Lithuanian bilingual) and considers (partial) replacement of Yiddish conjunctions, attempting to bring together two research

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perspectives, heritage language (HL) studies and contact linguistics, The basics of HL studies have been formulated over the past decade and it has become a discipline in its own right (Polinsky and Kagan 2007; Montrul 2010; Benmamoun, Montrul and Polinsky 2010). Definitions of HL speakers vary: some approaches are based on competence and developmental trajectory as compared to monolingual or fluent bilingual speakers, stressing limited input in the L1 (Valdés 2000; Polinsky 2008). For instance, Dubinina and Polinsky (2013, 11) refer to the HL speaker as someone who grew up hearing/speaking the home language and who as an adult can still understand or speak that language to a certain extent, but who feels more comfortable in another (usually dominant) language. Others, for instance, Fishman (2001) and He (2010) emphasize a specific sociocultural context (be it immigration, identity, minority communities, language attitudes, etc.) rather than the proficiency and linguistic resources used by HL speakers. Typically, the body of HL literature that deals with structural aspects operates with terms such as “incomplete/imperfect acquisition” and “limited input”, and compares HL varieties to “full” varieties, which are considered the baseline (see discussion in Sections 2 and 6). At the same time, there exists the long-established field of contact linguistics that investigates, among other things, the impact of L2 on L1/minority language/sociolinguistically subordinate language. Although the linguistic phenomena that both fields investigate are similar (if not identical), the research traditions, terminological frameworks and conceptualization of the phenomena in question are different. It has to be asked whether the difference is only in the world view, so to say, i.e., whether the dynamics in minority language acquired in bilingual situation make acquisition incomplete (HL perspective) or whether it is a case of contact-induced language change that, on linguistic level, is not different from other instances of contact-induced language change (albeit acquisition in question takes place under specific extra-linguistic circumstances). I will focus on the changes in the inventory of conjunctions in the heritage Yiddish of the informant. Borrowing of conjunctions is widely attested in contact linguistic literature (Matras 1998; Salmons 1990), but not so in HL literature. Conjunctions are borrowed in a great variety of contact situations that are not necessarily always HL situations. The data shows the borrowing of conjunctions not only from the dominant language of the heritage language setting, that is, not only from Lithuanian, but also from English, which was acquired by the informant at school and is used for business purposes in a limited number of contexts. Yet, no categorical

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differences are found between the borrowed conjunctions with regard to the language they originate from. The results can be best explained by observations within the study of language contact, especially in terms of Matras’ (1998) utterance modifiers, which tend to come from the pragmatically dominant language and not exclusively from the sociolinguistically dominant language, or the language one is most proficient in. The article is organized as follows: first, the field of HL research and relevance of Yiddish for the discipline will be presented. Then the situation of Yiddish in Lithuania will be described, followed by the presentation of the data and the (socio)linguistic profile of my informant. I will then turn to conjunctions in the Yiddish language and show what has happened to the conjunctions in the speech of the informant. Conjunctions are subject to retention, variation or replacement. Note that the informant is multilingual and thus the source of an equivalent to a particular Yiddish conjunction is not always obvious. In the discussion section I will turn to multiple factors behind the changes in the conjunction system. The final section contains suggestions for future research topics.

2. HL studies and Yiddish The field of HL studies has emerged, among other reasons, because of an interest in L1 acquisition in situations of community bilingualism (immigration, autochthonous minorities) and changes in the L1, including L1 attrition. Although the definition by Dubinina and Polinsky (2013) provided in the previous section implies sequential bilingualism, the HL speaker can also be a simultaneous bilingual, if one of the languages, usually the minority language, is not acquired in full. The HL speaker is considered a particular case of the bi- or multilingual speaker, whereby the acquisition of the HL frequently occurs under conditions of limited input (i.e., the language in question is limited to community or family usage; exposure to formal registers is minimal or absent, and formal schooling is conducted in the majority language). In other words, it is about a bilingual setting where one language is sociolinguistically dominant (majority/official language) and often becomes a dominant language in terms of proficiency (see Valdés 2000; Polinsky 2008, 149). Some careful suggestions for generalizations and a summary of the previous studies have been made (see a comprehensive description of the field by Benmamoun, Montrul and Polinsky 2010; also Polinsky 2011). Phenomena discussed in the HL literature include restructuring in

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phonology, lexical borrowing, semantic and morphosyntactic change, loss/restructuring of categories, word order changes (for an overview see Montrul 2010). Montrul (2010, 5) mentions that “[l]inguistically oriented studies of heritage language systems show that in many respects heritage language grammars reveal processes of simplification attested in language contact situations, the emergence of new linguistic varieties, and diachronic language change”

but she does not go further in comparing the scope of both fields.1 Yet contact linguistics deals with the above-mentioned phenomena as well, albeit from a different perspective, mainly with a focus on the impact of a particular variety on the given variety and without emphasizing that a given variety is not fully acquired. In this respect, Yiddish, a language that is nowadays very seldom acquired as an L1 and even as an L2 in Eastern Europe, provides certain useful insights. First, nobody is completely monolingual in Yiddish and this brings up the question of the already mentioned baseline, i.e. a basis of comparison (see Polinsky 2008, 149). According to Polinsky (2008, 149), the baseline does not equal the standard language, but a “certain full language”. However, this view is not unproblematic, for it is not always clear what a “full language” is, especially if there are no monolingual speakers, as in the case of Yiddish. This will be discussed later in Section 6. Second, in many locations of Eastern Europe (and in Lithuania in particular) Yiddish is not even a community language anymore, which fact has consequences for the quality and quantity of input and socialization. Third, the instances of early Yiddish-X bilingualism are rather rare in the secular setting and every occurrence of Yiddish-X bilingualism sheds light on the trajectory of bilingual repertoire development (on repertoire approach see Blommaert and Backus 2011). Examining individual Yiddish-X bilingualism could provide valuable data; when Yiddish was a thriving language in Europe, no such material was gathered, as the focus at the time was on dialectology and lexical borrowing and not on individual bilingualism. The informant in this study is multilingual and speaks Yiddish, Lithuanian, Russian and English but Yiddish is a less used and weaker language. Based on his performance in Yiddish and his linguistic biography, he is certainly classifiable as a heritage speaker. His Yiddish exhibits replacement, borrowing, semantic and morphosyntactic restructuring, that is, phenomena characteristic of heritage speakers in a variety of linguistic constellations (an overview of various case studies is provided by Polinsky 2011). As mentioned, his Yiddish speech exhibits

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changes in the system of conjunctions. Conjunctions, together with other discourse pragmatic particles, are reported to be especially prone to borrowing in the literature on language contacts (Salmons 1990; some important generalizations in Matras 1998, 23). The questions then are: What can be ascribed to the acquisition of Yiddish under the conditions of limited input and what to contact-induced innovations? Is it possible to establish a clear divide between the two? My position is that this is not always possible and language use data alone cannot lead to an unambiguous explanation (Verschik 2014). The difference between HL and other cases of bilingualism lies probably in the sociolinguistic circumstances of language acquisition and use, but not in what happens in a language system. I have argued elsewhere (Verschik 2014) that even when there is no doubt that input in the L1/minority language is limited both in quantity (opportunities to hear/use the language) and in quality (fewer registers, communication with older speakers predominantly), the phenomena we find in the L1/minority language often have multiple explanations. I maintain that the divergence view (departure from L1/minority language norm) should be combined with the convergence view: changes in the L1/minority language often occur under the impact of a particular L2/majority language and converge in the direction of the L2/majority language.

3. Yiddish in Lithuania Jews are an autochthonous minority in Lithuania. They arrived in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 14th century on the invitation of Duke Vytautas the Great. Gradually, Lithuania became home to a substantial Jewish (Yiddish-speaking) population. It was sometimes called a bastion of Yiddishism. Before WWII, 120,000 Jews resided in Lithuania, constituting 7% of the population and being the largest minority (Mendelsohn 1983, 225). While all Jews understood Yiddish and the majority used it as their main language (Mark 1951, 430), in the interwar period the language dynamics slowly changed and proficiency in Lithuanian grew both at the individual and community levels. For some, Lithuanian was becoming a language of cultural expression (Verschik 2010). During the Holocaust, the majority of the Jewish population were killed. After WWII, the Soviet regime (1944–1991) prohibited the reopening of Jewish educational institutions in Lithuania. Many survivors and their descendants left Lithuania either during or after the Soviet era;

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however, a small group of Lithuanian Jews have stayed with no intention of leaving. Yiddish in Lithuania has been affected by, e.g. population losses and emigration, as well as a language shift to Lithuanian or Russian. After the restoration of Lithuanian independence, there was an increase in activities and a Jewish school was established, with Lithuanian and Russian as the languages of instruction and Hebrew taught as a subject. According to the population census of 2011, 3,050 Jews (0.1% of the whole population) reside in Lithuania today. Unfortunately, the census data do not provide any information about their proficiency in Yiddish (Lithuanian Statistics Department 2013, Table 1, Table 5). There are still speakers of Yiddish as L1, mostly elderly people over 70. Clearly, there is no Yiddish monolingualism and, according to the local Yiddish speakers I know, monolingualism was not the case in their youth either (the first period of Lithuanian independence 1918–1940 and the Soviet era). Given this, the pool of informants cannot be large; in fact, it is rather surprising that there are such speakers today aged 50 or even younger (on the younger informants, see Verschik 2014).

4. The informant and his speech: regional Yiddish traits and impact of Lithuanian The data come from JŠ, who is male, a resident of Vilnius and in his early fifties. I have been acquainted with him since 2009. The informant was born in Kaunas. His father was born in the Kaunas area and, presumably, is a speaker of the Kaunas variety of North-Eastern Yiddish (Kovner jidiš). His late mother originated from Belarus and spoke Russian to her husband and children. She acquired Lithuanian but spoke no Yiddish at home. The informant has an elder brother, with whom he always communicates in Lithuanian. Both siblings attended a Lithuanianmedium kindergarten and secondary school, where English was taught as a foreign language. This detail is important for the further analysis. Both brothers studied medicine in Lithuanian. Nowadays, the informant lives in Vilnius and speaks Lithuanian to his family. Yiddish is reserved for phone calls to his father a couple of times a week. The father still lives in Kaunas. The informant defines himself as a Lithuanian Jew. He describes Lithuanian as his mother tongue on the basis of proficiency (the language he knows the best). Interestingly, he believes that Jews speak Lithuanian differently from non-Jewish Lithuanians, although this claim is not substantiated (see Verschik 2010). Yiddish is important to him as an

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identity marker, as he defines himself as a Jew in ethnic/ethnolinguistic rather than in traditional ethno-confessional terms. He is also fluent in Russian. The informant currently works as a small-scale businessman and uses mostly Lithuanian and sometimes English in his professional communication. As a Vilnius resident, he has learned to understand some Polish. I became acquainted with the informant through his daughter, who was a student of mine in the Vilnius Summer Programme on Yiddish Language and Culture. She mentioned that her father spoke Yiddish, albeit “not like our teachers speak in class”. This information in itself is not surprising because Standard Yiddish is taught and used in academia but those who have acquired Yiddish at home and have no formal instruction in the language mostly use regional varieties. Modern Standard Yiddish was created as a compromise supra-regional variety and was promoted mostly through secondary education especially during the so-called golden era of Yiddishism between the world wars. However, the period between the wars was too short for it to become a common variety. After WWII, the Soviet regime effectively erased Yiddish as a language of instruction in schools and among those who acquired the language in those times; very few learned to read and write Yiddish. So I expected to hear some version of North-Eastern Yiddish, probably with code-switching. Indeed, the informant’s Yiddish contains code-switching, borrowing and some changes in semantics and non-core morphosyntax. Again, this is not surprising. The pattern is similar in Estonian Yiddish, also a NorthEastern variety (Verschik 2003), and there are certain similarities in the sociolinguistic situations of the Baltic countries and multilingualism of Baltic Jews in general. For the sake of illustration of multilingual speech, observe example (1) where elements from Yiddish, English, Russian and Lithuanian are present in the same utterance (the language of elements other than Yiddish is indicated in brackets: E = English, R = Russian, L = Lithuanian). As will be discussed below, his speech quite surprisingly contains conjunctions from English, a language learned later at secondary school and in which he is less proficient than in Lithuanian or Russian. (1) And (E) ix farštanen, di DEF.ART.FEM.NOM and I understand-PPC beste zax iz opyt (R), patirtis (L) best thing is experience, experience ‘And I realized (that) the best thing is experience’

I recorded the informant in Yiddish twice, in 2011 and 2012, for about an hour each time. It became apparent that his speech cannot be described

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as a mere variety of North-Eastern Yiddish with the addition of codeswitching. The interviews were conducted in Yiddish (with occasional switches to Lithuanian, Russian and English on the part of the informant. In addition to this, I have had plenty of opportunities to have informal conversations with the informant both alone and within his family circle (in the latter case in Lithuanian). Quite expectedly, his Yiddish has some regional North-Eastern traits. The most marked regional morphological features are 1) lack of neuter (and a complex system with masculine, feminine and intermediate genders, see Jacobs 1990 and references therein) and 2) the merger of dative and accusative. Probably, the case and gender system of the informant has undergone further changes in the situation of multilingualism (I shall not, however, discuss Yiddish dialectal features in greater detail). In addition, there is Lithuanian influence in his Yiddish. He switched to Lithuanian occasionally during the interviews, but it should be noted that code-switching is a norm rather than an exception in the repertoire of multilingual Jews of the Baltic countries. During the interviews, he sometimes used Lithuanian items, emphasizing them with a distinct intonation, signalling his need for my help. The informant exhibits Lithuanian-like intonation and, remarkably, palatalization in consonant clusters (š’v’es’t’er ‘sister’, k’r’ign ‘to get’). In this respect, his Yiddish is not different from that of younger informants who are more fluent (described in Verschik 2014). In morphosyntax, there are departures from the usual Yiddish word order (for instance, V2 in the main clause: hajnt mir redn ‘today we speak’ instead of hajnt redn mir, literally, ‘today speak we’). There are also instances of omission of copula (du a dokter ‘you are a doctor’ instead of du bist a dokter, cf. Lithuanian with an optional copula tu [esi] gydytojas) and systematic omission of past tense auxiliary; these can be partly explained by the Lithuanian impact (Verschik 2014). Of course, it can be also said that V2 is more marked and in a bilingualism situation morphosyntax tends to develop in the direction of lesser markedness (Thomason 2013, 43). This is thought to be a general consideration concerning changes in grammar without any reference to sociolinguistic status of languages. A striking Lithuanian-induced feature that I have not attested in other informants’ speech is the use of 3SG for 3PL: zej zog-t (they say-3SG) ‘they say’ instead of zej zog-n (they say-3PL) in many instances. The same form for 3SG and 3PL is a distinct feature in Baltic languages: Lithuanian jis/ji/jie/jos kalba ‘he/she/they-MASC/theyFEM speak’. There are other features that have not been explained so far; for instance, the informant lacks future time auxiliary. In Yiddish, the future

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tense is analytic and consists of the auxiliary veln + infinitive (ix vel kumen ‘I will come’, zi vet kumen ‘she will come’, etc.). Instead of this, the informant produces utterances like vos mit undz zajn ‘what will happen to us’ (literally, ‘what will be with us’) instead of the expected vos vet zajn mit undz (what FUT.AUX.3SG be with us). I mention this for the sake of general characterization of his speech; otherwise, this remains outside the scope of the current article. What is quite striking is that certain grammatical words (prepositions, particles, conjunctions) come from English and not from the languages the informant is most fluent in, such as Lithuanian and Russian (recall example 1). I have not detected other forms of influence of English on his Yiddish grammar and morphosyntax.

5. Conjunctions in the informant’s speech At the background of the following description there is the original Yiddish conjunction system, introduced by the previous research. According to Jacobs (2005, 202–207), who summarizes previous descriptions of Yiddish grammar, such as Mark (1978) and Zaretski (1926), Yiddish has the following types of conjunctions: coordinating, disjunctive, conjunctions of comparison and subordinating conjunctions. In his account, Jacobs (2005, 204–205) concludes that his predecessors have included some problematic and/or borderline cases: ojx ‘also’ functions as an adverb, prepositions anštot ‘instead of’, ojser ‘except’ that according to Mark (1978) may function as conjunctions (Jacobs’ example is anštot du zolst es alejn ton... ‘instead of you doing it yourself...’). Coordinating conjunctions include un ‘and’ but also three conjunctions with the same meaning ‘both–and’: i–i, saj–saj and hen–hen, the first being of Slavic and the last of Hebrew-Aramaic origin (Jacobs 2005, 203– 204). The fact that several Yiddish conjunctions are borrowings will be discussed in the next section. Disjunctive conjunctions are ober ‘but’, oder ‘or’, ci ‘or’, oder–oder ‘either–or’ (and ober–ober and enfer/ endvider/entveder–oder with the same meaning), nor ‘but (rather)’, najert ‘rather’, abi ‘as long as’, kol-zman ‘as long as’, sajdn ‘unless’, (a)xibe ‘unless’, afile ‘even’, nit nor–nor ojx ‘not only–but (also)’. Conjunctions of comparison are vi ‘as, like, than’, ejder ‘than’ and archaic vider ‘than’ (Jacobs 2005, 205–206). Subordinating conjunctions include vajl ‘because’ with parallels such as vorem and maxmes; xotš ‘although’ with parallels hagam and vivojl, kedej ‘in order to’, az ‘that’, ojb ‘if’.

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In general, many Yiddish conjunctions have parallel forms and there is a degree of regional and stylistic variation: hen–hen ‘both–and’ is limited to traditional Jewish scholarly usage (Jacobs 2005, 203). The conjunctions of Hebrew-Aramaic origin maxmes ‘because’ and hagam ‘although’ are used in formal and/or learned registers. In certain North-Eastern Yiddish varieties, for instance, Estonian Yiddish, whose development has been strongly affected by (Baltic) German (Verschik 2003), the conjunction of Slavic origin i–i ‘both–and’ is not attested and in general the number of Slavic origin items is lower than in other varieties of Yiddish. In the speech of the informant the following conjunctions or their other-language equivalents occur: coordinating un ‘and’, disjunctive ober ‘but’, oder ‘or’, oder–oder ‘either–or’, subordinating az ‘that’, vajl ‘because’ and ojb ‘if’ and the conjunction of comparison vi ‘as, than, like’. These will now be explored in detail below.

5.1. Retention Two conjunctions have been maintained. The conjunction vi ‘how’, ‘as’, ‘than’ has been retained in all instances, both in comparison (examples 2 and 3) and in introducing relative clauses (example 4). The conjunction nit–nit ‘neither–nor’ is retained, too, although it appears only infrequently (see example 5). All other conjunctions are either subject to variation or replacement. (2) Un itster vi es iz and now as it is ‘and as it is now’ (3) Ix farštej, Estland nox klenere vi Lite I understand Estonia more smaller than Lithuania ‘I understand, Estonia is even smaller than Lithuania’ (4) Du vejst vi tsu you know how to ‘you know how to work’

arbetn work

(5) Nit Estland, nit Lite iz di land No Estonia no Lithuania is the country tsu maxn grejs biznes to do big business ‘neither Estonia, nor Lithuania is a country for a large-scale business’

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5.2. Variation Variation is understood here as variation between a Yiddish conjunction and its equivalent in either Lithuanian or English. Cases where conjunctions in three or more languages vary have not been attested. It appears that where variation exists, there is no strict functional division of labour between the Yiddish and non-Yiddish equivalents.2 The conjunction ‘and’ is probably used most frequently. Variation occurs between Yiddish un ‘and’ and English and. The Yiddish version appears in fixed expressions and constructions, for instance, in compound numerals such as in (6). Other than this, it is difficult to describe the distribution of un and and precisely. Both the Yiddish and English conjunctions can appear in the basic function of compounding (X and Y) and as introducers of new information/emphasis at the beginning of an utterance. Example (7) demonstrates compounding with un. In (8), un connects two clauses. (6) in finf un najntsikstn in five and ninetieth ‘in (nineteen) ninety five’

jor year

(7) Zajn in di tsajt un in di be in the time and in the ‘to be (exactly) at this time and in this place’

ort place

(8) Di pomeštšenje (R) hot ejner un arendirt the premises has one and rents di andere kompanje the other company ‘one (owner) has the premises and the other company rents it’

English and appears in the same function of compounding as well (see example 9). In examples (10) and (11), Yiddish un and English and respectively signal new information. Remarkably, both Yiddish un and English and can appear in the same utterance, as in (12): the English conjunction if, which has replaced Yiddish ojb will be discussed in the next section. One may claim that in (12) the functions of un and and differ slightly: un connects hierarchically equal elements (vi tsu ton ‘how to do’, vos tsu ton ‘what to do’) and and introduces the new piece of information. Still, there is no evidence of a strict division of labour between the two.

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44 (9)

Du kenst zajn tsvej mol kluge and (E) you can be two time clever and draj mol gliklex three time happy ‘you can be two times clever and three times happy’ (i.e. in the meaning ‘you can be as clever and as happy as possible but it does not help’)

(10)

Un du gejst, gejst, gejst and you go, go, go ‘and you go on and on’

(11)

And (E) ix farštanen3 and I understand-PPC ‘and I realized’

(12)

If (E) du vejst vi tsu ton un vos tsu ton and (E) di beste iz... ‘if you know how to do and what to do and the best is...’

Interestingly, not only Yiddish conjunctions vary with their nonYiddish equivalents but non-Yiddish conjunctions of different origins may vary as well. This refers to the alternation of Lithuanian bet ‘but’ and English but; their material similarity is striking. The informant speaks English with a Lithuanian accent and is unable to produce English [‫;]ݞ‬ sometimes the realization is clearly Lithuanian-like with the open front vowel [æ] and sometimes the quality of the vowel is unclear (something like [‫)]ۑ‬. One may interpret this also as a replacement because the Yiddish ober ‘but’ is totally absent from the data. A more English-like realization of the conjunction is shown in example (13). The informant is referring to his son’s choice to study economics at university and the son’s somewhat unclear future, unless one becomes a real expert in the field. In (14), the quality of the vowel is unclear, and in (15), one may say that the realization of the conjunction is in Lithuanian. (13)

Ix vejs nit, vos vajter, but (E?) do in Lite mit ekonomistn... ‘I don’t know what (will be) later on but here in Lithuania with economists...’

(14)

[bϷt] (E/L) ven ix zog, du darfst kumen ‘but when I say, you have to come’

(15)

Zej nejen bet (L?) zej vejs vi tsu nejen ‘they sew but they know how to sew’

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The situation with the conjunctions bet/but is another instance of borderline cases that often emerge in language contacts when an item cannot be assigned to a particular variety as used by monolinguals. This may happen in closely related languages (“bilingual homophones” in the words of Clyne 2003, 164–165), but also when items in not so closely related (or not at all related) languages have a similar shape and meaning. I believe that material similarity may be a reason why, say, an English equivalent is chosen to replace a Yiddish conjunction. This will be discussed in the next subsection.

5.3. Replacement The following Yiddish conjunctions have become substituted with English or Lithuanian equivalents: oder ~ tsi ‘or’, oder–oder ‘either–or’, ojb ‘if’ and az ‘that’. The conjunction tsi appears one time only (tsi kenst arbetn ‘or you.SG can work’); in all other instances it is replaced with the English or that the informant renders as [o:]. One may think that this is, in fact, Lithuanian o ‘and, but’ (like in o jis taip galvoja ‘and/but he thinks so’) but the context of use in (16) clearly suggests the meaning ‘or’. Recall that the informant has a Lithuanian accent in English. (16)

Du kenst [ ] špeter kumen you.SG can later come ‘later you can return or not return’

o (E?) nit or not

kumen come

The next instance is more complicated. The conjunction with the meaning ‘either–or’ appears as o–o. While o (< English or) has replaced oder/tsi ‘or’, the double use of o ‘or’ is modelled on languages other than English: Yiddish has oder–oder, Lithuanian arba–arba and Russian ili–ili, all with the meaning ‘either–or’, whereas the English conjunction consists of two different elements. Thus, only material properties were copied but used according to the model that is present in Yiddish as well as in Lithuanian and Russian, the languages in which the informant is fluent. There is only one occurrence of o–o ‘either–or’ in the recording of 2011. (17)

O (?) alts, o (?) nit or everything or no ‘either everything or nothing’

kejn any

zax thing

Instead of the Yiddish ojb ‘if’ the informant uses English if in all instances. Consider (18) and (19). It may very well be that a certain

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phonological similarity between Yiddish ojb and English if is a reason why the Yiddish conjunction has been replaced by its English equivalent rather than by the Lithuanian one: Lithuanian jeigu ‘if’ is less similar. This is not to say that material similarity is the decisive factor but it may have some weight. (18)

If (E) du gemaxt di DEF.ART.PL if you.2SG make-PPC ‘if you’ve earned ~ made the money’

gelt money

(19)

If (E) du maxst vos, nu, a klejninke zax, du kenst maxn di zelbe merer ‘if you do something, well, a small thing, you can make the same more’

Finally, Yiddish az ‘that’ has been substituted with Lithuanian kad ‘that’ in all instances, see (20). Lithuanian kad ‘that’ may co-occur with English conjunctions, as in (21). (20)

Zi zogt nit, kad (L) vil not that want3SG she say-3SG ‘she does not say that she does not want’

(21)

And (E) ix farštanen, kad (L) that and I understand-PPC nit zuxn not search ‘and I realized that I don’t have to search’

nit not

ix darf I need

5.4. Summary of the findings In this section, I have shown that the (monolingual) Yiddish system of conjunctions in the informant’s usage has changed under the influence of several languages. It was demonstrated that sometimes the ultimate source of influence cannot be unambiguously established and that a dichotomy approach (HL vs. dominant language) is sometimes insufficient. The informant has developed a distinctive system of conjunctions that can be summarized with the following key words: retention, variation and replacement. In other words, certain Yiddish conjunctions have not been affected and some exhibit variation (Yiddish/English, English/Lithuanian), while others have been substituted with Lithuanian or English ones. Given that the informant has “school English”, in his own words, it would seem

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rather unexpected to see the influence of a language he has a limited proficiency in. Table 5-1 summarizes the “fate” of the conjunctions described above. Letters Y, E, L, R stand for Yiddish, English, Lithuanian and Russian respectively. Clearly one cannot claim, for example, that replacement is characteristic of a certain type of conjunctions, because within the same type of subordinating conjunctions there is retention and replacement. Unlike in most contact situations described in the literature, there are two languages rather than one that influence the system of conjunctions; in this case, Lithuanian and English. Table 5-1. Summary of the conjunctions. Yiddish conjunctions un ‘and’ oder ‘or’ oder–oder ‘either–or’

Type

Notes

coordinating disjunctive disjunctive

ober ‘but’

disjunctive

vi ‘as, than’ vajl ‘because’ ojb ‘if’ az ‘that’

comparison subordinating subordinating subordinating

variation: un/and (Y/E) replacement: o (E) replacement: o–o (E shape but Y/L/R model) replacement + variation (E/L or ambiguous): but/bet/b[Ϸ]t retention retention replacement: if (E) replacement: kad (L)

Note that there are no pauses before or after the conjunctions and no self-corrections. A reasonable speech tempo is maintained all the time. There are indeed hesitations and pauses but this happens with content words. From this it can be assumed that whatever may have happened to the conjunctions, the current system in the informant’s idiolect is stable now and there is a degree of automatism in the production of conjunctions.

6. Discussion In this section, I will discuss several factors that may have triggered the change: limited input and divergence (HL perspective), convergence and contact-induced language change (contact linguistic perspective), the pragmatically dominant language and special status of discourse pragmatic

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words or, in Matras’ (1998) words, utterance modifiers (functionalcognitive perspective). The case under consideration suggests that L1 attrition may provide an explanation to certain instances. I will also show that input in multilinguals is more complex than just L1 and L2. Conjunctions can be, in the context of language contacts, grouped together with the large and somewhat vague class of discourse particles, also known as pragmatic particles or discourse pragmatic words (see Wertheim 2003, 154–155 on various terms for this group of lexical items; see also Maschler 1994). Although conjunctions are at first glance different from discourse particles because the former are grammatical words and the latter are not, their fate in a contact situation is rather similar and both belong to so-called metalanguage as opposed to propositional language (Maschler 1994), which justifies grouping them under the same heading. Elements belonging to metalanguage do not affect the meaning of a proposition; they render the speaker’s attitude or show how propositions are connected to each other. Maschler (2000, 437– 438) acknowledges problems of definition and mentions that from a functional perspective all these rather heterogeneous elements behave similarly. Matras’ (1998) term utterance modifiers appears to have more descriptive accuracy because it is not evident that discourse pragmatic words include conjunctions as well. In the contact linguistic literature these type of linguistic items are reported to be prone to borrowing (some seminal studies include Salmons 1990 and Matras 1998; many casestudies, especially those on Turkic languages, are referred to in Wertheim 2003). The previous section demonstrated the informant’s system of conjunctions in Yiddish. One of the factors that trigger such changes is limited input in Yiddish in the early formative years and very few opportunities to use the language, coupled with a higher proficiency in Lithuanian, the majority language. While defining dominance (in the sense of a higher proficiency) may be problematic in multilinguals (i.e., in certain domains, a multilingual speaker can have a higher proficiency in a language learned later in life than in L1), the present case is fairly clear-cut and Yiddish is indeed a weaker and lesser-used variety. At the same time, possible incomplete or, more precisely, halted/interrupted acquisition of L1 explains changes only to a certain extent. It has to be stressed that it is not just about divergence from the baseline (let us say, Kaunas or Vilnius varieties of North-Eastern Yiddish), but dominance in particular languages and convergence towards these languages.4 That is, borrowed items, patterns and rules originate from a particular variety (Lithuanian and/or English in our case), and saying that

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these are just deviations from a certain variety of Yiddish due to limited exposure is not enough. Therefore, convergence matters as well, although this is not very much stressed in the HL literature. Study of grammatical cases in various HLs is a fine illustration: sometimes it is stated that certain grammatical cases tend to be lost (see review in Montrul 2010, 5; Polinsky 2011), but, as it transpires, the studies in question describe HL with rich inflectional morphology under impact of analytic languages such as English. A study of the Russian genitive in Russian-Finnish bilinguals (Leisiö 2004) demonstrates that Russian grammatical cases are not lost, although there are certain changes in functions and semantics that are quite expectable under the influence of Finnish. Finnish is a language even richer in inflectional morphology than Russian. The complex linguistic biography of the informant calls for reflection upon complex input in multilinguals as such. Johanson (1999, 45–46), albeit in reference to something different, warns that it is not only the L1 and L2 that should be considered because there may be a number of varieties that the community and majority languages have at their disposal. Theoretically, several options come into mind here: the minority language as spoken by monolinguals (if such exist) or in the country of origin, the standard variety of this language, regional varieties and sociolects, nonmonolingual varieties of the language (i.e. used by multilinguals or next generation speakers); varieties of the majority language as spoken by monolinguals, L2 versions of that language; registers with dense codeswitching and so on. Here we deal with more than two clusters of varieties (“majority” and “minority” language). It can be argued that HL settings cannot be described in terms of a dichotomy. Given all this, the question of a so-called baseline, i.e. the point of comparison for HL speakers, remains unresolved. Dubinina and Polinsky (2013) suggest that HL speakers are different from stable balanced bilinguals. Intuitively, this appears reasonable but in practice it is not always clear how HL speakers can be separated from such bilinguals. First, it should be remembered that functional definitions of bilingualism do not presuppose “equilingualism” (see Jørgensen 2008, 19ff. on unintegrated view on bilingualism); second, stability is not defined and, third, there is a vast grey area between a prototypical HL speaker and a balanced/stable bilingual. Montrul and Bowels (2009, 363) propose a more nuanced view that a grammar may be

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Chapter Two deemed incomplete when it fails to reach age-appropriate linguistic levels of proficiency as compared with the grammar of monolingual or fluent bilingual speakers of the same age, cognitive development, and social group (emphasis mine).

Nonetheless, it has to be questioned whether and how multi- and monolingual speakers can be compared (provided all other mentioned factors match); in any case, a monolingual speaker/variety cannot be considered as an ideal. I concur with researchers who problematize the notion of a native speaker (Love and Ansaldo 2010; Ansaldo 2010; Jørgensen 2008). True, some older speakers of Yiddish are still available and they are multilingual as well, but accepting their Yiddish speech as a baseline is not un-problematic for at least two reasons. First, intra-generational differences can be found in any community regardless of the quantity and quality of the input. Second, and this is the main objection, the sociolinguistic circumstances of Yiddish language acquisition, socialization, availability of formal registers, opportunities for language use, etc., are much too different in pre- and post-WWII eras. Thus, it is not self-evident what kind of grammar is “full and complete” and it is not clear in the case of Yiddish with whom the comparison should be made. Coming back to conjunctions, I have no knowledge of HL literature on them or on discourse pragmatic words in general (although there are studies on pragmatics in heritage Russian in the USA; e.g. Dubinina 2011). There is certain contradicting evidence as far as the stability/borrowability of discourse-pragmatic words is concerned. Discourse pragmatics is considered to be hard to acquire in L2 (see literature on pragmatics in second language acquisition, starting from classics like Kasper 1992 on interlanguage pragmatics); also some postYiddish ethnolects (i.e., varieties that are the result of a shift from Yiddish) exhibit Yiddish discourse particles (but not necessarily conjunctions), such as dafke ‘precisely, namely’, bekitser ‘in short’, take ‘really, exactly’, etc., as well as other Yiddish discourse features (Verschik 2007, 221 on Yiddish pragmatic particles in Jewish Russian). While teaching Yiddish, I have noticed that certain conjunctions, especially az ‘that’ and also other subordinating conjunctions ojb ‘if’ and vajl ‘because’ are not acquired easily; students often tend to stop in the middle of a sentence to ask for my help. On the other hand, as mentioned above, in contact situations the domain of discourse pragmatics is easily borrowable, which means that L2 discourse particles either replace or co-occur with L1 equivalents.5 Also

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discourse particles other than conjunctions may co-occur in two languages (see Verschik 2008, 151–170 on Estonian particles in Russian). This contradiction (high probability of retention vs. high borrowability) may appear as such on the surface only and can probably be resolved by way of considering different sociolinguistic factors behind L2 acquisition, ethnolect formation and contact-induced language change. To a certain degree, the reported distinct “destiny” of discourse pragmatic particles/utterance modifiers has to do with their special functions (Matras 1998, 2009) and meaning (Backus and Verschik 2013). This category of language items differs from content words; recall the division between propositional and metalinguistic level. This is why Matras (1998) calls them ‘utterance modifiers’. Matras (1998 and in subsequent works, for instance, Matras 2009) suggest a functional-cognitive explanation for high borrowability of utterance modifiers: they help to relieve a substantial cognitive load for multilinguals and to shape and handle the discourse, being gesture-like features. To deal with the cognitive load of non-monolingual speech, it is probably easier to have one set of utterance modifiers. Interestingly, Jacobs (2005, 202), whose approach is descriptive and who does not discuss particles in detail, emphasizes the essence and the role of conjunctions along similar lines, saying that conjunctions are primarily syntactic traffic directors which link words, groups of words, or sentences. The conjunctions state the terms of the linkage: inclusion, exclusion, restriction, etc [emphasis mine].

According to Matras (1998, 285–286), utterance modifiers tend to come from a pragmatically dominant language, which is not the same as a sociolinguistically dominant language. Apparently, one’s pragmatically dominant language (as language dominance in general) can change through the life span. This would explain retention of utterance modifiers in some cases and partial replacement in others. Notably, substitution of utterance modifiers occurs in language contacts where limited input and/or drastically diminishing number of speakers is not a question. Consider Latvian un ‘and’ < German und ‘and’, Estonian jaa, jah ‘yes’ < German ja ‘yes’, Persian, Arabic and Russian conjunctions in various Turkic languages (Johanson 1997), and Hebrew conjunctions in English of English-speakers in Israel (Maschler 1994, 2000), or recall the description of Yiddish conjunctions of Slavic and Hebrew-Aramaic origin in Section 5. There is also a question of chronology: at what stage of the informant’s linguistic repertoire development did English conjunctions emerge?

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Clearly, outside school instruction, the informant had no exposure to English in Kaunas in the 1950–1960s (probably very few if anyone spoke English at that time in Soviet Lithuania). English was not present in the informant’s early formative years. Even if English lessons at school and at the university could have contributed to the emergence of English conjunctions, this occurred after the L1 (or L1s, Russian included) had been acquired. This means that prior to the internalization of English conjunctions there should have been conjunctions from a different source. This is where a L1 attrition perspective may be useful: a feature is acquired and later discarded/forgotten. It is impossible to establish whether this source was Yiddish or perhaps Lithuanian/Russian.

7. Conclusions In this article, it was demonstrated that phenomena described in contact-linguistic literature (borrowing of conjunctions, in this case) happen in HLs as well. Based on linguistic data only, it is impossible to distinguish whether one deals with a heritage variety that has emerged under circumstances of extremely limited input and few opportunities of usage or whether a variety in question has undergone contact-induced change and, at the same time, is maintained and normally transmitted to the next generation. It is a matter of preference whether such a variety would be deemed incomplete (as compared to a monolingual or precontact variety that is considered full) or a new norm. Contact linguistics and HL research describe similar linguistic effects (borrowing, restructuring, replacement and so on); however, HLs are specific because of the sociolinguistic circumstances of their acquisition and use. Some contact situations described in contact linguistics may probably be classified as HL situations but these are not specified as such in the literature. There are few if any cross-references and it appears that the two fields rarely meet. I suggest that defining HL through some kind of (limited) proficiency may seem intuitively reasonable, but in practice it is difficult to distinguish between linguistic effects in HL speakers and those in situations of contact-induced change described in contact-linguistic literature. There are likely to be sociocultural distinctions, such as dynamics of identity and linguistic profiles, community norms, language ideologies, etc., as suggested by Fishman (2001) and He (2010). Therefore, certain linguistic items and features in themselves (or lack thereof as compared to the

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baseline) are not sufficient to claim a particular variety to be a HL without giving attention to the sociocultural characteristics. As far as conjunctions are concerned, the functional-cognitive approach suggested by Matras (1998, 2009) provides an explanation as to why English conjunctions are present in the informant’s system. We know that the informant is not highly proficient in English, but the pragmatically dominant language is not necessarily the language one is most proficient in. It may be suggested that pragmatic dominance is somehow related to the frequency, quality (variety of genres) and quantity of usage, as well as to cognitive restructuring in multilinguals. On that scale, the informant uses English in a greater variety of contexts than Yiddish. Without any doubt, as a businessman he is exposed to a great deal of English. Recall that Jacobs (2005) elegantly labels conjunctions as syntactic traffic directors. Using conjunctions from whatever language helps to maintain a normal speech flow, and for this purpose, material from whatever language will do. English is simply more accessible and, probably, more frequently activated than Yiddish. Material similarity between the cognates (Yiddish and English) may be a factor facilitating the choice. There are several possible directions for further inquiry. As far as conjunctions and, more generally, discourse pragmatic particles are concerned, some studies report borrowing of all kinds of discourse pragmatic particles/utterance modifiers (Blankenhorn 2003; Goss and Salmons 2000; Leinonen 2009, 319; Maschler 2000; Muhamedowa 2006; Wertheim 2003). Other studies attest borrowing of discourse particles others than conjunctions: for instance, Igav (2013) describes frequent use of English meta-comment and deixis, interactional performatives and evaluatives (as termed by Wertheim 2003, 182–208) in online communication among adolescent Estonians. Quite similarly, studies of Estonian impact on Russian describe conventionalization of Estonian particles in Russian (Verschik 2008, 151–170; Zabrodskaja 2006) but there are very few conjunctions among them. In contrast to all this, the borrowing of conjunctions and not other discourse particles in the present case is striking. It remains to be investigated what causes such differences. One may suggest that in some instances borrowing of discourse particles is indicative of a specific (changing?) identity (multilingual youth in a tiny country as described by Igav 2013; former monolingual speakers becoming multilingual as in Verschik 2008 and Zabrodskaja 2006; expression of politeness and solidarity in communication across ethnic borders as in Verschik 2008). Particles that have meaning such as ‘fine’, ‘hardly’, ‘it means’, etc. are closer to content words (in fact, some particles are grammaticalized content words); they express the speakers’ attitude to

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what is said, while this is not true of conjunctions. I believe that politeness, marking of identity and other such factors can also partly explain the borrowing of particles other than conjunctions, whereas the borrowing of conjunctions (“traffic directors”) can be better described in the terms of Matras’ functional-cognitive model. The sociolinguistic situations and the language proficiencies of the speakers differ in case studies described above. It remains to be seen whether there is any pattern in borrowing conjunctions vs. other discourse pragmatic words. To facilitate this, it would be useful if the two research perspectives, HL studies and contact linguistics could be combined.

Notes 1. I disagree with the term simplification here because contact-induced language change cannot be unambiguously equated with either simplification or increase in complexity: much depends on a particular contact situation. 2. A division of labour (Yiddish vs. non-Yiddish origin items) does exist in other grammatical subsystems in the speech of this informant; for instance, the polysemic preposition fun ‘from, of, about, by’ has been retained in the possessive function (fun majn bruder ‘my brother’s’) but substituted in the spatial function (er iz from Šavl ‘he is from Šiauliai’; cf. Yiddish er iz fun Šavl). 3. I am not discussing the omission of the past tense auxiliary here; cf. un ix hob farštanen (and I have.1SG understand-PPC) ‘and I realized’; see Verschik (2014) on the topic. 4. I subscribe to the view that convergence is not necessarily mutual but can also be unilateral, that is, structures and patterns become similar not because both varieties are becoming more similar, but because one of the varieties is copying structures and patterns from another. Clyne (2003, 79), for example, says that it is not necessary that both languages change. This happens in situations of asymmetrical bilingualism where only one, usually the minority/immigrant community, is bilingual, and the status of the varieties is not equal. 5. For instance, see Clyne (1972) on English and German interjections following each other in the same utterance, Hlavac (2006) on co-occurrence of English and Croatian conjunctions, Matras (1998, 315–316) on alternation of Low German und ‘and’ and English and; English conjunctions in Yiddish as exemplified by Weinreich (1953, 30), nit er but ix ‘not him but me’.

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Glossing abbreviations ART AUX DEF FEM FUT MASC NOM PL PPC SG

article auxiliary definite feminine future tense masculine nominative plural past participle singular

References Ansaldo, Umberto. 2010. “Identity alignment and language creation in multilingual communities.” Language Sciences 32: 615–623. Backus, Ad, and Anna Verschik. 2013. “Copiability of (bound) morphology.” In Copies versus Cognates in Bound Morphology, edited by Lars Johanson and Martine Robbeets, 123–149. Leiden: Brill. Benmamoun, Elabbas, Silvina Montrul, and Maria Polinsky. 2010. Prolegomena to Heritage Linguistics. Harvard University. http://scholar.harvard.edu/mpolinsky/publications/white-paperprolegomena-heritagelinguistics. Blankenhorn, Renate. 2003. Pragmatische Spezifika der Kommunikation von Russlanddeutschen in Sibirien. Entlehnung von Diskursmarkern und Modifikatoren sowie Code-switching. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Blommaert, Jan, and Ad Backus. 2011. Repertoire Revisited: ‘Knowing’ Language in Superdiversity. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies, Paper 67. Accessed 20 October, 2013. http:// www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/education/research/ldc/publications/ workingpapers/67.pdf. Clyne, Michael. 1972. “Some (German-English) language contact phenomena at the discourse level.” In Studies for Einar Haugen, edited by Evelyn S. Firchow, Kaaren Grimstad, Nils Hasselmo, and Wayne O’Neill, 132–144. The Hague: Mouton. Clyne, Michael. 2003. Dynamics of Language Contacts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Dubinina, Irina. 2011. “How to ask for a favor: A pilot study in heritage Russian pragmatics.” In Instrumentarium of Linguistics: Sociolinguistic Approaches to Non-Standard Russian, edited by Arto Mustajoki, Ekaterina Protassova, and Nikolay Vakhtin, 418–431. Slavica Helsingiensia, vol. 40. Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Dubinina, Irina, and Maria Polinsky. 2013. “Russian in the U.S.” In Slavic Languages in Migration, edited by Michael Moser and Maria Polinsky. Vienna: University of Vienna. Accessed 26 October, 2013. http://scholar.harvard.edu/mpolinsky/publications. Fishman, Joshua. 2001. “300-plus years of heritage language education in the United States.” In Heritage Languages in America: Preserving a National Resource, edited by Joy K. Peyton, Donald A. Ranard, and Scott McGinnis, 87–97. McHenry, IL, Washington, D.C.: Delta Systems and Center for Applied Linguistics. Goss, Emily L., and Joseph C. Salmons. 2000. “The evolution of a bilingual discourse marking system: Modal particles and English markers in German-American dialects.” International Journal of Bilingualism 4 (4): 469–484. He, Agnes. 2010. “The heart of heritage: Sociocultural dimensions of heritage language learning.” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 30, 66–82. Hlavac, Jim. 2006. “Bilingual discourse markers: Evidence from CroatianEnglish code-switching.” Journal of Pragmatics 38: 1870–1900. Igav, Reet. 2013. Inglise-eesti koodikopeerimine Facebooki vestluses [English-Estonian code-copying in Facebook chat]. MA thesis. Tallinn University, Institute of Estonian Language and Culture. Jacobs, Neil. 1990. “North-eastern Yiddish gender switch: Abstracting dialect features regionally.” Diachronica 7 (1): 69–100. —. 2005. Yiddish. A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johanson, Lars. 1997. “Kopien russischer Konjunktionen in türkischen Sprachen.” In Ars Transferendi. Sprache, Übersetzung, Interkulturalität. Festsrift für Nikolai Salnikow zum 65. Geburtstag, edited by Dieter Huber and Erika Worbs, 115–121. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Johanson, Lars. 1999. “The dynamics of code-copying in language encounters.” In Language Encounters across Time and Space, edited by Bernt Brendemone, Elizabeth Lanza, and Esle Ryen, 37–62. Oslo: Novus forlag. Jørgensen, Jens Norman. 2008. Languaging. Nine Years of Poly-Lingual Development of Young Turkish-Danish Grade School Students. Vol.1.

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Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism, The Køge Series (K15). Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Humanities. Kasper, Gabriele. 1992. “Pragmatic transfer.” Second Language Research 8, 203–231. Leinonen, Marja. 2009. “Russian influence on the Ižma Komi dialect.” International Journal of Bilingualism 13 (3): 309–329. Leisiö, Larisa. 2004. “Sijamuotojen käytöstä suomenvenäjässä.” [Use of cases in Finland Russian.] Virittäjä 2/2004: 162–199. Lithuanian Statistics Department. 2013. Press release of 15 March 2013. Accessed 20 October, 2013. http://web.stat.gov.lt/uploads/docs/ gyv_kalba_tikyba.pdf. Love, Nigel, and Umberto Ansaldo. 2010. “The native speaker and the mother tongue.” Language Sciences 32: 589–593. Mark, Yudl. 1951. “Undzer litvish yidish.” [Our Lithuanian Yiddish.] In Lite [Lithuania] Vol. 1, edited by Mendl Sudarski, 430–472. New York: Kulturgezelshaft fun litvishe yidn. —. 1978. Gramatik fun der yiddisher klal-shprakh. [Grammar of Common Yiddish.] New York: Alveltlekher yidisher kultur-kongres. Maschler, Yael. 1994. “Metalanguaging and discourse markers in bilingual conversation.” Language in Society 23 (3): 325–366. —. 2000. “What can bilingual conversation tell us about discourse markers? Introduction.” International Journal of Bilingualism 4 (4): 437–445. Matras, Yaron. 1998. “Utterance modifiers and universals of grammatical borrowing.” Linguistics 36 (2), 281–331. —. 2009. Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mendelsohn, Ezra. 1983. The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Montrul, Silvina. 2010. “Current issues in heritage language acquisition.” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 30: 3–23. Montrul, Silvina, and Melissa Bowles. 2009. “Back to basics: Differential object marking under incomplete acquisition in Spanish heritage speakers.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 12 (3): 363–383. Muhamedowa, Raihan. 2006. Untersuchung zum kasachisch-russischen Code-mixing (mit Ausblicken auf den uigurisch-russischen Sprachkontakt). München: Lincom Europa. Polinsky, Maria. 2008. “Heritage language narratives.” In Heritage Language Education. A New Field Emerging, edited by Donna M. Brinton, Olga Kagan, and Susan Bauckus, 149–164. New York, London: Routledge.

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—. 2011. “Annotated bibliography of research in heritage languages.” In Oxford Bibliographies, Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Accessed 20 October, 2013. http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mpolinsky/files/obo.2-1.pdf. Polinsky, Maria, and Olga Kagan. 2007. “Heritage languages in the ‘wild’ and in the classroom.” Language and Linguistic Compass 1 (5): 368– 395. Salmons, Joseph. 1990. “Bilingual discourse marking: Code switching, borrowing and convergence in some German-American dialects.” Linguistics 28: 453–480. Thomason, Sarah. 2013. “Contact explanation in linguistics.” In The Handbook of Language Contact, edited by Raymond Hickey, 31–47. Paperback edition. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Valdés, Guadalupe. 2000. “The teaching of Spanish to bilingual Spanishspeaking students: Outstanding issues and unanswered questions.” In La enseñanza del español a hispanohablante [The teaching of Spanish to Spanish speakers], edited by M. Cecilia Colombi and Francisco X. Alarcón, 8–44. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Verschik, Anna. 2003. “On the dynamics of article use in Estonian Yiddish.” Folia Linguistica 25 (3–4): 337–369. —. 2008. Emerging Bilingualism: From Monolingualism to CodeCopying. London: Continuum. —. 2010. “Ethnolect debate: Evidence from Jewish Lithuanian.” International Journal of Multilingualism 7 (4): 285-305. —. 2014. “Bare participle forms in the speech of Lithuanian Yiddish heritage speakers: Multiple causation.” International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Special issue: Jewish Languages Contact, guest-edited by Ghil’ad Zuckermann, 213–235. Weinreich, Uriel. 1953. Languages in Contact. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter. Wertheim, Suzanne. 2003. Linguistic Purism, Language Shift, and Contact-Induced Change in Tatar. PhD dissertation. Berkley, University of California. Zabrodskaja, Anastassia. 2006. “Eestivene keel(evariant): kas samm segakoodi poole?” [Estonian-Russian language(variety): a step towards fused code?] Keel ja Kirjandus 9: 736–750. Zaretski, Aizik. 1926. Praktishe yidishe grammatik far lerers un student. [Practical grammar of Yiddish for teachers and students.] Moscow: Shul un bukh.

CHAPTER THREE INFLECTIONAL MORPHOLOGY IN INTERLANGUAGES: EVIDENCE FROM DECREOLIZATION AND SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION CUSTÓDIO MARTINS AND MÁRIO PINHARANDA NUNES Abstract Research combining Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and creole genesis has seen an increment in the past decades. If until recently both research areas were developing independently, more recent trends have attempted to bring them closer together, so as to understand to what extent each could inform the other, as is the case in Plag (2008), Siegel (2006; 2008), Lefebvre (2004), and Lumsden (1999), to mention just a few. Considering L2 learner language as an interlanguage with a specific system of its own, the aim of the present article is to contribute to this discussion by providing evidence of similarities between SLA and later stages of creole development (the post-creole continuum). The article looks at the use of standard Portuguese perfect preterite (PP) morphology among two groups of L2 speakers of Portuguese: (i) L1 Makista (the Macau Portuguese-based creole) speakers of Portuguese and (ii) L1 Chinese learners of Portuguese. Pinharanda Nunes (2012) has identified the lexifier verb morphology in Makista as evidence of late stage acquisition, resulting from the intensification of exposure to the lexifier. We compare data from a decreolization stage of Makista with data from advanced L2 learners of Portuguese in the quest to identify possible similarities and differences. Based on spoken data collected through sociolinguistic interviews from both groups of speakers, we analyze their use of Portuguese verb forms. From a variationist quantitative perspective, the current study takes into account both linguistic and non-linguistic variables through a VARBRUL analysis.

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1. Introduction The present article focuses on the analysis of two cross-linguistic situations, from two distinct corpora, derived from a fairly similar sociolinguistic context, even if referring to different periods in time and presenting differences in the variables and factors responsible for each of the these situations. Corpus 1 refers to oral L2 Portuguese production by elderly L1 Makista speakers who acquired Portuguese in naturalistic contexts, namely, at work, through their social networks and marriage. Corpus 2 refers to oral L2 Portuguese production by L1 Chinese (Cantonese) speakers who were in the process of acquiring Portuguese in a formal setting, i.e. as students of a Bachelor degree in Portuguese at the University of Macau. The corpora’s configurations share similarities as regards the place of birth and residence of the respective participants (Macau) and the linguistic environment: Cantonese, the L1 of the participants in Corpus 2 and the majority language spoken in Macau, is a household language, on par with Makista, for all of the participants of Corpus 1 as well. The possible correlation between the formation processes of creoles and second language acquisition (SLA) actually dates back to the very beginnings of the study of those specific contact languages. The Portuguese linguist Adolfo Coelho (1880–1886), in his pioneering studies of the Portuguese-based creoles during the 1880s, noted that the apparent syntactic and morphological simplicity common to all creoles he studied was dependent on the substrate languages involved in the formation of each of them. By suggesting what is now known as L1 transfer effect, resulting from poor access to the targeted L2, Coelho was indeed the forefather of what currently constitutes the Imperfect Learning Theory (Siegel 2006, 16). Nevertheless, it was not until the 1970s, when the SLA research first emerged and was gradually perceived as an established subfield of linguistics, that these scholars began to look into the field of Pidgin and Creole Studies (P/C) as a possible source for unanswered questions in SLA. Despite the scarcity of SLA studies at the time, Bickerton (1977, 49), for example, viewed pidginization as “secondlanguage learning with restricted input”. As referred to in Siegel (2006, 17), Ferguson and Debose (1977) analyzed learners’ grammars as “transient internal representations of the structure of the target language”, termed approximative systems by Nemser (1971) and interlanguages by Selinker (1972). During this period, the SLA studies looking at P/C for answers were mainly considering pidgins only, as in the case of Kay and Sankoff (1974), Corder (1981), and Valdman (1980). Gradually, however,

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starting from Andersen (1980; 1981; 1983), the specific relation between SLA and creolization came under focus as well. Siegel (2006) gives a neatly summarized overview of research exchange between the fields of SLA and P/C. This article focuses on the analysis of data stemming from two similar language contact situations involving L2 Portuguese. The first group of informants represents the last generation to have had Makista as their L1 and Portuguese as their L2. Makista (also referred to as papia makista and doci papiaçam) is a Portuguese-based creole endogenous to Macau. It was formed in the wake of Portuguese control over this Southern Chinese port, from 1557 onwards. Currently it is a severely endangered language, with only a few dozen elderly speakers left in Macau and scattered in several emigrant communities around the world. The second group is formed by Chinese students of Portuguese as L2. The Makista-speaking informants are in the process of decreolization whereas the Chinese group represents advanced L2 learners. We will compare these two groups with respect to their use of standard Portuguese tensemood-aspect (TMA) markers and analyze the use of Portuguese verb forms, looking at lexical and semantic transfer phenomena by both groups of speakers. The article starts with a description of the sociolinguistic context of Macau, from a historical perspective, in Section 2. Section 3 presents the theoretical underpinnings of languages in contact, where we refer to suggested scenarios of possible convergence of second language acquisition and creole contexts. Section 4 is dedicated to the discussion of inflectional morphology in creoles and contexts of second language acquisition. After describing the research methodology in Section 5, we discuss the results of both groups in Section 6 and its subsections, and present our conclusions in Section 7.

2. The sociolinguistic context of Macau In the quest to control the lucrative spice and silk trades in South Asia and the Far East, after the discovery of the sea route to India, Portugal successively took over important trading ports spreading from the western coast of India (Goa in 1498) to the Far East in Macau on the Southern Chinese coast (in 1557). Macau came under Portuguese administration some 50 odd years after the settlements established in India and Sri Lanka, and around 40 years after those in Southeast Asia—Malacca, Tugu, Batavia, Flores and Ternate. This time lapse was long enough for the Portuguese-based creoles of those three regions to be well into their

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second generation of L1 speakers, and for non-Portuguese Eurasian local populations who regularly maintained contact with them to have developed L2 or even pidginized varieties of these same creoles. Population displacement and migration within the Portuguese-controlled trade routes in the Orient was a common practice for a myriad of reasons: trade, marriage, military and religious purposes, and slave trade. Thus, from the very early stages of the establishment of the Portuguese in Macau, the migrant populations that were brought over were highly heterogeneous in their ethnicity, language as well as their social status. In the first decade after the founding of Macau, the majority of the population was from elsewhere, including the politically dominant native European Portuguese minority and the much larger number of subordinates, such as soldiers, sailors and other helpers of diverse ethnic origins (Conim et al. 1998, 109). Intermarriage between Portuguese men and Asian women throughout the Portuguese Empire in South and South East Asia became a practice encouraged by the Portuguese authorities established in Goa from as early as 1511 (Boxer 1963, 65). The Portuguese Eurasian families accounted for a considerable number of these arrivals, specifically those of the Luso-Malay stock (Conim et al. 1998, 110; Pinharanda Nunes 2012, 314). In fact, the census data collected in Conim et al. (ibid.) provides evidence of a continued influx of the latter Eurasian group, as well as ethnic Malays and Javanese into Macau as late as up to the 19th century. This is significant for the understanding of the possible scenario of the formation of Makista as there would have been a considerable number of L1 speakers of the Portuguese-based creole formed in Malacca (known as Kristang) and its close varieties formed in Tugu, Batavia, Flores, Ternate and the Moluccas. Kristang had rapidly become the lingua franca along the Portuguese-controlled Southeast Asian trade routes, on par with Malay, and it was also widely spoken as an L2 or in pidginized varieties by other populations in the vast region. Therefore Makista would have begun its formation mainly as a cultural accommodation and linguistic mixing and leveling process from pidginized and L2 varieties of Kristang (and other South Asian Portuguese-based creoles) within a complex social and linguistic contact reality. The quote in Tomás (2004, 55) of Hancock’s (1969, 39) observation of the similarity between Makista and Kristang strengthens our hypothesis of the latter’s influence on the former:

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The reason that Macao and Java Creole Portuguese dialects and supposedly the now probably extinct dialects of Timor, Shanghai, etc., are so similar is that Papia Kristang1 was in all likelihood already creolized when it spread to these areas, and therefore more resistant to modification.

As in other similar colonial settings, in Macau European Portuguese was mostly restricted to the ruling Portuguese elite minority. This reality was further enhanced by the very slow integration between the Eurasian and other Catholic Asian populations (i.e. the creators of Makista) settling in Macau with the local Chinese. The exception of Macau to such a practice sprung both from segregation practices and regulations by the Portuguese administration, as well as from the Chinese mandarins overseeing the foreigners’ (i.e. Portuguese) presence and governing of this city. The role of Portuguese would remain limited to administrative purposes. It spread only slowly from the European and Asian-born Portuguese elite L1 speakers to the Macanese Portuguese-Eurasian community—always as an L2. 19th century written data of Makista (corpus2 and descriptions3) reveals, for instance, that the verb form paradigm was identical to that of Kristang, i.e. it exhibited no functional standard inflectional morphology, with only the odd variation of such markings. Contrastively, the spoken corpus of the last generation of Makista L2 speakers born between 1900 and the late 1930s reveals a much more significant amount of standard inflection.4 For the first three centuries, the only schooling for the Portuguese and Eurasian population was exclusively provided by Catholic religious orders (Teixeira 1982). This restrictive and selective means of education functioned very irregularly, as the convents and seminaries were at the mercy of political changes in Portugal and underwent prolonged periods of forceful closure or even expulsion from Macau.5 It was only at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries that this community began to have access to public schooling in standard Portuguese on a full scale (Teixeira 1982). The first lay schools catering for Macanese6 children were founded by the collaborative effort of a few well-off members of this community from 1862 onwards. Government-run schools came only later, in the early 1900s. This increasingly widespread exposure of the Macanese youth to formal education in Portuguese (and English or French) was responsible for a considerably rapid shift from Makista to standard Portuguese as the L1 of the Macanese community between 1870 and 1920/30s.7 The Makista of those who still learned it as an L1 until the 1930s was increasingly influenced by standard Portuguese, in a context of diglossia and bilingual L1 acquisition (Portuguese and Makista). The evidence of such variation and change in the speech of the last L1 speakers of Makista is the object of

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our analysis and discussion in Section 6, with a focus on verb morphology. After the stabilization of Makista as the L1 of the Macanese in the early formation stages of Macau under Portuguese rule, Portuguese gradually became the L2 that the Makista speaking community targeted to achieve with the aim of sociopolitical and economic gains. By the mid-20th century, Portuguese had become the L1 of the vast majority of the community.8 For the majority community in Macau—the Chinese—standard Portuguese always remained inaccessible and superfluous. Contrary to the situation of the Portuguese and Macanese communities until the late 19th century, the endogenous Chinese community did have regular functioning schools organized and run by several associations, but the medium of instruction was exclusively Cantonese. From the early 20th century, religious schools ran two sections: a Chinese-medium section and an English-medium section. The instruction of Portuguese to Chinese speakers, however, remained restricted to those who attended the Catholicrun schools or the seminaries (for boys) and convents (for girls), or the very small minority who went to the inefficiently run public schools created in the early 20th century. The miserable conditions of such public schools and their inefficiency in teaching Portuguese to the wider Chinese community was registered in Governor Álvaro de Melo Machado’s 1913 description of Macau, in which he denounced the poor infrastructures of such institutions that housed only a small number of students “who hardly speak Portuguese” (Machado 1977, 40). Towards the end of the Portuguese administration of Macau there was a need to increase the number of Chinese officials in Government and the Civil Service in preparation for the Handover to China in 1999. It was only now that serious efforts were made to teach Portuguese as L2 in public and some private Chinese medium schools, as well as through courses specifically aimed at civil servants.9 In post-colonial Macau, i.e. since 1999, Portuguese was guaranteed an official status in the Basic Law negotiated between Portugal and China for the Macau Special Administrative Region. This document stipulates: In addition to the Chinese language, Portuguese may also be used as an official language by the executive authorities, legislative and judiciary of the Macao Special Administrative Region (Shào 2013, 336–337).

It therefore continues to be the language of an elite minority: of the Portuguese and other Lusophone communities residing in Macau, the ethnic Luso-Chinese community (alias, the Macanese10), and a minute Chinese literate elite who have achieved proficiency in the language. Nevertheless, the Central Government of the PRC (People's Republic of

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China) places great importance on the maintenance of Portuguese as one of the official languages of Macau. It has designated that one of Macau’s roles is to serve as a platform to promote the relations between the PRC and the Community of Portuguese-speaking countries. As a result, Tertiary Education institutions in Macau, mainly the University of Macau and the Macau Polytechnic Institute, have come to play a key role in the teaching of Portuguese to local students as well as to an increasing number of mainland students.11 This current trend and the symbiosis between official policies and commercial and academic interests are apparently perpetuating the life cycle of Portuguese in Macau, albeit in a very specific and closed circuit. The following section focuses on constructs relating to SLA and P/C studies which are relevant to our analysis discussed in Section 6.

3. Languages in contact: creoles and second language acquisition Recently, distinct fields such as “natural” second language acquisition and the emergence of “indiginized” varieties of regional second languages have been seen as part of the broader area of contact linguistics, creating a connection between the fields of SLA and creolistics (Winford 2007, 2728). In essence, comparing the formation of a creole to SLA processes implies the acquisition of an L2 by adults in extreme conditions of language contact, and such acquisition is continued by the subsequent generations of children to whom the emerging creole becomes an L1, with the consequent gradual regulation of its features (Pinharanda Nunes 2011). Considering the relevance of L2 acquisition in creole formation, Plag (2008, 125) notes: [– –] we should predict that creoles would show characteristics of interlanguages. And this is indeed the case with regard to inflectional morphology.

Mather (2006, 231) justifies the feasibility of comparing creolization to an SLA process by pointing out “that creole genesis does not involve any specific mental processes or strategies other than those found in ordinary second language acquisition.” The distinction lies merely in the sociolinguistic and historical forces behind the formation of this specific group of languages. Given the specific sociolinguistic context in Macau from its very beginnings, we consider the formation of Makista to be

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explainable from the point of view of an SLA process in a particular sociolinguistic context of language contact (cf. Section 2). Viewing creole formation as an SLA process implies admitting L1 interference in the initial stages, i.e. while L1 speakers of substrate languages still exist among the population mix of a particular emerging creole speech community. Sprouse (2006) stresses the relevance of L1 transfer at the initial stages of second language learners’ interlanguage as a whole. As pointed out by Migge (2013, 3), the existing consensus regarding the role of L1 on the formation of creoles is not followed by an equal agreement as to the “extent of this role, and the precise mechanisms by which structures of the first languagesentered the Creole”. Interference of L1 in SLA has generally been termed as transfer; a concept adopted also for creole studies. It is used with various meanings, referring both to the process as well as the outcome of such interference. Heine and Kuteva (2003) and Sharwood Smith (1986), for instance, use it as referring to cross-linguistic influence in general, i.e. the adaptation of linguistic material from one language to another. Van Coetsem (2000, 51) applies the term with the meaning of “transmission of material or elements from one language to another”. In the study of creoles, transfer, as used by van Coetsem for SLA, has been coined relexification, and constitutes a theory for the formation of creoles: Relexification Theory (Lefebvre 1998; Lumsden 1999). According to the Relexification Theory, the whole of an L1 (substrate) is imprinted onto the phonetic strings of the superstrate (lexifier). In other words, the phonetic strings of the L2 are mapped onto the lemmas of the substrate or substrates. This is seen as a cognitive process by which the language learner is able to create new vocabulary for the different lexical categories by associating the phonological forms from the L2 with “syntactic and semantic information that is already established in the lexicon of his native language” (Lumsden 1999, 225). This process involves copying and relabeling. Ultimately, relexification implicates two other processes: (i) reanalysis—“a mental process whereby a particular form which signals one lexical entry becomes the signal of another lexical entry” (Lefebvre 2004, 26); and (ii) “dialect-leveling”—which begins “when the speakers of the creole community stop targeting the lexifier language and start targeting the relexified lexicons, that is, the early creole” (Lefebvre 1998, 46). Relexification could be a possible explanation for the formation of Makista’s creole TMA system. Based on written data from the 19th century and recordings from speakers born at the turn of the 20th century, Pinharanda Nunes (2011) established that the creole matrix of that system

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would have been composed of Ø tense and aspect marking on the verb, and a preverbal aspectual marking: ta (progressive, habitual, continuous), ja (perfective) and logo (irrealis). These markers appear as reanalysis of the Portuguese auxiliary verb estar ‘to be’, the adverb ja ‘already’ and the adverb logo ‘later’, respectively, as the following sentences exemplify: (1)

Eu sa filo ja nacê POSS son PRT-PP born 1SG ‘My son was born in Macau’

(2)

Ele ta comê PRT-PROG eat 3SG ‘He is eating’

(3)

na Macau in Macau

Ta

quere su charutu. Ta want his cigar PRT-HAB ‘(He) wants his cigar. (He) goes out’ PRT-HAB

cu with

vai go

(4)

Vos ta cai PRT-CONT fall 2SG ‘You are very sleepy’

(5)

Eu sa filo logo casá na POSS son PRT-IRR marry LOC 1SG ‘My son would later get married in Vancouver’

rua. street

sono sleep Vancouver Vancouver

This system would have been transferred from Kristang, where it had developed as a relexification of the equivalent Malay TMA markers sedang (continuous), telah/sudah (perfective) and nanti/akan (irrealis): (6)

Mereka sudah PRT-PRF 3PL ‘They have arrived’

tiba arrive

(7)

Dia sedang belajar di university PRT-PROG study at university 3SG ‘She is studying at university’

(8)

Besok saya akan melawat PRT-IRR visit Tomorrow 1SG ‘Tomorrow I will visit my son’

anakku son-POSS

Another possibility for the origin of the Makista aspectual markers could also be a relexification process of the more elaborate Cantonese

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aspectual markers—(i) perfective: jo and gwo (experiential); (ii) progressive: gan and háidhouh; (iii) habitual: hoi (usual activities) and gwaan (‘to be used to’); (iv) continuous: jyuh, reinforced by their partial convergence with the Malay markers. This explanation for the formation of the Kristang and the ensuing Makista TMA particles shows clearly how the Relexification Theory refers to a process that “results in lexical items of the creole having semantic and syntactic properties from the substrate but phonological forms from the lexifier” (Siegel 2008, 111). The formation of creoles as analogous to SLA, specifically in naturalistic multilingual contexts with limited input of the lexifier has brought to the discussion the notions of feature pool and leveling. The feature pool is the set of variants of input from the various languages existent during the earlier stages of those multilingual communities. Just as in genetics some genes are selected over others in the process of evolution, so are some of those linguistic variants chosen over others by the emergent creole speech community (Siegel 1997; Mufwene 2000). Apart from language-external factors such as the number of speakers for each input language and other related sociolinguistic issues, the leveling12 of the variants in the feature pool is conditioned by psycholinguistic and linguistic factors: (i) markedness; (ii) perceptual salience; (iii) transparency; (iii) simplicity; (iv) frequency; (v) equivalence and congruence (Siegel 1997). Markedness refers to the degree of uniqueness or universality of a particular linguistic feature: The more universal a feature is, the greater the possibility of transfer. Perceptual salience refers to non-bound morphemes, which have greater probability of being transferred than the bound and consequently less salient ones. The transparency factor relates to the greater probability of transfer of elements with one meaning only, and which maintain that characteristic after transfer. The simplicity of an element relates to its lesser degree of complexity compared to the equivalent element in the other language. The simpler the structure is, the greater the probability of transfer. Frequency implies that the more frequent a feature is in one language, the greater the probability of its transfer to the other. Equivalence and congruence relates to the identification of formal similarities between certain elements in the different languages in contact. Siegel (2008, 112) refers to this as functional transfer. As expected, the greater the formal similarity between the languages, the higher the probability of transfer. Thus, there is in fact a considerable amount of similarity between what Siegel coins as functional transfer and Lefebvre as relexification. However, functional transfer is not only operational in the initial formation stages of a creole or in SLA, but also throughout the continuum of that

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creole and the SLA process. Drawing on Ellis (1994) and Kasper (1997), Siegel (2008, 121) distinguishes between transfer through language acquisition and through language use: [– –] L2 acquisition as opposed to L2 use is concerned with the gradual attainment of linguistic competence in the L2 – in other words, with the learning of the L2 grammar.

Although the emphasis on the direction of the transfer in contexts of language use in SLA studies continues mostly to be L1 to L2, in the case of creoles we cannot ignore the inverse possibility, namely L2 to L1. Especially so in contexts where: (i) the creole’s standard lexifier remains accessible throughout its continuum; (ii) L1 bilingualism or diglossia between creole and lexifier develops; (iii) the sociolinguistic contexts enhance motivation among the creole speech community to be proficient in the lexifier language. This application of the notion of transfer (i.e., operated during language use rather than initial stages of acquisition or formation) is relevant to our analysis of the emergence of standard Portuguese verb morphology, presented and discussed in Sections 5 and 6. Thus, SLA has also been associated with later stages of the creole continuum; specifically implicating an increased access of the creole speech community to the standard lexifier. The increase of that access and speakers’ motivation leads to a greater influence of the standard lexifier on the creole at all stages. This process, which is common to diverse cases of language contact, has been termed as decreolization in creole studies. Siegel (2008, 236) defines decreolization as a “gradual modification of a creole in the direction of the lexifier [– –] in terms of the adoption of particular features for example TMA marking”. Rickford (1987) proposes that such an approximation of the creole towards its lexifier closely resembles an SLA process with regard to duration of the process, and access to target language and learner motivation or lack thereof. Patrick (2002, 1) notes that the underlying concept of decreolization is that the standard and lexifier language of a creole-speaking society strongly influences the development of the creole at all stages, and not only at the early phase. He (2002, 4) rejects the notion that decreolization be considered a concept specific of pidgins and creoles, and proposes that it should be looked at as a normal concept of language contact, bearing similar features and processes as contact in non-creole situations. In our cross-analysis of SLA processes for the acquisition of Portuguese verb morphology between L1 speakers of a decreolizing Makista and L1 Chinese learners of L2 Portuguese, we adopt Siegel’s (2008) definition of

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decreolization, whilst taking Patrick’s (2002) stance on the non-specificity of decreolization to pidgins and creoles as a research hypothesis.

4. Analysis of verb morphology: the theoretical framework In SLA studies, the possible correlation between the acquisition of verb morphology (both in L1 and L2) and the semantic value of verbs (i.e. their lexical aspect) is a prominent line of research. Given our subject of study—standard verb morphology in Chinese and Makista L2 speakers of Portuguese—we have taken the Primacy of Aspect (POA) theory (Andersen and Shirai 1996) as the theoretical framework for the analysis of such morphology in these two groups.13 According to this theory, both in L1 and in L2, speakers choose morphological tense and aspect markings that carry similar values to the lexical aspect of the verbs: “What is important in early stages of acquisition of verb morphology is not grammatical aspect but lexical aspect” (Andersen and Shirai 1996, 531). The POA consists of four principles according to Andersen and Shirai (1996, 533): 1. Children first use past marking (e.g. English) or perfective marking (Chinese, Spanish etc.) on achievement and accomplishment verbs, eventually extending its use to activity and stative verbs. This roughly corresponds to Bickerton’s (1981) punctual-non punctual distinction (PNPD). 2. In languages that encode the perfective-imperfective distinction, imperfective past appears later than perfective past, and imperfective past marking begins with stative verbs and activity verbs, then extending to accomplishments and achievement verbs. 3. In languages that have progressive aspect, progressive marking begins with activity verbs, then extends to accomplishment or achievement verbs. 4. Progressive markings are not incorrectly overextended to stative verbs. This corresponds to Bickerton’s (1981) state-process distinction (SPD).

To strengthen their case of the POA’s applicability equally to SLA, Andersen and Shirai (1996, 547) make reference to L2 Spanish as a model example of how the perfect preterite morphology first appears on accomplishments and achievements, and that of the imperfect preterite with activities and states. They claim that, when learners acquire the notion of perfectivity, reference to the past is marked for lexical aspect in the following sequence: achievements—accomplishments—activities—

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states. Building onto the theory concerning the fixed sequence of acquisition of morphology (Andersen and Shirai 1996), the Distributional Bias Hypothesis (DBA) adds that an L1 and an L2 learner may mark achievements and accomplishments in perfect preterite contexts only on activities, simply because the majority of such verbs happen to be found among those two classes. The definition of lexical aspect (or Aktionsart) is essential here, and we may briefly summarize it in Comrie’s (1976) terms as the representation of different perspectives of the internal temporal constitution of a situation. The main characteristics of each lexical class as proposed by Vendler (1967, 106) are: ACTIVITIES: A was running at time r14 means that time instant t is on a time stretch throughout which A was running. ACCOMPLISHMENTS: A was drawing a circle at t means that t is on the time stretch in which A drew that circle. ACHIEVEMENTS: A won a race between t1 and t2 means that the time instant at which A won that race is between t1 and t2. STATES: A loved somebody from t1 to t2 means that at any instant between t1 and t2 A loved that person

Moens and Steedman (1987) propose the addition of another class— points (semel-factives for Smith, 1991), which we have also applied in the analysis of our data. For the analysis tests of the semantic properties of the verbs we follow those applied to Portuguese by Martins (2008). In the following section we present the methodology as well as the research questions that guided the current study.

5. Methodology Based on two larger studies (Martins 2008; Pinharanda Nunes 2011), the current study of verb morphology in L2 speakers of Portuguese looks contrastively at the production of such morphology in the speech of L1 Makista creole speakers and L1 Chinese speakers. Data for the first group were collected through sociolinguistic semi-guided one-hour interviews with 18 Makista L1 speakers. The participants were guided to retell past and present events in their lives. As for the L1 Chinese speakers, the data were also collected through sociolinguistic semi-guided one-hour interviews with university L2 students of Portuguese in Macau. Towards the end of the interview the learners were asked to retell a scene from the Charlie Chaplin film “Modern Times”, previously viewed. The oral retelling of scenes of films has been used as a data collection instrument in

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most L2 acquisition studies of tense and aspect. Both sets of spoken data were transcribed and the verb phrases were coded. Then each of the sets of data was treated quantitatively on Goldvarb X. Each token was further coded according to two dependent and four independent variables. The dependent variables are: (i) perfect preterite; (ii) imperfect preterite. The independent variables the study considers (i) existence and non-existence of subject-verb agreement; (ii) lexical aspect; (iii) morphological form; (iv) person/number marking. The previous studies on the same two corpora lead us to place the following research questions for the current analysis: 1. What verb morphology is used for the preterite by L1 Chinese and L1 Makista speakers in their oral use of L2 Portuguese? 2. How does the use of such morphology fair in comparison to the POA hypothesis for the Chinese L1 and the Makista L1 groups? 3. Do the results for the Makista group stand up to the definition of decreolization as a common process akin to other SLA situations? In Section 6 and its subsections we discuss the results of the analyses of the variables presented above for both groups.

6. Results and discussion The theoretical framework presented above proposes verb lexical aspect as a key player in the acquisition and use of verb morphology in the discourse of L2 speakers. We now go on to presenting the results of the probabilistic analyses separately applied to both our focus groups of L2 Portuguese for their respective use of verb forms. As defined in our research questions, we wish to observe how the POA theory (Andersen and Shirai 1996) applies to Portuguese L2 learners with an L1 Chinese background. Regarding our second, L1 Makista group, we intend to observe the informants’ use of standard Portuguese morphology for the same contexts and analyze whether they can be seen as (i) replacing the creole non-standard forms and (ii) show evidence of acquisition in the same order as that proposed by the POA hypothesis for SLA situations in general. For an easier and more comprehensive reading of the analysis we shall present the results of each corpus and each of the two aspectual markings separately. The perfect preterite (PP) (in Portuguese pretérito perfeito) is a grammatical aspectual category which in the definition of Mateus et al.

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(2003, 139) encompasses the notion of termination in contexts of past reference. The analyses of the PP involve the variables lexical class, morphological form, person/number markings and subject-verb agreement. Minor differences in the analysis, due to the specificities of each corpus, will be justified for each case in the relevant sections.

6.1. Lexical aspect Table 6-1 presents the distribution of the use of standard Portuguese morphology for the perfect preterite according to the lexical aspect, for the L2 corpus. The probabilistic analyses considered the finite forms of the perfect preterite in Portuguese as the dependent variable. As in all binomial probabilistic analysis of this kind, the neutral relative weight is set at p = .50 (Paolillo 2001). Table 6-1. Perfect preterite markings according to lexical aspectual class (L2 learners). Factor Accomplishments States Activities Semel-factives Achievements

N 915/1251 304/625 201/311 50/69 481/609

%

Prob.

73 49 65 72.5 79

0.59 0.22 0.50 0.53 0.64

For this variable, the use of perfect preterite markings by the L2 learners is favored, firstly, in accomplishments with a relative probability of p = .64, followed by achievements (p = .59) and semel-factives (p = .53). Activities exert a neutral influence on the use of this marking. It is clearly not favored by states (p = .22). This gradation of the past perfective according to the lexical classes follows the prediction in Andersen and Shirai (1996). Table 6-2 presents the distribution of the use of standard Portuguese morphology for the perfect preterite according to the lexical aspect for the L1 Makista corpus. In this corpus, all the finite forms appear in variation in the past contexts. Furthermore, the Portuguese perfect preterite morphology appears by and large in the corresponding aspectual contexts. For this reason, in our probabilistic analysis we took the finite verb as the dependent variable, consisting of three factors: (i) the standard infinitive

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derived form, (ii) the 3SG15, and (iii) the PP16. Thus, the probabilistic analysis was trinomial and the neutral relative weight in this case is set at p = .33. Table 6-2. Perfect preterite markings according to lexical aspectual class (L1 Makista). Factor Accomplishments States Activities Semel-factives Achievements

N

%

Prob.

146 35 11 5 107

18 13 5 15 26

0.37 0.32 0.14 0.38 0.46

This analysis reveals the following distribution for the use of PP morphology by the Makista L1 speakers: it is favored in achievements with the relative weight of p = .46, in accomplishments (p = .37), and in semel-factives (p = .38). It is disfavored in activities (p = .14) and in states with the near to neutral relative weight of p = .32. Thus, as was the case with the L2 learner corpus, the distribution according to the lexical aspect of verbs in the use of the PP is in accordance with Andersen and Shirai’s (1996) prediction.

6.2. Learning period In table 6-3 we present the results of the probabilistic analysis of the period of learning for the L2 learner group. Ayoun (2005, 92), Salaberry (2002, 406; 2005, 187), and Comajoan (2005, 57–68) consider that a speaker’s level of proficiency constrains the ability to distinguish between telic and atelic events. If this is so, then the use of perfect preterite morphology by L2 speakers should be proportional to their proficiency in the given language. To test this on the L2 learners, the group was divided into two subgroups according to the duration of their learning of Portuguese at the time the data were collected: 1–5 years and > 5 years. As the results in Table 6-3 show, the more experienced learners favor marking of the target language preterite morphology with a relative weight of p = .60, whereas the less experienced learners mark target preterite morphology with a relative weight of p = .49.

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Table 6-3. Learning period (L2 learners). Factor 1–5 years > 5 years

N 2392/27980 285/300

%

Prob.

85.5 95

0.49 0.60

For the Makista speakers the data is comprised of L2 Portuguese discourse with proficiency not necessarily nor exclusively acquired in formal learning settings. Thus the variable of learning period is not applicable here. However, based on the speakers’ personal accounts of their learning process and use of Portuguese throughout their lives, we established the variable of length of exposure to standard Portuguese, with the factors of little exposure, some exposure and large and continued exposure, to measure the possible impact this might have had on their respective acquisition and use of the morphology under research. Table 6-4. Learning period (L2 learners). Factor Prolonged Average Short

N

%

Prob.

208 70 25

20 9 7

0.52 0.32 0.19

As we may observe in Table 6-4, the only factor that favored PP morphology for this group was large and continued exposure. The element of continuousness contained in this factor appears to sustain the proposition that this morphology is not an early stage development in the life cycle of Makista, but rather one materialized much later, at a stage of near bilingualism for some speakers given the quality and duration of access to the standard lexifier. Thus, in line with the proposed readings of such phenomena in Siegel (2008) and Rickford (1987; see Section 3), this result marks a distinct effect of the variable of learning period on the production of the preterite morphology for each of the two groups.

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6.3. Subject-verb agreement and person/number markings (L2 learners) In Table 6-5 we present the results of the cross-analysis of the variables number and person markings of the perfect preterite forms and subject-verb agreement for the L2 learner group. Examples (9–11) show a specific feature of the L2 learners’ interlanguage, i.e., the fact that they use a restricted system of subject/verb agreement. Table 6-5. Subject/verb agreement and person/number markings (L2 learners). S/V P/N marking agreem. 1SG 3SG Factors N % Pr. N % Pr. 1214/ 316/ 77 0.51 79 0.57 Yes 1570 398 147/ 50/ 66 0.41 79 0.59 No 222 63

1PL 3PL N % Pr. N % Pr. 178/ 40/ 57 0.26 82 0.51 217 70 5/6 83 0.54 12/20 60 0.29

(9)

eu visitou muitos 1SG visit-PP-3SG many ‘I visited many museums.’

museus museums

(10)

eles não telefonou às voluntárias par faz coisa 3PL NEG call-PP-3SG to volunteers to do-PR-3SG thing ‘They did not call the volunteers to do something.’

(11)

O partido levaram o povo para construir The party lead-PP-3PL the people to build um país novo a country new ‘The party led the people to build a new country.’

The use of PP morphology by the L2 learners is favored in agreement with the relative weight of p = .55. The alternative factor for this analysis, non-agreement, neither favors nor disfavors the use of such markings in the production of this group of learners. As for person/number, the only such marking that significantly favors PP markings is the 1SG. The favoring by agreement in the use of PP by the L2 learners occurs both with person/number agreement (p = .57) as well as in the absence of this

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agreement (p = .59). The 3SG has a neutral effect in contexts of person/number agreement (p = .51) and it disfavors the PP markings in the absence of this agreement (p = .41). The 1PL marginally favors PP markings when there is no person/number agreement (p = .54) and disfavors it with agreement markings (p = .26). As with the 3SG, the 3PL also has a neutral effect with agreement markings (p = .51) and also disfavors it in the presence of agreement (p = .29). The PP morphology in the Makista corpus is primarily composed of 3SG forms of the PP used with standard subject-verb agreement. Only 21 out of the 312 PP tokens (i.e. 6.7%) do not exhibit this number and person marking.17 Therefore we considered only the 3SG tokens in the analysis. All instances were used with subject-verb agreement for this person/number marking (i.e. 3SG), which thus ruled out the sense of any individual or cross-factor probabilistic analysis (cf. the analysis of data presented in Table 6-5 for a comment on the relevance of the frequency factor as proposed by Siegel 2008).

6.4. Person/number markings and morphological form Table 6-6 presents the results of the cross analysis of the morphological form and person/number (P/N) markings for the L2 learner corpus. Table 6-6. Morphological form and person/number markings (L2 learners). Morphological P/N marking form 1SG Factors N % -a theme verbs 159/215 74 -e theme verbs 57/67 85 -i theme verbs 23/26 88.5 irregular verbs 128/154 83 1PL -a theme verbs 19/30 63 -e theme verbs -i theme verbs irregular verbs 19/39 49

Pr. 0.42 0.60 0.64 0.72

N 665/796 167/192 92/105 436/698

0.26 0.20

82/97 19/23 22/24 67/92

3SG % 83.5 87 88 62.5 3PL 84.5 83 92 73

Pr. 0.51 0.63 0.59 0.42 0.49 0.47 0.69 0.47

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Overall, the perfect preterite in the L2 data is mostly favored by the 1SG when we cross-analyze P/N and morphological form. All three vowel theme verb groups and the irregular verbs favor PP morphology. The verbs with an irregular conjugation paradigm present the most significant relative weight of p = .72. As for the regular verbs, those belonging to the -i thematic vowel group favor the marking under study by p = .64. This marking is also favored by the -e theme verbs (p = .60). Only the -a theme verbs do not favor the PP marking for the 1SG. The other P/N marking for the singular which is used with PP morphology in L2 learner corpus is the 3SG. In this case, the only verbs that favor P/N marking are the -e theme verbs. These verbs combined with the 3SG favor the PP (p = .63). As for the 1SG, this morphology is favored by p = .60. The -a theme verbs neither favor nor disfavor the PP (p = .51). The only group of verbs that disfavors the morphology in question for the 3SG in this analysis is the group of irregular verbs in this corpus (p = .42). Next, we view the results for the distribution of PP morphology according to the morphological forms. These results suggest that phonological salience contributes significantly to P/N marking. As we could see from the results in Table 6-5, P/N marking is restricted to 1SG, 3SG and 3PL. In a more fine grained analysis, Martins (2008) concludes that this restricted P/N marking in this group of L2 learners is used systematically. The marking does not always show evidence of TL agreement (cf. Table 6-5). Table 6-7 presents the results of the cross-analysis of the morphological form and person/number markings for the L1 Makista speakers (see also examples 12–14). Table 6-7. Morphological form and 3SG person/number markings (L1 Maquista speakers). Factors -a theme verbs -e theme verbs -i theme verbs (12)

N

%

Prob.

111 88 21

39 19 4

0.619 0.365 0.022

Cabe minha mana, chegou pra Then my sister arrive-PP-3SG to ‘Then my sister came to work’.

trab’lhá work-INF

Inflectional Morphology in Interlanguages (13)

Cava eu sa filo nasceu, POSS son be born-PP-3SG After 1SG nos vai Hong Kong 1PL go-PP-3SG Hong Kong ‘After my son was born, we went to Hong Kong.’

(14)

Unga dia eu abri unga naipe, open-PP-1SG one suit One day 1SG pai caiu Manila Diamond father fall-PP-3SG Manila Diamond ‘One day I opened a suit of cards and my father got a Manila Diamond.’

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In the corpus of L1 Makista speakers, the distribution of the verb morphology shows that PP marking is favored by -a theme vowel verbs (p = .62), followed by -e theme verbs (p = .37). The PP is disfavored by regular verbs of the -i theme vowel group (p = .02). Given that the PP marking in the Makista L1 data concerns only 3SG forms and is only favored by -a theme vowel verbs, the verb inflection at stake is -ou, as for example in falou > Portuguese falar ‘to speak’. A frequency check on an oral data corpus for standard Portuguese (Davies and Ferreira 2006) reveals that among the three morphological forms possible for the PP 3SG on regular verbs, this is the most frequent form. This result is highly relevant given the naturalistic nature of acquisition of Portuguese by this group, as it concurs with earlier findings on the SLA/creolization interface: For Makista, frequency is a key variable in the acquisition process of the lexifier, just as it is for the formation stage of creoles, as proposed in Siegel (2008). Contrary to the L2 learner group, in the L1 Makista data phonological salience does not emerge as a favoring variable for PP marking.

7. Conclusions The comparative probabilistic analysis of perfect preterite (PP) morphology in the speech of L2 learners of Portuguese with L1 Chinese and L1 Makista provides a preliminary view of the SLA processes at work in the acquisition of this morphology both for a formal learning setting as well as among speakers of a later stage creole, highly influenced by the standard lexifier. Thus, the current comparative analysis contributes to the study of the interface between SLA and creole languages. However, contrary to the focus on the similarities and differences of SLA processes

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in the early creolization stages, our findings bring to light similarities between SLA and the later stages of a post-creole continuum. Our first research question concerned the PP markings used by L1 Chinese and L1 Makista speakers in their spoken L2 Portuguese. The results show that the acquisition and use of this category is influenced by lexical aspectual class in both groups. The groups mark PP morphology first on telic verbs, which generally confirms the POA hypothesis (see Section 5). As for the identification of interlanguage features, our results show that both groups use PP marking according to specific patterns. In terms of person/number (P/N) marking, the L2 group marks 1SG, 3SG, and 3PL. This restricted selection of P/N agreement marking may reveal the learners’ difficulty in assigning form/meaning mappings. In this particular case the learners seem to concentrate more on conveying meaning than focusing on form. The findings are in line with one of the features Adjemian (1976) attributes to interlanguages: they serve the purpose of communication. It would seem that these learners resort to the use of the more phonologically salient forms, one of the factors with significance in the initial stages of SLA. The Makista speakers, on the other hand, only mark 3SG. This sole P/N marking for PP used by this group is exclusively applied in contexts that preserve its standard tense/grammatical aspect value, i.e. perfective preterite. We hypothesize that the Makista group acquired the perfective aspectual value prior to acquiring person/number marking. Like the L1 Chinese learners of Portuguese, the L1 Makista speakers mark PP morphology according to the inherent aspectual value of the verb, as predicted by the Primacy of Aspect (POA) theory. The results for P/N marking in the L2 learner data reveal that learners consistently use a restricted system based on 1SG, 3GS and 3PL. These three forms are predominantly used with -e and -i theme verbs as well as with irregular verbs. Agreement marking is not consistent, though, since the three verb persons do not always show marks of target language agreement. As previously mentioned in this section regarding phonological salience, the L1 Chinese learner group seems to favor PP marking on 1SG in irregular, -i theme, and -e theme verbs. 3SG marking, on the other hand, is favored in -e theme and -i theme verbs. In the Makista group, however, the same P/N marking is favored first by -a theme and secondly by -e theme verbs. The relevant significance of the latter is particularly interesting, as this is the form that exhibits the highest frequency of occurrence in spoken Portuguese, according to the spoken corpus in Davies and Ferreira (2006). This presents evidence that the frequency

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factor as proposed by the cognitivist framework of SLA processes and creolization (Siegel, 2006) is not only relevant in the initial formation stage of a creole, but also much later, in the “post-creole continuum” (DeCamp 1971) or decreolization stage. The acquisition of standard forms such as the PP morphology, in the case of Makista speakers, also appears to benefit from the transparency and markedness qualities of the morphemes at stake: (i) the PP forms mark only one aspect, the perfective, and thus possess transparency; (ii) the PP forms used by the Makista speakers are favored by regular -a theme verbs, and thus are unmarked. As for the period of learning, the results for the Chinese L1 learner group show that the use of PP is favored by those with a longer learning period (i.e. > 5 years). In the case of L1 Makista speakers, the use of PP is exclusively supported by the factor of high exposure to Portuguese. Thus, both corpora confirm the proposition whereby the level of the speaker’s proficiency in a language places a constraint on the capacity to differentiate between telic and atelic events (Ayoun 2005; Salaberry 2005). The overall comparative analysis shows common features between both groups: 1. acquisition and use of standard verb morphology (specifically PP markings in the current data) by both the L2 learners and the creole speakers 2. the importance of lexical aspect in the acquisition of the PP morphology 3. restricted use of P/N agreement forms. All of the above suggests the applicability of Adjemian’s (1976) and Lakshmanan and Selinker’s (2001) proposal that interlanguage does not show mere transfer from L1, but is a system in its own right. Furthermore, it confirms the possible existence of verb morphology in creoles as a rather late development, as contented by Plag (2008, 2). The complexity of studying cross-linguistic influence and contact situations and the fact that the different variables and corresponding factors may interact to define the processes behind the speakers’ utterances call for further studies in the field from a psycholinguistic perspective of online information processing. A more fine-grained study looking closely at the non-target forms of L2/L3 Portuguese by L1 Chinese speakers and those of Makista at other levels of grammar is the next logical step.

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Notes 1. Papia Kristang, literally ‘speak Kristang’, is the common mode of reference by the speakers of Kristang to their heritage language. 2. A compilation of texts, plays and anecdotes make up the 19th written corpus, in Barreiros (1943/44). An existing oral corpus from the 20th century is composed of sociolinguistic audio recordings by Prof. Michel Charpentier in 1984, in Macau and Hong Kong, and Pinharanda Nunes in 1999 and 2007. 3. Dalgado (1900) and Schuchardt (1889). 4. The texts from the 19th century corpus that have been tagged for verb forms reveal only 9.8% of functional standard forms. The existing oral corpus from the early 20th century L1 Makista speakers reveals 46% of such forms. 5. Teixeira (1982) gives a detailed account of the precarious schooling system of the Portuguese administration and the religious orders in Macau from 1557 until the beginning of the 20th century. Machado (1913[1997]) describes the inefficiency of the teaching of Portuguese in Chinese public medium schools in the early 1900s. 6. The term Macanese is the English translation for the macaense in Portuguese. Macaense has traditionally referred to the Portuguese Eurasian community of Macau and their descendants elsewhere, i.e., the heritage community of Makista. After the Handover of Macau to the administrative power of the People’s Republic of China, however, the English version has increasingly been applied to refer to any individual born or residing permanently in Macau. In Portuguese, it continues to be used essentially as that particular community. 7. Based on the oral recordings of Macanese speakers born between the 1890s and 1940s, Pinharanda Nunes (2011; 2012) estimates that the last generation of Macanese to have learnt Makista as an L1 would have been the one born in the late 1930s, at the most. Naturally this would have varied from family to family, and there were exceptions where Makista continued to be learnt in a few homes as an L1 until a little later. Obviously Cantonese, too, has always been of major element of the language proficiency and use of the Macanese, but it falls out of the scope of this study. 8. This was concluded based on the personal reports collected among the elderly Macanese participants in the data collection, as well as in the linguistic analysis of these participants’ discourse analyzed in Pinharanda Nunes (2011; 2012). 9. Shào Zhaoyang & Huang Yi (2006–2007), based on official census data, provide a chronological perspective of the number of native Portuguese speakers in Macau from 1910 to 2001: in 1910 they accounted for 4.8% of the total population, and remained relatively stable till a dramatic peak between the 1991 and 1996 censuses where it rose to 28.5% (in 1996) only to drop just as dramatically to 2.0% in 2001, i.e., after the Handover in 1999. In light of the same census data, they also point out that of “all the workers and assistants in the government” currently only 20.1% speak Portuguese and 18.7% can write Portuguese. 10. For the majority of the Macanese, Portuguese has been since the generations born in the 1940s their L1, albeit used with its own morphosyntactic and semantic variations relatively to the European norm. For a progressively growing number of

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Macanese, mostly due to intermarriage into the Chinese community, Portuguese is becoming an L2 or even an L3, having given way to Cantonese as their L1. 11. The University of Macau offers a general B.A. degree in Portuguese studies, as well as a Masters and a PhD degree in three specific fields: Translation, Literature and Linguistics. The Polytechnic Institute offers a B.A. degree in translation. 12. Due to the target shift from the lexifier language to the relexified forms by the speech community involved in the formation of a creole, the reanalysis and the leveling process may never be fully completed. Thus, as Mather (2006, 241) points out, in reference to Lefebvre’s relexification model, “the learners’ final interlanguage stage (the creole) is akin to the initial stage of SLA”. 13. As for research on verb morphology in Portuguese Creoles, Pinharanda Nunes (2011) is the only existing study of the tense and aspect categories under the POA hypothesis. Martins (2008) is also the first extensive study on the acquisition of tense and aspect of European Portuguese by L2 learners in general, and more specifically on the acquisition of those categories of European Portuguese by Chinese learners. 14. In italics in the original. 15. 1SG was not considered as the number of tokens is too scarce to be included in a probabilistic analysis. 16. The standard infinitive derived form and the 3SG are the basic creole verb forms of Makista, corresponding to the basilect and mesolect of this creole. The PP form appears to be a recent entry in the system, corresponding to the phase of greater influence from the lexifier. 17. These 21 tokens carry 1SG marking.

Glossing abbreviations CONT HAB INF IRR LOC NEG PL POSS PP PR PROG PRF PRT SG

continuous habitual infinitive irrealis locative negative plural possessive perfect preterite present tense progressive perfective particle singular

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—. 2008. The Emergence of Pidgin and Creole Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Carlota S. 1991. The Parameter of Aspect. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Sprouse, Rex. 2006. “Full transfer and relexification: Second language acquisition and creole genesis.” In L2 Acquisition, edited by Christine Lefebvre, Christine Jourdain, and Lydia White: 169–181. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Teixeira, Manuel. 1982. A Educação Em Macau. [Education in Macau.] Macau: Direcção Dos Serviços de Educação. Tomás, Maria Isabel. 2004. O Kristang de Malaca: Processos Linguísticos e Contextos Sociais na Obsolescência das Línguas. [Malacca Kistang: Linguistic and Social Contexts of Language Obsolescence.] Unpublished PhD Dissertation. Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Valdman, Albert. 1980. “Creolization and second language acquisition.” In Theorectical Orientations in Creole Studies, edited by Albert Valdman and Arnold Highfield, 297–311. New York: Academic Press. Vendler, Zeno. 1967. Linguistics in Philosophy. Cornell: Cornell University Press. Weinreich, Uriel. 1953. Languages in Contact. The Hague: Mouton. Winford, Donald. 2007. “Some issues in the study of language contact.” Journal of Language Contact – THEMA 1 (2007): 22–40.

CHAPTER FOUR LANGUAGING: WAYS-OF-BEING-WITH-WORDS ACROSS DISCIPLINARY BOUNDARIES AND EMPIRICAL SITES SANGEETA BAGGA-GUPTA Abstract This empirically driven multidisciplinary study is broadly framed in the intersections of Communication Studies, Literacy Studies, Deaf Studies and Educational Sciences and takes a socioculturally oriented, postcolonial perspective on language and the meaning-making processes of everyday life. An overarching aim is to contribute to the academic domain of (what is glossed as) bi/multilingual research from bi/multilingual multimodal perspectives. The sets of multi-site and multiscale data, which are presented here, are from ethnographic projects at the Communication, Culture and Diversity (CCD) research group at Örebro University in Sweden. The analysis highlights that ways of conceptualizing, reporting and “talking about bi/multilingualism” are not in sync with mundane languaging or ways-of-being-with-words, or people’s engagement in everyday “bi/multilingual communication” inside and outside institutional settings. The role of the written word as a technology in relationship to languaging in a broad sense and ways in which written, oral, and signed words are handled across everyday life are explored through a range of representations like “transcripts at the meso and micro scales”, “thick accounts”, “video-grabs” and “maps”. Focusing the ways in which individuals in different communities language— convened in public spaces or in more stable organizations like work places or schools—makes visible the performative active work that participants (and institutions) “do” with symbols and tools. Language is empirically accounted for not as the sole property of an individual, community of practitioners or geopolitical state, but rather in terms of an intrinsic performatory dimension of interlinked language varieties and modalities

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on the one hand and humans in concert with tools on the other in face-toface and textually mediated sites. Focusing social practices—what gets communicated and the ways in which the same occurs—allows for problematizing the oral language bias in academic reporting and dominant monolingual-monomodality positions in addition to the monological essentialistic colonial perspectives on language.

1. Introduction A focus upon situated-distributed mundane communication in this article represents an interest in language-use or what has more recently come to be termed languaging and translanguaging. This interest focuses meaning-creating semantic processes that differ from linguistic, psychological, sociological, developmental and/or (special) educational perspectives. Focusing social practices—more specifically, what gets communicated, in what manner, and in which sites and communities of practitioners this unfolds—allows for critically scrutinizing the dominating monolingual-monomodal colonial positions and monological perspectives that continue to shape understandings of language in general and the relationship between language, communities or geopolitical spaces in particular, not least in the global North. This empirically driven multidisciplinary study is broadly framed at the intersections of Communication Studies, Literacy Studies, Deaf Studies and Educational Sciences traditions. Recognizing the historical development and the heuristic nature of different established and emerging domains in the Language Sciences requires paying due attention to analytical-methodological framings at the epistemological level. Regardless of the concepts that are used to describe and discuss different dimensions of communication, the analytical approaches used here recognize the need to (re)conceptualize language, spaces and entities, beyond the notion of boundaries. Meaning-making processes in everyday life are here accorded primacy when compared to formal structural properties of linguistic variation and modalities. Meaning takes place within specific social relations […] produced and construed by agents with expectations and repertoires that have to be grasped ethnographically […] Meaning is far more than just the ‘expression of ideas’, and biography, identifications, stance and nuance are extensively signaled in the linguistic and textual fine-grain (Rampton 2007, 585).

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My aim in this chapter is to highlight how analysis at different scales, including the use of time and space, informs issues related to communication or languaging. Research on multimodality by scholars who focus on face-to-face interaction on the one hand (e.g. Duranti and Goodwin 1992; Goodwin 1981, 2003), and texts and images on the other (Kress 1997, 2003), has in the last few decades thrown important light on the complex nature of human communication. Covering these separate areas of scholarship is both beyond the scope of this article but also not my specific agenda here. For present purposes, I would like to point towards both “the oral language bias” (Bagga-Gupta 2012a) as well as “the monolingual bias” (Bagga-Gupta 2013a; Fishman and Garcia 2010; Gal 2007; Gal and Irvine 1995) in analytical reporting in the academic fields of multimodality, bi/multilingualism and literacy, to name a few. The former highlights the privileging of the oral modality in studies that focus human communication. For instance, use of the written modality and time and space—important dimensions that frame human communication— are ignored or not made visible in the analysis when social interaction is up-fronted (e.g. in positions such as ethnomethodology, sociolinguistics, ethnography of speaking [sic], etc). Furthermore, a dominating trend in the literature (e.g. reporting in the Educational Sciences, Conversational Analysis, etc) equates communication as being equivalent to monolingual (oral) talk. The use of multiple language varieties in mundane face-to-face and written communication either gets compartmentalized in the academic domains of bilingual studies or second or foreign language acquisition and/or the use of different language varieties is ignored in the reporting. My concern here, augmented from a postcolonial perspective (see, e.g. Apple and Buras 2006; Bagga-Gupta 2004a, 2013a; Maldonado-Tores 2011; Mignolo 2009), is to raise issues regarding these types of de-privileging, currently common in different academic domains of the Language Sciences. Such marginalization continues to eclipse significant dimensions of communication. Going beyond both the oral language bias and the monolingual bias, my analytical aim here is to highlight alternate contributions from finely tuned understandings of ways-of-being-withwords1 (Bagga-Gupta 2006, 2010, 2014 [in press]; Heath 1983) from different empirical sites and disciplinary domains. As I outline below, focusing data from different projects enables the emergence of common analytical ideas. Poststructurally framed shifts that centre-stage a social practices position offer a performatory lens to the field of Communication Studies. Action-oriented concepts like “languaging” and “translanguaging”2 can be

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understood as renewed attempts to sidestep monological static understandings subscribed to the noun-oriented concept “language”. This has seen scholars like Garcia (2009), Linell (2009) and Jørgensen (2008) draw attention to the monological connotations attached to concepts like codes, switching, and the need to address the hybrid and heteroglossic (Bachtin 1981) nature of human communication. Going beyond more static concepts such as bilingualism and language in its monolithic sense, concepts like plurilingualism, polylingualism, metrolingualism, etc. emerged at the end of the 20th century, and action-related concepts languaging and translanguaging more recently. Languaging, in the sense it is being used here, is fundamentally social and dynamic. Its situated-distributed character is scrutinized in this article across both temporal and empirical sites. Highlighting some of the dimensions that contribute to the complexities of languaging, taken up here, thus entails attending to aspects of human behavior that make visible its written, oral, signed and embodied nature including the use of different language varieties. Thus the overarching aim of the work presented here is to continue contributing to the academic domain of (what is glossed as) bi/multilingual research from bi/multilingual perspectives. This adds to my specific long-term interest in highlighting the role of research and its discourses in the reproduction of selective understandings related to language generally and language learning specifically. The cultural linguistic systems of meaning (Bachtin 1981; Linell 1993, 2009), which are here termed language varieties, “are sociocultural constructions which certainly are important but rarely represent real-life language use” (Jørgensen et al 2011, 28). However important and interesting borders between language varieties and modalities may be to researchers interested in language issues, boundaries are not and have never been a key concern in the daily lives of people who are glossed as being bi- or multilinguals. This being said, monolingual positions in academics and institutional learning contexts continue (in large parts of the global North at least) to obscure the fact that the majority of the people in the world live lives engaging with and deploying resources from more than one language variety (Gal 2007). This colonial linguacentrism furthermore recognizes only in a limited manner that routine ways of meaning-making or communication in mundane life inside and outside institutional settings like schools, work places, service agencies, etc. are not only rich sites for research, but that languaging here needs to be attended to from multilingual and multimodal points of departure (BaggaGupta 1995, 2013a; Garcia 2009). Highlighting this postcolonial critique on the continuing “monolingual bias” that colors bi/multilingual studies

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can be appropriately sensed in Grosjean’s formulation from nearly two decades ago: “Few areas of linguistics are surrounded by as many misconceptions as is bilingualism” (1996, 20; see also Bagga-Gupta 1995, 2012b; Gal 2007; Gal and Irvine 1995; Rosen and Bagga-Gupta 2013, In press). Languaging, in the study reported here, is recognized and conceptualized in two fundamental ways: in terms of a continuum and fluidity where communication glossed as bi/multilingualism and writtenoral-signed multimodalities are centre-staged, and the analysis in the research enterprise takes multilingual and multimodal points of departure. In other words, micro scale analyses of slices of textually-oriented communication and differently scaled analyses explore the performances and irreducible dialectical dimensions of languaging across the boundaries of disciplines, empirical sites as well as language varieties and modalities. This then is what I attempt to do in the study presented here. This article is structured as follows. Section 2 briefly explicates the analytical framings employed and introduces my data sources. The central empirical Section 3 presents analyses of examples and a synthesis from different data-sets and spaces: textual artefacts used and produced inside and outside institutional settings, everyday communication and use of space in special educational settings. The concluding Section 4 summarizes salient issues highlighting the need for theoretically and empirically informed multidisciplinary analysis in the Language Sciences.

2. Analytical-methodological framings The ways in which human beings live in language (van Lier 2004) and their languaging (Garcia 2009; Linell 2009) has an implicit but also an overt bearing upon socialization or learning, including the learning of language-use in different spaces. As Liddicoat frames it, a “text, whether written or spoken, is a performance of communication” (2009, 124). Highlighting performatory and accounting practices in terms of the ways in which (language) categories and positions get “talked-written-signedinto-being” and become framed in mundane interactions and textual inscribings shifts the analytical lens away from (i) language as an autonomous system, and (ii) the “real” meanings that reside in and are ascribed to the irreducible symbiotic relationships between people, communities and language varieties or modalities.

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2.1. Unit of analysis and aims While shifts have been noted regarding conceptualizations of the relationship between the individual-collective and mind-body dichotomies, these tend to have occurred primarily at the theoretical or philosophical levels. Here I situate these by discussing the multilayered nature of everyday life analytically and empirically through different data-sets. In established analytical framings the unit of analysis is the individual or policy or the individual and context, or (purported homogenous) communities. Going beyond these, in social practices perspectives, actorsin-(inter)action with cultural tools, or as Wertsch puts it “individual(s)acting/operating-with-mediational-means” (1998, 24), constitute the composite unit of analysis. Thus, taking a sociocultural or a socially oriented position and a postcolonial framework on human ways-of-beingwith-words, the aim of this contribution is twofold: Firstly, by making detailed descriptions of mundane languaging across time and space, I make visible the performatory nature of language generally and the glossed concepts multimodality and bi/multilingual communication specifically. Secondly, by using a range of representations, my aim is to illustrate the ways in which empirically driven analysis of human-tool and human-sign interactions (see below) across settings allows for revisiting framings related to language. A salient difference between a sociocultural perspective on communication (Vygotsky 1934/1962; Wertsch 1998; Säljö 2005) and other framings of communication in the Language Sciences is related to the role attributed to cultural tools, including language. In addition to the performatory dimensions of languaging, these tools are recognized as having emerged phylogenetically over time in our species and as being appropriated ontogenetically in the individual human lifespan. The recognition accorded to the symbiotic relationship between cultural tools, including language—the “tool of tools”, and humans in concert with one another, accounts for the composite (and thus hyphenated) concepts, seen in sociocultural writings (see for instance Wertsch 1998). Here the bounded nature of individuals, communities and technologies is challenged analytically through the explicit focus upon the irreducible inter-connections of humans and mediational means or cultural tools. Such key theoretical ideas of the human-tool irreducible medley gives rise to an important analytical-methodological stance: in order to understand human behavior, including languaging, the research enterprise needs to (in a parallel irreducible manner) focus on the concert of actorsin-(inter)action-with-tools across different sites and across larger and

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smaller temporal and spatial units. Languaging in situ, instead of language per se or reported information by actors on dimensions of social practices, thus becomes the irreducible unit of analysis for analytical attention, irrespective of the scale—micro, meso or macro—of this attention. This then is what I attempt to attend to through a range of representations of languaging across sites in Section 3.

2.2. Multidisciplinary analysis and data-sets A multidisciplinary framing allows for liberating the analytical enterprise from the clutches of specificities that invariably emerge in separate academic fields over time. The fields of “language contact” and “second language acquisition” can illustrate this point. The established domain of language contact is recognized as having diversified into domains like bilingual studies, second or foreign or additional language acquisition studies, contact linguistics, historical linguistics among others. Furthermore, while the domain of contact linguistics recognizes that it is (bilingual) human beings who are in contact, the field has analytically focused contacts between communities defined by linguistic parameters in the same geopolitical spaces. In contrast, the field of second language acquisition has analytically concerned itself with the socialization of individual human beings into an additional language after a mother tongue has been acquired. Epistemologically, what these two fields (and quite a few other domains in the Language Sciences) share is the implicit or explicit continuing point of departure (and concomitant belief) in the bounded or compartmentalized nature of any given language. What is recognized as one distinct language is inevitably in contact with another separate language variety or dialect. Having said this, two significant issues can be highlighted for present purposes. Firstly, as has been spelled out above, however interesting heuristically important contacts between linguistically defined language systems are for researchers, human beings in mundane situations communicate without paying overt attention to these boundaries. Secondly, not giving due recognition to forces that have historically created boundaries (irrespective of the social, political or religious reasons behind the same) between language varieties or dialects, or even within a single language3, continues to contribute to problematic “webs of understandings” (Bagga-Gupta 2012b) related to language and bilingualism. These webs of understandings, as I have discussed at length previously, arise and are maintained through mythical conceptualizations

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and metaphors like the “one language one nation” equation, “first, second, additional… language”, “numerical, vertical and horizontal language divisions” etc. (Bagga-Gupta 2004a, 2012a). Divisions between different modalities that comprise human communication are also part of these webs of understandings. The recent “modality turn” (Jewitt 2009), in similar fashion, makes visible modality-framed resources of mundane languaging, where the focus of analysis is human interactions in social media settings. Multimodality however frames all face-to-face languaging and not just communication in digital contexts. Furthermore, the Literacy Studies tradition (see Scribner and Cole 1981; Heath 1983) too builds upon an oral-written (multimodal) continuum. Thus, attending to mundane interactions inside and outside different institutional sites potentially enables making visible a range of communicative resources and signs of languaging in social practices. To reiterate, my purpose in the study presented here is to illustrate these analytical issues through empirical evidence from across different sites (that are traditionally attended to in separate academic disciplines). Regardless of the concepts that are used to describe and discuss different dimensions of communication (including identities that are evoked or conferred upon individuals or communities), the analytical approaches deployed here thus recognize the need to (re)conceptualize language, identity, time and space, beyond the notion of boundaries (Akkerman and Bakker 2011; Bagga-Gupta 2013a). The point is that intersections and transitions are inbetween spaces (Krzyzanowski 2010) in their own right and constitute rich sites for understanding how dimensions of communication are privileged and/or overlooked. This, I argue, justifies that the analytical focus is on the borderlands and interfaces of disciplinary boundaries and empirical sites themselves. Here the analyses of ethnographic recordings of activities from projects in different sites allow for juxtaposing explorations of language varieties side by side.4 These sites can be conventionally described in terms of written texts that circulate in public and institutional urban spaces in the global North and South (see Section 3.1); and, segregated special schools for the deaf in the global North (see Section 3.2). I have argued previously (and above) that, while a ‘compensatory perspective’ guides the activity and institutional field of bilingual education […] critical multilingual and participatory perspectives themselves make up marginal positions in the bilingual research landscape. In other words, there exists both a dominance of monolingual points of departure and a parallel paucity of research that focuses social practices in the bulk of the research that informs the

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thematic area of bilingual research (Bagga-Gupta 2012b, 88, emphasis in original).

Furthermore, and as the analysis presented in the next section reinforces, ways of conceptualizing and “talking about bi/multilingualism” are not in sync with mundane languaging or ways-of-being-with-words, or people’s engagement in everyday “bi/multilingual talk” inside and outside institutional settings. The ways in which written, oral and signed words are handled across everyday spaces and life is explored in the next section. “Transcripts at the meso and micro scales”, “thick accounts”, “videograbs” and “maps” of languaging across time and space are presented and discussed. The conventional labels, used for the language varieties and modalities deployed in the data-sets explored in this study include: (i) written Swedish, written English; (ii) written Hindi, written English; and (iii) multimodalities in Swedish Sign Language, (henceforth SSL)5, in addition to Swedish. Let us turn our attention first to micro scale analyses of slices of textually-oriented communication and then multi-scaled analyses to explore the performances and irreducible dialectical dimensions of languaging across the boundaries of disciplines, empirical sites as well as language varieties and modalities.

3. Performing and making visible languaging The different data-sets presented and explored in this section have been purposefully chosen from sites that contrast with one another. Analytically they display, in a range of ways, some of the many layers of complexity that characterize languaging: the linking of different conventional language varieties (Sections 3.1 and 3.2) as well as modalities (more specifically attended to in Section 3.2). The three examples in Section 3.1 highlight the chained manner in which different language varieties are deployed in three written languaging sites: Example 1 illustrates the fluidity between Swedish and English, two different language varieties that share a similar orthography in the written modality; and, Examples 2 and 3 illustrate the fluidity between Hindi and English, two language varieties that conventionally deploy different script systems in the written modality. Section 3.2 sees the intertwined-cum-layered use of language varieties and modalities in analyses of face-to-face interactions in spaces that constitute special schools for the deaf. This section also illustrates the in situ nature of the dialectical performance of ways-of-being-with-words,

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highlighting the fluidity between different language resources from two language varieties—SSL, fingerspelling and written Swedish (primarily), as well as the intertwining of different modalities in languaging. The data presented in Sections 3.1 and 3.2 thus exemplifies the complexity of waysof-being-with-words in a gradual progression where each data-set builds upon issues that are highlighted in the previous ones. The analysis illustrates that communication is modality intertwined-cum-layered and mediated in and through a range of language resources.

3.1. Chained meaning-making flows in mundane textual spaces Within fields such as writing, multimodal studies and policy studies, a discourse or semiotic analytical approach to the study of textual, policy materials, advertisements of special deals (see Figure 3-1) or formal and mundane inscriptions (see Figures 3-2 and 3-3) entails the scrutiny of texts, discourses, resources or dimensions of pictures, symbols, layout, etc. My interests here lie in illuminating languaging in textual inscribings that are consumed or produced as part of people’s everyday lives with a specific focus on the language varieties used and displayed in them. Here, as we will see, understanding languaging (verb) via the reproduction and maintenance of boundaries between language codes (noun) can only be maintained through an outsider, non-participant’s etic standpoint. From an insider emic participant performatory position, there exists a seamless meaning-making continuum in such textual spaces. In other words, the three examples of mundane texts explored below constitute rich sites of boundary-work (Akkerman and Bakker 2011; Bagga-Gupta 2013a) and inbetweenness (Krzyzanowski 2010). 3.1.1. Languaging in and for public spaces—a pizza deal An in-depth semiotic analysis of a recent special deal by an international pizza chain in Örebro, Sweden entails attention being drawn to features such as textual layout, pictures, the written information displayed, etc. For present purposes, I will highlight aspects of the written text (see Figure 3-1), paying particular attention to meaning-making potentials of the ways-of-being-with-words that they afford. Going beyond language correctness and bounded understandings of language codes, users of Swedish and English who come into contact with this advert will

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perhaps note the playful (and skillful) manner in which lexical items from the language varieties (and pictorial affordances) are deployed.

HOLE/whole/all INCLUSIVE ͸visiting temporarily 6 May –16 June͸ GUESS WHAT? We have made a hole/whole/all in our new pizza and have placed a Crispy mix-sallad in the middle. Crazy, or what? We celebrates the summer sun with Pizza Sun, a tasty and thin pizza with aubergine, pesto, sun-dried tomatoes, mozzarella-cheese, chicken breast, champinjoner, bell peppers and parmesan-cheese as really nice topping AND IT’S REALLY HOLE/whole/all INCLUSIVE. Figure 3-1.6 Languaging in textual inscriptions—whole/hole pizza advertisement and translation (bolded words: Swedish; unmarked words: English; italicized words: phonetic translation of words with Swedish spelling and English meanings; shaded – 6, 16, ? .: common inscriptions (numbers, punctuation) in both Swedish and English; underlined words: common words in Swedish and English and other language varieties).

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While specific English lexical items can be identified in the text (inclusive, crazy, celebrates, tasty, and, tomatoes, topping), a number of items lie at the borderland of both conventional Swedish and English (including other language varieties): numbers 6 and 12, pizza, aubergine, pesto, mozzarella, parmesan. Furthermore, one may consider phrases like Guess what? and And it’s really hole/whole/all inclusive as part of the language repertoires of many people, particularly the below 40s, who live in the geopolitical spaces of Sweden. The playful use of hole/whole/all inclusive in the title and the text body that follows builds perhaps on the “all inclusive” travel package deals of the globe-trotting Swede. Phonetic translations of two word items that have Swedish spellings (hål and najs) and English meanings—hole/whole/all and nice—also highlight the playfulness and the modern globe-trotting Swedes’ languaging repertoires. Concepts like language (code) switching or alternation or borrowing (Auer 1998) are problematic here since fluidity is the very essence of the text, and which language is being borrowed into which language matrix is far from clear-cut. The use of chained and linked language varieties in this textual space is a seamless hybrid way-of-being-with-words which is neither ad hoc nor particularly exceptional. It is, to use a conventional concept in the Language Sciences, a hybrid chained “code”, a languaging characterized by a specific way-of-being-with-words. Making visible this complexity entails an analytical viewing that takes bi/multilingual points of departure. 3.1.2. Languaging in institutional work—a collectively authored wall chat While the two language varieties—Swedish and English—displayed in Figure 3-1 both share the same script (Latin), this is not the case with the next two examples taken from work place settings and represented in Figures 3-2 and 3-3. Everyday written languaging in institutional settings like work places displays the fluidity and chaining of language varieties in ways that are similar to the linking highlighted above. The two examples in this subsection are taken from the ongoing GTGS project7 where issues of communication and identity are explored inside and outside MMC8, a not-for-profit organization that provides a range of services for migrant construction laborers, their families and children in a megacity in the global South. The specific data-sets focus upon everyday written communication in what is glossed as multilingual spaces of MMC educational centers and women staff empowerment workshops. Figures 3-

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2 and 3-3 illustrate languaging in the context of everyday textual work in a wall chart that displays women staff’s weekly responsibilities at a MMC center and board work at an empowerment workshop for the women staff.

STAFF work distribution CENTER - agripada day making food cleaning monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday saturday

shubhangi sandhya sandhya nanda nanda shubhangi asha sandhya vidya shubhangi on STAFF’S discretion

going to COMMUNITY vidya asha sandhya shubhangi nanda

prayer nanda shubhangi shubhangi sandhya sandhya

Figure 3-2. Women staff’s weekly responsibilities displayed on a wall chart (CAPITALIZED WORDS: transliterated Latin script English words into Devanagari script; regular and bolded words: Hindi words in Devanagari script).

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The notational space of a wall chart that displays staff responsibilities across a week highlights use of Hindi words in the Devanagari script (day, discretion, work, distribution, making food, cleaning, prayer, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday) chained with English terms that have been transliterated into the Devanagari script (staff, center, community).9 Furthermore, the six working week days and staff names10 are color-coded (in the original chart). Conventionally, scripts deployed to write the language varieties Hindi and English use the Devanagari and Latin systems respectively. Transliteration of English word items into the Devanagari script (staff, center, community) here displays the seamless nature of mundane “bilingual” written communication, as well as the work place flavor of urban languaging (compare metrolingualism, Otsuji & Pennycook 2010). The fluidity of languaging in the everyday work of women MMC staff emerges both as a result of the communication repertoires of the members of this community, as well as in response to the Non-governmental organizations’ (NGO) multifaceted tasks in its provision of child care, health services, education, etc. for migrant communities and their children.

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3.1.3. Languaging in institutional work—board work at an empowerment workshop

day 29-4-2013 aunty children xxxx xx

PRIMARY art-craft WORKSHOP subject  environment name of story shobhna (1) going on a PICNIC on green grass xx

Figure 3-3. Languaging at an empowerment workshop: a video-grab (bolded words: Hindi; CAPITALIZED WORDS: transliterated English words in Devanagari script; 29, - (1): common inscriptions (numbers, punctuation) in both Hindi and English; underlined words: common words (generic names, proper names) in Hindi, English and other language varieties; xxx: obstructed words).

The final example in this subsection is drawn from video data from an empowerment workshop at MMC. The analysis focuses upon a video-grab of some routine board work, where one member of a discussion group, entrusted with the task of accounting for its discussion, is writing salient themes on the whiteboard. Generic relational terms like aunty, used frequently in Mumbaiya Hindi for all adult women, and proper names (Shobhna) are written in the Devanagari script and at least two English word items (primary, workshop) are transliterated into Devanagari. In addition, the convention of using European Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, 4…), rather than the conventional Devanagari script associated Hindi-Arabic

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numerals (C, D, E, F…), further illustrates the fluid nature of languaging in the bi/multilingual ways-of-being-with-words in these spaces. Analysis of data from these institutional spaces—wall charts that are public displays as well as inscriptions that constitute process texts that are temporarily displayed on boards—allow for insights to be drawn from the complex ways in which individuals and groups perform language. Structural boundaries that are frequently drawn between one language variety and another neither attend to these complexities nor the performatory aspects of how people communicate—irrespective of whether it is a formal display of staff members’ responsibilities on a wall chat at MMC centers (Figure 3-2) or the accounting of a group’s discussion on the board (Figure 3-3). Using postcolonial lenses of bi/multilingual perspectives in the analysis allows us to view and recognize the interplay and fluidity across language varieties. Such chaining repertoires constitute resources that people draw upon in everyday languaging. The ways-of-being-with-words in written texts in public and institutional spaces, presented in this subsection, thus display fluidity that characterizes languaging. Peoples’ performatory agency in the deployment of such resources is perhaps at odds with how we, analysts situated in the Language Sciences, routinely conceptualize language boundaries. 3.1.4. Discussion—chaining as a dimension of languaging The analysis so far shows that focusing communication from bi/multilingual and language as action perspectives in textual spaces allows us to “see” the intricate ways in which language varieties and chaining as a resource are at play. The pizza advert in a global North site, the wall chat or what the discussion group leader writes on the board in global South sites are not merely made up of one or two discreet language varieties with clear-cut boundaries; rather they display a systematicity that is here conceptualized in terms of linking and chaining. Figure 3-1 strikingly displays present-day languaging repertoires of the digital globetrotting members of the geopolitical spaces of Sweden. Figures 3-2 and 33 display a collectively authored text and participants’ engagement with a range of issues, discussed in a workshop group, inscribed in an institutional context. More importantly, an apparently seamless or chained flow of languaging is displayed where at least two language varieties are deployed by participants in each of the examples focused above. The human-tool performatory dimension of languaging has been attended to in

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this section in an implicit manner. The analysis at the textual scale of the advert, the wall chat and the board work can only make sense in the context of the community of practitioners where they become meaningmaking resources in contexts of social practices (of placing a meal order, of distributing or discussing staff workloads, of reporting in a workshop). The human-tool dimension will be center-staged through an analysis at different scales in the next subsection. Furthermore, the analysis above suggests that contact in and between varieties is not an anomaly. Rather it is a dominant pattern of languaging in different sites. This fluidity of languaging is a fundamental aspect of social practices particularly in settings characterized by diversity and where the written modality is drawn upon. One can say that the human condition of languaging is littered with a complexity that is (in)accessible to us analysts from the outside—as members of academic tribes who are both colored by Eurocentric monolingual understandings of language-use as well as from our etic ivory tower Language Science lenses. From emic participant positions, the large majority of people in the world language in ways where more than one variety is in concert with other varieties and with tools (as the empirical analysis makes clear in the next subsection). Making this type of mundane complexity visible in analysis from bi/multilingual perspectives has important applications in the fields of Education and Communication Sciences.

3.2. Chained handling of tools and spaces in special schools The analyses presented here bridge the complexities of languaging across written-oral-signed modalities and tangible dimensions of time and space as they get played out in the everyday lives of adults and pupils in institutional settings. The second data-set that I engage with to make visible languaging generally, and the “language variety cum modality continuum” especially, through analytical representations of naturally occurring communication is taken from what is conventionally called segregated bilingual schools for the deaf. Swedish schools for the deaf are, both previously and at present, accounted for in terms of arenas where deaf children can be, or rather should be, educated in and though their oral needs, or their SSL needs, or their bilingual needs, or their social needs, etc. during different historical periods (see Domförs 2000; Bagga-Gupta 2004b; Holmström 2013). The data explored below come from sets of projects11 in what can be perceived of as the “SSL needs” period, i.e. 1990s to the early part of this century.

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Aspects of the linked and chained ecology of bilingual ways-of-beingwith-words from my long term research engagement in segregated schools, where deaf pupils and both deaf and hearing adults are members, have contributed to challenging the structural view of bilingualism that has dominated national policy and conceptualizations in these schools since the mid-1990s (Bagga-Gupta 2002, 2004c, 2010, 2012a).12 While these dimensions of “bilingual talk”13 have highlighted the fallacy of conceptualizing the language varieties of Swedish and SSL as “in need” of being kept apart, the data explored in this subsection illustrates the chained ecology of languaging through analysis of mundane practices, including the spatial and temporal framings involved in a specific subject—SSL—in these schools. SSL is a core compulsory subject that deaf pupils have guaranteed access to in segregated school settings.14 How discursive tools (e.g. smartboard, computer, smart-phones) are engaged with and how languaging unfolds in these SSL subject instructional spaces is attended to via empirical analysis at three scales here: at a spatial organizational scale (Section 3.2a), an overarching lesson phase scale (Section 3.2b) and at the micro interactional scale (Section 3.2c). In the specific SSL lesson data under scrutiny, seven pupils from grade three (nine years of age) consume and (re)produce written texts in order to be able to structure a SSL narrative (i.e. a video-text). Going beyond the scale of the textual data-sets analyzed in Section 3.1, my attempt here is to illustrate the multilayered fluidity with which different language varieties and modalities are deployed against the backdrop of how time and space are organized and used. Here the continuum of language varieties and modalities is augmented, importantly, with the human-tool continuum.15 Three main types of instructional settings have been identified in previous analysis of the interactional order in school lessons more generally: teacher-led, mixed and individual desk-top lessons (Sahlström 1999; Bagga-Gupta 1999, 2002). As will be seen in the analysis below, SSL lessons represent mixed lesson-types where teacher-led instructional phases alternate with small group or individual work and/or whole class work phases (see Table 3-1). 3.2.1. Handling spaces and discursive-technological tools The presence and uptake of smart-phones, 3G and 4G networks and other technologies has been earlier in the lives of deaf people—both inside and outside school settings—as compared to the hearing majority in

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Sweden (Holmström and Bagga-Gupta 2013). This also emerges in the comparative analysis of educational spaces: a relatively larger range of tools is present in segregated deaf schools as compared to hearing schools in Sweden. This allows for an enhanced scrutiny of the human-tool interface in studies of these spaces. Figure 3-4 constitutes representational composite maps that highlight artifacts and discursive-technological tools available in the SSL lesson spaces at segregated primary, secondary and high schools for the deaf. This scale of data analysis allows for understanding a participant’s use of both analog and digital tools over time in these spaces. A striking feature of the main SSL classroom is its “U” shaped or halfcircle arrangement of tables and chairs (see Figure 3-4). The teacher, whiteboard or smart-board and different tools like a TV, computer, video devices, overhead projectors, etc. are positioned in the front part or the opening of the “U”. This U-formation is a common feature of the spatial organization in school environments where deaf, hard-of-hearing and children with Cochlear Implants (CI) are members in Sweden (and other parts of the global North). This spatial arrangement can be accounted for by the visually-oriented nature of languaging in deaf educational settings (Bagga-Gupta 1999, 2004c). In addition, maps hang from the roof; posters and digital pictures from excursions and other group activities and pupils’ own texts and creative works are available on the walls. It is not uncommon for a video-camera to be positioned on a tripod in SSL classrooms and smart-boards made their appearances in these spaces fivesix years ago. Pupils in these schools have their own working books in their individual desks and files and other working materials in the cupboards in the classroom (see Figure 3-4). The cupboards also house materials and books of relevance for the ongoing theme that the class may be working with during a particular semester. There may be a texttelephone in the classroom if the teacher is deaf; a telephone mounted on the wall if the teacher is hearing. With the advent of smart-phones, these discursive-technologies are becoming obsolete in the segregated special schools.

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SSL classroom

Språk Box Figure 3-4. Composite floor map of SSL classrooms and Språk Boxes at segregated special schools for the deaf in Sweden.

Specific satellite spaces within or in the vicinity of SSL classrooms called “Språk boxes” (Swedish: Language boxes) are made use of, in addition to the main SSL classroom during these SSL lessons (see Figure 3-4). The two together constitute the learning spaces of the SSL subject classroom. Språk Boxes are technologically infused spaces where a pupil

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can retreat with the purpose of producing a SSL text by using videocreating tools (see Figures 3-4 and 3-5). Here a table and a chair are cordoned off from the main SSL classroom space by a curtain or a door. A video recorder-cum-player with a screen (TV or laptop) stands on top of the table. A paper holding device usually stands beside the video and screen. Deaf children in Swedish segregated special schools are introduced to video-recording and playing tools from the primary grades onwards. My fieldwork, across grades, schools and over time has highlighted the technological savviness and nuanced handling of tools that deaf children, young people and adults display. The use of discursive-technological tools and spaces, and the flow of activities in these spaces are both framed by and themselves frame the language modalities and varieties deployed by the participants here (see below). Leaving the scale of the organization of spaces in the SSL lessons, the next subsection zooms into the scale of languaging, including the human-tool continuum in these sites. 3.2.2. Languaging in and across SSL lessons: activity- and localchaining Lessons in SSL (or in social sciences and natural sciences) in segregated special schools are often organized into theme units that are studied during a couple of schooldays. Furthermore, the use of different language varieties in systematic and multilayered ways characterizes the communication here. Table 3-1 represents the participant constellations, the flow of language varieties that dominate the different phases and the tools used during the different phases of the SSL lesson in grade three16 that is in focus in this data-set. Seven children and two adults, a teacher and a resource person, are members in this study unit of two lessons across two days. The creation of a visual narrative enables collective analysis of the narrative during a whole class discussion phase of a SSL lesson (see Table 3-1, Day 2: Phase 2.3). The process of producing a visual narrative however necessitates the creation and notation of a narrative first on paper. In other words, pupils are required to (re)produce and (re)use a textual narrative, a written text that recycles in the classroom practices over time and across space in the course of the SSL lesson: -

the pupils write a narrative in the main classroom; adults and/or other pupils comment on this written narrative (see Table 3-1, Day 1: Phase 1.3);

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-

once this is approved the pupils individually create a list of keywords, also in the main classroom; the keyword list aids recall of the narrative as well as structures the visual narrative that pupils produce in the Språk Box (see Table 3-1, Days 1 and 2: Phases 1.3 and 2.2).

Table 3-1. Interlinked activity flows. SSL lesson-unit across two days in a segregated special school in Sweden (abbreviations: T: teacher; RP: resource person; Ps: seven pupils). Day/Lesson Phase (space) DAY ONE PHASES 1.1. Introduction (main classroom)

Language used (participants)

Tools (primary user)

SSL dominates (T) Written Swedish (T)

1.2. Lesson work/explanation (main classroom) 1.3. Work: individual or pairs (main classroom, Språk Box)

SSL dominates (T, Ps) Written Swedish (T, Ps) Written Swedish dominates (Ps, T, RP) SSL (Ps, RP, T)

Whiteboard (T) Curricular texts (T) Overhead (T) Whiteboard (T) Curricular texts (T) Overhead (T) Paper/pencils(Ps) Texts, curricular, popular (Ps) Whiteboard (T)

1.4. Closing (main classroom) DAY TWO PHASES 2.1. Brief introduction, re-cap, clarification (main classroom) 2.2. Work: individual (main classroom, Språk Box)

SSL only (T)

SSL (T, Ps) Written Swedish (T)

Overhead (T)

Written Swedish dominates (Ps, T) SSL dominates (Ps, RP, T)

Paper/pencils (Ps) Texts, curricular & popular (Ps) Whiteboard (T) Cameras, video recorders, tapes TV, video player, tapes Whiteboard (T)

2.3. Work: group (main SSL dominates (Ps, T) classroom) Written Swedish (T) 2.4. Closing (main SSL only (T) classroom)

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The teacher-lead phases on both days of the linked SSL lesson-unit are interwoven with individual or small-group work either in SSL or Swedish or a complex mixed pattern where both are in concert. This interweaving and mixing of different language varieties and modalities is similar to the pattern identified in the analysis of written data-sets in Section 3.1. This type of languaging over larger chunks of time has been conceptualized as “activity-chaining”, and across micro chunks of time as “local-chaining” in previous studies from both segregated special educational settings, but also bilingual hearing school and adult learning environments (Bagga-Gupta 1999, 2002, 2004c, 2010, 2012a; Hansen 2005; Gynne and Bagga-Gupta 2013; Messina Dahlberg and Bagga-Gupta 2013). Use of SSL dominates during specific phases (Table 3-1, Days 1 and 2: Phases 1.1, 1.2, 1.4, 2.3, 2.4) while Swedish (the written modality) dominates during others (Days 1 and 2: Phases 1.3, 2.2), and both modalities are intricately interwoven in large parts of the interactions during some (Day 2: Phases 2.1, 2.2, 2.3). In addition to the chaining of the two language varieties SSL and Swedish, there is a layering of different modalities here: (i) the visually-oriented signing modality on-thehands and mediated via technologies like TV, video player, whiteboard, etc. (including the composite signing resources of fingerspelling, mouthing, etc.), (ii) the written modality in textual tools like books, papers, whiteboard, etc., and, (iii) the oral modality on-the-mouth. Already existing texts in Swedish (in contrast to teacher-produced stencils and materials) are made use of routinely during SSL lessons. The written modality is used for pragmatic purposes, rather than for practicing literacy in a technical sense. Most teachers of SSL are deaf themselves. They commonly use discursive tools like overhead, whiteboard, smart-board, and existent Swedish literature during instructional work. As we saw above, pupils produce and recycle their own written narratives and keyword lists during SSL lessons. Comparative analysis has highlighted that this type of complex languaging where language varieties and modalities are chained is uncommon during Swedish, English and Mathematics lessons in these same school settings (see Bagga-Gupta 2002). Important didactical implications can be accrued from this: languaging where the use of resources including modalities from different language varieties is routine and authentic textual materials are consumed and produced (in comparison to especially designed materials) for multiple recipients (rather than solely for assessment by the teacher) enables participation in learning and teaching genres that differ substantially between the contrastive sets of lessons highlighted here. In other words, the

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chained resources in languaging that has been illustrated through the SSL data-set here creates opportunities to be socialized into ways-of-being-withwords that mediate and scaffold learning through multiple pathways where both SSL and Swedish language varieties play central roles. Group teachings’ interactional order is created in six of the total eight phases in the mixed lesson across two days illustrated in Table 3-1. Here the adults routinely encourage pupil-pupil and pupil-group interaction within the public interactional spaces of the lesson (as opposed to pupiladult interaction, which comprises the routine interactional order in Swedish, English and Mathematics lessons in these settings; see BaggaGupta 2002). Day 1: Phase 1.1: Phase 1.2:

Phase 1.3:

Phase 1.4: Day 2: Phase 2.1: Phase 2.2: Phase 2.3: Phase 2.4:

- attends to SSL talk and written Swedish instructions during whole class instruction - attends to SSL talk and written Swedish instructions during whole class instruction - looks through some curricular reference texts that the teacher has brought to the classroom - reads and makes notes on a paper; - creates a narrative on a new paper; - consults a peer twice and the teacher once; - creates a key-word list from the approved narrative; - observes attentively to a SSL explanatory exchange between the resource person and a peer - attends to SSL talk during whole class instruction - attends to SSL talk and written Swedish instructions during whole class instruction - consults the teacher once; - makes a SSL recording from a key-word list in the Språk Box - attends to SSL talk (face to face and via video narratives) during whole class instruction - attends to SSL talk during whole class instruction

Figure 3-5. One pupil’s (pupil -) interactional trajectory in an SSL classroom that stretches across two days.

Figure 3-5 represents the languaging and interactional trajectory of one of the seven pupils, pupil -, within the framework of the SSL lesson in focus here. The interactional trajectory of pupil - highlights, amongst

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other issues, the concert between one pupil’s engagement with the spatial environment and tools: the intellectual tools of different language varieties and technological tools like paper, pencils, video recorders and playing devices in both the main classroom and the Språk Box (see Figures 3-4 and 3-5). This scale of analysis too illustrates the complex and systematic use of a range of resources from SSL and Swedish, including different modalities. These are engaged with actively by the participants and enable the production of SSL narratives that can be shared and revisited or reviewed collectively during Phase 2.3 (see Table 3-1and Figure 3-5). The written modality (Swedish) and the signing modality (SSL) are (potentially) both visually accessible to the participants seated in the Uformation of the classroom. Participants however need to attend to these actively. If gaze is directed away from the whiteboard or the signer— teacher, resource person or peer—then meaning-potentials in the ongoing languaging are not available to -. Meaning-making and participation is thus visually mediated. The complex layering and mixing of communicative resources, including modalities, creates bridges or links between the different language varieties or the different cultural meaning systems, which give the participants—particularly young children— opportunities for meaning-potentials in different types of systems, including the system of written language (see also Padden 1996; Erting 1999; Hansen, Bagga-Gupta and Vonen 2009; Tapio 2013). As can be gauged from the representation of the interactional order at the phases-scale in the SSL lesson (Table 3-1 and Figure 3-5), tools and the interplay of the two dominating language varieties and modalities occur in a complex medley, rather than in some instrumental normative manner. The modality concert between SSL and (primarily written) Swedish is similar to the multimodal interface that is reported from studies of social practices in virtual arenas (Leander, Philips and Taylor 2010; Enriquez-Gibson 2013). Thus, the local-chaining at the modality level that emerges through the micro scale analysis here is similar to people’s interactions with digital tools in hearing settings (see also Aarsand, Melander and Evaldsson 2013; Bagga-Gupta 2013b; Messina Dahlberg and Bagga-Gupta 2013). In other words, the interactional order of activitychaining and local-chaining that have been identified in the SSL mixed lesson explored here (see also below) represent common multimodal languaging in other settings as well. A further didactical implication can be gleamed from what Mayer and Wells (1996, 104) have called the “nature and quality of exposure”, not least the ways in which written language interfaces with SSL in participants’ everyday lives. They suggest that rather than the amount of

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texts that deaf pupils are exposed to, it is the type of texts and the quality of social practices where pupils engage with these texts that constitute enabling or disabling aspects of participation and learning. This has educational significance, not least since issues related to literacy acquisition have been central in discussions related to deaf schools worldwide for over 130 years (Moores 1991; Marschark 1997; Chamberlain, Morford, and Mayberry 2000; Bagga-Gupta 2004b). As mentioned above, my previous studies from the projects in segregated special schools in Sweden have presented social practices and languaging at the micro and meso scales. A short example of a micro scale representation of local-chaining from a high school SSL lesson data is presented in Transcript 3-1.17 Linking of the two language varieties and modalities including the specific resource of fingerspelling18 in face-toface interaction at the segregated school sites is illustrated by four turns represented in Transcript 3-1. When a 17-year-old high school pupil, during the individual work phase of a SSL lesson, asks the teacher how the sign on-her-hands, glossed in turn 1 as AUTHORITY, should be writtenon-paper, he uses the resource of fingerspelling as a prompt (A-U-T) moving the interaction forward. The pupil is unsure about the written language spelling convention for the SSL sign AUTHORITY. Based on the prompt, -

-

the teacher (who appears unsure about the problem word) fingerspells the Swedish word, links it to the SSL sign AUTHORITY, fingerspells it again enquiring if that is the sign and fingerspelled word the pupil has requested assistance with (turn 2); the pupil nods approvingly, fingerspells the first four letters of the word on-his-hands, indicating with a facial expression that he had not succeeded in noting the entire fingerspelled word (turn 3); the teacher, in the final turn (4), fingerspells the word, writes the word on the whiteboard, presents the sign for the word, and finally points to the word she has written on the board.

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Transcript 3-1. Actors in interaction in high school segregated settings: SSL– Swedish languaging (adapted from Bagga-Gupta 2004:193-4). (CAPITALIZED WORDS: SSL talk; H-Y-P-E-R-N-A-T-E-D W-O-R-D-S: fingerspelling; [words within straight brackets]: supporting information; unmarked words: English translation of SSL-Swedish communication; : written language on whiteboard.) 1. Pupil: AUTHORITY HOW SPELL A-U-T [pause] official public authority A-U-T what 2. Teacher: MEAN A-U-T-H-O-R-I-T-Y PUBLIC AUTHORITY A-U-TH-O-R-I-T-Y [looks questioningly] do you mean public authority 3. Pupil: [Nods] A-U-T-H [pauses, looks questioningly] yeah, A-U-T-H, how is it spelled 4. Teacher: A-U-T-H-O-R-I-T-Y PUBLIC AUTHORITY [points to what she has written on the board] it is spelled A-U-T-H-O-R-I-T-Y; this is how it is written; this is how it is signed

Despite the one-to-one interactional order of such exchanges (primarily during Phases 1.3 and 2.2, see Table 3-1 and Figure 3-5), public displays of such interactions in the visual modality allow all deaf participants to potentially access the words on-the-hands as well as words displayed onthe-board. In addition to highlighting the existence of this complex communicative genre within visually-oriented institutional sites, such an analysis of languaging contributes to a nuanced and deeper understanding of both bilingualism and the layered dimensions of face-to-face literacies and modalities. Participants’ languaging and the human-tool concert, as illustrated in Table 3-1, Figure 3-5 and Transcript 3-1 particularly, once again, can be seen to be situated-distributed across individuals. A visualmanual dimension of languaging here highlights the subtle ways in which pupils’ and adults’ queries and responses build upon one another, rather than being a dimension of any one individual. Issues of access to the interactional order build upon a visual-modal orientation. This holds for both the language variety and modality on-the-hand and the language variety available on-the-board. An important dimension of languaging in visually-oriented learning environments where SSL is itself in focus, for instance the creation of SSL narratives in Språk Boxes and the consumption of SSL texts during Phase 2.3, is the need for engaging with Swedish. Swedish texts are (re)used during almost all phases of the SSL lesson (see Table 3-1 and Figure 3-5). Swedish texts are furthermore also produced (Phase 1.3) and consumed (Phases 1.3, 2.2) during SSL lessons. During specific phases when both the written language on-the-board or on-the-paper and the manual

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language on-the-hand overlap, participants are obliged to and adept at attending to and reproducing the written signs on paper (or digital media) on-their-hands (or the other way round as is illustrated in Transcript 3-1) in an intricate manner or they request for contributions from others who have experiences of the links between the signs on-the-paper/board and on-the-hands. These chunks of languaging, for instance asking a peer or adult for the spelling of a word during Phase 1.3 of the SSL lesson (see Table 3-1, Transcript 3-1), are a routine dimension of “bilingual” languaging or ways-of-being-with-words. While reading curricular texts that the teacher makes available during the SSL lesson, pupils often ask an adult or another peer “BETYDER VAD” (SSL ‘what does this mean?’). Pupils also commonly pause their individual writing in the middle of a sentence to enquire about the spelling of a SSL sign (see Transcript 3-1). For present purposes, what is interesting in this type of routine languaging is that participants engage with different resources from different language varieties and modalities at the micro scale. This linking is both situated as well as distributed between the participants, as is evident in and through Table 3-1, Figure 3-5 and Transcript 3-1. 3.2.3. Discussion—the human-tool continuum as a dimension of languaging The representations of languaging and the use of space and tools made available through the analysis above illustrate furthermore three aspects that are interesting. Firstly, technological tools are engaged with in terms of resources and a routine part of the ongoing interactional order in these segregated institutional learning sites. The deployment of space and tools here cannot be meaningfully understood without analytically focusing what participants do in specific activities. Secondly, different language resources and modalities at the micro and phase-scales constitute important dimensions of languaging. Different language varieties and modalities are used (see Transcript 3-1): fingerspelling, SSL and written Swedish. These resources are contingent upon a visual orientation and a finely tuned linking of modalities that both makes concrete as well as highlights participants’ performance, irrespective of whether this gets mediated via SSL on-the-hands, or via written words on-the-board/paper. Here one can critically discuss the opportunities for participation in meaning-making and learning that deaf pupils have access to in segregated (or mainstream) environments, rather than the different cultural linguistic

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systems of meaning – written Swedish, oral Swedish, SSL, etc. – that are and have been ideologically pushed as being the correct language or modality of instruction during the different historical phases in deaf education (Moores 1991; Bagga-Gupta 2004b). A third aspect of the multidimensional interaction that has been focused upon and illustrated here can be related to “bilingualism” in special schools for the deaf in Sweden. The fluidity of languaging, where different language varieties and modalities are linked to one another in complex and routine ways at different scales, exemplifies visually-oriented interaction where discursive tools are deployed as mediational means. Here semiotic resources and modalities from Swedish are interlinked with SSL in mundane classroom life. Local-chaining and activity-chaining are thus aspects of “bilingual” languaging and, and to rephrase Grosjean (1996), of “being in the bilingual mode” in visually-oriented institutional learning sites. Finally, going beyond the “needs” of deaf pupils in terms of a specific language variety or modality, the data and analyses presented here highlight dimensions of participants’ interactional order where language varieties and modalities are engaged with in a fluid manner. The dominant ideology that has framed deaf education in Sweden since the mid-1990s has envisaged the “needs” of deaf pupils vis-à-vis a specific language variety, i.e. SSL. Here SSL is seen as a prerequisite for subsequently acquiring another language variety, i.e. Swedish (Domförs 2000; Bagga-Gupta 2004b). This ideology also envisages the need for keeping these two language varieties apart from one another in learning sites. The systematic analysis of mundane social practices across time and space (as illustrated above) however suggests that this gets played out in quite a different and complex manner. In the segregated SSL learning settings focused here, a range of language varieties and resources are deployed by the participants in the process of creating and consuming a SSL narrative. The performance of bilingual languaging, thus appears to be at odds with the structural bilingual model that the segregated special schools have been envisioned upon.

4. Summarizing comments The different data-sets analyzed and discussed above in Sections 3.1 and 3.2 allow for a reviewing of human beings’ participation in a range of social practices across time and space. Analysis of interactional, spatial and temporal dimensions of textual communication and social practices has been represented through a range of techniques: sequential turn-by-

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turn “talk and text” in micro scale transcripts and figures, process flows of the interlinked interactional order in activity phases, organization of space and the use of tools via composite maps. Focusing upon languaging through a range of representations allows us to revisit the performance of language and un-package bi/multilingualism and multimodality as a dimension of this performance. The study of communication is a multidisciplinary endeavor and understanding the nature of language more specifically is multifaceted. It is nevertheless commonly dependent upon the disciplinary vantage point that disciplinary research enables. Over 40 years ago, communication scholars Carswell and Rommetveit (1971) envisaged that the .

time has definitely come to attempt to bridge the gap between […] disciplines purporting to deal with language behavior and communication processes. Each discipline has valuable data to offer future combined study of linguistic behavior in communication settings, but previous findings must be re-evaluated as the whole here is certainly not equal to the sum of its parts (1971, 7).

My aim in the study presented in this article has not been to present a coherent overview of language-use across sites as conceived by researchers working in different fields in the Language Sciences. Rather my interest has been to explore communication across disciplines and empirical sites with the intention of contributing to alternative and overarching understandings of languaging. The sociocultural and postcolonial analysis of empirical data presented in this chapter has highlighted the ways in which participants in different communities of practitioners language—convened in public spaces or in more stable organizations like work places or schools. Thus the analysis makes visible the performative active work that participants (and institutions) “do” with symbols and tools through representations of naturally occurring communication and mundane interactions. Language, from a socioculturally and postcolonially framed perspective, has been empirically accounted for not as the sole property of an individual, community of practitioners or geopolitical state, but rather in terms of an intrinsic performatory dimension of interlinked language varieties and modalities on the one hand and humans in concert with tools on the other in face-to-face and textually mediated sites. Juxtaposing data from different empirical sites has allowed for contrastive analysis of the dynamic and chained resources and meaningmaking that characterizes social life. Employing a range of representations illustrates some of the ways in which multimodal analysis of the humantool and human-sign interactions allows us to analytically revisit

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dimensions of language. Language, as we have observed, is more than one individual’s explicit use of a discursive or tangible material tool. In addition to its situated nature, we have also empirically observed its distributed character. The micro scale analysis represented in textual spaces, transcripts and other representations of languaging across spatial and temporal scales highlight explicitly the fact that modalities and actorsin-action-in-concert-with-others (including tools) are closely intertwined. For instance, languaging in restaurant adverts and institutional spaces in the global North and South comprises of different language varieties at play; languaging has a bearing upon the use of space and multimodal conventions in segregated special schools in the global North. We have seen how deaf pupils and deaf and hearing adults in school settings deploy a range of resources from both SSL and Swedish in the mundane work involved in creating SSL narratives in classroom work. The complex linking of different language varieties also comprises routine behaviors in public spaces during mundane practices at an NGO. The analysis of dimensions of languaging in terms of the meaning potentials of the “tool of tools” (rather than static meanings that reside in words or sentences) illustrates also how participants become apprenticed into different zones of linguistically related potential development. This can be compared with Vygotsky’s popular concept “zone of proximal development”. Such apprenticeship into different types of resources and genres of languaging contributes to and enables membership into a range of activities and arenas. Knowing how to participate in the languaging in a segregated deaf classroom or in a work place discussion is not primarily contingent upon individual participants’ skills in a specific language variety or modality. It is the situated-distributed nature of particular kinds of epistemic worlds (in the community of practioners) that are significant in the learning afforded in different sites. Discursive-technological tools enable access to “a range of multimodal signs” and constitutes a “new life order” (Jones and Hafner 2012, 85) where people’s communicative practices are part and parcel of the technologically infused life order in spaces like segregated special schools or NGOs or restaurant adverts. These tools and spaces (like whiteboards, wall charts, or Språk Boxes) create specific types of affordances (and perhaps curtail others) for the participants. They are framings of languaging and social practices where the pupil or adult or visitor participates, relates to, co-constructs, thinks and “is” in specific relationships with semiotic signs. Communication is displayed in and through the embodied languaging represented in the empirical examples from the data-sets explored in this article. Language as action, as

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empirically illustrated through different data-sets, builds upon fluidity where actors-in-interaction with others as well as mediational means get center-staged. Conceptualizing pupils or adults as participants separated from the affordances offered in and through the communicative practice they coconstruct in different sites would therefore comprise a reductionistic view of the practice. While participants’ oral contributions are primarily highlighted in much of the research literature that focuses social interactions, analyzing the multimodality of social practices raises a range of important insights that have a bearing upon our understandings of languaging more broadly. Language, in the data-sets explored in this article, can be seen to be layered and includes embodiment (for instance, highlighting, fingerspelling, writing, gazing) and the linking of oral or manual, textual and haptic dimensions of human conduct. An oral language bias in the reporting of interactionally focused research represents languaging in terms of written transcripts of (primarily) oral talk; or where what an individual says orally with regards to an issue (for instance in an interview) gets equated with the complexities that make up social life. A monolingual bias in the Language Sciences tends to obscure or make invisible the complex interplay of different language varieties (and dialects, sociolects, etc.) in the reporting on languaging. Taking multilingual points of departure and using a range of representational techniques however enables us to attend to the complexities of languaging (or translanguaging) and to go beyond both these biases. Rather than being the property of individuals or communities or nations, the research presented here illustrates the intrinsic performatory dimension of languaging by going beyond established academic and across different empirical sites.

Notes 1. Heath’s (1983) classical research, together with her colleagues, on “ways with words” where everyday communication in different communities and schools was studied across time and space, has been one source of inspiration in my studies on communication, culture and diversity. My interest lies upon ways-of-being or identification processes together with communication or human ways-with-words. Ways-of-being-with-words brings to center-stage what languaging is all about. 2. For present purposes I use these two concepts interchangeably. See also endnote 1. 3. The case of Hindi and Urdu are significant here. They share a fair amount of oral resources but have two completely different written scripts (see Chaudhary 2013; Sajjad 2013).

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4. The projects from which empirical data are analyzed and presented in this article are based at the Communication, Culture and Diversity, CCD research group (www.oru.se/humes/ccd, July 2014) at Örebro University, Sweden. 5. SSL, like oral, signed and/or written language varieties (eg. Swedish, English, Hindi, Japanese, American Sign Language, British Sign Language, etc.), is a “natural” human language built upon manual signs. 6. The written text in the advert is made available here for purposes of clarity: HÅL INCLUSIVE På tillfällig besök 6 maj-16 juni GUESS WHAT? Vi har gjort hål i vår nya pizza och ställt en krispig mixsallad in the middle. Crazy, eller hur? Vi celebrates sommarsolen med Pizza Sun, med tasty och tunn pizza med aubergine, pesto, suntorkade tomatoes, mozzarellaost, kycklingfilé, champinjoner, paprika and parmesanost som riktigt najs topping. AND IT’S REALLY HÅL INCLUSIVE. 7. The ongoing Gender Talk Gender Spaces project builds upon previous ethnographic fieldwork at a not-for-profit organization during 1991–93 (see Bagga-Gupta 1995, 2012b, 2014 [in press]). 8. The Mumbai Mobile Creches (http://www.mumbaimobilecreches.org/, July 2014). 9. Such records routinely display transliteration from Latin to Devanagari (BaggaGupta 1995, 2012b, 2014 [in press]). The transcription key for Figure 3-2 makes available information regarding the transliterated word items. 10. Hindi written in the Devanagari script does not make use of any capitalization convention (at the start of a sentence or to mark proper nouns). 11. I have conducted ethnographically oriented fieldwork since the mid-1990’s in these schools. For studies reported previously from these projects, see for instance Bagga-Gupta (1999, 2002, 2004a, 2004c, 2004d, 2010). 12. These projects at segregated schools are based within the Deaf Studies stream of the CCD research group since the mid-1990s. A recent project also explores the everyday lives of deaf children with Cochlear Implants, CIs (advanced hearingaids that are operated into the inner ear) in mainstream school settings. A dramatic increase of CI operations on very young deaf children in Sweden has been reported since the turn of the century (Holmström 2013). The data-set presented here is from projects at the segregated school settings from classrooms for the deaf at the primary and high school levels. 13. Compare with “talk about bilingualism” (Bagga-Gupta 2004d). 14. Deaf pupils in mainstream settings, for instance those with CI’s, do not have access to SSL as a subject in their curricula. See http://www.skolverket.se/omskolverket/andra-sprak-och-lattlast/in-english/the-swedish-education-system for information in English on the Swedish school system (July 2014). 15. I have previously described this type of languaging in terms of discursivetechnological communication and visually-oriented practices (see particularly Bagga-Gupta 1999, 2004c). 16. This is very similar to the organization of life in SSL lessons in secondary and high school sites. Two-three SSL lesson units of 45–60 minutes each commonly take place across one or two schooldays.

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17. See Bagga-Gupta (2004c) for an in-depth analysis from which this transcript has been adapted. 18. Similar to other Signed Languages, SSL is a language variety where a special embodied manual system—fingerspelling—is used for representing the Swedish alphabets (or alphabets from other Latin based language varieties) in a visualmanual modality on-the-hands.

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communities of practices.] In Literacy-praktiker i och utanför skola [Literacy practices inside and outside schools], edited by Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta, Ann-Carita Evaldsson, Caroline Liberg, and Roger Säljö, 19–40. Malmö: Gleerups. —. 2014 [in press]. “Performing and accounting language and identity: Agency AS actors-in-(inter)action-with-tools.” In Theorizing and Analyzing Agency in Second Language Learning: Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Ping Deters, Xuesong Gao, Elizabeth Miller, and Gregana Vitanova-Haralampiev. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Carswell, Elisabeth, A., and Ragnar Rommetveit, eds. 1971. Social Contexts of Messages. European Monographs in Social Psychology, 1. London: Academic Press. Chamberlain, Charlene, Jill P. Morfor, and Rachel I. Mayberry, eds. 2000. Language Acquisition by Eye. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Chaudhary, Shreesh. 2013. “Script and identity.” In Alternative Voices: (Re)searching Language, Culture and Identity…, edited by Imtiaz Hasnain, Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta, and Shailendra Mohan, 210–220. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Domförs, L-Å. 2000. Döfstumlärare – specialpedagog – lärare för döva och hörselskadade. En lärarutbildnings innehåll och rationalitetsförskjutningar. [Deaf and dumb teacher – special teacher – teacher for deaf and hard-of-hearing. A teacher education’s content and rationality shifts.] PhD Dissertation, Örebro University. Duranti, Alessandro and Charles Goodwin. 1992. Rethinking Context. Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Enriquez-Gibson, Judith. 2013. “Being (t)here: mobilising ‘mediaspaces’ for learning.” Learning, Media and Technology 38 (3): 319–336. Erting, Carol. 1999. “Two languages at home and at school. Early literacy in ASL/English contexts.” Invited plenary lecture at the European Days of Deaf Education (EDDE) conference. Örebro, September 1999. Fishman, Joshua and Ofelia Garcia, eds. 2010. Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity. Disciplinary and Regional Perspectives. Volume 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gal, Susan. 2007. “Multilingualism.” In The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics, edited by Carmen Llamas, Louise Mullany and Peter Stockwell, 149–157. New York: Routledge. Gal, Susan and Judith, T. Irvine. 1995. “The boundaries of languages and disciplines: How ideologies construct difference.” Social Research 62 (4): 967–1001.

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Garcia, Ofelia. 2009. Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub. Goodwin, Charles. 1981. Conversational Organization: Interaction Between Speakers and Hearers. New York: Academic Press. —. 2003. “Pointing as situated practice.” In Pointing: Where Language, Culture and Cognition Meet, edited by Sotaro Kita, 217–41. Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Grosjean, Francois. 1996. “Living with two languages and two cultures.” In Cultural and Language Diversity and the Deaf Experience, edited by Ila Parasnis, 20–37. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gynne, Annaliina and Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta. 2013. “Young people’s language usage and identity positioning. Chaining in ‘bilingual’ educational settings in Sweden.” Linguistics and Education 24: 479– 496. Hansen, Aase, Lyngvær. 2005. Kommunikative praksiser i visuelt orienterte klasserom: En studie av et tilrettelagt opplegg for døve lærerstudenter. [Communicative practices in visually oriented classrooms: A study of a designed education for deaf teacher students.] PhD Dissertation, NTNU, The Norwegian technological-natural sciences University, Norway. Hansen, Aase Lyngvær, Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta, and Arnfinn Vonen. 2009. “Visually oriented multilingual communication in the classroom.” Paper presented at the 37th Congress of the Nordic Educational Research Association. Trondheim, 5–7 March 2009. Heath, Shirley Brice. 1983. Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holmström, Ingela. 2013. “Learning by Hearing”. Technological Framings for Participation. Örebro Studies in Education 42. PhD Dissertation, Örebro University, Sweden. Holmström, Ingela and Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta. 2013. “Technologies at work. A sociohistorical analysis of human identities and communication.” Deafness and Education International 15 (1): 2–28. Jones, Rodney and Christoph Hafner. 2012. Understanding Digital Literacies. A Practical Introduction. Oxon: Routledge. Jewitt, Carey, ed. 2009. The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis. London: Routledge. Jørgensen, Normann. 2008. “Polylingual languaging around and among children and adolescents.” International Journal of Multilingualism 5 (3): 161–176.

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Jørgensen, Normann, Martha Sif Karrebaek, Lian M. Madsen, and Janus Spindler Moller. 2011. “Polylanguaging in Superdiversity.” Diversities 13(2): 25–38. www.unesco.org/shs/diversities/vol13/issue2/art2. June 2014. Kress, Gunther. 1997. Before Writing: Rethinking the Paths to Literacy. New York: Routledge. —. 2003. Literacy in the New Media Age. New York: Routledge. Krzyzanowski, Michal. 2010. The Discoursive Constitution of European Identities. A Multi-Level Approach to Discourse and Identity in the Transforming European Union. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Leander, Kevin, Nathan C. Philips, and Keith Taylor. 2010. “The changing social spaces of learning: Mapping new mobilities.” Review of Research in Education 34: 329–394. Liddicoat, Anthony, J. 2009. “Communication as a culturally contexted practice: A view from intercultural communication.” Australian Journal of Linguistics 29 (1): 115–133. Linell, Per. 1993. Approaching Dialogue: Talk, Interaction and Contexts in Dialogical Perspectives. IMPACT Studies in Language and Society. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. —. 2009. Rethinking Language, Mind, and World Dialogically: Interactional and Contextual Theories of Human Sense-making. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Maldonado-Tores, Nelson. 2011. “Thinking through the decolonial turn: Post-continental interventions in theory, philosophy, and critique – an introduction.” Transmodernity Fall: 1–15. Marschark, Marc. 1997. Raising and Educating a Deaf Child. A Comprehensive Guide to the Choices, Controversies, and Decisions Faced by Parents and Educators. New York: Oxford University Press. Mayer, Connie, and Gordon Wells. 1996. “Can the linguistic interdependence theory support a bilingual-bicultural model of literacy education for deaf students?” Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 1 (2): 93–107. Messina Dahlberg, Giulia, and Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta. 2013. “Communication in the virtual classroom in higher education: Languaging beyond the boundaries of time and space.” Learning, Culture and Social Interaction 2 (3): 127–142. Mignolo, Walter, D. 2009. “Epistemic disobedience, independent thought and decolonial freedom.” Theory, Culture and Society 26 (7-8): 159– 181. Moores, Donald. 1991. “The great debates. Where, how, and what to teach deaf children.” American Annals of the Deaf 136 (1): 35–37.

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Otsuji, Emi & Pennycook, Alastair. 2010. “Metrolingualism: Fixity, fluidity and language in flux.” International Journal of Multilingualism. 7(3): 240–254. Padden, Carol. 1996. “Early bilingual lives of deaf children.” In Cultural and Language Diversity and the Deaf Experience edited by Ila Parasnis, 99–116. New York, Cambridge University Press. Rampton, Ben. 2007. “Neo-Hymesian linguistic ethnography in the United Kingdom.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(5): 584–607. Rosen, Jenny, and Bagga-Gupta, Sangeeta. 2013. “From worker- to work oriented discourse in the language training for immigrants. Shifting identities in the development of the educational system ‘Swedish for immigrants’.” Language, Culture and Curriculum 26(1): 68–88. Rosen, Jenny, and Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta. In press. “‘Prata svenska vi är i Sverige’. Languaging and identities in the construction and organization of ‘Swedish for immigrants’.” Language and Education. Sahlström, Fritjof. 1999. Up the Hill Backwards: On Interactional Constraints and Affordances for Equality-Construction in the Classrooms of the Swedish Comprehensive School. PhD Dissertation, Uppsala University, Sweden. Sajjad, Mohammad. 2013. “The case of Hindi-Urdu-Hindustani, and the politics of nation making: A reappraisal.” In Alternative Voices: (Re)searching Language, Culture and Identity…, edited by Imtiaz Hasnain, Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta, and Shailendra Mohan, 260–273. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Scribner, Sylvia, and Michael Cole. 1981. The Psychology of Literacy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Säljö, Roger. 2005. Lärande och kulturella redskap: om lärprocesser och det kollektiva minnet. [Learning and cultural tools: on learningprocesses and collective remembering.] Stockholm: Norstedts akademiska förlag. Tapio, Elina. 2013. A Nexus Analysis of English in the Everyday Life of FinSL Signers: A Multimodal View on Interaction. PhD Dissertation, Oulu University, Finland. van Lier, Leo. 2004. The Ecology and Semiotics of Language Learning. A Sociocultural Perspective. Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic. Vygotsky, Lev, S. 1934/1962. Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T Press. Werstch, James. 1998. Mind as Social Action. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

PART II: TRANSLATION AS LANGUAGE CONTACT

CHAPTER FIVE THE CASE FOR A COMMON FRAMEWORK FOR TRANSFER-RELATED PHENOMENA IN THE STUDY OF TRANSLATION AND LANGUAGE CONTACT MARTINA OŽBOT Abstract In this article, attention is drawn to the fact that phenomena related to cross-linguistic transfer are of central relevance to contact-induced language change both in translational situations and in cases of classical language contact. It is suggested that translation, which is in actual fact a special type of language contact, is an important mechanism of contactinduced language change which can be productively studied along with other types of language contact situations, typically associated with societal bilingualism and with language-learning settings. In instances of classical language contact as well as of translation, two (and sometimes more) languages interact with each other, with various consequences for language processing and production, whereby linguistic material (lexical, conceptual, structural, stylistic, etc.) is mapped from one language onto another language. This results in contact phenomena of various kinds. While cross-linguistic transfer effects, especially in language production, have been intensely studied for several decades, the impact of crosslinguistic transfer as a mechanism of language variation and change in translation has so far received very little attention. The present article examines cross-linguistic transfer as an instrument of language change in a single multilingual society in both translational and classical language contact situations, providing examples from Slovene and its contacts with German and Italian at different times of its history. The study also discusses some possible epistemological reasons why the relationship between translation and language contact has for a long time been a marginal research issue, although several researchers

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have emphasized that the two types of situation share some fundamental features.

1. Introduction Over the past decades, translation has been intensely studied from a variety of perspectives. Research has shed much light on its transformative potential in literature, culture as well as language (Delisle and Woodsworth 1995; Ožbot 2011; McLaughlin 2011). As is well known, cross-literary influences are to a significant degree exerted through translated texts and many other conceptual changes concerning beliefs and mentalities—religious, ideological or political, among others—are made possible through translations. At the same time, translation is an instrument of sociolinguistic balance, which plays a primary role in language maintenance, attrition, shift and death. The sheer presence (or absence) of translation, as well as its extent and the situations in which it is practised for a given language and language pair, may also be highly indicative of the power relations between the languages concerned. Also, translation contributes in important ways to the shaping of languages, resulting in the introduction of various new elements. Linguistic innovations can most often be found in the lexicon, for which low contact intensity is sufficient, whereas the grammatical system and discourse patterns are normally transferred in situations of higher contact intensity (Thomason and Kaufman 1988, 74–76). However, translationrelated innovations may also affect stylistic patterns and the grammatical system of the target language. Examples abound (see below), both historical and contemporary, although it is often difficult to establish whether a linguistic innovation actually has its origin in a translated text or whether—which is more often the case—its presence in translations is to be interpreted as a terminus ante quem, i.e. as evidence of it having already entered into the language, perhaps through the spoken registers. Especially for earlier periods, it is frequently impossible to determine the role of translation in processes of language change, since the availability of parallel and comparable corpora may be very limited. In any case, it may be that through the process of translation a given trait that had already been present in the language is strengthened, possibly marginalizing the hitherto typical feature. In such instances, translation is essential in changing the quantitative relationships between alternative language uses (cf. Baumgarten and Özçetin 2008, 294) and in the long run possibly also the lexical, grammatical and pragmatic properties of languages.

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In view of this, translations are to be considered a significant means through which “imported” linguistic elements and uses are established in a language, even if they may initially make their way into it through other channels. Let me quote but two instances of translation-related language innovation: recently, a translation-bound transformative relation, in conceptual as well as in grammatical terms, has been suggested for the Greek preposition epì and some of its reflections in early translations of the Bible. In Latin, especially, various concepts encompassed by epì gave rise to some new constructions which continue in the Romance languages up to the present (Luraghi and Cuzzolin 2007). Also, in Slovene texts of the 16th and 17th centuries, both translated and non-translated ones, there is a heavy presence of verbal calques consisting of an adverbial element and a verb which are modelled upon German prefixed verbs (Merše 2003). Their use diminished later on account of the negative attitude that grammarians expressed towards them, but their presence in texts over a period of time is historically significant. However, although translation is a recognized and increasingly studied agent of contact-induced language change, it has hardly been dealt with as part of a wider context of transfer-related phenomena of language change. Therefore, the range of translation as a mechanism with potential to trigger change or even transform language remains, to a large extent, yet to be explored. In actual fact, translational situations are a special kind of language contact situation alongside settings of individual and societal bilingualism as well as second language acquisition: in all these instances, including translational situations, two (or more) languages interact with each other, with various consequences for language processing and production. Such cross-linguistic transfer effects, especially in language production (cf. Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008, 14), have received considerable attention over the past decades. However, the effects of cross-linguistic transfer that can be encountered in translation have rarely been regarded as part of the same phenomenon. In what follows, I would like to suggest that cross-linguistic transfer can be seen as an instrument of language change in two distinct, if interconnected ways: a. as a mechanism of change in translational situations and b. as a mechanism of change in classical language contact situations. Whereas language change in the latter has been extensively studied, it would be legitimate to also take into consideration the former as a complementary part of the same phenomenon of transfer-related crosslinguistic interaction. Sections 3 and 4 in this article focus on the context of Slovene multilingualism, where cross-linguistic transfer can be observed in translational settings as well as in classical language contact

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settings. As will be shown, the common core of both types of transfer situations is the presence of a semantically based transposition from the source to the target language, which may concern all levels of linguistic structure, from the morphemic to the textual. Naturally, research on language contact has evidenced a variety of contact effects in which semantic transfer is not involved, since they only concern the level of phonetics and phonology, but such cases will not interest us here. Let us now have a closer look at the relationship between translation and language contact: what fundamental features do they share and how have these been dealt with by researchers?

2. Translation and language contact Parallelisms between bilingual production (of both natural bilinguals and those who have acquired the knowledge of a second language later in life) and translation have already been observed by various researchers, especially over the recent years, although only few studies have been published which are directly concerned with the issue. Among these it is necessary to mention the article by István Lanstyák and Pál Heltai (2012), who take as their starting point the observation that in bilingualism (including linguistic production of second-language learners) as well as in translation “two languages come into contact” (Lanstyák and Heltai 2012, 99) and that “there is no sharp dividing line between bilingual and translator” (emphasis in the original; op.cit., 101). The authors go on to address the issue of the relationship between translation and language contact perhaps in the most direct and exhaustive way so far. The principal value of the paper is in discussing the relationship between translation and language change in general and in dealing with their complementarity in new ways. Other recent contributions to the topic also advocate the need to study translation along with other instances of bilingual communication, but they concentrate mostly on case studies (Siemund and Kintana 2008; Kranich et al. 2011; Kranich, House and Becher 2012; Kolehmainen 2013). The reason why the relationship between translation and language change has been neglected for a very long time (and still remains underresearched today) may be in part a matter of chance, for it is possible that other translation-related problems have been identified and dealt with by researchers before the relationship between translation and language contact came into focus. In part, however, the lack of attention is also due to epistemological circumstances characterized by the persistence of

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stereotypical ways of looking at translation, in spite of the flexibility of the concept itself, which has indeed a very broad range of uses, including those which refer to instances of non-verbal (or not entirely verbal) communication. Although, over the past few decades, translation has become an object of intense study from a variety of perspectives, it has become increasingly separated from linguistic research. In an attempt to establish translation studies as an autonomous discipline, the large majority of its researchers who have a “linguistic” (as opposed to “literary”) interest in translation have considered translation phenomena as pertaining exclusively to translational situations in a restricted sense, without taking into account the broader context in which translational communication shares a variety of traits with non-translational language use, both by bilingual and monolingual speakers. New insights began to be offered mainly by researchers who have dealt with questions of translation from a wider, cross-disciplinary perspective, not being confined within the limits of the new discipline. Among the scholars who have been particularly aware of features shared by translational and non-translational communication (and therefore also communication in bilingual settings) are Eugenio Coseriu, Andrew Chesterman, István Lanstyák and Pál Heltai. Coseriu (1978, 17), for instance, suggested that translation research be considered part of text linguistics broadly conceived: Wie beim Sprechen überhaupt hängt auch beim Übersetzen – das ja eine besondere Art des Sprechens ist – alles mit allem zusammen, so dass jede Formulierung eines Prinzips einer Partialisierung gleichkommt. Und vom Stand der Forschung her ist die angedeutete Aufgabe deshalb nicht leicht, weil die Übersetzungstheorie eigentlich eine Sektion der Textlinguistik sein müsste, und diese befindet sie trotz der Fortschritte der letzten Jahre immer noch in ihren Anfängen: Ja, es ist der Textlinguistik bisher noch nicht gelungen, ihren Gegenstand genau abzugrenzen und alle ihre ‘Kategorien’ zu identifizieren und sinnvoll zu ordnen. [As is the case with speaking in general, also in translation—which is a special kind of speaking—everything is related to everything else so that any formulation of a principle cannot be but partial. And in terms of the research situation, the task mentioned is therefore not a simple one, since translation theory should in actual fact be part of text linguistics, and the latter is—in spite of the progress made over the last years—still at its beginnings. Indeed, text linguistics has not yet managed to clearly define its object and to identify and sensibly arrange all its ‘categories’. (My translation)]

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Coseriu’s words were written in a period when language use had only just began to be studied from a textual perspective, and his unorthodox view of translation as an immanently textual phenomenon is particularly insightful. A similar conclusion is reached by Lanstyák and Heltai (2012, 100). They draw attention to Lanstyák (2003), who maintains that both types of communication [translation and bilingual communication] involve the use of two languages, and since translators are a subclass of bilinguals, TS may be regarded as a subdivision of contact linguistics, and issues in TS and contact linguistics should be dealt with in a unified framework.

About two decades after Coseriu’s article was published, the concept of translation universals became much debated in translation studies. Within that debate, Andrew Chesterman (2004, 45) posed the question of whether there might exist universal norms of communication which could provide explanatory principles for possible translation universals, perhaps along the lines of Grice’s maxims […] or notions of politeness.

The concept of translation universals—somewhat parallel to the notion of language universals proposed earlier in typological linguistic research—is a problematic and controversial one. It presupposes that there are some general characteristics which can be found in translated texts, such as, for instance, “explicitation” or “normalization”. The former consists of making explicit some elements of information which in the source text are only implicit, whereas the latter refers to the tendency of target texts to comply with target-language norms, sometimes even in an exaggerated way. There certainly are features in translators’ behaviour and their reflections in the target texts, which may be considered typical, but not necessarily general and therefore “universal”. Also, to prove the existence of translation universals, it would be indispensable to have data comparing translated and non-translated language, for it is highly probable that monolingual language users are guided by similar, largely selfimposed norms, often dependent on a given communicative situation (cf. Lanstyák and Heltai 2012, 110). However, problems of the concepts of translation universals notwithstanding, the debate opened the fundamental question to what degree translational communication may or may not have specific properties in comparison to verbal communication in general. Lanstyák and Heltai, who also deal with the question of translation universals, suggest that “translation universals are in fact language

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contact universals” (op.cit., 100), which show as “contact effects, or interference” (op.cit., 103). The authors distinguish between “absolute contact effects” and “relative contact effects”, whereby the former refer to the actual transfer of source-language elements to target-language production, whereas the latter encompass distributional phenomena related to grammatical or lexical elements of the target language which are brought under the influence of the source language. The elements themselves are already present in the target language, but may undergo a redistribution under language contact circumstances (op.cit., 104). According to Lanstyák and Heltai, “[m]ost transfer in translation can be compared to relative contact effects, i.e. distributional differences” (op.cit., 105; cf. Baumgarten and Özçetin 2008, 294). In a previous article, Heltai’s proposal is that translation universals should be considered communication universals (Heltai 2010; Lanstyák and Heltai 2012, 102). The idea that translation universals are actually part of communication universals is not entirely new, since it has previously, although less explicitly, been suggested by a variety of researchers, including Ernst-August Gutt and Juliane House (ibid.). Also, some other basic concepts, such as that of skopos1, which are largely used in contemporary translation theory, actually reflect more basic principles which have been recognized as such in communication research (Kellermann 1992). It is necessary to add that, unavoidably, translational and non-translational communication also present differences, in that translation is a derived activity, invariably based on a source text, whereas bilingual communication typically does not involve a pre-existent text (although this is also possible, for instance in various types of reported speech; Lanstyák and Heltai 2012, 100). However, any form of bilingualism can also be related to translation and translation is indeed a special form of bilingualism (Ožbot 2011, 57), both in individual and societal contexts. All translators are by definition bilinguals, although, of course, not all bilinguals are translators, but in their activity as language producers they necessarily also perform “translational operations” between their two (or more) languages. As will be shown below, this holds true of competent bilingual speakers, whose bilingualism may be highly balanced, as well as of language learners whose knowledge of the two languages in question and their ability to use them may differ starkly. In the rest of the paper, I will try to present the two ways in which transfer plays a central role in language variation and change. The focus is on Slovene, which is a particularly interesting case in that the Slovene culture can be described as a translation culture par excellence, where translation has for centuries been of foremost importance both in

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quantitative and qualitative terms. Even if it cannot always be demonstrated that a certain linguistic feature entered the language through translation, it is beyond doubt that a great many of linguistic innovations which are due to interlingual transfer have been strengthened by means of translated texts. Moreover, Standard Slovene and its regional varieties have also been intensely exposed to language contact, especially with German and in the border regions also with Italian, Hungarian and Croatian. Therefore it comes as no surprise that the language shows some peculiar traits which may be relevant to the study of the relationship between translation, language contact and language change.

3. Transfer in translational situations The term translational situations refers to situations in which a target text is generated on the basis of a given source text with the purpose of conveying a coherent message interlingually. In such situations, the global communicative functions of the two texts play a primary role, to which lower units are subordinated. During this process, linguistic innovations often arise that can gradually lead to diverse types of language change, although, in actual fact, the stage of language change is often not reached, because the innovation does not become generalized. As stated by Kolehmainen (2013, 108): Bei den Übersetzungen handelt es sich primär um eine vorläufige synchrone Variation, die sich auf übersetzte Texte beschränkt. Diese ist natürlich auch in anderen Kontaktsituationen möglich – sie bildet den Ausgangspunkt einer sprachlichen Veränderung –, aber in diesen kann die Entwicklung zusätzlich zu einem diachronen Sprachwandel führen, bei dem die Zielsprache permanent restrukturiert wird. [Translations concern principally temporary synchronic variation, which is limited to translated texts. It is, of course, also possible in other contact situations—constituting the starting point of language change—but in them the development can then lead to diachronic language change through which the target language becomes permanently restructured. (My translation)]

In translations, it is frequently possible to find evidence of “shiningthrough”2 effects (see Kranich, House and Becher 2012, 326), whereby source-text features can be detected in target texts, though without triggering language change as such. For the latter to be ascertained,

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features of the source language must have been generalized to targetlanguage texts which are not translations, i.e. they have been written directly in that language. Moreover, for such linguistic influence to establish itself, translational communication is not a necessary condition, since languages may influence each other directly through other interlingual transfer situations, during which various contact phenomena arise such as calques of source-language phrasal or clausal structures (cf. Kranich et al. 2011; Toury 1995, 275ff.; Mauranen 2000). As has been demonstrated by Kranich, House and Becher (2012) for German popular science writing, the German translations of English texts seem to account for a small amount of language change, since most of the studied features which are characteristic of English popular science texts have not spread to original German texts of comparable genre and function, but have rather remained limited to translations, where the potential of replicating a foreign model is obviously greater than in non-translational text production. Even if original German texts did show features similar to those of comparable English texts, which differ from the German tradition of popular science writing, this could well be the result of the writers’ direct exposure to English texts as well as of some more general tendencies in communicating about science in the contemporary world (Kranich, House and Becher 2012, 332). Moreover, it is likely that the innovations spreading from translated texts concern mainly language norms and stylistic conventions rather than the language system (Kolehmainen 2013, 106), which is, on the other hand, more often the case in classical language contact situations. However, taking into account that it is very difficult, and often impossible, to determine the precise role of translation in the processes of language variation and change, it seems nonetheless reasonable to suppose that some changes may in fact have their origin in translational situations, especially in texts that belong to written rather than spoken genres. The following may be an innovation of this kind: it has been shown (Jelovšek 2011) that a Slovene equivalent of the German 3rd person singular neuter personal pronoun es was extensively used in the impersonal construction in Slovene Protestant translations which were based on German originals. The following sentence (ex. 1a) is an example of such a use, with the pronoun ono functioning as a dummy subject. In modern Slovene, which is a pro-drop language, the use would be unidiomatic; in actual fact, in the version of the same sentence taken from a modern translation of the Bible, the subject is not expressed (ex. 1c). However, in the language of the sixteenth century Slovene Protestant writers, in their translations as well as

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in their “original” writings (Jelovšek 2011, 421), the use is extensively witnessed. (1) [John 1:39] a. Onu ie it is-AUX deǕǕete tenth-GEN

pag bilu okuli te but be-PPC about this/the-GEN vre. (Trubar 1557) hour-GEN

b. Es war aber it was but

vmb die about the-ACC

c. Ø

Bilo be-PPC.3SG ure. (SSV 1996) hour-GEN

SBJ

je is-AUX

zehende stunde. (Lu 1545) tenth-ACC hour okrog desete about tenth-GEN

d. it was about the tenth hour. (RSV) ‘It was about ten o’clock.’

The innovation has not survived, but in a certain period the use of a third-person dummy subject based on the German pattern was important. It is evident from the example that in translational situations the source and the target language may be in a contact relationship in which, in the mind of the bilingual user, the target language interacts with the source language in such a way as to be influenced by it and possibly undergo a process of change, during which it is brought closer to the source language. Similar, especially lexical instances of translational innovations, which did not become established in the language, can be found in a variety of Slovene Protestants’ texts based upon German models (Merše 2013, 175–176).

4. Transfer in classical language contact situations Let us now have a look at classical language contact situations in the Slovene context, i.e. those which are not subsumed under the term translation as interlingual cross-cultural communication at the level of discourse. Note that translational operations may nevertheless take place in the process of bilinguals’ text production and, in actual fact, some examples deriving from translated texts are also dealt with in this section. Under the term classical language contact situations I include cases of areal contact between two (or possibly more) languages. These span a

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variety of contexts of use, from community-based spoken language to written domains, comprising also literary texts, in which linguistic material (lexical and semantic, morphological, syntactic, discursive, pragmatic, conceptual) is mapped from one language onto another language (see Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008, 61–173; cf. also Thomason and Kaufman 1988, 35–109; Winford 2003, 29–100). The result of interlingual mappings are transfer phenomena of various sorts, which are characteristic of language contact situations: calques, semantic borrowings, structural replications and other types of hybrid elements and features, some of which concern lexical elements, while in others, more complex constructions are transferred from one language to the other. This is suggested, e.g. by Matras’ distinction between “matter replication” and “pattern replication” (Matras 2009, 234–237), whereby the former refers to various sorts of borrowing and the latter to transfer-related structural changes. As is the case with translation-related transfer, in classical situations of language contact, too, transfer occurs foremost in the language processing and production of bilingual individuals. The contact effects may then spread to communities of speakers and the language system as a whole. Classical language contact situations can be found in contexts of societal bilingualism and in second-language acquisition settings (formal and informal ones), where language contact also takes place—if not in overt language production, at least in the learners’ minds, i.e. at a purely cognitive level. It is well known that many structural errors and other types of unidiomatic language use by language learners are due to the influence of their L1 (and sometimes of other languages they are familiar with) upon the language in question and are often to be explained by the direct transfer of L1 elements (lexical material, grammatical structures, stylistic and discourse patterns, etc.) into the language which is being learnt. Transfer as interlingual mapping is to be considered an unavoidable process at various stages of language learning (as well as being a constant feature of situations of natural bilingualism). Often when learners are not able to make adequate use of the resources (at the level of lexis, grammar or discourse) of the language that is being learned, they avail themselves of what is structurally or conceptually available to them in their first language or, sometimes, in another language they have previously learned or studied. The outcome of such operations are transfers, which are to a certain degree present in the production of all language learners, including those who have successfully learned several languages. To what extent and in what ways transfer will actually take place depends on various circumstances, which may either encourage or hinder

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it from occurring and which encompass psycholinguistic, cognitive, experiential, situational and language-pair specific factors (Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008, 175). One of the key factors is that transfer can only take place if the recipient language is able to accommodate it. As suggested by Roger Andersen (1983), who formulated the “transfer to somewhere” principle, and as summarized by Jarvis and Pavlenko (2008, 174): a language structure will be susceptible to transfer only if it is compatible with natural acquisitional principles or is perceived to have a similar counterpart (a somewhere to transfer to) in the recipient language.

In any case, transfer remains an unavoidable cognitive strategy employed in the process of language learning, along with operations such as simplification and generalization, and will only take place when there is some perceived similarity between the two languages involved (ibid., 78).

4.1. The Slovene-German interface Phenomena such as the above take place in languages or language varieties developing in situations of natural bilingualism, in which an individual has learnt two languages without formal teaching in the course of her everyday life as her natural means of communication, and often […] relatively young (Skutnabb-Kangas 1981, 95).

As for Slovene, it is generally assumed that the language possesses a variety of features which are a consequence of its contacts with other languages. For historical reasons, the impact of German has been particularly strong, so much so that Slovene is considered the Slavic language that has undergone a German-induced change comparable perhaps only to Sorbian. This is not surprising, since for centuries, during which the territory of present-day Slovenia was under the Habsburg rule, German was the official language and as such the high code, whereas Slovene was primarily used as the language of the lower classes and typically relegated to informal settings, with some exceptions such as its use in church. The situation was largely characterized by diglossia, since the majority of Slovene speakers did not possess a balanced competence in the languages concerned, i.e. Slovene and German. Although the knowledge of German was often limited, the language was present, at least to some degree, in the lives of all the population strata, so that it inevitably

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had a strong impact on Slovene. It is also necessary to emphasize that for centuries there was a marked developmental imbalance between the two languages, German being the language of one of the most powerful European cultures with a strong literary tradition, while Slovene was the language of a numerically small ethnic group which only in the 19th century was able to start catching up with its own cultural, social and political delays (cf. Prunþ 1997; Stabej 1998). A great number of elements in Slovene are considered to be historically derived from German as the socially dominant language. They comprise both lexical and structural transfer, which clearly testifies to the length and intensity of contact between the two languages (cf. Thomason and Kaufman 1988, 74–76). Among the features which are often accounted for as a consequence of the contact between Slovene and German are the definite and indefinite articles. Like most Slavic languages, standard formal Slovene does not possess a fully functional system of articles, such as the one used, for instance, in Germanic and Romance languages, including German, Italian and Friulian, with which Slovene has for centuries been in close contact. However, especially spoken, colloquial Slovene—in its dialectal as well as non-dialectal varieties—does have a rudimentary system of both definite and indefinite articles. Their use is determined situationally, being typical of informal spoken Slovene, and it is never obligatory, which means that the contactinduced innovation remains a matter of register and style rather than system. The functioning of the article-like elements in contemporary Slovene can be observed from the following two examples, containing an indefinite article (based on the numeral en ‘one’, in its attributive use; ex. 2) and a definite article (based on the demonstrative ta ‘that’; ex. 3) respectively: (2) a. Imam enega kolega, one/a-ACC colleague-ACC have-PRS.1SG bi ti lahko pomagal. part-COND you-DAT ADV help-PPC (Colloquial) b. Imam kolega, colleague-ACC have-PRS.1SG ti lahko pomagal. you-DAT ADV help-PPC (Standard)

ki who

‘I've got a colleague who might help you.’

ki who

bi part-COND

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(3) a. Prosim, prinesi mi ta please bring-IMP I-DAT this/the-ACC pulover. pullover-ACC (Colloquial) b. Prosim, prinesi please bring-IMP (Standard)

mi I-DAT

moder blue-ACC

modri blue-ACC

pulover. pullover-ACC

‘Please bring me the blue pullover.’

The characteristics of the article-like elements in modern Slovene are in agreement with what has been observed by Heine and Kuteva (2005, 101, 251) about replication in the process of language contact: what is replicated in the recipient language tends to be less grammaticalized than it is in the source language. Also, the use of the articles in Slovene is sporadic with respect to their functioning in German (as well as in the other two neighbouring languages), so it does not appear to be the result of systematic calquing of the German model (cf. Heine and Kuteva 2005, 224). On the other hand, the Slovene definite article can neither be formally equated with the demonstrative, from which it is ultimately derived (although via one or more foreign sources): unlike the demonstrative, the definite article is not inflected and it only has one form regardless of number, gender and case: (4)

Pojedel je is-AUX.1SG eat-PPC ‘He ate the big apple.’

ta this/the

veliko big-ACC

(5)

Pojedli so ta velika be-AUX.3PL this/the big-ACC.PL eat-PPC jabolka/ ta velike hruške/ apple-ACC.PL this/the big-ACC pear-ACC.PL ta velike grozde this/the big-ACC.PL grape-ACC.PL ‘They ate the big apples/pears/grapes.’

jabolko. apple-ACC

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In contrast, as a demonstrative adjective, ta is inflected: (4’)

To krasno jabolko je bilo be-PPC this lovely apple is-AUX pravkar utrgano. just pick.up-PPC ‘This lovely apple has just been picked up.’

(5’)

Tega krasnega jabolka ne this-GEN lovely-GEN apple-NOM not bom pojedel sam. eat-PPC alone be-AUX.FUT ‘I’m not going to eat this lovely apple on my own.’

It has generally been assumed that the use of the two articles has arisen through the influence of German (probably written as well as spoken). It is possible that Italian and Friulian have also contributed to the establishment of this grammatical category in Slovene, for in some areas of the western part of present-day Slovenia the population was in intense contact with speakers of the two Romance languages, with which it shared its territory with the Habsburg Empire. Of course, as noted by Reindl (2005, 199), who has extensively studied the influence of German upon Slovene, there is also a more “universal tendency for the numeral ‘one’ to develop into an indefinite article and for the demonstrative to develop into a definite article,”3 an opinion shared by some Slovene grammarians, too (Orožen 1972, 106). But even so, the contact with other languages probably played an essential role in triggering the development of an otherwise latent structural feature of Slovene. Similar developments have been attested for various other languages (Heine and Kuteva 2005, 116–117, 132, 224; Heine 2012, 128–134) which do not possess a full article system, such as Czech, Sorbian, Basque, Romani, etc. The definite article was particularly frequent in Slovene Protestant translations of the second half of the 16th century which were based on German source texts. As illustrated in the following example from Orožen (1972, 108), all instances of the definite article in the German text (6b) are faithfully reproduced in the Slovene version (6a), although it is necessary to add that some Slovene texts of the period also contain exceptions to this practice (cf. Reindl 2005, 197). In contrast, in the modern Slovene Standard Version (6c) only the demonstrative meanings are expressed (Tiste dni ‘in those days’ and To je tisti ‘he is the one’):

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Chapter Five (6) [Matthew 3:1–3] a. V tim zhafu Pride loannes tu kerǕtnik, inu pridiguie vti pushzhaui te ludouske deshele, inu praui, Deite pokuro, tu nebeshku kraleftuu ie blisi prislilu. Inu on je leta, od kateriga EǕaias prerok gouori, kir praui: […] (Trubar 1557) b. Zv der zeit kam Johannes der Teuffer vnd prediget in der wüsten des Jüdischen lands vnd sprach Thut busse das Himelreich ist nahe herbey komen. Vnd er ist der von dem der Prophet Jsaias gesagt hat vnd gesprochen […] (Lu) c. Tiste dni se je pojavil Janez Krstnik in v Judejski pušþavi oznanjal z besedami: “Spreobrnite se, kajti približalo se je nebeško kraljestvo! To je tisti, o katerem je bilo reþeno po preroku Izaiju: […] (SSV) d. In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” For this is he who was spoken of by the prophet Isaiah when he said, […] (RSV)

The use of the definite article diminished in later periods, especially in non-translated texts. An important reason for the decrease may have been the attitude of prescriptive grammarians against it, as exemplified in the following quotation from a highly influential Slovene grammar book dating back to the second half of the 18th century: In BeǕtimmung des Artickels darf man Ǖich auf keine andere Sprache richten (Pohlin: Kraynska gramatika 1768, 1783, quoted in Orožen 1972, 111; ‘With respect to the article, one should not be guided by any other language’, my translation).

There are many other features of modern Slovene which concern all levels of language structure—from phonology to morphology, syntax and the lexicon—and can be explained as a consequence of German influence on the language, although the exclusive role of German in the process is in most cases impossible to prove. Among the many such features that are likely to have been induced (or at least reinforced) by the contact with German are several word-formation patterns and the verb-second placement.

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4.2. The Slovene–Italian interface Historically, Italian has also exercised a strong influence on Slovene, although not on the standard language, but on the varieties used along the Italian–Slovene border, especially in the Italian region of Friuli–Venezia Giulia (in the provinces of Trieste, Gorizia and Udine), where there is a Slovene minority whose daily exposure to Italian has been continuous and pervasive. The Slovene used by this minority displays many features which are the result of direct contact with Italian, which is the second language for virtually the whole community of the Slovene speakers in Italy (Ožbot 2009).4 To various degrees, the Italian influence permeates all situations of language use, being characteristic of spoken as well as written registers. Literary texts are no exception: Italian-induced elements are often a permanent feature of the authors’ linguistic usage and not only a means of intentional characterization of the content presented in the texts. It may therefore make sense to draw a parallel between the use of Slovene by the Slovene authors in Italy5 and the use of languages such as French or English characteristic of postcolonial literatures that are based upon new local language standards. Despite the important differences between postcolonial settings and situations of natural bilingualism, which concern, among other things, social and historical aspects of the interaction between the two (or more) linguistic communities as well as the typological relations between the languages involved, in all these situations the language develops “pluricentrically” as a result of intense contact with one or more other languages (see Clyne 1991; Muhr 2012; Muhr et al. 2013). In certain settings, linguistic pluricentrism may, of course, be a delicate question to tackle. It may be particularly difficult to deal with, for instance, in the language classroom, since it undermines the idea of a single standard language, which is still very much present in many national linguistic traditions, including the Slovene one. Nonetheless, the issue cannot be ignored. In postcolonial environments as well as in cases of natural bilingualism, the language of literature produced in contact situations may offer an insight into the mechanisms of language variation and change. To a significant extent, it is through contact-induced language change involving some form of cross-linguistic transfer, and sometimes also of translation proper, that new, non-standard language varieties come into existence.6 Slovene as it is used by members of the national minority in Italy is just one example among many and, in some sense, Slovene literature produced in the context of heavy Slovene–Italian bilingualism is the result of a literary practice which directly reflects the linguistically (as

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well as culturally) hybrid status of its native environment. Texts by Slovene bilingual authors often exhibit traits which show how strongly they have been influenced by the language of the majority, so that the hybridity of their works is usually much more than a stylistic feature intentionally employed. Interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, many of the traits characteristic of the language of the classics of Slovene Triestine literature are also found, usually in greater density, in writings produced by bilingual students of Slovene whose socialization was conditioned by a particularly strong exposure to Italian (or rather to its regional varieties), sometimes up to the point when it is difficult to establish, in terms of proficiency, which is the student’s first language, Slovene or Italian, since their alleged L1 may be the weaker of the two languages, their supposed L2 being the dominant language (cf. Kolehmainen 2013, 103–105). Given the very strong role Italian played in the lives of many members of the Slovene minority in Italy, it may therefore not be surprising if Italian, as L2, is having a strong influence upon Slovene, as L1. According to findings by Susan G. Guion and her colleagues, as reported by Jarvis and Pavlenko (2008, 198), the less established the L1 is at the time of L2 acquisition, the less influence it will have on the L2, and the more influence the L2 will have on the L1.

However, the parallelisms between language use in literary works and in situations of natural bilingualism in general should not be seen as too surprising, since [t]he effects of cross-linguistic similarity can be seen in a variety of domains, and can be found to affect the processes of comprehension, learning, and production (Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008, 176).

Among such contact-conditioned traits are: the use of punctuation, cases, prepositions, as well as syntactic features such as clause structure and word order (cf. Bennett 1987, 281–282), as shown in the following two examples, the first one (ex. 7) from a literary text and the second one (ex. 8) from a translation by a student from the Slovene minority. The glossing of these examples is here intended to illustrate the word order patterns only.

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(7) a. Se ti ne zdi, da onkraj vsega trušþa politike in orožja AdvAdjunct gre predvsem za to? (NP 157) V (go-PRS.3SG) b. Se ti ne zdi, da

gre onkraj vsega trušþa politike in orožja V AdvAdjunct predvsem za to? (Standard)

[c. Non ti pare che

al di là di tutto il rumore della politica e delle armi AdvAdjunct si tratti soprattutto di ciò?] V ‘Don’t you think that beyond all the political and military tumult, the issue is mainly about that?’

In Slovene, which is largely a V2 language, word order in dependent clauses differs from that of the main clauses in that the verb immediately follows the subordinator, with other elements such as the subject or the adverbial adjuncts coming after the verb. In main clauses, on the other hand, the subject or an adverbial adjunct occupies the initial position and the verb, again, occupies the second position, after the subject or the adverbial adjunct. In Italian, the basic word-order elements do not undergo such a change in position, which is clearly reflected also in Slovene texts produced by members of the Slovene minority in Italy. This is illustrated by the above example (7a) derived from a modern literary classic. In the object clause introduced with the conjunction da (‘that’; Ital. che), it would be expected that the verb would immediately follow the conjunction, as is actually the case in standard language (ex. 7b). This is, however, not the case in the sentence produced by a bilingual, where the adjunct, not the verb comes after the subordinator, just like in Italian; a possible Italian model is suggested in square brackets (ex. 7c). The same feature can be observed in a translation (ex. 8) made by a Slovene student from Italy raised in a bilingual environment. Given that the piece of writing in question (ex. 8a) is a translation based on an Italian source text (ex. 8c), the potential influence of the Italian model is particularly strong. Here, the use of word order in both the main clause and the dependent clause (introduced by the conjunction medtem ko ‘whereas’; Ital. mentre) can be observed. Again, the bilingual’s text shows no inversion between subject and object either in the main clause, which is introduced by an adjunct and would therefore require the verb to

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immediately follow it, or in the dependent clause, where the same would be expected, given the presence of a conjunction. However, sentence (8a) follows the same subject-verb (S–V) sequence of the Italian source text (8c), whereas in both instances standard Slovene (8b) requires an inversion (V–S): (8) a. V primerjavi s predhodnim letom, AdvAdjunct priseljencev s stalnim bivališþem S medtem ko novih dovoljenj, whereas S ki so bila dana do polovice februarja, RelClause

je 137.000 veþ, V AdvMeasure je bilo V

271.519. (ST) AdvMeasure

b. […]V primerjavi s predhodnim letom AdvAdj je priseljencev s stalnim bivališþem 137.000 veþ, medtem ko V S AdvMeasure whereas je bilo novih dovoljenj, ki so bila izdana do polovice februarja, V S RelClause 271.519. (Standard) AdvMeasure c. L’aumento degli extracomunitari residenti, S rispetto all’anno precedente, è di 137 mila unità mentre AdvAdjunct V AdvMeasure whereas i nuovi permessi, concessi fino a metà febbraio, sono stati S RelClause V 271.517. (Italian source text; La Repubblica, 2 March 2001) AdvMeasurre ‘The number of non-EU residents has increased, with respect to last year, by 137,000, whereas the number of new permits issued by midFebruary is 271,517.’

Similar contact phenomena can also be observed in examples (9)–(12). In examples (9) and (10), the text producers, a prominent writer and a student respectively, show probable influence of Italian prepositional use. In example (9), the Slovene dative (ploham in vetru; nominative plohe in veter ‘rainfall and wind’) is used as an alleged equivalent of the Italian prepositional collocation aperto al vento, alla pioggia, etc. (‘open to the

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wind, rainfall’, etc.), upon which the construction may have been modelled (cf. Ital. finestra aperta alle piogge e al vento ‘window open to rainfall and wind’). The result in Slovene is a non-idiomatic combination of the adjective odprt ‘open’ and a double dative object, while the choice of izpostavljen ‘exposed’ would instead be a natural one (izpostavljen ploham in vetru). (9)

Skoraj smešno je: tako zbirati v škatle kance, ki kapajo s trehe [sic!], ko je v zidu široka lina odprta ploham in vetru! (MTN 91) ‘It is almost ridiculous: to collect in such a way the drops dripping from the roof, while there is a broad opening in the wall exposed to rainfall and wind.’

It is interesting that hardly any occurrences of the phrase odprt vetru can be found in Slovene—and none is evidenced in GigaFida7, the major corpus of contemporary Slovene—and that one of the three occurrences that have been identified appears in a literary text translated from French, where the phrase ouvert au vent is idiomatic.8 Likewise, in example (10), Italian prepositional use appears to shine through the Slovene text, which is not uncommon in contact situations, especially when non-prototypical features of meaning are involved (cf. Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008, 188f). The Italian preposition su, used in this case with the verb scrivere ‘to write’, is prototypically associated with the Slovene preposition na ‘on’, although the Slovene counterpart of the Italian verb in question (pisati) would in such a context require the preposition v ‘in’. Again, an unusual combination napiše na življenjepis ‘[he] writes on the curriculum’ is produced—rather than napiše v življenjepis ‘[he] writes in the curriculum’—based on the Italian use scrivere sul curriculum. What needs to be emphasized is that interlingual transfer may have been brought about not just by the cognitive availability of the underlying Italian structures to the text producer, but also by some parallel ones which in actual fact do exist in Slovene: the verb pisati can also collocate with the preposition na (pisati na ‘to write on’), in phrases such as pisati na papir z glavo, ‘to write on headed paper’, pisati na steno ‘to write on a wall’ (cf. Italian scrivere su carta intestata, scrivere sul muro), but not in combination with nouns such as življenjepis ‘CV’. (10)

Zavedam se, da je za iskanje dela v Italiji bolj pomembno to, kar posameznik napiše na življenjepis, kot znanje in dobra volja, ki pridejo na dan s trdim delom. (ST) ‘I’m aware that when looking for a job in Italy, what one writes in the CV is more important that the knowledge and willingness [to do things] which develop with hard work.’)

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Examples (11) and (12a)–(12b) derive, again, from two literary texts and also illustrate typical linguistic uses that are the result of two languages interacting in the minds of bilingual text producers. In example (11), the Italian preposition di ‘of’, which is also used with Italian verbs such as pullulare or brulicare (Slovene mrgoleti ‘to teem [with]’), seems to be at the base of the Slovene genitive vojaštva ‘army men’, nomin. vojaštvo. A possible Italian model for the example above could be (ex. 11b) with a significantly similar syntactic structure to the one in example (8) above. However, with the Slovene verb in question the meaning ‘to teem (with)’ is expressed through an impersonal subjectless construction optionally accompanied with one or more adverbials (‘on the day’, ‘in the town’), as shown in (ex. 11c). Example (11a) could then be idiomatically rendered as in (ex. 11d). A parallel construction with an overt subject is actually also available, but it is much rarer9 and requires the preposition od ‘from, by’, which brings it syntactically close to the passive (ex. 11e). (11) a. […] poleg tega je Vipavska apart this-GEN be-AUX.PRS3SG Vipava-ADJ.NOM dolina mrgolela vojaštva. (NP 91) valley-NOM teem-PPC soldier-PL.GEN ‘[…] apart from that, the Valley of Vipava was teeming with army men.’ b. […] a parte ciò, la Valle di Vipava brulicava di soldati to part this the valley of Vipava teem-IPFV of soldier-PL ‘[…] apart from that, the Valley of Vipava was teeming with army men.’ c. Na dan tekme je v mestu be-AUX.PRS3SG in town-LOC on day-ACC match-GEN mrgolelo nogometnih navijaþev. teem-PPC football-ADJ.PL.GEN fan-PL.GEN ‘On the day of the match the town was teeming with football fans.’ d. […] poleg apart dolini valley-LOC

tega this-GEN mrgolelo teem-PPC

je be-AUX.PRS3SG vojaštva. soldier-PL.GEN

v Vipavski in Vipava-ADJ.LOC

The Case for a Common Framework for Transfer-Related Phenomena e. […] poleg tega je Vipavska apart this-GEN be-AUX.PRS3SG Vipava-ADJ mrgolela od vojaštva. teem-PPC of soldier-PL.GEN

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dolina valley

In the final example the structure of Italian shines through in the use of a demonstrative pronoun. The Italian demonstrative quello ‘that (one)’ can function as an anaphoric substitute for a noun, along similar lines to the English one. In Slovene, the construction with the demonstrative ta (and its inflected variants, in this case the dative form temu) is rather unidiomatic (ex. 12a). A possible Italian model could be example (12b): (12) a. Vso grmado papirjev bi spravil z mize in poskusil na þistini z zgodbo, ki bi imela vsaj slog podoben temu Durasove […] (SloS 194) ‘I’d remove from the table the whole pile of papers and make a fresh attempt with a story that would be at least stylistically similar to Duras’ style.’ Literally: […] which would have at least the style similar to the one of Duras […]. b. Metterei via tutta la mole delle carte per tentare, sulla scrivania sgombra, una storia che avesse almeno lo stile simile a quello della Duras [...].

All the above examples, whether the product of bilingual communities or translation, contain features of language which differ from standard usage and which have been brought about by various transfer operations (Ožbot 2009).

5. Conclusion By taking into account translational situations and classical language contact situations, this article aimed at pointing to some contact-induced features shared by translations as instances of cross-cultural communication on the one hand and texts produced in bilingual contexts, on the other hand. The material originating from bilingual contexts comprised texts by two rather different groups of language users, i.e. prominent literary authors and language learners, who, however, share some important characteristics of language use. It was shown that text production in translational as well as in bilingual settings is significantly determined by the interaction between the two (or sometimes more) languages involved and that interlingual transfer is a feature which they

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both have in common. In view of the relevance of transfer phenomena to classical language contact, language variation and change as well as to translation, it is suggested that its role in various types of communication involving more than one language deserves more attention than it has so far received. By way of conclusion, it may be worth adding that apart from crosslinguistic transfer effects, the text production of bilinguals may also be frequently characterized by translation as a means of interlingual communication at the level of discourse. Thus, the ultimate question to be explored further is how to distinguish between operations of crosslinguistic transfer from those of translation proper. However, this is a complex problem involving sociolinguistic, pragmatic and cognitive aspects, among others, and would deserve joint attention from researchers interested in language from a variety of complementary viewpoints.

Notes 1. Skopos is the basic concept (from Greek ıțȠʌȩȢ ‘target’, ‘purpose’) of a functional theory of translation developed in the 1970s by the German scholar Hans J. Vermeer and his colleague Katharina Reiss, according to which the defining feature of every translation is its purpose. 2. Shining-through effects are typically found in what is sometimes referred to as overt translation, as opposed to covert translation. The two terms were introduced in the 1970s by Juliane House (House 2010; cf. also Kranich, House and Becher 2012, 316) and describe certain textual properties of translations with respect to whether or not it is possible to detect in them syntactic, phraseological and other signals of their derived nature, i.e. of their being based on a source text written in a language different from their own. Similar dichotomies have been proposed, among others, by JiĜí Levý in the early 1960s, who distinguishes between illusionism and anti-illusionism (Levý 2011, 19–21). Lawrence Venuti has written extensively about the translator’s invisibility (Venuti 1995). 3. Heine and Kuteva (2005, 225) report on a similar process in Estonian as described by Ilse Lehiste, who observed an article-like use in some Estonian translations of a German literary text by Friedrich Schiller. 4. To some extent, the reverse influence is also present, whereby local variants of Italian and Friulian are affected by contact with Slovene. 5. Similar phenomena can be observed in literary texts produced by members of the Slovene community in Carinthia (Austria). 6. The issue of the formation of new language varieties has recently been discussed in relation to the English used in Cyprus, although not on the basis of literary production (Buschfeld 2013). 7. http://www.gigafida.net/

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8. The text in question is a translation of the French novel Le roi des montaignes by Edmund About. The passage is quoted in the French original and in the Slovene and English translations: Mme Simons jeta les hauts cris en voyant que sa maison se composait d’une simple bande de feutre grossier, pliée par le milieu, fixée à terre par les bouts, et ouverte au vent de deux côtés. (RM 79) Gospa Simons je glasno vpila, ko je videla, da je vsa njena hiša sestavljena iz debelega sivega sulena, ki je bil zložen po sredi in pritrjen s koli v zemljo in na dve strani odprt vetru. (KM 67) Mrs. Simons fairly screamed when she saw that her house was composed of a simple strip of heavy felt, pleated in the middle, fastened to the earth at the two ends, and opened to the wind on two sides. (KG 2) 9. In this and in other examples the judgments about the relative frequency of use are based on data retrievable from GigaFida.

Glossing abbreviations ACC ADJ ADV AUX COND DAT GEN IMP IPFV LOC NOM PL PRS PPC SG

accusative adjective adverbial auxiliary conditional dative genitive imperative imperfective locative nominative plural present past participle singular

Research materials KG

About, Edmund. 1924. Kralj gora. [22]. Trans. K. Hafner. Slovenec, 26 January 1924, p. 2.

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KM

About, Edmund. 1897. The King of the Mountains. Trans. C. A. Kingsbury. New York/Chicago: Rand McNally. [Electronic edition: University of Adelaide]. Lu Luther 1545. http://www.bibel-online.net/buch/luther_1545_letzte _hand. CID – christliche internet dienst GmbH. MTN Boris Pahor: Moj tržaški naslov. Trst: Gregorþiþeva založba, 1948. NP Alojz Rebula. 2004. Nokturno za Primorsko. Celje/Trst: Mohorjeva družba/Mladika. RM About, Edmund. 1925 [1857]. Le roi des montaignes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. RSV The Holy Bible. Revised Standard Version. 1971. New York/Glasgow: Collins. SloS Boris Pahor. 1995. Slovenska svatba: dnevniški zapiski 1990–1992. Maribor: Založba Obzorja. SSV Sveto pismo. Slovenski standardni prevod. 1996. Ljubljana: Svetopisemska družba Slovenije. ST student translation Trubar Primož Trubar 1557. Ta pervi deil tiga Noviga testamenta. Tübingen: Ulrich Morhart.

References Andersen, Roger. 1983. “Transfer to somewhere.” In Language Transfer in Language Learning, edited by Susan M. Gass and Larry Selinker, 177–201. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Baumgarten, Nicole, and Demet Özçetin. 2008. “Linguistic variation through language contact in translation.” In Language Contact and Contact Languages, edited by Peter Siemund and Noemi Kintana, 293–316. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bennett, David C. 1987. “Word-order change in progress: The case of Slovene and Serbo-Croat and its relevance for Germanic.” Journal of Linguistics 23 (2): 269–287. Buschfeld, Sarah. 2013. English in Cyprus or Cyprus English: An Empirical Investigation of Variety Status. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Chesterman, Andrew. 2004. “Beyond the particular.” In Translation Universals – Do They Exist?, edited by Anna Mauranen and Pekka Kujamäki, 33–50. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Clyne, Michael, ed. 1991. Pluricentric Languages: Differing Norms in Different Nations. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Coseriu, Eugenio. 1978. “Falsche und richtige Fragestellungen in der Übersetzungstheorie.” In Theory and Practice of Translation, edited by Lillebil Grähs, Gustav Korlén, and Bertil Malmberg, 17–32. Bern, Frankfurt am Main, Las Vegas: Peter Lang. Delisle, Jean, and Judith Woodsworth, eds. 1995. Translators Through History. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Heine, Bernd. 2012. “On polysemy copying and grammaticalization in language contact.” In Dynamics of Contact-induced Language Change, edited by Claudine Chamoreau and Isabelle Léglise, 125–166. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Heine, Bernd, and Tania Kuteva. 2005. Language Contact and Grammatical Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heltai, Pál. 2010. “A fordítás monitor modellje és a fordítói beszédmód.” In Nyelv, beszéd, írás, edited by Judit Navracsics, 95–110. Budapest: Tinta könyvkiadó. House, Juliane. 2010. “Overt and covert translation.” In Handbook of Translation Studies, vol. 1, edited by Yves Gambier and Luuk van Doorslaer, 245–247. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jarvis, Scott, and Aneta Pavlenko. 2008. Crosslinguistic Influence in Language and Cognition. London, New York: Routledge. Jelovšek, Alenka. 2011. “Neosebna raba oblike ono v jeziku slovenskh protestantov.” Slavistiþna revija 59 (4): 415–435. Kellermann, Kathy. 1992. “Communication: Inherently strategic and primarily automatic.” Communication Monographs 59 (3): 288–300. Kolehmainen, Leena. 2013. “Die Unikat-Hypothese der Translation: Etwas Altes, etwas Neues und etwas Geliehenes.” trans-kom 6 (1): 92– 114. Kranich, Svenja, Viktor Becher, Steffen Höder, and Juliane House, eds. 2011. Multilingual Discourse Production: Diachronic and Synchronic Perspectives. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kranich, Svenja, Juliane House and Viktor Becher. 2012 “Changing conventions in English-German translations of popular scientific texts.” In Multilingual Individuals and Multilingual Societies, edited by Kurt Braunmüller and Christoph Gabriel, 315–334. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lanstyák, István. 2003. “Fordítás és kontaktológia.” Fórum Társadalomtudományi Szemle 5 (3): 49–70. Lanstyák, István, and Pál Heltai. 2012. “Universals in Language Contact and Translation.” Across Languages and Cultures 13 (1): 99–121. Levý, JiĜí. 2011. The Art of Translation. Transl. Patrick Corness. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. [Czech original publ. in 1963.]

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Luraghi, Silvia, and Pierluigi Cuzzolin. 2007. “Mediating culture through language: Contact-induced phenomena in the early translations of the Gospels.” In Europe and Mediterranean as Linguistic Areas: Convergencies from a Historical and Typological Perspective, edited by Paolo Ramat and Elisa Roma, 133–158. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Matras, Yaron. 2009. Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mauranen, Anna. 2000. “Strange strings in translated language: A study on corpora.” In Intercultural Faultlines: Research Models in Translation Studies I: Textual and Cognitive Aspects, edited by Maeve Olohan, 119–141. Manchester: St. Jerome. McLauglin, Mairi. 2011. Tradurre/Tradire: Translation as a Cause of Linguistic Change from Manuscripts to the Digital Age. Berkeley: The Doe Library. Merše, Majda. 2003. “Glagolski kalki v zgodovini slovenskega knjižnega jezika (prevzemanje, raba in primerjava s stanjem v slovanskih jezikih).” Slavistiþna revija 51 (special number): 81–103. —. 2013. Slovenski knjižni jezik 16. stoletja: Razprave o jezikovnem sistemu, besedju in prevodni problematiki. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC. Muhr, Rudolf, ed. 2012. Non-Dominant Varieties of Pluricentric Languages: Getting the Picture. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Muhr, Rudolf, Carla Amorós Negre, Carmen Fernández Juncal, Klaus Zimmermann, Emilio Prieto, and Natividad Hernández, eds. 2013. Exploring Linguistic Standards in Non-dominant Varieties of Pluricentric Languages. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Orožen, Martina. 1972. “K doloþnemu þlenu v slovenšþini.” Slavistiþna revija 20 (1): 105–114. Ožbot, Martina. 2009. “Sloveno e italiano in contatto: Qualche osservazione sugli scambi linguistici in una zona bilingue.” In Alloglossie e comunità alloglotte nell’Italia contemporanea: Teorie, applicazioni e descrizioni, prospettive, edited by Carlo Consani, Paola Desideri, Francesca Guazzelli, and Carmela Perta, 39–52. Roma: Bulzoni. —. 2011. “Translation as an agent of culture planning in low-impact cultures.” In Between Cultures and Texts: Itineraries in Translation History. – Entre les cultures et les textes: Itinéraires en histoire de la traduction, edited by Antoine Chalvin, Anne Lange, and Daniele Monticelli, 55–66. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Pohlin, Marko. 1768, 1783. Kraynska Grammatika, das ist die crainerische Grammatik. Ljubljana: Joh. Friedr. Eger.

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Prunþ, Erich. 1997. “Slovenšþina in jezikovna enakopravnost v mednarodni komunikaciji.” Slavistiþna revija 45 (3–4): 547–557. Reindl, Donald F. 2005. The Effects of Historical German-Slovene Langauge Contact on the Slovene Language. PhD Dissertation, Indiana University. [Published version: Language Contact: German and Slovenian. Bochum: Brockmeyer, 2008.] Siemund, Peter, and Noemi Kintana, eds. 2008. Language Contact and Contact Languages. Hamburg Studies on Multilingualism 7. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove. 1981. Bilingualism or Not: The Education of Minorities. Transl. by Lars Malmberg and David Crane. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Stabej, Marko. 1998. “Oblikovanje knjižnega jezika v 19. stoletju med narodno enotnostjo in socialno razloþevalnostjo.” In Zbornik predavanj: XXXIV. Seminar slovenskega jezika, literature in kulture, edited by Erika Kržišnik, 19–33. Ljubljana: Center za slovenšþino. Thomason, Sarah Grey, and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge. Winford, Donald. 2003. Introduction to Contact Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.

CHAPTER SIX UNDERSTANDING TRANSLATED VS. NON-TRANSLATED FIGURATIVE IDIOMS: RESULTS OF A QUESTIONNAIRE SURVEY ESA PENTTILÄ AND PIRKKO MUIKKU-WERNER Abstract This article discusses figurative idioms and how they are understood. The study is based on a questionnaire survey that was conducted with Finnish native speakers, who had to explain the meanings of 20 Finnish idioms. In particular, the discussion concentrates on the differences in understanding translated vs. non-translated idioms. Certain other factors, such as idiom age and contextual usage restrictions, are also touched upon. These relate in various respects to the origin of the idiom. The data provide a glimpse into how idiom meanings are understood and processed and which are the factors that speakers base their interpretation of the expressions on. Differences between informant groups are also discussed.

1. Introduction Idioms can be regarded as prime examples of non-compositional phrasal expressions whose meanings cannot be arrived at by simply combining the meanings of their parts. Although this is too simplistic a view as such (see, e.g. Cacciari and Tabossi 1988; Glucksberg 2001; Nenonen 2002), it provides us with a criterion that can be used to determine whether people understand figurative idioms or not. If the meaning people give to an idiom is its holistic idiomatic sense, then they have understood it; if the meaning is something else, for example the compositional combination of the idiom’s component meanings, then the idiomatic meaning has not been understood.

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Partly, the notion of understanding overlaps with the notion of recognition, but there are differences between the two notions as well. Usually, when people understand a certain idiom, their understanding is based on recognizing the phrase and being familiar with its meaning. However, it is also possible (and this happened with our informants as well) that people recognize an idiom and have even come across it but are still unable to say what it means. On the other hand, it is just as possible that people meet a certain idiom for the first time in their lives but can nevertheless say what it means because of the figure of speech it contains. In this article, our main aim is to concentrate on the meanings that people give to idioms, and therefore we will rather talk about idiom understanding than idiom recognition in spite of the conceptual overlapping. Of course, it has to be remembered that idiom meanings are rarely restricted to a single, narrowly defined sense but may vary and allow different interpretations, and the same idiom may have several more or less related meanings. Moreover, the form of the idiom may vary to quite an extent, which adds further dimensions to the communicated idiomatic meaning (see, e.g. Moon 1998; Langlotz 2006; Mäntylä and Dufva 2007). Nevertheless, it is fairly easy to make a distinction between idiomatic and non-idiomatic meaning, and we used this information to study how well people understand the meanings of different types of figurative idioms. It is worth pointing out that this study only concerns figurative idioms, i.e. idioms whose meaning is based on metaphorical figures of speech. In addition, there are idioms that are non-figurative, such as the English take advantage of or pay attention to. These will fall outside our present scope, however, as their semantics is somewhat different from the figurative idioms discussed in this article. In addition to their non-compositional meaning, idioms carry various other properties (see, e.g. Nunberg, Sag and Wasow 1994; Penttilä 2010). They may, for example, be ungrammatical or contain isolate elements that do not exist elsewhere in the language, or their usage may be pragmatically constrained. They may also have their origin in some other language. The expressions that we studied are all part of the present Finnish idiom repertoire, but some of them have their background in other languages. In other words, they are translation loans or calques (see, e.g. Vinay and Darbelnet 1995 [1958], 32; Thomason 2001, 260).1 Translation is one way of introducing new idioms into language, and, as Backus (2010, 235) points out, “idioms, collocations, and figurative shades of meaning” are phraseological units that tend to get translated from one language to another. They function as concrete examples of

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situations where languages and cultures are in contact with one another through commerce and various other kinds of social intercourse. The role of translation loans in Finnish phraseology has long since been acknowledged in linguistics (see, e.g. Hakulinen 1955) and more specifically in folklore studies (see, e.g. Hakamies 1986), but as far as we know there is no research on translated idioms as a form of language contact—either in contact linguistics or in translation studies. Research on translated elements in language contact situations has so far concentrated either on vocabulary or on syntactic structures (see, e.g. Thomason 2001; Matras 2008; Kranich, Becher and Höder 2011; Backus, Demirऊay and Sevinऊ 2013). The survey we conducted allows us to discuss some of the aspects related to translated idioms and non-professional translation in connection with language contacts. This is done by letting native speakers reveal how well they know the meanings of certain tested idioms and analyzing these results from various points of view. Our study can be located somewhere on the borderline between linguistics and translation studies, hopefully contributing to both of them. The article is structured as follows. We will start by presenting the research question, data, and informants. We will then show how the tested idioms that were used in the survey can be viewed in terms of different linguistic and cultural dimensions that help to place them in the general framework of language contacts. Section four is devoted to the actual analysis of the results; we will first discuss idiom understanding with respect to the different dimensions of the idioms and then move on to compare the differences in idiom understanding between the informant groups. The article ends with a few concluding remarks.

2. Research questions, data, and informants The focus of this article is on people’s understanding of figurative idiom meanings. We studied these by conducting a questionnaire survey in which our informants had to explain the meanings of figurative idioms that varied in certain respects. In particular, we wanted to see whether there are differences with respect to three dimensions. The most important of these was the origin of the idiom, i.e. whether the idiom is a translation loan or an original Finnish expression. The two other dimensions that we analyzed were the age of the idiom and the possible contextual usage restrictions of the phrase. Thus, we wanted to know whether different types of idioms are understood differently. In addition, we wanted to see whether there are

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speaker-related differences in how figurative idioms are understood. We therefore divided our informants into six groups in order to compare their results. The questionnaire survey that was used for data gathering was conducted in autumn 2012. The questionnaire contained 20 Finnish figurative idioms, which were presented to the informants without context. The primary aim of the survey was to gather information on what kind of interpretations people give to idioms independent of whether they know them beforehand or not. Therefore we did not want to guide their interpretations by providing context (for a similar research design, see Mäntylä 2004, 93í94). The tested idioms are discussed in more detail in the next section. In the questionnaire, the informants were asked to explain the meaning of each idiom. Even if they did not know the expression, we still wanted them to explain the assumed meaning in their own words. If they were able to give the holistic meaning of the idiomatic phrase, we interpreted their answers as indicating that they understood the idiom. Of course, one has to remember that idioms may have more than one meaning, so often more than one alternative could be regarded as correct. For the sake of operationalization, however, we restricted the possible correct meanings in this survey to the main meaning of each idiom. Had we not done this, it would have been very difficult to draw the line between correct and incorrect meanings. As idioms rarely have clearly defined semantic boundaries, their meanings could be extended considerably, depending on the context. To some extent, this decision may have affected some individual results. For example, the idiom Baabelin torni (lit. ‘the tower of Babel’), which is based on a story in the Bible (Gen. 11: 1–9), can be used in religious contexts to refer to ‘a doomed (religious) project’, but the meaning that we defined as correct was ‘a variety or tumult of languages or cultures’, which is the meaning listed in Muikku-Werner et al. (2008). Moreover, this meaning is the one which the informants who functioned as a control group should be familiar with, as will be pointed out later. As can be inferred from the above, the meaning that was regarded as correct for each idiom in this study was determined on the basis of dictionary definitions and various other sources (see Section 3). If the idiom was not listed in any dictionary, which was the case with three of the tested idioms, we based our definition on the meaning that we encountered in the media – either in newspapers, on television, or on the Internet.

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In addition to the meaning of the idiom, the questionnaire contained other queries as well. We asked the informants, for example, how they had concluded the meaning and whether they were familiar with the idiom beforehand. Another important point was the attitude that the informants had towards the tested idioms, and therefore we asked them whether they liked the phrases or not, and whether they would be willing to use the idioms themselves. Finally, we asked the informants about their attitude towards idiomatic phrases in general: how they felt about idiomatic phrases in the first place and in which contexts they would find them appropriate. All these questions were asked in connection with each of the tested idioms. Although the information provided by these further questions is highly interesting, it cannot, unfortunately, be discussed in any detail within the scope of this article. Some of the points have, however, been dealt with elsewhere (Muikku-Werner and Penttilä 2014; Muikku-Werner and Penttilä, to appear). Naturally, we also asked for some background information that helped us in grouping the informants and pondering on some of the factors that may have affected their results. Altogether 102 native Finnish speakers participated in the survey, and they could be divided into six different informant groups.2 More detailed information about the division of the groups is presented in Table 2-1. Table 2-1. The distribution of the informants in the questionnaire survey. Informant groups (and their ages) 8th graders (14–15 years) Secondary school students (16–17 years) Students of Finnish (20–26) Students of English translation (24–41 years)3 Middle-aged (35–50 years) Pensioners (64–88 years) Total

No. of informants 13 26 15 7 30 11 102

As Table 2-1 shows, two of the groups included informants who were still at school, either comprehensive school (8th graders) or secondary school. The two university student groups consisted of young adults who were basically in their fourth or fifth year of studies. The students of Finnish were chosen because of their expertise in the analysis of the

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different dimensions of Finnish, which allowed us to expect that they may have a better understanding of Finnish idioms than the average native speaker. The students of English translation (in the language pair Finnish– English) were chosen for the survey as a control group. Like the students in the previous group, they are experts in Finnish, which is their A language4, and they also have an excellent knowledge of English. Moreover, because of their translation studies background, they are used to making conscious comparisons between the two languages and their corresponding structures, which allowed us to study whether this knowledge affected their answers. After all, our questionnaire contained idioms that have been borrowed into Finnish from English, which is a fairly common source of novel idiomatic translation loans at present (other sources include Swedish and Russian, and, most recently, the various languages spoken by new immigrant groups). Examples of recently invented Finnish idioms that derive from English are easily found on the Internet. They often have to do with popular culture, politics, and sports. For example, pala kakkua (lit. ‘a piece of cake’) ‘something very easy’, ei laatikon terävin veitsi (lit. ‘not the sharpest knife in the drawer’) ‘not very bright, clever’, tangoon tarvitaan kaksi (lit. ‘it takes two to tango’) ‘it takes at least two people to do something’, and raha puhuu (lit. ‘money talks’) ‘those with money have the power to decide’ are so common in Finnish discourse nowadays that they may not necessarily be recognized as translation loans (see also Kortelainen 2011, 32í33). In addition to the four student groups mentioned above, we had two further groups, the larger of which consisted of middle-aged adults. Unfortunately, the members of this group did not quite represent average Finnish adults, since their educational background was higher than the average educational background of middle-aged Finnish population. The majority of informants in this group had an MA-level degree and they worked either as teachers or technical writers and editors, and this does not correspond to the general demographics of the Finnish population (OSF 2013). Nevertheless, it was particularly because of their background that this group proved to be fruitful, since many of them were used to reflecting on language analytically and could therefore provide illustrative answers. The final informant group comprised people who had reached their retirement age and whose educational backgrounds were varied. With respect to male and female informants, the groups were unbalanced. The overall distribution between male and female subjects was 27.7% against 72.3%, but among the 8th graders and Finnish students as many as 92.3% and 92.9%, respectively, were female. As regards the possible differences in idiom understanding between male and female

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informants, our sample was too small and the intragroup distributions too uneven for any reliable results to be gained.

3. Continua of idiom characteristics As already mentioned, there were altogether 20 Finnish figurative idioms that we included in the survey. The expressions were chosen on the basis of the variety of characteristics that they could be considered to reflect. The idioms are listed below (with their translations) in the order in which they appeared in the questionnaire: 1. heittää veivinsä (lit. ‘to throw one’s crank’) ‘to die’ (informal) 2. Baabelin torni (lit. ‘the tower of Babel’) ‘a variety or tumult of languages or cultures’ (formal, archaic) 3. apina selässä (lit. ‘a monkey on one’s back’) ‘a (mental) problem or difficulty’ (esp. sports) 4. ottaa aivoon (lit. ‘to get into one’s brain’) ‘to get on one’s nerve, irritate’ 5. joutua suihkuun (lit. ‘to end up in the shower’) ‘to be forced to quit or leave (the game)’ (esp. sports) 6. olla härillään (lit. ‘to be with one’s bulls’) ‘to be horny or enthusiastic, irritated’ (esp. agriculture) 7. nähdä punaista (lit. ‘to see red’) ‘to get very angry’ 8. olla täpinöissä (lit. ‘to be in täpinäs’5) ‘to be very enthusiastic’ 9. laittaa rukkaset naulaan (lit. ‘to hang one’s mittens on the hook’) ‘to stop (working)’ 10. ihan sikana (lit. ‘as all pigs’) ‘lots of, immensely’ 11. vetää herneet nenään (lit. ‘to draw peas in one’s nose’) ‘to get agitated’ 12. ei oo kaikki muumit laaksossa (lit. ‘not to have all the Moomins in the valley’) ‘to be stupid, mentally unbalanced’ 13. sormet syyhyävät (lit. ‘fingers itch’) ‘eager to start something’ 14. lusikka pohjassa (lit. ‘the spoon on the bottom/floor’) ‘to drive fast, speed’ 15. rampa ankka (lit. ‘a lame duck’) ‘authority without real power because of end of term’ (esp. politics) 16. kaksiteräinen miekka (lit. ‘a double-edged sword’) ‘something with both favorable and unfavorable consequences’ 17. tulla puskista (lit. ‘to come from the bushes’) ‘to come as a total surprise’

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18. nakit silmillä (lit. ‘sausages on one’s eyes’) ‘totally drunk’ 19. puhua tanskaa (lit. ‘to speak Danish’) ‘to throw up, vomit’ 20. haukkua väärää puuta (lit. ‘to bark up the wrong tree’) ‘to blame someone unnecessarily’ The idioms that were tested in the survey varied with respect to a number of characteristics. Of these, the most important ones can be viewed in terms of three continua: 1) the continuum of idiom origin, 2) the continuum of idiom age, and 3) the continuum of idiom usage restrictions. The most central continuum that we looked at had to do with the origin of the expressions. As mentioned above, some of the idioms in our questionnaire, six in all, were translated from other languages. Two of the phrases, Baabelin torni ‘a variety or tumult of languages or cultures’ and kaksiteräinen miekka ‘something with both favorable and unfavorable consequences’, derive from the Bible and have their origin in Hebrew (see, e.g. Parkkinen 2005; Piirainen 2012). In the Bible, the expressions do not carry their present idiomatic meanings but are used in other, more concrete senses (see, e.g. Piirainen 2012, 213–214). However, the idiomatic meanings of these phrases have now been established and they are shared by most Judeo-Christian languages and cultures into which they have been translated. The idioms nähdä punaista ‘to get very angry’ and haukkua väärää puuta ‘to blame someone unnecessarily’ resemble the above-mentioned idioms of Biblical origin in the sense that their idiomatic meanings have become part and parcel of the Finnish idiom repertoire to the extent that people may no longer even recognize their translation loan status. The background of both of these phrases is in American English (Hendrickson 1997, 51–52, 600; see also Dobrovol’skij and Piirainen 2005, 326–327). The questionnaire also included two other arrivals translated from English, but they have been introduced into Finnish much more recently: apina selässä ‘a (mental) problem or difficulty’ and rampa ankka ‘authority without real power because of end of term’. Both of these are used in Finnish fairly regularly in sports and politics, respectively. However, in English there is a wider spectrum of senses in which the idioms can be used. A monkey on one’s back also refers to anger or drug addiction (OED). A lame duck, on the other hand, can refer to ‘a disabled person or thing’, ‘a ship that is damaged’, or ‘a commercial company that cannot survive without financial help’ (OED; Mäntylä 2004, 143). None of these additional meanings have entered Finnish. At the other extreme of the translated–non-translated continuum, there are expressions of clearly Finnish origin. The questionnaire contained

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twelve of such idioms: olla härillään ‘to be horny or enthusiastic, irritated’, olla täpinöissä ‘to be very enthusiastic’, laittaa rukkaset naulaan ‘to stop (working)’, heittää veivinsä ‘to die’, ottaa aivoon ‘to get on one’s nerve, irritate’, vetää herneet nenään6 ‘to get agitated’, tulla puskista ‘to come as a total surprise’, nakit silmillä ‘totally drunk’, ihan sikana7 ‘lots of, immensely’, ei oo kaikki muumit laaksossa ‘to be stupid, mentally unbalanced’, and puhua tanskaa8 ‘to throw up, vomit’. Of course, it is not always easy to tell the origin of the idiom. Especially figurative proverbial phrases are widely-spread among languages and cultures, and their etymologies may be difficult to detect. This applies to more recent idioms, in particular, while the origin of older translation loans is often “firmly established and secured by sound philological-historical research” (Piirainen 2012, 51). For example, our tested idioms included phrases like joutua suihkuun9 ‘to be forced to quit or leave (the game)’ and sormet syyhyävät10 ‘eager to start something’, which have English language counterparts with similar images. However, since the phrases take a somewhat different form11 in other languages, we could not be sure that they are translation loans and therefore did not place them at either end of the continuum of idiom origin. The second continuum that was relevant for our tested idioms concerned their age: some of the phrases were old, while others were clearly more recent, as mentioned above. There were several dictionaries that helped us make this distinction (Kivimies 1964; NSS; Kari 1993; Paunonen 2000; Parkkinen 2005; Muikku-Werner et al. 2008). When an idiom was listed in a dictionary, it could be regarded as established in Finnish at the time of compiling the work. Of course, if an idiom is not listed in a dictionary, this does not automatically mean that it is not part of the Finnish idiom repertoire. Dictionaries are based on selection, and, for example, the idiom Baabelin torni ‘a variety or tumult of languages or cultures’, although it is based on a very old figure of speech, was listed only in the most recent dictionary that we used (Muikku-Werner et al. 2008). In addition to the dictionaries, there were other studies that helped us determine the ages of some of the tested idioms (see, e.g. MuikkuWerner 2010; Kortelainen 2011; Penttilä and Muikku-Werner 2011). All in all, there were three very old idioms in the questionnaire that could be placed at this end of the age continuum. Two of them were translation loans (Baabelin torni ‘a variety or tumult of languages or cultures’ and kaksiteräinen miekka ‘something with both favorable and unfavorable consequences’) and one of Finnish origin (olla härillään ‘to be horny or enthusiastic, irritated’).

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The four most recent idioms in our questionnaire were apina selässä ‘a (mental) problem or difficulty’, rampa ankka ‘authority without real power because of end of term’, ei oo kaikki muumit laaksossa ‘to be stupid, mentally unbalanced’, and puhua tanskaa ‘to throw up, vomit’. The first two of these are translation loans, the last two of Finnish origin. Instances of each of these can be found, for example, on the Internet. The rest of the idioms in the questionnaire could be regarded as somewhere between the two extremes. To refer to their age, we have used the term “middle-aged”, which is not a technical term as such but suits the practical purpose of referring to idioms which have neither been part of the Finnish idiomatic repertoire for a very long time nor have been introduced into it during the last few years. Of the middle-aged idioms, two were translation loans (nähdä punaista ‘to get very angry’ and haukkua väärää puuta ‘to blame someone unnessarily’) and two of uncertain origin (sormet syyhyävät ‘eager to start something’ and joutua suihkuun ‘to be forced to quit or leave [the game]’). The rest, nine altogether, were of Finnish origin. The third continuum that was applied to our tested idioms had to do with the context of use. There were at least eight idioms in the questionnaire that are contextually restricted. Of the translated idioms, Baabelin torni ‘a variety or tumult of languages or cultures’ is basically used in non-colloquial, even formal, contexts only and would appear awkward if used informally. The two recent translation loans, on the other hand, are not limited to a certain register but rather to a certain area of life, as mentioned above. Apina selässä ‘a monkey on one’s back’ is mainly used in sports contexts, while rampa ankka ‘authority without real power because of end of term’ seems to be limited to political contexts. Six of the non-translated idioms in the questionnaire were restricted in terms of register. It is fairly usual for idioms to be informal in style, and this is the case with heittää veivinsä ‘to die’, ihan sikana ‘lots of, immensely’, vetää herneet nenään ‘to get very angry, become agitated’, ei oo kaikki muumit laaksossa ‘to be stupid or mentally unbalanced’, nakit silmillä ‘totally drunk’, and puhua tanskaa ‘to throw up, vomit’, all of which are used in colloquial contexts only. Two of our tested idioms, joutua suihkuun ‘to be forced to quit or leave (the game)’ and olla härillään ‘to be horny or enthusiastic, irritated’, have originally been contextually restricted but have now extended their usage. The first is still often related to sports but can also be used outside this context. In sports, it is often used in a fairly concrete sense, while elsewhere the meaning is more metaphorical. The idiom olla härillään, on the other hand, has originally referred to cows in heat but has now

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extended its usage to, for example, economics (Muikku-Werner 2010). However, since both of these phrases still retain some link to their original usage, we did not regard them as totally contextually free, but placed them somewhere between the two extremes. The same applies to ottaa aivoon ‘to get on one’s nerve, irritate’ and tulla puskista ‘to come as a total surprise’. Although not as colloquial as the six idioms mentioned in the previous paragraph, they are still fairly informal and would not be common in official contexts. The rest of the tested idioms could be regarded as more or less free of contextual restrictions. Admittedly, it is not always easy to judge whether an idiom is contextually restricted, especially as regards possible register limitations, since this could be considered a matter of taste to some extent. However, we feel that our intuition as native speakers of Finnish can be trusted reasonably well in this matter. The above discussion is summarized in Table 3-1, which shows how the idioms included in the questionnaire can be viewed in terms of the three continua. The division is fairly rough and shows only the cases at the two extremes of each continuum and the rest of the idioms could in each case be placed between these extremes. As can be seen, the same idioms may situate at various points of the different continua. Moreover, it should be remembered that the division is not exhaustive and is partly based on our native speaker intuition. However, it is beyond the scope of this article to provide a more refined division here.

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Table 3-1. The distribution of idioms at the extreme ends of the three continua. Continuum Extreme

Extreme

Translated apina selässä, Baabelin torni, haukkua väärää puuta, Idiom origin kaksiteräinen miekka, nähdä punaista, rampa ankka

Finnish ei oo kaikki muumit laaksossa, heittää veivinsä, ihan sikana, laittaa rukkaset naulaan, lusikka pohjassa, nakit silmillä, olla härillään, olla täpinöissä, ottaa aivoon, puhua tanskaa, tulla puskista, vetää herneet nenään

Old Baabelin torni, kaksiteräinen miekka, olla härillään

New apina selässä, ei oo kaikki muumit laaksossa, rampa ankka, puhua tanskaa

Restricted apina selässä, Baabelin torni, ei oo kaikki muumit laaksossa, heittää veivinsä, ihan sikana, nakit silmillä, olla härillään, puhua tanskaa, rampa ankka, vetää herneet nenään

Free haukkua väärää puuta, kaksiteräinen miekka, laittaa rukkaset naulaan, lusikka pohjassa, nähdä punaista, olla täpinöissä, sormet syyhyävät

Idiom age

Contextual restrictions

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4. How are figurative idioms understood? The analysis below concentrates on explaining how people understand figurative idioms. The most important distinction is the one between translated and non-translated idioms, but the other factors discussed in the previous section are also of interest. In addition, we will comment on the differences between the informant groups. The discussion is quantitativelyoriented, but we will comment on qualitative aspects as well.

4.1. Understanding different types of idioms There were clear general differences between the informants in understanding the tested idioms, and these differences were statistically highly significant (p < .001)12. The main division is between well-known and less well-known idioms. Of the 20 idioms, 11 were well known with more than four fifths of the informants knowing their meanings. Then there was a gap, and the idiom kaksiteräinen miekka ‘something with both favorable and unfavorable consequences’ could be regarded as a special case on the threshold between the two main groups; it was known by two thirds of the informants. The rest of the tested idioms were known by less than a half of the informants. The five least-known idioms were understood particularly poorly, since their correct meanings were only given by one fifth of the subjects or fewer. The general results can be seen in Table 4-1 (for more detailed results, see Appendix). Table 4-1. Understanding the meanings of the tested idioms (N = 2040). Idiom heittää veivinsä ‘to die’ ihan sikana ‘lots of, immensely’ ottaa aivoon ‘to get on one’s nerve, irritate’ vetää herneet nenään ‘to get agitated’ haukkua väärää puuta ‘to blame someone unnecessarily’ olla täpinöissä ‘to be very enthusiastic’ laittaa rukkaset naulaan ‘to stop (working)’

Sense known (%) 99.0 97.1 97.1 97.1 93.1 92.2 92.2

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nähdä punaista ’to get very angry’ tulla puskista ‘to come as a total surprise’ ei oo kaikki muumit laaksossa ‘to be stupid, mentally unbalanced’ sormet syyhyävät ‘eager to start something’ kaksiteräinen miekka ‘something with both favorable and unfavorable consequences’ nakit silmillä ‘totally drunk’ joutua suihkuun ‘to be forced to quit or leave (the game)’ lusikka pohjassa ‘to drive fast, speed’ puhua tanskaa ‘to throw up, vomit’ olla härillään ‘to be horny or enthusiastic, irritated’ apina selässä ‘a (mental) problem or difficulty’ Baabelin torni ‘a variety or tumult of languages and cultures’ rampa ankka ‘authority without real power because of end of term’ Total

90.2 89.2 88.2 83.3 67.6 45.1 44.1 40.2 21.6 18.6 17.6 13.7 12.7 65.0

The majority of the ten best-known idioms in the survey were nontranslated. Only the fifth and eighth phrases on the list, haukkua väärää puuta ‘to blame someone unnecessarily’ and nähdä punaista ‘to get very angry’, respectively, can be regarded as translation loans. This means that four fifths of the top ten best-known idioms are Finnish in origin, which indicates that the origin of the idiom may partly explain how well it is understood. Moreover, the two translation loans in the top ten are so frequently used in Finnish that it is quite likely that most speakers do not even recognize their translational background. At the other end of the cline, we have the opposite case: the three least known idioms, apina selässä ‘a (mental) problem or difficulty’, Baabelin torni ‘a variety of tumult of languages and cultures’ and rampa ankka ‘authority without real power because of end of term’, are all translation loans. However, there are also two Finnish idioms that can be found among the least known phrases, olla härillään ‘to be horny or enthusiastic, irritated’ and puhua tanskaa ‘to throw up, vomit’. Interestingly enough, some of the informants commented on the fact that they knew that rampa ankka was a translation loan from English, but still could not tell what it meant. Others pointed out that it is such an ugly Anglicism that they would never use it in Finnish themselves.

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The general differences in understanding the meanings of translated vs. non-translated idioms can be seen in Table 4-2. In addition, the table contains a class for the two idioms whose origin we were uncertain of, joutua suihkuun ‘to be forced to quit or leave (the game)’ and sormet syyhyävät ‘eager to start something’. The difference between the results of translated and non-translated idioms is highly significant (p < .001)13 and so is the difference between all three idiom groups (p < .001)14. Table 4-2. Understood idiom meanings with respect to idiom origin (N = 2040). Idiom origin Translated idioms Non-translated idioms Idioms of unknown origin Total

Meanings known (%) 49.8 73.1 63.7 65.0

Although there is a significant difference in the way translated and non-translated idioms are understood, there are great differences between individual expressions within each class as well. The recognition rate among the different translated idioms varies from 12% (rampa ankka ‘authority without real power because of end of term’) to 93% (haukkua väärää puuta ‘to blame someone unnecessarily’), and among nontranslated idioms from 18% (olla härillään ‘to be horny or enthusiastic, irritated’) to 99% (heittää veivinsä ‘to die’), which indicates that there are other factors that could explain the differences in addition to the origin of the expression. In the following, we will be looking at some of these possibilities in more detail. The second criterion that we looked at was the age of the expression, and we found that there were clear age-related differences. Interestingly enough, it seemed that old idioms and new idioms were understood equally poorly, whereas the “middle-aged” ones were understood well. The results between the three groups can be seen in Table 4-3.

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Table 4-3. Understood idiom meanings with respect to idiom age (N = 2040). Idiom age

Meanings known (%)

Old idioms “Middle-aged” idioms New idioms Total

33.3 81.5 35.1 65.0

The minor difference between the results of old and new idioms is not statistically significant (p = .7)15, whereas the differences between the three groups are very highly significant (p < .001)16. This indicates that in a certain respect old and new idioms could be thought of as forming a group that is clearly different from the middle-aged ones. When analyzed in more detail, old and new idioms do not form a homogeneous group but there are various types of expressions within those groups, and idiom origin seems to be an important factor in this respect. Old translated idioms are understood better than old nontranslated ones, and this difference is highly significant (p < .001)17. A significant difference can be found in understanding new translated vs. new non-translated idioms as well (p < .001)18, but this time it is the nontranslated idioms that are known better. The results of understanding old and new translated and non-translated idioms can be seen in Table 4-4. Table 4-4. Understood idiom meanings for old and new idioms with respect to idiom origin (N = 714). Idiom origin Translated idioms Non-translated idioms Total

Meanings known/ old idioms (%) 40.7 18.6 33.3

Meanings known/ new idioms (%) 15.2 55.9 35.1

Of course, these results should be considered with a pinch of salt, since the number of idioms in the comparison is so small. The category of old non-translated idioms, for example, consists of one idiom only (olla härillään ‘to be horny or enthusiastic, irritated’), and an increase in the number of tested idioms might change the results considerably. After all, people’s knowledge of less frequent idioms varies to a large extent. This

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can be seen, for example, with the two old translated idioms included in the survey; kaksiteräinen miekka ‘something with both favorable and unfavorable consequences’ was known by two thirds of the informants, while Baabelin torni ‘a variety or tumult of languages or cultures’ was familiar to only 13%. Of course it is possible that some of the differences in the results— especially between the new translated and non-translated idioms—can be explained by frequency of use. Sometimes idioms gain popularity fast and become widely used for a while, after which they are forgotten. They may, for example, be used by certain popular figures, which makes them favored by certain language users. This is something that may happen more easily with originally Finnish idioms than with translation loans. For example, the phrase ei oo kaikki muumit laaksossa ‘to be stupid, mentally unbalanced’ has become fairly popular recently, not simply in itself, but because it follows a particularly productive construction that is frequently used in spoken youth language; other synonymous phrases in present-day Finnish include ei oo kaikki kupit kaapissa (lit. ‘not to have all the cups in the cupboard’), ei oo kaikki inkkarit kanootissa (lit. ‘not to have all the injuns in the canoe’), ei oo kaikki eskimot iglussa (lit. ‘not to have all the eskimos in the igloo’), ei oo kaikki lepakot tapulissa (lit. ‘not to have all the bats in the belfry’), or ei oo kaikki pöllöt tornissa (lit. ‘not to have all the owls in the tower)’ to mention just a few (Kortelainen 2011)19. One of the reasons for the popularity of this construction could be that it is humorous, which is one of the features that is frequently found in idioms. The contextual limitations that apply to idioms seem to play a role in how well they are understood. It seems that the more contextually restricted the idiom is, the less well it is known. When we divided the tested idioms into three classes—those with clear usage restrictions, those with fairly few restrictions, and those with no restrictions—they formed a constant cline from the least known to the best known, as Table 4-5 shows. The differences between the groups are statistically highly significant (p < .001)20.

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Table 4-5. Understood idiom meanings between translated and nontranslated idioms depending on their contextual usage restrictions (N = 2040). Idiom origin

Translated idioms Non-translated idioms Unknown origin Total

Meanings known/ contextually restricted (%) 14.7

Meanings known/ fairly unrestricted (%) 68.3

Meanings known/ freely usable (%) 83.7

66.7

–

74.8

– 54.7

44.1 62.3

83.3 79.8

Again, it is not simply the usage restrictions that affect the recognition rate of idiom meanings, but there are differences between translated and non-translated idioms as well. Among idioms whose usage is restricted, the meanings of non-translated idioms are significantly better understood than the meanings of translated idioms (p < .001)21. Poor understanding of translated idioms with contextual usage restrictions could be expected, since the three idioms included in this class (apina selässä ‘a (mental) problem or difficulty’, Baabelin torni ‘a variety or tumult of languages and cultures’, and rampa ankka ‘authority without real power because of end of term’) all belong to either old or new translated idioms, which were the two groups that were less understood than the idioms between these two extremes. The difference between translated and non-translated idioms in the group of freely usable idioms is not very remarkable (83.7% vs. 74.8%), but it is still statistically significant (p < .01)22. Also, when we compare the differences between all three groups in this category, they still remain statistically significant, although to a lesser extent (p < .05)23.

4.2. Differences between informant groups Although there are general trends in how the various types of idioms are understood by the survey participants, these trends do not show in the same way in all informant groups. In general, the differences in understanding the idioms varied to quite an extent. The group that recognized idiom meanings best was that of the students of English

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translation, who were closely followed by the middle-aged informants. Both groups were able to understand more than three quarters of all tested idiom meanings. The group that had the most difficulties in understanding the meanings was that of the youngest informants, the 8th graders. Nevertheless, they too were able to understand a half of the tested idioms. The general results on the six informant groups can be seen in Table 4-6. The intergroup differences are statistically significant (p < .001)24. It is probably no surprise that English translation students were able to understand idiom meanings better than the other groups in this survey. They are experts in both Finnish and English and, as future experts of translation, they have been trained to recognize idiomatic expressions and think about their translations. As many as 12 of the 20 tested idioms were understood by all students of English translation. It could also be expected that the middle-aged informants would understand idioms better than some other groups. Their sphere of life is wider and therefore it is likely that they come across more varied language use in their everyday lives than many other age groups. Moreover, as mentioned already, the middle-aged informants in this survey were better educated than middle-aged people in general and many of them worked with languages and were probably better aware of their linguistic environment, including idioms, than could be expected of average laypersons. This could be seen in the fact that none of the idioms were totally unfamiliar to the middle-aged. Table 4-6. The success rate in understanding idiom meanings in each informant group (N = 2040). Informant group 8th graders Secondary school students Students of Finnish Students of English translation Middle-aged Pensioners Total

Meanings known (%) 50.4 55.0 66.3 85.0 78.3 55.0 65.0

The 8th graders did not understand idioms as well as the other informants, which could partly be explained by their age. Idiom comprehension is a complex process, and some of the abilities needed to

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understand complicated idiom meanings have not yet been fully developed at their age. As Kempler et al. (1999, 335) point out, it is not until the age of 15 when children’s ability to understand idiomatic expressions reaches the level of adult performance, and 8th graders are just about to reach that age. There were five idioms altogether in the questionnaire whose meanings none of the eighth graders knew: Baabelin torni ‘variety or tumult of languages or cultures’, apina selässä ‘a (mental) problem or difficulty’, rampa ankka ‘authority without real power because of end of term’, nakit silmillä ‘totally drunk’, and puhua tanskaa ‘to throw up, vomit’. On the other hand, there were as many as five idioms, whose meanings were understood by every single 8th grader: heittää veivinsä ‘to die’, ottaa aivoon ‘to get on one’s nerve, irritate’, ihan sikana ‘lots of, immensely’, vetää herneet nenään ‘to get angry, become agitated’, and haukkua väärää puuta ‘to blame someone unnecessarily’. This exceeds the pensioners’ results, since only one of the idioms was known by all pensioners in the survey. It may be slightly surprising that the students of Finnish did not understand Finnish idioms particularly well. Although they are experts of Finnish, their expertise does not seem to be directed to idiomaticity. However, there were only two idioms (olla härillään ‘to be horny or enthusiastic, irritated’ and rampa ankka ‘lame duck’) that none of the Finnish students understood. The same applies to the pensioners, who did not know the idioms Baabelin torni ‘variety or tumult of languages or cultures’ and apina selässä ‘a (mental) problem or difficulty’. On the other hand, there were as many as 11 idioms whose meanings were known by all Finnish students. This is better than with the middle-aged informants, among whom 10 idioms were known by everyone. In addition to the general differences between the various informant groups, there is significant variation within each group in understanding translated vs. non-translated idioms. In each group, idioms that are of Finnish origin are understood better than idioms with a translation background. Although this is the general trend, there are clear inter-group differences in the results as well. The two most successful groups (the students of English translation and the middle-aged) understood even the translated idioms better than the three least successful groups (the 8th graders, the pensioners, and the secondary school students) understood the non-translated ones. The general results for the differences between informant groups in understanding translated vs. non-translated idioms are shown in Table 4-7. The differences are statistically highly significant (p < .001)25. As can be seen, Table 4-7 does not contain idioms that are of unknown origin, which is why the results in the Total column differ from the results of Table 4-6.

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Table 4-7. Understanding translated vs. non-translated idioms in different informant groups (N = 1836). Informant group 8th graders Secondary school students Students of Finnish Students of English translation Middle-aged Pensioners Total

Translated idioms (%) 34.6

Non-translated idioms (%) 60.9

Total (%) 52.1

35.3

65.4

55.3

44.4

76.7

65.9

73.8

89.3

84.1

66.1 43.9 49.2

84.2 60.6 73.1

78.1 55.1 65.1

Interestingly enough, one of the two old translation loans, Baabelin torni ‘variety or tumult of languages or cultures’, is an expression whose meaning was unknown to all of the 8th graders, secondary school students and pensioners. For younger speakers, this could be expected, since they have not been taught religious history to the same extent as older generations have, and unless their families are religiously-oriented, they may not know many of the stories in the Bible very well. Pensioners, on the other hand, would have had a closer connection with the Bible in their past education, but of course their school days are so far behind that they may have forgotten such details. Maybe the most likely explanation for pensioners not understanding the meaning is that the idiom is so old, even archaic, that they do not come across it in their everyday lives. Also, our strict criteria for defining the correct meaning may have affected the results, as mentioned above. Only slightly more than a half of the English translation students understood the meaning of Baabelin torni, although the idiom has a particular status in translation studies, where it is used as an iconic metaphor for the whole field. According to the story in the Bible, people had an ambitious plan to build a tower which would reach up to heaven, and this caused God to come down to the earth and create mutually incomprehensible languages, which then led to the need for translation and interpreting in general. The students must have come across references to the story several times during their studies, and some well-known classics of translation studies, such as Steiner’s (1975) After Babel, even carry this reference in their title.

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The two new translation idioms, apina selässä ‘a (mental) problem or difficulty’ and rampa ankka ‘authority without real power because of end of term’, also show intergroup differences of understanding, although both were poorly understood in general. However, apina selässä was understood by the majority of English translation students and even two fifths of the middle-aged informants, whereas rampa ankka was known by less than a third of the middle-aged, who were the ones to understand its meaning the best. Hence, it seems that although rampa ankka has been fairly frequently used in the Finnish media during the past few years, people do not necessarily understand its meaning. Infamous lame ducks have included, for example, the prime ministers Matti Vanhanen, Mari Kiviniemi, and most recently Jyrki Katainen. Of course, when placed in context the idiom is probably easier to understand.

5. Concluding remarks In this article, we have discussed some of the points that have emerged in a questionnaire survey in which Finnish native speakers explained the meanings of Finnish figurative idioms of different types. We have touched upon some of the aspects that can be found in the research data and that can be discussed within the scope of this article. The data as such offers a plethora of possibilities to be discussed further in relation to idiomaticity and idiom understanding from various points of view. The above results have shown that there are differences in how the different informant groups understand translated vs. non-translated idioms, but it is difficult to estimate how much of the differences depend on the origin of the expressions and how much on other factors, such as the age of the expression or its context of use—or the age and background of the speaker. For example, the fact that new translated idioms and old nontranslated idioms are understood poorly, while old translated idioms and new non-translated idioms are understood fairly well, suggests that the relationship between understanding figurative idioms and the various characteristics that idioms carry is far more complex than has probably been anticipated. Although it could be claimed that the knowledge of idiom origin plays a role in the way it is understood, it is not quite clear what that role is. It may help if one knows the translation origin of the idiom, but in addition to that one should also know the meaning of the original idiom to be able to interpret its meaning; otherwise, translated idioms are just as difficult to interpret as any novel phrasal combinations that one meets for the first

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time. Indicative of this is some informants’ observation that although they knew where a certain idiom originated, they were still unable to say exactly what it meant. One aspect which we have only commented on in passing but which we certainly would like to study further is the speakers’ attitude towards translation loans. As some of the informants in the survey indicated, the knowledge that a certain idiom is a translation loan actually made the idiom less attractive to them. It may be that they consider this kind of language contact undesirable and that translation loans are a phenomenon which they do not want to encourage. How much this attitude affects idiom understanding would be interesting to know. The attitude toward translation loans may partly be age-related. After all, the present-day pupils at comprehensive school seem to feel that English is much “cooler” than Finnish and that it is somehow admirable to use English instead of Finnish (see, e.g. Mykkänen 2013). It could be assumed that if people have an attitude like this, they have no need to avoid translation loans, at least not from English. They may even venture to create them in their own Finnish usage, because as it seems, translation loans are at present often created by non-professional translators who use the phrases for various reasons, while professional translators are actually inclined to avoid them (Ingo 1990, 246). The possible restrictions of idiom usage also affect their understanding. Certain idioms are restricted to certain genres or may be preferred in certain contexts, and these expressions are not as widely understood as idioms without such restrictions, as our results have shown. In this respect, translated idioms with contextual restrictions are even less well known than non-translated idioms. However, it is possible that in some areas of life, such as popular culture or sports, novel translation loans from English may be more common than elsewhere because of the international nature of those subcultures. Unfortunately, this is something that cannot be discussed in any detail on the basis of our survey but requires a further study. Yet another factor that most likely has an influence on idiom understanding is the frequency of the expressions. The more an idiom is used, the more easily it is recognized and at the same time its meaning is usually known better. Again, this is something that would require further study, as we did not have the chance to delve into the frequency aspect within the scope of this article. All in all, we find that many of the points discussed in this study deserve to be studied further with a detailed research design that focuses on the individual research questions that still remain open.

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Notes 1. A translation loan could be defined as a literal translation where the phrase is transferred into another language by translating the words it contains while retaining the original structure. Newmark (1988, 84) prefers to use the term “through-translation” of this phenomenon. 2. We are grateful to Maija Leinonen for her help in acquiring the student data at the school environment and to Nana Uitto, Marketta Karttunen and Jari Hartikainen for their help in offering us contacts with the middle-aged informants in their work communities. 3. As can be seen, the age of the informants in this group overlaps with the informants in the middle-aged group. This is because the group contained two students who had taken another degree earlier, had been in working life for several years, but had then returned to their studies to take an MA degree in translation. These students were aged 38 and 41, respectively. Although they are middle-aged in terms of their age, they were still included in the student group because of their knowledge of translation studies, which is regarded as a more important background factor than their age. 4. The A language is the language that the translator or interpreter knows best and can use either as a source or target language at work. Usually, the A language is the first language of the translator. In addition, translators also work with B languages—and often with C languages as well. A B language is a foreign language in which the translator is fluent and which may also be used as the target language, although it is more typically the source language. The B language can be regarded as an active language of the translator. A C language is a foreign language that the translator understands fluently and can translate from (but usually not into). The C language can be regarded as a passive language for the translator. All the students of English translation had Finnish as their A language and English as their B language, i.e. they were majoring in their B language at the university. 5. Täpinät is a morphological isolate in Finnish that only exists in this particular idiom. Similar words have been named, for example, cranberry morphs in the literature (see, e.g. Nenonen 2002, 2007). An example of a morphological idiom isolate in English is umbrage, which only occurs in the idiom take umbrage. 6. Although this idiom is of Finnish origin, Vilkamaa-Viitala (2005) suggests that its popularity may have been affected by the English idiom to take pepper in the nose, which carries the same meaning. 7. Ihan sikana also has a variant based on the Finnish male name Simo, which shares phonetic similarity with the word sika. The variant ihan simona (lit. ‘as all simo’) has entered the Finnish slang somewhat later than ihan sikana, in the 1990s (Paunonen 2000). 8. According to Paunonen (2000), puhua tanskaa also has the meaning ‘to fart’ in the slang of Helsinki, but so far we have never come across a single instance of the phrase with this meaning. However, we have come across the phrase puhua norjaa (lit. ‘to speak Norwegian’), which is used in the sense ‘to throw up, vomit’, and it appears that this version of the idiom is actually more frequent than the one that we included in our questionnaire. Some of the informants commented on this as well.

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9. In English, the corresponding expressions—be sent to (the) showers (AmE) and take an early bath (BrE)—are mainly used in sports contexts, although the expressions can be found in other contexts as well (COBUILD 1995). 10. In English, the idiom takes the form itchy fingers with the meaning that ‘someone is very keen to get involved in a particular activity’ (COBUILD 1995). 11. For example, in Swedish (which is one of the two official “national” languages in Finland), the same phraseological expression takes the form det kliar i fingrarna (lit. ‘it iches in the fingers’). 12. Ȥ2 test: Ȥ2 = 340.4857, df = 19, p < 2.2e-16. 13. Two-tailed proportion test: Ȥ2 = 102.9081, df = 1, p < 2.2e-16. 14. Two-tailed proportion test: Ȥ2 = 102.9282, df = 2, p < 2.2e-16. 15. Two-tailed proportion test: Ȥ2 = .1586, df = 1, p = .6905. 16. Two-tailed proportion test: Ȥ2 = 454.8915, df = 3, p < 2.2e-16. 17. Two-tailed proportion test: Ȥ2 = 13.9136, df = 1, p = .0001914. 18. Two-tailed proportion test: Ȥ2 = 68.9062, df = 1, p < 2.2e-16. 19. Although ei oo kaikki muumit laaksossa is an original Finnish idiom, it is possible that the formation of the phrase and its numerous variants have been influenced by the English idiom a few beers short of a six-pack, which carries a similar meaning and has been spread widely through the Internet (Kortelainen 2011, 94). 20. Two-tailed proportion test: Ȥ2 = 113.3346, df = 2, p < 2.2e-16. 21. Two-tailed proportion test: Ȥ2 = 6.7166, df = 1, p < 2.2e-16. 22. Two-tailed proportion test: Ȥ2 = 6.7166, df = 1, p = .009552. 23. Two-tailed proportion test: Ȥ2 = 6.7166, df = 2, p = .01573. 24. Two-tailed proportion test: Ȥ2 = 120.681, df = 5, p < 2.2e-16. 25. Two-tailed proportion test: Ȥ2 = 51.0925, df = 5, p = 8.28e-10.

References Backus, Ad. 2010. “The role of codeswitching, loan translation and interference in the emergence of an immigrant variety of Turkish.” In Working Papers in Corpus-Based Linguistics and Language Education 5, edited by Makoto Minegishi, Osamu Hieda, Emiko Hayatsu, and Yuji Kawaguchi, 225–241. Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. https://pure.uvt.nl/portal/files/1293488/Japan.pdf [Accessed May 16, 2014.] Backus, Ad, Derya Demirऊay, and Ye‫܈‬im Sevinऊ. 2013. “Converging evidence on contact effects on second and third generation immigrant Turkish.” In Tillburg Papers in Culture Studies (Paper 51), edited by Jan Blommaert, Piia Varis, Sanna Lehtonen, and Massimiliano Spotti. Tilburg: Tilburg University. https://www.tilburguniversity.edu/upload/ 31b75a3c-7bc7-47eb-85ad-f8c731797e76_TPCS_51_BackusDemircay-Sevinc.pdf [Accessed May 16, 2014.]

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Cacciari, Cristina, and Patrizia Tabossi. 1988. “The comprehension of idioms.” Journal of Memory and Language 27: 668–683. COBUILD. 1995. Collins COBUILD Dictionary of Idioms. London: HarperCollins. Dobrovol’skij, Dmitrij, and Elisabeth Piirainen. 2005. Figurative Language: Cross-Cultural and Cross-Linguistic Perspectives. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Glucksberg, Sam. 2001. Understanding Figurative Language: From Metaphors to Idioms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hakamies, Pekka. 1986. Venäläisten sananparsien vaikutus karjalaiseen ja suomalaiseen sananparsistoon. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Hakulinen, Lauri. 1955. “Suomen kielen käännöslainoista.” Virittäjä 59: 305–318. Hendrickson, Robert. 1997. The Facts On File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins. Revised and expanded edition. New York: Facts On File. Ingo, Rune. 1990. Lähtökielestä kohdekieleen: Johdatusta käännöstieteeseen. Helsinki: WSOY. Kari, Erkki. 1993. Naulan kantaan: Nykysuomen idiomisanakirja. Helsinki: Otava. Kempler, Daniel, Diana van Lancker, Virginia Marchman, and Elizabeth Bates. 1999. “Idiom comprehension in children and adults with unilateral brain damage.” Developmental Neurophysiology 15: 327– 349. Kivimies, Yrjö. 1964. Näinkin voi sanoa: Suomen kielen fraseologiaa. Helsinki. Tammi. Kortelainen, Kristiina. 2011. “Ei ole kaikki muumit laaksossa: Tutkimus suomen kielen idiomikonstruktion produktiivisuudesta.” MA thesis, University of Turku, Department of Finnish. http://www.doria.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/73976/gradu2011Kortelain en.pdf?sequence=1 [Accessed December 30, 2013.] Kranich, Svenja, Viktor Becher, and Steffen Höder. 2011. “A tentative typology of translation-induced language change.” In Multilingual Discourse Production: Diachronic and Synchronic Perspectives, edited by Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher, Steffen Höder, and Juliane House, 11–43. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Langlotz, Andreas. 2006. Idiomatic Creativity: A Cognitive-Linguistic Model of Idiom-Representation and Idiom-Variation in English. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Mäntylä, Katja. 2004. Idioms and Language Users: The Effect of the Characteristics of Idioms on Their Recognition and Interpretation by

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Native and Non-Native Speakers of English. Jyväskylä Studies in Humanities 13. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä. Mäntylä, Katja, and Hannele Dufva. 2007. “Slippery idioms: formulaic sequences and slips of the tongue.” In Collocations and Idioms 1: Papers from the First Nordic Conference on Syntactic Freezes. Joensuu, Finland, May 19í20, 2006, edited by Marja Nenonen and Sinikka Niemi, 200í212. Joensuu: University of Joensuu. Matras, Yaron. 2008. “The borrowability of structural categories.” In Empirical Approaches to Language Typology: Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-Linguistic Perspectives, edited by Yaron Matras and Jeanette Sakel, 31–73. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Moon, Rosamund. 1998. Fixed Expressions and Idioms in English: A Corpus-Based Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Muikku-Werner, Pirkko. 2010. “Olla härillään – muodon, merkityksen ja käytön vaihtelua.” Virittäjä 114: 374–395. Muikku-Werner, Pirkko, Jarmo Harri Jantunen, and Ossi Kokko. 2008. Suurella sydämellä ihan sikana: Suomen kielen kuvaileva fraasisanakirja. Jyväskylä: Gummerus. Muikku-Werner, Pirkko, and Esa Penttilä. 2014. “Tuntuu turhan pöljältä tavalta sanoa asia í suhtautuminen idiomeihin ja asennoitumisen perusteluja.” A paper presented at XLI Kielitieteen päivät, 9 May, 2014, University of Turku. Muikku-Werner, Pirkko, and Esa Penttilä. To appear. “Idiomit osana kielikontakteja: Lainaidiomien merkityksen päättelyä.” Virittäjä 3/2014. Mykkänen, Pekka. 2013. “Suomi, junttien kieli?” Helsingin Sanomat, December 1. Nenonen, Marja. 2002. Idiomit ja leksikko: Lausekeidiomien syntaktisia, semanttisia ja morfologisia piirteitä suomen kielessä. Joensuu: University of Joensuu. —. 2007. “Unique, but not cranberries: Idiomatic isolates in Finnish.” In Collocations and Idioms 1: Papers from the First Nordic Conference of Syntactic Freezes, Joensuu, May 19–20 2006, edited by Marja Nenonen and Sinikka Niemi, 213–226. Joensuu: University of Joensuu. Newmark, Peter. 1988. A Textbook of Translation. New York: Prentice Hall. Nunberg, Geoffrey, Ivan A. Sag, and Thomas Wasow. 1994. “Idioms.” Language 70 (3): 491í538. NSS = Nykysuomen sanakirja: Vol. 1–3. 1967. Helsinki: WSOY.

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OED = Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2013. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/ (requires password) [Accessed December 30, 2013]. OSF = Official Statistics of Finland: Educational Structure of Population [e-publication]. 2013. Helsinki: Statistics Finland. http://tilastokeskus.fi/til/vkour/index_en.html [Accessed January 6, 2014]. Parkkinen, Jukka. 2005. Aasinsilta ajan hermolla. Helsinki: WSOY. Paunonen, Heikki. 2000. Tsennaaks stadii, bonjaaks slangii? Stadin slangin suursanakirja. Helsinki: Sanoma Pro. Penttilä, Esa. 2010. “A prototype-based taxonomy of idiomatic expressions.” In Cognitive Linguistics in Action: From Theory to Application and Back, edited by ElĪbieta Tabakowska, Michaá ChoiĔski, and àukasz Wiraszka, 145–162. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Penttilä, Esa, and Pirkko Muikku-Werner. 2011. “English gategashers in Finnish: Directly translated English idioms as novelties of Finnish.” In Beyond Borders – Translations Moving Languages, Literatures and Cultures, edited by Pekka Kujamäki, Leena Kolehmainen, Esa Penttilä, and Hannu Kemppanen, 247í265. Berlin: Frank & Timme. Piirainen, Elisabeth. 2012. Widespread Idioms in Europe and Beyond: Toward a Lexicon of Common Figurative Units. New York: Peter Lang. Steiner, George. 1975. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thomason, Sarah G. 2001. Language Contact. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Vilkamaa-Viitala, Marjatta. 2005. “Vieraita kieliä sanojen takana.” Kielikello 2/2005. http://www.kielikello.fi/index.php?mid=2&pid=11& aid=1569 [Accessed May 27, 2014.] Vinay, Jean-Paul, and Jean Darbelnet. 1995 [1958]. Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation. Translated and edited by Juan C. Sager and M.-J. Hamel. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

1. heittää veivinsä 2. Baabelin torni 3. apina selässä 4. ottaa aivoon 5. joutua suihkuun 6. olla härillään 7. nähdä punaista 8. olla täpinöissä 9. laittaa rukkaset naulaan 10. ihan sikana 11. vetää herneet nenään 12. ei oo kaikki muumit laaksossa 13. sormet syyhyävät 14. lusikka pohjassa 15. rampa ankka 16. kaksiteräinen miekka 17. tulla puskista 18. nakit silmillä 19. puhua tanskaa 20. haukkua väärää puuta Total

Idiom

5 / 45.5

8 / 72.7 8 / 72.7

90 / 88.2

99 / 97.1 99 / 97.1

94 / 92.2

30 / 100.0 9 / 81.8 85 / 83.3 24 / 80.0 4 / 36.4 41 / 40.2 9 / 30.0 1 / 9.1 13 / 12.7 30 / 100.0 9 / 81.8 69 / 67.6 30 / 100.0 6 / 54.5 91 / 89.2 26 / 86.7 4 / 36.4 46 / 45.1 7 / 23.3 2 / 18.2 22 / 21.6 29 / 96.7 9 / 81.8 95 / 93.1 470 / 78.3 121 / 55.0 1326 / 65.0

17 / 65.4 2 / 7.7 1 / 3.8 12 / 46.2 25 / 96.2 2 / 7.7 1 / 3.8 22 / 84.6 286 / 55.0

7 / 53.8 2 / 15.4 0 / 0.0 3 / 23.1 8 / 61.5 0 / 0.0 0 / 0.0 13 / 100.0 131 / 50.4

7 / 100.0 6 / 85.7 2 / 28.6 7 / 100.0 7 / 100.0 6 / 85.7 5 / 71.4 7 / 100.0 119 / 85.0

22 / 84.6 15 / 100.0 7 / 100.0 29 / 96.7

12 / 92.3 15 / 100.0 3 / 20.0 0 / 0.0 8 / 53.3 15 / 100.0 8 / 53.3 7 / 46.7 15 / 100.0 199 / 66.3

26 / 100.0 15 / 100.0 7 / 100.0 30 / 100.0 26 / 100.0 15 / 100.0 7 / 100.0 30 / 100.0

13 / 100.0 13 / 100.0

10 / 90.9

Middle- Pensioners Total aged 30 / 100.0 11 / 100.0 101 / 99.0 9 / 30.0 0 / 0.0 14 / 13.7 12 / 40.0 0 / 0.0 18 / 17.6 30 / 100.0 9 / 81.8 99 / 97.1 18 / 60.0 3 / 27.3 45 / 44.1 7 / 23.3 6 / 54.5 19 / 18.6 30 / 100.0 10 / 90.9 92 / 90.2 30 / 100.0 7 / 63.3 94 / 92.2

23 / 88.5 15 / 100.0 7 / 100.0 30 / 100.0

En. tr. students 7 / 100.0 4 /57.1 4 /57.1 7 / 100.0 6 / 85.7 2 / 28.6 7 / 100.0 7 / 100.0

9 / 69.2

8th Secondary Fi. grade school students 13 / 100.0 25 / 96.2 15 / 100.0 0 / 0.0 0 / 0.0 1 / 6.7 0 / 0.0 1 / 3.8 1 / 6.7 13 / 100.0 25 / 96.2 15 / 100.0 2 / 15.4 10 / 30.8 6 / 40.0 1 / 7.7 3 / 11.5 0 / 0.0 11 / 84.6 19 / 73.1 15 / 100.0 11 / 84.6 24 / 92.3 15 / 100.0

Understanding Translated vs. Non-Translated Figurative Idioms 189

Appendix

Table A-1. The quantitative results of the questionnaire survey (N/%). The total number of answers was 2040.

CHAPTER SEVEN DISSOCIATION OF LINGUISTIC AND COGNITIVE DESCRIPTION IN TRANSLATION: THE COGNITIVE FIGURE-GROUND ALIGNMENT JUKKA MÄKISALO AND MARJATTA LEHTINEN I think linguists working cross-linguistically should necessarily acquire some knowledge on the translation process and its cognitive bases (Bernárdez 2005, 203).

Abstract In line with cognitive linguistic thinking and with reference to evidence from an empirical pilot study, we discuss the following tentative hypothesis on retention effects on translation. Because of the languagespecificity of grammatical categories, translation is less likely to retain syntactic similarity with the source language (SL) clause structure; however, affected by general cognitive aspects, translation is likely to retain, to a certain degree at least, cognitive similarity with the SL construction. Our empirical pilot study assumes that possible retention from SL to target language (TL) can be divided into linguistic and cognitive structures. The material is twofold: first, Finnish translations from a set of certain English verbs, and second, 28 Finnish translations of one SL text (English) translated by 28 translators. In both cases, we study sentences containing certain transitive verbs; in the former case, the variety of TL expressions for a particular SL verb as attested in different TL texts, and in the latter case, the variety of TL expressions for the same SL verb. The focus is thus on the variation of translations of the same verb, or of the same sentences. The analyses of the translations are executed within the framework of Radical Construction Grammar (RCG) developed by Croft (1991, 2001). We argue that RCG offers a suitable framework for

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analysing translating and translations. A central idea in the RCG framework is that lexical and grammatical categories, i.e. constructions, are language-specific and not universal. In this way, we wish to shed new light on theorizing the cognitive description of translation as a phenomenon of language contacts as well.

1. Introduction In translation and interpreting, it is generally—and most of all, in practice—assumed that some part of the information of the source language (SL) message is retained, or moved, transferred, conveyed, or mediated, to the target language (TL) message. This statement sounds like an understatement in a paper on translation studies; however, it easily turns out to be the only thing we may say for sure, when we ask the following logical question: what exactly is retained in translation, and what is not? Although translation is highly frequent in everyday life, it is a form of language contact that is often overlooked. The issue, however, is not irrelevant for scientific description of language contacts, the central topic of the present book. Especially professional translation is a special instance of language contact where the translator is actively and consciously hiding the traces of the contact (i.e. the cross-linguistic influence). This article thus has a focus that differs from most of the other articles which usually address the visible (linguistic) effects of language contact. By the verb retain (and the expression information retaining, or retention) we mean the process of mediating a piece of information (and language) from the source to the target text in translation. It should also be noted that our approach is highly empirical in nature; we do not intend to provide the term retain with a definition that would a priori delimit the analysis of our empirical findings. However, at the end of this article we will briefly discuss the nature of information retaining (or information transfer, which has also been used with the meaning of mediating information1), reflecting on how to outline the conceptual sense of the term. All in all, in our empirical journey, the notion retain appears as a fairly technical expression for describing the process of mediating information verbalized in language in the communicative act of translation. The issue of information retained in translation is seldom dealt with in translation studies, let alone empirically investigated. In our empirical approach, we distinguish the information at the linguistic level and at the

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cognitive level. In translation, the former takes place at the obvious and perceptible (or overt) level and involves, for instance, lexical choices and choices of syntactic constructions and word order. The latter, however, takes place at a more hidden and covert cognitive level and involves, just to characterize the issue, choices in argumentation, causality of entities or existence. Now, it is normally and at least implicitly assumed that in translation the information at the cognitive level is retained more accurately than the linguistic information. This will also be our hypothesis, which we will soon formulate more technically. We have developed a methodological framework involving the two levels, the linguistic and cognitive level, for investigating the process of retaining information in the act of translation: the linguistic level by the lexical and syntactic constructions, and the cognitive level by FigureGround alignment. Our tentative hypothesis is that while translation is less likely to retain syntactic similarity with the SL clause structure, it is likely to retain, at least to a certain degree, cognitive similarity with the SL construction. Section 4 reports on two studies that provide empirical evidence on certain aspects of transfer in translation, supporting the tentative hypothesis. Both studies involve corpus data from translations from English into Finnish, the former study translations of certain low-transitive sentences in FinnishEnglish translation corpora compiled and analysed by Lehtinen (forthc.) and the latter the translations of a set of transitive and intransitive sentences by 28 translators selected from the material by Immonen (2011). Our interpretation of the evidence is that the Figure-Ground alignment is one possible tool to describe the information retaining that takes place at the cognitive level of translation. Finally, we shall also discuss the nature of information mediation in translation.

2. The hypothesis It seems that research on what is retained in translation ought to be split up into more specific questions concerning the levels that are presumably transferred in translation: we must at least be able to differentiate the linguistic and cognitive levels of a linguistic message. For instance, when studying several translations of the same text, an empirical analysis obviously calls for (developing) a feasible theoretical apparatus for comparing these translations. One of the research questions might thus be: Does the translated text A contain more information than the translated text B? Accordingly, if we intend to conduct empirical research on

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information retaining, we also need to ask how to measure the degree of variation between different translations of the same text. In order to illustrate what the variation might consist of, we shall analyse example (1) representing an English source text and its Finnish translations provided by three different translators. The examples and their translations are compiled from the research material presented below in Section 4.2. (1)

At one extreme they [words] can be taken to imply a full-blown European State.

(1a) Äärimmäisessä extreme-INE merkitsevän mean-PC-GEN (1b) Yhden one-GEN on, että is, that sanan word-GEN

tapauksessa case-INE Euroopan Europe-GEN

niiden voidaan they-GEN can-PAS.PRS liittovaltiota. federation.state-PAR

katsoa see

ääripään mukainen tulkinta extreme.end-GEN in.accordance interpretation ne puhuvat Euroopan Yhdysvalloista they speak-3PL Europe-GEN United.States-ELA varsinaisessa merkityksessä. actual-INE meaning-INE

(1c) Niitä voidaan äärimmäisessä extreme-INE they-PAR can-PAS.PRS pitää täydellisen Euroopan consider-INF1 full-GEN Europe-GEN perustamista puolustavina. founding-PAR argue.for-PC-PL-ESS

muodossa form-INE liittovaltion federation.state-GEN

On the whole, the three target texts (TTs) can be seen to show variation in terms of wording (lexical choices) and syntax in how they verbalize, i.e. conceptualize, the state of affairs portrayed in (1). First, the relations profiled by the predicate constructions in (1a, 1b, 1c) are verbalized differently. Schematically, focusing on the main, content verb encoded by the infinitive or participle (and ignoring the auxiliary + take) we can observe that the verb corresponding to imply is in (1a) merkitä ‘mean’, ‘imply’, in (1b), puhua ‘speak of’ and in (1c), puolustaa ‘argue for’. Second, the entities encoded by the nominal phrases are also verbalized differently in the translations. Third, the TTs in (1b) and (1c) show various changes in terms of the word order and the sentence structure of the ST. A closer look at the wording and configuration of (1a) reveals that it starts with a conventional idiom (äärimmäisessä tapauksessa ‘at one

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extreme’), conforming to the initial adjunct of (1) with a similar meaning (at one extreme). It is noteworthy that the word order of the Finnish translation is identical with the word order of (1): adjunct–subject–verb– object. The form-meaning construction encoded by the predicate phrase (they) can be taken to imply is translated rather literally, with the Finnish passive (the Finnish passive is subjectless, encoded morphologically in the verb). The object, instantiated by the noun phrase a full-blown European State, is re-worded in the Finnish rendering with a compound Euroopan liittovaltio, meaning the federal state form of the EU. Translation (1b) decomposes the sentence structure of the source text (ST) into a main clause and a subordinate clause. The meaning of the ST expression at one extreme the words imply is re-conceptualized with a premodified nominalization subject and the ‘be’-verb yhden ääripään mukainen tulkinta on, ‘the interpretation according to one extreme is’. This instantiates an evidential construction, whose main clause (i.e., the clause beginning with että ‘that’) repeats the main verb, as it were, in the predicate verb construction [sanat] puhuvat Euroopan Yhdysvalloista, ‘[words] speak of the Unites States of Europe’. Furthermore, this translation implies a comparison with the governmental system of the future EU with the one in the United States, a comparison that does not exist in the ST; this—political—formulation is intensified by the lexical addition of the adverbial phrase sanan varsinaisessa merkityksessä, ‘in the proper sense of the word’. The beginning of the main clause yhden ääripään renders the meaning of ‘at one extreme’ literally with the compound word ääri+pää, ‘extreme+end’. In part, the translation in (1c) resembles (1a), as well as the ST pattern in syntax. The Finnish passive construction is voidaan pitää täydellisen Euroopan liittovaltion perustamista puolustavina, ‘can be regarded as arguing for the founding of a full European federal state’. As mentioned above, the main verb is puolustaa ‘argue for’, conceptualized in participial form in the construction pitää + object + essive oblique; the essive case oblique encodes an equational phrase (‘regard something as something’). The entity ‘full-blown European State’, täydellinen Euroopan liittovaltio, is profiled as an object of a process encoded by the nominalization perustaminen ‘founding’ (from perustaa, ‘found’). This is a lexical addition by the translator, justified by the context. The variation at the lexical and syntactic levels shows that the quality and quantity of information in translation does not remain intact if we compare the TTs with the ST, on the one hand, and with each other, on the other. Intuitively, however, all three TTs are plausible translations of the ST, and this calls for an analysis at the level of conceptualization of the

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translations. This means studying the meaning-form mapping in translation, focusing on how the state of affairs encoded by the ST is verbalized, i.e., conceptualized, in the translations. Thus, besides the considerations at the textual or discourse level of description implied above by Enkvist (1991) and Johansson (2004), we need further theoretical (cognitive linguistic) tools for describing how form is mapped to meaning in translation. The following section provides an attempt to outline an apparatus for describing the cognitive level. On the basis of the reasoning above, we would like to propose the following tentative hypothesis: Translation is less likely to retain similarity in lexical choices and choices of syntactic constructions with the SL clause structure, but it is more likely to retain cognitive similarity with the SL construction. In the following section we present the theoretical background of our study and the technical analysis of our data. At the end, we also formulate a more technical hypothesis for testing the dissociation between linguistic and cognitive levels in translation.

3. Theoretical background It should be pointed out that there are indeed studies on information retaining in translation situations; these are text linguistic contrastive studies comparing two languages in terms of functional devices such as word order and theme-rheme organization, and their data analyses are based on translations retrieved either by intuition or from corpora. As regards contrastive studies involving Finnish, research on clause syntax in discourse has been focused on how the translator handles constructions for which there is no grammatical equivalent in the target language. A case in point is translating constructions instantiating the Germanic type passive, in particular, a by-agent passive (e.g. Hiirikoski 1992). Another functional domain is the marking of definiteness of nouns; instead of an article system as in the Germanic languages, Finnish speakers convey definiteness through other devices: word order, ‘function words’ (certain deictic pronominal modifiers, mainly in speech), and context alone (Chesterman 1991). In both functional domains, the passive and the reference of nouns, the translator is, accordingly, faced with the problem of a lack of isomorphism: how to construct the target clause in terms of both syntactic and information structure (see Ihalainen 1980).2 In view of the framework of the present study, cognitive linguistics, it is interesting to observe that earlier theorizing on translation involves

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attempts to understand the experience of translators in terms of aspects relating to cognition. One can compare, for example, the principle of experiential iconicity in translation suggested by Enkvist (1991). Consider translating the Latin sequence Veni, vidi, vici. Here, the temporal sequence of events is reflected by the order of verbs in translation; in other words, the order is experientially motivated. In the same vein, the contrastive studies on translating functional devices such as the passive can be seen as pointing to an effort to understand the experience of translators. In verbalizing the state of affairs to be mediated in translation, one relevant factor, among others, is how to start the utterance, what to choose as the theme. Among the participants of a clause, the subject NP tends to convey the theme; it opens up and maintains a cognitive file, i.e. it is tracked in subsequent discourse (Croft 1991, 118). Thus, a number of scholars have examined, on the one hand, whether translations preserve the subject of the original sentence; and on the other, with which element translations open the sentence. These include, e.g. Johansson (2004, 2005) and Hasselgård (2004) on Norwegian translations of English text. In the experiment by Johansson (2004) there were 10 professional translators translating the same English texts (one text fiction, the other non-fiction). The results by Johansson indicate that in the main, the subject is preserved in the translations, unless there are reasons to do otherwise (Johansson 2004, 32). It seems intuitively clear that structural isomorphism (congruence) depends, at least in part, on the typological relatedness of the languages; shifts in subject choice may be due to language- and construction-specific reasons (cf. Johansson 2004). Such contrastive knowledge of language-specific structures and related assumptions on translation can be combined with what we know of languages in general, and we can examine the motivation for shifts and similarities in translation from a wider, cross-linguistic perspective. Crosslinguistically, word order is motivated by iconicity; the temporal order of elements is thought to reflect the temporal order in which information is introduced into the discourse (“given” first). Apart from this, what the speaker expresses first is often determined by what is at the moment uppermost in his/her mind. This order, motivated by importance, is in conflict with the given-first order, but it also points to iconicity, in an indirect, metaphorical sense (Croft 2003, 66, 202). Finally, crosslinguistically, the building of the clause, and the choice of subject, also reflects animacy hierarchy, as well as the transitivity prototype. Animacy hierarchy means that an animate referent has a privilege to the subject role, and the transitivity prototype means that languages prototypically encode causal action as a subject-object configuration reflecting agent-patient role

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alignment. In sum, isomorphism in syntactic structure in translation can be approached by considering motivation by iconicity, animacy hierarchy and transitivity prototype. These are all cognitive dimensions of language use; they figure in functional, usage-based models such as cognitive grammar by Langacker (1987), and its offspring, Radical Construction Grammar (RCG) by Croft. Cognitive linguistics is characterized by the following properties, among others (Croft and Cruse 2004, 1–4): Unlike abstract, formalist approaches, cognitive linguistics hypothesizes that the linguistic faculty is but one among the cognitive faculties and language reflects general cognitive processes. Accordingly, syntax is non-autonomous, symbolic in nature, and syntactic categories are functional and meaningful. Second, grammar ought to be equated with conceptualization: the speaker can construe reality, his/her experience to be communicated, in different ways; these conceptualizations are not reducible to simple truth-conditional correspondences with the world. Third, knowledge of language is thought to emerge from language use. This involves conventionality and schematicity: a speaker’s internal grammar, semantic, syntactic, morphological and phonological categories and structures build up, by inductive schematization, from his/her cognition of utterances used in specific contexts. All in all, cognitive linguistics hypothesizes that semantic representation is conceptual in nature, and so is meaning-form, and this is what the translator works with; in an act of translation, meaning in context, i.e. function, is in focus. In translation, mapping form to meaning is variable; consider, e.g. the fact that different translators translate the same text differently. Studying, say, lexical variation needs the notion of schematicity and frame-semantics. The meaning of a word is understood against the background of a frame or domain (like the verb buy against the frame of commercial transaction). In our view, the cognitive linguistic framework offers appropriate tools for operationalizing relevant research questions connected with translation correspondence (equivalence), cognitive processes in translation, and mediating information via translation. The RCG by William Croft (1991, 2001) is a functional-constructionist theory of language, and usage-based like the other models within cognitive linguistics. But it differs from the other cognitive models in that it emphasizes the actual construction of language-specific grammars (syntax) on the one hand, and the typological knowledge of languages on the other. Central tenets in RCG are that certain grammatical categories like clausal participants are language-specific and not universal, and that

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true explanations of linguistic phenomena do not necessarily exist at the linguistic level. Consider what Croft suggests regarding the relation of cognitive linguistic research to typology: Current typological research has investigated very basic questions of grammatical structure. These investigations have produced a number of cross-linguistic patterns that are interesting in themselves and are worth investigating from a cognitive perspective. (Croft 2003, 203)

In our opinion it seems worth reflecting on what the above views on the interrelationships of language structure (typology), language use (form-meaning mapping in discourse), and cognition might mean for studying translation on the one hand, and for studying languages by means of translation evidence on the other. Translation is necessarily crosslinguistic and usage-based exploration, and studying mediation of information cross-linguistically calls for approaching it from the cognitive perspective. The Causal Order Hypothesis by Croft (1991, 184–186) states that the hierarchy of grammatical relations (Subject < Object < Oblique) corresponds to the order of participants in the causal chain. Prototypically, agents, initiators of the causal action at hand, are made subjects, and patients, endpoints of the causal action, are made objects. The causal chain involves transmission of force, and accordingly, directionality. But this generalization applies only to a subset of events, those which involve force-dynamic structure, and are clearly individuated. Events of containment and inclusion as well as (non-volitional) mental and abstract relations fall outside of this, because they do not involve transmission of force from the initiator-subject to the endpoint-object, and are not necessarily individuated, since they may point to relations between abstract entities or be generic (Croft 1998, 23–25; Schmid 2007, 133). Working within the framework of RCG, we introduce a further cognitive dimension affecting the verbalization and clause structure, the Figure-Ground organization. In cognitive linguistics, Figure-Ground is a construal operation instantiating a general cognitive process. An act of visual perception is typically encoded in language as an asymmetry between two entities: see example 2a and Figure 3-1. The smaller and movable object is a natural choice for a figure, whereas the larger and non-movable object is the ground; this asymmetric relationship follows from how perception works in cognition, as dictated by Gestalt psychology. The alignment in (2b) is unnatural, unless the speaker is taking a picture and composing a scene for it: ‘I want the house to be behind the car’ (Croft and Cruse 2004, 56–57).

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(2a) The car is in front of the house. (2b) ??The house is behind the car.

Figure 3-1. The Figure-Ground distinction in the sentence The car is in front of the house as illustrated technically in Gestalt psychology.

More generally, Croft and Cruse (2004) have enlisted the properties of objects that favour Figure or Ground construal (see Table 3-1, adapted from Talmy 1983). Table 3-1. The properties of objects that favour Figure or Ground construal (Talmy 1983, in Croft and Cruse 2004, 56). Figure location less known smaller more movable structurally simpler more salient more recently in awareness

Ground location more known larger more stationary structurally more complex more backgrounded earlier on scene/in memory

We attempt to tackle here the following possible levels of information retaining, namely  the lexical level  the level of syntactic constructions  the level of cognition by the Figure-Ground distinction. As an example illustrating the relationship between grammatical encoding and Figure-Ground asymmetry, consider the Finnish sentence (3) and its alternation (4):

Dissociation of Linguistic and Cognitive Description in Translation (3)

– – ei

tarvitse paukuttaa harjalla need bang-INF1 broom-ADE ‘needn't to bang the floor with the broom’

V.NEG.3SG

(4)

– – ei tarvitse paukuttaa harjaa V.NEG.3SG need hit-INF broom-PAR ‘needn't to hit the broom on the floor’

201

lattiaa – – floor-PAR lattiaan – – floor-ILL

Sentence 3 construes the Ground lattia ‘floor’ as the object, and the Figure harja ‘broom’ as an (antecedent) oblique (with the adessive case encoding the function of Means). However, sentence 4 construes the event differently, with the Figure harja ‘broom’ as the object, and the Ground as a (subsequent) oblique, i.e., as path (with the illative case encoding the function of Goal) (cf. Croft 1991). As a theoretical tool, and a continuation of the Figure-Ground distinction, RCG introduces the notion of the Causal Order Hypothesis (Croft 1991, 184–186). In association to the image-schema of action chain by Langacker (1987), the Causal Order Hypothesis is based on force dynamics and spatial (Gestalt) relations, and figures in transitivity too. Transitivity in translation is one of the cases that we employ as evidence in exploring what is retained in translation. The Causal Order Hypothesis by Croft (1991, 184–186) states that the hierarchy of grammatical relations (SBJ < OBJ < OBL) corresponds to the order of participants in the causal chain. Prototypically, agents, i.e. initiators of the causal action at hand, are made subjects, and patients, i.e. endpoints of the causal action, are made objects. The causal chain involves transmission of force, and accordingly, directionality. The transitivity prototype stems from Hopper and Thompson (1980); it is a typological prototype meant for describing transitivity behaviour in languages of the world, extending from high transitive to intransitive morphosyntax; the prototype involves 10 features (see Croft 2003, 175–178). The results of a study of non-prototypical low transitivity are explicated below. It should be noted that the transitivity category in our data only includes sentences that occur with a grammatical object. After presenting the theoretical apparatus for studying the dissociation of linguistic and cognitive levels in translation, we would like to narrow down the tentative hypothesis into a more technical one: Translation is less likely to retain similarity in lexical choices and choices of syntactic constructions with the SL clause structure, but it is more likely to retain, to a certain degree at least, (cognitive) similarity of Figure-Ground alignment with the SL construction.

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4. Results 4.1. Reverse verbs in English and their translations in Finnish The first piece of evidence comes from the data analysis of the English verbs contain, include and involve and their Finnish translations3. The causal chain involves transmission of force, and accordingly, directionality. Events of containment and inclusion profiled by contain, include and involve as well as non-volitional mental and abstract relations are non-prototypical, low transitive, because they do not involve transmission of force from the initiator-subject to the endpoint-object, and they may point to relations between abstract entities or be generic (Croft 1998, 23–25; Schmid 2007, 133). The verbs contain, include and involve are classified as “reverse verbs”, because they take as subject the endpoint of the causal chain (cf. the verb occupy, the normal transitive counterpart for contain, Croft 1991, 251). Consider example (5). The verb contain takes as subject the locative role, the Ground, encoded by table, and as object the Figure, encoded by information. (5)

The table contains information – –.

Unlike English, Finnish does not seem to favour the use of this type of transitivity in encoding relations of location and inclusion, i.e. low, static transitive with the Ground as subject. Finnish has been characterized as a topic-oriented language (Chesterman 1991, 145), as opposed to subjectoriented languages like English, in which the subject is grammatically prominent, a necessary constituent, and tied to pre-verbal position.4 The majority of Finnish translations use nouns in locative case and non-transitive verbs, like olla ‘be’ in (6): (6)

x:ssä on y x-INE is y ‘in x is y’

The data analysed by Lehtinen (forthc.) consists of transitive sentences with the verbs contain, include and involve, and their translations (see Table 4-1); the material is retrieved from the FECCS database corpus (see note 3). The majority of translations favour a non-transitive Finnish verb with Ground in locative case and Figure as subject.

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Table 4-1. The distribution of transitive and non-transitive Finnish translations from the English transitive reverse verbs contain, include and involve with the Ground as subject. Original x contains y (N = 78) x includes y (N = 43) x involves y (N = 12)

Finnish translations x sisältää y:n (transitive) non-transitive (13%) (87%) x käsittää y:n (transitive) non-transitive (23%) (77%) x käsittää y:n (transitive) non-transitive (33%) (67%)

Thus, for the inclusion or containment schema, we have the conventional conceptualizations X contains Y, X includes Y, or X involves Y and their default non-transitive Finnish translations X:ssä on Y, X:ään kuuluu Y, or X:ssä on Y (default by frequency of use and ease of access in psycholinguistic terms; cf. Slobin 2007, 905). Despite the syntactic differences reflecting different mental imagery (transitive vs. location/motion, path), the original and the translation share the same cognitive structure, in which the Figure Y is demoted and the Ground X promoted (on demotion and promotion of Figure, see Talmy 1985). This similarity of perceptual asymmetry, instantiated by the two grammatical constructions, bears resemblance to the similarity of the linear thematic organization (suggesting a kind of experiential iconicity, see above). The conclusion is that Finnish translations tend to change the grammatical construction from transitive to non-transitive; however, they do retain the Figure-Ground alignment.

4.2. The variance and invariance in the 28 translations of the same source text The second piece of evidence comes from the material compiled by Sini Immonen (2011), where 28 professional translators translated the same EU text from English into Finnish. The text, a speech by a British politician, consisted of 18 long sentences (289 words). For the analysis, we chose seven clauses with transitive and nontransitive verbs from the original source text:

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a.   conference that [Ground] paved the way [Fig] for the Treaty of Rome   b. At one extreme they [Fig] can be taken to imply a full-blown European State [Ground]. c.   ‘political union’ [Fig] in the text before Dublin [Ground] became overnight ‘political dimension’. d.   beneath which [Ground] lies the vigorous horse-trading [Fig]   e. Britain [Fig] cannot accept a Europe [Ground]   f. Nor do we [Fig] need to accept a looser concept [Ground]:   g.   while they [Fig] may accept us [Ground] as partners,  

The hypothesis is that the translations involve more alternation of the grammatical structure of the ST clause than that of the cognitive, FigureGround structure. Consider, for instance, sentence (a), repeated here in (7), and its translations (7a–c). Translation (7a) shows no alternation in terms of syntax, and (7b) shows a syntactic and lexical change, and (7c) shows further differences in lexical and syntactic conceptualization: (7)

  conference that [Ground] paved the way [Fig] for the Treaty of Rome  

(7a) No alternation:   konferenssi joka [Ground] tasoitti tietä [Fig]   conference that pave-PST.3SG way-PAR Rooman sopimukselle   Rome-GEN treaty-ALL ‘conference that paved the way for the treaty of Rome’ (7b) Lexical alternation:   kokous jossa [Ground] raivattiin tietä [Fig] clear-PAS.PST way-PAR   meeting that-INE Rooman sopimukselle   Rome-GEN treaty-ALL   ‘meeting that cleared the way for the treaty of Rome’

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(7c) Construal alternation:   konferenssiin jossa [Ground] tehtiin where made-PAS.PST   conference-ILL valmistelutyö [Fig] Rooman sopimusta varten   preparation.work Rome-GEN treaty-PAR for ‘to the conference where the arrangements for the treaty of Rome were made’

In example (7b) the Ground [Figure] of the ST, instantiated as ‘conference [(pave) way]’, remains the same. Likewise, in (7c) the cognitive structure is the same as in (7), ‘conference [(do) preparation]’. There were thus no alternations in the cognitive structure in the translations of this clause; however, an example of such an alternation would be (7d) (fabricated). The absolute proportions are compiled in Table 4-2. The cognitive structure of (7d) would be ‘conference [(come up) treaty]’. (7d) Cognitive alternation: *   konferenssi jossa [Ground] Rooman sopimus [Fig] Rome-GEN treaty   conference that-INE nousi esiin   out   rise-PST.3SG ‘conference in which the treaty of Rome came up’

In 62% (N = 122) of translations the lexical choices can be considered to show similarity with the ST. The syntactic construction is isomorphic with the ST in 68% (N = 134) of the TTs. On the other hand, the Figure is retained in 90% (N = 177) and the Ground in 95% (N = 186) of the translations. Table 4-2. The proportions of changes in lexicon, syntactic structure, Figure and Ground in the material of 28 professional translations.

Lexical Syntactic Figure Ground Total

Stays

Changes

Total

122 134 177 186 619

74 62 19 10 165

196 196 196 196 784

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All in all, there is a highly significant statistical difference (in Chi square with Yates’ correction p < .001) between the stability or invariance of linguistic and cognitive levels in translation, when lexical and syntactic changes are merged into the linguistic level (256 stays and 136 changes) and, respectively, Figure and Ground into the cognitive level (363 stays and 29 changes). However, there is no statistically significant difference between the retention at the lexical and syntactic levels (122–74 vs. 134– 62), on the one hand, or between the retention of the Figure or the Ground at the cognitive level (177–19 vs. 186–10) on the other.

5. Conclusion Our data suggest that there are good reasons to distinguish (and dissociate) between linguistic and cognitive levels of retention in translation. Quantitatively, translations tend to be altered more often at the linguistic level (38% of the lexical choices and 32% of the syntactic structures) than at the cognitive level (the Figure alternates in 10% and the Ground in 5% of the translations). Moreover, qualitatively, Finnish translations from English tend to change the grammatical construction from transitive to non-transitive; however, they do retain the FigureGround alignment. We want to emphasize that various kinds of retention effects in translation have not been studied in the cognitive framework, and we argue that RCG offers a suitable framework for analysing translating and translations. Thus we wish to shed new light on theorizing the longdebated issue of various kinds of retaining and transfer effects in translation. On the basis of our findings, we suggest the following general hypothesis: When describing translation from a source text to a target text, it is possible to distinguish linguistic and cognitive levels, and it is the cognitive level (cognitive model of the state of affairs) that is primarily retained in translation. We have operationalized the linguistic level by analysing lexical choices and choices of syntactic construction. At the cognitive level, the Figure-Ground distinction provides a theoretical and conceptual tool for description. However, it is apparently not the only tool needed for describing the variety of clause types; it seems important to analyse conceptualization, i.e. form-meaning mapping, in translation in terms of

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other construal operations instantiating general cognitive processes (see Croft and Cruse 2004, 40–73). The Figure-Ground asymmetry is but one of the manifestations of cognition that shows in language. Considering our empirical findings, the concept of retention presented in the introduction should also be re-analysed. We also want to replace the notion information transfer with this new theoretical concept, a term which subsumes the meaning ‘mediation of information in translation’. The term retain itself originates from the so-called CONDUIT metaphor used in everyday speech for describing translation: the message is the contents of a conduit, in the form of sentences, and in translation this message is mediated—not transformed—by providing the contents with a form of sentences in another language. We propose a functional and cognitive approach to translation: a translation of a source text is more than just a different linguistic representation of the same contents. In most situations, translation is not about semantics, but it is about references to the real world, viz., pragmatics. Assuming language-specificity of grammar, as Croft does in RCG, makes the view untenable that translating is identical to finding the conceptual and grammatical correspondences in the TL: the tertium comparationis (“the third part of the comparison”, the quality that two things which are being compared have in common) of judging correctness of translations is not the cognitive level of profiling the state of affairs. Instead, the t.c. is the state of affairs per se. This means that any translation of a text (portraying an event) in another language also has the potential to be a different cognitive conceptualization of the event to be portrayed. Cognition does not necessarily remain stable in translation, but it may do so—and our results indicate that it mostly does: retaining the Figure-Ground organization in translation has iconic motivation. This is the rationale behind measuring the amount of cognitive information mediated in translations, by analysing the cognitive structure of SL and TL. Dissociating linguistic from cognitive and constructing theoretical tools for it is most relevant for any study in the field of language contacts. Finally, a note concerning the nature of methodology: We should keep in mind that the analysis of the semantic structure of the ST and TTs is based on the scholars’ intuition—as tends to be the case in cognitive linguistics. The view of retaining information at the cognitive level in translation is not an empirically proven fact; rather, it is based on intuition in the very same way as the evaluation of correctness or quality of translation is based on the intuition of a bilingual speaker (and his/her knowledge of the two languages). Croft makes the same distinction and

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presents a similar line of argument when dealing with iconicity in language: The iconicity of human language is a hypothesis that can be used to propose hypotheses of cognitive structure that can be tested and confirmed or rejected by cognitive psychological research. This is actually a reasonable way to proceed, because language provides the most explicit and most easily observed facet of cognitive behavior, and therefore is better suited to be the producer rather than the verifier of hypotheses regarding cognitive structure. (Croft 2003, 203.)

Similarly, we can obtain empirical evidence on the retention of information in translation, i.e. on how cognition works in translation, through experimental operationalization of the Figure-Ground alignment. The results reported on and gained in the analyses presented in this article show that such operationalization is well worth undertaking.

Notes 1. To our minds, the term transfer is too heavily loaded by various specific meanings in many fields of research, and it also has many definitions in linguistics and translation studies. In foreign language learning, it is most often understood as a kind of effect of L1 on L2, or more generally, of a source language on a target language, cf. the definition by Jarvis (2000). In translation studies, it refers to an effect of the source language on the target language, and very often it is used in the same sense as interference; however, when transfer is distinguished from interference, it is taken to be the positive face of interference, which then is perceived as negative (Mauranen 2004, 67). In sociolinguistics, it has also been used to refer to the context of everyday conversation, where it means some kind of temporary effect of a stronger or predominant (native) language on a weaker or secondary (foreign) language. Now, in the above contexts, the notion of transfer also tends to imply something negative: the effect of the source language on the target language is basically understood as something foreign, strange, to speakers of the target language. This is a feature that is missing from our use of the notion of information transfer, or information retaining. 2. Apart from these devices, which are used for discourse purposes, there is corpus-based research on basic argument structure, see Laine (1997) on translating Finnish clauses with spatial configurations into English. 3. The material has been collected from FECCS = The database corpus stored by Finnish-English Contrastive Corpus Studies, English Department, University of Jyväskylä. English books and their Finnish translations, plus Finnish books and their English translations, fiction and non-fiction. 4. While in English the topic tends to be made the subject, irrespective of its

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semantic role (Hawkins 1986; Blake 1987; and Taylor 2003), such diversity, semantic opacity, is not characteristic of Finnish subjects. Rather, subjects in Finnish show properties connected to agentivity, such as volitionality, responsibility or control (Leino 1989). Finnish subjects are not attributed to topicality properties to the extent that English subjects are: the Finnish subject does not necessarily precede the verb in non-contrastive declarative sentences, and the function of sentence topic can be encoded by obliques as well. Note also that a variety of Finnish clause types are subjectless and yet grammatical. The Finnish subject is thus not a prominent clausal category in the same sense as in English, or most other Indo-European languages (Karlsson 1982, Chafe 1976).

Glossing abbreviations ADE ALL ELA ESS GEN ILL INE INF NEG PAR PAS PC PL PRS PST SG V

adessive allative elative essive genitive illative inessive infinitive negative partitive passive participle plural present tense past tense singular verb

References Bernárdez, Enrique. 2005. “Social cognition: Variation, language, and culture in a cognitive linguistic typology.” In Cognitive Linguistics. Internal Dynamics and Interdisciplinary Interaction, edited by J.R. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibañez and M. Sandra Peña Cervel, 191–222. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Blake, Barry. 1987. “English and German. Two languages two thousand years apart.” Review of A Comparative Typology of English and

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German: Unifying the Contrasts, by John A. Hawkins. Multilingua 6 (3): 309–323. Chafe, Wallace. 1976. “Givenness, constrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view.” In Subject and Topic, edited by Charles N. Li, 1–55. New York, San Francisco, London: Academic Press. Chesterman, Andrew. 1991. On Definiteness. A Study with Special Reference to English and Finnish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Croft, William. 1991. Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Relations. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. —. 1998. “Event structure in argument linking.” In The Projection of Arguments: Lexical and Compositional Factors, edited by Miriam Butt and Wilhelm Geuder, 21–63. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar. Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2003. Typology and Universals. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Croft, William, and D. Allan Cruse. 2004. Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Enkvist, Nils Erik. 1991. “Discourse type, text type, and cross-cultural rhetoric.” In Empirical Research in Translation and Intercultural Studies, edited by Sonja Tirkkonen-Condit, 5–16. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Hasselgård, Hilde. 2004. “Thematic choice in English and Norwegian.” Functions of Language 11 (2): 187212. Hawkins, John A. 1986. A Comparative Typology of English and German: Unifying the Contrasts. London: Croom Helm. Hiirikoski, Juhani. 1992. “Non-subject causer constructions in Finnish: BECOME-clauses vs. DO-clauses.” In The 1992 Yearbook of the Linguistic Association of Finland, edited by Maria Vilkuna, 163–206. Helsinki: Linguistic Association of Finland. Hopper, Paul J., and Sandra A. Thompson. 1980. “Transitivity in grammar and discourse.” Language 56 (2): 251299. Ihalainen, Ossi. 1980. “Some remarks on word order and definiteness in Finnish and English.” Papers and Studies in Contrastive Linguistics 11: 5968. Immonen, Sini. 2011. “Unravelling the processing units of translation.” Across Languages and Cultures 12 (2): 235–257. Jarvis, Scott. 2000. “Methodological rigor in the study of transfer: Identifying L1 influence in the interlanguage lexicon.” Language

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Learning 50 (2): 245–309. Johansson, Stig. 2004. “Why change the subject? On changes in subject selection in translation from English into Norwegian.” Target 16 (1): 29–52. —. 2005. “Sentence openings in translation from English into Norwegian.” Norsk lingvistisk tidskrift 23 (1): 3–35. Karlsson, Fred. 1982. “Kieliteorian relevanssi suomen kielen opetukselle.” [Relevance of Linguistic Theory for Teaching Finnish.] In Suomi vieraana kielenä, edited by Fred Karlsson, 89–114. Porvoo: WSOY. Laine, Päivö. 1997. Local Cases in Finnish and Their Equivalents in English. Licentiate thesis. Vaasa: University of Vaasa. Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 1. Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press. Lehtinen, Marjatta. Forthcoming. Taking the Perspective. Unprototypical Transitive Sentences in English and Their Translation Equivalents in Finnish. Manuscript for Ph.D. dissertation, University of Eastern Finland. Leino, Pentti. 1989. “Paikallissijat ja suhdesääntö: Kognitiivisen kieliopin näkökulma.” [Local cases and the relation rule: An approach from cognitive grammar.] Virittäjä 93: 161–219. Mauranen, Anna. 2004. “Corpora, universals and interference.” In Translation Universals – Do They Exist?, edited by Anna Mauranen and Pekka Kujamäki, 65–82. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2007. “Entrenchment, salience, and basic levels.” In Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, edited by Dirk Geeraerts and Herbert Cuyckens, 117–138. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Slobin, Dan I. 2007. “Language and thought online: Cognitive consequences of linguistic relativity.” In The Cognitive Linguistics Reader, edited by Vyvyan Evans, Benjamin K. Bergen, and Jörg Zinken, 902–928. London, Oakville: Equinox Publishing Ltd. Talmy, Leonard. 1983. “How language structures space.” In Spatial Orientation: Theory, Research and Application, edited by Herbert L. Pick, Jr., and Linda P. Acredolo, 225–282. New York: Plenum Press. —. 1985. “Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms.” In Language Typology and Syntactic Description, vol. 3: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon, edited by Timothy Shopen, 57–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, John R. [1989] 2003. Linguistic Categorization. 3rd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PART III: IMMIGRANT AND MINORITY LANGUAGE COMMUNITIES

CHAPTER EIGHT CONTACT-INDUCED LEVELLING: THE BEGINNING STAGES OF KOINEIZATION OF ENGLISH IN JAPAN KEIKO HIRANO Abstract The purpose of this study is to elucidate the mechanism of linguistic changes in a community where dialect contact occurs through frequent face-to-face interaction between native speakers of English with different varieties and dialects in a second-language setting. This paper aims to investigate rudimentary dialect levelling (Trudgill 2004) in English at an early stage of koineization, or new-dialect formation, and gender effects on the change in an Anglophone community in Japan where English is not used as a primary language. This longitudinal study focuses on examining the levelling process of intersonorant (t), with a total of more than 10,000 tokens gathered from native-speaking English teachers on two occasions, one year apart. The results point to some changes in the informant groups from all three countries, indicating that the variance observed in pronouncing intersonorant (t) among the informants became smaller after a year. The analyses of the linguistic constraints of (t) show that significant changes are taking place in the intervocalic environment at word-final position in the American group and with (t) preceded by a vowel and followed by /l/ in the word-medial position in the New Zealand group.

1. Introduction Recent globalization has dramatically improved the mobility of languages as well as the geographical mobility of people. The purpose of this study is to examine linguistic changes resulting from the mobility of languages and people and to illustrate the mechanism of these linguistic changes. Today, more than 100,000 native speakers of English (NSsE)

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from different parts of the world reside in Japan to study or work (National Statistics Center [NSTAC] 2011). Their contact with and acquisition of Japanese have tangible effects on their English. Furthermore, dialect contact occurs through frequent face-to-face interaction between NSsE employing different English varieties and dialects. Through long-term interaction, a process of koineization may take place (Trudgill 1986, 107, 126). The first stage of koineization involves rudimentary dialect levelling and interdialect development (Trudgill 2004, 89). This paper aims to investigate an early stage of koineization in a second-language (L2) setting where English is not used as the primary language but as a medium of international communication. This paper also aims to examine whether the linguistic constraints of the linguistic variable in question and the gender of the speakers have any effects as these factors often play important roles in linguistic change. The current study investigates a community of NSsE that is not at all homogeneous and consists of a mixture of nationalities of English speakers of different regional varieties in an L2 setting. In this community, therefore, there is no established regional dialect and no institutional norm that privileges one dialect of English over another. Despite the fact that a number of studies have uncovered the mechanisms of dialect change and new-dialect formation in dialect contact situations where English is spoken as the primary language (Britain 1991, 1997, 2001, 2002, 2008; Britain and Trudgill 2005; Gordon et al. 2004; Kerswill and Williams 2000, 2005; Sudbury, 2000; Trudgill, 1986, 2004; Trudgill et al. 2000), little is known about communities of people who are in countries where English is not the primary language (Hirano 2008, 2010, 2011, 2013). The present study investigates an Anglophone community in Japan—a community of NSsE who have just moved to a new linguistic environment to work for a few years. Although English is not used as the primary language in Japan, dialect contact occurs among NSsE living there. The dialect contact situation in this community can be considered as conducive to the first stage of koineization or new-dialect formation and a process of rudimentary levelling is likely to take place. This paper focuses on examining the process of an early stage of koineization—the levelling process of intersonorant (t), including wordfinal and word-medial intersonorant (t) in words such as better and get it. Intersonorant (t) has been widely investigated in studies of language acquisition and accommodation in dialect contact situations (Chambers 1992; Tagliamonte and Molfenter 2007; Shockey 1984; Trudgill 1986). In this longitudinal study of linguistic change, a total of more than 10,000 tokens were gathered from NSsE on two occasions, one year apart. The

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two datasets were compared and the variation and modification differences in the pronunciation of intersonorant (t) were analysed. All participants were language instructors from England, the United States (US) and New Zealand (NZ), and were living in Japan. The following sections will first discuss the brief history of English education in Japan and the context surrounding native speakers of English who come to Japan as language teachers, and then review the relevant theoretical background and previous studies into dialect contact and koineization. After a closer examination of the aims and methodology of the present study, I will present the results of the analysis of the use of intersonorant (t) in terms of linguistic constraints and gender. The article will conclude with a discussion of the results with regard to the patterns of linguistic change and rudimentary levelling in this community.

2. English education and the Anglophone community in Japan In order to explore the consequences of English dialect contacts in an L2 setting where there is no particular local dialect of English for newcomers to acquire, I have chosen an Anglophone community in Japan as the target community. The current study investigates a community of NSsE who have recently arrived in Japan as English teachers and who mix with speakers of different regional varieties in an L2 setting. The start of English education in Japan took place in the latter half of the 19th century. The United Kingdom (UK) and the United States had an enormous influence on political and military agendas within Japan and also a tremendous impact on Japan’s modernization and westernization. Learning English became necessary for the Japanese people if they wished to gain access to Western civilization. After the Second World War, Japan was occupied by the US, and English became a compulsory subject at the vast majority of secondary schools (Honna 2009, 119). Today, a foreign language is one of the required subjects taught at junior and senior high schools and universities. Most such institutions teach English as the first foreign language (Okuno 2007, 38). A large number of NSsE come to Japan from various countries to teach at schools and universities (NSTAC 2011). The majority of those who come to Japan as teachers of English at state schools are participants in the JET (Japan Exchange and Teaching) Programme, which is sponsored by Japanese ministries1 with the purpose of increasing mutual understanding between the people of Japan and the people of other nations (Council of

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Local Authorities for International Relations [CLAIR] 2013). The JET Programme invites young university graduates from overseas to teach at primary, junior high and senior high schools and to participate in international exchange throughout Japan. The number of JET participants employed since the start of the programme in 1987 exceeds 55,000 and these people, mostly young graduates, come from more than 62 countries. The number of JET participants per year reached over 6,000 in 2000, and the most recent report indicates that over 4,000 people from 40 countries were participating in the programme in 2013 (CLAIR 2013). Thus, the Anglophone community in Japan consists of a mixture of nationalities. Furthermore, this community’s members are socially and geographically mobile. The members usually only stay in Japan for one to three years, and they are constantly replaced by new arrivals. Their relationships, therefore, are often established on a short-term basis, but they are linked with people in a wide range of social contexts. In this paper, the Anglophone community is defined as a community of NSsE from English-speaking countries who are living temporarily in Japan as language instructors working for state schools or private institutions. The whole community is not located in one particular area, but its members are geographically scattered. This paper, however, regards the described group of NSsE as an Anglophone community. Almost all of the NSsE with whom the JET participants and teachers of private conversation schools have a close relationship in Japan are English teachers like themselves, according to the information collected from the informants of the present study. Social interaction, therefore, often takes place in an intra-group context. The JET participants are assigned to locations varying from large cities to remote mountain villages generally based on their preference. Participants have occasional chances to meet each other at local government offices during the week when they have no classes to teach at school. They are usually not isolated as public transportation is quite comprehensive, even to rural areas, and they sometimes have some form of personal transportation. Thus, access to friends and colleagues as well as places of work is relatively easy and there are opportunities for interacting and engaging in various activities with each other on a daily basis. Their linguistic situation varies, however. The amount of English and Japanese they use in their free time largely depends on how, and with whom, they spend their time. There are many opportunities for interacting with Japanese people outside of work, and a lot of NSsE enjoy spending some of their spare time with the locals. Some of them may be keen on taking lessons on various aspects of Japanese art and culture, while others

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may enjoy practicing Japanese martial arts at school with the students or at a local club with people from the area. Some may join a local sports team to play with Japanese people or other NSsE from the neighbouring areas. The JET participants are also expected to engage in local international exchange activities. In the cases mentioned above, the NSsE would use both English and Japanese according to the English proficiency of the people they interact with and their own Japanese ability. CLAIR, one of the sponsors of the JET programme, provides Japanese language training courses at different levels to the JET participants who wish to improve their Japanese language skills (CLAIR 2013).

3. Dialect contact and koineization Let us now turn to the theory and concepts of dialect contact underlying the present study. Immigrant koine results from contact that takes place not in the region where the dialects originate, but in another location where large numbers of speakers of different regional dialects have migrated (Siegel 1985, 363–364).

Studies of this type of koines within an English-language context include, for example, studies focussing on New Towns, such as Milton Keynes in England (Kerswill and Williams 2000, 2005), studies focussing on reclaimed land areas such as the Fens in England (Britain 1991, 1997, 2002; Britain and Trudgill 2005), and, of course, studies of transplanted koines, such as the Hindi/Bhojpuri varieties spoken in Mauritius (Domingue 1981) and South Africa (Mesthrie 1993), Falkland Islands English (Sudbury 2000), and New Zealand English (Britain 2001, 2008; Gordon et al. 2004; Trudgill 2004; Trudgill et al. 2000). In dialect contact and dialect mixture situations, a large number of linguistic variants will appear, and interdialect phenomena will begin to occur through the process of accommodation in face-to-face interaction (Trudgill 1986, 107, 126). As time passes, focussing begins to take place, and the variants present in the mixture begin to be subject to reduction. According to Trudgill (2004), new-dialect formation consists of six key processes: mixing, levelling, unmarking, interdialect development, reallocation, and focussing. Trudgill (2004, 82–128) distinguishes between “three different chronological stages in the new-dialect formation process, which also roughly correspond to three successive generations of speakers” (2004, 89).

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Chapter Eight Stage I: Rudimentary levelling and interdialect development This stage involves the initial contact of first-generation immigrants who have migrated to a new environment and mixing between adult speakers of different regional and social varieties. During this stage, limited types of accommodation occur, and, as a consequence, rudimentary dialect levelling takes place (Trudgill 2004, 89). Stage II: Variability and apparent levelling in new-dialect formation This stage involves the contact of children, the second-generation immigrants, who demonstrate considerable inter-individual and intraindividual variability because of the availability of many different models at which to aim (Trudgill 2004, 101). Stage III: Determinism in new-dialect formation This stage is represented by arrival at the final, stable, relatively uniform outcome of the new-dialect formation process among the third-generation immigrants (Trudgill 2004, 113).

The dialect contact situation in the present community, the focus of the current investigation, can be regarded as being at the beginning stages of Trudgill’s Stage I (2004, 89). This involves rudimentary dialect levelling and interdialect development through initial contact of the first-generation immigrants. Since the constituents of the community in question are repeatedly replaced by new members arriving in Japan, this linguistic environment involves the initial contact of first-generation Englishspeaking expatriates. Their linguistic situation, therefore, is likely to have some similarity with a “tabula rasa” situation where “there is no priorexisting population speaking the language in question, either in the location in question or nearby” (Trudgill 2004, 26). In such a setting, rudimentary dialect levelling is likely to take place. Levelling is one of the processes of new-dialect formation and “usually consists of getting rid of forms which are used by only a minority of speakers” (Trudgill 2003, 79). This means that majority forms tend to be selected from a “feature pool”, which is the mixture of linguistic features in a language contact situation (Mufwene 2001). Mufwene (2010) states that: The basic idea is that all speakers of a language contribute to a pool of features from which 1) each learner selects a particular subset that will form his/her respective idiolect and 2) a speaker can select new variants as he/she accommodates his/her interlocutors while they interact.

A number of linguistic and non-linguistic factors determine each feature’s relative dominance in the feature pool. New language and dialect varieties would thus evolve through a competition-and-selection process between

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features available to speakers in the feature pool of possible linguistic choices. The linguistic situation studied in this paper is neither colonial nor post-colonial, as is the case in the above-mentioned studies, and the dialect contact setting in the present community is synchronic rather than a diachronic one. Trudgill’s model (2004) is, however, expected to be applicable to the current case (see Section 7).

4. Aims of the study The present research aims to explore rudimentary dialect levelling in English at an early stage of koineization in an Anglophone community in Japan and to investigate the mechanisms of change in a dialect contact situation. One of the basic assumptions underlying the aims is based on accommodation theory (Giles 1973; Giles and N. Coupland 1991; Giles and Powesland 1975), which posits that speakers tend to adjust their linguistic behaviour in order to increase their similarity to those people with whom they interact. Long-term accommodation occurs if this adjustment in linguistic behaviour takes place frequently enough and over a lengthy period of time (Trudgill 1986, 40). Long-term accommodation can often be observed when speakers of different regional varieties come into prolonged and sustained contact. NSsE who are resident in Japan are likely to come in contact with speakers of different English varieties and, as a result, long-term linguistic accommodation can occur. Unlike in countries such as the UK or the US, where English is used as the primary language and there are established regional dialects, in Japan, English is taught as a foreign language and used as a medium of international communication, and there is no particular single target dialect which the speakers are expected to acquire or accommodate to. The present community is linguistically heterogeneous since speakers come from different parts of different English-speaking countries. As Hirano’s (2008, 2010, 2011, 2013) studies demonstrate, long-term linguistic accommodation occurs because of frequent interaction with speakers of different English varieties on a regular basis over a sustained period of time. The dialect contact situation in the present community can be considered to be at the beginning stages of koineization or new-dialect formation in an L2 setting. More precisely, it might just represent the first stages of Trudgill’s (2004, 89) Stage I. Koineization, however, could not possibly be achieved in this community because the members usually stay

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in Japan for only a couple of years, and are continuously replaced by new arrivals. Most of them do not settle down or have families in Japan and, hence, give birth to the next generation. Nevertheless, the members of the community are in a similar situation to first-generation transplanted immigrants. A process of rudimentary dialect levelling is likely to take place even in an L2 setting where English is not used as a primary language. The members of the present community are all adults employed as English teachers in Japan. As adults, they are less adept than children at acquiring a second dialect (Tagliamonte and Molfenter 2007, 650; Trudgill 1986, 31). They are, however, capable of participating in koineization processes such as creating interdialect forms and levelling out minor forms in a dialect contact situation. The changes observed in the current study are expected, therefore, to represent a highly subtle and slow process rather than provide evidence of dramatic transformations. The present study also aims to investigate how some of the linguistic constraints influence the patterns and changes in the choice of variants of intersonorant (t) in the present community. Two linguistic constraints of (t)—word position and preceding/following phonological environment— will be analysed. Both of them are known to be strong constraints in influencing the realization of (t) (Fabricius 2002; Holmes 1994; Roberts 2006; Tagliamonte & Molfenter 2007). It is therefore worthwhile to analyse the patterns and changes in the mean percentage use of each variant according to these two constraints in the first and second datasets. These analyses will help to illustrate the mechanism of linguistic change in this particular segmental sound. The third aim of the current study is to examine whether strong effects of informant gender are present in the choice of variants of intersonorant (t) and in linguistic change. Gender difference influencing language use is often one of the key factors in the mechanism of linguistic change. Some studies have demonstrated that certain linguistic changes are led by female speakers of the speech community (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1999; Holmes 1994; Labov 1966; Milroy 1980; Trudgill 1974), while others have shown that male speakers initiate particular linguistic changes (Labov 1972; Milroy 1980; Trudgill 1974). The present study will investigate the role of gender effects in linguistic change in the Anglophone community.

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5. Methodology The target community of the current study is an Anglophone community in Japan, which consists of NSsE who are living temporarily in Japan as language instructors. This study reuses the linguistic data collected for previous studies (Hirano 2008, 2011, 2013). The description of the methodology used, therefore, will be brief and limited to the main points.

5.1. Informants and linguistic data The linguistic data for this study consists of natural, spontaneous conversation between two NSsE from the same country. The informants consist of three nationalities: 15 English, 11 Americans and 13 NZ nationals, as shown in Table 5-1. A total of 39 NSsE, all of whom arrived in Japan in the summer of 2000, participated in the study. They included 36 Assistant Language Teachers on the JET Programme and three English conversation instructors employed by private language schools. The informants were aged between 21 and 34 at the time of the first data collection, averaging 24.7 years of age. Some of them returned home after a year but most of them remained in Japan for a second year. All of the informants had completed courses of higher education and some even had postgraduate degrees. In terms of aspects of social background such as age, educational achievement, occupation and income in Japan, the informants represent a relatively homogeneous group. Table 5-1. Number of informants. Gender

English

American

NZ

Total

Male Female Total

5 10 15

7 4 11

3 10 13

15 24 39

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Kyushu Map 5-1. Map of Japan.

Map 5-2. Map of Kyushu.

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The data used for this study were collected in three different prefectures of Kyushu (Fukuoka, Saga and Kumamoto) as shown in Maps 5-1 and 5-2, from the same informants on two separate occasions. The first dataset was collected in the autumn of 2000 immediately after the informants’ arrival in Japan and the second dataset was collected during the summer-autumn of 2001—about one year after arrival in Japan. This longitudinal study was conducted to compare and contrast the results of the two datasets and to trace the course of changes in real time. In both sessions, casual conversations between two NSsE from the same country were recorded for 45 minutes.2 In most cases the two people in each pair were friends. A total of 34 hours of speech were used. The informants were paired with someone from the same country to reduce any possibility of short-term accommodation. This might have occurred if they had been paired with someone who spoke a different variety of English. Thus, it was possible to minimize the risk of changes being caused by the conversation partner at the time of data collection. Any linguistic changes observed between the first and the second datasets, therefore, were most likely caused by the linguistic environment in which informants had daily conversations with various NSsE or non-NSsE throughout the preceding year in Japan. The traditional way of collecting sociolinguistic data is to conduct a sociolinguistic interview using, for example, the method developed by Labov (1966, 1972). The current research, however, used a method designed to elicit more naturally occurring conversation from the informants. The interviewer was not present while the informants were being recorded in order to lessen the possibility of inducing psychological pressure or speech modification resulting from the presence of a non-NSE. In this way, the problem of the “observer’s paradox” (Labov 1972, 209) could be avoided.

5.2. Linguistic variable: intersonorant (t) The focus of this study is on the variation and modification of intersonorant (t), which is often referred as the equivalent variable of intervocalic /t/. It is found in utterances like but I, get it, getting, sorting, better and little. Intersonorant (t) is subject to variability of pronunciation. The choice of variant is determined to some extent by its position in the word and depends largely on the variety of English. In England, the Received Pronunciation (RP) form for intervocalic /t/ is a voiceless alveolar stop [t]. In word-final position, however, the glottal

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stop is also used by young RP speakers, especially in London (Fabricius 2002). Recent studies have demonstrated that the glottal stop is often used by speakers in many parts of England (e.g. Docherty and Foulkes 1999, 50, 54; J. Milroy et al. 1994; Schleef 2013; Tollfree 1999; Trudgill 1999, 2002). In word-medial position the glottal stop does not occur intervocalically in RP (Upton 2004, 228), but it is frequently used in South East London English (Tollfree 1999, 171) and is particularly common among Cockney speakers (Wells 1982, 261). Also, it is increasingly produced by young speakers in many urban and rural locations across England, including Derby (Docherty and Foulkes 1999; Foulkes and Docherty 2007), Norwich (Trudgill 1974, 1999, 2002) and Newcastle (Docherty and Foulkes 1999). However, the glottal stop used in wordmedial position is claimed to be “sharply stigmatized” (Wells 1982, 261). In intervocalic position, the flap (including T-Voicing3 and tap) is sometimes observed in certain casual styles in British accents ranging from those employed by RP speakers to those employed by Cockney speakers (Tollfree 1999, 170; Wells 1982, 250). According to Trudgill’s observation (1986, 19), it is common in London and widespread in the southwest of England and Wales where the flap is traditionally used. It is also common in Tyneside (J. Milroy et al. 1994) and Sandwell near Birmingham (Mathisen 1999). In Standard American English, intervocalic /t/ is “most often realized as a tap or flap, frequently with voicing” (Kretzschmar 2004, 267). TVoicing is one of the most salient characteristics of American pronunciation to most non-Americans, according to Wells (1982, 248). Also Chambers (1992, 682) states that “the rule is ubiquitous in North American English”. A “normal” speaker of American English flaps 100% of intervocalic /t/s, according to Shockey (1984, 89), who observes that a fully released alveolar [t] is heard only when the speaker attempts to indicate how a word is spelled through pronunciation, to correct a misunderstanding, or in other unusual circumstances requiring maximal distinctiveness. Strassel (1998), however, demonstrates that flapping can be variable depending on the phonological environment, regional effects and style effects. Trudgill and Hannah (2008, 45) state that [t] may occur in a very formal style. Roberts’s (2006) study in Vermont, however, demonstrates that the glottal stop does occur in word-final position among Vermonters. Intervocalic glottal stop is categorically absent in the wordmedial position, though. Glottal stop does occur before /n/ (button) in American English and, in New York City and Boston, before /l/ (bottle) (Trudgill and Hannah 2008, 45).

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In NZ English, intervocalic /t/ is “usually voiced and tapped between sonorants in words such as getting, butter, bottle” (Bauer and Warren 2004, 593). “A voiced segment”, Bauer (1986, 228) indicates, “is probably the most widespread realization of /t/” in intervocalic environments. In NZ English, intervocalic /t/ has been extensively studied by researchers including Bauer and Holmes (1996), Bayard (1999), Bell (1984), Holmes (1994, 1997) and Woods (2000). Holmes’s (1994) study has demonstrated that people use flaps extensively for both word-final and word-medial intervocalic /t/s. The flap is more likely to occur in the speech of younger speakers than that of older speakers, it is more common in the speech of working-class speakers than that of middle-class speakers and occurs more often in word-final than word-medial position. Holmes (1997, 19) states that “T-Voicing is well-established in the conversational style of working class young people” and that “young middle class women were playing an important role in the spread of the new variant into middle class speech”. Holmes’s findings have also been confirmed by Bayard’s (1999) study which suggests that certain social and linguistic factors are constraining usage of particular variants for intervocalic /t/. Holmes (1997, 20) indicates that the move to T-Voicing may represent “natural” phonological change and may reflect the influence of American English. Although Gordon et al. (2004, 34) and Hay et al. (2008, 19) indicate that glottal stops are not used in intervocalic environments, in Holmes’s (1994) study some glottal stops are observed as occurring in word-final positions, but not in word-medial positions. In the datasets for the present study variation in the pronunciation of intersonorant (t) clearly exists among NSsE who have come to live in Japan. Most English informants use flaps occasionally as shown in examples (1) and (2). Examples of some American and NZ informants using glottal stops in word-final position are shown in (3) and (4) respectively. Examples shown in (5) and (6) are examples of rare instances of an American informant and a NZ informant using the glottal stop in the word-medial position. Examples of the use of alveolar stops [t] by American informants are shown in examples (7) and (8). (1) En.: I have… done quite a bit this morning… but… still got a lot to do [‫ݐ‬ሿ        [‫]ݐ‬ (B&R2, R11) (2) En.: and the shower which was pretty expensive and [‫]ݐ‬

(B&R2, R396)

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(3) US: but I thought it said seven [‫]ݦ‬ [‫]ݦ‬

(T&A2, A354)

(4) NZ: if I’m going out I might go and get some but I don’t keep it in the house [‫]ݦ‬ [‫]ݦ‬ (G&P1, G530) (5) US: yeah so I was like… waiting around at seven and then like [‫]ݦ‬ (T&A2, A356) (6) NZ: but then you’re drinking again on… Thursday and Friday and… Saturday [‫]ݦ‬ (G&P1, P546) (7) US: oh he’s a mean teacher… he will hurt us all [t]

(T&A2, A354)

(8) US: they’re pretty… (I’m gonna) miss the hyaku[hundred]-yen shop [t] when I go home (T&A2, T973)

In the present study, variation and modification in the pronunciation of intersonorant (t) are observed over a period of one year from arrival in Japan among NSsE from England, the US and NZ.

5.3. The data and the analysis The study involves 5,353 tokens from the first dataset and 5,105 tokens from the second dataset. This makes a total of 10,458 tokens, which amounts to approximately 268 tokens per person, as shown in Table 5-2. Table 5-2. Number of tokens. Data

English American NZ Total informants informants informants (N = 39) (N = 15) (N = 11) (N = 13) 1st dataset 2250 1403 1700 5353 2nd dataset 2251 1303 1551 5105 Total 4501 2706 3251 10458 1st dataset: immediately after arrival; 2nd dataset: one year after arrival

Per person 137 131 268

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All tokens were auditorily analysed to determine how the informants had pronounced each target segment. In order to analyse a large number of tokens, impressionistic judgement was used. The phonetic realization of target segments was categorized impressionistically into three variants: flap [‫ ;]ݐ‬glottal stop [‫ ;]ݦ‬and alveolar stop [t]. In order to test the reliability of the researcher’s auditory judgments, a randomly selected portion of the tokens were judged by an experienced native-speaker dialectologist of English. The dialectologist judged approximately 10% of the whole conversation for four pairs of English, four pairs of American and four pairs of NZ informants, a total of 24 informants, of the second datasets. 99% agreement between these two sets of judgments suggests that an acceptable degree of reliability was reached. To provide results for the linguistic data analysis, SPSS version 18 was used and the following statistical tests were performed: paired-samples ttest, independent-samples t-test and mixed between-within subjects ANOVA4. To perform these analyses by SPSS, it is required that each informant provides sets of scores. In this study, the percentage use of a particular variant for each informant was used in the statistical analyses instead of the raw frequencies for each variant. In addition to the mean percentages given in the tables below, the raw frequencies are provided in the tables in the Appendix5.

6. Results The results section will first address the relationship of nationality to overall change in the choice of variants of intersonorant (t) from the first dataset to the second dataset. An SPSS paired-samples t-test was used to assess the extent of change and to demonstrate whether there were any significant changes among the variants. Second, change in the choice of variants is analysed according to two of the linguistic constraints of (t), word position and preceding/following phonological environment. Third, gender effects on linguistic changes are tested. An independent-samples ttest was used to compare the mean percentage use of each variant for male and female groups, and a mixed between-within subjects ANOVA was used to assess whether change in the use of each variant is gender specific.

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6.1. Overall results Table 6-1 shows the mean percentage use of flaps, glottal stops and alveolar stops for intersonorant (t) by the informants immediately after arrival in Japan (1st dataset) and one year later (2nd dataset). The mean percentage use of each variant was calculated from the percentage use by individual informants. English informants use glottal stops most of the time and alveolar stops about one third of the time. It should be noted that they already used flaps when they arrived in Japan. This usage increases noticeably after a year in Japan, although the change is not statistically significant. American informants use flaps to a large extent and hardly ever use alveolar stops. It is clear that they were already using glottal stops when they came to Japan. A paired-samples t-test shows two significant changes among American informants. The use of flaps significantly decreases, and inversely the use of glottal stops significantly increases after a year. NZ informants mostly use flaps and occasionally glottal stops and alveolar stops. The use of flaps increases and the use of alveolar stops decreases noticeably after a year, although the changes are not statistically significant. Table 6-1. Mean percentage use of each variant of (t). Informants

Data Flap (%) Glottal stop (%) st

English American NZ Average

1 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd

13.3 16.3 89.8 84.3 * 69.3 73.4 53.5 54.5

54.5 53.3 8.9 14.2 * 13.5 13.9 28.0 29.1

Alveolar stop (%) 32.3 30.4 1.4 1.6 17.2 12.7 18.5 16.4 *

Paired-samples t-test (2-tailed): *significant at P < .05

These modifications which the individual informants from all three countries show make the variance or standard deviation6 in the use of each of the three variants smaller after a year, as shown in Table 6-2. Although the changes are relatively small for all three variants, the reduction in the standard deviations may indicate that the differences observed in pronouncing intersonorant (t) among the informants from the three

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countries may have become slightly less pronounced after spending one year in Japan. Table 6-2. Change in the variance of each variant. Variant Flap Glottal stop Alveolar stop

Data 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd

No. of informants 39 39 39 39 39 39

Min. % Max. % Mean % Standard score score score deviation 0.8 97.6 53.513 34.7877 0.7 90.2 54.487 33.0559 1.2 92.3 27.959 24.9230 5.4 89.9 29.133 24.4557 0.0 64.2 18.536 17.2368 0.0 55.5 16.392 15.5482

Regarding the change in the use of flaps, the percentage uses of the three nationalities shift towards each other, which makes the variance smaller after a year. The use of flaps by the informants from England and NZ shifts in the direction of American high usage, increasing the proportion of usage quite noticeably after a year. On the other hand, the American informants’ proportion of usage of flaps significantly decreases after a year, which represents a shift towards the lower usage of flaps by the informants from England and NZ. The change in the average percentage use for flaps from 53.5% to 54.5% among the three nationalities, as shown at the bottom line of Table 6-1, seems very slight, but there are noticeable or significant changes among the individual countries, which, in consequence, draw the percentages for the three nationalities towards each other. Variance in the use of glottal stops also becomes slightly smaller in the second dataset, as shown in Table 6-2. While the informants from England and NZ show very little change in usage as indicated in Table 6-1, the American informants, by increasing the proportional use of glottal stops to a statistically significant degree a year later, shift their usage in the direction of the English nationals’ high usage. The change in average use of glottal stops among the three nationalities between the first and second datasets is small (28.0% to 29.1%) as shown in the bottom rows of Table 6-1. The variance among the three countries, however, has become slightly smaller because of a significant shift by the Americans. The change in average use of alveolar stops shows a statistically significant decrease after a year, as displayed in Table 6-1. The English informants show a slight decrease in usage and the NZ informants show a noticeable decrease. Although the American informants show practically

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no change, they consistently show an extremely low proportion of alveolar stops in both the first and second datasets. The direction of alveolar usage for the complete informant group is towards lower levels of usage. The results above demonstrate that variance in the three variants observed in pronouncing intersonorant (t) became slightly smaller among the informants from the three countries after spending a year in Japan. This is a possible indication that rudimentary dialect levelling in English might be taking place in such Anglophone communities in Japan.

6.2. Linguistic constraints Two of the linguistic constraints of (t)—word position and preceding/following phonological environment—are known to be strong constraints in influencing the realization of (t) (Fabricius 2002; Holmes 1994; Roberts 2006; Tagliamonte & Molfenter 2007). The first and second datasets were analysed in terms of the patterns and changes in the mean percentage of use of each variant with regard to these constraints. 6.2.1. Word position As regards word position, the tokens were coded into three categories: 1. word-final position (but I, get it) 2. morpheme-final position (getting, sorting) 3. no-boundary position (better, little)

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Table 6-3. Mean percentage use of each variant of (t) according to the word position. Informants Word position Word-final English

Morphemefinal Noboundary Word-final

American

Morphemefinal Noboundary Word-final

NZ

Morphemefinal Noboundary

Data 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd

Flap Glottal stop (%) (%) 70.0 16.0 67.7 21.0 10.5 34.8 6.4 37.8 8.9 23.4 9.0 22.4 83.6 15.8 75.9 * 22.8 * 96.5 1.0 95.3 3.5 98.1 0.0 97.7 0.0 72.9 21.1 72.6 23.1 0.0 64.0 0.6 76.2 2.8 65.7 0.5 72.3 *

Alveolar stop (%) 14.1 11.3 54.7 55.8 67.7 68.7 (0.6) 1.3 2.5 1.2 1.9 2.3 5.9 4.3 36.1 23.2 31.5 27.2

Paired-samples t-test (2-tailed): *significant at P < .05

Table 6-3 indicates that increase in the use of flaps by English informants mostly occurs in the word-final position. American informants scarcely use the glottal stop in word-medial positions including morpheme-final and no-boundary positions, but occasionally use it in word-final position. In this position, there is significant decrease in the use of flaps and significant increase in the use of glottal stops. Like the American informants, NZ informants hardly use the glottal stop in morpheme-final or no-boundary positions, but sometimes use it in the word-final position. Increase in the use of flaps only occurs in the morpheme-final and no-boundary positions. The latter change is statistically significant. In contrast, the NZ informants decrease the use of

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alveolar stops noticeably in these two positions. These findings indicate that changes are taking place more in the word-final position than in the word-medial position among the English and American informants, but more in the word-medial position among the NZ informants. 6.2.2. Preceding and following environments The tokens were coded into the following three categories of phonological environment: 1. V(t)V: intervocalic (t) (better, get it) 2. V(t)L: (t) preceded by a vowel and followed by /l/ (bottle, little) 3. VR(t)V: (t) preceded by /r/ and followed by a vowel (sort of, thirty) Only American English requires the last category since it is the only rhotic variety of English under consideration. There are other phonological environments where intersonorant (t) occurs, but those other environments are not included in token identification in the present study. Table 6-4 indicates that noticeable increase in the use of flaps and decrease in the use of glottal stops by English informants occur more in the V(t)L environment. With American informants, significant decrease in the use of flaps and significant increase in the use of glottal stops occur only in the intervocalic environment. As regards NZ informants, significant increase in the use of flaps and significant decrease in the use of alveolar stops are found in the V(t)L environment. The results shown in Table 6-4 suggest that English informants replace some of the glottal stops with flaps for word-medial intersonorant (t) in words such as little and bottle. In the same phonological environment, NZ informants replace some alveolar stops with flaps. American informants replace some of the flaps with glottal stops in words such as but I, get it, for (t)s in the intervocalic environment.

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Table 6-4. Mean percentage use of each variant of (t) according to the preceding and following phonological environment. Informants Preceding and Data following segment 1st V(t)V 2nd English 1st V(t)L 2nd 1st V(t)V 2nd 1st American V(t)L 2nd 1st VR(t)V 2nd 1st V(t)V 2nd NZ 1st V(t)L 2nd

Flap (%)

Glottal stop (%)

13.5 16.4 5.8 11.2 88.6 82.0 * 100.0 99.1 91.9 93.2 69.2 72.8 68.8 89.2 *

54.0 53.3 61.1 53.4 10.1 16.6 * 0.0 0.0 4.8 3.6 14.2 14.5 0.0 0.0

Alveolar stop (%) 32.5 30.3 33.1 35.4 1.4 1.4 0.0 0.9 3.3 3.3 16.7 12.6 31.2 10.8 *

Paired-samples t-test (2-tailed): *significant at P < .05

6.3. Gender When the data are divided into a male group and a female group for each nationality, a paired-samples t-test shows four significant changes between the two datasets. As shown in Table 6-5 and Figure 6-1, male American informants significantly decrease the use of flaps (92.3% ĺ 86.4%, p = .017), and significantly increase the use of glottal stops after a year (6.4% ĺ 11.6%, p = .013). Although the changes are not statistically significant, the female Americans reduce the use of flaps to a much lower degree (85.2% ĺ 80.5%) and increase the use of glottal stops to a much higher degree (13.2% ĺ 18.6%) than the male speakers. The significant changes in the use of the respective variants by the male informants draw the levels closer to those of the female group. In regard to NZ informants, females significantly increase the use of flaps (65.2% ĺ 71.0%, p = .022),

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and significantly decrease the use of alveolar stops (21.2% ĺ 15.1%, p = .027). The male informants, however, seem to show quite stable use of the three variants (flaps 82.9% ĺ 81.3%; glottal stops 13.2% ĺ 13.9%; alveolar stops 3.9% ĺ 4.8%). Table 6-5. Mean percentage use of each variant of (t) by gender. Informants Gender Data Female English Male Female American Male Female NZ Male Female Average Male

1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd

Flap (%) 13.3 17.1 13.3 14.7 85.2 80.5 92.3 86.4 * 65.2 71.0 * 82.9 81.3 46.9 50.1 64.1 61.5

Glottal stop (%) 52.9 51.0 57.6 57.8 13.2 18.6 6.4 11.6 * 13.7 13.9 13.2 13.9 29.9 30.2 24.8 27.5

Alveolar stop (%) 33.8 31.9 29.1 27.5 1.6 1.0 1.3 1.9 21.2 15.1 * 3.9 4.8 23.2 19.8 * 11.1 11.0

Paired-samples t-test (2-tailed): *significant at P < .05

As demonstrated by the statistical analysis, the gaps between some mean percentage uses by the two gender groups became narrower after a year. To compare the mean percentage uses of the two gender groups for each nationality for the first dataset and the second dataset respectively, an independent-samples t-test was performed. The results for the first dataset show three significant differences between the two gender groups—in the use of flaps (female 85.3% : male 92.3%, p = .042) and glottal stops (female 13.2% : male 6.4%, p = .045) by the American informants, and in the use of flaps (female 65.2% : male 82.9%, p = .041) by the NZ informants. An independent-samples t-test for the second dataset, however,

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shows that the only significant difference is in the use of glottal stops (female 18.6% : male 11.6%, p = .044) by the American informants. These findings indicate that, apart from the use of glottal stops by the American group, the differences between the two gender groups in the use of flaps in both American and NZ groups have become less pronounced after a year in Japan.

Figure 6-1. Mean percentage use of each variant of (t) by gender.

Statistical analyses in relation to linguistic constraints and gender revealed some significant changes between the first and second datasets. Regarding the word position of intersonorant (t), a paired-samples t-test shows three significant changes. (1) The male American informants significantly decrease the use of flaps in the word-final position (but I, get it) (87.1% ĺ 79.5%, p = .050). (2) The female NZ informants significantly decrease the use of alveolar stops in the morpheme-final position (getting, sorting) (45.5% ĺ 28.8%, p = .046), and (3) significantly increase the use of flaps in the no-boundary position (better, little) (58.9% ĺ 67.0%, p = .042). With regard to the preceding and following environments, a pairedsamples t-test shows five significant changes. (1) The male American informants significantly decrease the use of flaps in the intervocalic environment (better, get it) (91.8% ĺ 84.4%, p = .014), and (2) significantly increase the use of glottal stops in the intervocalic environment (7.2% ĺ 13.8%, p = .018). (3) The female NZ informants significantly increase the use of flaps in the V(t)L environment (bottle,

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little) (61.9% ĺ 85.9%, p = .039), (4) significantly decrease the use of alveolar stops in the V(t)L environment (38.1% ĺ 14.1%, p = .027), and (5) significantly decrease the use of alveolar stops in the intervocalic environment (20.5% ĺ 14.9%, p = .039). In order to test whether the amount of change in the use of each variant over time is statistically different for the males and females, a mixed between-within subjects ANOVA was conducted. The only significant gender-related difference found in this analysis is the change in use of alveolar stop in word-final position among the English informants (Wilks’ Lambda = .682, F(1, 13) = 6.062, p = .029, multivariate partial eta squared = .318). While females hardly showed any change, maintaining a rate of 13%, males reduced the usage from 15% to 6%.

7. Discussion The statistical analyses found some significant and near-significant changes in pronouncing intersonorant (t) among the informants from all three countries during their year’s stay in Japan. The results indicate that the variance observed among the informants immediately after their arrival in Japan became slightly smaller after a year. One of the possible reasons for this change is that rudimentary levelling (Trudgill 2004) might take place in this Anglophone community. This chapter attempts to discuss the results obtained from the statistical analyses. The English informants noticeably increased the average percentage use of flaps after a year in Japan. The flap was already available in the native English accents on arrival, being widespread in the intervocalic position in London, the southwest of England and Wales (Trudgill 1986, 19), and the north of England in places such as Tyneside (J. Milroy et al. 1994) and Sandwell (Mathisen 1999). It is also observed in casual styles among RP speakers (Tollfree 1999) and Cockney speakers (Wells 1982, 250). Since most speakers from North America, Australia and New Zealand typically use flaps for intersonorant (t), the flap is currently the majority form and would likely become the focused form—if this community were to develop—within the feature pool created in the present community. English informants picking up the majority form from the feature pool and increasing their use of it might not, therefore, be surprising. A noteworthy point is that the English informants’ increase in the use of flaps mostly occurs in the intervocalic environment in wordfinal position, and in the V(t)L environment in non-boundary position at an early stage of koineization in a dialect contact situation in the present

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community. One of the reasons why changes are taking place more in the intervocalic environment in the word-final position might be that the form they increase the use of, namely the flap, is relatively unmarked at this position in comparison to the word-medial position, and therefore easily adopted and increased. The increase in the use of flaps in the V(t)L environment in non-boundary position might result from avoidance of frequent use of glottal stops in this position. American informants significantly increased average percentage use of glottal stops, and significantly decreased use of flaps after a year in Japan. The glottal stop was already available in their native accent as one of the variants for intersonorant (t) on arrival in Japan. Glottal stops are widely used in British English and are growing in popularity in NZ English (Holmes 1994). The intervocalic /t/ is a highly salient linguistic feature for any English speaker but is quite an easily modifiable variable (Chambers 1992; Shockey 1984; Tagliamonte and Molfenter 2007; Trudgill 1986). Interacting frequently with speakers of these English varieties might have stimulated American informants to shift from flap usage to glottal stop usage. The American informants’ modification seems to begin with an increase in use of glottal stops and a decrease in use of flaps in the intervocalic environment in word-final position. One explanation for this trend might be that the use of glottal stops may be relatively unmarked at this position in comparison with word-medial position. This reflects the trend observed among the informants from England in the use of flaps in word-final position. The NZ informants’ average percentage use of flaps increased and the use of alveolar stops decreased noticeably after a year in Japan. According to Holmes (1994), in New Zealand English T-voicing is a vernacular change in progress and is now a well-established variant of intervocalic /t/. It is, therefore, plausible that the NZ informants have increased their use of flaps since it is the form they most frequently use and, at the same time, it is the majority form in the feature pool. The NZ informants’ increase in use of flaps and decrease in use of alveolar stops mostly occur in wordmedial position, particularly in the V(t)L environment in non-boundary position. This tendency can be explained by the strong influence of the almost categorical use of flaps by Americans in this environment. Flap was already available in NZ informants and was their first choice for this linguistic environment when they first arrived in Japan. They simply replaced some of their alveolar stops with flaps. The statistical analyses undertaken have found that variance in the use of flaps, glottal stops and alveolar stops diminished somewhat among all the informants after interacting with speakers of different varieties of

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English. The informants from the three countries in the present study seem to have subtly adjusted their linguistic characteristics and shifted somewhat in the direction of the linguistic features in other varieties of English in the course of cross-dialectal interaction. As a result, variance in the use of the three variants becomes slightly smaller among the informant group. As Trudgill (1986, 107, 126) indicates, in dialect mixture situations, rudimentary levelling is likely to begin to occur through the process of accommodation in face-to-face interaction. The linguistic changes found in the present study are, thus, believed to be a phenomenon that can be explained by the notion of “rudimentary levelling”. Trudgill’s (2004) model for rudimentary levelling seems to fit, if not perfectly, at least fairly well to the patterns of linguistic change in this community. It should be noted, however, that the American speakers seem to accommodate to a minority form in the feature pool of the present community, the glottal stop. This indicates that majority forms are not always chosen from the feature pool. In fact, Hirano (2008, 2010, 2011, 2013) reveals evidence that the speaker’s linguistic behaviour and change are strongly correlated to his or her social network in the dialect contact situation of the Anglophone community in Japan. As Schneider (2007, 21) states, speakers accommodate “their speech behaviour to those they wish to associate and be associated with”. The present study has also identified some gender effects on this linguistic change. Paired-samples t-tests including linguistic constraints for two gender groups have found some significant changes in the male American and the female NZ informants between the first and second datasets. No significant changes were found among either male or female English informant groups. In the case of the American group, the male informants make some significant changes, whereas the female informants make substantial changes which are not, however, statistically significant. In regard to the NZ groups, the female informants make significant changes. The male informants’ percentage uses, however, are quite stable, and do not show great fluctuation. The female informants, therefore, seem to be the contributors to the linguistic change, appearing to pilot the direction of the change. This behaviour appears to be consistent with Holmes’s (1997, 19) suggestion, made in her study on NZ English, that “young middle class women were playing an important role in the spread of the new variant [the flap] into middle class speech”. The informants for the present study were all language teachers and, therefore, are considered to be members of the middle classes. ANOVA found one significant difference in the change in use of the alveolar stop in word-final position between the English male group and the English female group, with the

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male group decreasing its use and the female group not showing much change. This is, however, the only difference found in the English group and located in one particular linguistic environment. There were no other strong gender effects indicated by ANOVA. Further analyses will be required, employing more data on other linguistic variables, before finding a firm conclusion on this gender effect issue.

8. Conclusions This paper attempted to demonstrate a process of rudimentary dialect levelling in English at an early stage of koineization or new-dialect formation in an Anglophone community in Japan. It explored the consequences of dialect contact between native speakers of different varieties of English and examined dialect contact processes of accommodation in the present community. The key condition of the dialect contact situation under study is that the NSsE in question are in a country where English is not the primary language. They are in a highly mobile, turbulent speech community that is in flux and where there is little social stability. Furthermore, they constantly have contact with speakers of different dialects and varieties of English. The current study demonstrated some linguistic changes which might support the idea that the present community is at the beginning stages of koineization or new-dialect formation. New-dialect formation, however, could not possibly be achieved in this community because the members are repeatedly replaced by new arrivals. The contact situation may be merely at the beginning stages of Trudgill’s (2004, 89) Stage I, but some of the evidence suggests that rudimentary dialect levelling seems to be taking place. Further investigation into more linguistic variables will hopefully help to reveal the complexity of the mechanisms of linguistic variation and change in modern urban-type mixed English dialect contact situations.

Notes 1. The JET Programme is sponsored by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (CLAIR 2013). 2. There is one exception. One NZ informant had an Australian partner whose data is not used in this study. 3. Some linguists including Wells (1982) and Holmes (1994, 1997) use “T-

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Voicing” for flap. 4. Mixed between-within subjects ANOVA is a combined analysis of betweensubjects analysis (comparing two or more different groups) and within-subjects or repeated measures analysis (one group of subjects exposed to two or more conditions) (Pallant 2005, 239). 5. See Table A-1 in the Appendix for the raw frequencies and percentage rates for each variant—flap, glottal stop and alveolar stop—in the first and second datasets obtained from informants from England, the US and NZ. See Table A-2 for the frequencies according to the word position, Table A-3 for the frequencies according to the preceding and following phonological environment, and Table A-4 for the frequencies by gender. 6. Standard deviation is a “measure of dispersion” which “indicates the average, or standard, deviation of scores away from the mean” (Brace, Kemp and Snelgar 2003, 348).

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Appendix Table A-1. Frequencies of each variant of (t). Informants Data 1st English

2nd 1st

American

2nd 1st

NZ

2nd

Flap (%) 297 (13.2%) 330 (14.7%) 1266 (90.2%) 1105 (84.8%) 1172 (68.9%) 1147 (74.0%)

Glottal stop (%) 1263 (56.1%) 1258 (55.9%) 119 (8.5%) 181 (13.9%) 229 (13.5%) 211 (13.6%)

Alveolar stop (%) 690 (30.7%) 663 (29.5%) 18 (1.3%) 17 (1.3%) 299 (17.6%) 193 (12.4%)

1st dataset: immediately after arrival; 2nd dataset: one year after arrival

Total 2250 2251 1403 1303 1700 1551

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Table A-2. Frequencies of each variant of (t) according to the word position. Informants Word position Word-final English

Morphemefinal No-boundary Word-final

American

Morphemefinal No-boundary Word-final

NZ

Morphemefinal No-boundary

Data 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd

Flap Glottal stop 222 276 30 17 45 37 633 593 218 206 415 306 738 676 161 167 273 304

1039 1001 112 147 112 110 116 171 3 10 0 0 216 207 0 2 13 2

Alveolar stop 170 156 184 147 336 360 6 8 5 3 7 6 62 41 99 49 138 103

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Table A-3. Frequencies of each variant of (t) according to the preceding and following phonological environment. Informants Preceding and following segment V(t)V English V(t)L V(t)V American

V(t)L VR(t)V V(t)V

NZ V(t)L

Data Flap Glottal stop Alveolar stop 293 1206 672 1st nd 2 322 1206 638 st 4 57 18 1 2nd 8 52 25 st 1009 113 15 1 nd 2 898 178 13 135 0 0 1st nd 2 84 0 1 st 122 6 3 1 2nd 123 3 3 st 1115 229 278 1 nd 2 1083 211 183 57 0 20 1st nd 2 63 0 10

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Table A-4. Frequencies of each variant of (t) by gender. Informants

Gender

N

Female

10

Male

5

Female

4

Male

7

Female

10

Male

3

English

American

NZ

Data 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd 1st 2nd

Flap 207 243 90 87 451 362 815 743 850 863 322 284

Glottal stop 811 827 452 431 60 84 59 97 177 164 52 47

Alveolar stop 490 483 200 180 7 4 11 13 284 176 15 17

CHAPTER NINE BILINGUAL SPEECH IN RUSSIAN-GERMAN LANGUAGE CONTACT: FINDINGS BASED ON AN ANALYSIS OF NATURAL CONVERSATIONS IN RUSSIANSPEAKING IMMIGRANT FAMILIES IN GERMANY ANNA RITTER Abstract This article discusses the current situation of Russian and German language contact in Germany focusing on the particular role of the family in bilingual speech. Russian-speaking immigrants represent one of the largest immigrant groups in Germany. Most have been living in this country for 15–20 years. A great number of them pay special attention to the use of Russian in the family circle and primarily with their children. The main purpose of this paper is to show that immigrant families can be seen as examples of micro level language contact where bilingual speech can be observed and analysed. In addition, the paper will show how social factors impact on bilingual speech in an immigrant family. The method of analysis is based on the dynamic typology of bilingual speech presented by Auer (1999). Auer suggests that bilingual speech can be conceptualized as a continuum from code-switching via language mixing to fused lects. The research data consist of self-recordings of natural conversations in ten immigrant families of Russian background, representing two immigrant generations. The results show that some of the conversations tend towards codeswitching or language mixing. Furthermore, crucial differences were detected in linguistic development not only between the two immigrant generations but also within each generation. Social factors which define the first generation are education in Germany, contact with German native speakers and having children of one’s own. For the second generation,

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these factors are the parents’ language attitude, contacts with Russian native speakers, and/or instruction in Russian.

1. Introduction In the past few years, the social and linguistic integration of the newly arrived group of Russian-speaking immigrants in Germany (see Section 2), their language biographies, attitudes and beliefs as well as RussianGerman code-switching have come more and more to the forefront of linguistics in Germany (e.g. Berend 1998; Zemskaia 2001; Meng 2001; Roll 2003; Goldbach 2005; Brehmer 2007; Anstatt and Dieser 2007). In this paper, I discuss the current situation of Russian and German language contact in Germany focusing on the particular role of families. My main aim is to show that an immigrant family can be considered an example of micro level language contact in which the process of codeswitching can be observed and analysed. Therefore, this paper contributes to the intergenerational field of studies on the Russian-speaking immigrant group and follows comparable studies on immigrant family language(s) (e.g. Pauwels 2005; Schüpbach 2009). The specific approach of this study is to combine the sociolinguistic background information on the participants with the findings of their linguistic code-switching behaviour. In what follows, I will first briefly introduce the sociolinguistic context of this immigrant group and then proceed to describe my data and the design of the study. I will conclude with the findings and a discussion on the role of social factors and their impact on the language contact situation in the participant families.

2. Sociolinguistic context Since the end of the 1980s, large numbers of citizens from the Soviet Union and its succession states have immigrated to countries around the world: primarily to the USA, Israel and Germany. This so-called 4th emigration wave (Zemskaia 2001, 43–49) of Russian-speakers in the late 20th century was provoked by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dramatic political and economic consequences of this process. Now Russian-speaking immigrants form one of the largest immigrant communities in Germany, together with immigrants from Turkey, Poland and the former Yugoslavia.

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The Russian-speaking immigrant community in Germany can be divided into three subgroups: ethnic Germans or Russian Germans, people of Jewish ancestry, and other immigrants (see Brehmer 2007, 165–167). In the 18th and 19th centuries Germans settled in the Russian Empire and organized their own closed colonies, where they spoke different German dialects. After the beginning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Russian Germans were deported to Siberia and the Soviet Republics of Central Asia, where most of them lost their German dialects due to a strong pressure of assimilation and shifted to Russian (Roll 2003, 18–22). From 1988 to 2009 about two million Russian German immigrants came to Germany from the former Soviet Union (BPB 2012). The early 1990s saw the peak in this immigration wave, when the number of Russian-speaking immigrants reached 150,000–200,000 per year. Since the late 1990s, this number has decreased to just 2,000 persons in 2011 (ibid.). These people, mainly from Russia, Kazakhstan, Kirgizstan and Ukraine, have different language biographies depending on their age and their living conditions (see Meng 2001, 39–40; Berend 1998, 25). Nevertheless, most had little or no knowledge of German on arrival in the country, mainly using Russian among themselves. The second subgroup of Russian-speaking immigrants consists of around 220,000 persons of Jewish ancestry who came to Germany between 1989 and 2005 from former Soviet Union countries, including the Baltic States (ZjD 2009). Almost none of them had any knowledge of German on arrival. The third subgroup consists of those who arrived in Germany for different reasons, for example university studies, work or marriage. It is difficult to estimate the size of this group because it is quite heterogeneous and has no dedicated statistics. It is, however, possible to find up-to-date data on the numbers of foreigners living in Germany on the website of the Federal Statistical Office of Germany. According to these statistics, by the end of 2013 there were about one million first- and second-generation immigrants who had citizenship of one of the USSR succession states (Destatis 2013). Resulting from the different reasons for emigrating, these people had varying levels of knowledge of German on arrival, ranging from beginners (for example, in the case of marriage) up to professionals (for example, in the case of university studies). As mentioned above, the majority of immigrants came to Germany at the beginning of the 1990s and have now been living there for about 15– 20 years. This relatively long period of time together with the significant size of the group have served as the preconditions for the development of a varied infrastructure for Russian-speaking people in Germany, including

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shops, travel agencies, mass media, and lawyers for Russian-speaking clients as well as a number of public organizations. There are also several Russian centres throughout Germany offering a wide range of Russian courses, music classes or sports for children. Some of the centres are partners of the Russian foundation Russkiy Mir ‘Russian World’ (Russkiy Mir Foundation 2008), the official promoter of Russian language and culture outside the Russian Federation. This infrastructure serves directly and indirectly to increase the vitality of Russian in Germany. A study by Achterberg (2005, 252) confirms that Russian is the most vital Slavic language in Germany and dominant in most Russian-speaking families.

3. Family as a micro level example of language contact Family plays an essential role in the dynamic process of language contact, because an immigrant family consisting of two or three generations forms the smallest language community in which one can observe the development of individual language biographies as well as linguistic peculiarities of different generations (see Pauwels 2005, 124; Stößlein 2005, 52–54). New linguistic phenomena may emerge in the conversations of individual families and extend to whole immigrant communities, as, e.g. in the case of the Michif language (Thomason 2001, 201–202). Thus, an immigrant family can be defined as a micro level of language contact. In case of extended and nuclear families1 (Pauwels 2005, 125), it is possible to detect which languages or mixtures of languages are used between individual members of a family. In this context, Søndergaard (1991, 85) even proposes the term familylect, which describes the linguistic phenomenon of code-switching in a multilingual family consisting of several members, each with a different linguistic background. Moreover, extended families can serve as examples of linguistic relationships between immigrants and their environment in the “home” country if some members of an extended family do not immigrate. Immediately on arrival in a new country, an immigrant family has to adapt to the new linguistic environment and to solve a number of linguistic questions, such as: Do the parents want to speak their mother tongue with each other? Do they wish to transmit their mother tongue to their children and why? What language policy does a family want to follow? However, not every immigrant family consciously introduces a family language policy (see Schwartz and Verschik 2013, 1–7).

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After the birth of children in an immigrant family, the language contact situation can change several times. Both languages are present in the children’s environment from the very beginning of their lives, even if their parents only speak the immigrant language in the home. The language contact situation changes considerably when children begin nursery and/or school. Anstatt and Dieser (2007, 139–162) describe school children from immigrant Russian-speaking families and the differences in their mastering of both languages. At this point, a family language policy plays an important role as the country’s majority language tends to override the immigrant language for the children. A further linguistic change may occur when children reach adolescence. At this stage, the influence of their parents is declining, while the influence of their friends and other people is growing. This is one of the reasons for the emergence of youth varieties described by a number of European linguists (e.g. Kotsinas 1992, 43–62; Keim 2006, 89–105; Nortier and Dorleijn 2008, 125–142). Finally, there may be a linguistic change when adolescents become adults and change their minds about the language(s) that they can and want to use in their daily lives. Although this decision is influenced little by their parents, it may provoke a new turn in the language contact situation in the whole family. This phenomenon was observed in the course of the present study and will be described below (see Section 8). A number of factors may have an impact on the process of language contact in immigrant families, although each case is highly individual. Australian researchers Pauwels (2005, 125–126) and Schüpbach (2009, 17–19) both emphasize the type of family—exogamous or endogamous2— as an important factor in language transmission. Further factors that Pauwels (ibid.) suggests as influential for the maintenance of the immigrant language are the presence of non-English-speakers in the family, overseas visitors from the “home” country, individual and family visits to the “home” country, arrival of new immigrants, the presence of extended families with an extensive network and access to the language via electronic media. Schüpbach (2009, 17) points out a large factor cluster, labelling it “language attitudes and beliefs of the parents”. The role of the language attitudes of immigrant parents was also underlined in the study by de Houwer (2009, 8) and in the present study (see the following section). Apart from the factors relevant to immigrant families, Achterberg (2005, 249) sets priorities for three factors that are relevant to the language maintenance of individuals: age, age upon arrival and duration of stay in

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the new country. The influence of these factors in the present study will be discussed in Sections 8 and 9.

4. Informants Ten immigrant families (30 persons) participated in the present study, with at least one of the adult informants speaking Russian as the mother tongue or as one of his/her mother tongues. Most informants are defined as Russian-Germans coming from Russia, Kazakhstan, Tadzhikistan or Ukraine and now living in the German federal states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. The remaining informants came to Germany for different reasons and, therefore, belong to the third subgroup of Russianspeaking immigrants, as described in Section 2. Two types of parental attitudes towards the Russian language could be detected among the participants. Parents in the first group want their children to learn Russian, and they organize and monitor the learning process, for example by speaking Russian with them consistently and taking them to language courses. Parents in the second group also wish their children to speak Russian but do not make any efforts to achieve this aim (see Schwartz and Verschik 2013, 9). None of the participating parents considered it undesirable or unnecessary for their children to learn the Russian language. The informants were divided into three immigrant generations according to the criteria of age on arrival in Germany and the language of education. General data about the informants are represented in Table 4-1 below (gen. = immigrant generation). The first immigrant generation came to Germany at the age of 17–18 or older and completed their school education in Russian. All have been living in Germany for at least 8–9 years. This period of time is not a strict criterion but is considered to be enough to learn German and to complete an academic or non-academic vocational education in Germany. The second generation3 is more heterogeneous, as it includes persons who arrived in Germany at the age of twelve and younger as well as those born in Germany. Thus, this group was divided into two subgroups in accordance with the schooling conditions of the informants: those who at least started their education in Russian and those who had/have their school education in German only. Only one informant, whose mother herself came to Germany as a child, belongs to the third immigrant generation. Thus, it was not possible to analyse this immigrant generation in the present study.

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Table 4-1. Three immigrant generations of the informants. Family FA1 FA2 FA3 FA4 FA5 FA7 FA8 FA9 FA10 FA11 Total

1st gen. 1 2 2 2 1 1 1 2 1 13

Years in Germany 16 18 18 and 19 20 8 10 18 22 and 20 20 16

2nd gen. 1 1 2 1 1 2 1 1 2 2 14

Years in Germany born born born 20 born born 18 born 20 born

3rd gen. 1 1

Unclear gen. 2 2

In addition to the above-mentioned clear cases, there are two less clear ones in one of the families. These informants arrived in Germany at the ages of 14 and 16 respectively. Both finished middle school in their countries of birth in Russian. However, their further schooling and education as well as the main part of their lives (22 and 20 years respectively) took place in Germany. Therefore, they cannot be clearly defined either as first- or second-generation immigrants (see Section 8).

5. Data collection Audio data were collected by means of self-recordings made by the informants. I lent a tape recorder to the informants for several days or weeks, in order to minimize the observer paradox (see Stößlein 2005, 15). Each family was asked to record at least 40 minutes of their speech when doing their home activities. The recordings are informal conversations between 2–4 family members in natural situations, when eating, cooking, doing homework or playing with the children. Together they speak about their daily routines, other family members, friends and news from their schools or nurseries. The recordings were transcribed using the GAT-2 transcription system (Selting et al. 2009). The complete recorded time is about eleven hours.

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In addition to the audio data, all informants were asked to fill in a questionnaire to collect details of place of birth, education, and experience of work before and after arrival in Germany. There were also questions about the mother tongue(s) of the informants, the way they learned German and Russian, languages spoken with different family members and languages used at home, at work, and with friends and neighbours. Finally, I held meta conversations with almost all the adult informants and some older children. During these partly guided interviews, the informants talked about their experiences with both languages, their attitudes towards German and Russian and towards the transmission of Russian to the next generations.

6. Theoretical background: Auer’s typology of bilingual speech The Russian–German language contact in Germany has been changing since the mid-1990s. Obviously, language use was different in the communities of Russian-speaking immigrants who arrived in Germany at that time than what it is in the same communities now. In this study, my focus is on the present-day bilingual language use in Russian-speaking families. However, the diachronic dimension is relevant both for the methodological set-up of the research data, involving two generations of immigrants, and for the central theoretical framework of analysis, Auer’s typology of bilingual speech. This typology was chosen because, to the best of my knowledge, it is the only one showing the dynamics of language alternation phenomena. Auer (1999, 310) describes the phenomenon of language alternation as a continuum that bridges the gap between two extremes: code-switching (CS) and fused lects (FL). The mid-point of this continuum is the stage of language mixing (LM). Auer emphasizes the dynamic character of the process of language alternation, which may proceed from CS via LM to FL but not backwards. It is important to note that the complete transmission from CS to FL is not a necessity, as “a bilingual community may stabilize on a certain point on the continuum” (1999, 329). The present study aims to discuss the dynamics of the Russian– German language situation based on recorded conversations to find out whether tendencies towards CS, LM or FL can be observed and what the prospects of their future development are. This is my motivation for using Auer’s typology as a theoretical framework for the study.

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Auer provides the following definition of CS as the first stage in his typology (1999, 310): CS will be reserved for those cases in which the juxtaposition of two codes (languages) is perceived and interpreted as a locally meaningful event by participants.

Thus, the most important characteristic of CS is its functionality. The interlocutors can interpret or explain the use of both codes as meaningful. The function of the switching can be, e.g. participant-related or discourserelated (see Section 7.1.; ibid.). Auer notes that “CS may be called a personal or group style” (1999, 312) but it “is not a variety in its own right” (ibid.). The second stage of the typology is LM, described by Auer (1999, 310) as [– –] the juxtaposition of two languages in which the use of two languages is meaningful (to participants) not in a local but only in a more global sense, that is, when seen as a recurrent pattern.

LM is characterized by the absence of functionality when participants are switching. In contrast to CS, it is not easy to interpret the reason for switching and in some cases there is no clear reason at all. Another essential feature of LM is that it “may affect units of any size, typically not only at clause boundaries but also below” (1999, 315). Thus, it affects grammatical structures of both participant languages, especially on the levels of morphology and syntax. The frequency of switching is higher in LM than in CS, and it is difficult—if not impossible—to define the matrix language. Auer’s use of the term matrix language arises from the Matrix Language Frame model by Myers-Scotton (1993). She defines matrix language as the main or the basic language of two or more participants in the process of codeswitching (see Myers-Scotton 1993, 75). Auer argues that in the case of LM “individual turns cannot be labelled language A or language B mainly due to the frequency of turn-internal language juxtaposition” (1999, 315). In addition, the juxtaposition of both languages in the case of LM “may affect units of any size, typically not only at clause boundaries but also below” (ibid.). This makes the choice of a matrix language in a conversation much more complicated. The third stage in Auer’s language alternation phenomena concerns fused lects, which he defines as “stabilized mixed varieties” (1999, 310). FL is particularly obvious on the grammatical level as the transition from

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LM to FL “presupposes a loss of variation” in the use of mixtures of both languages and “the stabilization of function-form relationships” (1999, 321). The speakers of a FL do not necessarily need to be proficient in the languages involved in the FL. According to the examples given by Auer (1999, 321–322), FL may emerge among the representatives of third and further generations of immigrants. With regard to the sociolinguistic characteristics of the group of Russian-speaking immigrants observed (see Section 4), only two stages of Auer’s typology are relevant for the present study: CS and LM.

7. Method of analysis According to Auer’s typology, as described above, there is a continuum between CS and LM. Moreover, phases in which CS and LM patterns coexist may occur in the transition between CS and LM (see Auer 1999, 319). The methodology that is based on this typology is primarily qualitative, although it has been supplemented with quantitative data for increased transparency. The aim of the study is to show the language contact situation in each family using their recorded conversations as examples, not to compare the families as per a list of criteria. Similar strategies are followed in other studies on code-switching, for example in the study by Goldbach (2005) on the speech of Russian-speaking students in Berlin and by Søndergaard (1991) on a complicated linguistic pattern of switching between seven different language codes in one family. The analysis consists of three steps: 1) detecting the switches and their functions, 2) uncovering and describing linguistic phenomena, and 3) tying up the findings and social factors.

7.1. The first step The first step allowed for a global view of each conversation. The aim was to detect all the cases where the language of a conversation changes and to find out whether the switching was functional or not. Functionality means that switching from one language to another “is meaningful and can be interpreted by participants” (Auer 1999, 310). If the switching is predominantly meaningful and thus functional, the conversation shows a tendency towards CS. Otherwise it shows a tendency towards LM. Auer suggests two types of functional switching: discourse-related and participant-related. Discourse-related switching can be interpreted as

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contextualizing some aspects of the situation (Auer 1999, 310) and may have different subtypes. For example, citation (see Goldbach 2005, 78–81; Riehl 2009, 24) is a subtype of discourse-related switching, as it “signals ‘otherness’ of the upcoming contextual frame” (Auer 1999, 312). Riehl (2009, 24) in fact considers citation to be one of the most frequent forms of functional code-switching. Participant-related switching, then, can be interpreted as a feature of the speaker using code-switching. It includes the language preferences and competences of the speaker (Auer 1999, 310). One more important piece of evidence that helped to define functionality is provided by self- and other-corrections or (self) repair of language choice, as they show participants’ orientation to a preference for one language at a time (Auer 1999, 312–313). The term repair, originating from the field of conversation analysis, may serve as an instrument to organize sequentiality in monolingual conversations (Gülich and Mondada 2008, 59–66). In the course of bilingual speech, repairs—often in the form of repetitions—may have a number of discourse functions, e.g. to emphasize or to explain (see Matras 2009, 120; Gardner-Chloros 2009, 75).

7.2. The second step The second step aimed at a more detailed analysis on the level of sequences, sentences and phrases. The main purpose of this step was to uncover and describe linguistic phenomena that may be characteristic of the stages of CS or LM in Auer’s typology. First, every conversation was divided into sequences, identified by the criteria of conversational coherence (Brinker and Sager 2006, 77–88). The purpose of this division was to determine the matrix language of the sequences (see Section 6). According to Auer’s criteria, if it is easy to determine the matrix language of the sequences of a conversation, then this conversation manifests a tendency towards CS. If it is difficult to determine the matrix language due to the frequency of switching and the turn-internal position of many of the switches, then there is a tendency towards LM. Thus, the determinability of the matrix language was intended to prove the tendencies found in the first step of the analysis. Second, every sequence was divided into sentences and phrases to uncover linguistic phenomena on the levels of syntax and morphology. As mentioned above (see Section 6) Auer points out language mixing at the sub-sentence level as a characteristic feature of LM. Therefore, it was important to find out where and how strongly the phrasal and grammatical

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structures of both Russian and German are affected in the conversations and what phenomena can be found, e.g. bilingual compound verbs, “bridge” phenomena (see Section 8.2), or double morphology (GardnerChloros 2009, 107–108). The purpose of this part of the analysis was to detect whether there are linguistic phenomena that are characteristic of CS or LM.

7.3. The third step The third step in the analysis included the information gained from the questionnaires and the meta conversations, for the purpose of allocation of social factors to the linguistic phenomena discovered earlier. I first matched the tendencies towards CS or LM observed in the conversations with the answers of the informants in the questionnaires about their language knowledge, preferences and possible difficulties. Then, I composed a list of common linguistic and social features distinguishing the representatives of the first generation from those of the second one. On the basis of these findings, I analysed the language contact situation in the conversations of ten families regarding the specific factors that may have an impact on this process (see Section 3). Finally, I matched the results of the linguistic analysis of the conversations with the information about the families’ language policy or “private language planning” (Piller 2001, 6– 62), which was expressed by the representatives of the first generation in the meta conversations.

8. Findings All the conversations were transcribed, analysed and put on a continuum line between CS and LM. There are no conversations that manifest cases of LM only. Moreover, a half of the conversations show a tendency towards CS. Conversations of five families (FA1, FA3, FA5, FA8 and FA11) manifest sequences with a tendency towards CS. Conversations of two families (FA4 and FA10) can be put somewhere in the middle between CS and LM, as they show no clear tendencies. Conversations of three families (FA2, FA7 and FA9) have sequences with a tendency towards LM.

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8.1. Tendency towards CS In the first step of the analysis, conversations with a tendency towards CS show similar characteristics. Most of the cases of switching are functional (from 70% to 90%), being primarily discourse-related or participant-related. For example, in the conversations about eating or cooking, informants usually switch to Russian. In contrast, they speak in German about school, studies or work (e.g. FA3 and FA8). CS also occurs in situations of spontaneous ‘Russian lessons’, when representatives of the first generation try to teach their youngsters to pronounce and use Russian words properly (e.g. FA1, FA3 and FA5). Their motivation is usually to give their children Russian equivalents for German words or to explain to them typical Russian concepts, for example names of dishes, festivities or objects. The children, then, see these “lessons” as a sort of game and at least repeat the words after their parents. As mentioned in Section 7, in some cases representatives of the first generation use self-repairs in order to persuade their children and/or grandchildren to clarify something (see Example 2, FA1). Thus, they repeat their Russian utterances in German. In accordance with the second step of the analysis, these conversations were divided into sequences and analysed in order to identify the matrix language. This was an easy task in all the sequences. However, there were differences between the two generations. In those sequences where representatives of the first generation speak with each other, the matrix language is Russian, as in the family FA3 (see example 1). In cases where representatives of both generations speak with each other, the matrix language is German (e.g. FA3 and FA11) or each person uses one language and occasionally switches into the other (e.g. FA1 and FA5). Families FA3 and FA11 have similar linguistic situations. In both families the children more or less understand Russian but hardly use it. These language contact situations are close to the case of receptive bilingualism (see Ribbert and ten Thije 2007, 75) taking place within nuclear families. There is no negative attitude towards Russian in these families. Moreover, the parents would like their children to speak Russian, but as they state in the meta conversations, their children do not have much interest in Russian. Both parents from the family FA3 and the mother from the family FA11 stated that they first started to learn German in Germany and still use Russian more than German after having spent 16 and 18 years in the new country respectively. Nevertheless, this seems to have no significant impact on their children’s knowledge of Russian.

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Example 1 shows an excerpt from the conversation of the family FA3. The participants in the conversation are mother (MU3), father (VA3) and their 15-year-old Germany-born daughter (TA3). VA3 and MU3 speak Russian with each other (lines 0115–0121) but switch to German immediately after their daughter, who obviously understands their Russian utterances, speaks with them in German (lines 0123–0129). This is a case of participant-related CS, where the switching occurs at syntactic boundaries and does not affect the grammatical structure of the sentences (see Section 7). Examples of discourse-related cases of switching in the conversations of this family include topics related to the children. Even if MU3 and VA3 start to speak about their own childhoods or lives before the immigration in Russian, they usually switch to German as soon as their children take part in the conversation. (1) 0115 0116 0117 0118 0119 0120 0121 0122 0123 0124 0125 0126 0127 0128 0129

MU3: ɋɄɈɅɖɤɨ ɬɟɛɟ ɧɚɞɨ ɟɳɺ ɜɪɟɦɟɧɢ ɪɚɛɨɬɚɬɶ? How much time do you still need for the work (--) ɧɚ ɷɬɨɦ ɤɨɦɉɖɘɬɟɪɟ (.) ɩɨ ɩɨɜɨɞɭ ɷɬɨɝɨ on this computer, in matters of this (---) ɩɪɢȻɈɪɚ? device? (1.0) VA3: ɭ ɦɟɧɹ ɧɟ ɩɨɥɭɑȺɟɬɫɹ. It doesn’t function. (---) TA3: wieso fragst du MICH (.) nicht? (.) Why don’t you ask me, wie lange ICH (.) brauche (.) noch. how long I need, [ESsen zum bei (.)spiel.] for example to eat? VA3: [und woFÜR?] for what? (1.0) wie lange brauchscht du zum ESssen? How long do you need to eat? TA3: weiß ich noch NICHT. I don’t know yet.

The conversations of the families FA1 and FA5 are quite different from the above as the children have regular practice in Russian. In the family FA1, the child has instruction in Russian at the local Centre for

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Russian Language (see Section 2). At home he has regular practice in reading and speaking Russian, supervised by his mother, and shows no animosity towards the language. About 20% of his utterances are in Russian, especially when speaking about home activities, eating or cooking. Example 2 gives an excerpt from the conversation of this family, the participants being the mother (MU1) and her son (SO1). In the first part of the conversation (lines 0122–0132), MU1 speaks only Russian while SO1 uses both languages. This is a rare example of SO1 speaking Russian, although he clearly understands all his mother’s utterances in this language. In line 0125, he starts with the German conjunction aber ‘but’ and switches into Russian. Aber is a German discourse marker widely used by different groups of immigrants in Germany (see Matras 2009, 20–21). Although MU1 answers him in Russian, he switches to German again. The probable trigger for this switching is the German modal particle doch, which has no equivalence in Russian. In the second part of the conversation (0358–0369), MU1 speaks both languages and her son uses only German. In line 0361, she repeats the information said in line 0360 in German. This is a self-repair in order to emphasize the difference of age between her son and another girl. His next utterance shows that he has understood this emphasis as he declares loudly that the girl is seven years old like himself (line 0363). Later MU1 switches back to Russian, which is the language she usually uses with her son (see line 0369). Thus, both switches of MU1 are functional. Most of the switches in this conversation occur at syntactic boundaries and between the utterances of the participants, as in this excerpt. This conversation manifests few switches at the grammatical level or turninternally (see line 0125). These linguistic characteristics and the sociolinguistic information from the meta conversations with MU1 about their languages of communication are supportive of the tendency towards CS. (2) 0122 0123 0124 0125 0126

MU1: ɞɚɜɚɣ ɜɵɤɥɸɱɚɣ ɬɟɥɟȼɂɡɨɪ (.) ɩɨɬɪɟɧɢɊɍɟɲɶɫɹ. Okay, switch off the TV-set, you’ll have some exercises. SO1: ɱɬɨ ɬɚɄɈɟ. What is going on? MU1: ɑɌɈ ɬɚɤɨɟ? (.)ɑɌɈ ɬɚɤɨɟ? What is going on? What is going on? SO1: ºhhh (-)aber ɧɟɦɟɰɤɢɣ ɹ Ⱦȿɥɚɥ [ɫɟɝɨɞɧɹ]; But I practiced German today. MU1: [ɞɚ ɹ] Yes, I

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266 0127 0128 0129 0130 0131 0132 0358 0359 0360 0361 0362 0363 0364 0365 0366 0367 0368 0369

ɩɥɨɯɨ CɅɕɲɚɥɚ, = didn’t hear it well. ɹ ɞɚɠɟ ɧɟ ɦɨɝɥɚ ɩɪɨȼȿɪɢɬɶ_ I couldn’t even check. ɢ ɷɬɨ (.) ɤɧɢɠɤɭ ɬɵ ɫɜɨɸ ɬɨɠɟ ɧɟ ɋȾȿɥɚɥ. And here, you haven’t done your book either. SO1: HAbe ich doch. But I have (done). (1.4) ich hab_s. I have (done) it. (…) SO1: ist die ÄLter als ich? Is she older than me? (--) MU1: ɧɟɬ ɨɧɚ ɧɚ ɲɟɫɬɶ ɧɟɞɟɥɶ (.) ɆɅȺȾɲɟ ɬɟɛɹ.= No, she is six weeks younger than you. sechs wochen JÜNger. Six weeks younger. (1.8) SO1: also_die ist schon auch SIEben! So, she is seven (years old) too! (---) MU1: sie ist SIEben. (-) She is seven. genauso wie DU. Just like you. (2.8) SO1: DA! (.)hi Look! MU1: ɯɨɊɈɲɚɹ ɮɨɬɨɝɪɚɮɢɹ. Good photo.

The girl (TO5) from the family FA5 does not attend any Russian courses. However, in contrast to other families, FA5 has a strong connection to Russia, where TO5 has friends her age. Regular family visits to the “home” country, already mentioned in Section 3, seem to affect not only her knowledge of Russian but also the way she uses it. In the conversations recorded for this study, about 30–40% of her utterances are in Russian. However, she does not mix the languages on the level of sentences and phrases as children from the families FA1 and FA2 do (see below). Her switches occur on the syntactic boundaries and she can form longer sentences in Russian. Perhaps her own experience with people who do not speak German helps her in making a conscious language choice.

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The case of her mother (MU5) is noteworthy too. Although she is the only representative of the first generation who at the time of the study had spent “just” eight years in Germany and who has a strong connection to Russia, she shows a very high level of German. This conclusion was drawn on the basis of the meta conversations and observations of her communication with German native speakers. One of the reasons for this linguistic development is their exogamous family: Her husband is a German native speaker. Thus, she uses German not only at work and with friends, as is the case with other representatives of the first generation, but also in family affairs. The language contact situation in the family FA8 is different, as the representative of the second generation in this family is not a child but a young woman (TO8). She is able not only to understand and read in Russian, but she also speaks this language fluently. She states that she arrived in Germany at the age of ten and her mother tongue is Russian. However, soon after the arrival she refused to speak Russian and spoke only German. As an adult, she changed her mind, refreshed her knowledge of Russian and even learned to write and read in this language anew. The reasons for this were her Russian-speaking friends, colleagues and partly her work situation. However, her increasing use of Russian provoked increasing use of this language in her family too (cf. Section 3). Her conversations with the representatives of the first generation are good examples of CS because almost all her switches are discourserelated. It depends strongly on the topic if she prefers to use Russian or German. Moreover, the analysis of her utterances shows that she tries to avoid any mixing of the two languages. For example, she tries not to use bilingual compound verbs in her Russian utterances (see Section 7) and makes self-repairs in order to find Russian equivalents for German verbs.

8.2. Tendency towards LM Conversations with a tendency towards LM share several linguistic features too. As for the first step of the analysis, about 50–60% of the instances of switching are functional. The remaining cases are nonfunctional (up to 35–40%) or not clear. Cases of functional switching have almost the same functions here as in the conversations with a tendency towards CS. In many non-functional switches, it was not easy to identify the matrix language in about 20–30% of the sequences in these conversations. In addition, switches were detected on the level of sentences and phrases and

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there were even cases with more than one switch inside a sentence. Both parents (first generation) and children (second generation) in the families FA2 and FA7 switch from one language to another very intensively and the process of switching does not necessarily depend on the topics of conversation. It was also not possible to identify definitive language conventions—individual communicative styles and language choice— between the members of these families either during the analysis of their conversations or from their questionnaires and meta conversations. These factors distinguish these families and conversations from those discussed above. Conversations of the family FA2 show about 30% of sequences with non-functional switches where it is difficult to identify a matrix language. The participants in the conversations are grandmother (OM2), her daughter (MU2), who came to Germany as an adult, and the Germanyborn 11-year-old granddaughter (EN2). Although this family recorded several longer conversations, it is not clear what the conventions of their language use are, if any. OM2 as the only representative of the first generation stated that German was actually her mother tongue, but she had to keep it a secret that she was Russian-German during the time of the Soviet Union. As her husband was Russian and she saw no reason to teach her children German, she had forgotten German completely. This may be the reason why she often starts her utterances in Russian and then switches to German. MU2 uses a certain mixture of both languages when speaking with OM2 and especially with EN2. It is difficult to predict what language she is going to use next. EN2 manifests a similar pattern when speaking with her mother and grandmother. In contrast to other children, she does not need any specific form of address in Russian or any other trigger from her mother or grandmother to switch into this language. Interestingly enough, these informants are well aware of their way of speaking. In the course of the meta conversations, MU2 and OM2 joked about themselves saying that they are bilinguals with two halves belonging to two different languages or “double semilinguals”. Example 3 gives an excerpt from the conversation between OM2 and EN2 where they are doing homework in mathematics together. The switches of EN2 in lines 0598, 0604 and 0609 are non-functional. In lines 0598 and 0609, she inserts German words and word constructions into Russian sentences. The syntactic structure of the sentence in line 0598 cannot even be clearly identified as a German or a Russian one. In line 0604 the main clause of the sentence is in German and the subordinate

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clause is in Russian. In contrast, her switch into German in line 0610 is discourse-related, as she quotes her school teacher. The switches of the grandmother from Russian to German in lines 0591 and 0593 are non-functional too. Moreover, her utterances in these lines could not be clearly defined as Russian or German ones, because the word ɬɭ /tu/ may mean ‘that’ in Russian or the imperative form of the German verb ‘make’. This linguistic phenomenon is labelled as a “compromise form” between two languages, when “similar or identical sounding words … may serve as a ‘bridge’ facilitating the transition” from one language to the other one (Gardner-Chloros 2009, 108). Thus, because of the intensity and quality of these switches, it is not easy to identify the matrix language of this sequence. (3) 0589

EN2:

0590

OM2:

0591 0592 0593 0594 0595

OM2:

0596 0597 0598

EN2:

0599 0600

OM2:

0604

EN2:

0605

OM2:

0606 0607

OM2:

0608

JETZT (-) die zweite pyramide.= Now the second pyramid. ɧɭ ȾȺ:,= Well, yes. ɬɭ s ma::l auch, Draw it, (1.0) ɬɭ s ma:le. draw it. (4.5) ɷɬɨ ɜɵ ɟɳɺ ɜ ɒɄɈɥɟ ɧɚɱɚɥɢ Ⱦȿɥɚɬɶ, You have already started to do it at school ɚ ɬɵ !ɇɂ:ɑȬ! ɧɟ ɭɫɩɟɥɚ (.) ɞɚ?(.) Ʌɟɧɚ. and you didn’t have time for anything, yes Lena?, (1.0) !DOCH! (-) ɹ SCHON ɭɫɩɟɥɚ, Sure, I did have time. [aber wir] haben es erst jetzt !AN!gefangen in der schule. But we have just started at school. [ɭɫɩɟɥɚ?] Did you have time? (…) man kann NICHT so sagen, ɱɬɨ ɹ ɧɟ ɭɫɉȿɥɚ. One can’t say that I didn’t have time. ɧɭ ɯɨɪɨɒɈ. Well, okay. (1.0) ɅȺɞɧɨ, (--) ɛɭɞɟɦ ɝɨɜɨɪɢɬɶ ɱɬɨ ɬɵ ɜɫɺ ɭɫɉȿɥɚ. Okay, let us say that you had time for everything. [ɪɚɡ(ɞɜɚ)] one, two…

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EN2:

[ɹ ɭɫɩɟɥɚ,] einfach nur ɨɧ ɩɨɬɨɦ ɫɤɚɡɚɥ; I had time but then he just said es ist die AUFgabe (das) hat er geSAGT. this is the task, he said.

Conversations recorded by the family FA7 show a similar linguistic pattern. The mother (MU7) and her children (TO7 and SO7) use both languages very intensively and manifest partly non-functional switches. However, there are some notable peculiarities in their sociolinguistic conditions. Both children have regular instruction in Russian at the same Centre for Russian as the child from the family FA1. Unlike all other children, though, they seem to have a very positive attitude towards the language, as they are the only two young representatives of the second generation who sometimes switch into Russian when speaking with each other in the absence of their mother. An interesting linguistic case is the family FA9. As explained in Section 4, neither parent (VA9 and MU9) can be definitely identified as a representative of one of the immigrant generations. Rather, they manifest characteristics of both generations. For example, in comparison with the representatives of the first generation, there are several longer passages (2–5 minutes) in their conversations where they only use German. This probably results from the specific technical topic they are discussing in these passages. Nevertheless, no similar linguistic situation was noted in the conversations of the first generation. On the contrary, all the conversations between the representatives of the first generation have Russian as the matrix language. On the other hand, it was noted that both VA9 and MU9 speak Russian without an accent or grammatical errors indicative of a second-language status (e.g. false declinations or conjugations), they make their own creative word formations “playing” with the language and constantly use Russian slang. They can also read and write in Russian. These factors distinguish the informants not only from the Germany-born young representatives of the second generation but also from the adult representatives of the second generation who do make grammatical errors in Russian. Apart from this, the conversations of VA9 and MU9 are characterized by a high intensity of switching with non-functional switches both outside and inside the syntactic boundaries. As a result, it is not easy to define the matrix language of the sequences.

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8.3. No explicit tendencies Conversations of the families FA4 and FA10 manifest some features of both CS and LM but no explicit tendencies. In terms of functionality, these conversations show a number of instances of switching where it is difficult to detect whether these switches are functional or not. Of course, there are such cases in the other conversations too, but not as many. Although the frequency of switching in the conversations of these two families is relatively high and the members of both generations use both languages roughly equally, most of the switches occur on the syntactic borders, not at the level of sentences and phrases, as is the case in the families FA2, FA7 and FA9. Auer (1999, 319–321) labels such cases as a transition phase from CS to LM. The sociolinguistic information gathered from these families confirms the linguistic analysis of their conversations and shows considerable similarities between FA4 and FA10. By the time of the recordings, both families had lived in Germany for 20 years. Both arrived with small children—FA4 with a five-year-old daughter, FA10 with a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old daughter—who are now young women. Both parents in these families learned German in Germany. Remarkably, both families state that the wives learned German better than the husbands and thus were able to have better careers. In comparison to the young woman in the family FA8, these three young women have never consciously rejected the use of Russian, possibly because of their young age at the time of the arrival and/or a smooth linguistic integration. On the other hand, they have never tried to refresh their knowledge of Russian, can hardly read Russian and cannot write in Cyrillic. Example 4 provides an extract from these conversations from the family FA4. This family made one longer recording. In the first part, grandparents (OP4 and OM4) are eating and playing with their 3.5-yearold granddaughter (EN4) who is the only representative of the third immigrant generation. The questionnaire and the conversation indicate that she does not speak Russian and can hardly understand it. This part of the conversation is a good example of CS, even though OM4 and OP4 cannot speak with their small granddaughter in the same way as with their adult daughter (TO4). In this part of the conversation, about 90% of the switches are functional and participant-related, concerning the granddaughter. A few are explanations in both languages that the grandparents produce for the child.

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However, the situation changes when the daughter (TO4) comes home, both grandparents demonstrating, in the same recording, a different linguistic pattern. This part of the conversation with four people in total manifests no clear tendencies to CS or LM. It is not easy to determine the matrix language in a number of sequences. Nearly 45% of the cases of switching are non-functional or it is not clear whether they are functional or not. Apparently the presence of TO4 is a trigger for the whole conversation. Example 4 illustrates the conversation with TO4. Her father starts with a typical Russian interjection and then greets her in German (line 0421). It is not clear in this context whether this form of greeting has a function of irony or not. Although I often heard from different informants that they use the German word Tschüss ‘bye’ in conversations with their family members, this is the only time in this informants’ group when a representative of the first generation uses a German form of greeting with his family members. In lines 0427 and 0428, TO4 first answers in Russian and then in German that she “wasn’t (there)”. It is possible that this is a case of selfrepair in German in order to emphasize the utterance. However, it is not clear why OM4 then asks her the same question once again in German (line 0429). Therefore, OM4’s switch could be interpreted as a nonfunctional one. (4) 0421

OP4:

0422

OM4:

0423 0424

OP4: OM4:

0425

TO4:

0426

OM4:

0427

TO4:

0428 0429

OM4:

0430

TO4:

ɨɣ hallo hallo. Oh, hello, hello. ɬɵ ɱɬo ɬɚɤɚɹ ɤɪɚ(.)ɋɂɜɚɹ? Why are you so pretty? hahaha (ɘ::ɛɤɚ) ɤɚɤɚɹ ɭ ɬɟɛɹ ɲɢɄȺɊɧɚɹ. You have got such a dressy skirt. !ɑɌɈ! What?! ɨɧɚ ɭ (XXX) ɧɚɜɟɪɧɨ ɛɵɥɚ. Surely she was at... ɧɟ:ɬ (-) ɧɟ ɛɵɥɚ.= No, I didn’t. !NNEI:N! war ich nicht. No, I did not! WARSCHT_du nicht? Didn’t you? ich war nur bei (XXX). I was only at...

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In general there seem to be certain conventions—communication style and language choice—between these family members. OM4 and OP4 speak with each other almost only in Russian and with EN4 almost only in German. In the case of the “wrong” language they just switch into the “right” one. It is not clear whether there are any conventions between OM4, OP4 and TO4. They may all start their utterances in either language. Although the grandparents often start a new topic in Russian, the recorded conversation also provides several cases in the opposite. During our meta conversation, neither OM4 nor OP4 could give a certain answer as to what language they prefer when speaking with their daughter. TO4 and EN4, then, speak German as a general rule, although TO4 sometimes makes short utterances in Russian when speaking with the child. This was also stated in her questionnaire.

9. Discussion and conclusions The aim of this study was to uncover the current language contact situation of Russian-speaking immigrant families in Germany using the data provided by the informants’ conversations, questionnaires and meta conversations and combining sociolinguistic background information with the findings of their linguistic code-switching behaviour. The findings proved that the role of the family in the individual linguistic development of every immigrant is significant because the language attitudes of every member may influence the language use of the whole family. The influence of the first generation is stronger at first, but the second generation may change the language contact situations of their families when growing older. These findings confirm those in the earlier studies (see Pauwels 2005, 127–129; Schüpbach 2009, 128–129; de Houwer 2009, 7–8). The study also uncovered an example of how the language balance may switch back and forth between Russian and German in one family (FA8). For these families and their language use, the most important factors are the first generation participants’ positive attitude towards Russian and their wish to teach the language to their children. However, their strategies are different and thus produce different results. In the conversations of the first and the second generations, some representatives of the first generation try to use Russian consistently (e.g. FA1 and FA5). It was observed that these persons do not mix their languages very much, and when they do, their conversations show tendencies towards CS. Another

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common feature for these informants is that they have more or less regular contact with friends or relatives in their “home” country. Other first generation informants do not seem to think about their language choice (e.g. FA2, FA9) and use both languages to different proportions. These persons mix Russian and German quite often and their conversations demonstrate tendencies towards LM rather than CS. In contrast to the above, these informants and their children have little or no contact with their “home” country. The present study thus suggests that there is a correlation between the tendencies in the conversations and the level of contact with the speakers’ former Russian-speaking community. The situation is particularly interesting in two families, where the second generation displays a tendency towards receptive bilingualism (FA3 and FA11). The parents in these families tend to use German much more than Russian with their children. Thus, the matrix language in most of the sequences of their conversations is German. The parents in these two families declare that they use primarily Russian in communication with each other but not with their children. Moreover, it was observed that these families have very little contact with the “home” country. These findings confirm the results obtained by Pauwels (2005, 129), who points out the particular difficulty to transmit the language from one generation to the next, when the nuclear family has “limited access to an extensive network of relatives” and the second generation’s contact with the language “is limited to the family” (ibid.). Finally, in contrast with the study by Achterberg (2005), it was found that the number of years spent in Germany by the first generation participants is not as important for their competence in German as the influence of certain social factors (see Section 3): education in Germany, regular communication with German native speakers and having their own Germany-born children. The number of years spent in Germany did not correlate with the tendencies towards CS or LM in their conversations either. For the representatives of the second generation, whether Germanyborn or not, German is clearly the dominant language. Their Russian skills depend strongly on their parents’ attitudes towards this language and “parental language use” (Dixon et al. 2012, 544–545) discussed above. As can be expected, regular instruction in Russian or at least regular contact with Russian native speakers who do not know German has an impact on the second generation’s linguistic development and supports their use of Russian (e.g. FA1, FA5 and FA7). Apparently, these sociolinguistic factors may lead to switching but not mixing the languages and to a greater awareness of the language choice (cf. FA2 vs. FA5). Nevertheless,

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if the representatives of the second generation use Russian, they state that they speak it primarily with their relatives and very seldom in other situations (e.g. FA8 and FA5). It was found that the conversations of five of the investigated ten families display a tendency towards CS, while the conversations of three families showed tendencies towards LM. However, one should take into consideration that these conversations do not reveal the whole linguistic scope of the informants. Their language preferences and communicative styles may vary with regard to different participants and topics of conversation outside the study. These data nevertheless allow a close look at the language contact situation in ten immigrant families, and hence, at patterns of authentic bilingual speech. Together with the sociolinguistic information they enable a better understanding of the bilingual development of the families. In the course of the analysis, it was detected that the general tendency in this group of informants is the loss of Russian by the third or at least by the fourth immigrant generation in accordance with the three-generation model of language shift (Thomason 2001, 9–10). It is possible that the entire Russian-speaking minority in Germany will ultimately face a loss of Russian. This prediction is supported by the facts that the peak of the immigration wave is over (see Section 2) and the immigrants’ attitudes towards the Russian language and culture are highly varied (see Roll 2003, 213–214). It would therefore be of interest to carry out a follow-up study with the same informants and their families later on in order to identify and analyse the possible changes.

Notes 1. Both terms originate from Pauwels (2005, 125), but in the present study, a nuclear family is defined as consisting of parents and their children only, while an extended family consists of a nuclear family plus several other relatives (e.g. grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins). 2. Exogamous families are those where the parents have different first languages. In endogamous families the parents share a first language but live in a different language environment (see Schüpbach 2009, 17). 3. Polinsky (1995, 372) proposes the term non-first generation of immigrants. However, I will use the term second generation in the present study.

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ZjD (Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland). 2009. “Gesetzliche Regelungen.” Accessed December 2, 2013. http://www.zentralratdjuden.de/de/topic/62.html.

PART IV: CONTACT EFFECTS IN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND TEACHING

CHAPTER TEN MEASURING PERCEPTIONS OF CROSS-LINGUISTIC SIMILARITY BETWEEN CLOSELY RELATED LANGUAGES: FINNISH AND ESTONIAN NOUN MORPHOLOGY AS A TESTING GROUND ANNEKATRIN KAIVAPALU AND MAISA MARTIN Abstract Perceptions of similarity are the foundation of all contact-induced language phenomena; to influence each other, languages or language varieties must have something in common. Quite often, however, this common area between languages is underspecified in research. This article begins by discussing similarity, with the aim of drafting a taxonomy which could be used as a basis for the definition of the construct, regardless of the domain or the purpose of the study. This taxonomy is then tried out in the context of perceived morphological similarity between two closely related languages, Estonian and Finnish. A test of 48 word pairs was constructed to contain four different levels of actual similarity between the languages. 43 Finnish-speaking and 43 Estonian-speaking participants with no previous exposure to Estonian or Finnish respectively were asked to rate each pair of words as similar, somewhat similar, or not similar. The results are first discussed to shed light on the differences between actual and perceived similarity, and this is followed by a comparison of the two groups to determine whether the perceptions of similarity are symmetrical across the languages. In both parts of the study the overall correlations are high but a detailed study of individual word pairs reveals some interesting new questions relating particularly to the nature of morphological processing. The most interesting result is that the Finnish speakers find

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more similarity than the Estonian speakers. The reasons for this are discussed in the light of contextual factors and the participants’ comments.

1. Introduction Contact-induced language change starts with bi- or multilingual individuals who share linguistic material, patterns or more abstract notions between the languages they use, sometimes resulting in change in one or other of the languages—first on the individual or family level, later perhaps within the language community as a whole. Language learning can also be seen as sharing the resources of two languages which come into contact in the cognition of the learner. Initially, learners have access to the resources of the first language (L1) and of any other languages (Ln) that they already know, but as words and constructions of the new language, the target of learning (TL), enter the mind of the learner, they are compared with those of the L1 or Ln in order to detect something familiar that will aid understanding and consequently production. This is often a one-way process, with properties of the L1 making their way into the TL, at least in the early stages of acquisition. For the learner, the L1 is a big, powerful language compared with the struggling seedling of the TL. The process is not unlike that of other contact-induced changes which tend to travel only one way. Finnish has great many English loan words, English hardly any Finnish ones; Estonian has subsumed many Finnish words, while Estonian loan words in Finnish are hard to find.1 The bigger and more prominent language imposes itself on the other. For contact-induced processes to take place, both the multilingual speaker and the language learner must perceive something that is similar between the two languages. Similarity acts as a gateway or an interface through which the influence from one language to another can pass. Where there is no contact point between the languages, the two systems and the two worlds remain separate. To detect similarities, the language user or learner has to make interlingual identifications (Jarvis and Odlin 2000, 538) between the vocabulary, structures, patterns, and rules of the two languages. The notion of interlingual identifications is commonly used in contact linguistics (Weinreich 1953) as well as in research on crosslinguistic influence (e.g. Kaivapalu and Martin 2007; Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008), indicating the contiguity of the two research areas. The degree of similarity determines the usefulness of the interface. In closely related languages, the similarity of the languages provides much more space for interlingual identifications than in non-related languages.

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The best-known study of similarity in language learning, which divides it into objective or actual similarity (the term preferred by us), and perceived and assumed similarity, is found in Ringbom (2007). These types of similarity relate to different levels. Actual similarity refers to the cross-linguistic similarity of language systems. Actual similarity is symmetrical across languages, applying equally from language A to language B and vice versa, and it is constant over time (Ringbom and Jarvis 2009, 107). This type of similarity has also been called typological proximity and language distance. It exists within the domains of contrastive linguistics and typology and is also discussed in studies of language contact, translation, grammaticalization, and historical linguistics (Herlin and Kotilainen 2004; Kolehmainen et al. 2013). So far, however, there is little agreement about how to define or measure the actual similarity existing across languages. We discuss some attempts to conceptualize and measure actual similarity in Sections 3 and 4.1. Actual and perceived/assumed similarities2 can hypothetically be fully congruous if the learner accurately perceives the actual similarities between two languages, but this appears to be relatively rare. Although actual similarities do seem to account quite well for learners’ rate of acquisition and achieved TL proficiency (e.g. Ringbom 1987, 66; Odlin 1989; Schepens et al. 2013), there is agreement in the field that actual similarities have a less direct effect on language learning and performance than perceived and assumed similarities do. A number of constraints on the effects that similarities have on TL performance appear to be related primarily to learners’ perceptions and assumptions. (Ringbom and Jarvis 2009, 106í107). The degree of actual similarity can be based on typological research while the fuzzy concepts of perceived and assumed similarity belong to the field of psycholinguistics and involve much more individual, learner-related variability. The former is relevant in the comprehension, the latter in the production of the TL (Ringbom 2007). Perceived and assumed similarities, as well as the related concept of intelligibility, are not necessarily symmetrical (for the asymmetry of intelligibility see, e.g. Gooskens et al. 2010): they may have a stronger effect in one direction than in the other. Furthermore, the perception of similarities changes as the learner’s TL experience and proficiency increase (Kellerman 1979). Similarity can be detected at all levels of language, from phonetics to textual, interactional, or cultural patterns. In the comprehension and production of morphologically rich closely related languages such as Estonian and Finnish, which also share a large number of lexical items, interlingual identifications at the level of morphological forms are of

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primary importance. For this reason we concentrate on similarity in vocabulary and morphology between Estonian and Finnish. Our focus is mainly on formal similarity, even if the similarities of function and form are not always easy to keep apart. Perceptions of similarity are also different depending on the TL proficiency level of the learner. In this study all the participants are at the true beginner level, with no previous exposure to the TL. Thus there is no developmental approach here. Nor do we present oral data; the discussion is limited to perceiving similarity in writing. The perceived similarity of Estonian and Finnish word forms is discussed from three angles. The domains of similarity are first discussed with the goal of drawing up an extended taxonomy of similarity. To examine the perceived similarity across languages, we must conceptualize, operationalize and measure perceptions of similarity. The definition of the construct is discussed in the third part of this article, after the presentation of some background information on the role of similarity in studies of second language acquisition. The second angle is the relationship between actual and perceived similarity, and the third is the question of symmetry: do speakers of two closely related languages see similarity in the same way? If not, how do their perceptions differ? We present an experiment which was conducted to test a methodological approach for exploring perceived similarity. The results of the experimental study are discussed, and the article concludes with what this study can tell us about the nature of similarity across languages.

2. Cross-linguistic similarity in second language acquisition In the heyday of contrastive studies, one of the most common aims of researchers was to produce descriptions of languages that could pinpoint areas where the systems differ in ways which could be problematic for language learners. These observations were then imported into classrooms and teaching materials. This approach did not always lead to satisfactory results in language learning. Sometimes pointing out similarities and differences between the L1 and TL only confused learners, or they failed to perceive them in the intended way. At the same time, in the 1970s and 1980s, new theoretical models of second language acquisition (SLA) played down the role of the L1, thus reducing interest in studies of crosslinguistic similarity and subsequent transfer, or cross-linguistic influence (CLI), as it is now usually called. Theories aside, language learners and

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teachers have always known that a closely related TL, with a lot of similarity with the L1, is easier and faster to learn than a more distant one. They have also noticed that some errors are typical of learners with a given L1, while those with another L1 will hardly ever commit them. Work by Ringbom (1987) and Odlin (1989) renewed interest in finding out exactly how the L1 influences the learning of the TL. Together with the more context-oriented and generally less dogmatic SLA research climate of the late 1990s and 2000s, this interest has led to new developments in CLI studies, including methodologically more rigorous studies inspired by the comparison-based approach presented by Jarvis (2000, 2010) and more detailed definitions of the key terms or constructs needed for detecting and discussing the determinants and constraints of CLI. In the last two decades, CLI research has developed enormously in terms of its interdisciplinary theoretical status as a result of an increasing cross-pollination among the fields of theoretical linguistics, SLA, bilingualism, cognitive science and psychology (Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008, 15). Most SLA theories and models (see, e.g. Mitchell and Myles 2004) have recognized CLI as an important or even the major factor determining second language acquisition, in interaction with other factors that together determine the likelihood of the transferability of a given structure in a given context. Nearly all SLA studies, whether linguistic, cognitive, functional, or interactional, acknowledge CLI at least at the level of data description; the L1 of the informants is one of the standard background variables. Previous research has underscored that CLI is a highly complex cognitive phenomenon that is often influenced by language users’ perceptions, conceptualizations, mental associations, and individual choices (Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008, 13). In an even wider perspective, usage-based theories in general see learners’ perceptions as the starting point of the emergence of linguistic knowledge, and the language learning process as the restructuring of L1 structures in competition between L1 and TL perceptions (MacWhinney 2005). CLI research has also substantially expanded its scope in terms of topics, directionality, the number of languages considered, areas of language use, and the processes in which it has been explored (Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008, 15). While the importance of CLI has long been acknowledged in the areas of phonology and lexis, morphosyntactic transfer has been treated with a great deal of scepticism throughout the history of CLI research. Morphology, in particular, is an area where some previous research has maintained that cross-linguistic influence is rare or even non-existent (for

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references, see e.g Jarvis and Odlin 2000). Underplaying morphological transfer, especially positive transfer, must be seen against the fact that most empirical SLA research on CLI has focused on languages with a scant morphological repertory. One of the long-perpetuated myths about morphological transfer is that bound morphemes are immune to CLI. The few studies (Duškova 1984; Selinker and Lakshamanan1992; De Angelis and Selinker 2001) that have documented the overt transfer of bound inflectional morphemes have dealt mainly with negative transfer from learners’ L1. Jarvis and Odlin (2000), however, have provided compelling evidence that even where overt morphological transfer does not occur, language users do make interlingual identifications between the bound or free morphology of their L1 and corresponding bound or free structures. In closely related languages like Finnish and Estonian with their rich inflectional morphology, the L1 influence is clearly seen in bound morphology and its outcomes are considerably more often positive than negative, making it easier for Estonian speakers to learn Finnish than it is for Russian speakers, for example (Kaivapalu 2005; Kaivapalu and Martin 2007). In other words, L1 influence is not a unitary phenomenon. There is more than one possibility for L1 influence in processing the TL; interlingual identifications made by learners between the L1 and TL enable both positive and negative transfer from the L1, depending on the learners’ perceptions of the convergence or divergence of the L1 and TL patterns. Second language research has tended to concentrate on differences, manifested in linguistic variation of numerous kinds, rather than on similarities. Yet the theme of this article, similarity, is the starting point in the CLI process. Cross-linguistic similarity has been seen as a prerequisite for cross-linguistic influence since Andersen’s (1983) “Transfer to somewhere” hypothesis, though this viewpoint was rarely accepted in the 1980s and1990s, when research on cross-linguistic influence focused predominantly on negative transfer (interference). The degree of congruence between the L1/Ln and TL (actual similarity) is one of the best known predictors for transfer (Kellerman 1979; Kaivapalu and Martin 2007; Jarvis and Pavlenko 2008, 176; Schepens et al. 2013). Better understanding of similarity is required to develop the methods for studying the cognitive processes underlying CLI. Actual similarity may or may not exist in the cognition of the learner, while the other two types of similarity in Ringbom’s taxonomy, perceived and assumed, are directly related to the functioning of the learner. This division is also

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presented by Jarvis and Pavlenko (2008, 177), who use the terms objective and subjective similarity, as does Ellegård (1976).

3. The construct of similarity Discussing the role of similarity in CLI or SLA is futile unless we can agree on the meaning of the word. The division of the concept into objective and subjective similarity, the latter further divided into perceived and assumed, as in Ringbom (2007, 7–8, 24–26) and in Jarvis and Pavlenko (2008, 176–182), is obviously necessary. Perceived similarity refers to the familiarity of TL items, processes or systems (for this discussion, see Martin 2006; Ringbom 2007, 54–58; Kaivapalu and Martin 2007), which is based on the L1 or Ln, as perceived by the language user. It relates to receptive skills, i.e. the comprehension of speech and writing. It is the basis of positive transfer, which in turn can (but does not always) lead to understanding and learning. Perceptions of similarity give rise to assumptions on how the TL works. The assumed similarity is actualized in production (speaking, writing), resulting in either acceptable or faulty TL production, depending on whether the assumptions are correct or not. Perceived similarity is one of the underlying factors of TL comprehension. It is not the only factor, since much of understanding is based on shared knowledge of the world, personal experience, general linguistic ability, the interactional context and situation etc. All these factors are present in the understanding of any language, while similarity is the factor that makes understanding closely related languages easier than understanding remotely or non-related languages. The notion of receptive multilingualism between related languages, such as the Germanic, Romance or Scandinavian languages, promoted by the European Union (EuroComDidact 19953), is based on people’s ability to recognize something familiar in the speech or writing of a user of another language, making it potentially possible to communicate without a lingua franca. There is little knowledge, however, of what it is that makes mutual comprehension possible (Gooskens 2006, 2007). The detailed exploration of the concept of similarity attempted in this paper is intended to contribute to this knowledge base. Language testers have made it clear that all valid measurement requires that the construct to be measured is well defined (see, e.g. Bachman 1990), i.e. we must know what it is we are measuring. The first step in this process is the theoretical definition of the construct, involving its dimensions and the relations between the dimensions, creating a taxonomy

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of the construct. Only after this can we proceed to operationalize the construct and start to design research instruments, which will eventually lead to quantifiable results (ibid. 41–45). Thus to study perceived crosslinguistic similarity one must necessarily focus the research on a fairly narrow area, because one must be able to separate similarity effects from other factors. The very first decision to be made is to choose the languages or varieties to compare. Then the unit of analysis must be selected. One way to delimit it is by language level: a study can focus on sounds, orthography, morphology, vocabulary, syntax, or textual structure etc. As similarity can appear in form, function, or both, the decision must also be made as to whether to attempt to separate formal and functional similarity. While the other two choices, the language and the unit of analysis, are often dictated by the interests of the researcher, the form/function choice is more a matter of the SLA theory underlying the research. Most traditional SLA research concentrates on the development of either formal (grammar, vocabulary) or functional (expressing time, politeness etc.) skills, while construction-based approaches (see, e.g. Eskildsen 2009) consider form and function as inseparable. Furthermore, the perceptions of similarity and subsequent CLI phenomena are dependent on TL proficiency (see, e.g. Kaivapalu 2005; Kaivapalu and Martin 2007; Nissilä 2011), which must also be controlled to achieve reliable results. Perceiving similarity can also place different requirements on the cognitive resources of the learner, depending on the particular TL skill: detecting orthographic similarity in reading requires different skills from detecting phonological similarity. A reader can reread and use previous and later information in the text to assist comprehension while a listener has less time to catch similarities, and comparing items across the discourse is mostly beyond the capacity of the working memory. The above factors are usually taken into account when similarity is discussed. For a study of the symmetry of perceptions, however, we need another dimension: the degree of similarity. It is here defined as consisting of two parameters: the distance between the units to be compared and the concrete vs. abstract nature of the units. We present the relationships between the two parameters in Figure 3-1 below. The taxonomy of degrees of similarity presented here is general in nature. It applies to all levels of language and proficiency, to formal and functional similarity, and not only to perceived but also to actual or assumed similarity. It can be used in the study of transfer both in receptive skills (oral comprehension, reading) and in productive skills (speaking, writing) when similarity as a source of CLI is hypothesized.

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Figure 3-1. Degrees of similarity.

Of the two parameters of the taxonomy, the concrete–abstract opposition is easier to distinguish. It relates to the difference between Ringbom’s (2007, 54–58) item vs. system transfer, where the term item is used for an individual material unit (e.g. sound, letter, morpheme, word, phrase, syntactic unit), and system is defined as a set of principles for organizing forms paradigmatically and syntagmatically (e.g. the idea of agglutination), and for mapping meanings onto those forms. Item transfer means that a one-to-one relationship is established in the learner’s mind between an item in the TL and either an item or a concept in the L1. [– –] The cross-linguistic similarities that underlie item transfer are a concretely perceived similarity of form usually combined with an associated assumed similarity of function or meaning. Being grounded in perceived (not just assumed) formal similarities between languages, item learning has a predominantly positive effect on learning, notably on learning for comprehension. [– –] In system transfer – which might be better termed procedural transfer – abstract principles of organizing information are transferred. Positive procedural transfer lies behind the easy comprehension of a related TL [– –] (Ringbom and Jarvis 2009, 110).

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Concrete visual or audible similarity between an item in the L1 and another item in the TL provides the basis for the transfer of a sound, word, meaning etc. To perceive item similarity, the two strings of sounds or letters must be accessible to the language user at the same time, i.e. there must be a cognitive connection between them. The exact nature of this connection in the human mind is outside the realm of this article; it is better studied with the methods and tools of psycho- and/or neurolinguistics. Individual items of language are not sufficient to reveal systemic similarity between languages. Yet, once detected, systemic similarity can be quite helpful in language use. For this reason it is often pointed out by teachers. It is possible, however, that language users themselves also start noticing similarities across linguistic systems once they have had enough exposure to the TL, but the ability to do this shows large individual variation. Our similarity taxonomy presented in Figure 3-1 is illustrated in Table 3-1 with Finnish–Estonian examples. Table 3-1. Finnish–Estonian examples of the similarity taxonomy. Dimension

Description

Sameness

The entity in language A is identical to the entity in language B.

Correlation

A systematic relation between entities in language A and language B.

The entity in language A Resemblance resembles the entity in language B.

Formula

a=b

a:b= c:d

a~b

Example FI–ET puu –puu ‘tree’ veri–veri ‘blood’ kieli–keel ‘language’ mies–mees ‘man’ murte-i-ssa– murde-i-s ‘dialect-PLINE’

Comments

Concrete string of sounds or letters.

Identical surface relationships between entities (here ie–ee). Enough concrete similarity to connect the two strings in the user’s cognition.

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Analogy

Vague similitude

Inconstant relation

Entities of language A have an analogous relationship with entities of language B. There is something in the individual items of languages A and B to facilitate comparison but the resemblance is not obvious. The relationships between the languages are not systematic but there is some overall similarity to facilitate comparison.

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Requires teaching or a large set of examples to emerge (here the analogous relationship of ie– uo–yö).

a:b~ c:d~ e:f

tie–tee ‘road’ työ–töö ‘work’ suo–soo ‘swamp’

a~~b

Requires knowledge of the historical sate-i-ta– development of sademe-i-d different languages ‘rain-PL-PAR’ or guessing from the context.

a~~ b~~ c~~d

velko-j-a– võlgu ‘debt-PL-PAR’ hein-i-ä– heinu ‘hay-PL-PAR’

Not very useful for language use. Here the Estonian stem allomorph of plural partitive relates to the different Finnish partitive plural formatives.4

In Figure 3-1 the degrees of similarity are visually presented as separate from each other and in Table 3-1 the Finnish–Estonian examples attempt to present a prototypical case of each degree. In reality, however, the degrees of similarity are obviously not just three, nor are they clearly distinguishable from each other, but rather they form two continua: one for items, the other for systems, ranging from clearly identical or systematically correlated via resemblance and sporadic similarity to total difference.

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Item similarity:

Sameness Resemblance Vague similitude No similarity

System similarity:

Correlation Analogy Inconstant relation No similarity

Figure 3-2. Similarity continua.

Despite the continuous nature of the construct, labelling some points on the continua helps us to operationalize and measure it. Different ways and previous efforts to pinpoint similarity are discussed in more detail in the next section. To some extent such efforts must also be languagespecific, due to the structure of the languages in question. In Finnish and Estonian, for instance, it is not possible to determine a priori whether the stem alternations related to inflection are perceived as more similar or less similar than inflectional morphemes or formatives, let alone place the variety of such items along the continua in an order of similarity. Such work requires carefully designed empirical testing.

4. Measurement of perceived similarity 4.1. Previous measures In transfer studies which discuss perceived similarity–or often actually the similarity assumed to be perceivable by the writers, based on actual similarity across languages–the construct of similarity has been defined or

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described in many ways which are not always compatible. Examples of such studies are presented briefly below. To our knowledge, the earliest attempt to define and measure similarity is Ellegård (1976). He points out many different facets of similarity and builds an elaborate mathematical model for quantifying them. He attempts to include all areas of language, both vocabulary and grammar, with all its levels, from phonetics to textual structure, in one model. This quickly leads to impossible assumptions, particularly about the nature of grammatical rules. Ellegård’s contribution, however, is important because it clearly shows the complexity of the construct of similarity and the need to define carefully the domains to be compared. He also emphasizes the role of frequency of both lexical items and grammatical rules. His way of introducing it in his model seems clumsy today but at the time it was probably quite innovative, considering that he had none of the computing tools we have at our disposal today. Revisiting the role of frequency in perceiving similarity, using the digital corpora we have now, would be a worthwhile task (and a good start in that direction can be found in Moberg et al. 2006) but is beyond the scope of this article. Ard and Homburg (1992) built five-point scales, based separately on formal (orthographical and morphological) and functional similarity. Their examples are from Spanish vs. English. The formal scale ranges from identity, including a difference in grammatical ending (moderno– modern), to regular orthographic correspondence (-cion/-tion), irregular orthographic correspondence (sorpresa–surprise), and finally to more distant relationships (promover–promote). Although similar on the surface, this scale differs from the one proposed above in two important ways: it deals only with orthographic similarity, and the determining factor is regularity, which implies that the system level is involved without being clearly separated from the item level. Ard and Homburg’s functional similarity scale is based on dictionary listings: 1) primary dictionary meaning the same (modern), 2) primary meaning different, second listing the same (plantas–plant), 3) primary meaning different, tertiary meaning the same (competent), 4) expansion or contraction of the Spanish meaning (parientes = all relatives), 5) greater distance, false friends (Ard and Homburg 1992, 55–59). This scale, of course, is greatly dependent on lexicographers’ notions of the rank order of meaning of words across languages, which may vary a lot. The newest dictionaries, which use huge corpora as the basis for deciding the most common meanings of words, might be more reliable as a source for this type of scale.

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In the model presented by Bezooijen and Gooskens (2007, 256), lexical similarity was classified as a) completely transparent, with no difference in pronunciation while spelling may differ (Frisian buro’s– Dutch bureaus), b) fairly transparent, i.e. “so similar that the reader can be assumed to recognize the relationship fairly easily” (Afrikaans sewentig– Dutch zeventig), c) rather untransparent (Frisian jierren–Dutch jaren), and d) completely untransparent (Afrikaans hê–Dutch hebben). This again resembles our taxonomy above, but only covers vocabulary and item similarity. Also, phonological and orthographic similarity are not separated, indicating that both are available for the language user at the same time, which is often not the case. The fairly shallow orthography of Dutch may justify this decision, however, as could the even more transparent orthography of Finnish. In comparing Finnish and Estonian, orthographic differences are quite regular, too, but discovering this regularity requires comparing the systems, not individual items. Similarity also appears as one factor in many general expositions of mutual intelligibility, such as the model of seven sieves proposed by Klein and Stegman (2000). This emphasizes the role of previous and contextual knowledge in finding familiarity in the TL. Besides international words, the model lists words shared across related languages, regular phonological and orthographic correspondences, syntactic and morphosyntactic regularities, and shared affixes (see also Hufeisen and Marx 2007, 312–319.) This approach has also been used by Wiik (1994) and Kasik (1994, 10–17) who provide lists of important similarities and differences between Finnish and Estonian. The most thorough presentation of actual inflectional similarities and differences between these two languages was constructed by Remes (1995, 2009, 94í95), who determined the actual inflectional similarity of shared cognates on historical-comparative grounds (cf. Gray and Atkinson 2003). The historical-comparative method entails a judgment process carried out by expert(s) who are able to identify how stems and inflectional formatives are preserved or have changed over time (on lexical cognacy judgments see e.g. Dyen, Kruskal and Black 1992). This method of comparing the similarity of the stems and inflectional formatives of Estonian and Finnish is the basis for determining actual similarity between inflectional forms in this study. A computational approach to similarity between languages is provided by a technique called Levenshtein Distance5, which has been employed by Gooskens and Heeringa (2004), Beijering et al. (2008) and Heeringa et al. (2013). In this method each letter/phoneme which is different between

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items in languages A and B is counted as an addition, deletion, or change, arriving at an index of similarity/difference. A similar method was independently used in Martin (1995), who compared stem changes within a variety of inflectional paradigms of Finnish nouns to predict learners’ ability to inflect Finnish words. Although the predictive value turned out to be quite good in a test of context-free word forms, the same may not be true in actual language use. This was tentatively tested by Martin (an unpublished study) by selecting a group of words (inflectional categories with basic forms ending in -i in Finnish), clearly differing in the “difficulty index” provided by the 1995 test. All words belonging to these inflectional categories were collected from a large set of writing samples (the data of the Cefling project6) and rated for accuracy of inflection. No correlation was found between the predicted difficulty and actual accuracy. The perception of similarity is clearly not determined by such details but rather by the overall shape and sound of items, with frequency as an important factor. Nor is it certain that phonemes determined as identical by researchers are perceived in the same way by language users (Ellegård 1976), or that insertions, deletions, and changes carry the same value in perception. The Levenshtein Distance assumes the similarity to be symmetrical, which is not necessarily the case, as shown by the results of this study. The issue of symmetry was addressed by Moberg et al. (2006). They used conditional entropy as a measure of sound correspondences between Scandinavian languages. Their results coincide with those of previous intelligibility tests, indicating that one-to-one and one-to-many relationships have a different role in the comprehension of closely related languages. This is a promising computational approach, which also brings to mind some previous suggestions for factors of receptive multilingualism, e.g. Nissilä (2011), where the same issue is explored but no statistically significant relationship is found, or even the notion of strong cues in the Competition Model (MacWhinney 1987). The perceptions of overall similarity between the L1 and TL can also differ from the perceptions of similarity in certain domains of the two languages (Hall et al. 2009). Moreover, the actual similarity of a given domain can be manifest in language items (words and constructions) in many ways, with a variety of degrees and combinations of convergence and divergence (Kaivapalu 2005; Kaivapalu and Martin 2007). In closely related languages the similarity of word forms can range from maximal formal and functional convergence (identity) between the languages to maximal divergence (zero relation). These combinations of similarity of word forms between Estonian and Finnish will be described below.

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4.2. Method: A measure of morphological similarity between Estonian and Finnish 4.2.1. Regularities between Estonian and Finnish Of the many facets of similarity between the two languages, this study focuses on testing the perceptual validity of actual similarity in Estonian/Finnish bound morphology. Estonian and Finnish are to some extent mutually comprehensible, closely related languages with similar morphological systems. Both languages employ agglutination and fusion of stems and morphological formatives in inflection, but in Estonian fusion occurs more commonly, leading to less transparent word forms. The paradigm-internal alternations of stems in inflection are partly the same, partly different in Estonian and Finnish (e.g. consonant gradation kukk : kuke : kukke ‘rooster’ in Estonian or kukko : kuko-n : kukko-a ‘rooster’ in Finnish). Even when only one word form is presented, L1 speakers of Finnish/Estonian in most instances know immediately whether the word is a member of an alternating paradigm, e.g. Finnish kengä-ssä ‘in a shoe’ automatically implies the nominative form kenkä ‘a shoe’, as does the Estonian nurga-s ‘in a corner’ the nominative form nurk. The formatives are often (nearly) similar but their distribution may be different. The languages use the same alphabet, but there are some differences in spelling: for example, Estonian /t/ is often spelled with d while the long /t/, is spelled with t, in contrast to the Finnish spelling (t and tt), as in the Estonian inessive plural murdeis and Finnish murteissa ‘in dialects’, or the Estonian partitive plural noote and Finnish nuotteja ‘notes’. As the length of consonants carries a similar phonemic importance in both languages, this is confusing in writing but not in speech. The vowel inventory is also slightly different: in addition to the a, e, i, o, u, y, ä, and ö, found in Finnish, Estonian has õ and spells /y/ with ü. Another very frequently occurring systematic difference is that the word-final vowel of standard Finnish is often not present in Estonian (and in some Finnish dialects). Thus, Estonian and Finnish learners can quite easily make interlingual identifications between morphological formatives (such as the elative case ending -st (herne-i-st ‘pea’) in Estonian and -sta (herne-i-stä) in Finnish. Such systematic regularities are counted as similar in stimuli design.

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In both languages grammatical functions, in this case plurality and case, are expressed by using inflectional formatives agglutinated to certain stem allomorphs (EKG § 91, VISK § 57). Inflectional formatives can also express more than one grammatical function; -d in Estonian kala-d or -t in Finnish kala-t ‘fishes’, for example, express both plurality and the nominative case. In Estonian it is also possible for a stem allomorph alone to express grammatical functions, without any formative, as e.g. lehti ‘leaves’, which is a partitive plural form but has no case or number marking, or pesa ‘nest’, which can express the nominative, genitive, or partitive singular functions. Even when the formative is present, the border between the stem and the inflectional formatives is not always salient for language users: the formatives and often also a part of the stem are commonly perceived as chunks (Kaivapalu 2005). In general it is quite easy for a Finnish learner of Estonian and an Estonian learner of Finnish to perceive that the inflectional systems of the two closely related languages work in the same way and that most of the inflectional formatives are similar. The similarity of the inflectional forms can be (but is not always) both structural and functional, but we concentrate here only on the similarity of the word forms, as the meaning or use of the forms presented to the participants in the test below is not in focus. It is conceivable that they assumed the semantic meaning of the words and the syntactic use of the formatives to be the same in both languages, but we have no information on such assumptions. 4.2.2. Stimuli, task and participants Actual similarity refers to the linguistic distance between the units to be compared (here, morphological forms). To determine this, a historicalcomparative analysis, based on Remes 1995 and 2009, was performed to determine the degree of actual similarity between Estonian and Finnish inflectional forms. All the tested cognate nouns and adjectives appear in both Finnish and Estonian. Different combinations of stem allomorphs and inflectional formatives within the word pairs represent a continuum of actual similarity from maximal morphological convergence to maximal divergence, forming four groups (Tables 4-1í4-4) in which Estonian examples are presented first. The first group (Table 4-1) presents the test pairs with similar stem allomorphs and similar formatives in Estonian and Finnish and represents maximal morphological similarity between the languages. It covers the areas of (near) identity and resemblance in the taxonomy presented in Table 4-1.

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The second group (Table 4-2) consists of test pairs with similar stem allomorphs but different formatives, presenting vague similitude. Table 4-3 presents test words with different stem allomorphs, but similar formatives, representing vague similitude like test words of Table 4-2. The fourth group (Table 4-4) presents inconstant morphological relations between Estonian and Finnish: test pairs with different stem allomorphs and different formatives. Table 4-1. Actual similarity of test words: Similar stem allomorphs, similar formatives. Estonian kala-d raamatu-st silmi-s herne-i-st pabere-i-s kuninga-i-l murde-i-s sinis-te hoone-i-st pu-i-d hamba-i-d suur-te keel-t

Finnish kala-t raamatu-sta silm-i-ssä herne-i-stä papere-i-ssa kuninka-i-lla murte-i-ssa sinis-te-n huone-i-sta pu-i-ta hampa-i-ta suur-te-n kiel-tä

Meaning ‘fish’ ‘book, the Bible’ ‘eye’ ‘pea’ ‘paper’ ‘king’ ‘dialect’ ‘blue’ ‘building, room’ ‘tree’ ‘tooth’ ‘big’ ‘language’

Case PL NOM SG ELA PL INE PL ELA PL INE PL ADE PL INE PL GEN PL ELA PL PAR PL PAR PL GEN SG PAR

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Table 4-2. Actual similarity of test words: Similar stem allomorphs, different formatives. Estonian saar-te pesa lehti noote võlgu järve läände sedele-i-d endisi lain-te-st albume-i-d pere-sid

Finnish saar-i-en pesä-ä leht-i-ä nuotte-j-a velko-j-a järve-en länte-en setele-j-ä entis-i-ä laine-i-sta albume-j-a perhe-i-tä

Meaning ‘island’ ‘nest’ ‘leaf’ ‘note’ ‘debt’ ‘lake’ ‘west’ ‘billet’ ‘former’ ‘wave’ ‘album’ ‘family’

Case PL GEN SG PAR PL PAR PL PAR PL PAR SG ILL SG ILL PL PAR PL PAR PL ELA PL PAR PL PAR

Table 4-3. Actual similarity of test words: Different stem allomorphs, similar formatives. Estonian harrastuse-st õnnetu-t vete-l tiigre-i-lt tütre-le vangla-s sademe-i-s nobeda-i-le hõbeda-i-st mustika-i-d kuusiku-i-d

Finnish harrastukse-sta onneton-ta ves-i-llä tiikere-i-ltä tyttäre-lle vankila-ssa sate-i-ssa nope-i-lle hope-i-sta mustiko-i-ta kuusiko-i-ta

Meaning ‘hobby’ ‘unhappy’ ‘water’ ‘tiger’ ‘daughter’ ‘prison’ ‘rainfall’ ‘speedy’ ‘silver’ ‘blueberry’ ‘spruce forest’

Case SG ELA SG PAR PL ADE PL ABL SG ALL SG INE PL INE PL ALL PL ELA PL PAR PL PAR

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Table 4-4. Actual similarity of test words: Different stem allomorphs, different formatives. Estonian kolmanda-te-s keskus-te-sse toa us-te maa-de-sse linde heinu nelju lube punase-i-d kooli-de-s laeva-de-lt

Finnish kolmans-i-ssa keskuks-i-in tuva-n uks-i-en ma-i-hin lintu-j-a hein-i-ä nel-j-iä lup-i-a punais-i-a koulu-i-ssa laivo-i-lta

Meaning ‘third’ ‘center’ ‘room’ ‘door’ ‘country’ ‘bird’ ‘hay’ ‘four’ ‘permission’ ‘red’ ‘school’ ‘ship’

Case PL INE PL ILL SG GEN PL GEN PL ILL PL PAR PL PAR PL PAR PL PAR PL PAR PL INE PL ABL

To address the relationship between actual and perceived similarity the participants were presented with lists of these 48 pairs of Finnish and Estonian inflected forms in random order. The first member of each pair was in the L1 of the participant (L1 > TL). In the test the continuum of the degree of item similarity was operationalized as consisting of three degrees: similar (= [nearly] identical), somewhat similar, different (= not similar). The participants had to choose one of these and were also given the possibility of commenting on their choice. The instructions included the information that the two words in each test pair always present the same meaning, morphological case and number. The participants were 43 Finnish L1 and 43 Estonian L1 speakers, volunteer university students, mainly in their twenties, with no prior TL knowledge and extended exposure beyond what almost all Finns and Estonians have as a result of short tourist trips to each others’ countries. They typically also knew English and Swedish (in Finland) and Russian or German (in Estonia). All the groups (two in eastern and central Finland, two in Tallinn) performed the test in 90 minutes, during their first class of the TL. As a prerequisite for the comparison of the answers of the two participant groups, we also needed a way of quantifying the perceptions. A rating system was devised to create an index of perceived similarity: two points for each "similar" answer, one point for "somewhat similar", and 0 points for "not similar". The maximum similarity score for the list of 48 test pairs was thus 96 points, the minimum 0 points. In the following section we present the results of the perception test from two angles: first,

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the relationship between actual and perceived similarity, and then the symmetry of perceived similarity. The test concentrates on item similarity. It is possible, however, that the participants compared the words and forms within the lists and detected some similarity also in the inflectional systems (see Kaivapalu 2005 on the paradigmatic character of analogical relations between the L1 and TL). We also have previous sporadic observations on certain intragroup differences, relating to the surface distance of the words in the Leveshteinian sense and also to the overall shape of the words, but these observations are not included in this article.

5. Results 5.1. Perceptions of similarity The participants’ perceptions on the similarity of Estonian and Finnish test words are presented in Table 5-1. The tested pairs of words are arranged from those perceived most similar to least similar for each tested group of participants. Table 5-1. Similarity perceptions of test words. L1 Finnish Test pair silmissä–silmis raamatusta–raamatust kalat–kalad herneistä–herneist papereissa–pabereis kuninkailla–kuningail murteissa–murdeis hampaita–hambaid huoneista–hooneist sinisten–siniste tiikereiltä–tiigreilt suurten–suurte

Points Points 83 75 82 67 81 62 80 61 78 60 75 60 75 60 75 60 74 56 73 55 73 54 72 54

L1 Estonian Test pair kalad–kalat raamatust–raamatusta silmis–silmissä lehti–lehtiä herneist–herneistä pesa–pesää tütrele–tyttärelle siniste–sinisten hooneist–huoneista suurte–suurten tiigreilt–tiikereiltä pabereis–papereissa

304

puita–puid tyttärelle–tütrele entisiä–endisi harrastuksesta–harrastusest setelejä–sedeleid albumeja–albumeid saarien–saarte kieltä–keelt kuusikoita–kuusikuid mustikoita–mustikaid vankilassa–vanglas länteen–läände nopeille–nobedaile laineista–laintest järveen–järve hopeista–hõbedaist pesää–pesa punaisia–punaseid laivoilta–laevadelt lehtiä–lehti kouluissa–koolides sateissa–sademeis vesillä–vetel neljiä–nelju kolmansissa–kolmandates onnetonta–õnnetut nuotteja–noote lintuja–linde lupia–lube heiniä–heinu uksien–uste tuvan–toa velkoja–võlgu

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70 69 67 67 62 61 61 59 57 51 48 46 46 42 41 40 36 36 34 33 32 26 25 24 23 23 21 17 17 15 15 9 9

54 hambaid–hampaita 54 mustikaid–mustikoita 53 puid–puita 52 endisi–entisiä 51 murdeis–murteissa 49 laintest–laineista 49 kuningail–kuninkailla 47 järve–järveen 45 nobedaile–nopeille 45 nelju–neljiä 44 läände–länteen 42 heinu–heiniä 42 keelt–kieltä 42 kuusikuid–kuusikoita 41 albumeid–albumeja 37 vanglas–vankilassa 36 punaseid–punaisia 33 sedeleid–setelejä 33 harrastusest–harrastuksesta 31 hõbedaist–hopeista 30 laevadelt–laivoilta 30 koolides–kouluissa 29 noote–nuotteja 28 õnnetut–onnetonta 24 kolmandates–kolmansissa 23 linde–lintuja 22 võlgu–velkoja 22 uste–uksien 21 saarten–saarien 20 toa–tuvan 19 sademeis–sateissa 19 keskustesse–keskuksiin 18 vetel–vesillä

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keskuksiin–keskustesse perheitä–peresid maihin–maadesse

7 7 3

17 13 10

305

lube–lupia peresid–perheitä maadesse–maihin

It is clear that the 13 words with most actual similarity (see Table 4-1) are also perceived as most similar, i.e. they represent the left end of the item similarity continuum in Figure 3-2, the areas of (near) identity and resemblance. For the F1 speakers only one and for the E1 speakers four of the 13 test pairs of maximal actual similarity were not perceived as similar enough to place them among the top 13 most perceptually similar test pairs. In the case of vague similitude between Estonian and Finnish (Tables 4-2 and 4-3), the relations between actual and perceived similarity are less clear and depend on different L1 and TL configurations. Actual similarity clearly is also present here, but the factors contributing to the order of the words in the lists are less visible. Here the number of deletions and insertions (the Levenshtein Distance) might be significant, but an experiment with a larger number of examples of the different types is required to find out whether the two groups (similar stem, different formative vs. different stem, similar formative) can be reliably distinguished. Inconstant relations (Table 4-4) between the languages seem to be the least transparent for learners, as is to be expected. At this end of the continuum the Estonians see more similarity than the Finns, but both also see as different many words which actually belong to the middle groups. Thus, actual similarities do seem to predict learners’ perceptions very well in the case of sameness and resemblance relationships (Figure 3-1) between Estonian and Finnish, but there are a number of constraints on perception in the case of vague similitude and inconstant relations. As Kellerman (1977) has shown, learners tend to rely only on certain types of actual similarities. This issue as well as the asymmetry of learners’ perceptions that was revealed in all tested word pair groups will be discussed in the next section.

5.2. Symmetry of perceived similarity The question of cross-linguistic symmetry in perceived similarity has received little attention in CLI and SLA research. Ringbom (2007), however, has underscored that actual similarities are symmetrical across the languages being compared, whereas perceived similarity may have a stronger effect on intelligibility in one direction than in the other. Recent

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research on the symmetry of intelligibility (Moberg et al. 2006, Gooskens and Bezooijen 2006, 2013, Gooskens et al. 2010, 2012) has confirmed this in Germanic languages and pointed out linguistic and extralinguistic factors leading to the asymmetry of intelligibility. Perceptual similarity seems to be one factor, even if this term is not used in many studies of the symmetry of receptive multilingualism. The results of the similarity perception test of Estonian-Finnish inflectional forms presented in Tables 4-1–4-3 above and in Tables 5-2 and 5-3 below are intended to contribute to our understanding of this issue. To explore the potential asymmetry of the perceptions of similarity by Estonian and Finnish L1 speakers, the two similarity lists (E1 speakers vs. F1 speakers) presented in Tables 4-1–4-3 were correlated. The correlation between the two lists was very high (Pearson .988, significant at the .01 level), indicating a high degree of symmetry. Nevertheless, a comparison of the scores (Table 5-2) indicates that the perception of similarity in the inflectional forms of the two languages by Estonian and Finnish L1 speakers is not fully symmetrical. Actual similarity, on which the lists were based as described above, tends to be more transparent for Finnish L1 speakers (overall score 2,220) than for Estonian speakers (overall score 1,949 points). Finnish L1 speakers perceive more similarity between Estonian and Finnish inflectional forms and their perception scores show more variation. Table 5-2. The range of test scores.

Highest score Lowest score Total

Maximum/minimum 96 (2x48 words) 0 4,128 (96x43 participants)

L1 Finnish 83

L1 Estonian 75

3 2,220

10 1,949

The scores on the continuum of similarity perceptions (Table 5-3) also reveal that the Finnish L1 speakers perceived more of the test pairs as similar or somewhat similar than as different, unlike the Estonian L1 speakers, who perceived most pairs as somewhat similar or different.

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Table 5-3. Numbers of answers on the continuum of similarity perceptions of Finnish and Estonian L1 speakers. Similar L1 Finnish L1 Estonian Total

754 572 1,326

Somewhat similar 712 805 1,517

Different

Total

604 632 1,236

2,070 2,009 4,079

These results are in accordance with other research on the (a)symmetry of comprehension of Estonian and Finnish as TLs, which has shown that Finnish L1 speakers understand a written Estonian text on the cultural and historical relations of Estonia and Finland better than Estonian L1 speakers understand the same text in Finnish (Kaivapalu 2013). In production, Finns also tend to rely more on similar inflectional patterns between the two languages than do Estonians (Kaivapalu and Eslon 2011). During the test the participants were given the opportunity to write their reflections and comments on the reasons for their similarity choices. The Finnish respondents refer to the wide variety of forms in their L1. They frequently mention the resemblance between a certain Estonian inflectional form and some form of spoken, dialectal or old Finnish, or point out a parallel inflectional form in standard Finnish. For example, spoken Finnish is mentioned as a reason for perceiving the Estonian plural genitive suurte and Finnish suurten as similar: “In spoken Finnish the plural genitive n is not pronounced”. The existing parallel inflectional forms albumeita and seteleitä in Finnish, in addition to the test forms albumeja and setelejä, helps to perceive similarity with Estonian albumeid and sedeleid: “In Finnish also albumeita is possible.” This is in accordance with the results of research on inter-Scandinavian intelligibility (Gooskens 2006): the larger variety of forms in their L1 facilitated Norwegian L1 speakers’ comprehension of Swedish and Danish. In addition to variety, the two groups of participants also commented on different parts of the words in the test. The Finnish L1 speakers were more likely to notice complete or partial similarity in the stems, while Estonian L1 speakers tended to pay attention to the similarity of the inflectional formatives. The latter paid attention to phonological resemblance, e.g. t vs. d, both expressing nominative plural, or the formatives for expressing the allative case, lle vs. le. The Finnish L1 speakers did not comment on sound alternations of the stems, e.g on the missing of k in (harrastusest–harrastuksesta) in Estonian, but for the Estonian L1 speakers a difference in one sound could reduce the

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perception of similarity. One reason for this result may be the explicit teaching of L1 morphology in Estonian schools, focusing on detailed morphological analysis of inflectional forms into stems and formatives, which is not found in Finnish curricula. In spite of the quite high correlation of the similarity lists of Estonian and Finnish L1 speakers, the location of some pairs of words does deviate considerably from one list to another (Table 5-1). For the Finnish L1 speakers the Estonian stem plurals (e.g. lehti ‘leaves’ partitive plural, or heinu ‘hay’ partitive plural), which express grammatical meanings without any morphological formatives, are not salient enough for them to perceive the similarity with the corresponding Finnish word form (lehtiä, heiniä). They perceived lehti as a singular nominative form, which it is in their L1, while the Estonian L1 speakers perceived the Finnish fusionalagglutinative leht-i-ä as similar to the Estonian lehti. Also the frequency of the inflectional form in the L1 and the existence of parallel forms may influence perceptions of similarity. For example, plural forms of vesi ‘water’ are very rare in Estonian, whereas the adessive plural vesillä in Finnish is found in many formulaic expressions. Estonian saarte ‘island’, genitive plural, resembles the Finnish form saarten, which is an alternative to the Finnish test form saarien, which in turn does not exist in Estonian. Thus, the reasons for the asymmetry of the similarity perceptions are partly universal, such as word frequency or the extent of L1 variation, and partly language specific, yet also revealing more general tendencies, such as the effect of the differences in L1 and TL distribution of items which exist in both languages.

6. Conclusions Human cognition is geared towards noticing similarity, and learning is based on what learners already know. The study of languages, however, has long focused on differences and variety, even if “part of our knowledge of language consists in an ability to judge how similar two languages are” (Ellegård 1976). The purpose of this article is, by defining the construct and trying out one method of measuring it, to underline the importance of similarity perceptions as the basis of CLI and as a route for SLA. The concept of similarity also connects “CLI for SLA” research to other areas of language contact, as the same cognitive processes are likely to be at work in the domains of synchronic and diachronic consequences of language contacts.

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Perceived similarity is harder to determine than actual similarity because it depends to a great extent on language users’ personal characteristics, language learning experience and the stage of the acquisition process. Perceiving similarity is at least potentially a conscious process; language users manage to describe their perceptions, albeit not necessarily in linguistic terms (e.g. Kaivapalu and Muikku-Werner 2010). For this reason, in addition to psycho- and neurolinguistic methods of measuring cross-linguistic similarity and its perceptions, focusing on unconscious processing (e.g. ERP-effects in comprehension, see Kotz 2009; Tokowicz and MacWhinney 2005), perception tests and participants’ reflections on their perception processes, as applied here, are useful for exploring perceived similarity. The test designed for this study is firmly based on extensive research into the objective, historically-based similarity between Estonian and Finnish morphology, and it also makes use of what little has been previously known about similarity perceptions between these languages. The method used for scoring the perceptions for quantitative analysis is crude and should be further developed on the basis of this study. It has, however, produced two important results: actual and perceived similarity have a fairly high correlation, particularly at the two ends of the similarity continuum, although in the middle it is less obvious. As to the symmetry issue, it is interesting that in spite of the high correlation between the two groups, there are some quite clear differences. Both results give rise to new research questions. The continuum of item similarity was divided into only three parts in this study. At the time of designing the study this seemed enough, particularly as the main focus was on the symmetry of perceptions. With our previous knowledge of actual similarity between Estonian and Finnish (Remes 1995 and 2009 in particular) and with the results of this study it would be possible to construct a test which could distinguish more degrees of perceived morphological similarity, perhaps targeting specifically stem alternation as opposed to inflectional formatives, to see whether one or the other has more influence on the holistic view of similarity. Focusing on this area might also help to provide some answers to psycholinguistic questions of the nature of morphological processing. Both the clear and the as-of-yet cloudy results relate to important issues in CLI and SLA. On the whole, there is much less research on the transfer and acquisition of complex morphology than on syntax and phonology, mainly due to the heavy emphasis on learning English, where the role of morphology is tiny when compared with Finnish or Estonian. Perceptions of similarity and the perceptions required for learning

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inflection often coincide (cf. Martin 1995). Further research on these perceptions would thus feed both CLI and SLA research. Some issues, like the mutual perceptual relationship between deletions, additions, and changes of phonemes/graphemes (cf. Levenshtein distance) between two items, whether across languages or within an inflectional paradigm, are also issues in historical linguistics: is a deletion or an addition more likely to produce a change in language? This question challenges the Levenshteinian method of measuring the distance between two language items and could be explored by further studies comparing the results from our morphologically based “objective” similarity study with a Levenshteinian analysis. For the acquisition of morphology, the most important question is between learning by analysis and learning by holistic entities, whether they are called chunks or constructions. Both types of learning are likely to happen, maybe with a different emphasis as overall proficiency develops, but to what extent are stem change rules or agglutination real in the mind of learners? Or is learning a question of whole word patterns which are holistically compared with each other? In our study, very small differences that change the shape (often the syllable structure) of the word sometimes seemed to obscure the (to us obvious) similarity in the eyes of the participants. But then again, the longer the word (stem), the more similarity is perceived; in other words, the amount of shared material can also affect similarity. Nor are function and form separate: the short partitive forms of Estonian confused the Finns, as there seemed to them to be no indication of function there. This study concentrates on item similarity. The participants were only asked to compare two word forms at a time. Their comments reveal, however, that they also perceive systemic similarity. They compare the items in the lists, but they also search their L1 knowledge of regional, social and historical variation, as well as the alternatives which exist within the inflectional paradigms of the standard language. This can be interpreted as evidence for the way the construct of similarity is conceptualized in Figure 3-1, with item and system similarity integrated, rather than the way they are presented in Figure 3-2. Even if the latter is useful for test design, and visualizes the continuous nature of similarity, it fails to capture all aspects of the degrees of similarity. Any study using similarity as an explanation, be it for mutual intelligibility of related languages, for learning paths or results, or for historical development, needs a clear construct definition. The one proposed and pilot-tested here will hopefully be helpful for bringing further studies of similarity

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conceptually closer to each other, thus contributing to one small aspect of our shared knowledge of how language and the mind work.

Notes 1. Most cognates between Estonian and Finnish, however, are not loans but words that historically relate to the same word in a common ancestor language, sharing form and meaning. 2. Ringbom’s (1987) terms perceived and actual similarity are used in this article but the same issues can also be discussed as psychotypology, perceived proximity, or psycholinguistic reality of similarity. 3. EuroComDidact: http://www.eurocomresearch.net/. 4. We use formative (cf. nippumorfi in VISK § 57, formatiiv in EKG I § 91) here to indicate the combination of a plural marker and a case ending as the two bound morphemes are not always separable or the division is theoretically possible but not psychologically valid, certainly not for a learner (cf. Martin 1995, 198). 5. Levenshtein Distance: see http://xlinux.nist.gov/dads//HTML/Levenshtein.html 6. Cefling Project: see https://www.jyu.fi/cefling.

Glossing abbreviations ABL ADE ALL ELA GEN ILL INE NOM PAR PL SG

ablative adessive allative elative genitive illative inessive nominative partitive plural singular

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languages and their relationship to geographic distance.” In Phonetics in Europe: Perception and Production, edited by Charlotte Gooskens and Renée van Bezoijen, 99–137. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang. Herlin, Ilona, and Lari Kotilainen 2004. “External factors behind crosslinguistic similarities.” In Up and down the Cline – The Nature of Grammaticalization, edited by Olga Fischer, Muriel Norde, and Harry Perridon, 263–279. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hufeisen, Britta, and Nicole Marx. 2007. “How can DaFnE and EuroComGerm contribute to the concept of receptive multilingualism?” In Receptive Multilingualism. Linguistic Analyses, Language Policies and Didactic Concepts, edited by Jan ten Thije and L. Zeevaert, 307í321. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jarvis, Scott. 2000. “Methodological rigor in the study of transfer: Identifying L1 influence in the interlanguage lexicon.” Language Learning 50 (2): 245í309. —. 2010. “Comparison-based and detection-based approaches to transfer research.” In EUROSLA Yearbook 10, edited by Leah Roberts, Martin Howard, Muiris Ó Laoire, and David Singleton, 169í192. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jarvis, Scott, and Terrence Odlin. 2000. “Morphological type, spatial reference, and language transfer.” Studies in Second Language Acquisition 22: 535í556. Jarvis, Scott, and Aneta Pavlenko. 2008. Crosslinguistic Influence in Language and Cognition. New York, London: Routledge. Kaivapalu, Annekatrin. 2005. Lähdekieli kielenoppimisen apuna. [Contribution L1 to foreign language acquisition.] Jyväskylä Studies in Humanities 44. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä. —. 2013. “Mutual intelligibility in language learning context – symmetrical or not?” In Abstracts. NORDAND 11: Den 11:e konferensen om Nordens språk som andra- och främmandespråk, 26. Stockholm: University of Stockholm. Kaivapalu, Annekatrin, and Pille Eslon. 2011. “Onko lähisukukielen vaikutus suomen ja viron omaksumiseen symmetristä? Korpuspohjaisen tutkimuksen tuloksia ja haasteita.” [Is the influence of a closely related first language on the acquisition of Finnish and Estonian symmetrical? Some preliminary results and challenges of a corpus-based study.] Lähivõrdlusi. Lähivertailuja 21: 132–153. Kaivapalu, Annekatrin, and Maisa Martin. 2007. “Morphology in transition: The plural inflection of Finnish nouns by Estonian and Russian learners.” Acta Linguistica Hungarica 54 (2): 129–156.

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Kaivapalu, Annekatrin, and Pirkko Muikku-Werner. 2010. “Reseptiivinen monikielisyys: Miten suomenkielinen oppija ymmärtää viroa äidinkielensä pohjalta? [Receptive multilingualism: How Finnish as a first language helps learners to understand Estonian?]” Lähivõrdlusi. Lähivertailuja 20: 68–96. Kasik, Reet 1994. Hakkame rääkima! Viron kielen peruskurssi. [Let’s start speaking. Basic course in Estonian.] Turku: University of Turku. Kellerman, Eric. 1977. “Towards a characterization of the strategy of transfer in second language learning.” Interlanguage Studies Bulletin 2: 58–145. —. 1979. “Transfer and non-transfer: Where we are now.” Studies in Second Language Acquisition 2: 37–57. Klein, Horst, and Tilbert Stegmann. 2000. EuroComRom: Die sieben Siebe. Romanische Sprachen sofort lesen können. Aachen: Shake. Kolehmainen, Leena, Matti Miestamo, and Taru Nordlund, eds. 2013. Kielten vertailun metodiikka. [Methodology of comparing languages.] Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Kotz, Sonja A. 2009. “A critical review of ERP and fMRI evidence on L2 syntactic processing.” Brain & Language 109 (2–3): 68í74. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2008.06.002. MacWhinney, Brian. 1987. “The competition model.” In Mechanisms of Language Acquisition, edited by Brian MacWhinney, 249í308. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. —. 2005. “A unified model of language acquisition.” In Handbook of bilingualism: Psycholinguistic approaches, edited by Judith F. Kroll and Annette M.B. de Groot, 49í100. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, Maisa. 1995. The Map and the Rope. Finnish Nominal Inflection as a Learning Target. Studia Philologica Jyväskyläensia 38. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä. —. 2006. “Suomi ja viro oppijan mielessä. Näkökulmia taivutusmuotojen prosessointiin.” [Finnish and Estonian in the mind of the learner. Approaches to processing inflectional forms.] Lähivõrdlusi. Lähivertailuja 17: 43í60. Jyväskylä Studies in Humanities 53. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä. Mitchell, Rosamund, and Florence Myles. 2004. Second Language Learning Theories. London: Arnold. Moberg, Jens, Charlotte Gooskens, John Nerbonne, and Nathan Vaillette. 2006. “Conditional entropy measures intelligibility among related languages.” In Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands 2006: Selected papers from the 17th CLIN Meeting, edited by Peter Dirix,

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Ineke Schuurman, Vincent Vandeghinste, and Frank Van Eynde, 51í66. Utrecht: LOT. Nissilä, Leena. 2011. Viron kielen vaikutus suomen kielen verbien ja niiden rektioiden oppimiseen. [Impact of the Estonian language on the learning of Finnish verbs and their rections.] Acta Universitatis Ouluensis B. Humaniora 99. Oulu: University of Oulu. Odlin, Terrence. 1989. Language Transfer. Cross-linguistic Influence in Language Learning. Cambridge, USA: Cambridge University Press. Remes, Hannu. 1995. Suomen ja viron vertailevaa taivutustypologiaa. [A contrastive study of inflectional typology.] Oulun yliopiston suomen ja saamen kielen ja logopedian laitoksen julkaisuja. Oulu: University of Oulu. —. 2009. Muodot kontrastissa. Suomen ja viron vertailevaa taivutusmorfologiaa. [Forms in contrast. A contrastive study of inflectional morphology in Finnish and Estonian.] Acta Universitatis Ouluensis B Humaniora 90. Oulu: University of Oulu. Ringbom, Håkan. 1987. The Role of the First Language in Foreign Language Learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. —. 2007. Cross-linguistic Similarity in Foreign Language Learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ringbom, Håkan, and Scott Jarvis. 2009. “The importance of crosslinguistic similarity in foreign language learning.” In Handbook of language teaching, edited by Michel H. Long and Catherine J. Doughty, 106í118. Oxford: Blackwell. Schepens, Job, Frans van der Slik, and Roeland van Hout 2013. “The effect of linguistic distance across Indo-European mother tongues on learning Dutch as a second language.” In Approaches to Measuring Linguistic Differences, edited by Lars Borin and Anju Saxena. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Selinker, Larry, and Usha Lakshamanan. 1992. “Language transfer and fossilization: The multiple effects principle.” In Language Transfer in Language Learning, edited by Susan Gass and Larry Selinker, 197– 216. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Tokowicz, Natasha and Brian MacWhinney. 2005. “Implicit and explicit measures of sensitivity to violations in second language grammar.” Studies in Second Language Acquisition 27: 173–204. VISK = Hakulinen, Auli, Maria Vilkuna, Riitta Korhonen, Vesa Koivisto, Tarja Riitta Heinonen, and Irja Alho. 2004. Iso suomen kielioppi. [The big Finnish grammar.] Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. http://scripta.kotus.fi/visk URN:ISBN:978-952-5446-35-7, 12.12.2013.

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Weinreich, Uriel. 1953. Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems. The Hague: Mouton. Wiik, Kalevi. 1994. “Suomalaisten yksisivuinen viron kielioppi.” [Onepage grammar of Estonian for Finns.] In Lähivertailuja 8. Suomalaisvirolainen kontrastiivinen seminaari Hailuodossa 7.–9.5.1994, edited by Helena Sulkala and Heli Laanekask, 124–128. Oulu: University of Oulu.

CHAPTER ELEVEN THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE-EXTERNAL FACTORS IN THE ACQUISITION OF ENGLISH AS AN ADDITIONAL LANGUAGE BY BILINGUAL CHILDREN IN GERMANY SIMONE LECHNER AND PETER SIEMUND Abstract German foreign language classrooms are increasingly populated by students with diverse language backgrounds. Side by side with monolingual German learners of English as a foreign language we find students for whom German is a second language, and whose first language may be Turkish, Russian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Polish, Spanish, Italian, or Greek—to name just a few common examples. In these contexts, English is learnt as a second and third (or fourth) language within the confines of the same classroom. Investigating ways in which the acquisition of English in these groups differs from that in their “monolingual” German peer group can give us important insights into the positive and negative effects of multilingual language repertoires in foreign language acquisition. Educational studies in Germany (DESI 2008) suggest positive effects for children with migration backgrounds, at least at the initial state of foreign language acquisition. When investigating linguistic transfer effects, external factors play an important role. Trying to bypass external factors by choosing a homogeneous group with a similar socioeconomic background may lead to transfer effects that are highly artificial and in no way representative. Moreover, finding a truly homogenous group is a near impossible endeavor. In our contribution, we focus on external variables to control differences in language attainment, while keeping the sample as diverse and representative as possible. We offer a qualitative linguistic analysis of the English(es) acquired by randomly chosen bi- and monolingual individuals learning English in the context of the German school system.

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1. Introduction European classrooms in urban areas are becoming increasingly diverse. This is certainly the case for Hamburg, where the number of children with a migration background1 is continuously growing. By 2011, 46% of children living in the urban space of Hamburg were reported to have a migration background (Statistisches Amt für Hamburg und SchleswigHolstein 2011). By 2018, over 50% of students beginning school will be of foreign descent, leading to an increase in linguistic diversity in Hamburg’s schools and of the number of children with bilingual or multilingual backgrounds. Migrants bring with them a multitude of different language combinations, not just the official language(s) of their states of origin. Therefore, the exact number of languages spoken in Hamburg can only be roughly estimated (cf. Gogolin 2010). Consequently, many children attending school in Hamburg have acquired at least two languages before they start learning English. The languages migrants speak differ significantly from one another in terms of status, typology and language maintenance. Large-scale assessment studies in Europe and in Germany such as PISA show correlations between speaking a language other than German at home and low educational attainment (OECD 2010, Klieme et al. 2010). It must be pointed out that children from migrant communities in continental Europe often come from low socioeconomic and educational backgrounds, and thus the correlation between an L1 other than German and low educational attainment level cannot necessarily be attributed to the language constellation. Nonetheless, speaking a language other than German at home is sometimes identified as one of many risk factors in studies such as PISA (Stanat et al. 2010, 226; Daseking et al. 2011). English enjoys a high status and acquiring English at an early age is considered advantageous for children’s future prospects. If bi- and multilingual learners of English can be shown to have higher educational attainment levels for English as a foreign language than their monolingual peers, this would suggest that the correlation between speaking home languages other than German and low educational attainment is irrelevant and that the measured low attainment must indeed be attributed to different factors. Educational research conducted by the German Institute for International Pedagogical Research (DIPF) shows positive effects of multilingualism for English language acquisition in subtractive bilingual situations when socioeconomic factors are controlled for (DESI 2008). In a forthcoming article, Siemund and Lechner (2014) argue for advantages of bi- and multilingual children in the acquisition of English as an

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additional language compared to their monolingual peers, while simultaneously showing that these positive effects for children with migration backgrounds are only identifiable at the beginning of secondary schooling and seem to be either lost or leveled out in the process of secondary schooling. There are linguistic studies implying positive effects for bilinguals when learning additional languages (Flynn et al. 2004), but these studies often do not take language-external variables into account. Even if such variables are taken into account, they can be subsumed under languagerelated external variables, such as for example age of onset and recency of use (De Angelis 2007, 12). Other researchers attempt to control for language-external effects by acquiring language data from groups that are assumed to have similar socioeconomic backgrounds, e.g. university students (Bardel and Falk 2007). These data sets, however, are not representative of language communities as a whole, and can therefore only be starting points when considering acquisition processes of English as a foreign language by migrants in European contexts. At the same time, investigating more representative samples is highly challenging and is sometimes even viewed as unfeasible due to the disambiguation processes, i.e. the identification and weighting of different variables that have to be undertaken with the collected data. In this paper, we examine the effects of bi- and multilingualism on English language acquisition in a qualitative case study. We will do so by focusing on the linguistic aspects of subject-verb agreement and tense and aspect marking and looking at possible cross-linguistic influence (CLI). We argue that language-external factors need to be factored in prior to linguistic analysis, as they may override purely language-based results. We also offer our thoughts on which language-external factors necessarily have to be included. Finally, we argue that the relationship between speaking a language other than German at home and low educational attainment, in this case attainment of English as a foreign language, is a result of socioeconomic background variables rather than the maintenance of home languages.

2. Theoretical background: cross-linguistic influence, SLA and TLA Transfer has been a widely discussed phenomenon since the 1950s, starting with Weinreich’s Languages in Contact (1953) and gaining particular attention from the 1980s onwards (for an overview see Jarvis

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and Pavlenko 2010, 3). Odlin (1989, 27) defines transfer as a bi- and multilateral process enabling both facilitation and interference effects (i.e. both positive and negative transfer) as a result of differences and similarities between the languages involved. We here follow Odlin’s usage and therefore use the terms “transfer” and “cross-linguistic influence” interchangeably. The fact that there are substantial differences between first and second language acquisition (SLA) is widely recognized. By contrast, third language acquisition (TLA) has been treated as a special case of second language acquisition in the past and the differentiation between SLA and TLA remains debated to date (De Angelis 2007, 3–7). In psycholinguistic research in the area of third language acquisition, transfer has primarily been investigated in the domain of the lexicon (De Angelis 2007, 41–50). The area of morphosyntax has received more attention over the last two decades, particularly from generativist perspectives (Zobl 1992, Rothman 2011, 109–111). There are few studies only dealing with the acquisition of third or additional languages by bi- and multilingual children (but see, e.g. Cenoz and Jessner 2003). This is because in TLA research, the presupposition is often that the L2 has already been acquired in formal contexts (as a “true L2”; Bardel and Falk 2007: 460). The L3 is then acquired as a second foreign language. Therefore, language learning strategies developed in the acquisition process of the second language can be utilized when learning an additional language. In our subsample we investigate bilingual informants who acquire English as an additional language, which could be considered to be a case of SLA rather than TLA. When looking at additional language acquisition in bi- and multilingual contexts, developmental patterns are notoriously difficult to discern from CLI, even though the study of transfer has been linked to the study of bilingualism from its very beginnings (cf. Weinreich 1953). In the migrant contexts that the present study looks at, the home languages children have at their disposal come into contact with the language of environment, German, at a very early age (arguably as their second L1). We believe that individuals acquiring an additional language as their second foreign language behave differently from bilinguals acquiring their first foreign language. At the same time, however, we follow Cenoz and Jessner (2003) in contending that bi- and multilingual individuals acquiring an additional language behave differently from monolingual individuals acquiring a foreign language. Thus we believe that we are dealing with TLA rather than SLA. Nonetheless, we here opt to use the term “additional language” rather than “third language” precisely because of the highly complex nature of the subject matter.

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To complicate matters further, the present study deals with bilingual children who have German as their dominant language and learn English as their first foreign language in the context of school. English, then, is considered a global lingua franca. In the research on World Englishes, Germany is typically grouped with the expanding circle countries, as described in Kachru’s influential concentric model (Kachru 1985). This means that it is recognized as a lingua franca and used for purposes of international (business) communication but does not fulfill any official or administrative purposes. The special role of English as a global language means that language acquisition stages may pattern differently than they would in other languages, which is another factor that needs to be taken into account in the present study.

3. Methodology This case study is a subsample of a larger cross-sectional study dealing with the acquisition of English as a foreign language, which in itself is part of an ongoing educational longitudinal panel study (LiPS; see Gogolin, ongoing) on the development of home languages and the majority language German in migrant communities. We conducted interviews with 160 12- and 16-year-old Turkish-German, Vietnamese-German and Russian-German bilinguals as well as a German monolingual control group, distributed equally across age and language groups. The order of acquisition was the same for all bilingual informants: They all acquired their Russian, Vietnamese or Turkish first, German second and started learning English as their first foreign language at school. Background variables and informants’ attainment levels both in German and their heritage language were tested in the context of the main panel study. It was not always possible to extract informants from the main panel study. In these cases, additional interviews with smaller sets of background variables were conducted until the required target numbers were reached. We conducted an additional socioeconomic background interview and a parental questionnaire with all of the informants. The English language tasks consisted of an oral description based on a picture sequence, a written narrative based on a picture sequence (Good Intentions) and an academic language task, also based on a sequence of pictures, which was only conducted with the 16-year-olds and aimed for instructive texts (i.e. children were asked to write an instructive text detailing the construction of a boomerang based on a set of pictures). All of the instruments used were piloted prior to the study. Interviews were

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conducted in the children’s homes and interviews with bilingual informants were conducted by bilingual interviewers, whereas monolingual interviews were conducted by monolingual interviewers. The rationale behind this was to facilitate possible code-switching not only to German but also to bilingual children’s heritage languages. In addition to the 160 interviews conducted with bilingual children in Germany, we also collected reference data from control groups. To this end, interviews were conducted with children learning English as an L2 in Russia and Turkey, and will be conducted with children learning English as an L2 in Vietnam and monolingual English children in the future. In this paper, we focus on five 16-year-olds from each language group in the main cohort. We look at differences in their production of English, focusing on subject-verb agreement and tense/aspect marking. We focus on these two features because they are realized differently in the background languages we are investigating and thus allow us to determine whether transfer occurs from the informants’ L1 or L2. We will leave out language-external variables such as socioeconomic status and educational background of the family and the type of school the informants attend in the first analysis. In a second step, we will look in more detail at language-external factors and how factoring them into the analysis affects the results we find.

4. Preliminary results The results presented here are based on the written narrative only. As already stated above, we here focus on a very small sub-sample (N = 20 with N = 5 per language group) extracted from the older age cohort (16year-olds). The overall numbers of tokens that were produced by the different language groups are illustrated in Figure 4-1. What we find is that that the Turkish-German informants produced comparatively fewer tokens than the other three groups (two out of the five informants in the Turkish-German group produced the exact same number of tokens (N = 73), which is why two of the circles overlap). We can also see that the German monolingual control group contains the two informants who produced the highest number of tokens in the whole subsample.

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Language groups 1 = Russian-German 2 = Turkish-German 3 = Vietnamese-German 4 = German Figure 4-1. Token output.

4.1. Subject-verb agreement Let us now turn to the production of subject-verb agreement. The typologies of the investigated languages are highly diverse. Russian is an inflectional language with fusional morphology and displays fairly complex conjugation patterns (cf. Wade 2011, 240–267). Russian verbs agree with the subject in person and number in non-past forms and in

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gender and number in past forms. Vietnamese is isolating and therefore does not have subject-verb agreement (Ngô 2001, 10). Turkish is an agglutinating language in which the verb agrees with the subject when the subject is expressed by a noun phrase (Göksel and Kerslake 2011, 149– 151). German is moderately inflecting and verbs agree with the subject in number. English, finally, is weakly inflecting and verbs deviate from the standard unmarked agreement patterns only in the case of the third person singular -s as well as in the conjugation paradigm of to be. In the case of subject-verb agreement, we are dealing with potential morphological transfer. Jarvis and Odlin (2000) point out that contrary to claims that inflectional morphology does not transfer, L2 users exhibit cross-linguistic effects in their language use. Often, CLI effects in their language comprehension and production […] show that they have made interlingual identifications (or crosslinguistic associations) (Jarvis and Pavlenko 2010, 93).

It is therefore possible for inflectional morphology to transfer, but we here expect conceptual rather than direct transfer based on the different ways agreement is realized in the language constellations we are dealing with. In our analysis, produced features were split into target-like (TL) and non-target-like (NTL) occurrences. The target varieties that students are aiming for are standard British and American English as they are being taught in the German school context. The information provided in the background questionnaires shows that their contact with English outside school is infrequent. Moreover, we must keep in mind that we are looking at written texts, i.e. students are more likely to access standardized target structures acquired in school than in their oral communication. The accumulated absolute frequencies for each of the groups are illustrated in Figure 4-2. There are significantly more instances of TL than NTL subject-verb agreement in all four groups. Due to the fact that the Turkish-German subsample had the lowest token output overall, this group shows the fewest instances of subject-verb agreement, while simultaneously producing a comparatively higher rate of NTL subject-verb agreement. Examples (1) to (4) show some of the NTL occurrences that our informants produced. We use angled brackets to highlight the feature under discussion.

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(1) 143032 (German monolingual): The son to the father […] They […] (2) 133149 (Vietnamese-German): His father a fish. (3) 123241 (Turkish-German): He to home […] He (4) 113156 (Russian-German): But then another big fish [...]

Figure 4-2. Subject-verb agreement Good Intentions (absolute frequencies).

The most frequent NTL occurrence of subject-verb agreement in all groups is the omission of the third person singular -s. With regard to the typologies of the languages involved, we would expect a higher frequency of this particular non-occurrence with the Vietnamese-German bilinguals, as negative transfer from isolating languages often results in the omission of inflection. In fact, Vietnamese-German bilinguals’ only NTL occurrence is the omission of the third person singular -s, while in the other groups there are also instances of NTL agreement of verbs with third person plural subjects. Overall, however, the differences in production are not statistically significant and the third person singular -s is a feature that develops fairly late in first and second language acquisition processes of

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English. It must also be mentioned that all the Vietnamese-German bilinguals completed the task using the present tense (with interspersed NTL use of past tense forms in the case of one informant). This was not the case for the other language groups. In a next step we look at our informants individually, listing the individuals from most to least proficient according to their performance for the phenomenon of subject-verb agreement with regard to the number of tokens they produced overall. Table 4-1. Percentage of NTL attainment for subject-verb agreement in relation to overall token output. ID

Group

143009 113090 133013 113161 133011 123236 143032 113153 143400 133098 143558 143581 113162 123229 123240 133149 113156 133003 123226 123241

German monolingual Russian-German Vietnamese-German Russian-German Vietnamese-German Turkish-German German monolingual Russian-German German monolingual Vietnamese-German German monolingual German monolingual Russian-German Turkish-German Turkish-German Vietnamese-German Russian-German Vietnamese-German Turkish-German Turkish-German

S-V-agreement NTL % 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.38 0.48 1.07 1.14 1.22 1.52 1.85 1.92 2.74 3.57 3.70 4.76 9.09 10.20

Tokens 229 145 142 120 108 73 262 207 93 174 163 131 162 52 73 112 81 84 33 49

Table 4-1 shows a mixed picture for the percentage of NTL subjectverb agreement. Informants are of course likely to use grammatical

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structures they are familiar with. This means that informants with overall lower rates of attainment may seem more proficient at first glance when looking at specific linguistic structures, as they may produce more TL instances but use the same lexical items and simple tense forms. Furthermore, the informants whose texts did not display any NTL subjectverb agreement all completed their tasks in the past tense. This needs to be borne in mind in the interpretation of this data set. The results are therefore by and large inconclusive. In the German monolingual and the Turkish-German group we find the same number of texts completed in the present tense (N = 4 respectively) and in the past tense (N = 1 respectively). It is therefore interesting to note that most of the German monolingual informants can be found at the higher end of the attainment spectrum for the phenomenon in question, while the majority of Turkish-German informants shows comparatively low attainment levels – even when completing the task in the past tense. The percentage of NTL subject-verb agreement is low for all of the individuals save for 123226 and 123241 from the Turkish-German bilingual group.

4.2. Tense and aspect marking Let us now look at another investigated linguistic phenomenon, namely tense/aspect marking. The languages investigated all mark tense and aspect very differently. Russian has perfective-imperfective verb pairs and morphologically distinguishes between past and non-past (cf. Wade 2011, 240–267). In Turkish, aspect and tense meanings overlap in suffixes: We find fusional tense/aspect suffixes distinguishing between perfective and imperfective as well as the special case of the aorist (Göksel and Kerslake 2011, 180–187). Vietnamese, as an isolating language, normally derives aspectual and temporal meaning from context, and thus can remain unmarked for tense and aspect. Both tense and aspect are often made explicit through particles (Ngô 2001, 17). German distinguishes between past and non-past in terms of tense. Aspectual meanings can be expressed by means of adverbials and locative constructions. English also distinguishes between past and non-past tense, but tense forms encode aspectual meaning much more clearly than in German (progressive, perfective, habitual). Aspect marking in particular is an area that poses challenges for evaluation processes. We primarily investigated the use of tense morphology and target-like and NTL occurrences thereof (i.e. catched instead of caught

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[overgeneralization of -ed] and copula dropping) as well as occurrences of NTL tense switches (i.e. for example from past to non-past). Note that aspectual meaning could, of course, be TL in these cases (as in the case of substituting caught with catched). Aspect errors were only marked as such if the context necessitated the use of a certain aspect, for example through the use of trigger words and phrases such as the whole time and just. In different varieties of English, aspectual meanings are conveyed in different manners (see Davydova 2011). Therefore, it needs to be kept in mind in this context that the target variety the informants were aiming for was standardized British and American English as it is taught in the German school system. Our overall accumulated results for aspect/tense marking are illustrated in Figure 4-3.

Figure 4-3. Tense/Aspect Marking Good Intentions (Absolute Frequencies).

Since we are again looking at the informants’ production rate of verb phrases, there are no major quantitative differences in the output of

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subject-verb agreement and tense/aspect marking. Therefore, it is possible to compare the results shown in Figure 4-3 to those in Figure 4-2. What we can observe here is that the German monolinguals show comparatively more instances of NTL tense/aspect marking than subject-verb agreement. Examples (5) through (8) showcase instances of NTL tense and aspect marking: (5) 123240 (Turkish-German): The man lossing (6) 143009 (German mon.): After the boy and the man are home, they [...] (7) 133003 (Vietnamese-German): He fishing fish (8) 113090 (Russian-German): His father

The five German monolingual informants produced higher NTL occurrences relating to aspectual distinctions, while the other groups show more instances of NTL tense forms. The Russian-German informants used tenses and aspectual meaning in more complex ways than the other groups. They used a multitude of different tense forms and distinguished clearly between progressive and perfective aspectual meaning, whereas the other groups tended to use only one tense form throughout the entire text. The following extract from informant 113156 illustrates this nicely: (9)

Yesterday I went to a park outside the city with my grandpa. He wanted to show me how to fish without a route. So he took a fishcatcher and after a while he caught a big grey fish. My grandpa took the fish and carried it to our home. I’d been watching the fish all the way home. My grandpa wanted to make fish sticks out of the fish and had already put out his knife when I started to cry: “No. please don’t hurt the poor fish.” I just couldn’t see the poor fish die.

Informants are listed according to their percentage of NTL tense and aspect marking in Table 4-2. It is interesting to note that while the majority of Turkish-German informants is still at the lower end of the spectrum, the German monolingual group shows more mixed results overall. Furthermore, the Russian-German informants seem to show comparatively higher rates of TL tense and aspect marking. Their rate of NTL tense and aspect marking ranges from 0% to 1.37%. On average, individual percentages of NTL tense and aspect marking are higher than for subject-verb agreement across all groups. When compared with overall scores (see Section 3.3.), tense/aspect marking seems to be a better indicator of overall attainment rates than subject-verb agreement. Again, this can be attributed to the fact

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that NTL subject-verb agreement is far more prevalent in texts completed in the present tense. Table 4-2. Percentage of NTL attainment for tense and aspect marking in relation to overall token output. ID

Language group

113161 113156 143032 113162 143558 133013 113153 133098 113090 133149 123241 143400 123236 123226 133011 143581 143009 133003 123240 123229

Russian-German Russian-German German monolingual Russian-German German monolingual Vietnamese-German Russian-German Vietnamese-German Russian-German Vietnamese-German Turkish-German German monolingual Turkish-German Turkish-German Vietnamese-German German monolingual German monolingual Vietnamese-German Turkish-German Turkish-German

Aspect-tense NTL % 0 0 0.38 0.61 0.61 0.70 0.96 1.14 1.37 1.78 2.04 2.15 2.74 3.03 3.70 3.81 3.93 4.76 8.21 9.61

Tokens 120 81 262 162 163 142 207 174 145 112 49 93 73 33 108 131 229 84 73 52

4.3. Overall scores in the written task For our study, overall attainment scores were calculated for each task on the basis of textual complexity (scored as the relation of subordinate clauses to main clauses and function words to content words), lexical richness (determined through a type-token ratio and a lemma-token ratio), overall correctness score (overall TL vs. NTL occurrences) and the length

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of the text. We here choose to use the term attainment rather than proficiency, because the task we present here tested primarily for aspects of literacy attainment under specific circumstances. Moreover, we would like to caution that our overall scores are based on our production task rather than for example a C-Test. The generated scores were transferred into a scoring system which ranged from 0 (lowest possible attainment level) to 6 (highest possible attainment level). Attainment level 6 can be compared to a B2/C1 level in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe 2004; Little 2006), while 0 is below A1. When listing individuals according to these generated attainment scores from highest to lowest attainment level, the results are as illustrated in Table 4-3. Table 4-3. Informants listed according to overall attainment scores. ID

Language group

143032 113153 113161 143009 133013 113162 143558 113090 143581 143400 133098 133149 123241 133011 133003 113156 123240 123236 123229 123226

German monolingual Russian-German Russian-German German monolingual Vietnamese-German Russian-German German monolingual Russian-German German monolingual German monolingual Vietnamese-German Vietnamese-German Turkish-German Vietnamese-German Vietnamese-German Russian-German Turkish-German Turkish-German Turkish-German Turkish-German

Overall attainment score 6 5 4.5 4 4 4 3.5 3.5 3 3 3 2.5 2.5 2 2 2 1.5 1 1 0.5

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The table shows that the majority of Russian-German and German monolingual informants in the extracted sample range from intermediate to advanced attainment levels, while the Vietnamese-German and TurkishGerman informants can be found at the lower end of the spectrum. The four lowest language attainment rates in the performance of the written task of the investigated sub-sample can be ascribed to Turkish-German informants. Based on these results, the Turkish-German group is outperformed by the other groups both when looking at the isolated phenomena of subjectverb agreement and tense and aspect marking as well as at overall attainment rates. Their attainment levels of English as a foreign language seem to be comparatively lower.

4.4 Literacy attainment scores and language-external factors We will now turn to language-external factors in our analysis. We have decided to add to our results gender, the age of onset for German, the HISEI index (highest socioeconomic status according to parents’ income and occupation; Ehmke and Siegle 2005), the HISCED index (highest educational background of the household, i.e. the highest educational degrees informants’ parents acquired; Ehmke and Siegle 2005) and the school form the informants attend. For school form we will only distinguish between Gymnasium (i.e. the university-bound school track) and other school forms, since studies have shown that the biggest gaps in attainment levels can be observed between students who attend the Gymnasium and students who attend other school types, whereas the differences in attainment between other school types are not as high. The Stadtteilschule and the Gesamtschule are hybrid forms of secondary school. They combine middle and secondary school tracks. The Stadtteilschule is a school track that is unique to Hamburg. The Realschule is a school form that only offers middle school education. There are special school forms, such as the Förder- and Sonderschule. These tend to children with learning disabilities and are therefore attended by students with significantly lower educational attainment levels. Normally, differences in attainment within classes of the same school type are not as high in countries with tracked school systems as they are in countries with comprehensive school systems (Dronkers et al. 2011, 31). It is important to remember that the school forms children attend are a result of social stratification and thus a result of multiple underlying

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variables. The HISCED index ranges from Level 1 (lowest possible level) to Level 6 (highest possible level). The HISEI index ranges from 16 and 90, 90 being the highest possible socioeconomic status. Table 4-4 again lists informants according to their overall attainment level in the written task with the addition of the background variables discussed. Table 4-4. Overall attainment scores and language-external factors (School form: G = Gymnasium, Ge = Gesamtschule, S = Stadtteilschule, R = Realschule). ID 143032 113153 113161 143009 133013 113162 143558 113090 143581 143400 133098 133149 123241 133011 133003 113156 123240 123236 123229 123226

Group Attainment Gender Onset HISCED HISEI School level German* level form Ger. mon. 6 f Ger. mon. 6 88 G Rus.-Ger. 5 m 4 6 71 G Rus.-Ger. 4.5 f >6 6 88 G Ger. mon. 4 m Ger. mon. 6 51 G Viet.-Ger. 4 m 0 5 44 G Rus.-Ger. 4 f >6 4 34 G Ger. mon. 3.5 m Ger. mon. 6 69 G Rus.-Ger. 3.5 f 6 6 67 G Ger. mon. 3 m Ger. mon. 4 30 S Ger. mon. 3 m Ger. mon. 3 56 R Viet.-Ger. 3 f 3 6 67 G Viet.-Ger. 2.5 f 4 5 43 G Tur.-Ger. 2.5 m 0 3 49 S Viet.-Ger. 2 m 3 3 34 S Viet.-Ger. 2 m 3 n/a 71 Ge Rus.-Ger. 2 f 0 2 30 R Tur.-Ger. 1.5 f 0 3 39 S Tur.-Ger. 1 f 0 2 43 G Tur.-Ger. 1 f 3 3 26 R Tur.-Ger. 0.5 f 3 3 26 S

*) Age of onset.

Bearing in mind that our results are descriptive and qualitative in nature, Table 4-4 demonstrates that the age of onset for German as well as the gender of informants plays a negligible role in the sample discussed

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here. The school form informants attend, by contrast, is a strong predictor of their overall attainment scores for the written task, but it is not the only predictor. When HISCED and HISEI are both high and the child attends the Gymnasium, the overall attainment score is high, as well. This is the case for the three informants with the highest overall attainment scores in our data. Low HISCED and HISEI indexes in turn coincide with the lowest overall attainment scores. Although informant 123236 attends the Gymnasium, her overall attainment score is low. However, her family has a low educational background and a slightly below average socioeconomic background. In sum, the educational and socioeconomic backgrounds of informants’ families seem to play an equally important role as the school form informants attend. These variables are possible explanations as to why some of the informants who attend the Gymnasium are outperformed by informants who attend other school forms. At first glance, 143581 and 143400 (both German monolinguals) seem to diverge from the pattern, as they do not attend the Gymnasium, and their households have comparatively lower HISEI and HISCED indexes. A closer look however reveals that their attainment scores are the same as that of informant 133098 (Vietnamese-German), who attends the Gymnasium, and only slightly above those of 133149 (VietnameseGerman), who also attends the Gymnasium but whose family has a comparatively lower HISEI index. Informant 143400 remains an interesting case. A look at further background variables reveals that this informant spent some time abroad living with a family in the United States, thus accounting for a comparatively high attainment score with regard to school form and socioeconomic background. All of the bilingual informants stated that they mostly spoke their heritage languages at home. In addition to the variables discussed here, individual differences such as language aptitude also account for differences in language attainment. In our study, these were controlled for by means of a digit-span memory test. The results indicate higher levels of language aptitude for informants attending the Gymnasium.

5. Discussion In our sample of 16-year-olds, the informants’ language backgrounds are likely not the primary source for NTL occurrences in their written production of English as a foreign language. For the phenomenon of subject-verb agreement, the quality of NTL occurrences is similar for all language groups. For tense and aspect marking, there is a slightly higher

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tendency for German monolinguals to use aspect in a NTL manner than for the other groups, while at the same time Russian-German informants have the least difficulties as far as aspect marking is concerned. However, the differences for these two isolated features are marginal overall. Turkish-German individuals are outperformed by their peers both regarding subject-verb agreement and aspect marking. In addition, they also have overall lower attainment scores. In this context, it is interesting to note that the lowest attainment levels for reading competencies in German were measured for children of Turkish descent in the PISA study (Stanat et al. 2010, 227). It is unlikely that the low attainment levels of the Turkish-German informants in our sub-sample can be attributed to their bilingualism, since both the Russian-German and Vietnamese-German group show no significant differences when compared with the German monolingual group. It is therefore more likely that the transfer effects we can observe are the result of different developmental stages of language acquisition and/or incomplete acquisition processes due to language-external factors. It is a widely acknowledged phenomenon that in late L2/Ln acquisition, important stages of language development are sometimes skipped or not reached at all (cf. Singleton and Ryan 2004). All of the informants in our sample had English as a school subject since grade three (in some cases since grade one). In primary school, foreign language education is highly informal. At the end of fourth grade, students in Hamburg are expected to have reached an A1/A1+ attainment level in English according to the curriculum for English in primary schools (Gründemann et al. 2011). According to the European Framework of Reference for Languages, A1 is defined as the Breakthrough Level. In the framework, a language learner with an A1 attainment level is described as follows: Can understand and use familiar everyday expressions and very basic phrases aimed at the satisfaction of needs of a concrete type. Can introduce him/herself and others and can ask and answer questions about personal details such as where he/she lives, people he/she knows and things he/she has. Can interact in a simple way provided the other person talks slowly and clearly and is prepared to help (Council of Europe 2004, 24).

Learners with an A1 attainment level will tend to have more pronounced receptive than productive language skills. The A1 written level is restricted to very basic, formulaic language i.e. “writ[ing a] short simple postcard […] [and] fill[ing] in forms with personal details” (Council of Europe 2004, 26, our additions). In Germany, extensive formal written education of English as a foreign language starts in grade five, i.e.

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at the beginning of secondary school. It is therefore possible that by age sixteen some NTL aspects of students’ English language production have already become fossilized and manifest in their written output. Since our informants learn English as a foreign language, it is highly unlikely that they will achieve native or native-like attainment in the context of schooling (Cenoz 2003, 78). It must also be pointed out that English language education takes place in a decidedly monolingual framework, i.e. English is taught based on the assumption that it is the first language besides German that is being acquired. All of the bilingual informants in our subsample were unbalanced bilinguals with German as their dominant language. With German as the point of reference in English language teaching and its dominant status, it seems more likely for cross-linguistic influences in bilingual informants’ written output to come primarily from German. If we look at informants 123229 and 123226, i.e. the informants with the lowest attainment scores out of the entire sub-sample, we indeed find instances of code-mixing from German: (10) 123229 (Turkish-German): But then come a and eat the fish (‘shark’) (11) 123226 (Turkish-German): He (‘cuts it out’)

These instances are examples of coping strategies to overcome low attainment levels in English rather than bilingual code-switching with communicative and social meaning (Auer 1999, 1). Code-mixing occurs from German rather than Turkish, which makes sense given how students in Germany are taught English and considering that they often have no formal written education in Turkish. Switching to German or directly transferring grammatical phenomena from German does not occur with informants who have an attainment level of 3 or higher in English. Sociopragmatics may also play a role here, since it seems reasonable to assume that informants would want their written output to be understandable to the reader. Subsequently, we can observe negative lexical transfer effects from the majority language German, even though lexical transfer from German does not occur in higher attainment levels. For the morphosyntactic features discussed in this article, however, there are no significant differences between the groups. The quality of the effects we could observe did not single out German as the main source for transfer. Differences in transfer effects based on the different background languages of our bilingual informants seem unlikely for the two features evaluated here. As stated above and expanded upon in Section 3.2, we did observe that German monolinguals tended to produce more aspect-based NTL occurrences and Russian-German bilinguals had a tendency to

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produce aspectual meaning in a more complex way. This points towards an effect of typological similarity and salience of the feature in question, as Russian distinguishes between different aspectual meanings more clearly than German. These tendencies, however, were too small to point conclusively towards transfer effects from Russian or German, and therefore bear no measurable significance. For subject-verb agreement, there were no significant differences in the quality of transfer effects that could be observed. Based on these findings, differences in written language production at first glance are not primarily the result of language-based transfer effects from the children’s home languages, at least not in this age group and not as far as the investigated features of subject-verb agreement and tense and aspect marking are concerned. Regarding the differences in production that we could observe, it is noteworthy that German and English are typologically more similar than any of the other languages involved. In addition to the fact that most of our bilingual informants did not acquire literacy skills in their L1s, typological proximity, which has been identified as one of the most important factors for the transferability of features (Jarvis and Pavlenko 2010, 176; Ringbom 2007), provides a convincing explanation for our findings. In fact, Russian-German bilinguals with high attainment rates in our task had acquired literacy skills in Russian. This needs to be kept in mind in the interpretation of the data at hand as it can serve as an explanation for their comparatively high attainment scores. To sum up, although the observed differences in English language production are not primarily related to the languages children have at their disposal, the typological proximity of German and English is likely to play a role, albeit one that is statistically insignificant. When taking the socioeconomic background variables into account, lower attainment scores seem to coincide with lower socioeconomic background factors, including the educational level of the households that the informants come from. Germany has a tracked school system, and students are normally divided into different school types after grade four. School forms are a consequence of social stratification, as children with higher socioeconomic and educational backgrounds are more likely to attend the highest possible form of secondary education, i.e. the Gymnasium. For the most part, the school forms students attend, as a result of these social stratification processes, are indicators of their overall educational attainment levels. We find this mirrored in our results for the overall attainment scores of the written task, as most of the students with higher attainment scores are, in fact, attendees of the Gymnasium. This is, however, not always the case, and automatically equating students

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attending the Gymnasium with higher overall attainment scores is therefore not possible. To sum up, our results demonstrate the importance of languageexternal variables for the analysis of language data, as the attainment scores of the Turkish-German group can be adequately explained by factoring in background variables. These results are mirrored on a larger scale, as evidenced by findings regarding the socioeconomic and educational background of Turkish-German participants of the PISA study (Stanat et al. 2010, 225). Although we have illustrated the importance of language-external factors, we have also shown that not all of the background variables we collected have an effect on our data. Most noticeably, gender and the age of onset for German do not seem to play a major role for the written attainment scores of the informants in our subsample. It must be noted that there are other additional variables that are important in children’s L2/Ln acquisition processes which could not be adequately measured with our interview design. One important external factor we could not control for is the quality of language input and English language teaching. In conclusion, German students do not have higher levels of attainment in English than their bi- and multilingual peers after language-external factors have been taken into account. At the same time, however, bi- and multilingual informants in the sub-sample discussed here have no measurable advantages compared to their peers at age sixteen. This is not only the case for the sub-sample discussed in this article, but for all 16year-old informants in our study (N = 80). These results are interesting with regard to the DESI study, which investigated students between the ages of fourteen and sixteen and found advantages for migrant children in this age group. Although we could not confirm these findings, our results show that unbalanced bilingualism does not seem to be the primary reason behind the low educational attainment levels of English as a foreign language of specific migrant groups in Germany.

6. Concluding remarks In this small, qualitative study we investigated bilingual and monolingual production of written English, focusing on the phenomena of subject-verb agreement and tense/aspect marking. Our results have shown that speaking a language other than German at home most likely cannot be viewed as the reason for low educational attainment levels of some migrant groups in the acquisition of written

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English in the German context. Even though the investigated sub-sample is small in size, the results coincide with other large-scale studies (DESI 2008). Contrary to the results from the DESI study, however, we could thus far not identify advantages for sixteen-year-old bi- and multilingual informants compared to their monolingual peers, even when factoring in socioeconomic background variables. We would like to stress once again that our results must be viewed in the light of the fact that we investigated only a small subsample of informants, so that the scope of our results is, of course, limited. Nonetheless, the effects observable in our informants’ English output could not be attributed to the differences in their language background. Although the cross-linguistic effects observable in the informants’ language output could not be conclusively traced back to their L1s, it is conceivable that the developmental patterning in English can be considered to be the result of prolonged contact with German. Due to the typological similarity of German and English, it seems likely that informants would draw upon German rather than their typologically more distant L1s in their production of English. We do find some instances of overt lexical transfer from German with informants who achieve comparatively lower literacy scores, whereas there is no overt CLI observable from the informants’ L1s. Overall, however, our results indicate that differences in our literacy attainment scores for English are more adequately explained by looking at language-external factors. In migrant communities language-external factors play important roles in the overall attainment rates of individual groups. We have argued that the major differences in the level of literacy we could observe–i.e. the difference between the Turkish-German and the other groups–are the result of differences in developmental stages which in turn can be traced back to differences in language-external factors. No singular languageexternal variable can explain the effects we can observe in their entirety. Moreover, we cannot assume unilateral paths of development for specific migrant groups based on ethnic factors. Rather, there are multiple factors that need to be considered, leading to a complex, super-diverse picture (cf. Vertovec 2007; Blommaert 2010). Using the school form as a determining factor for homogenizing background variables in the context we investigated is not necessarily valid. Additional variables need to be taken into account. Similarly, it cannot be assumed that informants will have similar educational and socioeconomic backgrounds simply because they attend the same educational institute, as other language-external factors may

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nevertheless have a major impact on the results. This needs to be taken into account in further research in all areas that deal with empirical language data.

Notes 1. In Germany, children are categorized as having a migration background if one of their parents was either born abroad or has a foreign national identity (= a foreign passport). If the children themselves have a foreign national identity they are categorized as foreign nationals.

References Auer, Peter, ed. 1999. Code-Switching in Communication. Language, Identity and Meaning. London, New York: Routledge. Bardel, Camilla, and Ylva Falk. 2007. “The role of the second language in third language acquisition: The case of Germanic syntax.” Second Language Research 23 (4): 459–484. Blommaert, Jan. 2010. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cenoz, Jasone. 2003. “The influence of age on the acquisition of English: General attainment, attitudes and code mixing.” In Age and the Acquisition of English as a Foreign Language, edited by Maríadel Pilar García Mayo and María Luisa García Lecumberri, 77–93. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Cenoz, Jasone and Ulrike Jessner, eds. 2003. English in Europe: The Acquisition of a Third Language. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Council of Europe. 2004. The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. 7th edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daseking, Monika, Anika Bauer, Julia Knievel, Franz Petermann, and Hans-Christian Waldmann 2011. “Kognitive Entwicklungsrisiken bei zweisprachig aufwachsenden Kindern mit Migrationshintergrund im Vorschulalter.” Praxis der Kinderpsychologie 60 (5): 351–368. Davydova, Julia. 2011. The Present Perfect in Non-Native Englishes. A Corpus-Based Study of Variation. Topics in English Linguistics, Vol. 77, edited by Bernd Kortmann and Elisabeth Closs Traugott. Berlin and Boston: Mouton de Gruyter.

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De Angelis, Gessica. 2007. Third or Additional Language Acquisition. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. DESI-Konsortium, edition. 2008. Unterricht und Kompetenzerwerb in Deutsch und Englisch. DESI-Ergebnisse Band 2. Weinheim: Beltz Pädagogik. Dronkers, Jaap, Rolf van der Velden, and Allison Dunne. 2011. “The effects of educational systems, school composition, track-level, parental background and immigrants’ origins on the achievement of 15-years old native and immigrant students. A reanalysis of PISA 2006” [= ROA Research Memorandum 6]. Maastricht University: Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market (ROA). [http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:unm:umaror:2011006. Accessed April 8th 2014]. Ehmke, Timo, and Thilo Siegle. 2005. “ISEI, ISCED, HOMEPOS, ESCS.” Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft 8 (4): 521–539. Flynn, Suzanne, Claire Foley, and Inna Vinnitskaya. 2004. “The cumulative-enhancement model for language acquisition. Comparing adults’ and children’s patterns of development in first, second and third language acquisition.” International Journal of Multilingualism 1 (1): 3-17. Gogolin, Ingrid. 2010. “Linguistic diversity management in urban areas – LiMA – ein Forschungsverbund der Universität Hamburg.” Diskurs Kindheits- und Jugendforschung 4: 441–444. Göksel, AslÕ, and Celia Kerslake. 2011. Turkish: An Essential Grammar. New York: Routledge. Gründemann, Angela, Pamela Hanus, Ester Lehmbäcker, Maike ReichartWallrabenstein, and Dagmar Rucys. 2011. Bildungsplan Grundschule: Englisch. Hamburg: Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg (Behörde für Schule und Berufsbildung). Jarvis, Scott, and Terence Odlin. 2000. “Morphological type, spatial reference, and language transfer.” Studies in Second Language Acquisition 22 (4): 47–77. Jarvis, Scott, and Aneta Pavlenko. 2010. Crosslinguistic Influence in Language and Cognition. 2nd edition. New York: Routledge. Kachru, Braj B. 1985. “Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: The English language in the Outer Circle.” In English in the World: Teaching and Learning the Language and Literatures, edited by Randolph Quirk and Henry Widdowson, 11–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klieme, Eckhardt, Nina Jude, Jürgen Baumert, and Manfred Prenzel. 2010. “PISA 2000-2009: Bilanz der Veränderungen im Schulsystem.”

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In PISA 2009. Bilanz nach einem Jahrzehnt, edited by Eckhard Klieme, Cordula Artelt, Johannes Hartig, Nina Jude, Olaf Köller, Manfred Prenzel, Wolfgang Schneider, and Petra Stanat, 23–66. Münster: Waxmann. LiPS: LiMA (Linguistic Diversity Management in Urban Areas) Panel Study (LiPS); 2009–2013; Projektkoordination LiPS: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Ingrid Gogolin; ©LiMA-LiPS 2013. Little, David. 2006. “The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Content, purpose, origin, reception and impact.” Language Teaching 39 (3): 167–190. Ngô, Binh N. 2001. “The Vietnamese language learning framework. Part One: Linguistics.” Journal of Southeast Language Teaching 10: 1–23. Odlin, Terence. 1989. Language Transfer. Crosslinguistic Influence in Language Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. OECD. 2010. PISA 2009 at a Glance. OECD: OECD Publishing. Ringbom, Håkan. 2007. Cross-Linguistic Similarity in Foreign Language Learning. Second Language Acquisition 21. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Rothman, Jason. 2011. “L3 syntactic transfer selectivity and typological determinacy. The typological primacy model.” Second Language Research 27 (1): 107–127. Siemund, Peter, and Simone Lechner. Forthcoming in 2014. “Transfer effects in the acquisition of English as an additional language by bilingual children in Germany.” In Transfer Effects in Multilingual Language Development, edited by Hagen Peukert. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Singleton, David, and Lisa Ryan. 2004. Language Acquisition: The Age Factor. 2nd edition. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Stanat, Petra, Dominique Rauch, and Michael Segeritz. 2010. “Schülerinnen und Schüler mit Migrationshintergerund.” In PISA 2009. Bilanz nach einem Jahrzehnt, edited by Eckhard Klieme, Cordula Artelt, Johannes Hartig, Nina Jude, Olaf Köller, Manfred Prenzel, Wolfgang Schneider, and Petra Stanat, 277–300. Münster: Waxmann. Statistisches Amt für Hamburg und Schleswig-Holstein. 2011. Statistik informiert...Spezial. VII/2011.City of Hamburg. Vertovec, Stephen. 2007. “Super-diversity and its implications.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 29 (6): 1024–1054. Wade, Terence. 2011. A Comprehensive Russian Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell. Weinreich, Uriel. 1953. Languages in Contact. The Hague: Mouton.

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Zobl, Helmut. 1992. “Prior linguistic knowledge and the conservatism of the learning procedure: Grammaticality judgements of unilingual and multilingual learners.” In Language Transfer in Language Learning, edited by Susan Gass and Larry Selinker, 176–196. Rowley: Newbury House.

CHAPTER TWELVE BORROWING METALANGUAGE: FINNISH PAST TENSE TERMINOLOGY IN GRAMMAR DESCRIPTIONS AND TEACHING MARIA KOK Abstract Creating and maintaining metalanguage is a practical language contact situation which involves borrowing, translation and interpretation of terminological items. The variety of sources to borrow from and the long history of grammar traditions can turn individual metalanguages into complex networks where target-source relations and term-referent relations are intertwinend with tradition and the practical needs of communicative and educational purposes. Borrowed terminological items have the tendency to onomasticize or become non-transparent. Once this happens, their meaning may become unstable and start to shift. Interesting examples of onomasticized metalinguistic items are the traditional names of the Finnish past tenses. My attempt is to examine the process of borrowing and onomasticizing of the Latin derived grammatical terms imperfekti and perfekti, which entered Finnish during the 17th–19th century. In the earliest Finnish grammar books—Petraeus (1649), Martinius (1689) and Vhael (1733)—a different terminological system for the tenses was used in comparison to the contemporary grammars. Especially Vhael (1733) shows a good understanding of the differences between the tense systems of Finnish and Latin. The set of the tense terms currently in use appears for the first time in Finnische Sprachenlehre für Finnen und Nicht-Finnen by Johan Strahlmann (1816), who also suggests that the meaning of the terms is motivated by a remoteness distinction between the corresponding tenses. This explanation becomes popular during the first half of the 19th century. Towards the end of the century, a more rigid approach begins to dominate: grammarians insist that the Latin aspectual system is directly applicable to Finnish. This approach finally gives way to an onomasticized interpretation according to which imperfekti and perfekti

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are simply names for verbal categories and their meaning does not need to be understood or explained.

1. Introduction The object of the present study1 is to determine how the Latin-derived names imperfekti and perfekti became part of the traditional Finnish grammar. Imperfekti is used as the name for the Finnish simple past tense and perfekti refers to one of the composed past tenses. These names are purely conventional and in contradiction with their referents: In practice imperfekti has more often a perfective than imperfective aspect, and although perfekti may express past completed actions, it is often used for expressing actions that are still continuing at the moment of speech. Although the discrepancy between the discussed terms and their referents is well known (e.g. Hakulinen 1979, 247–248; Itkonen 1966, 281; Larjavaara 2007, 365) most scholars have consented to use them. Recently there has been pressure to find suitable replacements. Terms such as imperfekti have caused compatibility issues in comparative linguistics and language typology research (Miestamo 2005, 573). In addition, teachers of Finnish as L2 have expressed their concerns about the negative impact that misleading terminology may have on the learning process (Siitonen 2000a, 2000b; Martin et al. 2005, 856; Kok 2012). The role of modern metalanguage in language awareness and second language acquisition has been studied lately by, e.g. Schleppegrell (2013) but to my knowledge, the connection between traditional grammar terminology and language contact situations has not yet received much attention, even though metalanguage has historically played an important part in situtions where scolars and speakers of different languages have met. As my database I have used a corpus that consists of 48 grammars and grammar-related texts, published between 1649 and 1915, in which the terminology and the Finnish tense system are described. By using a text oriented method I attempt to investigate how the terms imperfekti and perfekti were taken from their original source system into the function and position they currently hold in Finnish grammar. This article is structured as follows: the relationship between metalanguage, language contacts and borrowing is discussed in Section 2. The studied terms are introduced in connection to the actual verb forms they putatively describe. Also, the data and the methods are discussed in more detail in this section. Sections 3–9 are devoted to a close reading of the early grammars. Finally, the results of the study are discussed in chapter 10 in the light of the present situation.

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2. Metalanguage, onomastization and pseudo terms Metalanguage, our “language about language”, is the verbal framework that we use to conceptualize linguistic phenomena. It is related to language contacts on many levels. On the one hand, metalanguage facilitates language contacts. Classifying and conceptualizing vocabulary is helpful in conscious language contact situations such as learning, studying and teaching foreign languages. Metalanguage becomes indispensable in linguistic research on international level, especially when we want to share the results of our findings. On the other hand, language contacts contribute to the development of metalanguage. Linguistic vocabulary, such as names for grammatical structures and categories, needs often to be borrowed. Occasionally this may be because the language we wish to describe does not have the vocabulary needed. We also wish to harmonize diverse metalinguistic systems. By borrowing terminology and concepts and by negotiating their meaning, we collectively constitute an interface that enables us to communicate about languages across borders. Although the purpose of metalanguage is to systematize language description, individual metalanguages are not always as systematic as presumed. Linguistic research is an ongoing process. When new insights are acquired, these must be conceptualized, and new vocabulary often needs to be borrowed. Frequent borrowing from various sources during long periods of time creates metalinguistic stratifications. An average university student or a teacher can easily use terms originating from four or five sources during one single day, without being aware of this. Common sources for the basic grammatical concepts have been the old lingua franca -languages such as Latin (e.g. singular, plural, adjective, pronoun) or Greek (e.g. analytical, anaphoric). More specialized terms suh as the German umlaut and ablaut or the old Sanskrit bahuvrihi originate from traditions where a certain linguistic phenomenon was first discovered. Even those terms that may seem domestic are often loan translations or calques, such as the Finnish yksikkö ‘singular’, monikko ‘plural’ or taivutus ‘inflection, declination’. It is also possible to combine loans from various sources and to coin terms such as bahuvrihi-adjective or anaphoric pronoun. Besides other metalinguistic systems, we may use other professional fields as sources of terminology. A phenomenon in other research field may have enough resemblance with a linguistic phenomenon in order to be used as a metaphor. For instance, the syntactic concept of valence as a property of verbs originates from the field of chemistry, in which valence refers to the reactivity of chemical substances.

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Constituting our metalanguage from loanwords and borrowed concepts can be most profitable. It may even be the very method that keeps our metalanguage communicative. We should, however, stay alert: loan words easily start to lead their own lives, and grammar terms are no exeptions. If the metalanguage users lose access to the source, the borrowed items may become semantically non-transparent and turn into onomastic items. Users may still know to which concepts the terms refer to. Most of them, however, are no longer able to discern the motivation between the terms and the corresponding concepts. Onomastization is a cognitive and collective process that affects whole communities of metalanguage users, the expert level included. A grammar term may be considered fully onomasticized when its meaning has become obscure for professionals such as teachers and grammarians, who use the term in a similar way as a toponym, a trademark of a product, or a name for an animal or plant species. Even a completely non-transparent term may still be in harmony with the concept it refers to. Its extension, however, may start to expand or to narrow down from the original or to distort in other ways. Minor shifts may pass without much practical consequence. A case in point would be the term adjective which traditionally refers to words that denote qualitative properties. The literal meaning of adjective is rather ‘a word that is added to another’ than a ‘word indicating quality’. Because most of the additional words or attributes do also indicate quality, the shift of meaning does not significantly distort the extension of the term. An onomasticized terminological item may, however, develop into a pseudo term if one or more of the following changes take place: 1. The extension of the term expands to include referents unrelated to its original meaning. 2. The extension partly or totally shifts away from the original referents. 3. The extensional shift violates conceptual hierarchies and confuses subordinate and superordinate concept levels. A traditional Finnish grammar term indefiniittipronominit ‘indefinite pronouns’ will serve as an example (e.g. Leino 1997, 70–71). At first glance indefiniittipronominit seems a valid term, for pronouns of indefinite meaning do exist. In the Finnish tradition however, this pronoun class has become a grammatical dumping yard: the extension of the term has expanded to include not only the actual indefinite pronouns but also many pronouns with a definite meaning, some adjectives and even a few

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adverbs (Tuomikoski 1969, 84; Suojanen 1977, 18–19; Vilkuna 1996, 335; Kok 2011). Besides, conceptual hierarchies have been crossed: indefiniittipronomit is the name of the whole pronoun class, and also of one of the subgroups of this pronoun class. Iso suomen kielioppi ‘A Comprehensive Finnish Grammar’ (ISK 2004, § 740–762) has replaced indefiniittipronominit with a more accurate term kvanttoripronominit ‘quantifier pronouns’. In spite of this, the term indefiniittipronominit is still in common use. Once established, pseudo terms can become persistent, ergonomic problems that affect the very purpose of metalanguage (Kok 2012). For this study I have chosen two pseudo terms in traditional Finnish grammar, namely imperfekti and perfekti. They both belong to a terminological system that refers to the Finnish tenses. Imperfekti refers to the Finnish simple past tense. Morphologically, it is formed by placing the marker i before the personal ending (compare the examples 1 and 2): (1) Asu-n Helsingi-ssä live-1SG Helsinki-INE ‘I live in Helsinki’ (2) Asu-i-n Helsingi-ssä live-PST-1SG Helsinki-INE ‘I lived in Helsinki’

Despite its name, imperfekti is not typically used for denoting continuous, uncompleted or otherwise imperfective past actions. On the contrary, it is frequently characterized as a tense that denotes actions that have been completed at a spesific time in the past or at least are considered to be all over at the moment of speech. Imperfekti is typically used in narratives. (Ikola 1950, 15; ISK 2004, §1530, 1531; White 2008, 199.) The term perfekti refers to a composed past tense consisting of a present tense auxiliary verb olla ‘to be’ and a past participle of the main verb (see example 3). In addition to imperfekti and perfekti, the Finnish language also has another composed past tense called pluskvamperfekti. It consists of the auxiliary verb olla ‘to be’ in the simple past tense and the past participle of the main verb (example 4).

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Chapter Twelve (3) Ole-n asu-nut Helsingi-ssä Helsinki-INE be-1SG live-PPC ‘I have lived in Helsinki’ (4) Ol-i-n asu-nut Helsingi-ssä Helsinki-INE be-PST-1SG live-PPC ’I had lived in Helsinki’

Perfekti is characterized as a tense that “partly represents the past and partly the present” or as a past tense with “relevance to the present moment” (ISK 2004, § 1534; Karlsson 2002, 156). The action that perfekti refers to may be completed or still continuing at the moment of speech. In both cases perfekti refers to the earlier event in connection to another event or situation on the non-past temporal level, which may be either the present or the future. (ISK 2004, § 1534–1535, 1537; Ikola 1949, 46–47; 1950, 85.) Pluskvamperfekti2, on the other hand, usually refers to a past event that has taken place before another past event or situation (ISK 2004, § 1540–1541; Ikola 1950, 171.) Because imperfekti and perfekti may express perfective (completed) and imperfective (not completed) actions, both these verb forms have been named according to a feature that is not their essential or delimiting characteristic (see Suonuuti 1997, 10). The extension of the term imperfekti includes many verb forms that denote perfective actions while not all verb forms with an imperfective meaning are classified as instances of imperfekti. The same type of extensional shift has occurred to perfekti. The reason behind this mislabeling is historical: the tenses were named before their use was studied3. A series of “industrial accidents” occurred at critical moments when the terms were transferred from one metalinguistic system to another. By a close reading of earlier Finnish grammars I attempt to track how imperfekti and perfekti were borrowed, onomasticized and turned into pseudo terms. The majority of my corpus data comes from the collection of Suomen Wanhat Kieliopit (SWK) ‘The Old Finnish Grammars’ compiled by Kalevi Wiik (1987). It contains 43 works that were published between 1649 and 1898. I have excluded those writings that deal only with nouns, phonetics and derivation or are otherwise irrelevant for the present purposes. Besides Wiik’s collection, I have included two 19th century grammars available online (Roos 1851; Sohlberg 1861), a recently found early grammar called Rudimenta linguae Finnicae breviter delineata (Rudimenta 2012), four articles on grammar by Elias Lönnrot (1990b, 344–452; 1991, 205–208, 299–304) and the Memorandums (1888; 1915) of the two first national Grammar Committees4. My interest is especially on the description of the

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Finnish tense system as a collective product and my main method is close reading. This text oriented5 research method originates from New Criticism, a branch of literature studies that strives to approach the studied texts without previous bias, to pay close attention to the details and to seek keys for interpretations within the studied texts themselves (e.g. Richards 1978 [1929]). I have attempted to work according to these guide lines and to keep my focus on the contents of the studied works. Values of judgements given by previous research have been temporally laid aside. As a complementary method I have applied concept analysis, a technique used in terminology studies (e.g. Wüster 1985, Suonuuti 1997). Several explanatory languages have been used in the studied texts. It has been my policy to quote directly those grammars that have been written in Latin or in German and to provide these examples with my English translation in square brackets. Quotes from grammars written in other languages have been translated into English but the examples, the terms and interesting key words have been left intact and translated. Their meaning has been indicated in inverted commas. Square brackets have been used if other additions, such as explanations have been inserted to the quoted text. The typographical means of the original text, such as boldface, italics, quotation marks, capitals letters and brackets have been left intact, when possible. I have also added typographical effects when the original text does not provide enough means of clarification. Italics are added to separate terminological items and examples from the main text, and boldface is added to mark headings of grammatical entries. Several early grammars (e.g. Petraeus 1649, Martinius 1689, Vhael 1733 and Strahlmann 1816) use special old type fonts (e.g. Fraktur) to separate the Finnish examples from the main text. I have substituted these fonts with boldface italics. The grammars studied here contain terminology and phrasings that are not currently in use. Translating these items into contemporary academic English would make the texts easier to read but would not give the right impression of the nature of the original documents. To allow the reader a view into the emerging character of the 19th century grammar tradition, my translation policy has been to render the original texts as transparently as possible. Especially the Finnish grammar terms have been translated to the letter. This may have resulted in some highly unconventional English equivalents. It should be kept in mind that their Finnish originals can be considered unconventional as well.

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3. Latin grammar as a direct source system – a practical approach At the time when Eskil Petraeus (1649) and Matthias Martinius (1689) wrote their grammars, Finland was a province of Sweden. The main language of administration was Swedish but the language of all academic life and education was Latin. Latin was a logical choice as an explanatory language for these early grammars that also fulfilled a practical need: Lingua Finnicae Brevis institutio (Petraeus 1649) and Hodegus Finnicus, eller Finsk Wägwijsare (Martinius 1689) were mainly designed as L2 text books for Swedish administrators and priests who wished to learn Finnish. The role of Latin was to provide students and teachers with a familiar format: the Latin school grammar was a concept the students were already familiar with. (Vihonen 1978, 77, 188; Korhonen 1986, 17–18; Stipa 1990, 121; Hovdhaugen et al. 2000, 75–78) Petraeus and Martinius used the Latin grammar tradition as their direct source system. They used the grammatical categories of Latin as their starting point and attempted to find their Finnish counterparts—sometimes with more, sometimes with less success. Much has been written about their failures (e.g. Ahlqvist 1855, 6; Itkonen 1966, 137–138; Rapola 1967, 146–147; Häkkinen 1994, 105–106; 2000, 809). Their description of the tense system, however, is not without merits. In order to follow Petraeus and Martinius’ categorization of the Finnish verbs, some basic knowledge of their Latin source system is needed. Latin has three past tenses which in their full form are called praeteritum imperfectum, praeteritum perfectum and praeteritum plusquamperfectum. These multi-word expressions consist of a head noun praeteritum ‘over, past’ and an adjective modifier that informs what kind of past the multiword term refers to. Contemporary Finnish grammars use only the modifiers as grammar terms, but for Petraeus and Martinius praeteritum was the main constituent of the term. The modifiers also deserve a closer look. Each of them has perfectum ‘completed’ as a common part, which points to the aspect of the corresponding verb category and indicates whether the past action is considered im-perfectum ‘not completed’, perfectum ‘completed’ or plus-quam-perfectum ‘more than completed’6. The first Finnish grammarians (Petraeus 1649; Martinius 1689; Rudimenta 2012) did not reflect deeply on the semantic character of the tenses but importantly, they translated their Finnish examples into Latin. Their translations are very revealing, but in order to interpret them, it is necessary first to know, how the Latin past tenses are used and how they look like. Table 3-1 presents the personal inflection of the verb amare ‘to

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love’ in the three aspect marked past tenses, in the active voice of the indicative mode. This regular verb of the 1st conjugation is a frequent example in early and contemporary Latin grammars. Table 3-1. The three past tenses of the verb amare ‘to love’ in the active voice of the indicative mode. Person Praeteritum imperfectum 1SG ama-ba-m 2SG ama-ba-s ama-ba-t 3SG ama-ba-mus 1PL ama-ba-tis 2PL ama-ba-nt 3PL

Praeteritum perfectum amav-i amav-isti amav-it amav-imus amav-istis amav-erunt

Praeteritum plusquamperfectum amav-era-m amav-era-s amav-era-t amav-era-mus amav-era-tis amav-era-nt

Praeteritum imperfectum of all the regular verbs can be recognized from the -ba- marker. Praeteritum perfectum has its own set of personal endings (-i, -isti, -it, -imus, -istus, -erunt) and the marker of praeteritum plusquamperfectum is -era-. The translation of these verb forms depends on the context in which they are used. Contemporary Latin textbooks prefer explanations to fixed translated equivalents. The English past continuous is often used for translating praeteritum imperfectum, so amabam may have the meaning ‘I was loving’ but it can also mean ‘I used to love’; legebam ‘I was reading’ or ‘I used to read’; scribebam ‘I was writing’ or ‘I used to write’. Similarly, amavi can be translated either ‘I loved’ or ‘I have loved’, legi ‘I read’ or ‘I have read’; scripsi ‘I wrote’ or ‘I have written’. On the other hand, Finnish has no specific past continuous. Depending on the context, both imperfectum and perfectum can be translated with the Finnish simple past or occasionally with perfekti. In narrative texts, both the Finnish and the English simple pasts are the most common and obvious equivalents to the Latin perfectum which is used for relating the actual events that move the story forward. Imperfectum is used for describing the past situation or the actions on the background. (e.g. Derix et al. 1994, 74–75; Pekkanen 1988, 141–142; Betts 1991, 7, 9, 26– 17; Elo 1995, 66) Similarly, Petraeus (1649) and Martinius (1689) consider the Finnish simple past and the Latin perfectum as equivalents:

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Chapter Twelve Tempora sunt [the tenses are]: Praesens, Opetan/doceo [I teach], Lugen/lego [I read], kirjoitan/ scribo [I write] Praeteritum, Opetin/docui [I taught], lugin/legi [I read], kirjoitin/scripsi [I wrote] Praeteritum plusquamperfectum, ut: Olen opettanut/docueram [I have taught], lukenut/legeram [I have read], kirjoittanut/scripseram [I have written]. (Petraeus 1649, 26.) Tempora sunt tria [there are three tenses] PRAESENS, ut: minä racastan/ iag älskar/amo [I love]. Kirjoitan/skrifwer/scribo [I write]. Luen/läser/lego [I read] PRAETERITUM, ut: minä racastin/ iag älskade/amavi [I loved]. Kirjoitin/skref/scripsi [I wrote]. Luin/iag laas/legi [I read]. Praeteritum plusquamperfectum, ut: minä olen racastanut / iag hafwer älskat/amaveram [I have loved]. minä olen kirjoitanut/ iag hafwer skrifwit/scripseram [I have written]. minä olen lukenut/ iag hafwer läsit/legeram [I have read]. (Martinius: 1689, 48.)

The simple past is introduced as plain praeteritum but the examples are translated with the Latin perfectum (docui, legi, scripsi, amavi; not docebam, legebam, scribebam, amabam). Martinius translates them also with the Swedish simple past (älskade; skref; laas). The Finnish perfekti is called praeteritum plusqvamperfectum by Petraeus and Martinius but the actual pluperfect seems to be missing. Their grammars do not have a grammatical entry for praeteritum imperfectum either. Petraeus and Martinius did not find a Finnish verb form that would exactly match the Latin imperfectum even though the meaning could be produced: Futurum non distingvitur â praesenti quoad terminationem. Nec Imperfectum distinctum â Praeterito perfecto, dicitur enim: Cosca minä racastin/ dum amavi vel dum amabam. [The endings of the the future tense do not differ from the present nor does the imperfectum differ from the praeteritum perfectum, e.g. Cosca minä racastin ‘when/because I loved’ is either amavi or amabam.] (Petraeus 1649, 27, my translation, typography adapted.) NB.1. Imperfectum â Praeterito perfecto non distingvitur, dicitur enim: Cosca minä kirjoitin/medan jag skref/dum scripsi, vel scribebam. [Imperfectum does not differ from the Praeteritum perfectum, e.g. cosca minä kirjoitin ‘when/because I wrote’ / medan jag skref/ is either scripsi or scribebam.] (Martinius 1689, 48, my translation, typography adapted.)

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Imperfectum, however, has a marginal role. These short excerpts quoted are the only instances in which Petraeus and Martinius refer to it. Similarly as the future tense, praeteritum imperfectum is not considered a formal Finnish category. The simple past, first introduced as plain praeteritum, is called praeteritum perfectum in all conjugation tables (Petraeus 1649, 26, 33–36; Martinius 1689, 48, 52–60). The verb forms in simple past are consistently translated with the Latin perfectum in these tables and also in the Syntax section from which the following examples are taken: Hän täytti maljan wijnalla/ implevit pateram vino ‘filled the cup with wine’ Tyhjensi laivan suoloista/ exportavit salem é navi ‘emptied the boat from salt/the salt from the boat’ (Petraeus 1649, 56–57, boldface added to highlight the verb forms.) Hän purjehti Rijcan/han seglade til Rijg/ navigavit Rigam ‘he sailed to Riga’ Hän tuli Tuckhulmist Turckuhun/han kom ifrån Stockholm til Åbo/ venit Holmia Aboam ‘he came from Stockholm to Åbo’ (Martinius 1689, 101, 102, boldface added to highlight the verb forms.)

Petraeus and Martinius seem to consider preteritum perfectum as the default meaning of the simple past. Compared to how this tense is represented in contemporary L2 Finnish grammars like White (2008), they can hardly be blamed for misrepresenting it: The imperfect tense tells us what happened before the moment of utterance, at a certain point of time in the past. The event or state of affairs is all over, finished. (White 2008, 199.)

Petraeus and Martinius may already have noticed that the simple past has a tendency towards the perfective aspect. It is interesting to compare their descriptions with the treatment of tenses in Rudimenta linguae Finnicae, a short manuscript written by an anonymous author7 around 1650. While Petraeus and Martinius marginalize the significance of imperfectum in Finnish, the writer of Rudimenta omits it altogether. The Finnish simple past is called either praeteritum simplex (Rudimenta 2012, 58), perfectum simplex (op. cit. 59, 61) or perfectum (op. cit. 64, 66). Three verbs are used to illustrate the inflectional categories: racastaa ‘to love’, cuula ‘to hear’ and olla ‘to be’. Each of them is translated with the Latin perfectum in the simple past: racastin ‘I loved’ is amavi; cuulin ‘I heard’ is audivi; olin ‘I was’ is fui, which is the praeteritum perfectum of

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the irregular esse ‘to be’ (Rudimenta 2012, 82–86). The possibility of expressing imperfectum in Finnish is not mentioned in Rudimenta. According to Suvi Randén (2012, 31–32), who has translated Rudimenta into Finnish, this is most extraordinary. As an indispensable part of the Latin verbal system praeteritum imperfectum is presented in all Latin grammars and its omission is a significant deviation from the traditional pattern. Praeteritum imperfectum is, however, not an indispensible part of the Finnish verbal system. The author of Rudimenta may have understood this and the omission may be a conscious choice. At the first glance, Petraeus (1649), Martinius (1689) and Rudimenta do not seem to describe the composed past tenses successfully. Rudimenta presents only one composed tense—perfekti—which is called Praeteritum compositum seu plusquamperfectum ‘past composed or pluperfect’ (Rudimenta 2012, 58). One composed tense seems also to be missing from Petraeus (1649, 26) and Martinius (1689, 48) who apply the term praeteritum plusquamperfectum on perfekti in the active voice. Curiously, the actual pluperfect (as a verb form) appears in the examples on the passive voice or impersonalis, where perfekti, in turn, is omitted. The same term plusquamperfectum is applied on this verb form: Paradigma Pas. I Conjugationis. – – Praeterito Plusquamperfecto: Minä olin racastettu/ amatus eram vel fueram, sinä olit racastettu/amatus eras vel fuerat – – [I was or I had been loved, you were or you had been loved – –] (Petraeus 1649, 31, italics and boldface added.)8 Paradigma Verbi impersonalis. Indicativo praesenti, Sanotan/ that sådes/dicitur [It is said/it is being said] Praeterito perfecto: Sanottiin/ sades/ dictum est [it was said] Praeterito plusquamperfect: Oli sanottu/ det var sagdt/ dictum erat – – [it had been said] (Martinius 1689, 62, italics and boldface added.)

Both Petraeus and Martinius seem to treat the two composed tenses as variants of the same category. Besides their formal similarity, perfekti and pluskvamperfekti have important semantic features in common: Perfekti refers to events that preceed a non-past situation while pluskvamperfekti denotes events before another past event, and hence, both composed tenses refer to previous events in relation to other events or situations (see, e.g. ISK 2004, § 1534–1535, 1537; § 1540–1541; Ikola 1949, 46–47; 1950, 85, 171). Petraeus and Martinius may have considered the common features of these tenses more important than their differences. They may also have had a challenging task in describing the characteristics of emerging grammatical categories. According to Lauri Hakulinen (1979, 248), the

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Finnish past participles, which are used to form perfekti and pluskvamperfekti, are very old. The grammaticalization of the composed past tenses into fixed multi-verbal constructions, however, took place only after Finnish separated from other Finnic languages. Areal contacts with Swedish speakers had a major role in this process, which also explains the striking similarities between the tense systems of contemporary Finnish and Swedish. Osmo Ikola (1950), on the other hand, has compared the use of the past tenses in old written Finnish and contemporary Finnish. Alhough all the tenses existed already during the period of old written Finnish (1500–1810), their distribution and division of tasks have changed. Old written Finnish texts sometimes use perfekti where the contemporary Finnish would use pluskvamperfekti and vice versa (Ikola 1950 passim).

4. Latin grammar as a source system – a creative approach Grammatica Fennica by Bartholdus Vhael (1733) has the reputation of being the first Finnish grammar that “broke free” from the Latin model and sought to describe the Finnish language “as it really was spoken”. It is considered to be the model for all the later Finnish grammars. (Korhonen 1986, 18–19; Stipa 1990, 22; Memorandum 1994, 28; Hovdhaugen et al. 2000, 78; Häkkinen 1994, 106; 2000, 809.) Several 19th-century grammars such as Strahlmann (1816), von Becker (1824) and Renvall (1826; 1840) frequently mention it as a source. Although the praise is well deserved, Vhael should be considered a skillful and cautious reformer rather than a revolutionary. Grammatica Fennica is written in Latin. Its disposition has many similarities with the previous Finnish grammars. Vhael also uses traditional Latin grammar concepts such as accidentia in the same way as Petraeus (1649) and Martinius (1689): Verbo Personali Accidunt Octo: Genus, Species, Tempus, Modus, Figura, Persona, Numerus & Conjugatio. [Personal verbs have eight accidentias9: Genus, Species, Tense, Mode, Figura, Person, Number & Conjugation.] (Petraeus 1649, 25; Martinius 1689, 45, my translation, italics added.) Verbo Personali accidunt septem [Personal verbs have seven accidentias]: Genus, Species, Tempus, Modus, Persona, Numerus & Conjugatio. (Vhael 1733, 66, my translation, italics added.)

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The parallel quoted is just one of the many examples to show that Vhael did not abandon the Latin traditions. He did however apply them flexibly. In the true spirit of the Enlightenment he created new concepts and terms for those Finnish categories that did not exist in Latin. Vhael has been rightfully credited for improved descriptions of Finnish phonetics, the noun cases and types of verb derivation and conjugation (e.g. Korhonen 1986, 18–19, 22; Hovdhaugen et al. 2000, 78). Vhael also improved the description of the tenses. Unfortunately, his system is not well known. Despite all the praise that Grammatica Fennica has received, it has not been consulted as much as it would deserve. Grammatica Fennica introduces the Finnish temporal system by mentioning that there are five tenses: “Praesens, Praeteritum imperfectum, Praeteritium primum, Praeteritun secundum, Praeteritum plusquamperfectum” (Vhael 1733, 76). In Finnish however, praeteritum imperfectum and the future are only semantic categories, not surface verb forms: Nota: Revera duo tantum tempora habet Lingva Fennica, Praesens & Praeteritum. Praeteritum Imperfectum Indicativi, partim exprimitur per Praesens, partim per Praeteritum. [Note: There are actually only two tenses in the Finnish language, the present and the praeteritum. The praeteritum imperfectum of the indicative is expressed partly by the present tense and partly by praeteritum.] (Vhael 1733, 76, my translation, italics added.)

What Vhael means by expressing the praeterium imperfectum “partly by the present tense and partly by praeteritum” is not entirely clear. He may have had the narrative use of the present tense—the dramatis praesens—in mind. However, because Vhael does not provide examples, this cannot be substantiated. Probably due to the untimely death of the author (Hovdhaugen et al. 2000, 78) Grammatica Fennica is very scarce in examples and has no syntax section. The current practice to call the simple past imperfekti cannot possibly originate from Vhael. In Grammatica Fennica the simple past is called Praeteritum primum (‘the first past tense’) and perfekti is called Praeteritum secundum (‘the second past tense’). Pluskvamperfekti is called praeteritum plusquamperfectum and it has a past tense auxiliary verb in the active and passive voices alike. All the existing Finnish past tenses, simple and composed, are presented in full. (Vhael 1733, 76–77, 88–95.) The excerpt below shows the way in which Vhael presents the past tense inflection of the verbs säästää ‘to save’, maksaa ‘to pay’ and luulla ‘to assume, to presume, to suspect’:

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Praet. 1. Sing[ular]. Säästin. maxoin. luulin. /säästit. maxoit. luulit./säästi. maxoi. luuli – – [I saved/ I paid/ I assumed; you saved/ you paid/ you assumed; (s)he saved/(s)he paid/(s)he assumed – –] Praet. 2. Sing. Olen, olet, on säästänyt/ maxanut/ luullut [I have, you have, (s)he has saved/ paid / assumed – –] Plusqvam Perf. Sing. Olin, olit, oli säästänyt/ maxanut/ luullut [I had/you had/(s)he had said/ paid/ assumed – –] (Vhael 1733, 88–89, typography adapted.)

Unfortunately Vhael has not translated these Finnish verb forms into Latin. He indicates their general lexical meaning by infinite verb forms. However, praeteritum primum (= simple past) has been translated with the Latin praeteritum perfectum in the example below, in which Vhael explains how the endings of the Finnish verbs change in the 1st praeteritum: 7. Prima Conjugatio habet in indicativis Praesensis 1. persona sing. terminationem an/ vel alternas än. haec mutatur in Praeteriti prima sing. in in. sed maxan/solvo, betalar/ haber maxoin. sic jaxoin, valui, orckade; aloin/ caepi, begynte; caiwoin/ fodi, grof; kirvoin/ maledixi, bannades – – [The First Conjugation has in the indicative 1st person sg. the ending an or än. In 1st praeteritum it changes into in so that maxan/solvo ‘I pay’ has as ending maxoin ‘I paid’ and likewise jaxoin/ valui, orckade ‘I was strong/healthy; I managed’; aloin/ caepi, begynte ‘I started’; caiwoin/ fodi, grof ‘I dug’; kirvoin/ maledixi, bannades ‘I cursed’ – –] (Vhael 1733, 82 my translation, typography adapted.)

The Latin verb forms valui10 ‘I was strong/healthy’, caepi ‘I started’, fodi ‘I dug’ and maledixi ‘I cursed’ are all praeteritum perfectum. It may be hypothesized that Vhael considered the meaning of praeteritum primum to be closer to perfectum than to imperfectum. In any case, Bartholdus Vhael can fairly be credited as the first grammarian who presents the Finnish tense system as a whole, correctly and clearly. Because of the lack of full sentence examples his presentation is not optimally descriptive, but systematic flaws cannot be found. Ordinal numbers (primum, secundum) as modifiers are not informative but not misleading either. If Vhael’s system had been taken as a starting point and the ordinal numbers had been substituted by characterizing modifiers, the Finnish tenses might today have a terminological system that could be considered exemplary. Curiously, Bartoldus Vhael was the first to apply imperfectum as a grammatical entry in Finnish. In Grammatica Fennica however, imperfectum does not refer to any tense but to a modal category called conditional present by contemporary Finnish grammars. Vhael (1733, 90–

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91) calls verb forms like säästäisin ‘I would save’, maxaisin ‘I would pay’, luulisin ‘I would assume’ the imperfectum of the subjunctive mode. This practice was taken over by several 19th century grammarians (e.g. Juden 1818, 50–53; von Becker 1824, 122–131; Wikström 1832, 20–21) and was bound to cause much confusion because these same grammarians used imperfectum also as the name for the simple past. In his letter to Niclas Keckman, Elias Lönnrot (1990a, 148) criticizes Finsk Grammatik (von Becker 1824) with the following words: How, for instance, could nostaisin ‘I would lift’ be Imperfectum (Praeteritum) for it never expresses past time but always time that is still passing, though perhaps in a different way than nostan ’I lift’, nostanen ‘I may lift’ etc. (Lönnrot 1990a, 148; my translation, italics added).

The Latin subjunctive (also called conjunctive) is a mode for subordinate clauses (see, e.g. Betts 1991, 87–90). Though Finnish does not have a special subordinate mode, Vhael describes quite adequately the way in which the conditional and the potential11, in addition to their other functions, can be used when Finnish equivalents for subjunctive are required. The Latin subjunctive/conjunctive has an imperfectum which is not a strictly temporal category (praeteritum). The Finnish conditional can be compared with it in many instances. If the 19th century grammarians had kept praeteritum ‘past tense’ as an active part of their vocabulary, or even better, translated it to a language that is still spoken, the confusion between the past tense and the conditional mode might have been avoided.

5. The Germano-Latinistic framework as a source system An abrupt change can be observed between the 19th century grammars and the earlier works. One indication of a paradigm shift is the different lexical structure of the terms: While Petraeus (1649), Martinius (1689) and Vhael (1733) prefer the full names of the tenses, most 19th century grammarians abandon the head noun praeteritum and operate mostly or exclusively on the modifiers imperfectum, perfectum and plusquamperfectum, their phonetically adapted or translated equivalents. A more substantial though subtler change is an extensional shift: the Finnish simple past, which had been called praeteritum (perfectum) and translated by the Latin perfectum as a rule, becomes connected with the term imperfectum or its equivalents. The immediate reason behind the shift is a change in the source system: while the early grammarians relied directly on the Latin

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grammar traditions, the 19th century authors had a set of new resources at their disposal. Germano-Latinistic framework is my name for the current terminological system that connects the vernacular simple past (Finnic or Germanic) with imperfectum and the composed past tenses with perfectum and plusquamperfectum. As the term suggests, this practice originates from countries where Germanic12 languages were spoken, but it may not have been developed for the vernacular languages in the first place. It may have first been an attempt to make the Latin tense system comprehensible for German speaking students. The following example is from a Latin grammar by Philip Melanchton (1538). Though vernacular is used very sparsely in this work, the examples about tenses have been translated into German. Præsens, quod praesentis temporis actione significat [refers to present actions]: ut, uenio, ich kom [I come]. Præteritum imperfectu, quod actionem quidem cœptam, sed incompletam significat [refers to actions started but incompleted]: ut, ueniebam, ich kam [I came]. Præteritum perfectum, quod tempus et actionem completam significat [refers to completed time and action]; ut, veni, ich bin komen [I have come]. Præteritum plusquamperfectu, quod actionem tempore ia olim praeterito completam fuisse significat [refers to actions that were completed in the past]: ut, ueneram, ich var komen [I had come]. (Melanchton: 1538, 196, my translation, typography adapted.)

This practice seems common though not universal. Not all Latin grammars used vernacular. The famous Latina grammatica (1648) by the Dutchman Gerardus Vossius was written entirely in Latin. Sakari Vihonen (1978, 124), on the other hand, has located at least one Latin Donatus13 that uses vernacular but does not fit into the Germano-Latinistic framework. It is printed in Stockholm in 1628 and Swedish is used as an additional explanatory language. The verb amare ‘to love’ is translated into Swedish in the following manner: Praesens; amo/ iagh elskar [I love] Praet. Imperfectum: amabam/ iagh hölt uppå at elska/ eller elskadhe [I was loving/ or loved] Praet. Perfectum: amavi/ iagh elskadhe [I loved] Praet. Plusquamperfectum: amaueram/ iagh haffuer elskat [I have loved] (Vihonen 1978, 124 < Donatus 1628, italics added.)

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Vihonen (1978, 123) concludes that Donatus (1628) must have been among the sources that Petraeus (1649) and Martinius (1689) used because the tenses are treated much in the same way: the Latin praeteritum imperfectum and the vernacular simple past may occasionally be equivalents but the preferred translation of the vernacular simple past is the Latin praeteritum perfectum. More research is needed to find out whether there have been competing schools of interpretations on the meanings of the past tenses. As far as we know today, Latino-Germanistic approach became the dominant approach. In an early work on Germanic vernacular, De Nederduytsche grammatica by the Dutchman Christiaen van Heule (1626, 44), the simple past is called imperfectum/De Onvolkomen Voorleden tijt ‘uncompleted past time’ and the composed past tenses are called praeteritum/Voorleden tijt ‘past time’ and plusquamperfectum/De meer als Voorleden tijt ‘the more than past time’14. The first Estonian grammar by Henrik Stahl (1637) also uses Germano-Latinistic tense system. The comparison of the Finnish and Estonian tenses in the geo-historical work Epitome (Wexionius-Gyldenstolpe 1650, part III, chapter X)15 is an interesting example of early metalinguistic compatibility problems. Wexionius-Gyldenstolpe uses Petraeus (1949) and Stahl (1637) as sources and is not able to match the two conflicting terminological systems. In order to please both authorities, the auxiliary verb olla ‘to be’ is treated within the Germano-Latinistic framework. The simple pasts of Estonian and Finnish are both called imperfectum (F: minä olin; E: minna ollin; L: eram). The simple pasts of verba realia ‘content verb’ in both languages (F: rakastin; E: minna armastasin; ‘I loved’), are called praeteritum perfectum as in Petraeus (1649) (see also Koski 1995). Borrowing conceptual models can be most useful and even essential in order to create functional metalanguage. The similarities between the Finnic and Germanic tense systems could also have justified similar terminological systems. The problem was, however, that the GermanoLatinistic framework was a misinterpretation of the Germanic tense system in the first place: the simple past is not used in any Germanic language for denoting uncompleted past actions in particular. The source system already had a defect, and when borrowed into Finnish, the terminological system became a misrepresentation of the Finnish tense system as well.

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6. Remoteness distinction hypothesis The 19th century grammarians probably had the best intentions: they did not only wish to introduce new terms but they also wanted them to be coherent. Remoteness distinction hypothesis was an early theory that justified the use of imperfectum, perfectum, plusquamperfectum or their adapted or translated variants within the Germano-Latinistic framework. In Finland, this hypothesis was introduced by Johan Strahlmann16 in Finnische Sprachenlehre für Finnen und Nicht-Finnen (1816). According to Strahlmann, the function of the Finnish tenses was to indicate temporal remoteness17: 1. Die gegenwärtige Zeit (Praesens), zeigt an: was eben geschiehet [what happens now], als Minä teen, ich thue [I do/I make], tehdään, werde gemacht [is done/is made]. 2. Unlängst vergangene, (Imperfectum), was kürzlich gescehen ist [what happened recently], als Minä tein, ich that [I did/made], tehtiin, würde gemacht [was done/was made]. 3. Völligvergangene, (Perfectum), was völlig geschehen ist [what has happened completely], als Minä olen tehnyt, ich habe gemacht [I have done/ I have made], olen tehty, bin gemacht worden [I am made].18 4. Längstvergangene (Plusquamperfectum), was vor längst geschehen ist [what happened a long time ago], als Minä olin tehnyt, ich hatte gemacht [I had done/made], – olin tehty, – War gemacht wörden [I was done/made]. (Strahlmann 1816, 84.)

The suggested difference between the three past tenses is chronological: imperfectum, perfectum and plusquamperfectum do not refer so much to the degree of completeness of the past actions but rather to the completeness of the past moment itself. The assumed recentness of the past event (“kürzlich geschehen”) justifies the name imperfectum: a recent past is not yet completely past. Correspondingly, plusquamperfectum is an appropriate name to a verb form that refers to events that took place long ago (“vor längst geschehen”) because a remote past is logically more complete (plus quam perfectum) than a recent past. Perfectum (“völlig geschehen”) is placed somewhere between the two extremes on the temporal continuum. Although Strahlmann’s German terms and explanations are based on sheer imagination, they are interesting interpretations of the Latin terms. In onomastic research they would be called folk etymologies. Remoteness distinction hypothesis was not Strahlmann’s own invention. According to Marja Järventausta (2013, 131) Strahlmann was acquainted with the famous Grundlegung einer Deutschen Sprachkunst by

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Johann Christoph Gottsched and very much relied on its vocabulary. The book appeared first in 1748 and several re-editions are digitally available through Google Books19. An edition from 1749 uses almost the same terms as Strahlmann: Die jüngst/unlängst vergangene – ich scrieb (praeteritum imperfectum) Die völlig vergangene – ich habe geschrieben (praeteritum perfectum) Die längst/vorlängst vergangene – ich hatte geschrieben (praeteritum plusquamperfectum) (Gottsched 1749, 262, 267.)

Whether Gottsched was the inventor of the remoteness distinction hypothesis is a matter that requires further investigation. Strahlmann was, however, not his first follower. Swedish Christopher Dahl applies the remoteness distinction hypothesis on Latin. He uses Swedish as a main explanatory language in Grammatica Latina: Latinska Språkläran (1796), and introduces20 the Latin tenses as having a remoteness distinction: 1. Praesens, indicates that something happens now: jag läser (nu) ‘I read (now)’ 2. Imperfectum, indicates that something just happened: jag läste (nys) ‘I read (just, recently)’ 3. Perfectum, indicates that something has happened earlier: jag har läsit (tillförne) ‘I have read (earlier, before)’ 4. Plusquamperfectum, indicates that something had happened a longer time ago: jag hade läsit (längre sedan) ‘I had read (longer ago)’ (Dahl 1796, 4–5; my translation, typography adapted, brackets original.)

This hypothesis received a handful of followers in Finland, some of whom combined it with other theories. According to Finelius (1845, 32– 33), the Finnish tenses have both a remoteness distinction and an aspectual distinction. As in most of the 19th century Finnish grammars, Swedish is the main explanatory language in Finsk Språklära för Lägre ElementarSkolor. Time can be perceived as being present (presens; närvarande), as past (preteritum; förfluten) or as still coming. Of these three main tenses the ‘past time’ (förflutna tiden) has also two auxiliary tenses, so the time when the event took place can be considered as being “närmare eller längre tillbaka” ‘in the recent past or in the remote past’ – –. Imperfectum (den nyligen förflutna tiden ‘the recently passed time’) is to be used about an event that is not yet completed and takes place while another event occurs: minä kirjoitin, kuin sinä tulit, jag skref, då du kom, ‘I wrote, when you came’

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Perfectum (den helt och hållet förflutna tiden ‘the completely past time’) is used when one wants to express that an event has taken place without reference to any other event or time: minä olen kirjoittanut, jag har skrifvit; ‘I have written’. Plusquamperfectum (“den redan längsedan förflutna tiden” ‘the time that passed already long ago’) is used for denoting past events that are completed when another event takes place: olin minun työni lopettanut, kuin sinä tulit, jag hade slutat mitt arbete, då du komm. ‘I had finished my work, when you came’. (Finelius 1845, 32–33, my translation, typography adapted.)

Finelius uses praeteritum occasionally as a superordinate concept. In comparison to Strahlmann his full sentence examples are an improvement even though they are intentionally constructed to support the author’s assumptions. During the 19th century much was done to develop Finnish into a language that could be used in all domains of the society. Creating standards for written Finnish was an important project. New vocabulary was actively created for the growing needs of culture, education and science, including linguistics and grammar. (Korhonen 1986, 90–94; Hovdhaugen et al. 2000, 235.) A few grammarians preferred Finnish terminology to Swedish and Latin, but this did not automatically lead to better grammatical descriptions. The Finnish names for the past tenses are loan translations in most cases. Because of defects in the source system, the Finnish appearance of these borrowed items is only a “cosmetic disguise”. Finnish terms are however interesting because they can reveal the conceptual framework endorsed by the author. I consider the following sets of Finnish terms to reflect the remoteness distinction hypothesis: Roos 1851 Present tense: Nykyinen aikakunta ‘the present/current time realm’21 Simple past: Puolimennyt aikakunta ‘half past / half gone time realm’ Perfekti: Täysimennyt aikakunta ‘fully past time realm’ Pluskvamperfekti: Ylitäysinen aika ‘overfull time’ Ronkainen 1881; Tamminen 1884; Länkelä 1867 Present tense: lähiaika ‘near time’ Simple past: entinen lähiaika ‘previous near time’ Perfekti: ohiaika ‘past time, time that is over’ Pluskvamperfekti: entinen ohiaika ‘previous past time’

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Roos (1851, 26) has unique terms: I have not yet come across another grammar that calls the simple past puolimennyt ‘half past’. The other set of terms, used by Ronkainen, Länkelä and Tamminen, contains the lexical element lähi- ‘near’ to denote an event that is assumed to be non-remote.

7. Experimental and independent solutions During the 19th century, the mainstream practice was to call the Finnish past tenses by their names of Latin origin. The head noun praeteritum was omitted as a rule and the modifiers imperfectum, perfectum and plusquamperfectum were phonetically adapted to the explanatory language, which was often Swedish. However, when Finnish was used as explanatory language, loan translations were common. The chosen terminology was justified according to the remoteness distinction hypothesis or an aspectual distinction between the past tenses was assumed. A few grammarians, however, chose a different path. In this section I will examine the way in which the Finnish tense system was presented by those authors who did not conform to the Germano-Latinistic framework. The beginning of the 19th century was a time of many political changes. Finland’s new position as an autonomous grand duchy under the Russian Empire had a positive impact on the status of Finnish as the language of administration and education. A lectureship of Finnish was founded at the University of Helsinki in 1828 with Nicholas Keckman22 as its first occupant. Finnish became a compulsory study subject at schools and gradually even a language of instruction at the universities. New possibilities also created new demands: Finnish had not yet been used to study linguistics, physics, mathematics or other sciences and therefore proper terminology was required. Many familiar Finnish terms for physics, chemistry, geometry, biology and grammar have been created by the 19thcentury wordsmiths. The most productive of them was Elias Lönnrot. (Korhonen 1986, 90–96; Hovdhaugen et al. 2000, 235, 252) Lönnrot never wrote a complete grammar but he published several writings on the Finnish language. A list of Finnish grammar terms appeared first in Litteraturblad ‘Literature journal’ (1847) and a few years later another was published in Suomi (1857). Both lists are accompanied with a short article and contain suggestions of Finnish equivalents for Latin grammar terms (Lönnrot 1991[1847], 205–208; 1991[1857], 299–304). The following terms are suggested for the verbal tenses:

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Litteraturblad 1847 (Lönnrot 1991[1847], 205–208) tempus, aika ‘time’ presens, oleva ‘being’ imperfectum, ennen-oleva ‘before-being’ perfectum, ollut ‘been’ plusquamperfectum, ennen-ollut ‘before-been’ preteritum, mennyt ‘gone’ Suomi 1857 (Lönnrot 1991[1857], 299–304) tempus, aika ‘time’ tempus praesens, lähiaika ‘near time’ tempus imperfectum, entinen lähiaika ‘previous near time’ tempus perfectum, ohiaika ‘past time’, literally ‘over time’or ‘bygone time’ tempus plusquamperfectum, entinen ohiaika ‘previous past time’

The terms suggested in Suomi 1857 are identical to Ronkainen (1881), Tamminen (1884) and Länkelä (1867). Lönnrot may have been the inventor of these terms, which were not, however, designed necessarily for Finnish but for linguistic research in general. Lönnrot suggests names for categories that do not exist in Finnish, such as “kaksikko” for the dual and “vaihtomuotoinen tekosana” ‘shift-formed action words’ for deponent verbs. Finnish alternatives to poetry and metric terms that derive from Greek were also suggested. (Lönnrot 1991[1847], 206, 208; 1991[1857], 303, 304.) Lönnrot even demonstrates how his Finnish terms can be applied to study Latin: One can certainly say that meliorem is in the accusativus case and in the comparativus state and docerem is in the imperfectum time and conjunctive mode, but why not just say in Finnish that the first word form is in the “target case of the winning state” [org. voittotilan kohdesijassa] – – (Lönnrot 1991[1857], 304; my translation, italics original.)

One of Lönnrot’s many projects was to improve the description of Finnish verbs, because he was not satisfied with von Becker’s (1824) treatment of verbs.This process may be detected in his correspondence with his close friend, Nicklas Keckmann (Lönnrot 1990a, 147–149). The results were published in an article Suomen kielen lausukoista ‘On the Finnish verbs’ in Mehiläinen ‘The Bee’ in 183723 (Lönnrot1990b, 344– 352). Another paper, Bidrag till Finska Språkets Grammatik ‘A contribution to the grammar of Finnish language’ appeared in Suomi (issue 1841–1842, Lönnrot 1991[1842], 118–147/SWK 3: 1124). Instead of relying on the Germano-Latinistic framework, Lönnrot chose to revise the

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description of the Finnish verbs completely. According to him, Finnish verbs appeared in eight “manners” or modes. The infinitives and the participles were impersonal modes, the others were personal. All the modes had a present or an “ongoing” temporal level and a past tense level (Tempus Praeteritum) (Lönnrot 1990b, 347, Lönnrot 1991[1842], 139– 140). A major difference with all the former descriptions was that the indicative mode was split into two independent subcategories. The present tense together with perfekti formed the Indicativus Mode, while the Historicus Mode/Revocativus consisted of the simple past and the pluperfect. In addition, the Finnish names for these terms appeared in Mehiläinen (Lönnrot 1990b, 347). Indicativus modus was called Lausuntatapa ‘the manner of pronounciation’ and the Historicus Modus or Revocativus was called Kerrontatapa ‘the manner of narration’ (all the upper cases are original). Even though names such as imperfectum/imperfekti or perfectum/perfekti were not used, some attempts to import Latino-Germanistic interpretations into Finnish may be observed: according to Lönnrot, the simple past was the tempus praeteriens, the “ongoing time” of the Historicus Modus which was used to express what “was happening” in the past. Lönnrot can, however, fairly be credited as the first grammarian who explicitly noticed the narrative character of the simple past and who clearly perceived that perfekti was dependent on the present tense and the pluperfect on the simple past.

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Figure 7-1. The system of Finnish verbal modes according to Lönnrot (1990b, 347; 1991[1842], 139–140).

Lönnrot’s concept of eight modes did not become popular. The sudden death of Nicklas Keckman in 1838 may have been one reason behind this. Keckman called the Finnish tenses by their Germano-Latinistic names, at least in his doctoral dissertation on passive and middle voice (1829), but he had been interested in Lönnrot’s concepts. As a lecturer at the University of Helsinki he had an influential position and he might have been able to do some necessary adjustments to the terminology: some verb forms that Lönnrot suggested—such as the past tense of the imperative mode—did not actually exist, and to call the simple past “the present time of the narrative mode” was a clumsy formulation. The concept of eight modes was, however, applied in the first grammar written in Finnish: Suomalainen Kieli-Oppi kowlujen tarpe’eksi ‘A Finnish grammar for the needs of the schools’ by K. Koranteri [Corander] (1845, 52–75). Also Gustaf Eurén, an influential teacher and a productive grammarian, applied this concept once in Suomalainen kielioppi suomalaisille ‘A Finnish Grammar for the Finnish’ (1852), even though he mixed it with the

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Germano-Latinistic system. The simple tenses were first introduced among the modes, the present tense as lausunto ‘statement’ and the simple past as kerronto ‘narrative’. Both were also considered as tenses. Their Finnish names—menevä ‘ongoing’ for the present and ennenmenevä ‘previously ongoing’ for the simple past—indicate that the author considered the simple past to have a continuous or imperfective aspect. (Eurén 1852, 67–70.) A fresh approach to the Finnish tense system was taken also by Gustav Renvall (1840, 94). His temporal system has only two tenses: the past tense (praeteritum) and the non-past tense (praesens) which denotes both the present and the future. The terms imperfectum, perfectum and plusquamperfectum are not used and the composed tenses do not exist as grammatical entries in Renvall’s account. Both composed tenses are, however, presented in another way: The participles, which are used to form the composed past tenses, have a praesens and a praeteritum. These can be used for “perifrastisk Conjugation”, or multi-word verb expressions, in order to make the temporal expressions more precise (Renvall 1840, 81–100, 109–111). A similar but shorter description is given by Renvall in the foreword of his dictionary Lexicon Linguae Finnicae (1826: xiii–xvi). Renvall makes an excellent point with his twolevel temporal system. A Comprehensive Finnish Grammar (ISK 2004, § 450–455) agrees that Finnish has only two morphological tenses, but many possibilities to combine auxiliary verbs with participles. Also other infinitive verb forms or even verbal nouns can be used for constructing multi-verb predicates. Technically perfekti and pluskvamperfekti are periphrastic verb expressions among many others. They have a special position as “composed tenses” in the traditional Finnish grammar, but they could have been interpreted as syntactic constructions as well. After Renvall (1840), the two-level temporal system is applied by two grammarians: Gustaf Eurén utilizes it in Grunddragen till Finsk formlära ‘The basics of Finnish morphology’ (1846, 40–56) as does Estonian Mihkel Weske in Soome keele opetus. 1, luhikene grammatik ‘Finnish study, a short grammar’ (1881, 37; 41, 50). As the title indicates, Weske’s description is brief. Not only are the composed tenses entirely missing from his grammar but also the participles and the infinitives. Eurén (1846), on the other hand, presents the participles but not the composed tenses. The two-level temporal system may not be entirely Renvall’s invention. Some of its elements are present already in Reinhold von Becker’s (1824) Finsk Grammatik. Von Becker (1824, 85, 88–99) calls the non-past tense praesens and the simple past sometimes praeteritum but more often imperfectum25. The composed past tenses are called perfectum

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and plusquamperfectum, but von Becker (1824, 144–147) presents them in a separate table which he calls “Allmän Perifrastisk Konjugation” ‘the general periphrastic conjugation’. According to him, composed tenses are rather syntactic constructions than inflections (von Becker 1824, 89–90). Not well-known although an irreprehensible terminological set for the Finnish tenses has been compiled by Russian G. Okulof in Grammatika finskago jazika (1836) ‘The grammar of the Finnish language’, in which the Finnish past tenses have the following names: ɉɪɨɲɟɞɲɟɟ ɩɪɨɫɬɨɟ [prošedšeje prostoje] ‘past simple’: esim. minä sanoin: sinä sanoit; sanoisin: sanoisit ‘I said, you said; I would say, you would say’ ɉɪɨɲɟɞɲɟɟ ɫɥɨɠɧɨɟ 1. [prošedšeje složnoje 1.] ‘past composed1st’: esim. minä olen sanonut; minä (ollen ~) lienen sanonut ‘I have said; I may have said’ ɉɪɨɲɟɞɲɟɟ ɫɥɨɠɧɨɟ 2. [prošedšeje složnoje 2.] ‘past composed 2nd’:esim. minä olin sanonut; minä olisin sanonut ‘I had said; I would have said’ (Okuloff 1836, 68–69, typography adapted.)

Those who are familiar with French may recognize passé simple and passé compose as Okulov’s possible source items. From the point of view of concept analysis, his terms could be called text book examples: The head noun of each term, prošedšeje, correctly denotes the superordinate concept level which is ‘past’. The modifiers prostoje and složnoje denote an essential feature of the corresponding past tense: each is either formed morphologically (simple) or composed of two word forms. While Okulof's terms are impeccable, all of his examples are not. For instance, two of the verb forms above that are supposed to represent the simple past are in fact conditional present forms, namely sanoisin, sanoisit; ‘I would say, you would say’. Even though Okulof is not the only grammarian to confuse the past and the conditional, obvious blunders such as this diminish the quality of Grammatika finskago jazika. The terminology used in Finn nyelvtan ‘Finnish language’ by the Hungarian linguist József Budenz (1880, 116–118) will serve as my last example of deviations from the 19th century mainstream. Budenz has the very system that many would like to see used today (see, e.g. Hakulinen 1979, 247–248; Itkonen 1966, 281; Miestamo 2005, 573): the Finnish simple past is called preteritum26, while the familiar perfectum and plusquamperfectum are the names for the composed tenses. József Budenz was well-respected in the Finnish linguistic circles and E. N. Setälä considered his book a useful source when he was working on his own grammars (Karlsson 2000, 70–71). However, Setälä did not to use

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Budenz’s terminology. In Suomen kielioppi: Äänne- ja sanaoppi ‘The grammar of Finnish: sound patterns and word forms’, Setälä (1898, 80) admits that preteriti would the correct name for the simple past. In spite of this, he calls it imperfekti or “entiskestämä” ‘previously continuing/enduring’.

8. The rigid approach to the Latin Framework Towards the end of the 19th century more and more grammars began to show a tendency that I will call the rigid27 approach to the Latin framework. Grammars with this approach took the aspectual distinction between the Latin past tenses as their starting point. The same distinction was insisted on existing not only in Finnish but in all languages that were taught in Finnish schools. This is illustrated in an excerpt from the 1st Grammar Committee’s Memorandum: With respect to the tenses, languages differ from each other so much that a perfect harmony could not be reached. Because of this, the Committee has only been able to attempt to clearly and with accuracy notice those two things that determine the meaning of each tense. These are: 1) the action, which is either a) finished or b) unfinished, and in this latter case also meant to be enduring or sometimes also attempted, and 2) time which is either a) past, b)present or c) coming – – (Memorandum 1888, 9; my translation; original italics.)

The rigid approach may first have been the scholarly opinion of individual grammarians, but it gradually developed into an educational project. The use of the same names for “the same” categories in all the languages taught was considered the most convenient practice, and the rigid yet simple approach was applied both in L1 and L2 education. Sohlberg’s (1861, 12–13) account on the temporal system of “languages in general” will serve as an example: Time ( tempus ), when the action takes place, is either present ( praesens ) or past ( praeteritum ) or still coming ( futurum ). The action itself ( actio ) is either enduring ( imperfecta ) or ended ( perfecta ). Every verb will thus have six forms of time ( tempora ). Three of these belong to enduring action and three to ended action. A) The times of enduring action are: 1. Menevä aika ’ongoing time’ ( praesens ), which expresses that something happens (and means thus enduring action in the present time), e.g. luen ‘I read/I was reading’.

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2. Ennen menevä aika ’previous ongoing time’ ( imperfectum ), which expresses that something happened (and means thus enduring action in the past time), e.g. luin ‘I read’ . 3. Tuleva aika ( futurum simplex ), which expresses something to happen in the time to come (and means thus ongoing action in the future), e.g. olen lukeva ‘I will be reading’ B ) The times of ended action are : 1. Mennyt aika ’past time’ ( perfectum ), which expresses that something has happened (and means thus ended action in the present time), e.g. olen lukenut ‘I have read’. 2. Ennen mennyt aika ’previous past time’ ( plusqvamperfectum ), which expresses that something had happened (and means thus ended action in the past time), e.g. olin lukenut ‘I had read’. 3. Ennen tuleva aika ’previous coming time’ ( futurum exactum ), which expresses that something in the future has happened ( and means thus an ended action in the future) e.g. tulee lukeneeksi ‘will have read’. (Sohlberg 1861, 12–13; my translation.)28

In fact, Sohlberg 1861 is not a grammar of Finnish at all but a translation from a Swedish “general grammar” by the same author. Even as such, it takes many special features of the Finnish language into consideration. According to Sohlberg (1861, 7) Finnish has 15 cases while Latin has six and Swedish only two. The Finnish tense system, however, is not considered special in the 19th century literature. As A. W. Jahnsson (1871, 5–6) states, “Finnish tenses and modes in general are similar with the corresponding forms in Swedish”. In Suomenkielen muoto-oppi ‘The Morphology of the Finnish Language’ E. Hämäläinen (1883, 66) explains the function of the tenses almost exactly in the same way as Sohlberg (1861, 12–13). Hämäläinen also uses a summarizing table (see Table 8-1 below). Interestingly, the examples of verb tenses are translated into Latin, which is rare in the 19th century grammars. Hämäläinen translates the Finnish simple past luin ‘I read’ with the Latin imperfectum legebam ‘I was reading’ or ‘I used to read’.

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Table 8-1. The temporal and aspectual relations of the Finnish and Latin tenses by Hämäläinen (1883, 66). Time/Nature of action Nykyinen ‘present’

Kestävä ‘continuing’ Luen ‘I read’ (lego)

Lopetettu ‘finished’ Olen lukenut ‘I have read’ (legi)

Aijottu ‘intended’

Mennyt ‘past’

Luin ‘I read’ (legebam)

Olin lukenut ‘I had read’ (legeram)

Olin lukeva ‘I was going to read’ (lecturus eram)

Tuleva ‘coming, future’

Luen, olen lukeva ‘I read/ I will be reading’ (legam)

Olen lukenut ‘I have read’ (legero)

Olen lukeva ‘I will read’ (lecturus ero)

Olen lukeva ‘I will be reading’ (lecturus sum)

Based on the explanation pattern by which the Germano-Latinistic terminology is justified, I consider the following grammars of the 19th century to follow the rigid approach or to show inclinations towards it: Wikström, Matias Wilhelm. 1832. Försök till en finsk grammatika. Collan, Fabian. 1847. Finsk språklära. Förra delen, formläran. Eurén, Gustaf Erik. 1849. Finsk språklära. Eurén, G. E. 1852. Suomalainen kielioppi suomalaisille. (Mixed with the concept of 8 modes) Sohlberg, Herman F. 1861. Yhteinen kieli-oppi. Hämäläinen, K. 1883. Suomenkielen muoto-oppi. Memorandum 1888 of the 1st Grammar committee. Kallio, A. H. 1890: Suomen kielioppi ensimmäistä alkeisopetusta varten. Jännes [Genetz], Arvi. 1895. Suomen kielioppi: Alkeis-, muoto- ja runo-oppi oppikouluja varten. Grammars that adopted the rigid approach prefer Latin terms that are phonetically adapted to the explanatory language. Also Finnish terms may, however, reflect the rigid approach. If they are built up from elements with lexical meanings such as ‘ongoing’, ‘continuous’, ‘enduring’; ‘finished’ ‘ended’ or ‘gone’, they are loan translations and give reason to assume that the author believes in aspectual distinction between the Finnish past tenses. I have found the following sets of Finnish terms with this tendency:

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Table 8-2. Finnish sets of terms reflecting the rigid approach. Current name

Eurén (1852, 106–107)

Memorandum 1888; Kallio (1890: 34) kestämä ‘continuing, enduring’

preesens

menevä ‘going, ongoing’

imperfekti

ennenmenevä ‘previously ongoing’

entis-kestämä ‘previously continuing/enduring’

perfekti

mennyt ‘gone’

päättymä ‘ended, finished’

pluskvamperfekti

ennenmennyt ‘previously gone’

entis-päättymä ‘previously ended/finished’

Not all the 19th century grammars, however, explain the difference between the past tenses. It remains unclear which approach the following grammars apply: Juden, Jacobus. 1818. Försök till utredande af finska språkets grammatik. Stenbäck, Gustaf L. 1844. Sammandrag af finska språkets formlära: (efter von Becker) till skolornas tjenst. Eurén, G. E. 1851. Finsk språklära i sammandrag.29 Ahlman, Ferdinand 1864: Lärokurs i Finska Språket för skolornas lägre klasser II. Kockström, V. R. 1868. Lärobok i finska språket: Första läseårets wårtermins kurs. Kockström, V. R. 1872. Lärobok i finska språket: Tredje delen. Swan, C.G. 1868: Lärobok i Finska språket. Jahnsson, A. W. 1871. Finska språkets satslära: För läroverkens behof. Genetz, Arvid. 1881. Suomen kielen äänne- ja muoto-oppi ynnä runous–oppi. Salonius, Paavo. 1885. Praktisk läröbok i Finska språket. Eliot, C. N. E. 1890. A Finnish Grammar. These grammars deal with the tense system either very briefly or are mainly concerned with formal properties such as endings and markers, stem-vowel changes and inflectional types. All these grammars use the

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Latin terms that are phonetically adapted to the explanatory language and organized in Germano-Latinistic fashion.

9. The final stage of onomastization Emil Nestor Setälä’s (1864–1935) role as a grammarian, a linguist and a gatekeeper in academia cannot be underestimated. His Suomen kielen lauseoppi. Oppikirjan koe ‘The Finnish syntax. An experimental textbook’ (1880) with its numerous re-editions became the standard textbook of Finnish syntax for more than 60 years. Just as influential was Setälä’s grammar on phonetics and morphology, Suomen kielioppi. Äänne- ja sanaoppi, which was first published in 1898. These books were re-edited and reprinted for more than 15 times and they also provided a model for other grammarians and L1 Finnish textbook writers. (Karlsson 2000, 178– 226; Hovdhaugen et al. 2000, 8, 10, 180–185) In this section I will examine the presentation of the Finnish tense system in two early editions of Setälä’s syntax grammar: Setälä 1880 and Setälä 1898. In the first edition of his syntax grammar, Setälä (1880, 34–35) calls the Finnish past tenses by their conventional Latin names and shows an inclination towards the rigid approach: perfekti is presented as the tense for present but completed action while imperfekti is believed to expres continuing action in the past. In comparison to the previous grammars, some progress has been made: imperfekti is recognized as “the main historical tense” which is used in past tense narratives. The most significant differences between Setälä (1880) and the previous grammars, however, are not the terminology and explanations but the abundance of full sentence examples, even though these are selective and intentional. For instance, the examples in the book support the traditional view that perfekti denotes completed action in the present time. The first edition of the syntax grammar30 (Setälä 1880) is in fact an experimental work, written by 17-year old Setälä under the supervision of his teacher, Arvid Genetz, and the later editions were substantially revised. (Hovdhaugen et al. 2000, 180–181, 204) Finska språkets sattslära till läroverkets tjänst ‘Finnish syntax for educational purposes’ (Setälä 1892) is an early Swedish edition. Even though the conventional terminology is applied, the actual use and characteristics of the tenses are explained with more accuracy and nuance than in any previous grammar (Setälä 1892, 82–83). The Finnish perfekt (Swedish spelling) is introduced as a tense that is mainly used to expresses completed action in the non-past time. It has

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however three major contexts of use. It may refer to actions that have taken place a) recently, just before the moment of speech: Nyt olen saanut reen valmiiksi ‘Now I have finished the sledge’. Tyttö on lattian lakaissut ‘The girl has swept the floor’. Jo olen työni tehnyt ‘Already have I done my work’. b) often, usually or always: Hän on aina tehnyt työnsä kelvollista ‘he has always done his work well enough’. Sitähän olen aina sanonut ‘I have always said that’. c) In the future: Kun huomenna tulet luokseni, olen jo kirjoittanut kirjeen valmiiksi ‘When you come tomorrow I have already finished the letter’. (Setälä 1892, 83; my translation, original italics.)

The examples in group a) and c) can be classified as having a perfective aspect. Examples in group b) represent the continuing or habitual use of perfekt which Setälä seems to consider very common. He illustrates it with as many as five examples of which I have selected only two. It is hardly justified to apply the term perfekt to continuous or habitual actions, but Setälä does not seem to be disturbed by the contradiction. He uses perfekt merely as a name of a verbal category. Imperfekt (Swedish spelling) is treated similarly. Setälä (1892, 83) takes the literal meaning of the Latin term (‘uncompleted’) as the starting point, but covers the basic usage of the simple past quite adequately. The imperfekt may denote a) An uncompleted action in the past time (egentligt imperfekt ‘the actual imperfect’). It may Į) take place simultaneously with another action: Tyttö lakaisi lattiata kun oven avasin ‘the girl was sweeping the floor when I opened the door’. ȕ) It may also take place often or always: Ennen terveenä ollessan hän teki aina hyvän työn ‘When still in good health he always did a good job’. b) An independent, often a momentary action in the past time. This is called the historisk imperfect31 ‘the historical imperfect’, which can be compared with the aorist in Greek, the historisk perfekt ‘the historical perfect’ of Latin and the passé defini ‘the definite past’ of French: Juopunut löi oven kiinni ja piti kauheata menoa ‘The drunkard slammed the door and made a terrible commotion’. Tänään, eilen, tällä viikolla sain kirjeen. ‘Today, yesterday, this week I received a letter’. (Setälä 1892, 83; my translation, original italics and brackets, boldface italics added.)

Setälä admits that the examples in category b) are not “actual imperfect” but rather have the characteristics of the Latin perfectum. The contradiction does not seem problematic to him. He uses the conventional names even though they are not in accordance with his own explanations.

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Imperfekt and perfekt are used as onomasticized items. They have lost all their descriptive power and their only function is to provide the verb categories with recognizable names. It would be wrong to blame Setälä for creating pseudo terms, because he did not invent the current use of perfekti and imperfekti. He did, however, canonize the mainstream practice of the 19th century. Why did he not use his influental position and his insights to improve the terminology? The Memorandum (1915, 114–116, 220) of the Second Grammar Committee, with Setälä as its president, provides some clues: According to the committee’s notes, aspect and tense in various languages had been studied extensively recently. Although the committee was aware of these studies, it did not recommend changes to the Finnish tense terminology: In general, the attempt to highlight the distinctive properties of the tenses through their names is likely to prove unfruitful. Certain tenses show a great many nuances of meaning and may also coincide with the meanings of another tense. Based on this, it is probably better to keep ourselves to the same names that already have been used; even though they are not the most accurate, than to choose new ones that will most likely prove themselves unsatisfactory anyway. The term “preteriti” can hardly have any advantages in comparison to the old name “imperfekti”, for the tense that would be called “preteriti” is not the only tense that expresses past time. (Memorandun 1915, 119–120, my translation, original quote marks.)

This pessimistic remark displays the final stage of onomastization. By calling preteriti a “new” alternative for “old” imperfekti, the Memorandum reveals how obscure the meaning, the history and the hierarchial relations of these two concepts have become. In a certain sense, the committee is right: Other tenses than the simple past could be called praeteritum. The committee, however, seems to be unaware that this has already been done before. The familiar-looking grammar terms have become non-transparent and hidden their true face even from the experts on the highest level.

10. Conclusions My attempt has been to explore how imperfekti and perfekti turned into pseudo terms in the course of the borrowing process. According to the common belief, imperfekti and perfekti are misleading terms because they have been borrowed from a language which has a very different temporal system than Finnish. Generally speaking this is true, but the actual course of events leading to the present situation has been much more

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complicated. The earliest Finnish grammars that used the Latin grammar tradition as their only source system succeeded to describe the Finnish tense system relatively well. Especially the simple past was represented more accurately by Petraeus (1649) and Martinius (1689) in comparison to the 19th-century grammarians who used the Germanic tradition as their source system. The obvious differences between the tense systems of Finnish and Latin may have prevented Petraeus and Martinius from making too direct comparisons. They also knew the Latin tradition well enough to understand that praeteritum was the head noun of a compound term and imperfectum and perfectum only its modifiers. Even though the main function of metalanguage is to describe and conceptualize the phenomena of a language, the community of users may not always prefer those terms that are most descriptive. During the 19th century several alternatives were proposed to the current terminological system but without lasting success. Descriptiveness may not have been the main quality required by the public: grammar terms were also expected to facilitate language contact situations and to allow generalizations about cross-linguistic phenomena. Lönnrot’s concept of eight modes did not lack descriptivity or innovation. His system was rather too language-specific in order to gain wider popularity. The same is true of Renvall’s two-level temporal system: It could be justified as a description merely of Finnish verbs, but it did not pay enough attention to the obvious similarities between the Finnic and the Germanic tense systems. Renvall’s approach did not offer enough support for cross-linguistic comparative studies or second language acquisition. Correcting pseudo terms can be most painstaking once the communityof users has grown fond of them. In Iso Suomen kielioppi (ISK 2004) ‘A Comprehensive Finnish Grammar’ extensive changes were implemented on the terminology. Also the names for the tenses were about to be revised, but the intended users of the grammar did not support this change. The revision plans were met with strong resistance, especially from the teachers of Finnish as L1. Their arguments were not linguistic but pragmatic, even emotional: imperfekti and perfekti are familiar to all language users. These terms are used on every level of the Finnish educational system, from the elementary school to the linguistic departments of universities. (Maria Vilkuna and Irja Alho, p.c.) They are also learned early. According to the National Core Curriculum for Basic Education (2004, 50), Finnish children should be familiar with the temporal inflection of the verbs by the end of the 5th grade. Especially imperfekti is one of the few grammar terms that is acquired easily and

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remembered long after the completion of school. It would have been very inconvenient to change such effective machinery. A need for better terminological tools still remains. Our old allies are abandoning the Germano-Latinistic framework: even relatively old Swedish grammars recommend preteriti as the name for the simple past instead of imperfekt (e.g. Nylund-Brodda et al. 1973, 87) as does the Swedish terminological database Rikstermbanken. The term perfect is still commonly used to denote the composed past “with relevance to the present moment” in Germanic languages, but like the World Atlas of Language Structures admits, – – the terms “perfect” and “perfective” are not synonymous (the terminology is confusing but has a historical motivation) (WALS 68).

Negotiations over the meaning of tense terminology may soon be expected. Meanwhile, the Finnish tradition is becoming a source system itself: Finnish-related minority languages such as Karelian, Vepsian and Meänkieli are currently in the process of revitalization and standardization. The Finnish traditional grammar is looked upon as a logical source by those who write grammatical descriptions and study materials for these languages. In fact, imperfekti and perfekti have already found their ways into Karelian and Vepsian grammars (e.g. Zaiceva 2003, 101–107; Pyöli 2011, 84–91). By leaving our own metalanguage unmaintained, we are providing a false example for others. According to Elias Lönnrot (1991, 208) a grammatical category that is named well is already “half explained”. At their very best, grammar terms may function as compressed definitions of the categories or phenomena they refer to. In order to revise the tense terminology successfully, some of the early grammars may provide useful resources32. Especially Bartholdus Vhael (1733) left us with a template that requires only minor adjustments: praeteritum 1, praeteritum 2 and a praeteritum plusquamperfectum could be turned into adequate terms by translating praeteritum into modern Finnish, and by replacing the ordinal numbers and the onomasticized pluskvamperfekti with characterizing modifiers. In search for suitable modifiers, Lönnrot’s system of eight verbal modes may provide inspiration. Much is already known about the properties and the use of the Finnish tenses. A descriptive set of terms should not be too hard to create if all that we know is taken into consideration. On the other hand, borrowing terms and concepts from other metalinguistic systems does not necessarily have harmful consequences. If borrowing is used consciously it may help to create a terminological system which is not only descriptive

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but also communicative and functional in various language contact situations.

Notes 1. This study was funded by the Academy of Finland (Project 137479, University of Eastern Finland) and by The Kone Foundation. 2. Any criticism against the term pluskvamperfekti has not yet come to my attention. The use of this tense in Finnish roughly corresponds to the English past perfective and the Latin plusquamperfectum and a similar name may be justified. Though maybe not a pseudo-term, pluskvamperfekti is incomprehensible for most users and should be replaced. 3. The use of the Finnish tenses has been studied extensively e.g. by Ikola (1949, 1950, 1964), Wiik (1976) and Lyytikäinen (1997). The description of the tense system in ISK 2004 is largely based on these studies, which consent to the traditional terminology in spite of the many accurate observations on the characteristics of the past tenses. Recent studies on the use of the tenses are Korhonen (2011) and especially Pallaskallio (2013), who calls the Finnish simple past preteriti. 4. These committees were not set to improve the description of the Finnish language but to harmonize the grammar terminology and textbooks in L1 and L2 education. The 1st committee consisted of C. Synnerberg (president), C.J. Lindeqvist, B.B. Godehjelm, J.G. Geitlin and Arvid Genez (secretary). The 2nd committee was first lead by A.V. Streng and later by E.N. Setälä. Other members were K.H. Appelqvist, I. Uschanov, R.E. Saxen and K.S. Ahonius. Genetz and Setälä represented the Finnish language. The other members were officials or experts in foreign languages taught in Finnish schools. (See also Memorandum 1994, 31–37.) 5. Unfortunately I had to limit the amount of historical background information presented. For the English-speaking reader who wishes to read more about the early Finnish grammars and their writers I recommend The History of Linguistics in the Nordic Countries (Hovdhaugen et al. 2000) and Finno-Ugrian Language Studies in Finland by Mikko Korhonen 1986. 6. Actually, the main use of plusquamperfectum is not to denote “more than completed” actions but rather events before other past events. 7. The manuscript of Rudimenta linguae Finnicae breviter delineata was discovered in 2008 at Sotheby’s auction. The author, exact time of writing and the targeted readers are unknown. The Finnish Literature Society has published Rudimenta (2012) as a critical edition including a facsimile with a Finnish translation and background articles. 8. Because the Finnish passive voice has no personal inflections, contemporary grammars would consider these examples rather as past predicative sentences than instances of pluskvamperfekti. They are, nevertheless, composed verb forms with a past tense auxiliary verb. The example below, quoted from Martinius (1689: 62)

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describes the Finnish pluperfect in the passive voice more accurately. (See also Häkkinen 1994, 248–525.) The English equivalents given to the Finnish and Latin verb forms, in both quotes, should be considered as approximates. Whether the Finnish pluskvamperfekti, the Latin praeteritum plusquamperfectum and the English past perfective can be considered as equivalents, depends much on the context in which they are used. 9. The accidentia called Genus refers to active, passive, transitive and intransitive meanings of the verb form and roughly corresponds to the concept of voice. Species denotes whether the verb is primitiva‘non-derivate verb’ such as open/opin ‘I learn’ or derivata ‘derivate verb’ such as opetan ‘I teach, I cause to learn’ (Petraeus 1649, 26; Martinius 1689, 46; Vhael 1733, 68). Figura refers to the lexical structure of the verb. Figura simplex consists of one single lexeme, simple or derived, such as astun ‘I step, I walk’. Compound verbs such as alasastun ‘I step down’ or ylösastun ‘I step up’ represent Figura Composita (Petraeus 1649, 28; Martinius 1689, 51). Vhael (1733, 66) does not mention Finnish verbs to have Accidentia Figura, and curiously, compound verbs have later been considered as Swedish influence and an alien structure to the Finnish language. 10. The Latin verb form valui (< valeo) ‘I was fit/ strong/ healthy’ ‘I had power/ influence’ and the Swedish orckade (modern spelling orkade < orka) ‘managed’ can both be considered as equivalents of the Finnish verb form jaksoin. The verb jaksaa is a unique item (see, e.g. Kolehmainen, Meriläinen, Riionheimo Chapter 1 in this book) with an approximate English meaning ‘to have the strenght’. In connection to an adverb it may also express state of well-being: jaksan hyvin ‘I am well’, jaksan huonosti ‘I am not well’. 11. The use of the potential mode as a subjunctive is rare in standard Finnish but common and regular in the closely related Karelian languages. See also Forsberg (1998, 23, 30, 43, 73). 12. The oldest vernacular grammars were not written of Germanic but Romance languages, for example Italian and French, in which past tenses are marked for aspect (see, e.g. Vihonen 1978, 12). Terms such as imperfectum and perfectum are completely relevant for these languages. 13. Aelius Donatus lived and worked around 350 AC. His Ars minor and Ars major set the model for the Latin school grammars for longer than 1000 years and had a great influence on the emerging vernacular grammars throughout Europe. A Latin school grammar was often called Donatus regardless of the author who had written the actual edition (Vihonen 1978, 6–7). 14. It should be noted that van Heule’s interpretation of plusquamperfectum as “meer als voorleden” literally means ‘more than past’ rather than ‘more than completed’. This interpretation is insightful because the pluperfect refers rather to an event before another past event than to an action that is “more than completed”. 15. Epitome originally has no page numbers but the Finnish and Estonian tenses are discussed on pages 159 (131)–163 (135) of the pdf-version available online (http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi–fd2010–00003219). 16. Johan Stråhlman published his grammar under the name of Strahlmann. He wanted to spread his book in Germany and probably considered the spelling

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Strahlmann to be more familiar to the German readers than Stråhlman (see Järventausta 2013). 17. According to the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS, feature 66A), a feature called remoteness distinction does exist. While some languages combine tense and aspect markers, there are languages that use different tense markers for events in the recent and in the remote past. Most of the European languages— including Finnish and German—do not have this feature. (http://wals.info/feature/66A#2/25.5/148.2.) 18. Because the Finnish passive sentence has no subject, these examples on passive composed past tenses are not considered correct Finnish. They should rather be: on tehty ‘has been done/made’; oli tehty ‘had been done/made’. 19. Google books have many old grammars available free of charge. They are not accessible through links but require a user’s account. 20. Later, Dahl (1796, 58) explains the meaning of the Latin tenses in the classical way. He connects the imperfectum with the Swedish simple past but remarks: “Often stands the Swedish Imperfectum also for that which is completed (han kom ‘he came’) but in Latin always perfectum is used (venit ‘he came’).” A whole new concept is born: “the Swedish imperfectum” is a simple past which is called imperfectum but used in the function of perfectum. 21. ‘Time realm’ may not be an optimal translation for aikakunta. This experimental term is not currently in use and cannot even be considered as very good Finnish. 22. On the life and work of Nicklas Keckman and his friendship and collaboration with Elias Lönnrot, see Pääkkönen (1994, 2005). 23. In his Bidrag till Finsk Grammatik Lönnrot (1991[1842], 140–141) slightly modifies the Latin names of his eight modes. He deletes the hyperonym modus and changes Historicus modus into Revocativus. Lönnrot also applies his concept of eight verbal modes onto the Vepsian language in his lecture for professorship Om det Nord-Tscudiska språket in 1853 (Lönnrot 1991[1853], 61). 24. For this study I have used Lönnrot’s Selected works vol. 3 (1991) instead of SWK 3: 11. The texts in both works are identical but the page numberings in the selected works are more convenient for the present purposes, and in addition, there are more copies in circulation for the interested reader. 25. Von Becker (1824, 91–145) uses imperfectum as an onomasticized, synonymous expression for praeteritum in his inflectional tables. Unfortunately pages 86 and 87 which might contain some explanations for his choices of terms are missing from the edition I have used. 26. Budenz (1880, 117) provides several full sentence examples of the various uses of praeteritum. Some of these have the meaning of aoristus and others imperfectum, but praeteritum as the term for the past tense in general covers them both. 27. It should be noted that this term only characterizes how the tense system is dealt with and it is not intended to label entire works or individual grammarians. A grammar that describes the Finnish tenses in a rigid fashion may deal with other grammatical categories more insightfully.

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28. Because Sohlberg 1861 is from a digital corpus which uses plain text format, it is not possible to see if the boldface and italics are original. It is, however, safe to assume that some typographical means have been used to separate the headings, the terms and the examples from the main text. 29. Because Eurén has experimented with many different conceptual systems it is not possible to deduce which particular approach he applies in this brief presentation. 30. Fred Karlsson (2000) suspects Setälä’s syntax grammar (1880) of being plagiarized from Finska Språkets satslära (Jahnsson 1871). As far as the tense system is concerned I fail to see the connection. The basic use of the Finnish tenses is discussed very briefly in Jahnsson (1871, 5–6): “Tempora och modi I finskan öfverenstämma I almänhet med motsvarande former I svenskan. “ [The tenses and modes in Finnish generally are similar to the corresponding forms in Swedish.] The brief description of the tenses is not necessarily a flaw because Jahnsson (1871) concentrates on the syntactic functions of the cases. Other early syntax grammars (Yrjö-Koskinen 1860, Corander 1861) do not deal with the tense system at all. 31. It was likely Setälä who coined the term historisk imperfect. I have not yet found examples in other grammars. 32. It is my sincere wish to contribute to the terminology work that is presently being conducted by Tieteen termipankki, The Bank of Finnish Terminology in Arts and Sciences. (http://tieteentermipankki.fi/wiki/Termipankki:Etusivu.)

Glossing abbreviations 1SG INE PPC PST

first person singular inessive past participle past

Research materials Ahlman, Ferdinand. 1864. Lärokurs i Finska Språket för skolornas lägre klasser II. Helsingfors [Helsinki]: G.W. Edlunds förlag. [SWK 6: 25.] von Becker, Reinhold. 1824. Finsk grammatik. Åbo [Turku]: Bibelsällskapets tryckeri. [SWK 2: 6.] Budenz, Jozsef. 1880. Finn nyelvtan. Olvasmányokkal és szótárral. Budapest: Kiadja Knoll Károly. [SWK 8: 28.] Collan, Fabian. 1847. Finsk språklära. Förra delen, formläran. Helsingfors [Helsinki]: J. C. Frenckell & Son. [SWK 4: 17.]

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Eliot, Charles Norton Edgecumbe. 1890. A Finnish Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon press. [SWK 9: 38.] Eurén, Gustaf Erik. 1846. Grunddragen till Finsk formlära. Åbo [Turku]: J.C. Frenckel & Son. [SWK 4:16.] —. 1849. Finsk språklära. Åbo [Turku]: J. C. Frenckell & Son. [SWK 4: 18.] —. 1851. Finsk språklära i sammandrag. Åbo [Turku]: J.W. Lillja & Co. [SWK 5: 19.] —. 1852. Suomalainen kielioppi suomalaisille. Turku: J.W. Lillja & Co. [SWK 5: 20.] Finelius, Karl August. 1845. Finsk Språklära för Lägre Elementar-Skolor. Wasa [Vaasa]: Wollfska Boktryckeriet. [SWK 4: 15.] Genetz, Arvid. 1881. Suomen kielen äänne- ja muoto-oppi ynnä runousoppi: Oppikouluja varten. Helsinki: K. E. Holm. [SWK 8: 30.] Hämäläinen, Konstantin. 1883. Suomenkielen muoto-oppi. Helsinki: K. Hämäläinen. [SWK 8: 33.] Jahnsson, Adolf Waldemar. 1871. Finska språkets satslära: För läroverkens behof. Helsingfors [Helsinki]: Utgifvarens förlag. [SWK 7: 29.] Jännes [Genetz], Arvi. 1895. Suomen kielioppi: Alkeis-, muoto- ja runooppi oppikouluja varten. 4th edition. Helsinki: Weilin & Göös. [SWK 10: 42.] Juden, Jacobus. 1818. Försök till utredande af finska språkets grammatik. Wiborg [Viipuri]: And. Cederwaller. [SWK 2: 5.] Kallio, A. H. 1890: Suomen kielioppi ensimmäistä alkeisopetusta varten. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. [SWK 10: 39.] Kockström, V. R. 1868. Lärobok i finska språket: Första läseårets wårtermins kurs. Helsingfors [Helsinki]: Finska Litteratur-sällskapets tryckeri, författarens förlag. [SWK 7: 28.] —. 1872. Lärobok i finska språket: Tredje delen. Helsingfors [Helsinki]: Finska Litteratur-sällskapets tryckeri, G. W. Edlunds förlag. [SWK 7: 28.] Koranteri [Corander], Henrik Konstantin. 1845. Suomalainen Kieli-Oppi, Kowlujen Tarpe’eksi: Ruotsalaisen esi-puheen kanssa opettajalle. 1. Wiipuri [Viipuri]: Johanna Cederwaller & Son. [SWK 4: 14.] Länkelä, J. 1867. Suomen kielen kielioppi. Helsinki: Weilin ja Göös. [SWK 6: 26.] Lönnrot, Elias. 1991 [1847]. “Grammatikaliska termer på Finska.” In Valitut teokset. 3, kirjoitelmia ja lausumia, edited by Raija Majamaa, 205–208. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seuran toimituksia 551. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. [Litteraturblad 1847/ 9, 11.]

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Rudimenta 2012 = Rudimenta linguae Finnicae breviter delineata: Suomen kielen varhaiskielioppi ja sen tausta. Edited by Petri Lauerma, translated into Finnish by Suvi Randén. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seuran Toimituksia 1380. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Salonius, Paavo. 1885. Praktisk läröbok i finska språket. Åbo [Turku]: G. W. Wilen. [SWK 9: 35.] Setälä, Emil Nestor. 1880. Suomen kielen lauseoppi: Oppikirjan koe. Helsinki: K. E. Holm. [SWK 8: 29.] —. 1892. Finska språkets satslära till läroverkens tjenst. Helsingfors [Helsinki]: Söderström & Co. [SWK 10: 40.] —. 1898. Suomen kielioppi: Äänne- ja sanaoppi: Oppikoulua ja omin päin opiskelua varten. Helsinki: Otava. [SWK 10: 43.] Sohlberg, Herman Fredrik. 1861. Yhteinen kieli-oppi. Kuopio: P. Aschan. Available online at http://kaino.kotus.fi/korpus/1800/meta/sohlberg/ yhteinenkielioppi1861_rdf.xml. Stenbäck, Gustaf L. 1844. Sammandrag af finska språkets formlära: (efter von becker) till skolornas tjenst. Borgå: Widerholm. [SWK 3: 12.] Strahlmann [Strålman], Johann. 1816. Finnische Sprachenlehre für Finnen und Nicht-Finnen. St. Petersburg: M. C. Iversen. [SWK 1:4.] Swan, Carl Gustaf. 1868. Lärobok in Finska Språket. Helsingfors [Helsinki]: J. Simelius, Författarens förlag. [SWK 6: 27.] SWK 1–10 = Wiik, Kalevi. 1987. SWK, eli Suomen Wanhat Kieliopit [The Old Finnish Grammars]. Vol. 1–10, issues 1–43. Turku: University of Turku. Tamminen, Emanuel. 1884. Äidinkielen oppikirja kansakoulujen tarpeeksi. Helsinki: W. Edlund. [SWK 8: 34.] Vhael, Bartholdus Gabrielis. 1733. Grammatica Fennica. Åbo: Johan Kiämpe. [SWK 1:3.] Weske, Mihkel. 1881. Soome keele opetus. 1, luhikene grammatik. Eesti kirjameeste seltsi toimitused 47. Wiljandi: Eesti kirjameeste seltsi. [SWK 8: 34.] Wikström, Matias Wilhelm. 1832. Försök till en finsk grammatika, främställande en enda declination och en enda conjugation : Jemte tvenne bihang. Wasa [Vaasa]: C. A. Londicer. [SWK 2: 8.]

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CONTRIBUTORS Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta is Professor of Education at the Center for Feminist Social Studies, Örebro University, Sweden. Her transdisciplinary research encompasses literacies, mono-multilingualism, multimodality, learning and identity. Using multi-scale ethnography she studies everyday life, policy and sociohistorical dimensions of social practices from sociocultural and postcolonial approaches. She has published extensively in different domains including Communication Studies, Deaf Studies, and Educational Sciences. Her books include Literacies and Deaf Education (2004), Alternative Voices. (Re)searching Language, Culture and Diversity (co-edited, 2013), Literacy-practices inside and outside school (Swedish, co-edited, 2013). She heads, since 2008, the Swedish Research Council-funded multidisciplinary Research School LIMCUL (Literacies, Multilingualism and Cultural Practices in Present Day Society). Keiko Hirano is currently Professor in the Department of English at the University of Kitakyushu, Japan. She was awarded a PhD in Linguistics by the University of Essex, UK, in 2011. Her research focuses on dialect contact, variation and change in the English language. She is the author of Dialect Contact and Social Networks (2013). Annekatrin Kaivapalu is Associate Professor of Finnish in the Institute of Estonian language and Culture at Tallinn University. Her research interests involve second/foreign language acquisition, especially morphological and morphosyntactical development of Estonian and Finnish as second/foreign languages with a special emphasis on crosslinguistic influence and psychotypology. She is currently exploring perception of cross-linguistic similarity and its symmetry as well as comprehension of closely related languages and interaction between comprehension and production in learner language development. She is the editor-in-chief of the journal published by Estonian Association of Applied Linguistics Lähivõrdlusi. Lähivertailuja (‘Close Comparisons’). Maria Kok is a teacher of Finnish as a second language and a PhD student in Finnish Language at the University of Eastern Finland. Her forthcoming doctoral research is focused on the emphatic and adverbial uses of the pronoun itse ‘self’ which has been erroneously classified as indefinite by most traditional Finnish grammars. Her research interests

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Contributors

involve grammaticalization studies, historical syntax of the Finnic languages and the history and ergonomics of grammar traditions. Leena Kolehmainen works as Associate Professor (tenure track) of German Language and Culture at the University of Eastern Finland. Her current research interests include the corpus linguistic and contact linguistic study of translation. Another core area of research is the crosslinguistic study of German and Finnish grammatical features (e.g. structurally complex verbs, valency/argument structure, and the interface between syntax and semantics). Simone Lechner is a Researcher at the Department of English Linguistics at the University of Hamburg. She is currently completing her doctoral thesis titled "The acquisition of English as an L3 in multilingual contexts" under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Peter Siemund and Prof. Dr. Ingrid Gogolin. Marjatta Lehtinen is a PhD student in English Language and Translation at the University of Eastern Finland. Her research is focused on the study of clause structure in English–Finnish translation within the framework of Cognitive and Radical Construction Grammar. The aim is to develop methodology for describing equivalence with reference to un-prototypical transitivity and the subject, among others. Jukka Mäkisalo is University Lecturer in the Methodology of Linguistic Sciences, and currently Acting Professor in Translation Studies, at the University of Eastern Finland. He received his PhD in general linguistics in 2000, his dissertation dealing with Finnish compounds from an experimental psycholinguistic perspective. His work has subsequently taken a turn towards translation studies and he is the author or co-author of several peer-reviewed articles that address various aspects of translation. His other academic interests involve cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics. Maisa Martin is Professor of Finnish as a Second or Foreign Language at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, since 1996. She has supervised numerous PhD and MA theses in various aspects of second language acquisition and multilingualism and been widely involved in the development of this research and educational area in Finland. Her main research interests are second language morphology and the development of functional writing skills in relation to the growth of linguistic

Language Contacts at the Crossroads of Disciplines

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knowledge. She is also involved in projects relating to learning-related cross-linguistic influence between Finnish and Estonian. Custódio Martins is Assistant Professor at the Department of Portuguese at the University of Macau. He has been teaching in Asia since 1992. His main research areas are second language acquisition and processing, applied linguistics, and bilingualism. He has published articles on the acquisition of tense and aspect by L2 speakers of Portuguese and also on L2 individual differences. Lea Meriläinen is a Post-Doctoral Researcher in English Language and Culture at the University of Eastern Finland. Her main academic interests are second language acquisition, cross-linguistic influence, learner corpus research, and the interface between learner English and indigenized L2 varieties English. She is the author of Language Transfer in the Written English of Finnish Students (2010) and a co-author of several articles that combine the perspectives of second language acquisition research, contact linguistics and translation studies. Pirkko Muikku-Werner is Professor of Finnish Language at the University of Eastern Finland. Her research interests include receptive multilingualism, idioms – their translation and understanding – and (im)politeness. She is the author of the monographs Tositarkoituksella – näkökulmia kontakti-ilmoituksiin (on the discourse and developments in dating advertisements, 2009) and Ilkeyden kahden kasvot (on the pragmatics, psychology and sociology of being mean, 2012) and co-author of Suurella sydämellä ihan sikana. Suomen kielen kuvaileva fraasisanakirja (a phrase dictionary of Finnish, 2008). Martina Ožbot is Professor of Italian at the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). Her main research interests concern languages in contact, translation theory and translation history. She has authored several publications, among which there are also two monographs: Prevajalske strategije in vprašanje koherence ob slovenskih prevodih Machiavellijevega Vladarja (Textual coherence and translation strategies in the Slovene translations of Machiavelli’s Prince, 2006) and Prevodne zgodbe: Poskusi z zgodovino in teorijo prevajanja s posebnim ozirom na slovensko-italijanske odnose (Translation stories: Studies in translation history and theory, with a focus on Slovene-Italian relations, 2012). She is editor of the book series Studia Translatoria, published by the Slovene

400

Contributors

Association of Literary Translators, and of the journal Linguistica. The works she has translated into Slovene include Edward Sapir’s Language. Heli Paulasto is a Post-Doctoral Researcher and University Lecturer in English Language and Culture at the University of Eastern Finland, her project entitled English language variation in local and global contexts (Academy of Finland 2012-2015). Her research deals with variation in English from the perspectives of contact linguistics, dialectology and sociolinguistics, and her main fields of interest at present are Welsh English and the development of so-called Angloversals in contact varieties of English. She is the author of Welsh English Syntax: Contact and Variation (2006), co-author of English and Celtic in Contact (2008) and co-editor of a number of publications. Esa Penttilä is University Lecturer, and currently Acting Professor, in English Language and Translation at the University of Eastern Finland. His research interests include idioms and idiomaticity and their role in language contact and non-professional translation, and the various aspects of figurative language from the cognitive perspective, in particular. He is the co-editor of, for example, the compilations Dialects Across Borders (2005) and Beyond Borders – Translations Moving Languages, Literatures and Cultures (2011). Mário Pinharanda Nunes is Assistant Professor at the University of Macau. He has taught in Asia since 1991, in Malaysia, Indonesia and Macau. His primary area of research is language documentation and description, namely of Makista and Kristang (from Malacca, Malaysia). His general research interests lie in the field of documentation and description of endangered languages (specifically of Portuguese-based creoles of Asia), language contact, language variation and change and second language acquisition. He has published his work on Asian Portuguese-based creoles in journals and books specific to the field. Helka Riionheimo is University Lecturer of Finnish Language at the University of Eastern Finland. Her main academic interests are contact linguistics, cross-linguistic influence, dialectology, sociolinguistics, Finnish and other Finnic languages, language endangerment, language attrition, and the interface between contact linguistics, second language acquisition studies, and translation studies. She is the leader of the project ‘CROSSLING: Language Contacts at the Crossroads of Disciplines’, funded by the Kone Foundation, 2011–2014. She has published a

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monograph on the contact of Ingrian Finnish and Estonian in 2007 (in Finnish), and recently she has published in the journal Studies in Language (2013) on the morphological intermingling of these two languages and in Multilingua (2013, together with Maria Frick) on codeswitching. Anna Ritter is University Lecturer at the Department of German and Comparative Studies at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität ErlangenNürnberg, Germany. Her research interests include bi- and multilingualism, code-switching and code-mixing, bilingual speech in immigrant families, language and emotions. Peter Siemund has been Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Hamburg since 2001. He has written four monographs (Routledge, Mouton de Gruyter, Cambridge University Press), published six edited volumes and has written on a wide range of topics in articles to journals and edited volumes. He has worked on reflexivity and selfintensifiers, pronominal gender, interrogative constructions, speech acts and sentence types, argument structure, tense and aspect, varieties of English, language typology, and language contact. Detailed information is available at http://www.eng-ling.uni-hamburg.de. Anna Verschik is Professor of General Linguistics at Tallinn University. Her scholarly interests include language contacts, Baltic sociolinguistics and ethnolects. Her monograph Emerging Bilingualism: From Monolingualism to Code-Copying (2008) explores emerging changes in Estonia’s Russian in the light of Code-Copying Framework, Yiddish in the Baltic countries and post-Yiddish Jewish ethnolects. She has published extensively on Estonian-Russian language contacts, including language contacts in blogs, on Yiddish in the Baltic countries, and post-Jewish ethnolects.

INDEX

A accent 44–45, 226, 238–239, 270, see also pronunciation accessibility 22–23, 53, 60, 64, 69, 75, 105–106, 113, 115, 117, 119, 121, 203, 255, 284, 292, 326, 350 accommodation 15, 19, 21, 25, 62, 142, 216, 219, 220–221, 225, 240–241 acquisition foreign language 91, 208, 319– 323, 334, 338, 340, 349 heritage language xiii, 23, 35 incomplete xiii, 33–34, 48, 60, 337 second language see second language acquisition third language xvi, 322 activation 7, 11, 22–24, 53 adjective 18, 145, 151, 299, 349– 350, 354 adverb 41, 67, 351, 384 adverbial 133, 149, 152, 195, 329 Afrikaans 296 age 38, 50, 106, 165–166, 179–180, 182–184, 223, 253, 255–257, 265–267, 271, 320–324, 334– 335, 338–340 age of onset 334–335 agreement xvi, 72–73, 76–78, 80– 81, 321, 324–329, 331–332, 334, 336–337, 339, 340 Aktionsart see aspect, lexical Albanian 16 animacy hierarchy 197–198 anthropology x

approximative systems see interlanguage Aramaic 41–42, 51 article 12, 17, 20, 25, 143–146, 154 aspect xvi, 14, 20, 61, 67–68, 70– 74, 80–81, 83, 321, 324, 329– 332, 334, 336–340, 347–348, 354–355, 357, 366, 368, 372, 374, 376, 379–380, 384–385 continuous 67–68, 355, 372, 376 habitual 67–68, 329, 379 imperfective 70, 329, 348, 351– 352, 372 irrealis 67 lexical 68, 70–74, 80–81 perfective 67–68, 70, 73, 80–81, 329, 331, 348, 352, 357, 379, 382 progressive 67–68, 70, 329, 331 attrition xiii, 3, 5–6, 14, 17–24, 26, 33, 35, 48, 52, 132 avoidance 4, 6, 11–12 B bilingual xi, xiii, xiv–xvi, 3–5, 7, 11, 14–16, 18–19, 21–24, 26, 33–36, 45, 49–50, 54, 63, 91, 95–97, 102, 105–106, 111, 116–117, 134–137, 140–141, 148–149, 152–154, 207, 251, 258, 261– 262, 267–268, 275, 319–324, 327–329, 336, 338–340 individuals xi, xiii, xvi, 4–5, 13– 14, 18, 21–24, 26, 33–35, 49– 50, 95, 134–137, 140–141, 148–149, 152, 154, 207, 268, 319, 321–324, 327–328, 336, 338–339

404 L1 acquisition 35, 63 production 97, 106, 134, 136– 137, 251, 258, 261, 275 repertoire 22, 25, 36, 40, 51, 100, 104, 319 society xiv, 16, 19, 35, 54, 153, 258 bilingualism x, 5–6, 14–15, 20, 24, 33, 35–37, 40, 49, 54, 69, 75, 91–93, 95–96, 106, 115, 117, 121, 131, 133–134, 137, 141– 142, 147–148, 263, 274, 287, 321–322, 337–338, 340 asymmetrical 54 balanced 49, 137, 142, 338, 340 receptive 263, 274 sequential 35 societal 131, 133, 137, 141 bilingualism research x, 6, 14, 24, 89, 91–92, 95–96, 287, 322 Bodic languages 16 borrowability 50–51 borrowing ix, xiii–xiv, xvi, 5–6, 15– 16, 22, 33–37, 39, 41, 48, 50–54, 100, 141, 166, 347–350, 352, 364, 367, 380, 382 C calque 133, 139, 141, 144, 162, 349 Cantonese 60, 64, 67, 82–83 case 40, 49, 144, 148, 195, 201–203, 298–302, 307, 311, 360, 369, 375, 386 Chinese xiii, 11–12, 17, 59–60, 64, 69–72, 79–81, 83 choice conscious 25, 358 lexical 9–10, 13, 20, 193–194, 196, 201, 205–206 linguistic xv, 17, 21–22, 53, 193, 196–197, 201, 206, 221–222, 225, 229, 239, 261, 266, 268, 273–274, 287 chunk 111, 116, 299, 310 clause dependent 149–150

Index main 12, 40, 149, 195, 268, 332 relative 12, 20, 42 subordinate 195, 269, 332, 362 CLI see cross-linguistic influence code-mixing 338 code-switching xiii, xv, 39–40, 49, 273, 324, 338 cognate 53, 296, 299, 311 cognition 197–200, 207–208, 284, 288, 292, 308 cognitive development 50 load 22, 51 process 4, 10, 15, 19, 24, 66, 198–199, 207, 288, 308 cognitive linguistics xv, 12, 196, 198–199, 207 collocation xii, 3–4, 16, 19, 24–25, 48, 150, 162, 195, 260, 284, 288 color 13–14, 20 Common European Framework of Reference for Languages 333 communication xi, xiii–xv, 15, 37– 39, 53, 80, 89–98, 100, 102, 104–105, 109, 113, 115, 118– 122, 134–140, 142, 153–154, 162, 192, 198, 216, 221, 241, 265, 267–268, 273–275, 289, 323, 326, 338, 347, 349–350, 383 communication research 89–91, 137 complexity 18, 40, 48–49, 54, 68, 81, 92, 97–98, 100, 104–105, 111, 113, 115, 117, 119–120, 141, 154, 179, 182, 200, 241, 287, 295, 309, 323, 325, 331– 332, 339, 341, 347 conceptual change 6, 12–14, 132– 133, 326 conceptualization xiv, 12, 14–15, 20, 34, 89–90, 93–97, 104, 106, 111, 120, 131, 141, 192, 194– 196, 198, 203–204, 206–207, 251, 285–287, 310–311, 349– 351, 364, 367, 381, 386 concrete-abstract 168, 170, 290–292

Language Contacts at the Crossroads of Disciplines congruence 68, 197, 288 conjugation 17, 21, 78, 270, 325– 326, 355, 357–361, 372–373 conjunction xiii, 33–35, 37, 39, 41– 48, 50–54, 149–150, 265 constraint xv, 74, 81, 162, 215–217, 222, 227, 229, 232, 237, 240, 285, 287, 305 construction xiv, 8–9, 16–17, 21, 43, 92, 133, 139, 141, 151–153, 177, 191–198, 200–201, 203, 205– 206, 268, 284, 290, 297, 310, 324, 329, 359, 372–373 contact areal xiv, 4, 140, 359 dialect xv, 215–217, 219–222, 238, 240–241 influence ix, xi–xiii, xv, xvii, 3– 4, 6–7, 24–26, 131, 134, 137, 139, 141, 150 language 60, see also creole; pidgin situation xi–xii, xv–xvi, 3–6, 11, 15, 17, 19–21, 24–25, 34, 36, 47–48, 50, 52, 54, 61, 81, 131, 133–134, 138–141, 147, 151, 153, 163, 220, 241, 252, 255, 260, 262–263, 267, 273, 275, 347–349, 381, 383 variety 5–6, 17, 52 contact linguistics ix–xiv, xvi, 3–6, 15, 19–21, 24, 33–34, 36, 47–48, 52, 54, 65, 95, 136, 163, 284 contact-induced change ix, 4, 7, 33–34, 47, 51– 52, 54, 131, 133, 147, 283– 284 innovation xiii, 37, 143 reduction 19 context xii–xiv, 4, 13, 18–21, 24– 26, 34, 45, 53, 60–61, 63, 65–66, 68–69, 71–73, 77, 80, 92, 94, 96, 104–105, 133, 135, 137, 140– 141, 147, 151, 153, 161, 163– 165, 170–172, 177–178, 182– 183, 185, 195–196, 198, 208,

405

217–219, 252, 254, 261, 272, 284, 287, 289, 293, 296–297, 319, 321–323, 326, 329–330, 338, 341, 355, 379, 384 contrastive linguistics 285 convergence 6, 14–16, 21–22, 25, 37, 47–49, 54, 61, 68, 288, 297, 299, see also transfer conversation analysis 91, 261 copula 40, 330 copying 4, 16, 54, 66, see also transfer corpus linguistics 7, 9 creole xiii, 59–63, 65–66, 68–72, 79, 81, 83 creole studies xiii, 60, 65–66, 69 creolization 61, 63, 65, 79–81 Croatian 54, 138 cross-disciplinary research ix, xiii, 3–6, 24, 135 cross-linguistic influence (CLI) x– xi, xiii, xv, 4–7, 10–15, 19–25, 66, 81, 192, 284, 286–290, 305, 308–310, 321–322, 326, 338, 341 culture x, 6, 34, 37, 39, 52–53, 62, 89, 92, 94, 113, 117–118, 120– 121, 132, 137, 140, 143, 148, 153, 163–164, 166–170, 174, 177–178, 180–181, 183, 218, 241, 254, 275, 285, 307, 367 curriculum 110, 112, 116, 121, 151, 308, 337, 381 D Danish 10, 13, 168, 307 deaf studies 89–90, 121 decay see attrition decreolization xiii, 59, 61, 69–70, 72, 81 degeneration 18, see also attrition deixis 18, 21, 53, 196 diachronic ix, xv, 7, 19, 36, 138, 221, 258, 308 dialect xv, 36, 40, 63, 66, 95, 120, 143, 215–217, 219–222, 229,

406 232, 238, 240–241, 253, 298, 307, see also contact; leveling; new-dialect formation dictionary 164, 169, 295, 372 diglossia 63, 69, 142 discourse xiv, 8, 37, 47–48, 50–51, 53–54, 72, 75, 82, 92, 98, 106– 107, 109, 111, 117, 119, 122, 132, 140–141, 154, 166, 196– 197, 199, 208, 259–261, 263– 265, 267, 269, 290 patterns 132, 141 pragmatics 37, 47–48, 50–51, 53–54 disintegration see attrition divergence 37, 47–48, 288, 297, 299 dominance xiii, 18–19, 21, 26, 33– 35, 46–48, 51, 53, 62, 90, 96, 105, 117, 143, 148, 208, 220, 254, 274, 323, 338, 364 Dutch 18, 296 E education 37, 39, 63, 65, 90, 93, 96, 100, 102, 107, 111, 114, 117, 166, 181, 217, 223, 241, 251, 256–258, 274, 320–321, 324, 334, 336–341, 347, 354, 367– 368, 374, 378, 381, 383 educational sciences x, 89–91, 105, 319–320, 323 emigration 38, 61, 252–253, see also immigration; migration encoding 9, 13–14, 70, 194–197, 199–202, 209, 329 English xii, xiv–xvi, 8–10, 12–14, 16–18, 25, 34, 36, 38–41, 43–49, 51–54, 63–64, 70, 82, 97–103, 111–112, 115, 121, 139, 147, 153–155, 162, 165–166, 168– 169, 174, 178–185, 191, 193– 194, 197, 202–203, 206, 208– 209, 215–223, 225–227, 229, 232, 234, 238–241, 255, 284, 295, 302, 309, 319–324, 326,

Index 328–330, 334, 336–341, 353, 355, 383–384 American 168, 185, 226–227, 234, 326, 330 British 185, 226, 238–239, 326, 330 Indian 17 London 226, 238 New Zealand 219, 227, 239–240 Singapore 17 varieties of xii, 17, 25, 154, 216– 217, 219, 221, 225, 234, 239– 241, 319, 323, 330 equivalence 8, 10, 12, 16, 18, 22, 35, 42–46, 50, 67–68, 91, 139, 150, 196, 198, 225, 263, 265, 267, 353, 355, 362, 364, 368, 384 erosion see attrition error 11, 14, 141, 270, 287, 330 Estonian xv–xvi, 19, 51, 53, 154, 283–286, 288, 292–294, 296– 303, 305–311, 364, 384 ethnography 89–91, 96, 121 ethnolect 50–51 ethnolinguistic 39 European Union 195, 203, 289 evaluation 118, 207, 329, 338 exposure 35, 49, 52, 59, 63, 75, 81, 114, 139, 147–148, 283, 286, 292, 302 F false friend 295 family xv, 35, 38, 40, 62, 82, 100, 181, 222, 251–252, 254–258, 260, 262–268, 270–275, 284, 324, 336 familylect 254 feature pool 68, 220–221, 238–240 Figure-Ground 191, 193, 199–201, 203–204, 206–208 fingerspelling 98, 111, 114–116, 120, 122 Finnish xiv–xvi, 8–10, 12–13, 19, 22, 49, 161–172, 174, 177, 179–

Language Contacts at the Crossroads of Disciplines 185, 191, 193–196, 200, 202– 203, 206, 208–209, 283–286, 288, 292–294, 296–303, 305– 309, 311, 347–362, 364–378, 380–386 grammar tradition xvi, 348, 350– 351, 359, 372, 382–383 first language (L1) x, xiii, xvi, 3, 11–15, 17–21, 23–24, 26, 33–38, 48–50, 52, 59–66, 69–74, 78–82, 141, 148, 184, 208, 275, 284, 286–289, 291–292, 297–298, 302–303, 305–308, 310, 319– 320, 322, 324, 338–339, 341, 374, 378, 381, 383, see also mother tongue influence 11–14, 18, 20–21, 33– 35, 66, 141, 148, 286–288, 341 transfer 60, 66, 69, 81, 141, 208, 286, 288 folk etymology 365 formal context x, 39, 60, 63, 75, 79, 98, 104, 141–142, 322, 337–338 register 35, 42, 50, 143, 226 French 9, 16, 63, 147, 151, 155, 373, 379, 384 frequency xii, xvi, 3–4, 7–8, 10–12, 19, 22–23, 25, 53, 68, 77, 79–80, 145, 155, 174, 176–177, 182– 183, 203, 221, 229, 239, 242, 247–250, 259, 261, 271, 295, 297, 308, 326–327, 330 Frisian 296 Friulian 143, 145, 154 functionality xiii, 16, 25, 43, 48–49, 51, 53–54, 63, 68, 82, 138–139, 143, 154, 196–198, 201, 207, 209, 259–261, 263, 265, 267– 272, 286–287, 290–291, 295, 297–299, 310, 332, 348, 362, 364–365, 375, 380–383, 385– 386 fused lect 251, 258–260

407

G gender grammatical 40, 139, 144, 326 social/biological xv, 38, 62, 100– 103, 121, 166, 215–217, 222– 223, 227, 229, 235–238, 240– 242, 250, 267, 271, 334–335, 340 generalization 18, 138–139, 142, 330 genre 5, 53, 112, 115, 119, 139, 183 German xiv, xvi, 8–10, 13, 42, 51, 54, 131, 133, 138–140, 142–146, 154, 251–253, 256, 258, 262– 274, 302, 319–324, 326–329, 331–341, 349, 353, 363, 365, 385 Germanic languages 8, 196, 289, 306, 363–364, 381–382, 384 globalization x, 215 grammar xiv, xvi, 4, 14, 16, 36, 40– 41, 49–50, 54, 60, 69–70, 72, 80–81, 132–133, 137, 141, 145– 146, 162, 191–192, 196, 198– 204, 206–207, 209, 259, 261, 264–265, 270, 290, 295, 298– 299, 308, 328, 338, 347–359, 361–378, 380–386 tradition xvi, 41, 133, 145–146, 347–359, 361–378, 380–386 grammaticalization 53, 144, 285, 359 Greek 16, 133, 154, 319, 349, 369, 379 Grice’s maxims 136 H Hebrew 38, 41–42, 51, 168 heritage language (HL) xiii, xv, 23, 33–37, 49–50, 52–53, 82, 323– 324, 336, see also acquisition heritage language research 33–35, 49–50, 52, 54 Hindi 17, 97, 101–103, 121, 219

408 historical linguistics x, 61, 95, 143, 169, 285, 293, 296, 299, 309– 311, 364 home language 34, 39, 320–323, 339–340 Hungarian 138 hybridity 92, 100, 141, 148 I iconicity 197–198, 203, 207–208 identity 34, 39, 52–54, 96, 100, 295, 297, 299, 305, 342 ideology x, 52, 117, 132 idiolect 47, 220 idiom xiv, 5, 161–185, 189, 194 age 161, 163, 168–169, 172, 175–176, 181 figurative xiv, 161–164, 167, 173, 182 origin xiv, 161, 163, 168–169, 172, 174–176, 182–183 translated xiv, 161, 163, 168, 170, 173–178, 180–183 understanding xiv, 162–163, 166, 178–180, 182–183 idiomatic xiv, 139, 141, 151–153, 161–162, 164–166, 168, 170, 179–180, 182 immigrant xv, 17–19, 54, 166, 219– 220, 222, 251–258, 260, 265, 270–271, 273, 275, see also migrant immigration 34–35, 252–254, 264, 275, see also emigration; migration impersonal 8–9, 20, 139, 152, 370 infinitive 8, 16–17, 20–21, 41, 73, 83, 194, 370, 372 inflection 18, 21, 49, 59, 61, 63, 65, 79, 144–145, 153, 288, 294, 296–299, 302–303, 306–310, 325–327, 349, 354, 357, 360, 373, 377, 381, 383, 385 informal x, 40, 141–143, 167, 170– 171, 257, 337 information structure 196–197

Index inhibition 22 innovation xiii, 25, 37, 132–133, 138–140, 143 input 18, 23, 34–37, 47–52, 60, 68, 340 institutional 89, 92–93, 96–97, 100, 103–105, 115–117, 119, 216 instruction 38–39, 52, 64, 106, 111– 112, 117, 252, 264, 270, 274, 368 intelligibility 285, 296–297, 305– 307, 310 interaction x, xii, 4, 53, 91, 93, 96– 97, 106, 111–118, 120, 133, 147, 215–216, 218–219, 221, 240, 285, 287, 289 interdialect 216, 219–220, 222 interference ix, 4, 6–7, 15, 25, 66, 137, 208, 288, 322, see also transfer interjection 54, 272 interlanguage 50, 59–60, 65–66, 76, 80–81, 83 interlingual identification 4, 284– 285, 288, 298, 326 intermarriage 62, 83 interpreter xi, 184 interpreting x–xii, 9, 181, 192 interview 40, 59, 71, 120, 225, 258, 323–324, 340 intonation 40 inversion 149–150, see also word order irregular 77–78, 80, 295, 358 isolate 17, 162, 184 isomorphism 22, 196–198, 205 Italian xiv, 131, 138, 143, 145, 147– 154, 319, 384 J Japanese 12, 14, 121, 216, 218–219 K koineization 215–217, 219, 221– 222, 238, 241 Kristang 62–63, 67–68, 82

Language Contacts at the Crossroads of Disciplines L L1 See first language L2 See second language language additional xi, xvi, 95–96, 319, 321–322 attitude 34, 133, 146, 165, 183, 252, 255–256, 258, 263, 270, 273–275 awareness 15, 348 change xiv, 7, 19, 25, 33–34, 36, 47, 51, 54, 131–134, 138– 139, 147, 215–217, 222, 225, 229, 240–241, 255, 284 colloquial 143, 170–171 community xiv–xv, 4, 11, 14–15, 19, 25, 35–37, 49–50, 54, 63– 64, 66, 68–69, 82–83, 89, 105, 118–119, 141, 147, 154, 215–218, 220–223, 238–241, 253–254, 258, 274, 284, 321 competence 15, 19, 20, 22, 24, 34, 69, 142, 261, 274 comprehension 22, 148, 285, 289–291, 297, 307, 309, 326 contact ix–xvii, 3–7, 15, 17, 20– 21, 24–26, 33, 35–37, 45, 48, 51, 61, 65–66, 69, 95, 131, 134, 137–141, 144, 153–154, 163, 183, 192, 207, 220, 251– 252, 254–255, 258, 260, 262– 263, 267, 273, 275, 285, 308, 347–349, 381, 383, see also contact death 17–18, 20–21, 26, 132 endangered 17, 61 maintenance xv, 65, 132, 255, 320–321 majority 16, 35, 37, 48–49, 60, 148, 255, 323, 338 minority xv, 17–19, 34–35, 37, 49, 382 mixing xv, 62, 111, 251, 258, 261, 267, 274, see also codemixing official 35, 64–65, 142, 185, 320

409

policy x, 65, 94, 98, 106, 254– 255, 262 shift 14, 17, 19, 38, 50, 63, 132, 253, 275 variety xi, xiii–xiv, 5–6, 15, 17– 19, 25, 34, 36, 38–40, 42, 45, 48–50, 52–54, 62, 65, 89, 91– 93, 95–100, 102–106, 109, 111–122, 138, 142–143, 147– 148, 154, 215–217, 219–221, 225, 234, 239–241, 255, 259, 283, 290, 326, 330 language contact research see contact linguistics language-external xvi, 34, 68, 306, 319, 321, 324, 334–335, 337, 340–341 language-internal 18, 26 languaging 89–107, 109, 111–120, 122 Latin 101–102, 121–122, 133, 197, 347–349, 353–369, 374–376, 378–379, 381, 383–385 learner xi–xiii, 5–6, 11–14, 17, 23, 59–61, 66, 69–81, 83, 134, 137, 141, 153, 220, 284–288, 290– 291, 297–299, 305, 308, 310– 311, 319–320, 337 learning 12, 14–15, 17, 20–21, 23, 60, 65, 69, 74–75, 79, 81, 92–93, 109, 111–112, 114–117, 119, 131, 141–142, 148, 208, 217, 256, 284–287, 289, 291, 308– 310, 319–324, 334, 348–349, see also acquisition strategy 17, 65, 142, 322 lemma 66, 332 leveling 62, 66, 68, 83, 215–217, 219–222, 232, 238, 240–241 lexeme 10, 384 lexicon x, 20, 66, 132, 141, 146, 205, 287, 322 lexifier 59, 66, 68–69, 75, 79, 83 lingua franca 62, 289, 323, 349 linguistic area see Sprachbund

410 relativity 12–13 literacy 91, 111, 114, 333–334, 339, 341 literacy studies 89–90, 96 Lithuanian xiii, 33–34, 36–41, 43– 48, 52 loan translation xvi, 162–163, 166, 168–170, 174, 177, 181, 183– 184, 349, 367–368, 376, see also calque loanword xvi, 284, 350 Low German 54 M Macanese 63–64, 82–83 Makista xiii, 59–75, 77–83 mapping 66, 80, 131, 141, 196, 198–199, 206, 291 markedness 17, 21, 40, 68, 70, 81, 143, 239, 326, 329–330, 355, 384 matrix language 259, 261, 263, 267– 270, 272, 274 mental xi, 4, 7, 10, 65–66, 199, 202–203, 287, see also cognitive metalanguage xvi, 48, 347–351, 364, 381–382 metalinguistic 51, 347, 349, 352, 364, 382 migrant 62, 100, 102, 320–323, 340–341, see also immigrant migration xvi, 18–19, 62, 219–220, 319–321, 342, see also emigration; immigration minority 16–17, 19, 26, 34–35, 37, 54, 62–64, 147–149, 220, 240, 275, see also language autochthonous 35, 37 indigenous 17, 19 mobility x, 215, 218, 241 modality xiii–xiv, 6, 12, 60, 63, 66, 71–72, 79, 82, 89–93, 96–98, 100, 102, 104–106, 109–122, 139, 141, 145, 147, 286, 307, 323–324, 326, 332, 334–340, 359, 367

Index Mongolic languages 16 monolingual 14–15, 34, 36, 38, 45– 46, 49–53, 90–92, 96, 105, 120, 135–136, 261, 319–324, 327– 329, 331–334, 336–338, 340– 341 individuals 14–15, 34, 36, 45, 49–50, 53, 135–136, 319– 322, 324, 327, 329, 331, 334, 336–338, 341 morpheme 68, 81, 232–233, 237, 248, 288, 291, 293–294, 299– 302, 311 morphology xiii, 7, 17–18, 20–21, 40, 49, 59–61, 63–65, 69–81, 83, 134, 141, 146, 184, 195, 198, 259, 261–262, 283, 285–288, 290, 295, 298–300, 302, 308– 310, 325–326, 329, 351, 372– 373, 375, 378 inflectional 18, 21, 49, 59, 61, 63, 65, 288 morphosyntax 16, 22, 36, 39–41, 82, 201, 287, 296, 322, 338 mother tongue xi, 38, 95, 254, 256, 258, 267–268, see also first language motion 9, 13, 16, 20, 203 multidisciplinary 89–90, 93, 95, 118 multilingual x–xiv, 3, 21, 35–36, 39–40, 48, 50, 53, 68, 89, 92–94, 96–97, 100, 104–105, 120, 131, 254, 284, 319–322, 340–341 multilingualism x–xi, xiii, 16, 39– 40, 89, 91, 93, 97, 118, 133, 289, 297, 306, 320–321 receptive 289, 297, 306 multimodality xiv, 89, 91–94, 96– 98, 113–114, 118–120 N narrative 106, 109–113, 115, 117, 119, 323–324, 351, 355, 360, 370–371, 378 native xiv, 7, 10, 19, 50, 62, 66, 82, 148, 161, 163, 165–166, 171,

Language Contacts at the Crossroads of Disciplines 182, 208, 215, 217, 229, 238– 239, 241, 251–252, 267, 274, 338 language 19, 66, 208 speaker xiv, 10, 50, 82, 161, 163, 165–166, 171, 182, 215, 217, 229, 241, 251–252, 267, 274 naturalistic 60, 68, 79 new-dialect formation xv, 215–216, 219–221, 241 Nivkh 17 non-standard 25, 72, 147 non-translated xiv, 7–8, 25, 133, 135–137, 139, 146, 161, 168, 170, 173–178, 180–183 non-verbal 135 norm 4, 25, 37, 40, 52, 82, 136, 139, 216 noun 92, 121, 151, 153, 195–196, 202, 283, 297, 299, 326, 352, 354, 360, 362, 368, 372–373, 381 number 18, 21, 72–73, 76–78, 80, 139, 144, 293, 298–299, 302, 307–308, 311, 325–327, 349, 359, 369 O object 149, 151, 195, 197, 199, 201– 202 onomastization 347, 349–350, 352, 378, 380, 382, 385 original 8, 139–140, 155, 163, 177, 182, 184–185, 197, 203, 353 orthography xiv, 97, 290, 295–296 output 325–326, 328, 330, 332, 338, 341 overuse 4, 11, 22 P paradigm 63, 78, 291, 297–298, 303, 310, 326 particle 8–9, 20, 22, 37, 41, 48, 50– 51, 53–54, 68, 265, 329 discourse 37, 48, 50–51, 53

411

pragmatic 8, 20, 22, 37, 48, 50– 51, 53 passive 19, 21, 152, 195–197, 358, 360, 371, 383–385 pause 10, 47, 116 performance 24, 36, 93, 97, 116– 118, 180, 285, 328, 334 person 17–18, 21, 72–73, 76–78, 80, 139–140, 325–327, 351, 354– 355, 359, 361, 370, 383 phonetics 66, 99–100, 134, 184, 229, 285, 295, 352, 360, 362, 368, 376, 378 phonology xv, 16, 20, 36, 46, 66, 68, 78–80, 134, 146, 198, 222, 226–227, 229, 232, 234–235, 242, 249, 287, 290, 296, 307, 309 phraseology 154, 162–163, 185 picture xiv, 13, 98, 107, 323–324 pidgin 61, 69–70 pidgin and creole studies 60–61, 65, see also creole studies pidginization 60, 62 plural see number plurilingualism 92 Polish 39, 319 politeness 53–54, 136, 290 political 19, 62–64, 89–90, 95, 100, 104, 118, 132, 143, 170, 195, 217, 252, 368 Portuguese xiii, 59–65, 67, 69–75, 79–83 postcolonial 89, 91–92, 94, 104, 118, 147 post-creole continuum xiii, 59, 80– 81, 83 pragmatic(s) xiii, 8, 20, 22, 33, 35, 37, 47–48, 50–51, 53–54, 111, 132, 141, 154, 162, 207, 338, 381, see also discourse pragmatics; particle, pragmatic preposition 9, 16, 21, 41, 54, 133, 148, 150–152 processing xii–xiii, 3, 5, 9–10, 19, 81, 131, 133, 141, 283, 288, 309

412 proficiency 13, 24, 34–35, 37–39, 47–48, 50, 52–54, 64, 69, 74–75, 81–82, 148, 219, 260, 285–286, 290, 310, 328–329, 333 pronunciation 215, 217, 225–228, 230, 232, 238, 296, see also accent prototypical 49, 151, 197–199, 201– 202, 293 psycholinguistic(s) xi, 68, 81, 142, 203, 285, 309, 311, 322 psychology x, 90, 199–200, 208, 287 R reanalysis 66–67, 83 recency 22, 321 recipient language 4, 15–16, 142, 144, see also target language reduction xii–xiii, 3–9, 11, 13, 15– 26, 219, 230 regional xv, 16, 38–40, 42, 49, 65, 138, 148, 216–217, 219–221, 226, 310, see also dialect register 35, 37, 42, 49–50, 132, 143, 147, 170–171 relexification 66–68, 83 repair 47, 261, 263, 265, 267, 272 replacement 33, 35–36, 42, 44–47, 51–52, 348 replication 139, 141, 144, see also borrowing; transfer reported speech 137 representation 4, 6, 11, 14, 20, 23, 25, 60, 71, 89, 94–95, 105, 113– 114, 116, 118–120, 198, 207, 364 restriction 16, 51, 161, 163, 168, 171–172, 177–178, 183 restructuring 6, 12, 14, 18, 35–36, 53, 138, 287 retention xv, 25, 35, 42, 46–47, 51, 184, 191–194, 196, 200, 206– 208 information 192–194, 196, 200, 207–208

Index Romance languages 16, 133, 143, 145, 289, 384 rural 218, 226 Russian xv, 8, 13–14, 18, 36, 38–41, 45, 47, 49–53, 166, 251–258, 260, 262–275, 288, 302, 319, 323, 325, 327–329, 331–334, 337–339 S salience xi, xvi, 68, 78–80, 93–94, 103, 200, 226, 239, 299, 308, 339 Scandinavian languages 289, 297, 307 script xiv, 97, 100–103, 121 second language ix–xiii, xv–xvi, 3– 6, 11–15, 17–26, 33–34, 36–37, 48–51, 59–66, 68–81, 83, 95, 133–134, 141, 147–148, 208, 215–217, 221–222, 270, 286– 290, 305, 308–310, 319, 321– 322, 324, 326–327, 337, 340, 348, 354, 357, 374, 381, 383 community 14, 147, 215–217, 221–222 indigenized 25 second language acquisition (SLA) ix–xiii, xv–xvi, 3–6, 11–12, 14–15, 19–21, 23–25, 50–51, 59–61, 65–66, 68–70, 72, 79–81, 83, 95, 133, 141, 148, 286–290, 305, 308–310, 321–322, 327, 337, 340, 348, 381 speaker/user 3–6, 12–15, 17–18, 23–24, 59, 63, 66, 70–72, 74, 134, 326 selection 22, 80, 169, 220 semantic(s) 14, 36, 39, 49, 61, 66, 68, 70–71, 82, 90, 134, 141, 162, 164, 198, 207, 209, 299, 350, 354, 358, 360 sentence structure 194–195 shining-through 138, 151, 154 similarity

Language Contacts at the Crossroads of Disciplines assumed 285, 289–291 cross-linguistic xv–xvi, 148, 283, 285–286, 288, 290–291, 309 formal 68, 286, 291, 358 perceived xv, 142, 283, 285–286, 289–291, 294, 297, 302–303, 305–306, 308–309 simplicity 60, 68 simplification 4, 6, 11–12, 17–18, 25–26, 36, 54, 142 Sinitic languages 16 skills xii, xiv, 3, 11, 14–15, 21, 24, 119, 219, 274, 289–290, 337, 339 SLA see second language acquisition slang 185, 270 Slavic languages 16, 41–42, 51, 142–143, 254 Slovene xiv, 131, 133, 137–140, 142–155 social ix, xi, 4, 25, 50, 60, 62, 90– 92, 94–96, 105, 113–114, 117– 120, 143, 147, 163, 218, 220, 223, 227, 240–241, 251–252, 260, 262, 274, 310, 334, 338– 339 factor 25, 223, 227, 251–252, 260, 262, 274 practice 90–91, 94–96, 105, 113–114, 117–120 stratification 62, 220, 334, 339 societal xi, xvi, 4–5, 131, 133, 137, 141 society xi–xii, xiv, 16, 19–20, 23, 26, 69, 131, 367 sociocultural 34, 52–53, 89, 92, 94, 118 socioeconomic xvi, 319–321, 323– 324, 334–336, 339–341 sociolect 49, 120 sociolinguistic xiii, xv, 14, 24, 33– 35, 37, 39–40, 50–52, 54, 59–61, 65–66, 68–69, 71, 82, 132, 225, 252, 260, 265, 270–271, 273– 275

413

context xiii, xv, 14, 24, 37, 39, 50, 52, 54, 60–61, 65–66, 69, 252, 270 factor 51, 274 sociolinguistics x, 91, 208 sociology x, 90 source language (SL) xv, 4, 7–10, 15–16, 21–24, 134, 137, 139– 140, 144, 184, 191–193, 196, 201, 207–208 source text xi, 7–10, 21, 24–25, 136–138, 145, 149–150, 154, 194–196, 203–207 space 89–90, 93–98, 100, 104–107, 109, 112, 118–119, 121, 320 Spanish 10, 13–14, 70, 295, 319 Sprachbund 16–17, 19 standard xii, 17, 36, 39, 49, 59, 61, 63–64, 69–70, 72–73, 75, 77, 79–83, 138, 143, 145, 147, 149– 150, 153, 226, 298, 307, 310, 326, 330, 367, 382, 384 stimulus 7, 10, 13, 22, 298–299 style 7, 42, 131–132, 139, 141, 143, 148, 170, 226–227, 238, 259, 268, 273, 275 subject xvi, 8, 72–73, 76–77, 139– 140, 149–150, 152, 195, 197, 199, 201–203, 209, 321, 324– 329, 331–332, 334, 336–337, 339–340, 385 dummy 139–140 subjunctive 17, 362, 384 substitution 45–46, 51, 54, 330, 361 substrate ix, 17, 22, 60, 66, 68 Swedish 12, 14, 97–100, 106, 109– 117, 119, 121–122, 166, 185, 302, 307, 354, 356, 359, 363, 366–368, 375, 378–379, 382, 384–386 Swedish Sign Language 97–98, 105–117, 119, 121–122 symmetry 7, 199–200, 203, 207, 283, 285–286, 290, 297, 303, 305–309 synchronic 7, 19, 138, 221, 308

414 syntax xv, 7, 20, 51, 53, 60, 66, 68, 141, 146, 148, 152, 154, 163, 191, 193–196, 198, 200–201, 203–206, 259, 261, 264–266, 268, 270–271, 290–291, 296, 299, 309, 349, 357, 360, 372– 373, 378, 386 T target language (TL) 3–4, 7–9, 11– 13, 17, 22–25, 60, 69, 74, 78, 80, 132, 134, 137–138, 140, 184, 191–192, 196, 208, 284–292, 297, 302, 305, 308, see also recipient language target text xi, 7–8, 10, 136, 138, 192, 194–195, 205–207 teaching xii, xv–xvi, 50, 64–65, 82, 112, 142, 217, 286, 293, 308, 338, 340, 347, 349 temporal 71, 92, 95, 106, 118–119, 197, 329, 352, 360, 362, 365, 370, 372, 374, 376, 380–381 tense xvi, 18, 40–41, 54, 328–332, 347–348, 351–368, 370–386 non-past 325, 329, 372 past 40, 54, 326, 328–329, 347– 348, 351–352, 354–365, 367– 368, 370–385 pluperfect 356, 358, 370, 384 present 18, 328–329, 332, 351, 360, 367, 370, 372 preterite xiii, 18, 59, 70–76, 78– 80 tense/aspect xvi, 67, 70, 72, 80, 83, 321, 324, 329–332, 334, 336, 339–340, 380, 385 tense-mood-aspect (TMA) 61, 66– 69 terminology x, 3–4, 6, 34, 347–351, 353, 361, 363–364, 367–368, 371, 373–374, 376, 378, 380– 383, 386 textual 5, 90, 93, 97–101, 104–106, 109, 111–112, 118–120, 134,

Index 136, 154, 196, 285, 290, 295, 332 transfer conceptual 13 direct/indirect 4, 6, 15–16, 141, 326 functional 68 information 192, 207–208 lexical 61, 143, 338, 341 morphological 287–288, 326 negative 8, 288, 322, 327, 338 positive 288–289, 322 reverse 13 transferability 287, 339 transitivity 197–198, 201–202 translated text xii, 7, 9, 11, 25, 132, 136, 138–140, 193 translation ix, xi–xii, xiv–xv, 3–11, 20–21, 23–25, 82–83, 100, 131– 141, 145, 147–149, 153–155, 162–163, 165–167, 174, 179– 182, 184, 191–199, 201–208, 285, 347, 353–355, 364, 375, 383, 385 covert 25, 154 non-professional 10, 163, 183 overt 25, 154 process xiv–xv, 6, 9–11, 24, 132, 191 theory 137, 154 translation studies x–xii, xv, 3–7, 19–21, 24–25, 135–136, 163, 166, 181–182, 184, 192, 208 translator xi, 6–11, 21, 24–25, 134, 136–137, 154, 184, 191–198, 203 professional 9–10, 183, 197, 203 transparency 68, 81, 260, 296, 298, 305–306, 347, 350, 353, 380 Turkic languages 16–17, 48, 51 Turkish 319, 323–324, 326–329, 331–334, 337–338, 340–341 typology 9, 13–14, 136, 147, 197– 199, 201, 251, 258–261, 285, 311, 320, 325, 327, 339, 341, 348

Language Contacts at the Crossroads of Disciplines U Ukrainian 319 underuse 4, 6, 9, 11–12, 22 unique item 4, 6–11, 25, 384 universals 18, 26, 68, 136–137, 145, 192, 198, 308, 363 urban 96, 102, 226, 241, 320 usage-based 23, 198–199, 287 V variation ix, xv, 7, 11, 19, 24, 35, 42–43, 46–47, 59, 63, 73, 82, 90, 131, 137–139, 147, 154, 180, 191, 194–195, 198, 217, 225, 227–228, 241, 260, 288, 292, 306, 308, 310 variety see contact; language verb see also aspect; tense auxiliary 17, 40–41, 54, 67, 194, 351, 360, 364, 366, 372, 384 finite 73 intransitive 193, 201–203, 206, 384 morphology 59, 64, 69–72, 79, 81, 83 phrasal 12, 20 transitive 191, 193, 201–203, 206, 384

415

Vietnamese 319, 323, 326–329, 331–334, 336–337 vocabulary 10, 13, 20, 66, 163, 284, 286, 290, 295–296, 349, 362, 366–367, see also lexicon W word functional 25, 41, 48, 50, 54, 196, 330, 332 lexical 4, 10, 25, 47, 51, 53, 89, 97, 100, 102–103, 110–112, 114–116, 119, 121, 184, 195, 198, 216, 225–227, 234, 263, 268–269, 272, 283–284, 286, 291–292, 295–303, 305, 307– 308, 310–311, 330, 332, 350, 353–354, 368–369, 372–374 word order 36, 40, 148–149, 193– 197 word position 222, 229, 232–233, 237, 242, 248 word-formation 146, 270 Y Yiddish xiii, 33–54 Z Zulu 17