Incomplete L1 Acquisition in the Immigrant Situation (Linguistische Arbeiten) [1 ed.] 348430426X, 9783484304260

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Linguistische Arbeiten

426

Herausgegeben von Hans Altmann, Peter Blumenthal, Hans Jürgen Heringer, Ingo Plag, Heinz Vater und Richard Wiese

Glenn S. Levine

Incomplete LI Acquisition in the Immigrant Situation Yiddish in the United States

Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen 2000

This work is dedicated to my wife Ursula and to the memory of my grandmother Miriam Nelson Levine who would be very pleased.

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Levine, GlennS.: IncompleteLl acquisition in the immigrant Situation : Yiddish in the United States / Glenn S. Levine. - Tübingen : Niemeyer, 2000 (Linguistische Arbeiten; 426) Zugl.: Austin, Univ., Diss. 1997 ISBN 3-484-30426-X

ISSN 0344-6727

© Max Niemeyer Verlag GmbH, Tübingen 2000 Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Printed in Germany. Gedruckt auf alterungsbeständigem Papier. Druck: Weihert-Druck GmbH, Darmstadt Einband: Industriebuchbinderei Nädele, Nehren

Table of Contents

Preface and acknowledgements

vit

1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7

Goals and theoretical framework Introduction Contents of this monograph Child language acquisition: Assumptions Bilingual LI acquisition Language death, LI attrition, and incomplete LI acquisition Linguistic studies dealing with speakers of Yiddish Summary

1 1 3 4 7 9 12 13

2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10

The study Introduction: Inherent problems in the study of obsolescent languages The population Pilot studies The sample Locating informants Primary informants Additional informants The interview Data analysis Summary

14 14 15 15 17 18 20 21 23 26 27

3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.3.1 3.3.2 3.4 3.4.1 3.4.2 3.4.3 3.4.4 3.4.5 3.4.6 3.5

The language of incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation Introduction Proficiency continuum and personal-pattern variation in informants' Yiddish What sort of speakers of Yiddish are primary informants? Are primary informants semi-speakers of Yiddish? Are primary informants native speakers of Yiddish? Characteristics of primary informants' Yiddish Phonological performance of primary and secondary informants Compensatory narrative/discourse strategies Scope and semantic characteristics of informants' lexicon Intrasentential codeswitching Verbal morphosyntax Nominal morphosyntax Summary

28 28 29 30 30 31 35 36 37 39 42 43 46 54

4

Social and sociolinguistic factors in the incomplete LI acquisition of Yiddish among primary informants A sociolinguistic model of incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation Speaker practice: Inadequate exposure Inadequate exposure: Limited domains and registers Inadequate exposure: One-way vertical communication Inadequate exposure: Early termination of active use

55 55 57 58 58 58

4.1 4.2 4.2.1 4.2.2 4.2.3

vi

4.3 4.4 4.5

Attitudes toward LI Linguistic identity Summary

5

5.8

Evidence of incomplete LI acquisition in primary informants' speech: Choice of auxiliary in the present perfect tense 69 Introduction 69 The present perfect tense in Yiddish and other Germanic languages 70 Primary informants' use of the present perfect 71 Secondary informants: 'Full acquisition' speakers of Yiddish with LI attrition 77 Bilingual and monolingual LI acquisition 79 Bilingual LI acquisition of German and English: Leopold (1970/1939-1949) 81 Bilingual LI acquisition of German and English: De Houwer (1990) and the role of the dominant language 83 Conclusion 86

6 6.1 6.2 6.3

Conclusion Summary of this monograph Implications of the study Directions for further research

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7

References Index

60 63 68

87 87 88 91 93 101

Preface and acknowledgements

... ikh gedenk ven mir hobn gekumen [sic] a television, and eh mayn mame, zi's iz nisht gefild gut but zi iz iz nokh nisht gehat ken stroke, and zi't gevoynt mit mir, un mir hobn gehat the television on and mayn mame, fun the old country zey hobn nisht farshtanen... and me vatshed it, television in nineteenzibnunferstik y'know zeksunfertsik, erst aroysgekumen the kleyne screens, hobn zey gehat television, bay tsen a zeyger banakht, nice television, a por shtunde a tog that's all. Cowboy movies. Mayn mame zogt tsu mir, fun vos makhen zey a lebn, me fort arum af de ferdelakh un zukht zikh tsures! And I couldn't believe it, I started to laugh she says far vos iz aza gelekhter? I said mame dos iz nisht emese menshn dos iz a piktsha, a moving piktsha! And zi't nisht farshtanen. Fun vos makhen zey a lebn, me fort arum un zukht zikh tsures. I often told that story it was so funny, no dos iz vi a moving picture she used to like to go to the movies, so dos iz nit menshn vos, dos iz zeyer arbet, zey forn arum af a ferd un me batsolt zey, y'know, explain it to her, and that struck me as so funny, I used to think my mother would never be Americanized... 'I remember when we got a television and eh my mother, she didn't feel well but she had not yet had the stroke, and she lived with me, and we had the television on and my mother, from the old country they didn't understand... and we watched it, television in 1946 y'know 1947, [it had] first come out the little screens, they had television at 10 o'clock at night, nice television, a few hours that's all. Cowboy movies. My mother says to me, how do they make a living, riding around on the little horses and looking for trouble! And I couldn't believe it, I started to laugh she says what's with the laughing? I said Mama that is not real people that is a picture, a moving picture! And she didn't understand. How do they make a living, riding around and looking for trouble. I often told that story it was so funny, no that is like a moving picture she used to like to go to the movies, so that's not people who, that's their work, they ride around on a horse and get paid, y'know, explain it to her, and that struck me as so funny, I used to think my mother would never be Americanized...' [narrated by DS during interview]

The quote printed above is from one of the interview transcripts, and I believe it captures why the entire project, from the first pilot study to the present monograph, has been an intense labor of love. For while the primary concern at most stages of the study was with analyzing the linguistic attributes of the speech data, it was the content of informants' narratives that made the study inherently interesting and engaging. And indeed, it was the substance of the interviews - the ways informants expressed themselves about the Yiddish language, personal experiences as speakers of Yiddish, and family histories - that led me to many insights about incomplete LI acquisition. I am grateful to all of these people w h o shared so much, and I look forward to getting to know more members of this population of Yiddish speakers; I also invite scholars of Yiddish and linguistics to join in the study of this fascinating group of people. As a linguistic investigation, the main contribution of this monograph is to establish a working, and workable, framework for the study of 'incomplete LI acquisition'. Far from offering any sort of 'last word' on this way of viewing certain bilingual situations, I offer here a 'first word', with the intent of raising questions about ways scholars analyze the linguistic manifestations of bilingualism. It will become evident that I believe that much of what has been labeled or attributed to 'attrition' actually may be better analyzed in terms of incomplete LI acquisition. An additional, though not explicit, goal of this monograph is to bring together certain disparate theoretical ideas that have driven areas of inquiry in linguistics in the last 30 to 40 years.

viii

While proceeding with basic acceptance of Chomskyan notions of innateness and the language faculty - indeed I believe that the presence of a language faculty helps account for why informants are able to converse in Yiddish at all after so many decades - 1 seek to explore the role of input in social and sociolinguistic terms. Specifically, I explore the ways that issues such as 'identity' or patterns of use act unambiguously to affect the quality of acquisition in bilingual situations. In a sense, what I describe here is what happens to language in the individual speaker when the Innate - the child's natural inclination to organize positive linguistic input into a mature linguistic system in a relatively short span of time - collides head-on with the Social - insurmountable social and sociolinguistic hindrances to 'normal' acquisition. The extent to which the dilemma described can be generalized to other bilingual or multilingual situations remains open. This volume represents a moderately revised version of my dissertation from the University of Texas at Austin (1997), written under the supervision of Robert D. King and Keith Walters. I thank both of them for their invaluable guidance. I am also indebted to Mark Louden, as a professor and a friend, who helped me keep the 'big picture' in mind throughout. More recently, I am grateful to Professor Dr. Heinz Vater for his assistance, intensive readings of the manuscript, and helpful comments and suggestions. I thank Ms. Carmen Luna at Niemeyer was very helpful to me in the preparation of the manuscript. For her encouragement and common-sense advice I also thank Ms. Karen Lowe in the Department of German at the University of California, Irvine. I would like to thank the Department of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas at Austin for their generous financial support of the study on which the dissertation was based. I wish to express my gratitude to my parents, Larry and Joyce Levine, for their support throughout the project, and particularly for their assistance while I was in Florida. I thank the management of Century Village in Pembroke Pines, Florida, who graciously gave me access to its facilities. I am immensely grateful to Grit Liebscher for her perceptive evaluations and input on various parts of the text, and for her unwavering encouragement and enthusiasm for and interest in my research. Gay Bowles and Marion Schirra also provided invaluable assistance to me during key phases of the project, without which I surely could not have finished. I extend my heartfelt thanks to all who participated in the pilot studies and the main study. You have made a valuable contribution to linguistics, to our understanding of language and the immigrant experience, and to Yiddish studies. Lastly, and most importantly, I express my deepest love and gratitude to Ursula Levine, my wife, for everything.

Glenn S. Levine Irvine, California, April 10, 2000

1

Goals and theoretical framework

We could think of the initial state of the language faculty [...] as being something like an intricately wired system with fixed and complex properties, but with some connections left open, to be fixed in one or another way on the basis of experience. (Noam Chomsky, quoted in Paikeday 1985:57)

1.1

Introduction

This quote by Chomsky captures in a nutshell what much of the study of language acquisition in the last few decades has been about. Researchers have studied the language faculty from many points of view, in order to describe and explain the system and its complex properties. Much attention has been paid, as well, to the connections that are left open, set through experience with a particular language or languages. The main goal of this book is to describe and analyze that basis of experience in the immigrant situation and explore some of the ways it influences the open connections. 'Incomplete LI acquisition' is the term I will use to describe the phenomenon whereby "some connections" actually remain open "on the basis of experience". In pursuit of this main goal, I demonstrate that, while many of the linguistic manifestations of incomplete first language (LI) acquisition in the immigrant situation are similar or identical to those of LI attrition, it is possible to isolate grammatical features that are solely, or at least primarily, the result of incomplete LI acquisition. In other words, there are divergent forms evident in the data I will present that do not tend to diverge from accepted norms in the speech of speakers who 'fully acquired' Yiddish, but who also have not used the language in many decades. Consequently, I show that the immigrant experience in the United States, i.e., the dynamics of that dominant/non-dominant language situation, relates directly to incomplete LI acquisition among informants, and hence to the grammatical divergence evident in the data. Apart from these goals, I also have a dual 'agenda' for this monograph. First, I would like to demonstrate that the phenomenon of incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation is a viable and interesting object of study, one which has implications the fields of LI attrition, language death, and bilingual LI acquisition. Incomplete LI acquisition in other situations, such as speech islands or indigenous populations, is not considered here. And second, I would like to bring to the attention of scholars a group of Yiddish speakers that to date has received only passing attention in the literature and which to my knowledge has never been studied specifically. Hence, this study constitutes the first detailed investigation of elderly, U.S.-born speakers of Yiddish, the offspring of Eastern European immigrants. These speakers acquired Yiddish as an LI simultaneously with English, ceased using the language actively by around school age (age 510), and have not heard or used it regularly in many decades. Before proceeding, it is important to define the term 'incomplete LI acquisition'. Incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation is brought about when a child language learner does not receive enough input, or the appropriate quality of input, in one of her or his LI's (the native language of a parent/both parents) and the child ceases using the language actively before adult linguistic competence is acquired, i.e. before the end of the critical period (as discussed by Birdsong 1999, Newport 1991, and others; see also Lenneberg 1967). The 'final' (i.e. adult) language competence of a speaker who has incompletely acquired one of two L i ' s is characterized by many

2 many interesting divergences from accepted norms. 1 Several types of these divergent features will be part of the focus of chapter 3. At the outset I would like to state that, although this study is based on linguistic field research conducted with a sample of the U.S.-born, Yiddish-speaking population, the text is not structured as a traditional linguistic research report. This monograph, and the dissertation it is based upon, may well constitute the first investigation of issues of child language acquisition in a group of speakers 50 to 70 years after acquisition took place. Of necessity, then, a great deal of the suppositions and conclusions drawn here are deduced through consideration of various factors of which there is at least relative certainty. For this reason, extralinguistic evidence, as well as evidence f r o m linguistic sources other than my interview data, is appealed to throughout; and for this reason, achievement of the goals did not lend itself to the format of a standard linguistic research report. Furthermore, as is well known, any field is defined largely by the questions it asks. I decided to allow the questions under consideration here to influence the structure and focal points of this book. This structure will be described shortly. The guiding questions of the project have been the following: 1) 2) 3)

4) 5) 6)

What does the language of incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation look like (how does it diverge from accepted norms)? What does one 'know' when one knows a language, that is, what sort of abilities characterize a 'native' speaker of a language, and do these differ from those of an L2 speaker of that language? How can the phenomenon of incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation best be accounted for, i.e., what experiential factors are most salient in bringing about incomplete LI acquisition or, conversely, in hindering complete acquisition of the mature language? What role do the dynamics of the immigrant situation play in incomplete LI acquisition? What is the relationship between LI attrition and incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation? Is it possible to separate the linguistic effects of incomplete LI acquisition from those of LI attrition, many decades after the former ended and the latter began?

With regard to question 6), the reader should note that in many cases, the processes of LI acquisition and LI attrition occur simultaneously (see Kaufman 1991), and at no time do I consider there to have been a point in time, before which acquisition occurred, and after which attrition influenced the speaker's knowledge. However, there likely comes a point in the speaker's life at which LI acquisition w a s no longer occurring. Likewise, in the case of elderly speakers who have not used the language in question in many years, it is assumed that there came a point in the loss of linguistic skills (if this indeed took place at all) after which the speaker's abilities cannot be said to have 'attrited' any further. In other words, if LI attrition was occurring over a long period of time, the process likely found an end state at some time many years in the past. Therefore, throughout this book the phenomena of incomplete L I acquisition and LI attrition are considered as distinct from each other and, at the risk of some measure of overgeneralization, as consecutive events in the linguistic development of the speaker. 2

1

2

This definition of should not be confused with the concept 'semilingualism' (Edelsky et al. 1983). Logical shortcoming of the concept - implying a speaker who does not possess adequate linguistic competence in any code - are identified by Martin-Jones and Romaine (1986), and Davies (1991). LI attrition in a small child who is still acquiring language is in many ways a creative process in which there is both the expected overlap in the linguistic knowledge of the child's two codes, as well as certain innovations which themselves are not found in either code. Such creative features were not evident in the data of primary informants in this study (Kaufman 1991).

3 Answers to the six research questions help form a model of incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation which may be applicable to other incomplete LI acquisition situations (e.g., speech islands). The study may also hold cross-linguistic implications for the study of LI attrition and language death, and monolingual and bilingual LI acquisition. Several of these implications are explicated in the conclusion of this book.

1.2

Contents o f this m o n o g r a p h

In the remainder of the present chapter (1.3-1.5) I present the theoretical framework as well as discuss relevant literature in the fields relating to this study. I consider questions and issues of child language acquisition, bilingual LI acquisition, LI attrition, language death, and, of course, incomplete LI acquisition. Thereafter, I digress briefly to describe several works in the linguistics literature pertaining to speakers of Yiddish. Throughout this chapter, working definitions are presented and explicated. In chapter 2 I describe the study, focusing first on inherent difficulties of studying speakers of an obsolescent language. Thereafter, I discuss the population under consideration and the pilot studies conducted in order to isolate the judgment sample ultimately defined and selected. The sample is divided into primary and secondary informants. Primary informants include U.S.-born offspring of Yiddish-speaking immigrants. Speech data from secondary informants, speakers who 'fully acquired' Yiddish as children but who also have not used the language in many decades, serve throughout as a sort of control group against which the speech of primary informants is compared. I then describe the details of the field research, i.e., locating informants and conducting interviews. In the process the methods employed throughout the study are explained and justified. Chapter 3 addresses the nature of primary informants' bilingualism and linguistic knowledge, e.g., whether or not they should be considered 'native speakers' of Yiddish. I also outline key aspects of their speech in the interview data, presenting a sort of 'grammar' of incomplete LI acquisition for the case of primary informants, largely in terms of linguistic features that tend to diverge from accepted norms. Specifically, I examine relevant aspects of primary informants' narrative/discourse strategies, lexicon, morphosyntax, and word-order patterns. In chapter 4 the social and sociolinguistic factors of the acquisition and use of Yiddish among informants are discussed. The purpose is to explore the dynamics of incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation and, if possible, attempt to capture some of the complexity of the phenomenon through several generalized variables. With this analysis I hope to demonstrate how and why incomplete LI acquisition 'happened' (or didn't happen) among the children of Yiddish-speaking immigrants in the U.S. I consider the 'break in linguistic tradition' (Anderson 1982) inherent in the immigrant situation in terms of three variables: 1) speaker practice vis-à-vis inadequate exposure 2) attitudes toward LI 3) linguistic identity It is argued that circumstances subsumed under these three variables bring about, and affect the course and speed of, the break in linguistic tradition that underlies the immigrant situation. I hypothesize that, considered together, these circumstances have linguistic/structural manifestations that are different from those evident in situations where LI attrition alone occurs. Having estab-

4 lished the particular social and sociolinguistic circumstances of primary informants, it remains to isolate such linguistic/structural manifestations of incomplete LI acquisition. Chapter 5 focuses, then, on a single grammatical form, namely the choice of auxiliary in the Yiddish present perfect. The purpose of the analysis is to determine whether, in the face of points made in chapter 4, it is possible to isolate a grammatical feature in primary informants' speech that is the result of incomplete LI acquisition and not the result of LI attrition. Included as evidence in this discussion are data from secondary informants, as well as from bilingual LI acquisition and monolingual child language acquisition. It is shown that the linguistic/structural manifestations of incomplete LI acquisition are different from those of LI attrition, and that, in the case of primary informants' Yiddish, the factors discussed in chapter 4 may stand in a causative relationship with the divergent feature analyzed in chapter 5, the choice of auxiliary in the present perfect. Chapter 6 provides a summary and explores several implications of the study for other areas of linguistic inquiry and larger questions of language acquisition, language loss, and language death. Lastly, directions for further investigation of the phenomenon of incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation are suggested.

1.3

C h i l d l a n g u a g e acquisition: A s s u m p t i o n s

In this section the theoretical linguistic assumptions of this study are detailed that pertain to child language acquisition. First, fundamental to my understanding of language and language acquisition is the Chomskyan assumption that language is an innate faculty, and that much of language acquisition is guided and constrained by biologically-endowed principles, and hence not by experience. The child, faced with positive linguistic input in the form of the speech of those in her or his environment, must 'solve' Plato's problem (Sharwood Smith 1991:11), as posed by Chomsky (1988:3-4, and elsewhere): [...] the problem is basically this: 'How comes it that human beings, whose contacts with the world are brief and personal and limited, are able to know as much as they know?' Plato illustrated the problem with the first recorded psychological experiment (at least, a 'thought experiment'). In The Meno Socrates demonstrates that an untutored slave boy knows the principles of geometry by leading him, through a series of questions, to the discovery of the theorems of geometry. This experiment raises a problem that is still with us: How was the slave boy able to find truths of geometry without instruction? Chomsky posits that "certain aspects of our knowledge and understanding are innate, part of our biological endowment, genetically determined [...]" (4). "Plato's problem" has been referred to variously as the learnability problem, the logical problem of language acquisition, and the projection problem (Baker and McCarthy 1981 :xi). All versions of the problem have in common questions of how the child learns her or his language in all its complexity in the face of deficient input. The issue is referred to by Lightfoot (1982) as "the central problem" of linguistics: The problem is one of the deficiency of the stimulus: people come to have a very rich, complex and varied capacity that goes far beyond what they can derive only from their childhood experience, i.e., from the experience that stimulates the growth of their languages [...] The child eventually comes to be able to utter and understand an indefinite number of sentences and expressions, in each case relating its sound to its meaning, to make jokes, to engage in word play, to make up new words and expressions that can be understood by other speakers of the language, and so on (15).

5 Although Lightfoot appears to see no distinction between form and function in language acquisition (i.e., between "sound and meaning" and jokes, word play etc.), he clarifies his understanding of this "deficiency of the stimulus" as follows: 1) The speech heard by the child in her or his environment "[...] does not consist uniformly of complete, well-formed utterances" (15); 2) "A child encounters only a finite range of expression but comes to be able to deal with an infinite range of novel sentences, going far beyond the sentences actually heard in childhood" (15); 3) "People come to know things subconsciously about their language for which no direct evidence is available in the data to which they are exposed as children [...]" (e.g., grammatically judgments of ambiguous statements) (16). Note that Chomsky and Lightfoot, and indeed most generativist linguists studying nonpathological/non-aphasic language acquisition, assume that full acquisition, or the acquisition of mature linguistic competence, is always the end state of the process; indeed, the problem as stated depends on acquisition of mature language by the speaker. With regard to the present study of incomplete LI acquisition in a bilingual situation, the following question arises: Despite the "deficiency of the stimulus" in the normal language acquisition process, what situations exist in which the stimulus is so deficient as to prevent the ultimate acquisition of the (adult) language? And in such situations, how little is too little input/stimulus? As I will describe later, while primary informants in this study did acquire Yiddish as an LI, these speakers did not attain a mature level of proficiency in the language. For example, they are apparently not "able to deal with an infinite range of novel sentences," nor are they able to make reliable or consistent grammaticality judgments. However, the fact that primary informants acquired the language at all as children and that they can communicate reasonably well after so many decades of disuse indicates that they must have 'solved' Plato's problem to some extent (i.e., they possessed some a priori knowledge of grammar that aided their acquisition of Yiddish), they must have gleaned crucial aspects of the grammar of Yiddish in their early years. I believe some innate faculty allowed them to tease out enough input from their environments to acquire a measurable level of competence in Yiddish, a competence which evidently remained permanent in their minds over their long adult lives. Yet in describing the linguistic abilities of primary informants, the generative, biological/genetic basis for language acquisition proves insufficient. It does not help account for how it is they did not acquire the language fully, why they did not become adult speakers of the language. The quote at the opening of this chapter, which is in essence a synopsis of the guiding notion behind the theory of principles and parameters, suggests that the social side of the equation, that relating to experience, is important. What Chomsky means, however, is that experience helps the speaker to set the parameters of her or his language, e.g., to find out whether "the heads of constructions precede their complements as in English, or follow them as in Japanese?" (Chomsky, quoted in Paikeday 1985:57). Neither this question, nor the concept of parameter-setting overall, assigns salience to specific social factors. For the purposes of the present study, though, the quote by Chomsky does open a door for us to a sociolinguistic/ethnographic account of incomplete LI acquisition. A question appears to cry out from the statement, namely, What if the "connections left open to be fixed in one way or another on the basis of experience" (57) were, in the case of the bilingual child in the immigrant situation, left open indefinitely? Such a situation would necessitate very close consideration of the nature of the "experience" that brought it about. Now, it is important to remember that I do not claim here that such a bilingual speaker never selects certain parameters at all, for obviously the speaker does come to acquire mature competence in one of two languages; I suggest simply that in the case of a bilingual speaker, certain pa-

6 rameters may be set in only one language, and not in the other. Despite the fact that much of the research on the parameter-setting model primarily investigates syntactic structures, I include in my understanding of the theory linguistic values at all levels, from the phonetic through the syntactic. In this study, as will be shown in chapter 5, it is the morphosyntax of the present perfect that sheds light on the linguistic manifestations of incomplete LI acquisition among the speakers under investigation. Thus, this appeal to 'experience' (or the lack of it) affecting whether or not the speaker sets certain parameters brings us to the second assumption underlying this study, namely that biologically-endowed linguistic competence (UG) must be considered in terms of its manifestations in social and sociolinguistic behavior ('experience'). For the child language learner, experience translates into what is generally called 'input', or positive linguistic input. This term, too, calls for some clarification. The concept of 'input' must include more than just the grammatical forms of a language. The concept of input must 1) include some consideration of the nature of "experience", or put differently, of the social and cultural experiences of speakers in interaction and their relationship to the codes being used by these speakers, and 2) explicitly include not only the auditory information received by the child, but also the speech produced by the child. To the first point, Hymes' (1987) concept of 'communicative competence' includes not only the grammatical rules of a language and "shared rules for interaction, but also the cultural rules and knowledge that are the basis for the context and content of communicative events and interaction processes" (SavilleTroike 1989:2-3). In short, speakers possess linguistic and cultural knowledge that allows them to react and speak appropriately in the range of verbal situations at work in a given speech community. This social/cultural experience should be considered as part of the positive linguistic input. Interestingly, it is important to remember that, as Dorian (1986) notes, a speaker can have rather deficient linguistic (verbal) abilities and possess a fairly impressive level of communicative competence. So, for example, semi-speakers of East Sutherland Gaelic, whose ability to express themselves is limited, may be able to act and react appropriately in a wide range of social situations such that fully fluent speakers are never fully aware of the semi-speakers' linguistic deficiencies. To the second point, in order to achieve communicative competence, the child not only must be exposed to, but also involved in, varied and rich interaction within the speech community, i.e., language socialization is a key aspect of language acquisition. Thus, children are essentially participant-observers of communication (Saville-Troike 1989). Too often, discussions of positive input appear to assume that 'input' consists primarily or solely of parental speech addressed to the child. However, children certainly participate in interaction from the earliest phase of infancy (e.g., cooing in response to speech). I do not imply here that scholars never consider utterances by the child as salient, rather I claim that many do not appear to consider child utterances as part of the linguistic input itself. Hence, I suggest that the term positive linguistic input should include not just the speech heard by the child, but also each communicative event (or each type of communicative event) to which the child is a party, including the speech produced by the child. This carries with it the assumption, then, that the child her- or himself must use the language in sufficient quantity and quality in order to acquire mature, native ability in that language. Unlike Lightfoot's understanding of the "central problem" (how children always acquire linguistic competence in the face of a deficiency of stimulus), which assumes only the successful acquisition of adult linguistic competence, my understanding of acquisition, which includes the acquisition of communicative competence and involves the child as participant, does allow for the possibility of incomplete acquisition of a language, for the possibility that the input ultimately can be 'too deficient', and that certain 'connections' may never be fixed by experience, to permit the acquisition of adult linguistic competence.

7 To summarize the assumptions of child language acquisition which underlie this study, on the one hand it is assumed that the ability to acquire language is an innate human capacity and that much of the process, particularly the ability to learn (or know/employ) grammatical rules by children, is cognitive in nature, i.e., not directly influenced by experience. On the other hand, the Chomskyan notion of the acquisition of linguistic competence ('Plato's problem') does not appear to allow for the possibility of incomplete LI acquisition, if only because actual speakers, and the social world in which they operate, are not considered salient. Therefore, I include a sociolinguistic understanding of competence, one that considers 'experience' to be particularly salient and includes the acquisition of communicative competence and the process of language socialization as equally important as that of structural/linguistic competence. This understanding of what is acquired by the child allows for the possibility that in bi- or multilingual situations the 'stimulus' may be in some cases altogether too deficient to lead to the acquisition of adult linguistic competence, or, to quote Chomsky again, it allows for the possibility that "some connections are left open" indefinitely, and not "fixed in one or another way on the basis of experience" (Paikeday 1985:57).

1.4

Bilingual LI acquisition

Bilingual language acquisition as discussed in this book refers specifically to Meisel's (1990, 1993, ed. 1994) and De Houwer's (1990) concept of simultaneous LI acquisition (abbreviated here as 2L1). This means, essentially, that the child is exposed to two languages from birth, or at least from very early infancy. Most of the literature on 2L1 acquisition can be divided into two camps: The psychological/psycholinguistic and cognitive; and the social/sociolinguistic. Works such as Meisel (ed. 1990, ed. 1994), Harris (ed. 1992), Bialystok (ed. 1991), Hyltenstam and Obler (eds. 1989), and Albert and Obler (1978) focus for the most part on cognitive and/or psycholinguistic aspects of 2L1 acquisition, primarily along the lines of generative theory, whereas works such as those by Gal (1979), Blount (1983), Fantini (1985), and Romaine (1989) consider the many ethnic, social, and sociolinguistic aspects of the phenomenon. Some researchers, such as Grosjean (1982), Baetens Beardsmore (1986), and De Houwer (1990) incorporate aspects of both approaches. The study of 2L1 acquisition has been approached from many different viewpoints and held a number of different priorities over the last several decades. For instance, the debate about whether or not childhood bilingualism is detrimental to cognitive or social development appears to have been laid to rest for the most part, with a general consensus that bilingual knowledge likely provides a child with certain advantages in earlier childhood, but that by later childhood no significant cognitive differences exist between a bilingual and a monolingual child (see Bialystok 1988, 1991). A second important focus of the study of 2L1 acquisition has to do with the nature of bilingual knowledge itself, i.e., whether the bilingual child possesses knowledge of one linguistic system or two from the earliest stages of acquisition. Uriel Weinreich (1970/1954:9) writes that the "actual experience of the bilingual" suggests two coexistent linguistic systems in the mind. Haugen (1956:72), in discussing Leopold (1939-1949), suggests that children may begin with a single language system containing elements of both languages, but by an early age they are able to separate the systems in their minds. De Houwer (1995) demonstrates how children likely do possess separate language systems from the earliest stages of linguistic interaction (see also Genesee

8 1989). De Houwer first highlights key shortcomings of the 'single system hypothesis'. For example, a major source of evidence for the single system hypothesis is the significant amount of codeswitching performed by bilingual children. De Houwer asserts that two factors (other than the single system hypothesis) influence bilingual child codeswitching. First, codeswitching is frequently present in the speech heard by the children; in this sense children are modeling what they hear (246). Second, noting a paucity of theoretical work on the socialization of children into codeswitching behavior, she suggests that children's codeswitching is likely socially motivated from very early on (247), as it is with adult speakers (see Myers-Scotton 1988,1993). De Houwer then offers evidence in support of the separate development hypothesis. She presents a detailed review of relevant literature, literature that isolates individual grammatical features in bilingual children's speech; it is claimed that children do indeed separate their linguistic systems from the start. De Houwer's main claim, in concurrence with Meisel (1990), that "bilingual first language acquisition does not differ in substantial ways from monolingual development" (241), could translate into a dilemma for the situation under investigation, for this assertion apparently contradicts the notion that primary informants' knowledge of Yiddish may have been divergent from fairly early on in acquisition, i.e., that their development of Yiddish knowledge did differ from what one sees in monolingual situations. Yet De Houwer does note that often the difficulty in the debate about 'one language or two' stems from difficulties in our understanding of the notion of 'system' (235). This concern is also addressed by Hill (1993). Hill describes the concept o f ' h e t eroglossia', "which is not necessarily sorted out into a clearly delineated system of codes" (69; I return to a discussion of these ideas with regard to linguistic identity in chapter 4). In short, people traditionally, and understandably, see codes (at the metalinguistic level) as independent entities like 'English' or 'Yiddish', entities with clear boundaries. For the speaker (or child language learner) in a bilingual situation, however, the subconscious and conscious boundaries between codes are likely both permeable and fluid, manipulated by speakers from one linguistic interaction to the next as "speakers deploy a set of interpretive and productive practices that are 'interested', exploiting the available symbolic materials to try to create those forms and meanings that may be most advantageous" (Hill 1993:69). As is discussed in chapter 4 with regard to linguistic identity, my assumption is that an absence of a "clearly delineated system of codes" in the speech communities of primary informants during child language acquisition is a key factor in the incomplete LI acquisition of Yiddish among primary informants. Rather than consider codes as separate entities in the mind of the speaker, then, I assume that the speaker uses the two codes as tools for communication; the boundaries of the language systems as separate or coexistent tools are subject to the subconscious and conscious manipulation of the speaker, and the needs of communication on-line. Hence, while we can speak here of'Yiddish' and 'English' as languages, each with its own grammar and lexicon, it is understood that the boundaries between these systems were/are manipulated by immigrant speakers and their children, and that for primary informants in this study, this manipulation itself comprised an important component o f 2 L l acquisition. This point obviates the need to determine whether primary informants possessed one mixed code or two distinct codes in their minds while acquiring Yiddish; it is likely that reality fluctuated between the two under the control of the speaker (which, according to De Houwer, ultimately would be evidence of two distinct codes).

1.5

Language death, LI attrition, and incomplete LI acquisition

Language death is defined here as the loss of an entire code in a speech community. LI attrition is understood as the loss of language skills in the individual. These two dimensions of language loss have attracted scholarly attention from many areas of linguistic inquiry over the last 20 to 30 years; to a large extent they have been employed to support or refute primary questions of these areas. In the process the study of language loss has acquired its own set of priorities and questions, establishing it as a sub-field of linguistics in its own right. The field can be said to have its roots in Jakobson's (1962/1941) regression hypothesis, which questioned whether language attrition (in aphasic speakers) might be the inverse of language acquisition, i.e., whether the loss of language skills might proceed feature by feature in the opposite order as acquisition. Despite the correlations between features which are acquired late in child language acquisition and features which tend to be lost first in dying languages (see Preston 1982), it has been found that the regression hypothesis cannot account for the complexities of the language attrition phenomenon (de Bot and Weltens 1991). Although there is a large body of literature on language death and language attrition in various language contact situations, in the remainder of this section I consider these phenomena in bilingual communities only. LI is most frequently the non-dominant, indigenous or ancestral language in a dominant/non-dominant language situation (see Campbell and Muntzel 1989). Interest in the subject of language loss in bilingual communities grew throughout the 1970's and into the 1980's primarily in response to, I believe, 1) the increase in experimental studies of language acquisition and the growth of that field, and 2) the rise in importance - following the rise of Labovian sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, the ethnography of communication, etc. - of field research with actual speech communities (as opposed to the focus from the early 1960's onward on formal linguistics and generative grammar, i.e., on language structure rather than speakers). Scholars began conducting studies of communities in which one of two codes was dying, or becoming 'obsolescent', as Dorian (ed. 1989) refers to the phenomenon. Notable work from this period includes studies by Dorian (1977, 1978, 1980, 1981) on East Sutherland Gaelic in Scotland, Dressier and Wodak-Leodolter (1977) on Breton in France, and Clyne (1982) on German and Dutch in Australia. The fields of 'language loss' (or language attrition as it came to be known by the 1980's) and language death can be said to have come into their own with the publication of Lambert and Freed's (ed. 1982) collection of papers on the loss of language skills, as well as with Dorian (1981). Lambert and Freed established the overall priorities that have dominated the field, outlined major research and methodological issues, and laid the foundation of a theoretical framework. The publication of Dorian (ed. 1989) and Seliger and Vago (ed. 1991) have provided viable answers to many long-standing questions and helped define the boundaries of the field for the next generation. I make no attempt to clearly separate the study of language death and language attrition here, for frequently the difference is moot. In general terms language attrition can be understood as 'language death' at the individual level, as a stage on the path to language death at the community level, i.e., language death is essentially language attrition on a mass scale. In other words, studies of language attrition often consider the phenomenon of language loss in individuals within a single generation (e.g., Kaufman 1991; Olshtain and Barzilay 1991; Waas 1993), whereas studies focusing on language death often consider intergenerational aspects of language loss, such as language change from one generation to the next (e.g., Gonzo and Saltarelli 1983; Dorian 1986; Huls and van de Mond 1992; de Bot and Clyne 1994; Polinsky 1995). Waas (1993) supports this generational classification of the two terms, and overall it is supported by the litera-

10 ture. Often, however, discussions in the literature of the linguistic manifestations of language attrition appear similar or identical to those of language death, i.e., a researcher discusses intergenerational language attrition which, according to my understanding, should be discussed as language death. It is the focus on linguistic structures, but perhaps also the overtly anthropomorphic, and undoubtedly fatalistic connotation of the term 'language death', that leads many researchers to employ the term 'attrition'. Studies of language loss in bilingual communities approach the topic from several points of view. For example, many studies seek to explain some aspects of language change (Gonzo and Saltarelli 1983; Bavin 1989; Sasse 1992), as well as the dynamics of language contact (U. Weinreich 1970/1954; Clyne 1980; Maher 1985, 1991; Brenzinger and Dimmendaal 1992; Clyne 1992; Sasse 1992). Other studies focus not on linguistic variables per se, but on overall linguistic proficiency of speakers and the continuum of speakers within the speech community (e.g., Dorian 1986,1994b). For many, the broader goal of language loss studies is the description of as many language death situations as possible in the face of alarming numbers of languages that are becoming 'obsolete' and dying (see Dorian 1981; Dressier 1991; Sommer 1992; DeChicchis 1995; Harmon 1995; Maher 1995; Mazurkewich 1995). Although many languages, those which are now all but extinct, have been 'preserved' by researcher's efforts (e.g., the work of Dorian; Waas 1993; Bettorn 1991), thousands more have disappeared, and continue to disappear by the hundreds, unrecorded in their final stages (see Harmon 1995). Hence, any case study of a dying language should be considered inherently valuable, for the resulting data indeed may be all that remains for future generations. The death of a language is, however, not the sole perspective taken of language loss in a speech community. Fishman (ed. 1985, 1991) and his colleagues have examined the issue under the rubric of the sociology of language, defining the problem in terms of language shift, i.e., a population shifts from the use of one language to another. For Fishman language death is but one possible outcome of language shift. The 'optimistic' view also might be adopted, such that language maintenance or language revival (Dorian 1994a; Baldauf 1995; Maher 1995), rather than language death, is the desired outcome of language shift (Fishman 1991). Statistically, however, it appears that non-dominant languages most often suffer, both structurally and socially, in competition with dominant languages (see Harmon 1995). Scholars with a primarily psycholinguistic perspective of language loss, which is still a fairly recent undertaking in the study of language loss, seek to understand the cognitive processes and on-line strategies of language attrition. For example, Kaufman (1991), Kaufman and Aronoff (1991), Seliger (1991), and Turian and Altenberg (1991) investigate compensatory strategies employed by speakers of dying language varieties in the face of 'deficient' language proficiency. Such studies attempt to isolate possible language universals and provide insights into aspects of the human mind. Studies such as those of Dorian on East Sutherland Gaelic, while occasionally acknowledging potential universals in their findings, do not tend to consider breakthroughs in the nature of cognition or the mind as salient. A more detailed review of some of the literature on language death and language attrition than is offered here can be found in Waas (1993). At this point I consider the following question: To what extent does the literature on language death and language attrition help provide a theoretical framework for the study of incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation in general or for this study in particular? In other words, how does the phenomenon of incomplete LI acquisition fit into those of LI attrition and language death? As mentioned earlier, many studies of language attrition and language death do not appear to consider the phenomenon of incomplete LI acquisition as directly relevant to language loss; these tend to lump generations together and consider the speech of all speakers as one corpus.

11 Several studies do consider the phenomenon of LI acquisition, however. Maher (1991:81) discusses 'partially replicated grammars' as important in the transmission failure of non-dominant languages in enclave speech communities. Silva-Corvalan (1991:161) concludes that the 'bilingual continuum' in a speech community is influenced strongly by generational factors, i.e., that the speech of the immigrant generation does not exhibit the same sort of divergence as subsequent, U.S.-born generations. Gonzo and Saltarelli (1983) consider language loss in the immigrant situation, with the goal of explaining why immigrant languages tend to be lost by the third generation. Calling the native language of immigrants the 'emigrant' language, they write that [...] the emigrant language is more often learned as a second language, using the limited data of the previous generation as input, and, under the influence of weak monitoring and drastically reduced communicative function, producing a fragmented and greatly simplified version of the original emigrant language (183-184). The authors go on to point out that there are differences between this reduced knowledge of second and third generation speakers and that of natural L2 acquisition speakers (primarily in "receptive control over the language"; 184), but that there are many similarities evident with the speech of Dorian's semi-speakers of East Sutherland Gaelic: "These speakers may be termed 'imperfect' because they have not had sufficiently intensive exposure to the home language or because they have been exposed more intensively or extensively to some other language (184)". I would like to discuss briefly Dorian's semi-speakers, although their situation does differ in many respects from that of the immigrant situation in general and primary informants' situation in particular. As pointed out by Gonzo and Saltarelli, the situation is similar to that of immigrant communities in that the knowledge of the non-dominant language is 'imperfect'. Dorian (1977, 1986) includes under the term semi-speaker any member of her informant group who speaks a structurally reduced version of the language. With reference to the circumstances of their language acquisition, semi-speakers are defined by Dorian as follows: Their acquisition histories are not uniform: Some began as fluent child speakers and lost capacity; some were always imperfect speakers; one or two were passive but not active childhood bilinguals who somewhat later made an effort to develop some active skills (1986:268). Dorian (1986) does believe that semi-speaker performance is, primarily, idiosyncratic, that is, characterized by intraspeaker and interspeaker variation. Strategies employed by semi-speakers to compensate for their divergent abilities appear to be more consistent among speakers, however, a finding that is supported by Turian and Altenberg (1991). Such compensatory strategies as employed by primary informants in this study are discussed in 3.4.2. In short, primary informants fall in line with part of Dorian's group of semi-speakers, namely with those who were "always imperfect speakers". Yet the similarity between primary informants and Dorian's semi-speakers must end there, due to the linguistic and social dynamics of the East Sutherland Gaelic speech communities themselves, i.e., having older fluent speakers, younger fluent speakers, and semi-speakers from both age groups, as well as a segment of the community who still uses the language actively. With regard to language loss in the immigrant situation, a two-fold question remains, one which I address throughout this monograph: 1) What role does incomplete LI acquisition play in language death in the immigrant situation, and 2) how is incomplete LI acquisition different from LI attrition? First, I claim that incomplete LI acquisition is a crucial but often overlooked component of the language death process in the immigrant situation (although scholars frequently do acknowledge the phenomenon as important, e.g., Dorian ed. 1989:8-9). Second, while there are many areas of

12 language structure and linguistic skill that are susceptible to attrition due to long disuse (e.g., lexicon, morphology), the phenomenon of incomplete LI acquisition is qualitatively different from that of LI attrition and that some of its linguistic manifestations are also different from those of LI attrition.

1.6

Linguistic studies dealing with speakers of Yiddish

There appear to be two primary reasons why so little linguistic field research has been conducted with speakers of Yiddish overall, but particularly since the advent of the current generation of linguistics (i.e., the 1960's with the birth of modern sociolinguistics and post-behavioralist psycholinguistics). First, most early linguistic studies having to do with Yiddish focused primarily on diachronic issues, influenced first and foremost by the work of Max and Uriel Weinreich and what I would call the 'Columbia School'. An offshoot of this school was also a group of dialectologists interested in recording and describing the many varieties of Yiddish. Early literature on speakers of Yiddish, and spoken Yiddish, dealt for the most part with the influence that immigration, and English, had on the Yiddish language in the U.S., although contemporaneous concerns about issues of bilingualism also were addressed (Max Weinreich 1931a, 1931b, 1932, 1941; Jaffe 1936; Mark 1938; Uriel Weinreich 1970/1954). Fishman (1952) was among the first to conduct actual field research with Yiddish-speaking children in his early work with the question of who speaks what to whom and in what contexts. Fishman and his colleagues (1966, 1972a, 1972b, ed. 1981, 1985, 1991) also are responsible for a good deal of the literature on language shift, language loyalty, and language maintenance under the rubric of the sociology of language. Fishman 1972b deals exclusively with Yiddish; otherwise Yiddish is usually considered along with other language shift situations (e.g., especially Fishman 1966). Although part of this literature is based on field research with speakers of Yiddish, the goal is to explain macro-level phenomena, rather than deal with micro-level questions of speech. Early field studies that examined specifically Yiddish in the U.S. include Green (1962, cited in Peltz 1990:55) and Rayfield (1970). Rayfield was interested in processes of language change under conditions of language contact. Yet he also addressed issues of cultural identity, and the relationship between degrees of bilingual proficiency and attitudes and experiences of speakers in everyday interaction. These two dissertations unfortunately do not present much in the way of speech evidence, nor do they specifically describe the speech of informants (Peltz 1990:56). Field research with Yiddish speakers based primarily on self-reports can be found in HudsonEdwards (1981), who considers the self-evaluations of Hebrew and Yiddish proficiency and patterns of use among U.S. university students, and Jochnowitz (1981/1968), who analyzes phonological interaction between Yiddish and English in several generations of a Lubavitcher Hasidic sect in New York. Peltz (1990) also deals with changes in Yiddish in the U.S., yet he is the first to acknowledge Yiddish in the U.S. as it is/was spoken in bilingual communities as a bona fide "continuation of the thousand-year tradition in Jewish history" (56). His goal in this article, as well as in his dissertation (1988), is to examine the sociolinguistic interrelationships between the maintenance of Yiddish and group identification of American Jews (56). His primary focus is on phonological phenomena, although he does briefly discuss certain grammatical changes.

13 1.7

Summary

In this chapter I have presented the goals and primary research questions of this study. Several of the key theoretical assumptions underlying the work also were addressed, namely those relating to child language acquisition, bilingual LI acquisition, LI attrition, and language death. I have attempted to show that this study and the phenomenon of incomplete LI acquisition hold a relevant place in each of these fields.

2

The study

2.1

Introduction: Inherent p r o b l e m s in the study of obsolescent languages

There are problems involved in the study of an obsolescent (dying) language that are not faced by most researchers of'healthy' or 'normal' language situations, that is, situations in which speakers interact in a fairly stable or (relatively) static manner in one or more codes. Dorian (1989:555557) discusses many of these problems. First, the researcher seldom has much choice as to location for conducting field research, as there may be but a small number of speech communities remaining. Second, in the case that there are very few actual speakers of the obsolescent language, the choice of informants is automatically limited; this appears to be the case more often than not, because most often an obsolescent language attracts the attention of linguists only after it is well on its way toward extinction. Furthermore, the language spoken by so-called terminal speakers (those speakers who are among the last speakers of a language) is likely to be highly divergent from the earlier, 'healthy' state of the language, and it may be too late in many cases to find speakers whose language represents what was considered the norm in earlier times. A fourth interesting set of concerns is, on the one hand, potential informants' willingness to cooperate with researchers and, on the other hand, potential negative attitudes toward the language among its speakers (Dorian 1989:560-561). As will be discussed in chapter 4, Dorian identifies an almost paradoxical attitude among many speakers, namely "a sort of lightly regretful pragmatism which gives rise to general protestations about the regrettable loss of the language unaccompanied by efforts to halt that loss" (my emphasis; 560). Related to the issue of negative attitudes is the presence of rivalries among speakers of an obsolescent language (Dorian 1989:562). This creates many problems for the large number of studies that rely on self-reports of speakers, or statements of certain speakers about others. Often more ability is attributed than they actually possess, or conversely, speakers know more of the language than they admit (562; e.g., see Du Bois and Melanfon 1995). Furthermore, Dorian points out that remaining speakers are sometimes revered, or even hallowed, by the community as representative of earlier times, and this condition makes reliable data collection difficult. On the other side of this coin, the situation in which linguistic purism among older generations toward the language of younger speakers, as well as feelings of intimidation among the younger generations in the face of criticism or ridicule of their divergent speech, has a powerful influence on the linguistic traditions of a speech community. Hill (1993) explores these issues of attitudes and their influence within the speech community and on the language in the cases of Mexicano, Dyirbal and Wasco. Dorian (1994a) also considers the effects of linguistic purism on the transmission of an obsolescent language. As a result of these, and other, inherent problems in obsolescent-language field research, linguists have been forced to combine a variety of data collection methods to obtain sufficient amounts and types of data from obsolescent speech communities. In cases in which the language is being spoken actively, field workers appear to favor simply recording day-to-day interaction among speakers. In the case of so-called semi-speakers (Dorian 1977, 1986) and in cases in which the community no longer actively interacts in the language, certain elicitation techniques are called for, for these speakers likely will not produce sufficient speech spontaneously. Dorian (1989:568) identifies many of the inherent dilemmas in eliciting speech from informants, most notably the generally artificial nature of such speech. However, she, like many other investiga-

15 tors, concedes that direct elicitation may be the only way of obtaining speech samples from certain informants. In such cases the best the researcher can do may be to become proficient enough in the language to be able to assess how artificial the collected data are, and perform analysis accordingly (568). The question of whether the open-ended interview, in the form of elicited narration, provides a 'natural' speech sample will be addressed shortly.

2.2

The population

The population under investigation in the present study consists of the U.S.-born children of Yiddish-speaking, Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Specifically, I was interested in the generation born roughly between 1910 and 1935. The parents of these people would have been part of the waves of emigration from the countries of Eastern Europe in the wake of various pogroms between 1903 into the early 1920's (for example, a series of especially brutal pogroms claimed upwards of 100,000 Jewish lives immediately following World War I, helping to drive the massive exodus; Tcherikower 1923). Many of these immigrants also came in search of better economic prospects in the face of restrictive laws against Jews and the ways in which they were permitted to make a living (Howe 1976:20-24). A large percentage of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to the U.S. settled in the New York metropolitan area. The largest concentration was on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and later in Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx (Howe 1976:130-133). There were also substantial, concentrated populations of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit; fewer settled in the west and south. Like many other immigrant populations, the children of these immigrants achieved a high degree of assimilation into mainstream U.S. society and culture. Many immigrants also made great efforts at becoming 'good Americans,' including learning English in night schools; they encouraged their children to adopt mainstream U.S. values of language and culture as well. This point is elaborated further in Chapter 4 in a discussion of sociolinguistic and ethnic identity issues.

2.3

Pilot studies

Three pilot studies were carried out in preparation for the present project. First, I visited a Jewish convalescent and retirement home in San Antonio, Texas. This study did not restrict itself to U.S.-born speakers, as the present study would do; in fact, only one of the three informants was bom in the U.S. 1 attempted to elicit Yiddish speech through a translation task of about 50 sentences (English to Yiddish), a picture narration task, word lists (English to Yiddish), and a grammaticality judgment task. I also attempted to have each informant tell me in Yiddish about her or his childhood, youth, immigration to the U.S., etc. Of the four elicitation tasks used, only the translation task met with even limited success, although it, too, proved to be too long for all three informants. For the picture narration task, the word lists, and the grammaticality judgment task informants demonstrated little patience, and felt generally uncomfortable with being 'tested'. The free narration was the least intimidating to the three informants, although the immigrant Yiddish-speakers found it nearly impossible to keep their narratives in Yiddish. Ironically, none

16 of the U.S.-born speakers I interviewed, either in the pilot studies or in the present study, objected to or had great difficulty keeping their narratives in Yiddish (not considering codeswitching), whereas almost all immigrants I spoke with would switch to English at some point and would remain fairly obstinate about switching back to Yiddish. After completing data collection in the convalescent home I decided that informants in the present study should be 'self-sufficient' individuals, as I suspect that with the three patients in the convalescent home factors of medical problems, medications of various sorts, and advanced age may have influenced speech performance (see Albert 1980, Kynette and Kemper 1986, Emery 1986, and Obler and Albert 1989 for a discussion of cognitive and linguistic decrement in the elderly). In the second pilot study I interviewed two informants at Century Village in Pembroke Pines, Florida (a description of this location follows in section 2.5). The two were a married couple, HA and AA (who also participated in the present study). I interviewed them separately, because together I found that each tended to comment frequently on the Yiddish of the other. When they were together prior to interviewing I also had attempted to persuade them to speak Yiddish to each other. They were unwilling to do this at any time, despite the fact that neither was shy about conversing with me in the language. In their many years of marriage they reprted that they had actually never spoken to each other to any great degree in Yiddish (isolated phrases from time to time, such as in front of the children). I had the two informants perform several elicitation tasks, similar to those used at the convalescent home. Additionally, I conducted a short, open-ended interview in which I asked them to tell me about their childhoods, their parents, family stories of immigration, or other stories. As with the first pilot study, the informants responded best to this open-ended interview format, and to the translation task. And as with the first pilot study, A A and HA also demonstrated impatience and reservation during the grammaticality judgment task. Lastly, they both had great difficulty dealing with the picture narration, primarily due to lexical gaps and retrieval problems. The third pilot study was restricted to a grammaticality judgment task. I was interested to know whether this population possessed 'native-speaker intuitions' about grammatical and ungrammatical constructions in Yiddish. I contacted 12 residents of Century Village through HA and AA. The 12 informants, including HA and AA, listened to sentences recorded on audiocassette and marked on a questionnaire whether they felt the sentences were grammatical or not. Three problems resulted in fairly inconclusive findings in this study. First, too many sentences were included in the task; informants lost patience with it after a certain point. Hence, they were not focusing well on each sentence equally. Second, many informants' Yiddish was very weak to begin with. Only the strongest speakers appeared to make grammaticality judgments based on their knowledge of the language, and even these were inconsistent. All informants appeared to take a rather haphazard approach to the task, and in any case they judged almost every sentence as grammatical regardless of whether it was or not. Third, the task inherently requires the use of metalinguistic rather than linguistic skill, and therefore cannot be expected to reflect the linguistic knowledge of these informants. In other words, I believe a speaker must have a certain minimum of competence in a language before a task such as grammaticality judgment can be said to reflect 'native-speaker intuitions'. If anything, then, this pilot study demonstrated that none of the informants in the pilot studies, or the main study for that matter, possesses a very high level of metalinguistic skill in Yiddish (cf. Bialystok 1988 and 1991 for a discussion of levels of metalinguistic awareness). The issue of informants' status as native speakers of Yiddish will be addressed in chapter 3. It should also be mentioned briefly that apart from these three pilot studies, I was able to conduct several 'informal' interviews in Yiddish with a number of speakers. Most of these were not tape-recorded, as I regarded them as 'training' for me, as well as simply exploratory: I was, after

17 all, searching for a dissertation topic in my fascination with the Yiddish spoken by immigrants and their children. Most of the interlocutors of these informal interviews were my own family members. Most were born in the U.S. to two immigrant parents, but I also spoke with a few who had one immigrant parent and one U.S.-born parent.

2.4

The sample

As it may have already occurred to the reader, the sample used in this study is not random. The sample is the product of judgment sampling (Milroy 1987:26). With a judgment sample the researcher "identifies in advance the types of speakers to be studied and then seeks out a quota of speakers who fit the specified categories" (26). A judgment sample is "based on some kind of defensible theoretical framework; in other words, the researcher needs to be able to demonstrate that his or her judgment is rational and well-motivated" (26). It would be prudent to demonstrate here that my judgment was both rational and well-motivated in selecting a judgment sample. The following are the criteria I used in identifying the sample: 1) 2) 3)

Informants are U.S.-bom. Both parents of informants were Yiddish-speaking (and Yiddish-dominant) immigrants. Informants were willing/able to speak Yiddish today.

First and foremost, the very nature of the population under consideration precludes any sort of random sample. In deciding at the outset that my larger goal was to understand incomplete LI acquisition and LI attrition in the immigrant situation I already isolated immigrants and their children as potential informants. Furthermore, in pursuing possible answers to questions of linguistic knowledge, e.g., what sort of/how much linguistic knowledge may be called 'native', I isolated the children of immigrants as informants because I was interested to know how the factors language attrition and incomplete language acquisition might be related. Thus, the research goals determined the criteria of the sample, and therefore, only a judgment sample could be considered useful. Additionally, the method used to attract and recruit potential informants, through announcements posted where they would likely be seen by members of the population (which is explicated shortly), made certain aspects of the search 'random' with regard to variables other than those listed above, variables such as gender, class, educational level, geographical origin etc. Admittedly, however, this aspect of 'randomness' is confounded in that the locations of posted flyers and the announcement in the newsletter are biased against potential informants who either did not have the means or desire to live at Century Village or else are not members of the synagogue. Whether the sample can be called representative of the population should also be addressed, especially considering the small size of the sample. The sample used in this study cannot be considered "technically representative" (Milroy 1987:27). However, I claim that this sample is sufficiently representative in part due to the systematic means and narrow criteria employed in identifying the population. Because the present study is not sociolinguistic in the traditional sense (i.e., an investigation of variation), and because its conclusions likewise are not based on statistical analysis, I felt it appropriate to approach the issue of sample size as would a psycholinguist. When the population has indeed been identified narrowly enough, and when theoretical issues of language acquisition and linguistic competence are at the heart of the investigation (as they are with study), then a

18 very small sample size can be said to be representative of a population (in many psycholinguistic studies N=\ can be considered sufficient: E.g., Kaufman 1991). In fact, psycholinguistic investigations of linguistic phenomena appear little concerned with the issue of representativeness overall, based on the assumption of the ideolect, and the belief that within a certain frame one individual's competence is much like that of another. Le Page and Tabouret Keller (1985) maintain the opposite view, namely that no two individuals possess the same linguistic competence. It is likely that the truth lies in some combination of these views.

2.5

Locating informants

Locating informants for this study posed several interesting challenges, primarily because the population under consideration does not exist as a 'speech community' as such, that is, one cannot go to a particular place and hear second-generation speakers interacting in Yiddish (see, however, Peltz's 1990 discussion of Yiddish in South Philadelphia), despite the fact that many cities possess Yiddish clubs of various sorts (see Romaine 1982, Pratt 1987, and Gumperz 1971 for a discussion of the concept 'speech community'). I did visit several different Yiddish club meetings prior to locating or interviewing informants. Conversation at meetings most often was in English with occasional Yiddish words interjected. Most of the Yiddish heard/spoken was in the form of songs sung or poetry and stories read from a podium to the group. The primary purpose of such clubs is for elderly speakers to sing 'the old songs' and highlight various aspects of 'Yiddishkeit.' This term is heard often in American Jewish circles, and it also is relevant to the discussion of identity in chapter 4. 'Yiddishkeit' stands variously for Jewishness in a religious and cultural sense, as well as to the Yiddish language and the culture associated with it. Howe (1976:16) defines it as [...] that phase of Jewish history during the past two centuries which is marked by the prevalence of Yiddish as the language of Eastern European Jews and by the growth among them of a culture resting mainly on that language. The culture of Yiddishkeit is no longer strictly that of traditional Orthodoxy, yet it retains strong ties to the religious past. It takes on an increasingly secular character yet is by no means confined to the secular elements among Yiddish-speaking Jews. It refers to a way of life, a shared experience, which goes beyond opinion or ideology. In any case, most Yiddish clubs focus primarily on entertainment, and do not pursue goals such as language maintenance or revival. Despite the lack of established geographical locations where one can find a speech community of this population, I was able to locate a concentration of second-generation speakers by virtue of speakers' station in life. Most informants in this study, and indeed a large number of speakers in this population, are retired and living in retirement communities of various sorts. I was able to take advantage of personal contacts to gain access to one such community in Pembroke Pines, Florida, near Fort Lauderdale. Century Village has a population of roughly 10,000 living in several hundred three-story condominium buildings situated around a golf course and numerous small, man-made lakes. It is a gated community with extensive facilities for residents, including swimming pools and other sporting areas, an immense clubhouse containing conference halls and classrooms, its own bus system, and a synagogue. Although I was not able to obtain specific information from the administration of Century Village, most people I spoke with estimate that 80% to 90% of residents are Jewish (all residents whom I asked this question were Jewish). Whether the percentage is actually this high is uncertain, but without a doubt Jewish residents

19 represent a large part of the population. Additionally, residents participate in dozens of various sorts of clubs and organizations, focusing on everything from table tennis to poetry reading. To digress briefly with a point that is pertinent to the issue of the intergenerational boundaries which I examine in chapter 4, among the many clubs at Century Village are two separate Yiddish clubs, the Yiddish Culture Club and the Yiddish Vinkl 'corner'. The membership of the former consists almost exclusively of the children of immigrants, and almost all activities occur in English. By contrast, the members of the Yiddish Vinkl are for the most part immigrants themselves, specifically, Holocaust survivors. Not only does there appear to be no common membership (i.e., residents tend to belong to one or the other club), but I perceived during my time at Century Village a distinct animosity between the two groups. The Culture Club appears to view the Vinkl as snobbish and highly critical of the Yiddish spoken by U.S.-bom speakers. The Vinkl members criticize the Culture Club members as ignorant of Yiddishkeit as such, as well as stubborn in their refusal to speak Yiddish socially (although most immigrants appeared to converse primarily in English themselves). I employed two means in my initial attempts to connect with potential informants for this study. First, I requested that the two informants who had participated in the pilot study help me contact others in their social networks. This met with limited success, as I was able to locate only two additional informants this way. The second method of meeting potential informants met with even less success. I obtained a pass to the clubhouse, the lobby of which resembles that of a large hotel. It is a popular meeting place in the mornings and afternoons. Unfortunately, most residents whom I approached, no matter how politely or nonchalantly, were too suspicious of me as a stranger (and probably as a youngster) for me to even find out if they were Yiddish speakers. This experience helped me realize that I had to find a means of having residents come to me. Therefore I prepared a flyer which announced in large, capital letters: Yiddish speakers wanted, followed by a brief description of the project and my telephone number. I posted the flyers by the elevators or laundry rooms at only about 30 of the condominium buildings (there are over 350 buildings on the property). Before I arrived home from hanging the flyers, the tape on my answering machine was full and the phone was ringing as I entered the house. The phone continued to ring almost incessantly for four days, at which time I was forced to remove the flyers, as I was turning down potential informants due to my own time limitations. Several people responded to my flyer who were either not U.S.-bom, or else did not have two Yiddish-speaking parents. I interviewed a few of them, though these speakers are not included in the analyses. The Yiddish data of three of the immigrants with whom I spoke are used as a control, a standard of sorts with which the performance of informants is compared. Interviews with speakers who had only one Yiddish-speaking parent were conducted primarily in English, as their Yiddish was too weak to speak for extended periods. In addition to the informants found at Century Village, I also was able to talk with four additional members of this population in Hollywood and West Palm Beach, Florida, and in Austin, Texas. In Hollywood I met a gentleman in a deli who agreed to an interview on the spot, over a cup of coffee. The informant in West Palm Beach is my own grandmother. In Austin I placed an announcement in the newsletter of a local synagogue. The announcement was worded similarly to that of the flyer in Century Village, and I received about half a dozen calls.

20 2.6

Primary informants

A total of 20 interviews were conducted. The sociolinguistic profiles of ten of the informants, which I call the primary informants, correspond to the judgment sample defined earlier. Bach was born in the U.S., had two Yiddish-speaking parents, and each was willing and able to carry on a conversation in Yiddish with me. Of the other ten interviews conducted, four were with speakers whose Yiddish was too weak as to be useful in this study; in each of these cases the speaker had only one Yiddish-speaking parent. An additional three were with fluent Yiddish speakers who have effectively never ceased using the language. The four weakest speakers, and the remaining three speakers, are discussed shortly, in 2.7. Table 2.1 lists primary informants with their ages, places of birth and current residence, and length of time they reported speaking and hearing Yiddish. Primary informants include seven women and three men. They ranged in age from 63 to 83 at the time of the interviews in March of 1995. None of their parents possessed more than a high school education, although most were literate in Yiddish. Many of the parents also spoke some other language (usually Russian or Polish), and this was generally reserved as their 'secret code' in front of the children. All parents came from what primary informants called working-class or lower middle-class backgrounds. This is typical of Eastern European Jews overall, as the majority came to the U.S. from situations of poverty, or at best extremely limited means, in Eastern Europe. In the U.S., most of the mothers were housewives, although many of these took on contracted work at home, such as sewing and needlework (this was common among immigrants in the early decades of this century). Informants' fathers were peddlers, 'junk' dealers, small shopkeepers, house painters, and in a few instances, scholars of the Torah and Talmud (i.e., these men spent a good deal of their time in the synagogue studying while their wives earned a living, a fairly common situation in Eastern Europe. Most of the primary informants' families were what informants called 'somewhat religious', meaning that they celebrated the Jewish holidays and generally kept a kosher kitchen, but that the Sabbath (Friday evening to Saturday evening) was not observed regularly. For many Eastern European Jews this constituted a major break with tradition from the 'old country'. Many Jews rejected a number of the 'restrictive' rules of Judaism in the face of their newfound 'freedom' in the U.S. Still, all three of the male primary informants, and a few of the female ones, attended cheder as children, Jewish religious school, which generally demanded several hours after school during the week and on Sunday as well. Three of the informants also attended an Arbeter-Ring Shul, or Workman's Circle School, an after-school Yiddish program in New York. They were taught in Yiddish to read and write the language. Two of these three were removed from this school by age eight or nine, when, according to one self-report, the parents 'found out' that the school was communist and was teaching 'communist songs' to the children. The three informants who attended the school are able to read and write just a few letters or words today. Although the accuracy of the self-reports of when informants ceased using Yiddish must be placed in doubt, if only because of the length of time elapsed, there is little question that informants have not heard the language regularly since at least their own twenties, i.e., after they married and moved away from the immediate proximity of their parents. That they stopped speaking the language sometime during grade school is supported not only by the linguistic evidence, but also by the general trend evident in other immigrant populations (see Gonzo and Saltarelli 1983; De Bot, Gommans, and Rossing 1991; De Bot and Clyne 1994). Most informants reported memories of parents (or other elders) speaking Yiddish to them, and that they would respond to their (apparently monolingual) elders in English. This pattern also has been noted in other immigrant situations (e.g., see Zentella 1995,1997).

21 Name

Sex

year of birth

place of birth/childhood

Current place of residence

Ceased using Yiddish: self report

AA

F

1921

Grand Rapids, MI

Pembroke Pines, FL

by age 10

AB

F

1932

NYC, the Bronx

Austin, TX

by age 12

DM

F

1928

Cleveland, OH

Austin, TX

age 40?

DS

F

1920?

Philadelphia, PA

Pembroke Pines, FL

by age 10

HA

M

1919

Chicago, IL

Pembroke Pines, FL

by age 10

JH

M

1930?

NY

Hollywood, FL

by age 10

JS

M

1912

NY-Lower East Side

Pembroke Pines, FL

by age 10

MF

F

1912

Chicago, IL

Pembroke Pines, FL

by age 10

ML

F

1922

New York, NY

W. Palm Beach, FL

by age 10

OK

M

1920?

Chicago, IL

Pembroke Pines, FL

by age 10

Table 2.1: Sociodemographic

2.7

information of primary informants

Additional informants

Apart from the ten interviews conducted with primary informants, I interviewed three speakers who acquired Yiddish as children in the home and who used the language actively and regularly until fairly recently, when their spouses died (in the 1980's). All three of these speakers were born in Eastern Europe and immigrated to the U.S. as adults, either prior to or following World War II. The Yiddish of these three speakers is fully fluent and shows no signs of divergence from accepted norms. Four speakers interviewed were unable to speak in Yiddish for any length of time. In one case, LM, the informant was either unable or unwilling to speak Yiddish at all. Each of the four had only one Yiddish-speaking parent, although each stated that many Yiddish-speaking relatives were around during their childhoods. Despite not having grown up speaking Yiddish and having only one Yiddish-speaking parent, each of these four non-Yiddish-speaking informants was able to comprehend lengthy narratives in Yiddish with no apparent difficulty. After determining that an informant could or would not speak Yiddish, I chose to tell them a biographical story about a fictional immigrant. I narrated how a woman left home at an early age, traveled alone by ship to America, found a job in a sweat shop in New York, met and married a co-worker, had children, and ran a household. During the five-minute narration I included several details that entailed a solid understanding of certain grammatical features in order to comprehend fully. For example, without stating the sex of the children, I mentioned that one of the children had become a doktorke, a female physician (the -ke suffix indicates that the referent is a woman). After completing my narration in Yiddish, I asked each informant to retell me the story in English with as much detail as possible. While all four were able to do this with ease, only one, LM, the one who refused to speak any Yiddish, and who initially denied knowing Yiddish at all, mentioned in her retelling of the story that the woman's

22 RB

AD

RG

Year of birth

1919

1905

1915?

Place of birth

Vilna, Lithuania, USSR

Minsk, Russia

Bridgeport,

Childhood Residence

Vilna, Lithuania

Minsk; New York

Bridgeport, and rural Connecticut

Came to the U.S. in

1930

1912

Born in U.S.

Literate in Yiddish as child?

"yes"

"very little"

"somewhat"

Primary Yiddishspeaking inter-locutors as a child

family, friends; after arrival in U.S., immediate family only

parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents

Mother (with motherin-law as an adult)

Approx. year/age ceased using Yiddish regularly (self-report)

1940/age 20

1946/age41?

Mid 1970's/age 55?

Connecticut

Table 2.2: Sociodemographic information of secondary informants child was a daughter. The others did not include it in their retelling, and when asked, said I did not mention the sex of the child. Further grammatical details included in my narration included past subjunctive forms (I spoke of things the fictional immigrant would have liked to do in her life had things been different). Each informant included these details in her or his English retelling. Lastly, interviews were conducted with three 'fully fluent' speakers to whom I refer as 'secondary informants' in this monograph. As mentioned earlier, the interview data of these three speakers are employed as a sort of control with which I compare the speech of the U.S.-born primary informants. Like the three fully fluent, foreign-born speakers I interviewed, each of the secondary informants claims to have used Yiddish actively into adult- hood. Like primary informants, however, these speakers have not used the language actively or regularly in 30 to 50 years. Table 2.2 presents a summary of pertinent demographic information for each speaker. Interviews with secondary informants were open-ended, and overall as 'conversation-like' as possible. Each interview lasted from 60 to 90 minutes. Two were conducted in the speakers' own living rooms. Overall, I attempted to have these interviews resemble as much as possible those conducted with the ten primary informants (these are discussed in 2.8). The interview with AD was carried out in her niece's living room. I was able to have RB perform a grammatically judgment task, a case assignment task, and a translation task. Before proceeding, I would like to briefly describe what each of these secondary informants described of their experiences using Yiddish throughout their lives. RB was born in 1919 in Vilna, Lithuania, then part of the U.S.S.R. She claims to have immigrated to the U.S. with her mother when she was nine or ten, ca. 1930 (RB was not sure). RB's Yiddish can easily be labeled 'fully fluent'. Her phonology cannot be distinguished from that an active, fully fluent speaker of Yiddish. She does not codeswitch as frequently as the U.S.-born informants in this study, and she seldom code-blends forms. Still, her Yiddish shows certain signs

23 of LI attrition, such as occasional case syncretism, and the ' Yiddishization' of certain English idiomatic phrases. Grammatically, however, she possesses the abilities of a 'native' speaker (as discussed in 3.3). RJB claims to have spoken Yiddish primarily with her maternal grandparents, whom she saw on a daily basis. Her mother spoke with her own parents in Yiddish, as did RB. RB claims that her mother learned English shortly after their arrival in the U.S. and spoke primarily English with RB. RB spoke Yiddish with her sister prior to immigration, and English afterwards. RB spoke no English upon arrival in the U.S., but learned the language in public school. RB claims to have spoken Yiddish every day, both at home with her grand-mother, as well as in her grandfather's grocery store, until she moved away from home at around age 20. Also, at about this time her grandmother died. Her husband speaks no Yiddish, and she claims not to have spoken Yiddish regularly since the time she was married (around age 20). The second speaker, AD, was born in a town near Minsk in 1905. She came to the U.S. with her parents at age seven in 1912. She first lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, then later in the Bronx. AD's Yiddish is characterized by 'native' phonology and intonation patterns. She had great difficulty at times remembering lexical items and appeared unaware that she often inserted whole English constituents into her Yiddish. AD claims that neither of her parents ever spoke English very well, and that Yiddish was always the language of communication among them and the children. Her father died in 1925, when she was 20. Her mother died in 1946. She claims to have spoken English with her siblings. Hence, she believes she has not spoken Yiddish regularly since the mid-1940's. The third speaker, RG, was born in the U.S. to two Yiddish-speaking immigrants. She was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. As a child she lived first in Bridgeport, then on two different farms in rural Connecticut, then again in urban Bridgeport. Her father died when RG was 24. Her mother moved in with her after her father died. RG's mother died in the mid-1970's. RG's Yiddish can be labeled 'fully fluent' without hesitation. Her phonology and intonation patterns do not appear to differ markedly from those of immigrant speakers. She displays a broad vocabulary, good command of a full range of domains, including academic and business topics, and registers, including a sensitivity to the du/ir (informal/formal) pronoun system. Differently from primary informants, RG apparently spoke Yiddish regularly well into middle age. Although she claimed at one point in the interview that she only ever spoke English with her parents, it is difficult to accept this at face value, considering the quality of her Yiddish (and the fact that her mother apparently lived with her until her death in the mid-1970's). Further probing in the interview revealed that RG saw her mother-in-law regularly and spoke only Yiddish with her until her death in 1975. Additionally, RG worked for several years at a theological seminary in New York, during which time she interacted with many Yiddish speakers. Lastly, she acted in a Yiddish play in New York when she was in her twenties. From the content of the interview it became clear that she had not heard or used Yiddish regularly since at least the mid 1970's.

2.8

The Interview

There were two reasons why I selected the open-ended interview, generally following a more ethnographic approach, as the primary means of obtaining a sufficient amount of'natural' speech data from primary and secondary informants.

24 First, as described in 2.3, during the pilot studies I found that informants did not deal well with various sorts of elicitation tasks. They often expressed impatience through body language or verbal comments about the tasks, or else they seemed to feel that they were being 'tested'. Hence I felt that, at best, informants' heightened affective filter would cause them to monitor their speech to the point of interfering with natural speech, and at worst, I feared creating an adversarial relationship between informants and myself. Second, I chose the open-ended interview because I concluded that only by these means could I obtain samples of speech that came close to being natural. For of all the speech I was able to record, very little can be considered 'natural' in the sense in which the term is generally meant. None of the informants speaks Yiddish with others at any time in their lives presently, and as mentioned, most have not spoken Yiddish at all in many decades. In the two instances in which I interviewed married couples I was unable to bring them into a conversation in Yiddish, whether by direct or indirect coaxing. This would have been, simply, too 'unnatural' a speech event for both couples. For this reason, as well, the possibility of participant observation (see Rayfield 1970) as a means of collecting data was not considered. Though the only logical alternative, it is important to consider here several problems associated with the one-on-one interview as discussed by Briggs (1986). Briggs describes the "communicative hegemony" inherent to the one-on-one interview, whereby the interviewer automatically assumes the role of authority as 'questioner', and the interviewee falls into the role of provider of information (7-8). Furthermore, the interview as a speech act between individuals is characteristically 'unnatural'. Briggs shows how several aspects of the interview stand in opposition to the flow and content of 'normal' conversation between individuals (23-26,44,48). A second problem inherent to the one-on-one interview is the unavoidable role of the observer's paradox, for I am both interlocutor and researcher, and the interviewee is aware of this fact. 1 Furthermore, the interview, being in Yiddish, is initiated and guided by the interviewer, and this forces us to strain the boundaries of what we can call 'natural' about the resulting speech event. A third problem is the question of the extent to which I, as interviewer, and as a relative youngster to informants who are my grandparents' contemporaries, can be considered part of the in-group, thereby gaining access to speech produced under conditions which are as natural as possible. This is a very important consideration, and I argue that I indeed was able to be considered in-group, for three reasons. First, as a fellow Jew, and the descendant of Eastern European Jews, I was immediately and automatically considered trustworthy. Indeed, I was invited into informants' homes over the phone, and in almost all cases I was alone with informants in their living rooms for several hours. Second, while playing down my role as a 'scholar,' I suspect that my youth actually helped lower each informant's affective filter, i.e., informants may have been more reluctant to speak with an interviewer who was closer to their own age (I was 31 at the time of the interviews). Third, the fact that each informant was aware prior to the start of the interview that I was a foreign-language, and hence imperfect, speaker of Yiddish also facilitated a sense of solidarity between the informant and myself. So, as with the issue of age difference, I believe that informants would have been far more reluctant to speak, and far busier monitoring their speech, had the interviewer been a fully fluent, native speaker.

1

Having the interview conducted by another Yiddish speaker, such as a Yiddish-dominant, native speaker was not considered, primarily due to the sort of animosity described in 2.5, which primary informants appear to feel toward such speakers in general.

25 A last point regarding the issue of 'natural' speech data and a severe limitation of the method employed in collecting it: The transcripts of interviews reveal clearly that all informants are very limited in the domains and registers in which they can function in Yiddish (this is discussed further in the following chapters). Considered together with the many divergent features of their Yiddish grammars, their speech is by definition 'unnatural', in addition to the fact that they appear incapable of altering, adapting, or accommodating their speech on-line to any great extent in response to the social situation as can a fully fluent, native speaker. The question of the vernacular, and the primacy of obtaining data which reflects the vernacular (see Labov 1972, 199-216; Briggs 1986, 17-18; and Milroy 1987, 60-61), is therefore not as much a concern in this study. All but two interviews with primary informants were conducted in informants' homes, usually in the living room or at the kitchen table. I attempted in each case to have the informant select the location in which she or he felt most comfortable. Most chose the kitchen table. I was able to place the portable tape recorder (Sony TCM-14) such that it was relatively unobtrusive, either behind some objects such as salt and pepper shakers, or my water glass. After the second pilot study I decided it was best to keep my notebook on the floor under my chair, rather than on the table. Pressing points had to be remembered until I got to the car after the interviews. Lastly, one interview (RG) was conducted at a pool area at Century Village, and another (JH), as mentioned, took place at a deli in Hollywood, Florida. I made every effort to not have the interview 'begin' and 'end' as such, that is, I tried to avoid giving informants the feeling they were being tested in any way. I usually talked with an informant for a while before turning the tape recorder on. During our English conversation I would turn the machine on. At some point I would attempt to initiate a switch to Yiddish by saying something like Lomir redrt yidish! 'Let's speak Yiddish!' In almost all cases informants switched with little effort, although many immediately encountered lexical retrieval difficulties, prompting them to switch back to English briefly. Most switched back to Yiddish again, though, without my coaxing or interference. In each case I began the Yiddish conversation by simply asking the informant to tell me about her or his mother or father. From there I made every attempt to keep the conversation flowing as 'naturally' as possible. So, for example, it was often appropriate for me to carry my part in the exchange by telling stories of my own. Thus I tried to create the context of two acquaintances talking about family and 'the old days' rather than that of the interview. I also made an effort to keep my questions to those which would appear 'normal' for a young person to ask of his elders, e.g., wanting to know how things were before I was born. I was candid with several informants that part of my goal for the study was to 'paint a picture', both social and linguistic, of what life was like growing up as the children of Yiddish-speaking immigrants. In most cases, after about 45 minutes or an hour, the conversation would begin to feel 'forced,' or else the informant appeared to be growing impatient with speaking Yiddish. At this point I often had us take a short break. Then I asked them if they would play a 'language game' with me before we finished. This was the translation task. I began by reading them a short series of sentences in Yiddish that they should translate into English. In all cases they were extremely simple sentences such as Ikh lib dikh 'I love you', for I felt it was important that informants enter the 'real' translation task with a feeling of success. The translation task from English to Yiddish, and the one in which I was primarily interested, involved approximately 25 sentences. During the pilot study I found that more than this number caused informants to grow impatient. Sentences contained either grammatical constructions that occur frequently in the interview data, such as the present perfect, or else they contained constructions which appear seldom, or not at all, in the interview data, such as past subjunctive, or prepositional relative clauses. Frequently occurring structures were included to find out if informants' performance would be different when speech was being monitored more closely than during the open-ended interview. Likewise, infrequently

26 occurring structures were included in the translation task to determine whether informants could produce them at all. It should be mentioned that in several cases I was prevented from going through complete translation tasks due to various social circumstances, e.g., the above-mentioned impatience with a 'test' situation, a phone call or spouse interrupting or terminating the interview, etc.). Following the 'language game' it was often easy to bring the informant back into further conversation in Yiddish. Usually, the subject of the interview was turned to the informant's feelings and overt attitudes about the Yiddish language. I often would be asked questions about my own studies of the language, and about my views on the 'future of Yiddish.'

2.9

Data analysis

The audio taped recordings of interviews with primary informants were first transcribed into computer word processor files. Because I transcribed the approximately 16 hours of conversation without assistance, the task took over a year to complete. In transliterating the Yiddish, which is written with Hebrew letters, into the Roman alphabet, I chose to employ the standard orthography set up by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. I did this because, first, it makes transcription and subsequent reading of the data simpler, I believe, than the IPA. Second, it is the standard employed by a large percentage of Yiddish scholars throughout the world.2 The analyses in this study can be considered qualitative in nature. Apart from calculations of frequencies of occurrence of several features for chapters 3 and 5, quantitative (statistical) analyses of the variables under discussion were deemed to be inappropriate, for three reasons. First and foremost, statistical analyses would likely be unreliable due to the small sample size. Second, with regard to the primary components of the present study, which are in chapters 3, 4 and 5,1 found that 1)

2) 3)

2

in chapter 3, although certain patterns are indicated by frequencies of occurrence of divergent features in the data, statistical analyses of these frequencies would have been confounded by the simple fact that only one interview was conducted with each informant (and hence performance on that day may have differed from performance on another day or during a subsequent interview), in chapter 4 quantitative analysis was unnecessary to the exploration of social and sociolinguistic variables under consideration, and the mean frequencies of occurrence of the linguistic feature discussed in chapter 5 sufficed on their own to make comparisons with the additional linguistic evidence examined in the same chapter.

With the exception of the following, the sounds represented by the YIVO transliteration are, for the purpose of the examples in this monograph, identical with those of English: o = [a] ay=[ aj]

e = [t] oy=[ Oj]

e = [t ]/ ey=[ej]

#

; = [i] kh = [x]

o = [0] r=[r]or[Y]

M = [u] r=[B]/

#

27 2.10

Summary

In this chapter I first discussed some of the problems inherent to the study of an obsolescent language, several of which are relevant to the present study. I then identified the population under investigation here and the pilot studies carried out in order to isolate the sample. The means used to locate informants were summarized, followed by a description of primary and secondary informants interviewed for the study. I also described the interview itself, and the means employed in transcribing the data. Lastly, I provided justifications for the use of qualitative over quantitative analysis of the interview data.

3

The language o f incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation

Hail to the Native Speaker, He never can go wrong! For by some process mystic, Subliminal, sublinguistic, And utterly spectacular, He knows his own vernacular To every last detail — He simply cannot fail! Field-workers seeking to dissect The structure of his idiolect Occasionally may detect What seems at first an odd effect, Yet every item simply must belong: The Native Speaker never can go wrong! Our analytic bag of tricks, Each segment, sign, and superfix Unto the uttermost fud, He knew 'em by the age of six — He has 'em in his blood. Yes, they're there, lurking there In some infra-conscious layer Where there isn't room for any trace of doubt — And all we have to do is draw them out! What if they prove erratic Or quite unsystematic? Could there have been a lapse? A slip of the tongue perhaps? No! No! No! It simply can't be so — No Native Speaker's syllable Is anything but unspillable; The fault is ours, and we must ask Are we equal to the task? [excerpt from "Song of the Native Speaker" by F. Cassidy, quoted in Paikeday 1985:93]

3.1

Introduction

While admittedly tongue-in-cheek, the poem reproduced here highlights part of the problematic nature of the term 'native speaker'. Detailed consideration of this problematic nature is in terms of what sort of speakers primary informants are is the first goal of this chapter. It is an issue that continually barged in on many phases of this study, particularly in the analysis of the data. For of

29 central concern throughout was the classification of primary informants as speakers of Yiddish, not only in terms of what sort of bilingual speakers of English and Yiddish they are, but also in terms of whether or not they should be considered 'native speakers' of Yiddish at all. Hence, the first part of this chapter addresses two questions: 1) What sort of bilingual speakers are primary informants? 2)

Can/should primary informants be considered native speakers of Yiddish?

Thereafter, the second goal of the present chapter is to describe key aspects of primary informants' Yiddish grammar which frequently diverge from accepted norms, as evidenced by their narrations during interviews.

3.2

Proficiency continuum and personal-pattern variation in informants' Yiddish

During the pilot studies and several of the 'informal' interviews I conducted in preparation for the present study, it was not difficult to note very large differences in linguistic performance among Yiddish speakers in the U.S., especially among those who were born in Eastern Europe, those born in the U.S. to two immigrant parents, and those born in the U.S. to one immigrant and one U.S.-born parent. It appears evident that there is some sort of continuum of performance among these groups of speakers, and a study of all of them in comparison would be a welcome contribution to the body of knowledge of Yiddish linguistics. After narrowing the criteria and the defining parameters of the population for the present study, I discovered that placing the ten primary informants along a proficiency continuum would be quite difficult, for their speech appears to be strikingly homogenous in nature. There are varying degrees of 'native' phonology in their Yiddish, and the divergent grammatical features to be described shortly also occur more frequently with some informants than with others. In order to place the speakers along a continuum, though, significantly more speech data for each speaker would have to be collected than was collected and used for the present study. Dorian (1994b) discusses at length the need for extensive amounts of data with a relatively large number of speakers in order to account for what she terms 'personal-pattern variation'. Personal-pattern variation is defined by Dorian as inter- and intra-speaker variation within a close-knit, homogenous speech community, after "style, geography, and age- and proficiency-related differences [are] discounted" (634). Although primary informants in this study do not constitute a 'speech community' per se, the nature of my judgment sample allows them to be grouped together and labeled 'homogenous' in terms of style, age, and, despite inter- and intra-speaker variability, of spoken proficiency. So, if each interview had been longer one might calculate, for instance, mean length of utterance, count the number of codeswitches per 100 utterances or the number of occurrences of a particular divergent form per 100 utterances, measure hesitancies and disfluencies etc., in order to group the ten into yet smaller groups along a continuum. I do quantify these frequencies for the description of divergent features below, but I do not use them to place speakers along a continuum, because the fact that each informant was interviewed only once would be problematic for this sort of measurement. It may be that informants' Yiddish would improve were they to be interviewed on multiple occasions within a short span of time, or it may be that their Yiddish was

30 just not 'up to form' on the day of our interview.' In any case, it is unclear what would be gained by knowing how each speaker's Yiddish performance relates to that of the others at this point. It has proven to be more useful, due to the small sample size and the relatively brief interview time with each informant, to aggregate the data in many instances, to consider the interview data in the composite. These data represent, then, a sizeable collection of utterances. As mentioned, though, later in this chapter frequency counts for certain divergent linguistic features are presented, in order to compare these with features in secondary informant data. In the case of primary informants, it is suggested that the inter- and intraspeaker variation evident in the data, i.e., performance variation, is related in some way to social and sociolinguistic variables, and specifically, to the sociolinguistic dynamics of incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation. These variables are the subject of chapter 4.

3.3

What sort of speakers of Yiddish are primary informants?

Characterizing exactly what sort of speakers of Yiddish primary informants are is a fairly slippery task, yet it is important to do so, for two reasons. First, it would be useful to ascertain how these speakers compare with other sorts of speakers. To this end I will contrast primary informants' speech with that of other speakers of obsolescent language varieties, such as secondary informants and Dorian's (1977) speakers of East Sutherland Gaelic. A second reason why it is important to determine what sort of speakers of Yiddish primary informants are concerns whether they can be called 'native' speakers of Yiddish, or whether they would more correctly be identified simply as LI or L2 speakers. And if they are indeed LI speakers, are they not by default also 'native' speakers? This discussion should provide some insight into question 2 posed in 1.1 - which is also one of the main questions of linguistics in general - namely, what is it one 'knows' when one knows a language? After this discussion, several divergent features of primary informants' Yiddish are described.

3.3.1 Are primary informants semi-speakers of Yiddish? As mentioned in 1.5, characteristics of informants' speech and abilities correspond with many of those of Dorian's (1977) semi-speakers. Primary informants in the present study are clearly 'imperfect speakers' of Yiddish relative to fully fluent, Yiddish-dominant speakers. They can make themselves understood in the language, yet they feel more comfortable speaking their dominant language (Dorian 1977:24, 1978:593). Their "[...] idiosyncrasy [...] [creative innovation with forms] ...shows rather less stability [and hence greater variability] across a number of occasions" compared with that of what Dorian calls "fluent speakers" of a dying language (1978:603). Further, informants "show a tendency to eliminate [grammatical structures] or reduce their number by favoring one of two or more structures" (Dorian 1980:40, see also Seliger 1991). Despite these linguistic shortcomings, primary informant appear to have, like Dorian's semi-speakers, the "stunning ability of the native speaker to understand virtually everything said in their presence, regardless of noise level, speed, or faulty articulation" (Dorian 1986:269). This assertion with re-

1

Overall, this appears to be a shortcoming of the sociolinguistic interview as a sampling of language ability or competence.

31 spect to primary informants must be qualified by stating that, overall, the range of speech to which I was able to expose them in the few hours of each interview was fairly limited in scope and depth. A key difference, of course, between Dorian's semi-speakers of East Sutherland Gaelic and informants in this study is the social and sociolinguistic circumstances of acquisition and use. For example, despite the fact that East Sutherland Gaelic also carried a generally negative stigma in East Sutherland, it differed markedly from the situation of immigrant Yiddish in the U.S. by virtue of being a language island with a clear continuum of speakers in frequent interaction in the language. In short, whereas in East Sutherland there was no conscious or stated intention to cease transmitting the indigenous language to subsequent generations per se, in the case of immigrant Yiddish in the U.S., and many other immigrant languages as well, there never was intention or desire to perpetuate the language. Hence, while informants share many linguistic characteristics with Dorian's semi-speakers, the social and sociolinguistic circumstances of acquisition and patterns of use differ in many ways (these circumstances are discussed in chapter 4). It appears that Dorian considers semi-speakers of East Sutherland Gaelic to be 'native' speakers of that language in some regard, albeit 'imperfect' speakers, although she never explicitly states this in her work. She does state, however, that her understanding of the term 'native speaker' "implies a degree of competence - that is, the ability to 'speak like a native'" (quoted in Paikeday 1985:40). It is clear that East Sutherland Gaelic semi-speakers are dominant in English, just as primary informants in this study are English-dominant. The question must be addressed, then, of just what a 'native speaker' is, and whether the term is adequate to describe all situations of LI acquisition. I would like to turn to a brief examination of the term.

3.3.2 Are primary informants native speakers of Yiddish? Davies (1991) explores many of the ramifications of the term 'native speaker', revealing what a complex and ambiguous term it is for linguists. Paikeday (1985:1) opens a synthesized 'dialog' among several dozen linguists by noting that it "seems a household word among linguists and taken as self-evident by dictionaries of record [...]" Davies (1991:1) cites the traditional 'common sense' definition of native speaker as referring to people who have a special control over a language, insider knowledge about 'their' language. They are models we appeal to for the 'truth' about the language, they know what the language is ('Yes, you can say that') and what the language isn't ('No, that's not English, Japanese, Swahili [...]'). Although this common sense definition of native speaker "is important and has many practical implications" (1), Davies shows that it is inadequate to cover all the situations in which speakers acquire and use language, e.g., the bilingual situation. While Davies acknowledges the possibility that a bilingual speaker could be 'ambilingual' in certain contexts (28; 75-77), he accepts the idea put forth by Grosjean (1982), among others, that by and large "bilinguals are rarely equally fluent in their languages [...]" (Grosjean 1982: preface, cited in Davies 1991:77). The question remains whether such a speaker should be considered a native speaker of two (or more) languages, even if both are L i ' s . Davies asserts that "bilingual native speakers are possible in terms of linguistic competence but not in terms of communicative competence [...]" (77). Unfortunately, Dorian's (1986) discussion of semi-speakers possessing what is essentially 'native' communicative competence in the face of deficient linguistic competence poses a problem for Davies' statement. Despite the fact that Davies' discussion of the 'native speaker' poses many important questions and accentuates the almost enigmatic quality of the term, the author's final criteria of what the 'native speaker' is remain quite problematic. Still, we may employ his criteria as a starting

32 point for recasting the definition in light of the present study. Among the characteristics of the native speaker, Davies lists the following: 1) The native speaker acquires the LI of which s/he is a native speaker in childhood, 2) The native speaker has intuitions (in terms of acceptability and productiveness) about his/her Grammar 1 [= his or her idiolect], 3) The native speaker has intuitions about those features of the Grammar 2 [= that which one individual shares with another, i.e., which is mutually intelligible] which are distinct from his/her Grammar 1, 4) The native speaker has a unique capacity to produce fluent spontaneous discourse, which exhibits pauses mainly at clause boundaries (the 'one clause at a time' facility) and which is facilitated by a huge memory stock of complete lexical items... In both production and comprehension the native speaker exhibits a wide range of communicative competence, 5) The native speaker has a unique capacity to write creatively (and this includes, of course, literature at all levels from jokes to epics, metaphor to novels). 6) The native speaker has a unique capacity to interpret and translate into the LI of which s/he is a native speaker (148-149). First, before discussing Davies' characteristics of the native speaker overall, I would like to take issue with numbers 4, 5 and 6 in this list. While it appears logical to assume that the native speaker admittedly must possess the ability to speak fluently and spontaneously in her or his language, it is unclear what Davies means by "a huge memory stock of complete lexical items." This phrase becomes more acceptable, I believe, if restated as 'a memory stock of lexical items appropriate to the speech community.' Concerning number 5, to assert that one must be able to write creatively in a language to be considered a native speaker is to imply that 1) (even monolingual) speakers of non-written languages, and/or 2) illiterate speakers of written languages should not/cannot be considered native speakers, an idea that most would agree is absurd. It also appears implicit in number 5 that even literate speakers of a language, but who may be completely 'uncreative' in their writing ability, also are not native speakers. With regard to number 6, while it may be true that many speakers possess the (metalinguistic) ability to translate into their 'native' language from a second language, it also appears problematic to suggest that those who cannot do so are not native speakers of their language. The first four characteristics in Davies list hold up somewhat better to scrutiny, although even here certain refinements are called for. Fundamentally, except for the requirement that the native language also be an LI, Davies defines the native speaker in terms of her or his abilities. In this respect, both Davies and Paikeday (1985) consider the speaker to be more a 'real person' in interaction with other speakers than an 'ideal' as understood by Chomsky (as presented in Paikeday 1985). Although the 'native speaker' can be regarded in ideal terms as a sort o f ' f i n a l authority' on the language in question, it appears reasonable to establish an inventory of abilities, as Davies has done, with which to define the native speaker. Hence, in accepting the premises that the native speaker acquires the LI in childhood, which can be narrowed by De Houwer's (1990) assertion that LI should be considered only those codes to which the child is exposed from birth or early infancy, then 1) 2) 3)

the native speaker possesses what we will call 'consistent' intuitions about grammaticality in LI, the native speaker has the ability to produce fluent, spontaneous speech drawing on a memory stock of lexical items appropriate to the speech community, the native speaker possesses a 'wide range' of communicative competence in LI,

we might change number 5 in Davies' list to include a more general criterion of 'narrative ability' along the lines of Slobin (1990), who considers the child's acquisition of narrative abilities a

33 crucial component of language acquisition overall. I understand under the term 'narration' control over aspects of humor, metaphor, word-play etc. Based on the forgoing discussion, then, the native speaker can be defined according to the abilities listed in Figure 3.1 below. Note that I did not include criteria such as 'language preferred', 'language spoken most frequently', or 'language spoken during childhood'. When we speak of these, I believe we move into a discussion of dominant vs. non-dominant language of the speech community. Hereafter, the terms dominant and non-dominant relate to the proficiency of the speaker. I refer specifically to 'the dominant language of the community' or 'communitydominant' with reference to the language spoken by the mainstream population. Of these three abilities, primary informants do not possess consistent intuitions about grammaticality, as demonstrated by the pilot study described in the previous chapter (see Levine 1994). With regard to 2), primary informants can produce speech that can be called 'fluent' compared with that of, say, an intermediate level foreign-language speaker of Yiddish. Yet in terms of overall speed of speech, their speech cannot be considered as fluent or spontaneous as that of secondary informants. Additionally, they clearly cannot draw on a memory stock of lexical items appropriate to the speech community (of their childhood) in producing Yiddish now. Whether they had such a memory stock of lexical items as children cannot be determined. Likely it was much better than it is now, but to what extent it was appropriate or adequate for communication in all appropriate domains during childhood must remain an open question. With regard to comprehension, despite the fairly limited range of our conversations (lexically, and in the registers and domains employed), primary informants are, to the best of my knowledge, able to understand all of what was said in their presence, as long as that speech was restricted to those domains and registers to which they would have been exposed as children. Overall, I believe their comprehension was equally good, or nearly so, when they were children. 2 The third ability listed in Figure 3.1, communicative competence, appears as problematic in our discussion of primary informants as it is for Dorian in her description of semi-speakers. The interviews with primary informants revealed that these speakers do possess some measure of communicative competence in Yiddish, i.e., they are able to speak, and act, appropriately at all times. As with lexical knowledge and range of domains, I qualify this statement with the admission that the discourse of the interviews limited the range of situations in which 'appropriate' linguistic behavior could have been observed. Further study would be necessary to ascertain more precisely the nature of informants' communicative competence. Subjectively, however, my assessment is that their communicative competence is, by and large, far superior to my own (as a foreign-language speaker of Yiddish), although my Yiddish is grammatically 'better' than theirs. In the face of these observations of primary informants' abilities, the question should be addressed, is the 'native language' identical with the LI? As discussed in 1.4, Meisel (1990, 1993, ed. 1994) and De Houwer (1990) deal with the phenomenon of'simultaneous first language acquisition' (abbreviated here as 2L1). Simply put, a child acquires two 'first' languages if the second of the two (2L1-2) is acquired prior to around age three; a language acquired after this period

2

As mentioned, when I say that they were/are able to understand most or all of what is said in their presence, I consider those domains to which the informants would have been exposed as a child. So, for example, it was/is not expected that any informant would comprehend much were the topic of conversation academic in nature, or were the domains involved those that were not present in the informants' childhood environment. The limitation of domains is an acknowledged aspect of the language death situation in general, and the immigrant situation in particular (see Anderson 1982; Gonzo and Saltarelli 1983).

34 A native speaker of a language acquires that language during early childhood and 1)

possesses 'consistent' intuitions about grammatically in LI, including intuitions about the grammatical characteristics of nonce words,3 has the ability to produce fluent, spontaneous speech drawing on a memory stock of lexical items appropriate to the speech community, and comprehend (nearly) everything said, regardless of interference, speed, noise, or faulty articulation, possesses a 'wide range' of communicative competence in LI, i.e., can speak culturally appropriately and without apparent effort in that range of contexts, domains, and registers which are appropriate in the vital speech community (i.e., not in the terminal speech community).

2)

3)

Figure 3.1: Abilities of a 'native' speaker can be considered L2. De Houwer (1990, 1996) claims that the 2L1 situation entails abundant exposure to both languages from birth, or at least very close to birth, and presents sound evidence in support of this classification. With either scenario (exposure from birth or exposure prior to age two or three), one of the 2 L l ' s often becomes dominant for a variety of language-external reasons. In either case, 2L1 or L1->L2, the child will be 'bilingual' to some extent.4 In the case of primary informants, all reported hearing and using Yiddish from earliest childhood. Most explained that either one or both parents were monolingual in Yiddish throughout informants' young childhood. In most cases it was the father who spoke some English, and whose desire to assimilate into American society and have his children do the same led him to use his 'faulty' English with his children. Based on informants' comments, though, it is unlikely that this was ever a straightforward 'one parent-one language' situation. Among siblings and peers, and at all times outside the home, primary informants reported using English; although their memories may not reflect the actual reality of their childhood experiences, all reported that they never used Yiddish with brothers or sisters at all (all informants had at least one sibling). Thus, based primarily on the fact that they heard Yiddish from infancy and interacted in Yiddish from early childhood on with at least parents and grandparents, it appears clear that informants are products of a 2L1 acquisition situation, and not L1->L2. With regard to dominance vs. non-dominance (of ability), assuming that siblings and peers spoke primarily or solely English with primary informants from very early on, we can conclude that Yiddish would have been the dominant language for primary informants only during the very early stages of acquisition, i.e., during the time that maternal speech (or that of grandparents) would have been the most frequently heard. So, although Yiddish apparently was the dominant language of parent-child communication at least until school age, it appears that the language was the dominant language for each individual informant for only a short time, if ever. Without a doubt, informants never would achieve the same level of proficiency in Yiddish as in English. To summarize thus far, ascertaining what sort of speakers informants are now, and were as children, requires consideration of three perspectives of the issue: 1) 2) 3)

3

4

native vs. non-native Ll-»L2vs.2Ll dominant vs. non-dominant

See Levine (1999) for a discussion of native and normative speaker intuitions in assigning gender to German nonsense nouns. There likely is a qualitative difference in the ultimate level of ability attained in each language in adulthood between the two situations, depending on when L2 was acquired relative to the 'critical period' (see Newport 1991).

35 If we accept the abilities listed in Figure 3.1 above as those which a speaker must have to be called a 'native' speaker, then informants can only be called 'non-native' speakers of Yiddish. However, labeling informants non-native speakers, and thus equating them with L2 or foreignlanguage speakers of Yiddish, does not seem satisfactory. The fact that Yiddish is a 2L1 for all informants may, therefore, require a reassessment of how we use the term 'native speaker' overall. Ultimately, the term 'native' as defined above not only excludes informants in this study, but also speakers who were dominant (even monolingual) in a particular language throughout childhood, moved to another language environment, then became dominant in an L2. After a lengthy period of disuse of LI, the literature has shown that speakers do lose some measure of their abilities in points 2 and 3 in Figure 3.1 (speakers appear never to lose the ability to comprehend, however; see De Bot, Gommans, and Rossing 1991; Waas 1993, 1996; De Bot and Clyne 1994). Yet in some regards it would be absurd to say that the LI of such speakers was not their 'native' language, regardless of how much ability they ultimately lose. Thus, it comes down to a combination of two dichotomous +/- criteria with reference to the community-dominant language: LI (or 2L1-1) vs. L2 (or 2L1-2), and dominance vs. nondominance (of ability), a schema in which the term 'native' and 'non-native' become superfluous and in which a speaker may move over time from one type to another. The terms 'native' and 'non-native' do not readily allow for a change in status over the lifetime: One is either 'native' or one is not. Figure 3.2. presents these criteria in the three most common constellations. Considering primary informants' English to be 2L1-1 (community-dominant) and their Yiddish to be 2L12 (community-non-dominant), they can be categorized as speakers of Type 1: Their nondominant language (of ability) is also the non-dominant language of the community. community-dominant

community-non-dominant

Type 1) LI or 2L1-1 dominant

]L2 or 2L1-2 non-dominant

Type 2) LI or 2L1-1 non-dominant

]L2 or 2L1 dominant

Type 3) LI or 2L1 dominant

]L2 or 2L1 dominant ('balanced' bilingual')

Figure 3.2: Types of bilingual speakers

3.4

Characteristics of primary informants' Yiddish

In the following I examine several aspects of primary informants' Yiddish discourse, lexicon, and morphosyntax. Throughout this section those aspects of primary informants' Yiddish that appear frequently in the interview data are highlighted, aspects of speech that are also evident in the speech of the three secondary informants. I have selected linguistic features that diverge from accepted norms in almost all interviews (primary and secondary informants). The main purpose of this section is to demonstrate that, for each of the divergent features examined in both groups of speakers, there is little more than an indication that secondaryinformant speech diverges less frequently than that of primary informants. In other words, the evidence presented in this chapter is insufficient to determine whether the observed divergences from accepted norms are due to incomplete LI acquisition or to LI attrition. Because these features are evident in the speech of secondary informants, though, we may suppose that they likely are due to LI attrition. In chapter 5 a divergent rule evident in primary informant speech will be

36 considered - the choice of present perfect auxiliary - that can be shown to be the result of incomplete LI acquisition (i.e. this feature does not appear as divergent in the secondary-informant transcripts). To help facilitate the goal of this section, I quantified several variables in 100 utterances, beginning on page three of each transcript, for all 13 informants (primary and secondary). An utterance is considered a constituent or set of constituents when they can stand alone (i.e. 'express an idea') in the interview. So, for example, an utterance containing only an NP, such as tsvey hayzer 'two houses' is considered an utterance and is counted. Most utterances counted, however, do contain at least a subject-finite verb pair (IP). Additionally, an utterance containing a matrix and an embedded clause also is considered an utterance (e.g., er hot gevolt az gornisht zol pasirn tsu his zun 'he wanted that nothing should happen to his son' is recorded as one utterance). Coordinate clauses are considered to be separate utterances, as are clauses conjoined by vayl 'because'. False starts, or incomplete constituents were not counted as part of the 100 utterances. The variables quantified include the total number of the following within the 100 utterances: 1) subject-finite verb pairs a) ungrammatical subject-finite verb pairs 2) past participles a) ungrammatical past participles b) code-blended past participles (i.e., English verbs with Yiddish morphology) 3) nouns a) Yiddish nouns b) English nouns 4) plural forms a) Yiddish plural forms b) English plural forms c) ungrammatical Yiddish plural forms 5) definite articles (case assignment) a) Yiddish definite articles b) de or the in place of Yiddish definite articles c) ungrammatical Yiddish definite articles The quantification of these variables in this manner is not intended to provide predictive information. As mentioned, the description of the data in this chapter are insufficient to differentiate with any certainty speakers who incompletely acquired Yiddish as children from those who did acquire an adult level of proficiency in the language and then lost that proficiency. These data should serve primarily to 1) provide the reader with a descriptive sketch of some key characteristics of informants' Yiddish, and 2) to indicate the points of similarity among primary and secondary informants in this study.

3.4.1 Phonological performance of primary and secondary informants Before proceeding with the main body of this section, I will address briefly informants' phonological and suprasegmental (prosodic) performance. I do not provide a detailed description of phonological variables here because by and large I do not believe that an investigation of these features would contribute greatly to the present discussion of incomplete LI acquisition. Phonological performance is one area that likely differentiates primary from secondary informants,

37 however. By contrast, prosodic performance likely does not. Secondary informants' 'accent' cannot in most instances be distinguished from LI, Yiddish-dominant speakers. The overall flow and prosodic patterns of their speech appear to have been adapted from their respective varieties of American English. This aspect of secondary-informant speech would be an interesting object of future research. Phonologically, all ten primary informants speak Yiddish with what LI, Yiddish-dominant speakers would call an 'American accent'. This is characterized to a large extent by a predominance of the retroflex /r/. Several primary informants are actually aware of their 'accent', as expressed in this exchange with OK: 5 (3.1a) (3.1b) (3.1c) (3.Id) (3. le)

Ikh red abisl yidish. Ikh farshtey es abisl beser vi ikh red bot ikh red idish mit, with an, an englishe accent, ikh red nisht idish aza vi a id red es. I don't roll my r's. I don't roll my r's. (OK) Asakhyidnmakhndosnisht...(INT) The alte idn take, zey redn, rrrredn [exaggerated trilled R], nisht redn, rrrredn. (OK) S'iz nisht azoy vikhtig, az me ret... (INT) Az men farshteyt es, dos iz de zakh. (OK)

(3.1a1) 'I speak a little Yiddish. I understand it a little better than I speak but I speak Yiddish with, with an, with an English accent, I don't speak Yiddish like a Jew speaks it. I don't roll my r's. I don't roll my r's.' (3.1b')

'A lot of Jews don't do that...'

(3.1c')

'The old Jews especially, they speak, speak, not speak.'

(3.Id')

'It's not so important, if/as long as you speak...'

(3.1 e')

'That one understands it, that's the thing.'

Additionally, primary informants' phonology is also characterized by non-dominant-speaker (English) vowel quality (e.g., distinctive vowel length; see U. Weinreich 1963). Still, there is little doubt that the overall phonological quality and fluency of primary informants' Yiddish, such as the nature of word boundaries and parsing, are more like those of LI, Yiddish-dominant speakers than of those one frequently hears in the speech of foreign language learners/speakers of Yiddish. These differences also should be the subject of further research of issues of language acquisition of Yiddish.

3.4.2 Compensatory narrative/discourse strategies An interesting difference between the speech of primary and secondary informants has to do with compensatory strategies employed in their narrative or discourse styles. These strategies are often similar to those found in the discourse of adult L2 learners (see Ellis 1994). Whereas secondary

5

In all examples from the interview data, my own utterances as the interviewer appear indented, along with the label INT in parentheses. The speaker is identified with her or his initials. With reference to glosses, grammatical information will be provided only when it is relevant to the discussion; otherwise, a simple translation follows each Yiddish utterance or verbal interaction. When a particular grammatical feature is discussed, then that feature is underlined.

38 informants were able to converse with me with no apparent effort (e.g., very little groping for lexical items), primary informants had to surmount the obstacle of just switching to Yiddish, of 'thinking' in Yiddish on demand, and hence they had to employ various strategies to compensate for performance/lexical retrieval difficulties (see Turian and Altenberg 1991). For most primary informants it was a considerable effort to sustain their speech in Yiddish. All primary informants encountered several points in their narratives at which they simply could not express a given thought in Yiddish (this did not occur with secondary informants). In these cases primary informants either switched to English momentarily, returning to Yiddish after the point was made, or else they abandoned the point altogether, such as in (3.2): (3.2)

Man momes shvester, zi hot du gekimen, the ershte, and zi hot, and zi hot, gibn gibn, tsu im, I'm having difficulty expressing myself. Zi hot, eh, she had mentioned to him where his opportunities might be at, and as a consequence he felt a little more secure knowing that he had a sisterin-law here. Ikh'l redn abisl yidish yetst. (OK)

(3.2')

'My mother's sister, she came here, the first one, and she [AUX], she [AUX], give give, to him, I'm having difficulty expressing myself. She [AUX], eh, she had mentioned to him where his opportunities might be at, and as a consequence he felt a little more secure knowing that he had a sister-in-law here. I will speak a little Yiddish now.'

Frustration often was expressed by primary informants at the inability to convey a particular thought in Yiddish. Still, most were surprised and pleased that they still could communicate at all in the language. Several informants even commented on it during the interview: (3.3)

Er iz geven a freylakh mensh un ikh hob gekent shpayzn mit im in lakhn mit im, yeah, er iz geven an andere- a mensh vos kikt af leybn, er ot gearbet shver ober er't geglakht obn freylakhs— I finally got that one out! (MF)

(3.3')

'He was a happy person and I could have a meal with him and laugh with him, yeah, he was a different— a person who looks at life, he worked hard but he liked to have [it] joyful— I finally got that one out!'

To generalize, the Yiddish narratives of all primary informants was characterized by 1) simple or conjoined sentences, most often with un 'and' or the English conjunction 'but', 2) false starts, inter- and intrasentential codeswitching. Overall, primary informants appeared to avoid embedded clauses, or else such utterances came out that might be called 'relexified English' or 'syntactic transfer' (Turian and Altenberg 1991:213). This is exemplified in (3.4) below, an utterance that would not be considered appropriate, either syntactically or stylistically, by LI, Yiddishdominant speakers; almost any Standard Yiddish (SY) version of (3.4) would have to contain an embedded clause, such as Ikh veys vi me leyent di oysyes 'I know how one reads the letters'. (3.4) (3.4') (3.4")

.. .ikh veys vos the letters zogt [3.p.sing]... (AB) ... I know what the letters says... '... I know what the letters say...'

When subordinate clauses were produced by primary informants, they often were introduced by English subordinating conjunctions, such as because. Still, almost all primary informants demonstrated at some point the ability to produce grammatical Yiddish embedded clauses using Yiddish relative pronouns or subordinating conjunctions, such as in (3.3) above (a mensh vos kikt af leybn 'a person who looks at life') or the following: (3.5) (3.5') (3.5")

Di fran a por vos cleanen du.-.(DS') The women a few who clean here 'The couple of women who clean here...'

39 (3.6) (3.6') (3.6")

De tsveyte velt-milkhume hot er gegangentsu shul vavl er. er hot eevolt The second world-war has he gone to school because he, he has wanted '[during] the Second World-War he went to school because he, he didn't want az gomisht zol pasirn tsu his zun (ML) that nothing should happen to his son anything to happen to his son'

(3.7) (3.7') (3.7")

...ikhhob never gevust the evner vos iz gestorbn (HA') I have never known the one who is died '...I never knew the one who died'

Other compensatory strategies described by Turian and Altenberg (1991) also were employed by primary informants, including overt comments about their linguistic deficiency (214), appeals for assistance from me (215), and avoidance of certain forms by rephrasing or changing the subject (215). As mentioned, such narrative strategies generally were not employed by secondary informants.

3.4.3 Scope and semantic characteristics of informants' lexicon Primary informants' active lexicon, as evidenced by the data, appears to be fairly limited in its scope, especially compared with that of secondary informants. Primary informants' passive comprehension of more lexical items than they actually produced during interviews is evident in the fact that no informant appeared to have difficulty responding appropriately to anything I said or answering any question I asked. Yet while the interview format and focus itself likely limited the type and range of vocabulary used either by informants or myself, I believe that the overall boundaries of informants' active vocabulary were at least approached during many of the interviews. I base this claim on what is known of domains and registers of informants' childhood use of Yiddish (see chapter 4). I would like to address briefly two interesting characteristics of lexical production that primary and secondary informants appear to have in common (though primary informants exhibit the first feature to a greater extent). The first is the influence of English in their mapping of form to meaning. As Hawkins (1985) describes in detail in a contrastive analysis of German and English, Yiddish also compares with English in the greater semantic transparency, or broader selection restrictions of certain lexical items (see Hawkins chapter 3). A case in point is the English verb 'to know'. In English this verb serves the dual purpose of referring to some fact or piece of information that one 'knows' (e.g., I know when Joe's birthday is), as well as to the familiarity that one has with some thing or person (e.g., I know Joe very well). Because English allows one verb to carry these two meanings, Hawkins describes greater "opacity" in the relationship of form to meaning in English than in German, in which the two meanings of 'know' are expressed, respectively, by the verbs wissen and kennen. Likewise, this relationship is more transparent in Yiddish, as in German, than it is in English, because there also are two distinct verbs for expressing the two meanings of 'know' (Yiddish \isn and kenen respectively). There is evidence in the transcripts that informants reduce the "semantic roles" (Hawkins 1985:62) of many such lexical items, in accordance with English. (3.7) above is an example of this reduction for the verb 'know' (the verb kenen would have been the grammatical choice in this utterance). A second characteristic evident in informants' lexicon is the use or non-use of Yiddish words of Hebrew/Aramaic origin. Yiddish lexical items with Hebrew/Aramaic (H/A) etymological origins occur fairly infrequently in the narrative of most informants (primary and secondary). Infre-

40 quent as well in the data are items of Slavic origin. Approximately 15% of the lexicon of SY is comprised of items of H/A origin. A further 5%-10% of SY lexical items have their origin in Slavic vocabulary (of course, none of the informants grew up hearing, or speaking, SY to any great extent, and one must consider that each Yiddish dialect group was different in its proportions of these components). With the exception of a set of 'core' lexical items for which there are no Germanic-Yiddish (GY) variants, a large number of Yiddish words have both a H/A variant and a German (G) variant (referred to pejoratively in Yiddish as daytshmerish 'Germanish'). Such lexical items originate in stylistic conventions of the nineteenth century, when Yiddish was regarded by many of its own speakers to be inherently inferior to German. I will discuss this point shortly (see also chapter 4). So, for example, the Yiddish words for 'in-laws', mekhutonim, and khasene 'wedding' apparently have no GY variants, and all informants used these words without apparent difficulty. By contrast, many informants appeared to favor the G variant of such words as 'family' (G familye, H/A mishpokhe), 'war' (G krig, H/A mil-khume), and 'friend' (G fraynt, H/A khaver). With many other less frequently-occurring lexical items, informants also selected the G variant (which is in these cases also were the pragmatically marked variants). For example, informant HA produced the following utterance during his narration: (3.8)

Zi hot ongefangen the Adas b'nei Israel.

(3.8')

'She started the Adas b'nei Israel.'

HA chose the G verb onfangen over GY onheybn 'begin, start' (grindn actually would have been most appropriate in this utterance). Other items which appeared as their G rather than as the H/A or GY unmarked variants were G geshikhte rather than H/A mayse 'story', G denken rather than GY trakhtn 'think', G shtunde rather than H/A sho 'hour', G monat rather than H/A khoydesh 'month', G bayshpil rather than H/A moshl 'example'. I should note that I refer to the variants informants selected as marked relative to SY; it is possible that these lexical items employed by informants were the unmarked variants in their parents' dialects. By contrast, primary informants occasionally did employ the robust class of Yiddish verbal idioms that contains H/A lexical items, and most did so grammatically. For example: (3.9)

So, ikh'l geyen zeyn dos denk ikh hob ikh movre veys ikh vu dos iz, s'iz on a tape... (DM)

(3.9')

'So, I'll go see, that [demonst. pron.] I think I'm afraid [I have fear] I don't know where that is, it's on a tape...'

Overall, however, it appears that primary and secondary informants seldom used idiomatic expressions containing H/A lexical items in their narratives. No informant appeared to have difficulty understanding me when I used them, however. Informants' overall preference for GY lexical variants is likely not due simply to the idea that they are 'easier' words. Rather, I believe the GY variants and daylshmerizmen 'Germanisms' may be present in informants' Yiddish to a large extent for historical/extralinguistic reasons. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were occasional yet concerted efforts by many (e.g., German-Jews and secular-Jewish Yiddish speakers) to 'clean up' the Yiddish language, to bring it 'back' to the 'uncorrupted' German from which it came. Although these efforts were unsuccessful, they often manifested themselves in print as newspaper, magazine and book editors chose G variants of Yiddish words, or outright German words (that were not part of the Yiddish lexicon). Editors also often 'Germanized' Yiddish orthography, by (unnecessarily) inserting a n /h/ into such words as ir (*in>N instead of *i>n) 'you.PL' (German ihr). It is therefore possible that informants heard the G variants of words more frequently than those of H/A or even GY origin. Further manifestations of speaker attitudes toward Yiddish are discussed in chapter 4.

41 Informant

>1 ff eB •c da

AA AB DM DS HA JH JS MF ML OK

uo t/i

AD RB RG

Nouns total 87 101 97 78 121 126 113 102 98 121 1=954

Yiddish N= 72 67 72 51 86 82 94 94 81 82 2=781

Yiddish, % of total 82.8 66.3 74.2 65.4 71.1 65.1 83.2 92.2 82.7 67.8 A/%= 75.1 (s=9.0)

English N= 15 34 25 27 35 44 19 8 17 39 2=263

English, % of total 17.2 33.7 25.8 34.6 28.9 34.9 16.8 7.8 17.3 32.2 jtf%= 24.9 (s=9.0)

124 68 113 1=305

102 55 99 2=256

82.3 80.9 87.6 M%= 83.6 (5=2.9)

22 13 14 2=49

17.7 19.1 12.4 M%= 16.4 (s=2.9)

Table 3.1: Yiddish and English nouns produced by all informants (100 utterances) Briefly, I would like to mention one particular GY idiomatic form -/tegn+INF 'used to+INF' (habitual past) - that was employed somewhat frequently by informants, a form that can be considered 'particularly Yiddish' in that it contrasts with both its English and German counterparts (modern Standard German has no direct idiomatic counterpart). Flegn is inflected as a modal auxiliary and usually followed by an immediately adjacent infinitive main verb (except with subject-verb inversion; negators and modal particles may be inserted between flegn and the main verb, as well). Primary and secondary informants consistently used the form grammatically, as exemplified in (3.10) through (3.12): (3.10)

.. .menshn obn gezogt bist a galitsianer un ikh fleg zogn. no, man muter iz geven rusish. (MF)

(3.10')

'...people said you're a galitsianer and I used to say, no my mother was Russian.'

(3.11)

Man tote iz geven a held, zeyer a shtarker, in fact in rusland fleg er zan. mir obn im gerift the enforcer... (OK)

(3.11')

'My father was a hero, a very strong [one/man], in fact in Russia he used to be, we called him the enforcer...' Me fleg iumpen. Un potsy, hop scotch, mir flegn es rufn potsy, shpiln mit the, ikh gedenk mir flegn shpiln, epes a meshugene game, mir flegn shpiln mit movie stars, men fleet ovsnemen a picture... (DS)

(3.12)

(3.12')

'We used to jump. And potsy, hop scotch, we used to call it potsy, play with the, I remember we used to play, some sort of crazy game, we used to play with movie stars, we used to take out a picture...'

With this brief focus on several areas of lexical performance among primary and secondary informants, it was my goal to demonstrate that the lexicon, while perhaps broader in the speech of secondary informants than of primary informants, represents uncertain ground on which to locate features which might help us distinguish the effects of incomplete LI acquisition from those of LI attrition.

42 3.4.4 Intrasentential codeswitching

In this section I address intrasentential codeswitching among both groups of informants. The key point to note is that codeswitches occur far more frequently with primary than with secondary informants. Secondary informants almost never codeswitch. With primary informants, intrasentential switches occur most frequently with substantives, entire NP's, PP's, complementizers, and discourse markers {yvell, so,y'know, etc.), as in (3.13). Noteworthy is the fact that codeswitches almost never occur with verbs (in both groups), i.e., informants almost never produce an English verb in a Yiddish utterance. Very common codeswitches are exemplified in the (3.13) and (3.14), as well as in many of the other examples provided throughout this monograph: (3.13)

.. .mavn bube un zevde kumen in the train, mir hobn kumen in the car... (AB)

(3.13') '... my grandmother and grandfather come [sic] in the train, we have come [sic] in the car...' (3.14) Ven ikh hob gegeyn [sic] arbet, gegangen arbetn, mit dem in the woodworking, un er't gehat a store, nokh yorn shpeter, uh, he't gemakht customers un hob geret the language abisl mit zey... (JH) (3.14') 'When I goed [sic] to work, went to work, with him in [the] woodworking, and he had a store, still many years later, uh, he made customer and [I] spoke the language a little with them...' I will not address further the codeswitching evident in the data, nor have I quantified frequencies of codeswitches in the data, for two reasons. First, it is nearly impossible to know for sure when an informant is using an English word that was an acceptable borrowing in the Yiddish of her or his childhood; hence, it would confound any conclusions to be drawn about motivations for codeswitching. Second, and related to the first point, because it was likely a normal (i.e., unmarked), socially acceptable practice during all informants' childhood years to switch frequently between Yiddish and English (or Yiddish and another language), it would be difficult to ascertain which switches were the result of such childhood input or discourse patterns, and which were due to other factors, like lexical retrieval/processing difficulties. So, if one accepts the difficulties in identifying what are codeswitches and what are borrowings in the speech of primary and secondary informants, it remains to be determined whether primary informants use more English lexical items in their Yiddish narratives than secondary informants. Again, the purpose in doing so is to establish whether there might be a relationship between the use of English lexical items and incomplete LI acquisition. The total number of nouns produced in 100 utterances by each informant was quantified (beginning on p. 3 of each transcript). These data are presented in Table 3.1. Although the mean frequency of Yiddish nouns is higher for secondary informants (83.6% vs. 75.1%), and although there appears to be greater interspeaker variability among primary informants than among secondary informants (i=9.0 for primary informants; s=2.9 for secondary informants), the overall difference in production does not appear significant between the two groups. In short, they appear to use English nouns in roughly the same frequency in their free narrations. Therefore, this aspect of informants' speech cannot be used to determine whether primary informants' use of English nouns in their Yiddish speech is due to in-complete LI acquisition or LI attrition. Again, this claim is based on the relative certainty that such forms of codeswitching may be considered unmarked in the varieties of Yiddish learned and used by all informants in their childhood or teenage years.

43 3.4.5 Verbal morphosyntax By and large, the verbal morphosyntax of both informant groups does not diverge from accepted norms in the interview data, with the exception of past participle formation. In this section, two aspects of informants' performance, subject-verb agreement and past participle formation, are considered. Table 3.2 shows that among primary informants finite verbs disagree with their subjects in only 3.4% of occurrences in the 100 utterances (mean % for 10 informants; s=2.8). Among secondary informants subject-verb agreement errors were even less frequent than for primary informants, 0.7% of 100 utterances (mean %, 5=0.5). It should be noted that overall (in all transcripts), both primary and secondary informants infrequently produced ungrammatical subject-verb pairs. Several of the ungrammatical subject-verb pairs that do occur in the data perhaps can be attributed to the semantic nature of the subjects involved (e.g.,familye 'family' or tate-mame 'parents'). For example, several informants produced utterances similar to (3.15): (3.15) De tate-mame hot geret idish. (3.15') The parents has.3.P.SING spoken Yiddish (3.15") ' My parents spoke Yiddish.' Although the Yiddish word for parents is plural, its composition as the compound of two singular nouns ('mother-father') may explain why it sometimes appeared in the transcripts adjacent to a third-person singular finite verb. A second area of occasional subject-verb disagreement was with the irregularly inflected modal verbs (including the auxiliary verb flegri). Several primary informants overregularized the verbal morphology, conjugating modals as if they were non-modals, e.g., er vilt kumen 'he wants to come' (SY er vil kumen). In (3.12) above informant DS overregularizes flegn, adding regular third-person singular morphology. Past participle formation was also a feature that informants occasionally overregularized, especially with strong verbs or irregular weak verbs such as blaybn 'stay' (past part, ge blibn), helfrt 'help' (geholfn), esn 'eat' (gegesn). For example, AB produced the following: (3.16)...er hot gehelfen mayn muter in the hoyz. (JS) (3.16')

'he helped my mother around the house.'

The grammatical past participle is geholfen. Additionally, that class of verbs whose past participles end in -nl-en (rather than -I) was overregularized in several instances. For example, in (3.14) the grammatical past participle in OK's parents' dialect (Ukrainian Yiddish) would be gerifn (SY gerufn): (3.17)

...mirobnimgerift the enforcer... (OK)

(3.17)

'We called him the enforcer'

Conversely, several instances of forming past participles with -n rather than -t appear in the transcripts. For example: (3.18)

...ikh hob gezogndi shprekhverter... (AB)

(3.18')

'...I said the sayings...'

Lastly, many informants occasionally abandoned past participle formation altogether, coupling an auxiliary with an infinitive verb rather than a past participle. Utterance (3.13) above is an example of this divergence from accepted norms.

44 Informant

S-V total

S-V errors

N=

£e B •E p

ooEfl

AA AB DM DS HA JH JS MF ML OK

AD RB RG

S-V errors, % of total 4.1 10.8 0.8 4.0 6.2 6.0 3.2 4.4 4.5 0.0

98 111 97 123 130 102 93 135 110 104

4 12 1 5 8 6 3 6 5 0

1139

50

A/%=4.4 (*=2.8)

104 114 129 347

1 1 0 2

1.0 1.0 0.0 M%= 0.7 (i=0.5)

Table 3.2: Subject-verb pairs and subject-verb agreement errors produced by all informants (100 utterances) Considering the data presented in Table 3.3 from 100 utterances for each informant, the mean percentage of occurrence of ungrammatical past participles for each group, 11.6% for primary informants vs. 2.0% for secondary informants, indicates that primary informants produce ungrammatical or overregularized past participles more frequently than secondary informants. However, if one considers each informant individually, a different picture emerges; several primary informants (DM, DS, MF, and OK) did not perform much differently overall from secondary informants (for the 100 utterances quantified). While it is true that primary informants tend to produce ungrammatical past participles somewhat more frequently than secondary informants, the difference is small enough that it remains unclear whether or not this divergence from accepted norms is the result of incomplete acquisition or LI attrition. In further studies, this would be a grammatical feature to focus on in more detail, for there is the suggestion that a competence difference may exist between the two condi tions, i.e., that if rules for past participle formation are acquired completely, then they likely cannot be lost due to long disuse. A further aspect of informants' production of past participles can be found in code-blended forms. Code blending is defined by Kaufman (1991:25) as "intra-word morpho logical code mixing [...]" in which "[f]ree or bound morphemes from one language are combined with free or bound morphemes of another language within a single word, while the phonological features of the respective source languages are retained." Although the mean frequency for the 100 utterances is higher for primary than for secondary informants (3.0% for primary informants vs. 0.6% for secondary informants), the data presented in Table 3.4 suggest that neither group produces code-blended past participles very often. It should be noted, though, that all informants (primary and secondary) produced code-blended past participles at some point in their narratives; for many these did not happen to fall in the 100 utterances counted from page three of the transcripts.

45 Informant

o*

ou V)

Past part, total

AA AB DM DS HA JH JS MF ML OK

70 78 118 56 81 130 69 60 72 84 818

Past part, errors N= 8 12 4 3 9 16 18 4 10 9 93

AD RB RG

82 59 113 254

4 0 1 5

Past part. Errors, % of total 11.4 15.4 3.4 5.4 11.1 12.3 26.1 6.7 13.9 10.7 M%= 11.6 ($=6.0) 4.9 0.0 1.0 M%f= 2.0 (j=2.1)

Table 3.3: Ungrammatical Yiddish past participles produced by all informants (100 utterances)

Informant

AA AB DM ^ | !CL

DS

HA JH JS MF ML OK

AD 8

RB RG

Past part, total

Code-blended past part, N=

70 78 118 56 81 130 69 60 72 84 818

1 6 5 0 4 8 4 0 0 0 28

82 59 113 254

0 1 0

Code-blended past part, % of total 1.4 7.7 4.2 0.0 5.0 6.2 5.8 0.0 0.0 0.0 3.0 M%= 3.0 (i=2.9)

Table 3.4: Yiddish and code-blended past participles produced by all informants (100 utterances)

0.0 1.7 0.0 (W%= 0.6 (i=0.8)

46 Examples (3.19) through (3.24) are examples of verbal code blending (3.22 and 3.24 include code blending in infinitive verbs). Note that in (3.20) the English verb 'figure' was blended not only with the Yiddish past tense prefix ge-, but also with a separable prefix oys- to form oysgefigured 'figured out' (SY oysrekhenen, past part, oysgerekhent). (3.19) ...but de mame geven aza cook, aza kekhin, vos hot gesaved. me raft dos kishke-gelt, hot zi mit dos gekeyft, a, hot hot hot gekeyft a hoyz... (DM) (3.19')

'...but mother was such a [good] cook, such a [good] cook.FEM, who saved, one calls that kishke-money, she bought with it a, [has has has] bought a house...'

(3.20) Ven de mame iz arayngekimen hot zi epes, hot geficured and gefigured in kop banakht, un hot oysgefigured az man man hot gemakht a a, gemakht a tores... (DM) (3.20') 'When[ever] mother came in she [has] something, figured and figured in her head in the night, and figured out that my husband made a a, made a mistake...' (3.21) ...zey hobn gerevzn chickens... (AB) (3.21')

'they raised chickens...'

(3.22) ...un zey hobn gegangen tsu visitn Motl, the landsman in California, un mayn zeyde hot gefelt zeyer gut, no migraines, so er hot gevolt movn, un so zey hobn gemoved un mayn tate hot gezogt er vil movn oykhet. (AB) (3.22') '...and they went to visit Motl, the landsman from California, and my grandfather felt very good, no migraines, so he wanted to move, and so they moved and my father said he wants to move too.' (3.23) Mayn tate hot ge-been in the army... (JH) (3.23') 'My father was in the army...' (3.24)

... ikh fleg belangen tsu an Italian sing-along. (DS)

(3.24')

'... I used to belong to an Italian sing-along.'

In examining these examples, and the frequency of occurresnces indicated by Table 3.4, it becomes clear that this type of performance 'error' also cannot be used to isolate differences between incomplete acquisition and LI attrition. As indicated, there are two reasons for this. First, despite the greater frequency of occurrence among primary informants, the overall frequency of occurrence is not great enough to be able to draw any conclusions. Second, as with codeswitching discussed in 3.4.4, it is likely that for both primary and secondary informants it was acceptable in the context of the Yiddish spoken in immigrant communities to code-blend as in the examples above. Therefore, this feature of informants' performance also cannot help us isolate the effects of incomplete LI acquisition from those of LI attrition.

3.4.6 Nominal morphosyntax Primary informants' nominal morphosyntax as evidenced by interview data shows greater divergence from accepted norms than their verbal morphology in two important features. In this section I examine gender and case assignment (or non-assignment) in the definite article system and plural morphology. Yiddish, as a Germanic language with nominal morphosyntax typologically similar to that of Standard German (SG), differs from English in that it assigns gender and case to nouns. SY and

47 most Yiddish dialects possess three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter (several dialects, those of Northeastern Yiddish, assign only two genders, masculine and feminine). The inflectional system is simpler than that of SG, although nominative, accusative and dative cases are assigned to nouns (unlike SG, Yiddish does not mark possession with the genitive case). All objects of prepositions are assigned the dative case. Primary informants appeared to have little difficulty assigning case through the personal pronoun system, which is presented in Table 3.5 below. The only consistently divergent feature I was able to locate in the data has to do with informants confusing zi (3.P.SING.FEM) with zey (3.P.P1.). Otherwise, even within prepositional phrases, all informants (primary and secondary) consistently assigned case grammatically in the personal pronoun system. Additionally, although case is not assigned in the Yiddish possessive adjective system, possessive adjectives also were produced grammatically in almost all instances (i.e., informants selected appropriate possessive adjectives). The definite article system reveals a different pattern from the personal pronoun system. Table 3.6 presents the definite article paradigm for SY. The most striking characteristic of informants' nominal morphology is the apparent individual variability in the assignment, or non-assignment, of gender and case. Very often, as in (3.25), gender and case were not assigned at all, and the definite article was reduced to de. (3.25)

...men nemt de fis un de kop fun de beheme...

(3.25')

'...one takes the feet and the head of the cow...'

The SY form of this utterance, in which noun case is assigned, would be as follows: (3.26) (3.26')

Men nemt di fis un dem kop fun der beheyme One takes the-ACC.PL feet and the-DAT.M head of the-DAT.F cow singular

plural

nom.

acc.

dal

nom.

acc.

dat.

I. person

ikh

mikh

mir

mir

unz

unz

2. person

du/ir

dikh

dir

ir

aykh

aykh

er zi es

im zi es

im ir im

zey

zey

zey

3. person

Table 3.5:

m. f n.

The personal pronoun system of Standard Yiddish nom.

acc.

dat.

masculine

der

dem

dem

feminine

di

di

der

neuter

di

di

di

Table 3.6: The definite article system of Standard Yiddish

48 The definite article also appears very frequently in the data as the English article 'the' (often preceding a codeswitch), as in (3.27): (3.27)

Es' geven about elf a zeyger in the morgen, in the fri, s'iz geven the vinter... (HA)

(3.27')

'It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, in the morning, is was the winter...'

The SY version of (3.27) would be (3.28) (3.28')

S'iz geven antkegn elef a zeyger inem frimorgen, inder fri It's been around eleven o'clock in-the-DAT.M morning, in the-DAT.F. morning

In grammaticality judgment tasks administered during one of the pilot studies, no speaker with a similar sociolinguistic profile to primary informants considered the use of de or 'the' to be ungrammatical. By contrast, secondary informant RB, who performed a grammatical ity judgment task, consistently considered de or 'the' to be ungrammatical, yet in her narrative she frequently produced de and 'the' in place of Yiddish definite articles (see Table 3.7). Interestingly, variation between production of Yiddish definite articles and de/the often occurred within the same utterance, or in close proximity, as in (3.29), in which primary informant ML both reduces to de and assigns gender and case to articles in the same narrative: (3.29) Fun de potsun eh, de kinder, zaynen tsvey zaynen abisl concerned (3.29') From the pots and eh, the children, are two are a-little concerned (3.29") 'From the pots and eh, the children, two are a little concerned az di muter kumt arayn vayl zey hobn altsding that the-NOM.F mother comes in because they have everything that the mother comes in because they have everything afn floor un di eyer zaynen on-the-DAT.M floor and the-NOM.PL eggs are on the floor and the eggs are broken and the child—

tsebrokhen un de kind— broken and the child—

vos denkt er ken makhn a gutn meal iz zeyer— frightened. (ML) who thinks he can make a good meal is very— frightened who thinks he can make a good meal is very—frightened' Primary informant JS typically reduced the definite article to de or 'the', yet she produced the following utterances during her interview, in which gender and case are assigned grammatically: (3.30) Ale vokh he shraybt letters tsudem vayb(JS) (3.30') Every week he writes letters to the-DAT.N wife (3.30") 'Every week he writes letters to his his wife.' (3.31) Ven vil erkumen tsudem hoyz?(JS) (3.31') When wants he to-come to the-DAT.N house? (3.31") 'When does he want to come to that house?' Additionally, as can be seen in (3.29) through (3.31), all informants tended to assign gender/case appropriately to the objects of prepositional phrases. Assuming that not all instances of gender and case assignment in the definite article paradigm involve frequently-used, unanalyzed expressions, such as in der heym 'in the-DAT.F home', 'at home', the fact that primary informants can assign gender and case suggests that 1) they acquired

49 Informant

sÏ •c

a.

def. art total

Yiddish

Yiddish, % of total

de/'the' N=

N=

de/ 'the' % of total

AA

18

5

27.8

13

72.2

AB

22

2

9.1

20

90.9

DM

51

20

39.2

31

60.8

DS

19

9

47.4

10

52.6

HA

26

6

23.1

20

76.9

JH

32

12

37.5

20

62.5

JS

24

2

8.3

22

91.7

MF

29

14

48.3

15

51.7

ML

23

4

17.4

19

82.6

OK

16

5

31.2

11

68.8

X=260

Z= 79

A/%=28.9

2=181

M%= 71.1

(i=13.7)

o

V tA

(¿=13.7)

AD

18

6

33.3

12

66.7

RB

24

10

41.7

14

58.3

RG

31

8

25.8

23

74.2

1 = 73

E= 24

A / % = 33.6

2 = 49

M%= 66.4

(5=6.5)

(j=6.5)

Table 3.7: Definite articles produced by all informants (100 utterances) at least some knowledge of gender and case as children and 2) that they are unable (or perhaps unwilling) to deal with gender and case now. Considering the data in Table 3.7 for 100 utterances from each informant, despite greater interspeaker variability among primary informants than among secondary informants (5=13.7 for primary vs. 5=6.5 for secondary informants), the mean frequencies of occurrence of Yiddish definite articles appears very similar for the two groups (28.9% for articles produced by secondary informants, 15.8% are ungrammatical (5=15.9). Thus, there is an indication that primary informants may be less able (or less willing) to assign gender and case grammatically in the definite article system than secondary informants. In examining Table 3.8, then, note that with Yiddish definite articles, secondary informants appear much more likely to produce them grammatically than primary informants. While these data may serve as a better indication of incomplete acquisition than other features, they still are inconclusive if our desire is to isolate the linguistic attributes of incomplete LI acquisition, if only because secondary informants do also inflect for case ungrammatically. Hence, we cannot state with certainty whether primary informants acquired the definite article system and then lost it due to disuse, or whether they never fully acquired the system in the first place.

50 Yiddish def. art. total

Def. art. errors, N=

Def. art. errors, % of total

AA

5

2

40.0

AB

2

0

0.0

DM

20

5

25.0

DS

9

3

33.3

HA

6

3

50.0

JH

12

4

33.3

JS

2

1

50.0

MF

14

8

57.1

ML

4

1

25.0

OK

5

3

60.0

£= 79

1= 30

M%=37.4

primary

Informant

(s=17.2)

ou to

AD

6

0

0.0

RB

10

1

10.0

RG

8

3

37.5

2= 24

2= 4

A/%= 15.8 (5=15.9)

Table 3.8: Ungrammatical Yiddish definite articles produced by all informants (100 utterances) I turn now to the question of whether informants' production of plural lexical items might be a feature distinguishing the linguistic manifestations of incomplete LI acquisition from those of LI attrition. The data presented in Table 3.9 suggest that all informants produce Yiddish plurals rather than English plurals most of the time (mean frequency 76.4%, 5=13.6, for primary and 95.5%, i=3.3, for secondary informants). Secondary informants apparently do so more frequently overall (RB produced only Yiddish plurals in the 100 utterances quantified). Yet as with other features under consideration here, examination of the frequency percentages for individual informants in both groups, rather than just the mean percentages of frequency, suggests that primary and secondary informants do not perform drastically differently in this regard. However, compare these data with those in Table 3.1 above for nouns produced by all informants. Primary and secondary informants appear closer in performance for nouns overall than for plural nouns, suggesting that production of plural lexical items is different overall. Yet in terms of the 100 utterances quantified, as well as the limitations of the present study, these data on plural lexical items also are inconclusive in the search for a feature distinguishing primary from secondary informants.

51 Plurals total

Yiddish

Yiddish, % of total

English N=

N=

English % of total

AA

20

15

75.0

5

25.0

AB

35

18

51.4

17

48.6

DM

24

20

83.3

4

16.7

DS

24

22

91.7

2

8.3

HA

21

17

81.0

4

19.0

JH

30

16

53.3

14

46.7

JS

26

24

92.3

2

7.7

MF

8

7

87.5

1

12.5

ML

21

16

76.2

5

23.8

OK

40

29

72.5

11

27.5

2=249

1=184

A/%=76.4

2=65

A/%= 23.6

primary

Informant

(i=13.6)

uu w

(j=13.6)

AD

34

32

94.1

2

5.9

RB

15

15

100.0

0

0.0

RG

26

24

92.3

2

7.3

1=75

1=71

M%=95.5

2= 4

A/%= 4.5

(*=3.3)

(i=3.3)

Table 3.9: Yiddish and English plural lexical items produced by all informants (100 utterances)

Primary and secondary informants' use of plural morphology is a very interesting feature of their Yiddish speech. SY, and to my knowledge all dialects of Yiddish, possess eight basic types of plural forms, only two of which resemble English plural morphemes. The plural morphology of SY is presented on Table 3.10. If one considers transfer from English a salient factor, one might expect that plurals in primary informants' Yiddish most often would be reduced to the s-plural (one might also expect this in secondary informants, if it is assumed that productive control of plural morphology can be lost over time). Yet the data show that primary informants did acquire knowledge of the various plural forms in Yiddish. I include here four passages from the transcripts that represent, I believe, typical examples of primary informants' knowledge of those plural forms that differ typologically from those of English. (3.32) (3.32')

...primarily I grew up with mostly yidishe fraynt, bovtshiks and mevdlakh (JS) .. .primarily I grew up with mostly Jewish friends, boys and girls

(3.33) (3.33') (3.33")

Um. s'iz nisht eeven ernes. Dray tee shpeter... (DM) Um, it-is not been true. Three days later... 'Um.it wasn't true. Three days later...'

52 Plural Ending

Frequently occurs with

Examples

1) -n/-en (iv-/v)

nouns ending in a consonant or stressed vowel

froy/-en 'woman/women'

2) -s/-es (DV-/0-)

words ending in -er (*w-), an unstressed vowel, borrowings

bobe/-es 'grandmother/-s'

3) -s/-es (nv)

words of Hebrew/Aramaic origin ending in unstressed syllable

khasene/-es 'wedding/-s'

4) -er (-IV-)

—

ey/eyer 'egg/-s'

shrayber/-s 'writer/-s' toyre/-s 'Bible/-s' kind/kinder 'child/children'

5) -ekh/-kh/-akh (iv-)

words ending in syllabic -1 (i?-) (e.g., meydl/tneydlakh 'girl/-s' diminutives) shtikl/shtiklakh 'piece/-s'

6) -im (o>-)

words of Hebrew/Aramaic origin ending in a consonant (accompanied by shift of stress to penultimate syllable)

7) vowel change

bokher/bokherim 'boy/-s' khaver/khaveyrim 'friend/-s' dokter/doktoyrim 'doctor/-s' fus/fis 'foot/feet' tokhter/tekhter 'daughter/-s' zun/zin 'son/-s'

8) neutral plural

fraynt 'friend/-s' shvester 'sister/-s' briv 'letter/-s' 6

Table 3.10: Plural morphology of Standard Yiddish

(3.34) ...but the eh, verter vos ikh ikhdarf trakhtn... (DS) (3.34') ...but the eh, words that I I have-to think... (3.34") ...but the eh, words that 11 have to think of...' (3.35) (3.35')

Zi glakht kleyne shtevtlakh (MF) She likes small cities

In all transcripts (not just the 100 utterances), only a handful of plurals could be found that exhibit apparent cross-linguistic influence (from English). (3.36) is an example of this: (3.36) Mavne tokhters hobn gehat a Rabbi Perl tsu lernen Hebrew (AA) (3.36') My daughters have had a Rabbi Perl to learn Hebrew (3.36") 'My daughters had a Rabbi Perl to learn Hebrew with' The grammatical SY plural here involves a vowel change: tekhter 'daughters', a form which AA used elsewhere in her interview. In (3.37) informant OK also pluralizes briv 'letter', adding -es:

6

The information in Table 3.10 is based on Katz 1987:53-63, and U. Weinreich (1971/1990:303-305).

53 Informant

Yiddish plurals total

Yiddish plural errors

Yiddish plural errors, % of total

15

0

0.0

AA

i

e c •n o.

AB

18

3

16.7

DM

20

1

5.0

DS

22

0

0.0

HA

17

1

5.9

JH

16

0

0.0

JS

24

0

0.0

MF

7

0

0.0

ML

16

1

6.3

OK

29

1

3.4

E= 184

1= 7

M%= 3.7 (i=5.0)

8U

AD

32

4

12.5

RB

15

1

6.7

RG

24

2

8.3

X= 71

2= 7

M%= 9.2 (i=2.4)

7a6/e 3.11: Ungrammatical Yiddish plural forms produced by all informants (100 utterances) (3.37) Golda hot geshribnferives...(OK) (3.37') Golda has written letters... (3.37") 'Golda wrote letters' Interestingly, OK did not say brivs, rather brives. This could be an example of what Guion (1993) refers to as 'structure exaggeration', i.e., a speaker uses, or overuses, forms which are regarded as particularly characteristic of the non-dominant language. Another example of this is found in (3.38): (3.38) Shpilt de mevdlakh mit de boves... (PS) (3.38') Plays the girls with the boys... (3.38") 'The girls play with the boys...' As with the other aspects of Yiddish morphosyntax under consideration (subject-verb agreement, past participles, and definite articles), plural morphology also appears to be used grammatically by all informants (primary and secondary) most of the time. The data for in formants' production of Yiddish plural morphology are presented in Table 3.11. Interestingly, two of the three secondary informants produced more ungrammatical plural forms than all but one of the primary informants (in the 100 utterances quantified). This is the only feature for which the mean percen-

54 tage of occurrence for secondary informants suggests a lower level of proficiency than for primary informants. Yet again, I stress that by and large, neither group produced ungrammatical plural forms to a great degree overall. Therefore, this aspect of Yiddish grammar also does not lend itself to distinguishing incomplete LI acquisition from LI attrition.

3.5

Summary

In this chapter it was established that primary informants cannot be considered 'native' speakers of Yiddish, if only because they do not possess all the abilities listed in Figure 3.1. After pointing out that it would be of little use to place primary informants along a proficiency continuum, at least for the purposes of the present study, and after comparing primary informants with Dorian's (1977) semi-speakers of East Sutherland Gaelic, I was able to at least classifiy primary informants as LI speakers of Yiddish (rather than L2). In terms of their bilingualism and the community-dominant language, I posited that they should be considered 2L1-1 dominant (in ability) in English and 2L1-2 non-dominant in Yiddish. In short, primary informants are LI, Yiddish-nondominant speakers. Lastly, I pointed out that the Yiddish spoken by primary informants should not be considered as its own variety of Yiddish, by virtue of 1) the great amount of intraspeaker variability evident in the interview data, and 2) the fact that primary informants never communicate in the language. A description was also presented in this chapter of several, frequently-occurring divergent features in the interview data, including narrative/discourse strategies, lexicon (including intrasentential codeswitching), verbal morphosyntax, and nominal morphosyntax. Several variables from 100 utterances of the interview data for each informant were quantified, in order to determine whether clear differences would emerge between primary and secondary informants. Identifying such differences would help isolate the linguistic manifestations of incomplete LI acquisition as distinct from those of LI attrition. Although it was shown that secondary informants tend to produce more grammatical forms in all but one of the variables considered (in the 100 utterances quantified), it was claimed here that these data are insufficient to determine whether the divergent forms in primary informant speech are the result of incomplete LI acquisition or LI attrition. The main goal of chapter 5 is to identify and analyze such a feature in the data.

4

Social and sociolinguistic factors in the incomplete LI acquisition of Yiddish among primary informants

Worthy Editor, I am sure that the problem I'm writing about affects many Jewish homes. It deals with immigrant parents and their American-bom children. ...We, the five brothers, always speak English to each other. Our parents know English too, but they speak only Yiddish, not just among themselves but to us too, and even to our American friends who come to visit us. We beg them not to speak Yiddish in the presence of our friends, since they can speak English... Imagine, even when we go with our father to buy something in a store on Fifth Avenue, New York, he insists on speaking Yiddish. We are not ashamed of our parents, God forbid, but they ought to know where it's proper and where it's not. If they talk Yiddish among themselves at home, or to us, it's bad enough, but among strangers and Christians? Is that nice? It looks as if they're doing it to spite us... We beg you, friend Editor, to express your opinion on this question, and if possible send us your answer in English, because we can't read Yiddish... Respectfully, I. and the Four Brothers [Letter to the editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, 1933; cited from Metzker 1971:158-159]

4.1

A sociolinguistic model of incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation

In chapter 2 I discussed in some detail the population under consideration and some of the problems involved in investigating a sample of such a population, as well as the study itself. In chapter 3 the issue of primary informants' bilingualism was addressed, and key aspects of informants' Yiddish grammar in the interview data were highlighted. It was concluded that most of the divergent forms evident in the interview data would not serve to help us isolate features that are the result of incomplete LI acquisition. The present chapter (as well as chapter S to follow) addresses directly the main topic of this monograph, namely the phenomenon of incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation. The specific goal of this chapter is to establish a sociolinguistic model of incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation. 1 The model represents what is essentially a 'vicious circle', in that each factor of the circle affects the others in such a way as to weaken the whole system. As long as each factor continues to maintain its influence, the system eventually will weaken to the point of language death. The primary question driving this model concerns how informants' Yiddish was weak enough during childhood to allow for the divergent forms evident in the interview data; in other words, why is primary informants' speech not more like that of immigrants themselves, or like that of secondary informants? This question leads, of course, to others. First, was primary informants'

1

The term sociolinguistic model is used here in a broader sense than usual. While sociolinguistic variation is an inherent factor of the model, the model also could be regarded as a historical/social/linguistic model, or as an ethnography-of-communication model. The term sociolinguistic is used therefore partly for the sake of stylistic simplicity.

56 Yiddish speech the same at age 10 or 15 as it is today? Based on what is known of language attrition among speakers who fully acquired LI and ceased using it for a long period of time (see Seliger and Vago, eds. 1991), it can be assumed that informants' performance abilities also have undergone some attrition over the decades. Second, was informants' speech at age 8 or 10 or 15 somehow divergent from the norm? It is very likely this was the case. As we possess no time machine to prove the point, however, I believe that by analyzing what is known about the historical, social, and sociolinguistic factors of the acquisition and use of Yiddish among primary informants, we can arrive at a sociolinguistic model of language loss in the immigrant situation. Figure 4.1 represents graphically, albeit in an oversimplified fashion, a possible relationship between the social/sociolinguistic variables that can be regarded as most salient. In the remainder of this chapter I deal with the relationship between 'speaker practice', 'attitudes toward L I ' , and 'linguistic identity'. These three extralinguistic factors influence, and are in turn influenced by, what Anderson (1982) and Preston (1982) call the 'break in linguistic tradition' (Anderson 1982: 87, 89-91; Preston 1982: 66), the fourth factor listed on Figure 4.1. Dorian (ed. 1989:9) refers to this break in linguistic tradition as the 'tip', or the 'abrupt transmission failure' of a language. I refer to the phenomenon in this chapter as the 'break in linguistic tradition'. My definition of the term is essentially that some identifiable change occurs in the linguistic status quo. The other three factors can be analyzed according to several criteria, and no absolute presence or absence of any one of the criteria is necessary for the break in linguistic tradition to come about. However, the break in linguistic tradition is clearly a bivalent factor: There is either a break in tradition or there is not. Any discussion of the severity of the break always will lead back to consideration of the other three factors. Hence, each of the three social/sociolinguistic factors is examined, and its possible influences on the break in tradition in informants' situation are considered. ATTITUDES TOWARD L 1 :

community internal community external

SPEAKER PRACTICE:

LINGUISTIC IDENTITY:

domains/registers early termination of use one-way vertical communication

LANGUAGE DEATH •

'acts of identity'; projection code boundaries; 'constructing voices'

BREAK IN LINGUISTIC TRADITION

Figure 4.1:

A social/sociolinguistic situation

model of incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant

With respect to these three factors and to informants, the following questions should be kept in mind: First, why did second-generation speakers of Yiddish not acquire the language to the same level of proficiency as their parents, and second, how is it that they still can communicate in the language after a lapse of so many years? At first glance the answer to the first question might be,

57 primarily, that they never acquired Yiddish fully because they did not grow up in a Yiddish-dominant environment. One of the purposes of this chapter is to show here that the circumstances are/were markedly more complex than this answer implies. To the second question, one might reason that they still can communicate in Yiddish because they did in fact learn Yiddish as an LI, albeit a secondary LI. Therefore they have never lost some element of basic competence. However, the social and sociolinguistic factors that influenced their present knowledge of Yiddish paint a more complex picture, and these deserve attention point-by-point.

4.2

Speaker practice: Inadequate exposure

Speaker practice is perhaps the least ambiguous factor involved in incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation. Aspects subsumed under 'speaker practice' are as follows: 1) contexts of use = 2) interlocutors = 3) choice of codes =

range of domains and registers in everyday verbal behavior who speaks to whom in the LI communication in the primary and secondary LI (including all types of codeswitching and code blending)

With reference to 3), the issue of codeswitching will not be dealt with further than it was in chapter 3, for two reasons. First, I believe that many codeswitches in the Yiddish data are attributable to cross-linguistic influence (Sharwood Smith 1989), or to lexical gaps due to long disuse, gaps that must be filled in order to communicate. This should not imply that social motivations do not underlie much of the frequent code-switching evident in the data. Indeed, sociolinguistic factors were surely at the heart of a great deal of the codeswitching in the speech of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, and by extension, of their children (see Rayfield 1970). Yet I believe it would lead to faulty conclusions to attempt sociolinguistic analysis of informants' codeswitching, as it likely cannot be ascertained what switches are due to lexical gaps and the like (linguistic deficits), and which are socially motivated, i.e., switches made for strategic or discourse purposes. Additionally, I do not believe that a detailed discussion of informants' codeswitching would contribute greatly to the current literature on the topic (see Gal 1989; Schatz 1989; Myers-Scotton 1988, 1992,1993 for discussions of codeswitching; see Kaufman (1991) for a discussion of code blending in psycholinguistic terms). The scope of the term 'speaker practice' can be narrowed further to the concept of'inadequate exposure' to Yiddish. The term 'inadequate exposure' is defined here as 1) exposure to limited domains and registers of use, 2) participation in predominantly one-way, vertical communication (meaning that elders usually initiated speech in Yiddish, and children generally responded in English), 3) early termination of active use of the immigrant LI (i.e., by age 5-7). As will be shown presently, each of these aspects of inadequate exposure is subsumed, respectively, under the points listed above, 'contexts of use', 'interlocutors', and 'choice of codes'. Each of the above points is now considered in turn. Thereafter the other two factors listed in Figure 4.1 are analyzed, attitudes toward LI and the role of linguistic identity. In each section I consider how a factor appears to affect the break in linguistic tradition in the situation of primary informants.

58 4.2.1 Inadequate exposure: Limited domains and registers While immigrant parents may decide they do not want their children to speak or hear their native language for a variety of reasons, it would likely never occur that parents resolve to withhold the use of, say, passive structures from their speech. Still, limited exposure translates into what is recognized by many scholars as one of the most potent destroyers of a language: The limiting of domains and registers of use (Schaufeli 1992; Preston 1982; Hill 1993). A great deal of the literature on language shift and language death considers how the status of a minority language within a dominant language community becomes ever more restricted in its uses to those of the home, say, or to those of intimate contact within the minority speech community (e.g., Fishman 1966; Dorian 1977; Anderson 1982; Gonzo and Saltarelli 1983; Gal 1989). These restricted functions serve to break the linguistic traditions (Preston 1982) of the immigrant generation, which in turn further dismantle the system of domains and registers of use (Anderson 1982; Gonzo and Saltarelli 1983; Hill 1993). So, although Yiddish-speaking parents and grandparents may have never purposely restricted their use of say, subjunctive forms, the contexts for use of these structures might rarely have arisen in daily interaction. However, to say that domains and registers were limited, and that this is part of a vicious circle, only begins to help explain why domains and registers were limited in the first place; an explanation of why these become limited may be found in the other two factors under consideration here, attitudes toward LI and the notion of linguistic identity. First, however, two more aspects of 'speaker practice' ('inadequate exposure') should be explicated.

4.2.2 Inadequate exposure: One-way vertical communication A second part of the issue of inadequate exposure is the question, Who spoke to whom, and in what language? Statements by several primary informants suggest that much of the communication among immigrants and their children or grandchildren was frequently vertical in one direction, that is, children generally responded to their Yiddish-speaking elders in English (see Hill 1993:89-90). Interestingly, the exception seems to have been when they were alone with a parent or grandparent; in this situation they likely responded in Yiddish. By school age, though, most children apparently responded to elders' Yiddish predominantly with English (see also Weinberg 1988:112-113). Hence, despite the fact that informants heard Yiddish on a daily basis for at least the first seven to ten years of their lives, it is likely that they spent only a limited amount of this time actually speaking the language themselves. Hill (1993) discusses a similar sort of interlocutor situation in the three minority languages she investigates, Dyirbal, Mexicano, and Wasco (see also Leopold 1970/1939-1949, vol. 4, 150, 152-153 for a description of a similarly one-way, vertical linguistic relationship in late childhood). The predominantly one-way nature of elder-youth communication helps us begin to gain insight into the presence of such a large number of divergent forms in informants' speech today. In short, it isn't simply a matter of 'if you don't use it, you'll lose it,' rather 'if you don't use it enough yourself during the process of acquisition, you'll never fully acquire it'.

4.2.3 Inadequate exposure: Early termination of active use One crucial point to be considered is that none of the ten primary informants reported using, or even hearing, Yiddish to any great extent after the age of about ten. Allowing for inaccuracy in the self-reporting of each individual informant, an overall trend is suggested by the fact that all

59 but two informants stated that by the time they entered their teenage years their parents themselves had largely switched to English, even with each other. Whatever role other factors may have played, namely those related to the child's own termination of use, it appears that parents and grandparents were the ones to actually initiate the termination of use in the home, rather than the children. Whatever the case may be with other immigrant situations, this elder-initiated termination of use apparently was a trend among the immigrant group under consideration. I would like to focus briefly on this trend among Yiddish-speaking Jews. For several socially and historically motivated reasons many parents placed little value on speaking Yiddish over the long term (a few of these reasons will be discussed shortly). Only in orthodox Jewish homes (e.g., among the Hasidim), or homes which considered themselves 'Yiddishist', would the use of the language have been considered important, or conversely, the learning of English regarded as of equal or lesser importance (Howe 1976:228). 'Yiddishists' were those active in some way in the robust Yiddish-language literary and cultural scene of the early decades of the twentieth century. This group placed itself in opposition to the outspoken Hebraists, mostly Zionists, who felt that Yiddish should be abandoned in favor of Hebrew in Palestine (history has shown who won this battle). Still, orthodox Jews and Yiddishists were, I would venture to say, in the minority in the Jewish population of the U.S. Most immigrants apparently had no overt political or ideological motivations regarding language. Their motivation to learn English was inherently practical and often patriotic; they wished to become 'good Americans' and to seek their fortune in the goldene medine, the 'golden land' of opportunity. In this regard Yiddish was a language used of necessity, that is, used when a member of the family or speech community was unable to speak English well enough to communicate effectively. In their pursuit of becoming 'good Americans' thousands of Yiddish-speaking immigrants attended 'night schools', as several primary informants called them, to learn English (Howe 1976:228). 2 Although schools in the New York area are most well-known today, night schools also existed in other metropolitan centers. Many primary informants' parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles attended such schools. As soon as a member of the family knew English sufficiently well, the switch was made to English. The early termination of use of Yiddish among primary informants likely played a role in informants' ultimate level of acquisition of the language. The Yiddish speech of the three secondary informants, all of whom used Yiddish past their teenage years, is qualitatively very different from that of primary informants; in fact, their speech bears many similarities to that of LI speakers investigated in other studies of LI attrition (e.g., Waas 1993). I believe there is no need to pinpoint a specific average age at which informants ceased using, or hearing, Yiddish. Rather, let it suffice to set the range at somewhere between age seven or eight and age thirteen (for some the switch to English may have come as early as age four or five). Note that this age span (8-13) corresponds with the range marking the approximate beginning and ending of the 'critical period' (see Lenneberg 1967; Newport 1991; Birdsong 1999). This section has focused on termination of use of Yiddish among informants. I suggested here that this termination may have been initiated by the elder generation. This influenced a key break in linguistic tradition, or change in the linguistic status quo. Of all the factors under discussion in this chapter, termination of use is among the most clearly identifiable, the least abstract, so to speak. There can be no stronger break in tradition than to cease altogether using a language

2

As early as 1889, the New York Board of Education administered 61 evening elementary schools, and four high schools. In 1908, 100,000 immigrants were enrolled in elementary, high school, and 'Americanization' classes; 40% of these students were immigrant women and their daughters. Two-thirds of the students attended for the sole purpose of learning English (Weinberg 1988:141).

60 which had been one's own and the children's first language. Of course, the children played a crucial role in the process as well. Their role in, and motivations for, the termination of active use of Yiddish is considered in the remainder of this chapter.

4.3

Attitudes toward LI

The next factor in the model in Figure 4.1, attitudes toward LI, community-external attitudes toward Yiddish, had a profound influence on the linguistic behavior of Yiddish-speaking immigrants and their children. After a discussion of these I examine community-internal attitudes toward the language. Yiddish in the U.S. was stigmatized along with many other immigrant languages from the very moment of arrival at Ellis Island and other ports of entry. These attitudes are exemplified in the following passage from a pamphlet dating from the early part of the century that was published (in Yiddish) by the Daughters of the American Revolution and distributed at Ellis Island: The Jew like any other foreigner is appreciated when he lives the American social life. Until then he counts for nothing. Join American clubs, read American papers. Try to adapt yourself to the manners and customs and habits of the American people. Have your name placed on the roll of the league or union of your trade... Become an American citizen as soon as you can (cited in Sachar 1992:155). Similarly, Riverda H. Jordan argued in 1921 that learning English should be made a condition of the immigrant's admission to citizenship: He must learn that to be a good citizen of the new homeland he must speak English at home, attend sermons preached in English, and read newspapers printed in English. All of these things must be considered as a prerequisite to his ability to cast his ballot in an American election - a privilege which should stand to him as the crowning attribute of citizenship, the final proof of his complete assimilation as an American (cited in Haugen 1956:109). The attitude that all things foreign should be expunged from immigrants and their communities, and that English should rightly replace immigrant languages as quickly as possible, intensified throughout the great waves of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the time informants were children (1910's-1920's), these attitudes were synonymous with patriotism, and 'Americanism', as the movement to assimilate immigrants was often labeled. Of course, Americanism was transmitted most effectively to the children of immigrants through the public schools. In earlier times, and certainly in Europe, it was by no means taken for granted (indeed, it often was forbidden) that Jewish children attend non-Jewish schools. Jews had the cheder and the yeshiva for the education of their own. Yet in the U.S. both the school administration and the immigrant population tended to view public schools as the immigrant children's best hope for financial and social success, for the 'American dream'. Thus teachers were encouraged to help immigrants (and their offspring) to "mask their immigrant origins" (Cowen and Cowen 1989:101). Schools went to great pains to erase the children's 'foreignness' and help them become 'good Americans' (100-108), often forbidding the use of Yiddish in school (Weinberg 1988:112-113).3

3

In New York City in the early years of this century, "teachers were told to patrol the lunchrooms, restrooms, schoolyards, giving students demerits if they dared to speak this un-American 'jargon'" (Weinberg 1988:112-113).

61 Many other extralinguistic (mostly socio-historical) factors influenced attitudes toward Yiddish both from without and from within the Yiddish-speaking communities in the United States. A thorough discussion of these factors would exceed the scope of this investigation, but it is reasonable to mention a few of them briefly, as they appear relevant to informants' acquisition of and attitudes toward Yiddish. Most informants were children during the Great Depression. In the 1920's much of the urban lower middle class, of which most informants' families were members (and indeed most Jews in the U.S.), was upwardly mobile. Jews of the Lower East Side of Manhattan and other urban centers were moving in large numbers to the suburbs (e.g., Brooklyn, the Bronx etc.; Sachar 1992:428-430). During the Depression, however, this upward mobility halted abruptly. Along with the dire economic changes came changes in the social behavior of many Jews (causality relationships among the changes are not claimed here). Apart from a growing de-emphasis on Jewish religious life during the 1930's, Jews (and other ethnic groups) responded to the economic crisis with a shift to the political left. Socialist and communist organizations enjoyed a remarkable increase in membership throughout the 1930's (Sachar 1992:430-436). Additionally, AntiSemitism intensified in the United States, as evidenced by increases in social and legal restrictions on Jews in all spheres of life (e.g., professions, universities, social clubs etc.; 319-334). Perhaps the most poignant personification of the anti-Semitism in this country was Father Charles E. Coughlin, whose radio programs and publications enjoyed enormous popularity throughout the 1930's (450-458). Lastly, there was in the 1930's an increase in published attestations of 'Jewish self-hatred' and the disavowing of all things Jewish by Jews themselves (414415; 450-458). I do not discuss specifically the possible linguistic effects of the social and cultural upheaval of the 1930's on informants as children, for such a discussion would of necessity be vague and speculative. Suffice it to suggest, however, that these events likely had an influence of some sort on informants' motivation, and perhaps opportunity, to acquire Yiddish completely. I turn now to a discussion of what is known of immigrants' (and informants') attitudes toward Yiddish. No matter how great the pressure was on immigrants from outside the speech community to assimilate linguistically and socially, community-internal attitudes were most effective in bringing about - and effecting the course and speed of - the break in linguistic tradition of Yiddishspeakers in the United States. In the case of Eastern European Jews and their children, their own attitudes reflected in many ways those expressed in the passages quoted at the beginning of this section. Most immigrants concurred with mainstream American views that English was key to their success. In the remainder of this section, I consider the role that overt metalinguistic evaluations of Yiddish by its own speakers may have played in the incomplete LI acquisition of Yiddish among primary informants. In discussing Yiddish during interviews, most primary informants waxed nostalgic about the language. Yiddish for them represents home, parents, 'the good old days', and more importantly, something inherently and undeniably Jewish. For most, the Yiddish language is associated with the notion of'Yiddishkeit', an amorphous term that variously stands for the religious and the cultural of Jewishness (see 2.5). Yet interestingly, when asked if they missed speaking Yiddish, most responded negatively. When asked to describe Yiddish as a language, primary informants consistently used terms such as 'bastardized German' or 'corrupted German'. The belief that Yiddish was "not really a language, just a mixture of languages" was in fact prevalent among Yiddish speakers in general (Rayfield 1970:41). Rayfield also writes that many Yiddish speakers whom he interviewed "seemed to feel that they might strip away the layers and borrowings like the skins of an onion and find no Yiddish left in the middle" (1970:41). I believe most informants in the present study would concur with this view of the language. My interviews also revealed the overall opinion

62 that one can express a fuller range of feelings and ideas with English than with Yiddish, and that Hebrew is a more beautiful-sounding language than Yiddish. "Yiddish is very guttural" was the comment of several primary informants. Additionally, almost all primary informants felt that Yiddish was extremely useful for telling jokes and anecdotes, i.e., something not serious. Hence, positive attitudes toward the language appear on a certain level, a level we might call the 'general idea of Yiddish' (as a component of a cherished past), yet overall primary informants appear to hold the language itself, the language as a system ('the particular idea of Yiddish'), in fairly low esteem. The views of these few are by no means pulled from thin air, nor are they solely the product of 'Americanism'. They are rooted in long-held attitudes toward Yiddish. Beginning with Moses Mendelssohn right through to the founding of the state of Israel, modern Yiddish was believed to be an inferior 'jargon,' a language "without rules, mutilated and unintelligible" (M. Weinreich 1980:281). In fact, the language was called zhargon rather than Yiddish by its own speakers until around the turn of the century. These attitudes prevailed at all socioeconomic levels of the Yiddish-speaking world. Thus, Yiddish speakers have long possessed a sort of inferiority complex regarding their mame-loshn 'mother('s)-tongue'. These prejudices of course were passed on to the first U.S.-bom generation. This does not mean that other, contemporaneous immigrant languages in the U.S., such as Italian or Polish, did not also experience a rapid shift to English; I merely suggest that community-internal attitudes toward the immigrant language have the power to accelerate the process. For instance, immigrant German held fairly high prestige for German-Americans, and maintenance efforts were successful into the twentieth century. With the outbreak of World War I, however, immigrant German lost most of its prestige. As with Yiddish, in less than a single generation the chain of transmission was broken. It is also important to point out an interesting paradox regarding the issue of language itself among the Jews. On the one hand language historically has been an important part of Jewish life. The perpetuation of Biblical Hebrew as a liturgical language, for example, attests to this Jewish devotion to language at some meta-level as something intimately tied to Jewish identity. Yet on the other hand, Jews have always adopted fairly quickly the vernaculars of whatever region in which they found themselves. In this regard, Jews also tend to be fairly unsentimental about particular vernaculars. So, despite informants' strong nostalgic feelings toward Yiddish, the language can be seen as a detachable part of their Jewish identity; one can be and feel Jewish, even Eastern European Jewish, without knowing Yiddish. Thus, in the shift from Yiddish to English, Yiddish-speaking immigrants and their children switched languages with little overt remorse for the loss of the language. This ambivalence toward Yiddish was as strong a factor in breaking linguistic traditions as was immigration itself in breaking countless cultural traditions. In contrast to this overall animosity toward Yiddish as an inferior vernacular that had outlived its usefulness in the face of dominant American English, I believe a condition to have existed in the in-group discourse of my informants for which I have as yet no data. Despite elders' desire for their children to know English as a vehicle of success, I surmise that parents and grandparents also exhibited a linguistic purism with their children's imperfect Yiddish which may have strongly inhibited the children's further use of the language. Hill (1993) offers evidence of a situation in which continuous criticism of youth language by traditional speakers of Mexicano discourages young people from communicating in that minority language, at least with their elders. Haugen (1956:97-98) also notes intergenerational linguistic purism among German speakers in Amana, Iowa. I am led to believe that a similar situation existed with these informants, in part because of the many instances during interviews in which informants criticized or questioned my own, non-native Yiddish, or probed my awareness of certain shibboleths in quite a 'purist' fashion themselves.

63 4.4

Linguistic identity

'Identity' initially appears to be the most ambiguous part of the study of language in general, and the study of a dominant/non-dominant bilingual situation in particular. For as elusive an issue as it is, I suggest that it represents as salient a factor as speaker practice and overt attitudes, both in the break in tradition under consideration, and in the structural aspects of incomplete LI acquisition. The role of identity in the perpetuation or loss of a language has been dealt with by many scholars and from many different perspectives; the topic has been discussed from so many points of view, in fact, that scholars seldom appear to be discussing the same thing, although all employ the term 'identity'. I would like to consider here several points of view of the notion of'identity' that are relevant to the social circumstances of acquisition and use of Yiddish among informants. I attempt to bring together the ideas of Nahirny and Fishman (1965), Giles and Johnson (1987), Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985), and Hill (1993). The point at which I believe all of these views intersect can be found in ways of interpreting the generational gap between Yiddishspeaking immigrants and their children. In the nature and extent of the conflicts that arose from this gap I suggest we might find the key to informants' linguistic identity, as I call it here, and thereby synthesize a more meaningful account of incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation. It should also become clear that what appears to bind the other factors discussed in this chapter, namely speaker practice and attitudes, can also be better understood when viewed in terms of this generational conflict. Nahirny and Fishman (1965) directly address the issue of 'ethnic identification' and generational conflict in immigrant groups. The authors criticize the so-called 'third generation interest' theory, challenging the validity of the generally-held belief that "what the son wishes to forget the grandson wishes to remember" (311). It is claimed that the prevailing means of measuring "ethnolinguistic identification" are "simplistic" because they ignore "the central fact that the fathers, sons and grandsons may differ among themselves not only in the degree but also in the nature of their identification with ethnicity" (312). They state, instead, that "the ethnic heritage, including the ethnic mother tongue, usually ceases to play a viable role in the life of the third generation" (311). The authors focus then, on the first and second generations, which they label the 'fathers' and the 'sons' (implying, it is assumed, mothers and daughters as well). Nahirny and Fishman posit that, almost paradoxically, "[t]he very violence with which some of the sons dissociated themselves from their ethnic heritage expressed the extent to which it had taken hold of them" (312; see also Weinberg 1988:120-122). Ethnolinguistic identity among the fathers (immigrants themselves), then, is understood as follows: Being an outgrowth of past personal experience, the ethnic identification of the immigrant fathers constituted something deeply subjective and concrete; that is to say, it was hardly externalized or expressed in general symbolic terms. So much was this the case that many of them were simply ignorant of their national identity (314). In other words, the immigrants themselves were products, and not the embodiment, of the cultures and languages in which they were raised; ethnic identity was specific to each individual and opaque (i.e., subconscious) to each individual. Hence, ...the immigrant fathers could scarcely transmit to their sons this kind of mnemonic orientation toward ethnicity, even when they genuinely tried to inculcate the mores maiorum of their ancestors. By listening to the stories told by parents or by studying ethnically related geography and history, the sons were able, at best, to respond to certain generalized attributes of the old country... But what bearing could such acquaintance with ethnicity have on that special relationship which links the family or the individual from

64 generation to generation [my emphasis]? Too radical a break in the actual life patterns of generations has made the personal and concrete experiences of the immigrant fathers inaccessible to the sons. For the fathers, the 'old ways' survived as realities, since they continued to link them meaningfully to the ancestral past as well as to the community of their immigrant contemporaries [authors' emphasis]. For the sons, in turn, they stood (at best) for ideals to be appreciated and cherished1'' [authors' emphasis] (316317). In short, Nahirny and Fishman claim that the children of immigrants could not be vessels of their parents' culture by virtue of the fact that they did not live that culture. This establishes, of course, a gulf between the two generations which cannot be closed, because each generation possesses a qualitatively different 'ethnolinguistic identification', or linguistic identity. Yet the intergenerational conflict goes much deeper than even this may imply. For, it is pointed out, the more intensely the children of immigrants rejected or despised their ethnic heritage (the language being the most poignant representative of this heritage), "...the more conscious they were of their ethnic identity. The more ashamed they were of this past, and even of their parents, the more they were aware of their ethnic background" (318). Ironically, "[w]hile estranged from the parental heritage, the sons, nevertheless, remained more conscious of their ethnic identity than were their immigrant fathers ... especially when passing through adolescence" (322). The generational discontinuity, coupled with the grave animosity spawned by the second generation's inability to escape it own ethnic identity, rendered the family ineffective as an agency for the transmission of traditional ethnicity. So pronounced was this generational gap that by the time the sons reached adolescence the immigrant family had become transformed into two linguistic sub-groups segregated along generational lines (322-323; my emphasis). Nahirny and Fishman's ideas account well for the intergenerational dynamics at work in the immigrant situation, and specifically, in the situation of primary informants and their families. This is evidenced by primary informants' awareness of their parents' memories of the 'old country' in only the most general of terms, as well as by their overall 'idealization' of their parents' backgrounds. Most informants conveyed the conviction that their parents were of a nobler, simpler time and culture. Whether they believed the same about their parents when they were children is not clear. The passage from the Yiddish newspaper Forverts printed at the opening of this chapter suggests what may have been closer to primary informants' attitudes toward their parents when they (informants) were children. T h e foregoing discussion of Nahirny and Fishman's concept of ethnolinguistic identification provides a foundation for our understanding of linguistic identity in the immigrant situation. A s mentioned, I believe the generational dimension of the present discussion of linguistic identity to be most salient in terms of incomplete LI acquisition. Yet other dimensions relating to group (and generational) membership and boundaries are also pertinent to this discussion. Therefore, in the remainder of this section several additional ideas will be presented in relation to those of Nahirny and Fishman. I employ here the ideas of Giles and Johnson (1987), Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985), and Hill (1993). Giles and Johnson (1987) consider language a central component of "social identity". Specifically, they state that [w]e categorize the social world and hence, perceive ourselves as members of various groups. Such knowledge of ourselves as group members is defined as our social identity, and it may be positive or negative according to how our ingroups fare in social comparison with relevant outgroups. It is argued that we strive to achieve a positive identity by seeking dimensions which afford favorable comparison

65 with outgroups... Language comes into the picture when a group regards its own language or speech variety as a dimension of comparison with outgroups (70-71). Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985) also consider identity to be linked to perception. They call every speech act an 'act of identity', a projection "onto others [of] images of the universe as they perceive it and of their own place and role in it in relation to others around them, by both what is said and the manner of saying it" (118). Thus identity translates into a reciprocal relationship between the individual and her or his perceptions of the world, and between the individual and her or his perceptions of her or his own place in the world; identity as such is wholly dependent on the perceptions of the individual. Giles and Johnson consider three variables related to social identity, 1) perceived vitality, 2) perceived group boundaries, and 3) multiple group memberships (71). These variables "increase or decrease the level of a person's sense of ethnic belongingness" (71). Ethnolinguistic vitality is understood as having status factors, demographic factors, and institutional support factors. Additionally, it is claimed that "the actions of individual group members are likely to be governed less by the actual vitality of their groups than by their perceptions of it" (72). The three dimensions of the variable perceived vitality should be discussed briefly. Ealier I described the perceived sociolinguistic status of Yiddish among immigrants, and primary informants. The bottom line appears to be that Yiddish often was not held in high regard by its own speakers, with the exception of devoted Yiddishists. Concerning demographic factors, although Yiddish-speaking immigrants often existed in close-knit neighborhood communities for several decades (1880's through the 1930's), demographic patterns of immigrant families underwent drastic changes during the childhoods of most informants. These families tended to move from the inner cities to the suburbs, or to the country (Sachar 1992:374).4 The demographic changes were characterized by the splintering of families among the nuclear family and the extended family; whereas the economics of the Depression, life as working-class immigrants, and cultural norms of the 'old country' led many extended families to live in close proximity, the economic growth in the U.S. in the late 1930's, increasing prosperity among immigrant groups, as well as the ever-deepening assimilation of immigrants themselves, influenced the demographic shift away from the former Yiddish-speaking communities of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland etc.5 A full description of the various types of institutional support enjoyed by Yiddish in the United States exceeds the scope of this discussion of linguistic identity. Briefly, except for groups such as the Arbeter-Ring (Workman's Circle), which operated about 200 Yiddish elementary schools or after-school Yiddish programs for children in the U.S., and despite the existence of cultural 'institutions' such as Yiddish newspapers, theater, and cinema, the Yiddish language cannot be said to have possessed organized institutional support in the United States (Sachar 1992:377). With the exception of the children's school programs, whatever support that was provided was targeted mostly at immigrants themselves (with the goal of 'Americanization'), and not at their U.S.-born children. And like the demographic shift of the 1930's and 1940's mentioned above, this period of time also marked an overall decline of such Yiddish educational and cultural institutions. To summarize, the 'perceived vitality' of Yiddish in the U.S. was not very great for immigrants and their children because 1) Yiddish as a language was held in fairly low esteem by its

4

5

For example, of 177,000 Jews living in Harlem in 1923 (a popular destination for immigrant settlement in the years after World War I), fewer than 5,000 remained in 1930 (Sachar 1992:374). This does not imply that Yiddish-speaking areas did not remain intact to some extent in areas such as the Lower East Side, South Philadelphia etc. into the 1950's and 1960's.

66 own speakers, 2) demographic changes in the U.S. affected the nature of the relationship among speakers of Yiddish, and 3) the language never enjoyed significant institutional support, and whatever support existed began its decline during the childhood years of most informants in this study. With regard to Giles and Johnson's second variable, group boundaries, the authors write that "group members try to maintain a high level of perceived boundary hardness... and this... clarifies ethnic categorization and norms for conducting intergroup encounters... (72). I will return to a discussion of'group boundaries' shortly. The third variable related to social identity discussed by Giles and Johnson, multiple group memberships, bears particular relevance to the present discussion of informants' linguistic identity. The authors state that "those who see themselves as belonging to numerous different, overlapping groups should possess a more diffuse social identity than persons who view themselves as members of only one or two groups" (72). Giles and Johnson consider these and other factors in terms of their predictive value for language maintenance among different 'subordinate' groups. They conclude that members of subordinate groups who do not consider language to be an important dimension of social identity (i.e., a 'detachable part' of identity) will be likely to conform to societal rather than ethnic ingroup norms and demonstrate weak ethnic solidarity (85). Such individuals also will be less likely to maintain the ingroup language if they (a) (b) (c) (d)

identify only moderately or weakly with the ethnic group; make secure social comparisons with the outgroup...; perceive their ingroup boundaries to be soft and open; perceive their ethnic group to have low ethnic vitality (85).

Informants in the present study appear to concur in each of these points. First, they appear to identify with the ethnic group only in the most general of terms, namely as 'American Jews of Eastern European descent'. And related to this, none would explicitly identify herself or himself as a Yiddish speaker, despite the ability to speak the language. Second, there is no doubt that each informant makes 'secure social comparisons with the outgroup', the outgroup being secular, mainstream society of the United States. Third, at this time, and likely as children, primary informants perceived the boundaries between themselves as members of the Yiddish-speaking ingroup and the outgroup to be extremely fluid, reinforced by their own parents' desire for them to assimilate into the society and culture of that outgroup. Fourth, primary informants likely have always perceived the ethnolinguistic vitality of the Yiddish-speaking ingroup to be weak, equating it as such with a 'foreignness' which eventually, and rightly, would be absorbed by the outgroup and disappear. Giles and Johnson's second and third variables, perceived group boundaries and multiple group memberships, are among the most important for our understanding of the linguistic identity of primary informants and its relationship to the speech data collected. Nahimy and Fishman's description of ethnolinguistic identification in the immigrant situation shows us that the children of Yiddish-speaking immigrants considered themselves not only members of "numerous different, overlapping [ethnic] groups" (e.g., 'Americans', Jews, Ashkenazic Jews, 'Galitsianer' etc.; Giles and Johnson 1987:72), but also as members of the younger of "two linguistic sub-groups segregated along generational lines" (Nahirny and Fishman 1965:323). With regard to the non-generational ethnic identifications among informants, all considered themselves Americans, of course, and Jewish ('American', I would venture to posit, is considered a sort of ethnic category by informants). None was able to tell me which label they would place first on a priority list. Yet each informant also identified herself or himself in no uncertain terms as an Ashkenazic Jew (of Eastern European origin, as opposed to a Sephardic Jew, of Spanish/North

67 African origin). Further, almost all informants identified with one or both parents' particular region of Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Galicia, Lithuania etc.). 6 Yet ultimately I believe it is the boundary between the immigrant generation and the second generation that fueled conflict of informants' linguistic identity, and most strongly influenced the 'break in linguistic tradition'. This conflict - rooted in a feeling of belonging to the ethnic group (Ashkenazic Jewry), and yet separated from it by an insurmountable generational and cultural gap - undoubtedly contributed to the qualitative nature of informants' incomplete acquisition of Yiddish. For if the first-hand cultural experiences of the 'fathers' were inaccessible to the 'sons', and if we accept the notion that a culture and its language are inextricably linked, then we must conclude that primary informants acquired Yiddish in a sort of 'cultural vacuum', that the language was not capable of taking on the diverse meanings it held for the elder generation. One linguistic (structural) manifestation of this concept is analyzed in chapter 5. Hill's (1993) ideas about code boundaries and "boundary-marking activities" (87) are also relevant to the present discussion. Drawing on the ideas of Bakhtin (1973/1929; 1980/1935), Hill suggests that speakers confront, not some clear, delineated sense of codes, but rather 'heteroglossia'. Speakers exploit the available symbolic materials to try to create those conjunctions and forms and meanings that may be most advantageous... [in] ...constructing 'voices': ways of speaking that represent particular interested positions and identities (69). Hill claims that the crucial break in linguistic tradition, to use Preston's (1982) term, is the result of deep anxieties about boundaries, boundaries of identity, of codes, of how the community is seen as 'different'. In other words, the ways in which speakers draw the boundaries of codes is a reflection of their identities, and these affect attitudes and speaker practice. Boundaries in Hill's understanding are not equated with identity, rather they exist as the "defense of threatened identities" (87). The (perceived) boundaries drawn within and around one's own code and speech community are linked closely to one's identity as a speaker of that language, as a member of a group, a 'group' being defined here in Le Pagean terms as those people who share a set of projections. Thus, the "boundary-marking activities" (87, 89-90) of, for instance, youths relative to their elders, contribute directly to the language attrition (and, in terms of the present study, the incomplete LI acquisition) process. In the cases of the languages Hill investigates (Mexicano, Dyirbal, and Wasco), the language of older, or traditional, speakers is considered 'purer' or better than that of the younger generations. Due to this and other social factors, such as the prestige of the dominant language, youth groups then restrict speech in the minority language to intimate contexts among themselves, if they use the language at all among themselves; and they generally respond to elders in the dominant language, rather than in the traditional language. The resulting 'imperfect' code of the young people, or 'solidarity code', exhibits simplification and convergence common to language attrition (87), and this form of the minority language remains fossilized. Paradoxically, and related to the 'vicious circle' described at the opening of this chapter, these patterns of linguistic behavior reinforce the inadequate input in the minority code, and "[t]his system of feedback thus yields the abrupt transmission failure of a language" (88).

6

Interestingly, although few possessed detailed knowledge of that areas of family origin, many informants did possess knowledge of certain linguistic shibboleths which they felt differentiated their group from others (e.g., "We say koyfit and they say keyfn'; koyfn/keyjh 'buy'). Additionally, each was generally aware of what their parents felt were the faults of other groups (e.g., 'The galitsianer were all thieves', 'The litvakes are all snobs', etc.).

68 Obviously there are parallels to be drawn between Hill's observations and what we know about primary informants' use of Yiddish as young people. Although it is unlikely that these Yiddish speakers interacted in 'intimate codes' among themselves to the extent that speakers investigated by Hill did, a comparable code boundary most likely existed between older immigrant speakers and the U.S.-born generation. Most informants expressed the opinion that their own Yiddish was, and always had been, inferior to that of their parents and grandparents. Perceived boundaries between codes would have facilitated the circumstances of inadequate exposure to the LI. This should not imply that the code boundaries were drawn only by the youth in response to their perceptions (projections) of their elder's own linguistic identities. Rather, with respect to the linguistic purism that I suspect existed among the older generations, this drawing of code boundaries was likely reciprocal; the cliché 'it takes two to tango' is perhaps appropriate in describing the situation. In this way the linguistic identity of primary informants played more than an abstract or ambiguous role in the 'vicious circle' of their own incomplete LI acquisition. Primary informants' linguistic identities, not merely as Yiddish speakers, but specifically as speakers of Yiddish as U.S.-born children of immigrants, carried great weight in the individual's and the group's day-to-day negotiations of social/verbal situations, in the 'constructing of voices', in their "projections of the universe as they perceive it and of their own place and role in it in relation to others around them" (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1982:118).

4.5

Summary

The goal of this chapter was to establish a social/sociolinguistic model of incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation. This model represents what is essentially a 'vicious circle', in that each factor of the circle affects the others in such a way as to weaken the whole system; as long as each factor continues to maintain its influence, the system eventually will weaken to the point of language death. The main factors involved are speaker practice, overt attitudes toward LI (outgroup and ingroup), and linguistic identity. Each of these factors was discussed in terms of its role in the 'break in linguistic tradition', or the abrupt transmission failure ('tip') of Yiddish in the United States. The central claim here is that, while each the many extralinguistic factors considered plays an unambiguous role in the incomplete LI acquisition of Yiddish among informants, it is ultimately the dynamics of the generational/cultural gap between the immigrant generation and the second generation which fuels the phenomenon of incomplete LI acquisition. This model should by no means represent the 'last word' on the social and sociolinguistic factors in informants' incomplete LI acquisition. Rather, the model should provide a foundation for further investigation and operational ization of the social and sociolinguistic factors of incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation. It is hoped that this model, although by necessity somewhat oversimplified, expresses to some extent the inherent complexity, not only of each factor discussed, but also of the relationships at work among these factors.

5

Evidence of incomplete LI acquisition in primary informants' speech: Choice of auxiliary in the present perfect tense

Diesen Ball ist von den Ende bis zu diesen gegangen This ball is from that end until to this gone 'This ball went from that end to this one' Ginmal hat der Ball auf diese beiden Glassen gesprungen Once has the ball on these both glasses bounced 'Once the ball bounced on these two glasses' [glass shelves]' [Hildegard at age 5;1; Leopold 1970/1939, vol. 4:91]

5.1

Introduction

The goal of the present chapter is to show that it is possible to identify structural manifestations of incomplete LI acquisition in the speech data of primary informants despite many decades of disuse. Of course, in order to achieve this goal it was necessary to isolate a particular divergent linguistic feature in the data which is not the result of attrition. In the 16 hours of transcribed data, the rules for use of the present perfect auxiliaries hobn 'have' and zayn 'be' appear to fit this criterion very well. Hereafter I refer to rules governing the choice of auxiliary in the Yiddish present perfect as the h/z rule. Several means are employed here to demonstrate that divergent manifestations of the h/z rule are indeed due to incomplete LI acquisition, and not to LI attrition. First, I show how this divergence does not generally occur in the speech of secondary informants, i.e., individuals who fully acquired Yiddish as an LI, but who, like primary informants, have not used the language in many decades. Second, speech data are examined from German monolingual and bilingual child language acquisition involving English and another Germanic language (German/English and Dutch/English), to determine when and how young bilingual children learning the h/z rule master this form, and under what social/sociolinguistic circumstances. To summarize, included in the following analysis are 1) a description of the h/z rule in Yiddish and other Germanic languages, 2) a discussion of manifestations of the h/z rule among primary informants, 3) analysis of h/z rule performance for Yiddish speakers who 'fully acquired' Yiddish but who, like informants, have not used that language in several decades, 4) speech data from monolingual German children, 5) speech data from Leopold (1970/1939-1949) for child bilingual LI acquisition (German/English), and 6) the findings of De Houwer (1990) for child bilingual LI acquisition (Dutch/English) with regard to the Dutch h/z rule. Through this analysis, I demonstrate that unless the social and sociolinguistic conditions exist which were described in chapter 4, namely those for incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation, features such as the h/z rule will not generally diverge from accepted norms. In other

70 words, the h/z rule tends to be very robust, and learned very well fairly early on under 'normal' linguistic circumstances. In the next section the Yiddish rules for the use of the present perfect are summarized, which, it is shown, are grammatically and semantically very similar to rules in the other Germanic languages under consideration, and lexically nearly identical in the auxiliaries of these other languages. Thereafter I describe the speech data, that is, when and how primary informants use the present perfect auxiliary rules.

5.2

The present perfect tense in Yiddish and other Germanic languages

The most striking typological contrast between Yiddish and other Germanic languages is that in Yiddish the present perfect, and the morphosyntactically related Yiddish pluperfect, are the sole verb forms for expressing completed events in the past. In contrast to all other Germanic languages, Yiddish lacks the preterit entirely. The semantic/temporal range of the Yiddish present perfect corresponds, however, closely to that of Germanic languages other than English, and especially to that of German, and contrasts with the semantic/temporal range of English. This assertion is supported by Klein and Vater's (1998) analysis of the German Perfekt and the English present perfect. The distinction in usage between German and Yiddish can be found, then, in the situations in which the preterit would be the required or unmarked form. For example, in German a sentence such as ?£> ist tot gewesen 'He has been dead' would likely be unacceptable.1 The corresponding Yiddish sentence, Er iz geven toyt is the only option available. The Yiddish present perfect is formed with an inflected auxiliary, generally placed in second position, plus an immediately adjacent past participle form of the main verb (negators, object pronouns, or modal particles, however, may be placed between the auxiliary and the past participle). Additionally, and importantly for the present discussion, the speaker must choose between two auxiliary verbs, hobn 'have', and zayn 'be'. The choice of auxiliary is determined by both the semantic nature and syntactic function of the main verb. Hobn is used with all transitive verbs. Zayn is used with intransitive verbs, but most frequently with that class of intransitive verbs indicating a change of location or state. Hence, verbs such as geyn 'go' and kumen 'come' express a change of location, while verbs such as shtarbn 'die' and vern 'become' involve a change of physical state; these take zayn as their auxiliary. Additionally, there is a small class of so-called 'positional' verbs that require zayn (Schaechter 1986), in contrast to Standard German (in which these verbs take haberi). This class includes the verbs blaybn 'stay', shteyn 'stand', lign 'lie', zitsn 'sit', shlofn 'sleep', and hengen 'hang'. Lastly, the verb zayn (its past participle is geven) also requires zayn as its auxiliary. Figure 5.1 contains examples of each type of construction in Yiddish. Several other Germanic languages adhere to a similar grammatical/semantic set of rules in the present perfect (with the exception of the Yiddish 'positional' verbs). These languages also employ lexical items as auxiliaries that are nearly identical to those of the Yiddish hobn and zayn. Figure 5.2 lists the present perfect auxiliaries in the two Germanic languages other than Yiddish that are dealt with in this chapter, German and Dutch.

1

Klein and Vater (1998:229) point out that the use of the copula is rare in the German present perfect, except in some southern German dialects.

71 zayn +

PAST PARTICIPLE

intransitive (no change of state or location)

Er iz geven dortn He is been there 'He was there'

intransitive (no change of state or location)

Zi iz geblibn in der heym She is stayed in the home 'She stayed home'

intransitive (change of location)

Ikh bin gegangen aheym I am gone home 'I went home'

intransitive (change of state)

Er iz geshtorbn nekhtn He is died yesterday 'He died yesterday'

hobn +

PAST PARTICIPLE

transitive

Erhot geleyent dos bukh He has read the book 'He read the book'

Figure 5. J: Present perfect constructions in Standard Yiddish

LANGUAGE

have INFINITIVE ( 3 . p . S . )

be INFINITIVE

Standard Yiddish Standard German Standard Dutch

hobn (hot) haben (hat) hebben (heeft)

zayn (iz) sein (ist) zijn or wezen (is)

(3.p.S.)

Figure 5.2: Present perfect auxiliaries in the Germanic languages under discussion

5.3

Primary informants' use of the present perfect

In this section I describe primary informants' use of the present perfect in Yiddish, based on the transcribed speech data. Specifically, details are presented here of their adherence or nonadherence to the h/z rule. Admittedly, the small sample size and the fact that only one narrative was collected from each informant may appear to confound conclusions to be drawn from the analysis. However, I believe that an examination of patterns of use of the h/z rule for all primary informants does provide a representative picture of this feature among the population in general (U.S.-born children of immigrants). This claim is supported by Peltz (1990:71), who cites several examples from his study of Yiddish in South Philadelphia in which U.S.-born speakers alternated between hobn and zayn in the present perfect in constructions in which zayn would be grammatical. It should be noted here that both Herzog (1965:148, cited in Peltz 1990:70) and Mark (1978:277, cited in Peltz 1990: 70) mentioned a possible shift in the Yiddish language to the sole use of hobn in the present perfect in the robust speech communities of pre-War Eastern Europe.

72 change of location hobn

E 1

AA AB DM DS HA JH JS MF ML OK mean %

zayn

100.0 100.0 80.0 96.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 91.7 100.0 73.3 94.1

0 0 20.0 4.0 0 0 0 8.3 0 26.7 5.9

change of state hobn 83.3 100.0 66.7 100.0 66.7 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 25.0 84.2

zayn (geven)

zayn 16.7 0 33.3 0 33.3 0 0 0 0 75.0 15.8

hobn 28.6 81.8 17.2 73.9 75.0 27.3 100.0 15.0 88.9 7.7 51.5

zayn 71.4 18.2 82.8 26.1 25.0 72.7 0 85.0 11.1 92.3 48.5

Table 5.1: Choice of auxiliary in the present perfect for primary informants: Ratio of frequencies (%) In several Northeastern Yiddish dialects this shift had indeed already taken place in Eastern Europe. There exists, however, no linguistic evidence that the h/z rule is/was anything but robust among fully fluent speakers (such as primary informants' elders), especially at the time primary informants were acquiring Yiddish as children. In other words, there is little doubt that informants' positive linguistic input as children included the h/z rule as described here. Furthermore, considering the relatively small number of dialects in which the sole use of hobn is grammatical, the overall influence of speakers of these dialects on the speech patterns of so many U.S.-born speakers could have been negligible at best. Hence, part of the purpose of this chapter also is to demonstrate the influence of incomplete LI acquisition as a linguistic phenomenon unto itself on the grammatical forms of a language. Consideration of it as such may shed light on aspects of language contact and language change that up to now have simply been explained as due to the 'influence' of the dominant language. Finally, before discussing primary informants' use of hobn and zayn in the speech data, it should also be mentioned that in all 16 hours of transcribed interviews there is not a single occurrence of informants using zayn as a present perfect auxiliary in place of hobn, i.e., all transitive forms are grammatical. In other words, primary informants never produce an utterance such as (5.1): (5.1) (5.1') (5.1")

2

*Ikh bin gezendemman. I am seen the man' 'I saw the man.' 2

Interestingly, one such instance occurred during the interview with secondary informant AD: Er iz gezogtaz, mit menshndarfst du sein vi de menshn... (AD) He is said that with people must you to-be like the people... 'He said that with people you have to be like the people...' Additionally, the data of Schaerlaekens (1977, cited in De Houwer 1990:206), reveal two instances in which a monolingual Dutch-speaking child used zijn instead of hebben.

73 change of location hobn N=

1 !

AA

34

AB DM

change of state

zayn N=

hobn N=

zayn (geven)

zayn N=

hobn N=

zayn N=

1=

0

10

2

8

20

44

0

8

0

36

8

96

40

10

4

2

15

72

143

DS

24

1

4

0

34

12

75

HA

10

0

4

2

30

10

56

JH

21

0

2

0

6

16

45

JS

22

0

7

0

7

0

36

MF

11

1

2

0

3

17

34

ML

34

0

4

0

16

2

56

OK

11

4

2

6

6

72

101

1=

251

16

47

12

161

229

716

74

Table 5.2: Choice of auxiliary in the present perfect for all primary informants: Raw frequencies

Table 5.1 represents the choice of auxiliary among informants for all verbs in all transcripts which take zayn as their auxiliary (N= 716). For verbs involving a change of location, such as geyn 'go' and kumen 'come' (N=267), and those involving a change of state, such as shtarbn 'die' (N=59), informants employ hobn as the auxiliary in 94.1% and 84.2% of instances respectively (mean percentage for all primary informants). Table 5.2 presents the raw scores for each primary informant. Further, as can be seen in Tables 5.1 and 5.2, the pattern of use for the verb zayn 'be' (past participle=gevew) does not appear to follow that of the other two verb types; there is greater intraspeaker and interspeaker variation with this verb than with other verbs involving a change of location or state. Obviously, there is some distinction made in primary informants' knowledge of the h/z rule in most cases between the verb zayn (geven) and the other two verb types. To summarize these results, primary informants tend to use hobn most or all of the time. Yet several (AA, DM, DS, HA, MF, OK) produce zayn grammatically often enough to demonstrate that they possess some level of knowledge of this rule. AB, JH, JS, and ML use hobn 100% of the time during interviews. Hence, the grammatical manifestation of the rule appears often enough in the data of six speakers to be able to rule out the unanalyzed 'parotting' of memorized chunks of speech (not to mention that these speech 'chunks' would have been heard least over 50 years ago in most cases). In this regard, informants also did not use zayn more frequently in response to my own use of this auxiliary. In fact, primary informants did not respond to my own grammatical application to the h/z rule by applying the rule themselves, as in examples (5.2) through (5.5) (note that 5.2b and 5.3b were uttered by speakers who did not use the h/z rule at all, i.e., they produced only hobn as an auxiliary): (5.2a) (5.2a1) (5.2a")

Fun vanen zavnen gekumen aver zeyde-bobe? (INT) From where are come your grandparents? 'Where are your grandparents from?'

74 (5.2b) (5.2b1) (5.2b")

Mayn zeydebubes hobn gekumen fun poyland. (AB) My grandparents have come from Poland 'My grandparents came from Poland'

(5.3a) (5.3a1) (5.3a")

Bistu oykh gegangen in a yidishe school? (INT) Are-you also gone in a Jewish school? 'Did you go to a Jewish school?'

(5.3b) (5.3b1) (5.3b")

Kh'hob gegangen, yes, mayn täte, ikh hob nisht gegangen tsu a a a a school, I-have gone, yes, my father I have not gone to a a a a school, 'I went, yes, my father, I didn't go to a school, hob ikh gegangen tsu a shule. (ML) have I gone to a shule.'' I went to a schule'

(5.4a) (5.4a') (5.4a") (5.4b) (5.4b') (5.4b") (5.5a) (5.5a1) (5.5a") (5.5b) (5.5b') (5.5b")

Iz er geven krank? (INT) Is he been sick? 'Was he sick?' Well er't nisht geven zeyer gezunt. (DS) Well he's not been very healthy. 'Well he wasn't very healthy.' Ven iz er gekumen ken Amerike? (INT) When is he come to America? 'When did he come to America?' Gekumen? Mayn täte ot gekumen, mayn Come-PASTPART? My father has come, my 'Come? My father came, my father was

täte it, m' h't 'm [me hot im] father has, one has him

genumen in the army... (DS) taken in the army... taken into the army...' Specific examples in the data which appear to best represent what informants actually do during communication are presented in (5.6) through (5.9). The present perfect constructions which require zayn are underlined. (5.6)

Man täte iz gekumen fun rusland in eh, nineteen-hundred and seven... Man mome iz gekumen tsvey yor nokh man tote. Er hot gekimen here, er hot gearbet, tsvey yor tse makhn gelt far ir passage (OK)

(5.6')

'My father came from Russia in eh, nineteen-hundred and seven... My mother came two years after my father. He came here, he worked, two years to make money for her passage'

(5.7a)

Zi hobn peven zeyer shtark, zeyer, uh, nisht farmers, they would trade, [...] er hot gekoyft fun the farmer, un er hot es, how do you say sold? (OK.)

(5.7b)

Farkoyft (INT)

(5.7c)

Er hot es farkoyft tsum, uh, baker. Er iz nisht geven raykh. Er iz geven zeyer zeyer a poor mensh. (OK)

(5.7a')

'They were very strong, very, uh, not farmers, they would trade, [...] he bought from the fanner, and he [it], how do you say sold?'

75 (5.7b') 1

Farkoyft

(5.7c )

'He sold it to the, uh, baker. He was not rich. He was a very poor person'

(5.8a)

Bin gebovrn gvorn nantsntsvelf. Ikh bin tsveyunakhtsik yor alt (MF)5

(5.8b)

Ir kikt oys zeyer gut, ikh'l oykh zayn azoy ven ikh bin tsveyunakhtsik... (INT)

(5.8c)

Denkst? Ikh hob seven tsu dem doktor nekhtn... (MF)

(5.8a')

'[I was] born nineteen-twelve. I am eighty-two years old'

(5.8b')

'You look very well, I would also like to look so when I am eighty-two'

(5.8c')

'[You] think? I was to the doctor yesterday...'

(5.9)

Oh, in di yor, efsher yetst eykhet, se geven biliger tse geyen mit an automobile, se geven mener vos hobn gekeyft, me ruft dos limousines, [...] so az zi iz geeangen tsu New York hot zi gegangen. iz zi geforn mit di... mit di mener...

(5.9')

'Oh, in those years, maybe now too, it was cheaper to go with an automobile, there were men who bought, you call them [one calls them] limousines, [...] so when they went to New York she went, she rode with the... with the men...'

Examples (5.6) through (5.9) were selected because the variation evident in the ratios in Tables 5.1 and 5.2 is well-represented in each utterance or exchange. Several of the examples in chapter 3 also contain both divergent and grammatical manifestations of the h/z rule. In each example above, the informant produced both variants of the h/z rule (with verbs which require zayn as their auxiliaries) in close proximity in their narratives. This suggests that informants employ a sort of'communicative priority list' in applying the h/z rule. As with case morphology (described in chapter 3), it appears that the h/z rule is 'expendable' to some degree for the sake of communication in the face of deficient linguistic knowledge and/or lexical retrieval difficulties, i.e., the demands of processing these rules/forms after long disuse. Yet because, for example, case syncretism (which is evident in the data of both primary and secondary informants) is acknowledged in the literature as a very common result of LI attrition, there is no way to know for sure whether primary informants did or did not acquire sufficient knowledge of gender and case as children, that is, whether they once knew the rules and lost them, or whether they never acquired the rules completely in the first place (the indication is, as mentioned in chapter 3, that they did acquire knowledge of case to some extent). With the h/z rule, however, it may be possible to shed light on whether primary informants acquired the rule as children or not. To this end, the remainder of the present chapter is devoted to the question, how can it be determined whether this particular divergence from accepted norms is the result of LI attrition, or whether this feature was indeed never fully acquired during childhood by primary informants? First, it is important to clarify what sort of 'truth' I am attempting to isolate. Three scenarios might account for the interview data with respect to the h/z rule: Scenario 1: Long term LI attrition Informants acquired 'full competence' in the h/z rule during childhood, then lost this competence to a large extent due to long disuse; hence they occasionally produce the grammatical forms today, but most often produce divergent forms.

3

Note that pro-drop is not ungrammatical in many dialects of Yiddish, and may be used in first or second person.

76 Scenario 2: Short term LI attrition Informants acquired 'full competence' in the h/z rule during early childhood (by age 4 or 5), but then lost this competence to a large extent during later childhood due to a shift in usage to English. This level of competence in late childhood became fossilized, but did not change drastically during the many decades of disuse. Scenario 3: Incomplete LI acquisition Informants never fully acquired 'full competence' in the h/z rule, because they shifted away from frequent use of Yiddish prior to the time at which most (Germanic language) monolingual language learners iron out difficulties in this form (4-5 years of age). Hence, the divergent forms evident in their current speech are essentially a combination of 1) fossilized child language and 2) dealing with incomplete knowledge in the face of the need to communicate. LI attrition does not play a role here. If 'processing difficulties' alone were responsible for the divergence, as a component of the LI attrition phenomenon, then we must also find evidence of the same divergence, and in roughly the same frequency, among speakers of Yiddish who clearly fully acquired the language, but who then did not use or hear the language for a comparably long time as primary informants (e.g., secondary informants). In this case Scenario 1 would account for the data, and we could attribute the divergence to 'long term LI attrition', or the loss of features due to long disuse. If Scenario 2 represents the true state of affairs, then we would find bilingual child language learners in comparable sociolinguistic situations (to primary informants) who clearly fully acquired (mastered) the h/z rule by age 4 or 5, but who lost the ability to apply the rule in late childhood or adolescence. This would indicate, by extension, that speakers such as secondary informants also would not adhere consistently to the h/z rule in their speech (i.e., they acquired mastery of the rule as children but lost this ability later on). 'Short term' attrition refers here to the loss of linguistic mastery of a rule over a short period of time (by late childhood), followed by an indefinite period of fossilized divergent performance. In any case, secondary informants would demonstrate similar divergent performance to primary informants. Finally, if scenario 3 accounts for the data, then we would have to find 1) 2)

that Yiddish speakers who fully acquired the language and who then did not use it for a long span of time (secondary informants) do not tend to reduce or abandon the h/z rule, and that child bilingual language learners in similar social/sociolinguistic circumstances as primary informants do produce divergent manifestations of the h/z rule from the earliest phase of use of this form; and conversely, that the form obtains differently in child bilingual language learners in dissimilar social/sociolinguistic circumstances from those of informants.

It should be clear by now that my main claim in this chapter is that scenario 3 best accounts for the data. Before considering sources of evidence to support this claim, I would like to address briefly the question of whether the divergent manifestations of the h/z rule in the interview data might simply be due to 'influence from English'. It is well known among foreign language teachers of German in the U.S. that students tend to reduce the German h/z rule to the single auxiliary haben. Most often this error is attributed to 'influence from English'. If this were the case, then it must also be true that foreign or second language learners of German whose native language does not possess the h/z rule at all would not tend to reduce the h/z rule to hobn. Yet it is also well known that foreign or second-language learners of German from language backgrounds such as Czech or Turkish do reduce to the auxiliary hobn, just as English speakers do, and just as primary informants do in the interview data. For this reason, it is unlikely that influence from English can stand as an explanation for the divergence. It is more likely the case that hobn is preferred by foreign-language learners because hobn is, for all intents and purposes, the 'unmarked' auxiliary in the system, if only by virtue of the greater statistical frequency of occurrence overall of verbs requiring hobn compared with verbs

77 requiring sein. In this same sense, hobn could be considered the 'default' auxiliary: Use hobn as the auxiliary unless the main verb is intransitive and there is a change of state or location. This 'default' nature of hobn in Yiddish would likely account to some extent for why primary informants demonstrated some knowledge of the h/z rule in their interviews, but reduced the system in most instances. This still does not tell us, however, whether they mastered the h/z rule as children and then lost the ability to apply it later on, or whether they never fully acquired the ability to apply the rule in the first place. To determine this, I turn now to a discussion of secondary informants, speakers who fully acquired Yiddish, but who, like primary informants, did not use the language for a period of many decades. Thereafter I consider the other linguistic evidence mentioned at the opening of this chapter.

5.4

Secondary informants: 'Full acquisition' speakers of Yiddish with LI attrition

A speaker who has 'fully' acquired a language is understood to possess the abilities listed in Figure 3.1. In the present section I examine the manifestations of the h/z rule in the speech data of the three secondary informants introduced in 2.7, whom I consider to have 'fully' acquired Yiddish as children. As discussed, though, they, unlike primary informants, used the language at least into their teenage years (or much later). But like primary informants, they have not heard or used it for several decades. For sentences in a grammaticality judgment task performed by RB (86 sentences, most of which had one ungrammatical form in them), the informant not only was able to identify ungrammatical applications of the h/z rule, she also was able to correct each appropriately and immediately. In those sentences in which I omitted the auxiliary altogether (those which take zayn), RB was able to provide the grammatical auxiliary. Likewise in an English-to-Yiddish translation task, RB was able to use zayn grammatically.4 In her free narration, RB adhered to the h/z rule in almost all instances. In the 45-minute narrative she provided, two instances of hobn appeared in which zayn would have been grammatical. The two utterances are as follows: (5.10)

Ikh'b gevelt forn ahin tse zen mayn tates keyver. Nito keyn zakh, ikh'b shoyn geven in Israel... (RB)

(5.10')

'I wanted to drive there to see my father's grave. Nothing there, I had already been in Israel...'

(5.11)

Mir hobn ale ge-valked [walked], gegangen tse fus... [to school]

(5.11')

'We all walked, went on foot... [to school]'

Because these are the only two such examples among all instances of the h/z rule in her narration, it is not clear what caused RB to produce these utterances. To conclude that 'processing difficul-

4

During one of the pilot studies for the present study, in which I had 12 U.S.-born Yiddish speakers with similar sociolinguistic profiles to primary informants perform a grammaticality judgment task, I found that none of the speakers could make grammaticality judgments with consistency or accuracy (Levine 1994).

78 ties' are at fault is to ignore the fact that she produced hundreds of grammatical forms in the interview. Apart from the fact that example (5.11) represents the only occurrence in her interview of a code-blended past participle 'walked' (which she also self-corrected), there may be a languageinternal explanation for her use of hobn with a verb involving a change of location. All past participles that take zayn as their auxiliaries in the present perfect end in -nl-en (e.g., gegangen 'went', geblibn 'stayed', gestorbn 'died'), whereas regular past participles taking hobn end in -t (geleyent 'read', gearbet 'worked', geret 'spoke'). 5 It may be that RB produced hobn with gevalked because the verb does not end in -nl-en. Regarding example (5.10), it is possible that some form of cross-linguistic influence is at work; based on the context of the utterance, the most accurate gloss actually might be in the past perfect, '...I had already been to Israel'. In this case it may be that English grammar is intruding upon the h/z rule. Still, if the past perfect is the intended tense of the speaker, then it may be that she simply produced an ungrammatical past perfect; the past perfect construction in Standard Yiddish uses both the present tense of zayn and the past participle of hobn, as in ikh bin gehat geven 'I had been'. In the 50-minute narrative provided by secondary informant AD, there is not a single use of hobn in place of zayn.6 In the 90 minutes of narration provided by secondary informant RG, in which hundreds of present perfect constructions requiring zayn appear, four instances of hobn in place of zayn could be found: (5.12)

Zey hobn gevoynt in Bridgeport, zev hobn gekimen fin ungam... (RG)

(5.12')

'They lived in Bridgeport, they came from Hungary'

(5.13)

Then hobn mir tserikgeeangen tse Bridgeport...

(5.13')

'Then we went back to Bridgeport...'

(5.14)

So mayn bobe iz gekimen fun zeyer gute menshn vos hobn gehat gelt, vos hobn nisht geven azoy orem...

(5.14')

'So my grandmother came from very good people who had money, who were not so poor...'

(5.15)

Mayn tate hot gegangen tse high school, banakht...

(5.15')

'My father went to high school, at night...'

Despite the fact that these examples resemble present perfect constructions produced by primary informants, I do not believe they reveal divergent competence of this form, evidenced by the overwhelming number of grammatical present perfect forms in RG's 90-minute narration (compare with the ratios presented in Tables 5.1 and 5.2). Other than suggesting that these four examples may be due to the demands of processing Yiddish on-line after long disuse, an explanation that, as with informant RB, does not appear to stand up to scrutiny, I am unable to offer a viable explanation for these few divergent forms.

5

6

Note that there is an irregular class of verbs taking hobn whose past participles end in -nl-en, e.g., geshribn 'wrote', gesen 'saw', though regular verbs are in a statistical majority. As mentioned previously, AD did produce a single ungrammatical application of the h/z rule, in which she actually used zayn in place of hobn.

79 In this section I have indicated that for speakers who fully acquired an LI possessing the h/z rule, decades of disuse and overall language attrition (e.g., case syncretism) will not cause an overall simplification of the h/z rule to the single auxiliary hobn. The occasional divergent manifestations of the h/z rule might be attributed, at best, to some sort of grammatical processing overload. Whatever the underlying cause of these divergent examples, it appears clear that they are not characteristic of secondary informants' Yiddish overall. The crucial point is that the Yiddish h/z rule appears to be a form which, once mastered in childhood, remains robust and is not lost from one's linguistic competence.

5.5

Bilingual and monolingual LI acquisition

Because comparable, Yiddish-speaking immigrant children are not available for study (Hasidic children's sociolinguistic situations differ in many key regards from those of informants), it becomes reasonable to examine examples of bilingual LI acquisition in which English is acquired simultaneously with a Germanic language possessing a robust, typologically similar h/z rule. Additionally, based on what we know of the social/sociolinguistic circumstances of acquisition and use of informants (see chapter 4), it is important to consider only immigrant families, rather than other sorts of language contact situations (e.g., speech islands, such as Pennsylvania Dutch or Yiddish among the Hasidim). Furthermore, like primary and secondary informants, the children in question must have heard and used both languages from earliest infancy. Although there is a paucity of literature relevant to the issues under discussion on bilingual LI acquisition overall (De Houwer 1990:9) and the extant body of data in the literature often proves to be confounded by several methodological/theoretical difficulties (De Houwer 1990:9-16), two studies appear to correspond well to the criteria mentioned above. The first is the often cited study by Leopold (1970/1939-1949) of a child acquiring German and English primarily in an English-dominant environment. The second study is De Houwer's (1990) investigation of a child learning Dutch and English primarily in a Dutch-dominant environment. To reiterate, the main purpose of examining the data of these two studies is to establish the fate of the h/z rule for each child. Yet two further questions are also pertinent to determining which of the three scenarios best accounts for primary informant data. First, how might the respective dominant language relate to what happens with the h/z rule with each child? Second, how does the development of the h/z rule for monolingual children progress, i.e., do monolingual German-speaking children also tend to reduce to the single auxiliary habenl I would like to address this last question first, before proceeding to the discussion of Leopold and De Houwer. Mills (1985), in reviewing the available data on German monolingual child language acquisition, finds conflicting reports from researchers about whether children produce divergent applications of the h/z rule or not. Without specifically stating the source of the information, she summarizes that from age 4;0 onwards [e]rrors are still frequent in the past tense of irregular verbs. Children tend to overgeneralize the use of the auxiliary haben to those verbs which should have sein, since this use cannot be predicted by any clear rule (157). Scupin and Scupin's (1907, 1910, cited in Mills 1985:170) child, Bubi, apparently produced ungrammatical present perfect forms between the ages of 2;10 and 5;0. Ramge (1973, cited in Mills 1985:170) reports self-corrections in the present perfect auxiliary as late as age 6;0. Yet Mills also mentions Stern and Stern's (1928) observation that their child was using the present perfect

80 grammatically at age 3;2 (Leopold (1939-1949) 1970 also noted this observation). Likewise, Mills (1985:170) includes in her discussion Park's (1971a,b) claim that his informant produced no ungrammatical present perfect forms. To this discussion I would like to add some observations of my own of extant German child language data. I examined monolingual child language data in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney 1995), which contains several transcripts of children acquiring German. I consider here the transcripts of Clahsen (1982) and Wagner (1985). Although the data of just these two sets of transcripts do not lead to any airtight conclusions, I noted two important points. First, the h/z rule appears to become psychologically real for the monolingual German child fairly early, by around age 3;0 (and possibly earlier). Children at this age appear to include in their speech some form of both the present perfect auxiliary and past participle. Second, in no instance in the extensive database did any child use the auxiliary haben in a construction in which seitt was required. This does not mean that these children did not produce divergent forms, rather only that they did not do so while being recorded. Obviously, based on the comments of Mills, and the findings of Scupin and Scupin (1907, 1910) and Ramge (1973), who noted divergent manifestations of the h/z rule, the question is not whether monolingual children produce divergent manifestations of the h/z rule, rather the following: 1) how frequently do they produce divergent forms and, more importantly, 2) at what point or points in their linguistic development do they produce such forms? The extant literature (before or since Mills' 1985 review) does not appear to provide an adequate answer to the former question. To the latter question of when childeen produce divergent forms, the conclusions of Marcus et. al (1992) may be helpful by extension to manifestations of the h/z rule under discussion. With reference to children's overregularization of English past tense forms (e.g., *goed), Marcus et al. confirm the long observed phenomenon that monolingual children produce grammatical forms early on, then go through a phase of overregularization, eventually returning to the adult-like form. They assert, however, that the number of overregularizations has been greatly exaggerated by researchers over the years, and they demonstrate that while children do overregularize forms, they do so to a very limited extent overall (median 2.5% of 11,251 irregular past tense tokens produced by 83 children: 1). In short, child language may be much more like the adult target language than researchers have believed, and researchers of monolingual child language development may be focusing to a disproportionate degree on divergent forms that do not actually occur with great frequently compared with grammatical forms. The extent to which overregularizations occur more frequently overall among bilingual children is currently under investigation (Levine 2000). The Marcus et al. model may account for the apparent discrepancies in the observations of the researchers reviewed by Mills. Monolingual German-speaking children actually may go through an initial phase of grammatical production of the h/z rule (from around age 3;0), move through a period of variable performance in which they occasionally overregularize the rule (to haben), and eventually iron out the overregularizations. Further, if the findings of Marcus et al. can be extended to this situation, it may be that such ungrammatical forms appear rarely in children's speech overall, contributing to the apparent disagreement among scholars (e.g., the transcripts that I examined in the CHILDES database represent many hours of child speech, yet no divergent manifestation of the h/z rule could be found). An important point to remember for the present discussion is that by age 6;0 (and probably much earlier), monolingual children apparently master the adult h/z rule in their German grammars. For the present study, the question remains open as to the extent to which monolingual-child learning of the h/z rule resembles that of the bilingual child from one stage of linguistic development to the next. It is shown in the following that in the bilingual situation the differences may depend heavily on the dominant language, and on the social/sociolinguistic factors that were discussed in chapter 4.

81 Before proceeding to the next section I would like to mention that in each of the two situations considered in the following (Leopold and De Houwer), there are several sociolinguistic differences from primary informants: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5)

the parents were highly educated; the families enjoyed a much higher socioeconomic status than did any of the primary informants as children; in each situation the practice of 'one parent-one language' prevailed; in each situation it was at least one parent's explicit desire to have the child learn the LI (German/Dutch); in the case of De Houwer, there was no social stigma attached to either of the child's languages (there was a certain stigma associated with German in Leopold's study, due to World War II).

Despite these sociolinguistic differences, I believe these studies are relevant and comparable to the present study because 1) both are immigrant situations, and 2) each child heard and used both languages from birth.

5.6

Bilingual LI acquisition of German and English: Leopold (1970/1939-1949)

Leopold's (1970/1939-1949) longitudinal study of his daughter's bilingual language acquisition has been frequently cited, discussed, praised, and criticized in the fields relating to language acquisition. Despite its shortcomings as a 'modern' study of language acquisition (for example, only speech produced by the child in Leopold's own presence was recorded), I am able to take advantage of many parts of his data, as well as his own comments on this data, for the purposes of this investigation of the h/z rule. Hildegard, Leopold's daughter, was born July 3, 1930. She remained an only child until age 6;0. Leopold, a native German speaker, was a professor of German in Evanston, Illinois during Hildegard's childhood. His wife was a native speaker of English born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, employed as a grade school and high school teacher. She was a proficient foreign-language speaker of German. Except for two visits to Germany (age 0;11-1;2 and 4;ll-5;6), Hildegard spent most of her time in Evanston and Milwaukee. Leopold writes that ...Hildegard was constantly exposed to both languages; her father spoke to her from the very beginning exclusively in German and adhered to this principle with rigidity; the mother spoke English always, but had somewhat of an inclination to use certain German words which the child had learned. The parents spoke to each other regularly each in his own language. The remaining environment, including servants, spoke English. German-speaking visitors, in spite of requests to speak German to her, would always fall into English as soon as the child's speech was predominantly English. Obviously, the position of English was under these circumstances much stronger than that of German (vol. 1:13). Additionally, already by age 3;2 Leopold notes that Hildegard speaks only English with her friends, who also are growing up bilingual, and that "English is the natural language for speaking with other children" (vol. 4:41). Interestingly, Leopold records no utterance, and makes no mention of the present perfect construction, until Hildegard is age 4;6. When she is age 5;1 Leopold notes that [t]he majority of her numerous mistakes can be traced to English influence. The regular word-order in subordinate clauses seems perfectly fixed: Jetzt geht es gar nicht, weil es hat hingefallen. The auxiliary haben, as always in place of "sein", also agrees with English (vol. 4:93).

82 He goes on to state that at age 5;2, when the family is midway through a six-month stay in Germany, "[t]he auxiliary of verb is always haben. This corresponds to English, but also to local usage, which is based on a Low German substratum" (vol. 4:97). Leopold attributes the supposed single-auxiliary usage to the local Hamburg dialect. Also at age 5;2, the author records one of his daughter's utterances, involving a change of state: Ich hab so viel gegessen, darum habe ich so viel gewachst. 'I ate so much, that's why I grew so much.'

(vol. 4:101)

Further, Leopold mentions the same divergent linguistic forms at ages 5;3, 5;4 (in two separate entries), and 6;2 (also in two entries). At age 5;4 Leopold writes: At the beginning of kindergarten [in Germany], the language has reached a considerable degree of correctness and assurance. The chief mistakes are still the almost invariable use of haben instead of "sein", supported by its local use with verbs of motion, and frequent, though decreasing, mistakes in the use of articles (vol. 4:111). In the second mention of "haben for 'sein'" at age 5;4, Leopold states that "Stern's daughter, p. 65, used the auxiliary always correctly" (vol. 4:112). Stern refers to Clara and William Stern's (1928) diary study of their own children. At 6;2, eight months after the family's return from Germany, he records an utterance by Hildegard in which haben is used rather than the grammatical sein: Sie hat weggelaufen. 'She ran away' The quote is followed by the note in parentheses, "(wrong auxiliary, frequent)..." (vol. 4:138). At the same age (6;2), Leopold also comments that forms such as "£r hat gekommen and similar uses of the wrong auxiliary which had disappeared late in Germany, are beginning to be regular again" (vol. 4:139). This is the last mention of the h/z rule in the work. As is evident from these statements, Leopold was convinced that Hildegard had effectively replaced sein with haben in her German grammar. Further, based on his comment that Stern's (1928) daughter used the form grammatically by age 3;2, it appears that Leopold believed this to have been divergent from the norm. However, I was able to locate several instances in Leopold's own data, often on the same pages as the comments cited above, in which Hildegard does employ sein grammatically. I list all instances in Figure 5.3 below, underlining the present perfect auxiliaries. All but the last of these is a form of the verb sein. I do not comment on the other divergent forms present in these utterances (e.g., word order and case assignment). They are reproduced here as they appear in Leopold (my translations follow each utterance in brackets). As with primary informants, it appears that Hildegard used haben in place of sein as the auxiliary a good deal of the time (it is, of course, impossible to know what percentage of the time), yet based on the few utterances Leopold recorded between age 4;6 and 5;1, it seems reasonable to conclude that Hildegard did have some control of the h/z rule and used sein grammatically some of the time. Yet her mastery of the rule was likely incomplete. It should be mentioned that all the utterances presented in Figure 5.3 above were produced during the family's time in Germany. In this regard, Leopold does note when Hildegard was 6;2 that she had begun to use the present perfect auxiliaries grammatically in Germany, only to revert back to the single-auxiliary system upon the family's return to the U.S. (vol. 4:139). He makes no direct reference to the utterances cited above in Table 5.3, however. As discussed in 5.5 above, monolingual German-speaking children apparently also produce occasional divergent applications of the h/z rule, in all cases replacing sein with haben (Mills

83 1985:157,170). This is apparently a normal part of the acquisition process. Whether Hildegard was ever able to iron out the divergent forms (as an adult speaker) is not recorded by Leopold. Because the family remained in the English-dominant environment of the U.S., it is possible that she did not. The important points with reference to primary informants are 1) that there are strong similarities between manifestations of the h/z rule in Hildegard's childhood speech and those of primary informants today, and 2) Hildegard was apparently producing divergent manifestations of the rule in her German at a relatively late age (compared to when monolingual children would have ceased using haben where sein would be grammatical. Age 4;6 While I was writing this, she suddenly recited for the first time the rhyme: Eins, zwei, drei, vier,filnf,sechs, siebenWo ist denn mein Schatz geblieben? ['One, two, three, four,five,six, seven Just where did my love stay?7=Just where can my love be?] (vol. 4:65) 5;0 Einen Tag wir sind da gegangen... ['One day we went there'] (vol. 4:85) 5;0 Wenn ich wär gesprungen Bock erst, ich wäre nicht runtergepurzelt... ['If I had jumped feetfirst,I would not have tumbled down...'] (vol. 4:85) 5;0 Es ist ein kleines bisschen [sic] gut gegangen. ['It went a little bit well'] (vol. 4:86) 5;1 ...wenn Vater und Mutter sind spät gekommen... ['...when Father and Mother came late...'] (vol. 4:91) 5;1 Diesen Ball ist von den Ende bis zu diesen gegangen (ends of the hall). ['This ball wentfromthat end to this one'] 5;1 Einmal hat der Ball auf diese beiden Glassen gesprungen (glass shelves for hats in the hall). ['Once the ball bounced on these two glasses'] (vol. 4:91) Figure 5.3: Instances of grammatical application of the h/z rule by Hildegard

5.7

Bilingual LI acquisition of German and English: De Houwer (1990) and the role of the dominant language

In this section I consider the findings of De Houwer (1990) as they pertain to the h/z rule. De Houwer conducted a longitudinal study of Dutch/English bilingual LI acquisition. Her informant, Kate, was the daughter of an American mother and a Flemish father (71). Born in Antwerp, Belgium, Kate spent most of her life up to age 3;4 in Dutch-speaking Antwerp, interrupted by

84 several short visits in the United States (none longer than 5 weeks; she also spent six months in Australia from 0;4-0;9) (72). As mentioned in 5.2 and presented in Figure 5.2, similar rules, and nearly identical auxiliary lexical items, obtain in Dutch as in SY. Like German, however, (and unlike SY), Dutch also has a frequently-used simple past. De Houwer's study follows Kate's development for a period of eight months from age 2;7 to 3;4. The parents employed, as did the Leopolds, the 'one parent-one language' approach to the positive linguistic input. Her mother spoke English with her, and her father and paternal grandparents spoke Dutch. With regard to the amounts of Dutch and English heard, De Houwer writes that [o]n week-days, English is heard by the child much more often than Dutch, with an average of about 10 hours of English versus about 4 hours of Dutch a day (of course part of the day will include an overlapping of both languages, e.g., when both parents are interacting with the child in the same room.) This is mainly due to the fact that Kate goes to an English-speaking pre-school, a small private school with a low pupil to teacher ratio. (Before Kate started going to school at age 2;6, the input for both languages on week-days was about equal: for three mornings a week she was cared for by a Dutch-speaking neighbor.) On week-ends, Dutch tends to be heard more often than English (Kate's father spends more time with her then, and this is mostly the time when the grandparents are present; also visits to Dutch-speaking acquaintances and friends tend to take place on week-ends). Kate occasionally spends a week alone with her monolingual Dutch-speaking grandparents in the holidays or during the school-term when her parents are away on business trips (73-74). It is important for the purposes of this discussion to note that although Kate lives in a Dutchdominant environment, she hears more English on weekdays than Dutch (in terms of number of hours). This section must of necessity be markedly briefer than the previous section on Leopold's study of Hildegard, for one important reason. De Houwer's informant apparently never produced a divergent application of the h/z rule (185, 206). De Houwer also writes that in monolingual Dutch acquisition, the choice of the right auxiliary is not always successful but inappropriate choices are rare ... Nowhere in the monolingual literature is there any mention of a major shift from the use of one auxiliary to the other. Again, then, the data from Kate resemble those for monolingual Dutch children (206). This observation appears to agree, more or less, with that of Mills (1985) for monolingual German children, who, as discussed in 5.6, found that despite some evidence to the contrary, it seems to be the case that monolingual children do produce occasional divergent present perfect constructions; De Houwer sums up the situations more appropriately, then, by asserting that divergence in the h/z rule does not constitute a "major shift from the use of one auxiliary to the other." Hence, Kate's performance of the h/z rule can be said to resemble that of monolingual language learners (of Dutch) much more than of primary informants in this study. The question remains, why does performance in the present perfect differ so diametrically between Kate and Hildegard, whose performance with the h/z rule more closely resembles that of primary informants? I suggest that it has to do with two factors. First, the dominant language of the community: In Hildegard's case, German, as the language possessing the h/z rule, was not the dominant language of the environment. Note here that the grammatical use of sein by Hildegard, as recorded by Leopold (Figure 5.3), coincided with her presence in a German-dominant environment. In Kate's case Dutch was undoubtedly the dominant language of the community, regardless of the fact that in De Houwer's estimation Kate heard more English than Dutch on a week-to-week basis (after age 2;6).

85 The second factor brings us back to the subject of chapter 4, namely the quantity and quality of the linguistic input, and the patterns of use among family members and others. In Kate's case, the child was hearing a great deal of diverse input in both languages from birth. Her father was not the only Dutch interlocutor, rather grandparents, friends, acquaintances, and of course the many people one encounters in public, likely provided Kate with ample input and opportunities to communicate in an appropriate range of domains and registers in Dutch. In the case of the Leopold family, with the exception of the six months spent in Germany, Hildegard's primary source of linguistic input in German was her father. And it should be reiterated that Leopold noted and recorded grammatical linguistic performance in the present perfect for their time in Germany, which apparently reversed itself when the family was back in the United States (vol. 4:139). Furthermore, as mentioned in 5.5, neither Dutch nor English was stigmatized in any way in Kate's environment; on the contrary, both languages enjoy very high prestige among the Flemish. As discussed in chapter 4, in the U.S. of the 1930's, languages other than English, and often the people who spoke them, were regarded with mistrust or outright disdain by the mainstream population. Of course, with the rise of Nazi Germany and the outbreak of World War II (when Hildegard was 9;2), the stigmatization of German in particular was intensified, even more so than it had been during and after World War I. This is reflected, I believe, in one of Leopold's last entries on his daughter's linguistic development, when she was 14;0: [August 9, 1944] The day before yesterday, when we were walking up the main street of Sister Bay, she suddenly made an unprecedented remark: Oh, Papa, don 7 speak German in the street. I think there was no war prejudice at the root of this protest. There are no other indications of it. The basis is presumably the striving for conformity, which is a very strong impulse with her - no longer for conformity with the family group, on the contrary; but conformity with the outside world, usually the world of adolescents of her own age (vol. 4:152). Despite Leopold's belief that Hildegard had no "war prejudice", it is likely that the peer pressure of which he writes had communicated to Hildegard that German would hinder her acceptance in society. Compare this diary entry with the quote from the Forverts at the opening of chapter 4. Hence, it is apparent that children respond overtly to the language attitudes in their environment, even at a very early age, as Leopold observes when Hildegard is just age 3;2: First resistance to a language which is not that of the environment: On the trip [to Wisconsin] she imitated German sentences. In a thoughtful moment, however, she addressed me, Papa! I inquired: "Ja, Hildegard?"- Papa, why do you have those words?- "Weil ich deutsch spreche" ['because I speak German'].- But Papa, that isn't nice. So far this has been the mood of the moment, which has had no repercussions on her general attitude (vol. 4:41). Finally, it should be noted that Hildegard apparently did not achieve balanced bilingualism by age 12;5. Leopold states when she is this age that she prefers English because her ability to express herself in German is limited (vol. 4:150). I have suggested in this section that the social and sociolinguistic factors involved in the acquisition and use of the respective Germanic varieties under consideration appear to be related to whether and how a child acquires control over the h/z rule. Whereas both children were raised in a 'one-parent-one language' bilingual environment from birth, the fate of the h/z rule was very different for each child. Hildegard, whose sociolinguistic profile corresponds in many ways to that of my informants, did not apparently master the h/z rule (she likely possessed a measure of competence in the rule, however). Kate, however, apparently did acquire control over the rule at an early age.

86

5.8

Conclusion

The evidence presented here suggests that Scenario 3 accounts best for manifestations of the h/z rule among primary informants in the interview data. I print the text again here for the reader's convenience: Scenario 3: Incomplete LI acquisition Informants never fully acquired 'full competence' in the h/z rule, because they shifted away from Yiddish as their primary language prior to the time at which most (Germanic language) monolingual language learners iron out difficulties in this form (4-5 years of age). Hence, the divergent forms evident in their current speech are essentially a combination of 1) fossilized child language and 2) dealing with incomplete knowledge in the face of the need to communicate. LI attrition does not play a role here. Essentially, I believe the data reveal fossilized child language in their application of the h/z rule, of which several primary informants demonstrate some knowledge. On the one hand, primary informants ceased using Yiddish (and most positive input ended) before the h/z rule could be ironed out; the evidence presented here also suggests that children in primary informants' situation (e.g., Hildegard) have a far greater level of difficulty with the h/z rule than children in other situations (e.g., Kate and monolingual children). On the other hand, the social and sociolinguistic circumstances of primary informants' acquisition and use of Yiddish precluded them from ever fully acquiring the rule. Additionally, processing requirements of the h/z rule and the fact that secondary informants did occasionally produce divergent present perfect forms suggests that primary informants also are dealing with 'processing difficulties' to some extent during interviews. The exact nature and extent of these processing difficulties should be the subject of future research.

6

Conclusion

6.1

Summary of this monograph

With this study I have demonstrated that the phenomenon of incomplete LI acquisition is a viable object of study in its own right. Furthermore, I sought to bring Yiddish in general, and this population of Yiddish speakers in particular, to the attention of scholars interested in LI attrition, language death, language acquisition, and bilingualism. Lastly, I have shown here that incomplete LI acquisition is qualitatively different from LI attrition. Linguistic features can be isolated in speakers' speech that are the result of incomplete LI acquisition and not of LI attrition. In the following I would like to summarize the entire monograph. In chapter 1 the theoretical framework of the study was presented and relevant literature in the fields relating to this study was discussed, namely child language acquisition, bilingual LI acquisition, LI attrition, language death, incomplete LI acquisition, and linguistic investigations of Yiddish speakers. In chapter 2 I described the study upon which this monograph is based, focusing first on inherent difficulties of studying speakers of an obsolescent language. Thereafter I discussed the population under consideration and described the pilot studies conducted that helped to isolate the judgment sample ultimately defined and selected. I divided the sample into primary and secondary informants. Primary informants include U.S.-bom offspring of Yiddish-speaking immigrants. Speech data from secondary informants, speakers who 'fully acquired' Yiddish as children but who also have not used the language in many decades, served throughout this work as a sort of control group against which I compared the speech of primary informants. I then described the details of the field research, i.e., locating informants and conducting interviews. In the process I explained and justified the methods employed throughout the study. In order to best summarize the remainder of this book, I would like to return to the research questions posed in chapter 1: 1) 2) 3)

4) 5) 6)

What does the language of incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation look like (how does it diverge from accepted norms)? What does one 'know' when one knows a language, that is, what sort of abilities characterize a 'native' speaker of a language, and does these differ from those of an LI speaker of that language? How can the phenomenon of incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation best be accounted for, i.e., what factors are most salient in bringing about incomplete LI acquisition or, conversely, in hindering complete acquisition of the adult language? What role do the dynamics of the immigrant situation play in incomplete LI acquisition? What is the relationship between LI attrition and incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation? Is it possible to separate the linguistic effects of incomplete LI acquisition from those of LI attrition, many decades after the former ended and the latter began?

Questions 1) and 2) were addressed in chapter 3. In this chapter I first established that primary informants should be considered LI speakers of Yiddish (rather than L2), but that their limited abilities in the language preclude their classification as 'native' speakers according to my definition of the term. I suggest, then, that the term 'native' deserves reconsideration, at least in the case of bilingual speakers, due to the difficulty in assigning the label to many speakers. It may be more appropriate to classify bilingual speakers according to L1/L2 or 2L1, and according to their dominant language (in ability).

88 I then examined several features evident in primary and secondary informants' speech which diverge from accepted norms. The purpose of this analysis was to determine whether primary informants' speech is qualitatively, and quantitatively, different from that of secondary informants. Such a determination would allow us to identify linguistic manifestations of incomplete LI acquisition as distinct from those of LI attrition. Despite an indication that secondary informants' speech diverges somewhat less frequently from accepted norms than that of primary informants, it was shown that none of the data of features under consideration reveal significant differences between primary and secondary informants. Chapter 4 deals essentially with questions 3) and 4). In this chapter I discussed the social and sociolinguistic factors of the acquisition and use of Yiddish among informants. The goal here was to explore the dynamics of incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation, and, if possible, attempt to capture some of the complexity of the phenomenon through several generalized variables. With this analysis I demonstrated how, and why, incomplete LI acquisition 'happened' (or didn't happen) among the children of Yiddish-speaking immigrants in the U.S. Specifically, I considered the 'break in linguistic tradition' (Anderson 1982) inherent to the immigrant situation in terms of three variables, speaker practice vis-à-vis inadequate exposure, attitudes toward LI, and linguistic identity. It was argued that circumstances subsumed under these three variables bring about, and effect the course and speed of, the break in linguistic tradition. Considered together, it was hypothesized that these circumstances have linguistic/structural manifestations which are different from those evident in the LI attrition situation. Having established the particular social and sociolinguistic circumstances of primary informants, it remained to isolate such linguistic/structural manifestations of incomplete LI acquisition. Thus chapter 5, which responds to questions 5) and 6), focused on a single grammatical rule, namely the choice of auxiliary in the Yiddish present perfect. The purpose of the analysis was to determine whether, in the face of points made in chapter 4, it is possible to isolate a grammatical feature in primary informants' speech that is the result of incomplete LI acquisition and not the result of LI attrition. Included as evidence in this discussion was data from secondary informants, as well as from bilingual LI acquisition and monolingual child language acquisition. It was demonstrated that the linguistic/structural manifestations of incomplete LI acquisition are sometimes different from those of LI attrition, and that, in the case of primary informants' Yiddish, the factors discussed in chapter 4 apparently correlate positively with the divergent feature analyzed in chapter 5, the choice of auxiliary in the present perfect.

6.2

Implications of the study

The present study carries implications for issues in the fields to which it relates directly, namely LI attrition and language death, child language acquisition, and bilingualism. In this section I consider a few of these implications. Thereafter, possible directions for future research of incomplete LI acquisition in general, and of the population under investigation in particular, are considered. Seliger and Vago (1991:4-6) discuss the nature of bilingualism in cases of LI attrition, and present their understanding of the role played by Universal Grammar (UG) in the languages of a bilingual speaker. Their goal is to provide a theoretical foundation for the phenomenon. The authors assert that the bilingual speaker (no age categories given) moves through three stages of bi-

89 lingualism, compound I, coordinate, and compound II (based on Silva-Corvalän 1991). I reproduce here Seliger and Vago's representation of the relationships at work between LI, L2 and UG: Compound I bilingualism

Coordinate bilingualism

Compound II bilingualism

LI UG

LI L2 UG

L2 L2 LI UG UG

->

L2 L2

L2 L2 L2

LI L2 L2 L2? LI

Compound I bilingualism is the stage at which "the speaker is just beginning the process of acquiring an additional linguistic system (L2)"(4). At this stage, "the learner utilizes the knowledge o f . . . LI as a source for hypotheses about... L2" (4). The authors appear to assume at the outset that the speaker has acquired LI fully before acquiring L2. At all three stages, the authors assert that UG is employed by the speaker to form hypotheses about L2. Coordinate bilingualism is characterized by the independent development of two grammars in the speaker's mind, although "there is still a role for LI transfer (interference) and universal principles." Again, full acquisition of LI appears to be assumed. At the stage of compound II bilingualism, the grammar of LI is influenced by the now dominant L2. Essentially, "there is a restructuring of the first language according to grammatical principles found in the second"(6). The authors are not sure what role UG might play at this stage. Allowing for code mixing as an on-line strategy (i.e., 'voluntary' influence of L2 on L I ) as one explanation for cases of compound II bilingualism, they also suggest that this last stage may be indicative of "gradual language attrition or loss as the bilingual increasingly loses control of conditions that constrain mixing"(6). The assumption that the speaker whose speech exhibits the characteristics of LI attrition did at one time acquire full competence in LI, underlies a great deal of the LI attrition literature. Of course, in many cases it is easy to ascertain that the speaker did in fact acquire full competence (e.g., in the case of a speaker who immigrated to a new country after puberty). Yet there are also many situations in which the speaker did not fully acquire LI, and that it is sometimes impossible to know through the speaker's self-report whether or not she or he did fully acquire LI (e.g., primary informants in this study, speakers of East Sutherland Gaelic, speakers of Cajun French; see Dubois and Melan?on 1995). Yet because the linguistic manifestations of LI attrition and incomplete LI acquisition are similar in so many ways, it would be called for to revise the current approach to LI attrition, as represented by Seliger and Vago's model, to include the possibility of incomplete LI acquisition. It could be argued that doing so may unnecessarily complicate the situation to the point of confounding investigation of the phenomenon, that assuming full acquisition of LI provides a logical common starting point for all studies of LI attrition. Yet if this assumption accounts for only a portion of LI attrition scenarios, then revision of the model may lead to greater insights into issues under investigation. With regard to language death, many studies have discussed the process whereby a language recedes through ever-fewer domains of use, until it serves only the most restricted of functions. Few studies address explicitly that the primary actors in this process in many cases are the child language learners of the dying language. While the parents/grandparents do play a key role in the limiting of domains and registers (among other processes at work), it is the children, on the receiving end of intergenerational transmission, who either do or do not fully acquire the dying language. Therefore, any consideration of intergenerational language death should incorporate study of incomplete LI acquisition.

90 T h e study of child language acquisition over the past 20 years or so has focused on many issues; the role of the input and t h e role played by t h e child in the process have been key a m o n g t h e m . T h e present study m a y act as a pointer for future research on issues of both. I have attempted to show that the input, however deficient it may be in the ' n o r m a l ' acquisition process, appears drastically so in t h e bilingual immigrant situation. Yet, as shown through this study, on t h e one hand primary i n f o r m a n t s did acquire a measure competence in Yiddish such that they can converse in the language after decades of disuse, and on the other hand their speech exhibits divergences from the norm which indicate that they did not receive ' e n o u g h ' input to fully acquire the language, i.e., that they ceased hearing and using it before ironing out divergent grammar. T h u s , the question of h o w little is too little input remains to b e explored. Consideration of t h e c h i l d ' s role in her or his acquisition of Yiddish in the immigrant situation w o u l d exceed the scope o f this study, if only because t h e subject of such a discussion should rightly be actual child speakers, not speakers who w e r e children 50 to 70 years ago. Yet I have indicated that primary informants somehow were able to glean enough of the grammar of Yiddish to acquire some m e a s u r e of competence; this alone suggests that the innate faculty and principles for language acquisition operate under even t h e most minimal or adverse conditions. A third issue often discussed in the literature on child language acquisition is L e n n e b e r g ' s ( 1 9 6 7 ) critical period hypothesis. Lenneberg suggested that t h e development of language is possible by virtue of a set of innate constraints present at birth or that appear early in maturation, and that the ability to learn language declines with increasing maturation because the innate constraints that allowed acquisition to occur in the first place themselves decay or weaken maturationally ( N e w p o r t 1991:124). M a n y scholars have investigated and reformulated the hypothesis over the years (see Birdsong, ed. 1999). N e w p o r t ' s (1991) refinement of the hypothesis to include the Less is M o r e Hypothesis accounts well for why it is that children are very good at acquiring languages, w h i l e adults are not. Her reformulation also helps clear up much of the disagreement about when t h e critical period ends (late childhood or puberty). In short, N e w p o r t posits that ...the cognitive limitations of the young child during the time of language learning may ... provide a computational advantage for the acquisition of language, and that the less limited cognitive abilities of the older child and the adult may provide a computational disadvantage for the acquisition of language (125).

N e w p o r t goes on to describe h o w child language learners in the early stages of acquisition appear to acquire "only limited bits and pieces of t h e surrounding language" (125). By contrast, "adult learners in the early stages of [presumably L2] acquisition appear to be much m o r e competent, producing more complex w o r d s and sentences early o n " (125-126). Hence, the child succeeds better than the adult at language learning precisely because she begins with the ability to extract only limited pieces of the speech stream, with a gradual increase over maturation and learning in the amount of material to be analyzed; in contrast, the more capable adult extracts more of the input but is then faced with the a more difficult problem of analyzing everything all at once" (126). So, children do not experience a decrease in language ability, rather an increase in many other sorts of abilities. N e w p o r t ' s hypothesis also accounts well for t h e observation that the ' d e c l i n e ' in language ability begins in middle childhood and continues until puberty. Considered in these terms, this study appears to provide support for N e w p o r t ' s hypothesis, and conversely, the hypothesis may, with further investigation, help account for further aspects of incomplete L I acquisition in the immigrant situation. That most informants ceased using Yiddish actively by the age of ten may not be due solely to t h e social and sociolinguistic factors discussed in chapter 4; it may be that maturational factors also influenced the patterns of primary infor-

91 mants' acquisition of Yiddish. I have implied here that much of the speech evident in the data may be manifestations of fossilized child language. If it is true that language learning becomes more difficult as the child's other cognitive functions mature, then I would suggest that already by age five primary informants had to contend with so many cognitive functions that sorting out grammatical problems with Yiddish would have taken a fairly low priority. Empirical study of children in the immigrant bilingual situation also would be called for to resolve this question. Finally, this study hopefully will have implications for the study of Yiddish speakers in general. As discussed in chapter 1, there is an unfortunate lack of data on actual speakers of the language, although there are still several million speakers worldwide. This study has shown that it is possible and fruitful to carry out field research even with speakers who are not part of a Yiddishspeaking speech community. And as the numbers of LI speakers of Yiddish continues to dwindle in the coming years, the need for such studies becomes ever more urgent.

6.3

Directions for further research

This study is unique in the literature in its investigation of issues of language acquisition among speakers for whom acquisition took place many decades ago. Yet this also limited the strength of the conclusions that could be drawn from the study to, primarily, deduction in the absence of incontrovertible evidence of 1) what actually took place during primary informants' childhood years and 2) what took place in the intervening decades. Therefore, further research of incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation should be conducted with three types of studies. First, a next logical step in research with this particular population would have speakers interviewed several times consecutively, in order to investigate whether informants can 'relearn' the Yiddish of their childhood to any extent, evident perhaps through a reduction in the number of code switches, fewer lexical retrieval difficulties, or a greater use of compound and compound complex sentences. Overall this would help determine in greater detail which aspects of informants' speech are due to LI attrition and which are due to incomplete LI acquisition. Second, a longitudinal study of a child or several children living in similar sociolinguistic circumstances to those of primary informants would provide more conclusive evidence of many of my findings. The child or children in such a study should also speak a Germanic language, such as German or Dutch, if comparison with this study is desired. Ideally, the child should be recorded in her or his natural speech environments (both with parents and peers) from about the one-word stage through school age (age 6-10). Third, a great deal could be learned about incomplete LI acquisition in the immigrant situation from a cross-sectional study of children in similar sociolinguistic circumstances to those of informants, involving groups of children at each stage of acquisition from several typologically different languages. Both of these types of studies could provide a great deal of information about the complex nature of the relationship between incomplete LI acquisition and LI attrition, the creative interplay between the two languages in question (see Kaufman 1991), and the dynamics of bilingual LI acquisition (see De Houwer 1990, 1995, Zentella 1997). Apart from studies with children, however, I have shown here how valuable and rewarding speech evidence from elderly speakers can be, especially in terms of the long disuse of nondominant-language knowledge. Although some scholars are beginning to show interest in such speakers from other immigrant groups in the U.S. (e.g., Fenyvesi 1994), the population of now elderly, former child speakers of immigrant languages is a vast untapped source of linguistic and

92 sociohistorical information. It is hoped that the present study has helped open the door to further investigation of these speakers.

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Index

abrupt transmission failure ('tip') 56,67,68 acts of identity 56 Ainu 94 Albert, Martin L„ 7,16, 93, 97 Albuquerque, 94, 95,97, 99 Altenberg, Evelyn P., 10,11,38,39,98 Americanism 60,62 Anderson, Roger W. 3 , 3 3 , 5 6 , 5 8 , 8 8 , 9 3 , 95 anti-Semitism 61 Aramaic 39,52 Arbeter-Ring (Workman's Circle) 20, 65 Aronoff, Mark 10,96 Ashkenazic Jewry 66, 67 attitudes: community external 60; community internal 60,61,62 attrition LI 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 9 , 1 0 , 1 1 , 1 2 , 1 3 , 1 7 , 2 3 , 35, 41,42,44,46, 49, 50, 54,59, 69,75,76, 86, 87, 88,89,91 Austin 19,21,95 Australia 9 , 8 4 , 9 3 , 9 4 , 9 8 Baetens Beardsmore Hugo, 7,93 Baker, C.L. 4,93 Baldauf, Richard B., Jr. 10, 93 Barzilay, Margaret 9, 97 Bavin, Edith L. 10, 93 Bettoni, Camilla 10,93 Bialystok, Ellen 7,16, 93 bilingual language acquisition 1, 3, 4,13, 69, 79, 83, 87, 88, 91 bilingualism 3, 7, 12, 54, 55, 85, 87, 88, 89; compound I 89; compound II 89; coordinate 89 Birdsong, David 1,59, 90, 93 Blount, Ban G. 7,93 boundary-marking activities 67 Brenzinger, Matthias 10,93, 97, 98 Breton 9 , 9 4 Bridgeport 22,23,78 Briggs, Charles L. 24,25,93 Bronx, the 15,21,23,61 Cajun French 89,94 Campbell, Lyle 9,93

Cary, Susan 93,97 cheder (Jewish religious school) 20, 60 Chicago 15,21,65,96,99 Chomsky, Noam 1,4, 5,7, 32, 93, 97 Clahsen, Harald 80,93 Cleveland 15,21,65 clubs, Yiddish 18,19 Clyne, Michael 9 , 1 0 , 2 0 , 3 5 , 9 3 , 9 4 code boundaries 56,67,68 codeswitching 8, 38, 42, 46, 54, 57, 97 communicative competence 6, 7, 31, 32, 33, 34,97 communicative priority list 75 Connecticut 22,23 constructing voices 56 Coughlin, Father Charles E. 61 Daughters of the American Revolution 60 Davies, Alan 2 , 3 1 , 3 2 , 9 3 daytshmerish ('Germanish') 40 daytshmerizmen ('Germanisms') 40 de Bot, Kees 9 De Houwer, Annick 7, 8, 32, 33, 34, 69, 72, 79, 81,83, 84,91,94 DeChicchis, Joseph 10,94 Detroit 15,95 dialects, Yiddish 40, 47, 51, 72, 75 Dil, Anwar 94,95 Dimmendaal, GerritJ. 10,93 domains 23,25, 33, 34,39,56,57,58,85, 89 Dorian, Nancy C. 6, 9, 10,11,14, 29,30, 31, 33, 54, 56,58, 93, 94, 95 Dressier, Wolfgang U. 9,10, 94 Dubois, Sylvie 89,94 Dutch 9, 69, 70, 71, 72, 79, 81, 83, 84,85,91, 94, 98 Dyirbal 14,58,67 early termination of use 56 East Sutherland Gaelic 6 , 9 , 1 0 , 1 1 , 3 0 , 3 1 , 54, 89,94 Edelsky, Carole 2,94 Ellis Island 60 Emery, OlgaB. 16,94

102 Fabb, Nigel 94,97 Fantini, Alvino 7, 94 Fase, Willem 93,94,95,98 Fenyvesi, Anna 91, 94 Fishman, Joshua A. 10, 12, 58, 63, 64, 66, 94, 95, 96, 99 Fletcher, Paul 94 Florida 16,18,19,21,25 Formosan 94 Fort Lauderdale 18 France 9, 94 Freed, Barbara 9,93,96 Gal, Susan 7,57,58,95 Galicia 67 galitsianer (Polish Jews) 41, 67 Gelman, Rochel 93,97 Genesee, Fred 7,95 German 9, 34, 39, 40, 41,46, 61,62, 69, 70, 71, 76, 79,80, 81, 82,83, 84,85,91, 96,97, 98 Gommans, Paul 20,35,94 Gonzo, Susan 9,10, 11,20,33,58,95 Grand Rapids 21 Great Depression, the 61 Green, Eugene 12, 95 Grosj ean, François 7,31,95 Guion, Susan G. 53, 95 Gumperz, John J. 18, 94,95 Harlem 15,65 Harmon, David 10,95 Harris, Richard Jackson 7, 95 Hasidim 59,79 Haugen, Einar 7, 60, 62,95 Hawkins, John A. 39,95 Hebrew 12,26,39,52,59,62,95 Herdt, Gilbert 98 Herzog, Marvin I. 71,95 Hill, Jane H. 8, 14, 58,62, 63, 64,67, 68,93, 95 hobn/zayn rule, description of 70 Hollywood (Florida) 21 Howe, Irving 15,18,59,95 Hudson-Edwards, Alan 12, 95 Huls, Erica 9,95 Hungarian 94, 95 Hyltenstam, Kenneth 7, 95, 96 Hymes, Dell 6,96

identity 12,15,18, 56, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67 inadequate exposure 57,58,68,88 incomplete LI acquisition, definition of 1 input: deficiency of. See also Plato's problem Israel 40,62,77,78 Jaffe (Joffe), Judah A. 12,96 Jakobson, Roman 9, 96 Jaspaert, Koen 93,94,95,98 Jewish Daily Forward 55, 97 Jochnowitz, George 12, 96 Jordan, Riverda H. 60 Katz, Dovid 52,96 Kaufman, Dorit Hannah 2, 9, 10,18, 44, 57, 91,96 Klein, Wolfgang 70,96 Kroon, Sjaak 93,94,95,98 Kulikov, Leonid 96 Kynette, Donna 16,96 LI acquisition: simultaneous, definition of 7 Labov, William 9,25,96 Lambert, Richard D. 9,93,96 language: death 1, 3,4, 9, 10, 11,13, 33, 55, 58, 68, 87, 88, 89, 97, 98; loyalty 12; maintenance 10,12, 18, 66,95; obsolescence 3, 9, 14, 27, 30, 87; sociology of 10, 12 Le Page, R.B. 18, 63, 64, 65, 68,96 Lenneberg, Eric 1,59,90,96 Leopold, Werner F. 7,58, 69, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 96 Levine, Glenn S. viii, 33, 34, 77, 80, 96 Lightfoot, David 4,5,6,96 linguistic identity 3, 8, 56,57, 58, 63, 64,65, 66, 67, 68, 88 linguistic tradition, break in 3, 56, 57, 59, 61, 67, 68, 88 Lithuania 22,67 litvakes (Lithuanian Jews) 67 Loepold, Hildegard 69, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86 Lowenberg, Peter 96,97 Lower East Side 15,21, 23, 61,65, 97 MacWhinney, Brian 80, 94, 96 Mäher, Julianne 10,11,96 mame-loshn (Yiddish) 62 Marcus, Gary F. 80,96

103 Mark, Yudl 12,71,96 Martin-Jones, Marilyn 2,97 Mayan 94 Mazurkewich, Irene 10,97 McCarthy, John J. 4,93 Meisel, Jttrgen 7,8,33,97 Melanfon, Megan 14, 89, 94 metalinguistic awareness 8.16. 32. 61 Metzker, Isaac 55, 97 Mexicano 14,58,62,67 Mills, Anne E. 79, 80, 82, 84, 97 Milroy, Lesley 17,25,97 Muntzel, Martha C. 9,93 Myers-Scotton, Carol 8,57,97 New Mexico 94,95,97,99 New York 12,15, 20, 21, 22,23, 55, 59,60, 65, 75, 93,94, 95,96, 97,98, 99 Newport, Elissa L. 1,34,59,90,97 night school, English language 15,59 Noble, Schlomo 99 North African Jewry. See Sephardic Jewry Obler, Loraine K. 7, 16, 93, 95, 97, 98 Olshtain, Lite 9,97 one-way vertical communication 56 Paikeday, Thomas M. 1, 5, 7,28, 31, 32, 97 Palestine 59 Park, Tschang-Zin 80,97 past participle 43, 44, 70, 71, 73, 78, 80 past participles 36, 43, 44, 45, 53 Peltz, Rakhmiel 12,18,71,97 Pembroke Pines 16,18,21 Pennsylvania Dutch 79 personal-pattern variation 29 Philadelphia 15, 18,21,65,71,94,96,97 pilot study 3,15, 16,19, 24,25, 27, 29, 33,48, 77, 87 Plato's problem 4, 5, 7 Poland 74,95 Polinsky, Maria 9,97 Polish 20,62 Pratt, Mary Louise 18, 97 present perfect tense 4, 6, 25,36, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 88 Preston, Dennis R. 9, 56, 58,67, 97 primary informants: description of 20 processing difficulties 42, 76, 78, 86

proficiency continuum 29 purism, linguistic 14,62,68,94 Ramge, Hans 79,80,97 Rayfield, J.R. 12, 24, 57, 61, 97 registers 23, 25, 33, 34, 39, 56, 57,58, 85, 89 Romaine, Suzanne 2, 7, 18, 93, 97,98 Rössing, Carola 20,35,94 Russia 22,41,74 Russian 20,41 Saltarelli, Mario 9, 10, 11, 20, 33, 58,95 San Antonio 15 Sasse, Hans-Jürgen 10,98 Saville-Troike, Muriel 6, 98 Schaechter, Mordkhe 70,98 Schaerlaekens, Annemarie 72, 98 Schatz, Henriette 57, 83, 98 Schaufeli, Anneli 58,98 Schweder, Richard A. 98 Scotland 9 Scupin, Ernst and Gertrud 79, 80, 98 secondary informants: description of 22 self-hatred, Jewish 61 Seliger, Herbert W. 9,10, 30, 56, 88, 89,94, 96, 97,98 semilingualism 2 semi-speakers 6 separate development hypothesis 8 Sephardic Jewry 66 Sharwood Smith, Michael 4, 57, 98 Silva-Corvalàn, Carmen 98 single system hypothesis 8 Slobin, Dan I. 32,97,98 sociolinguistic model of incomplete LI acquisition 56 Sommer, Gabriele 10,98 speaker practice 3,56, 57, 58, 63, 67,68, 88 Stem, Clara and William 79, 82,98 Stigler, James W. 98 structure exaggeration 53 Tabouret-Keller, Andrée 63, 64, 65,68, 96 Tcherikower, Elias 15,98 'tip'. See abrupt transmission failure Turian, Donna 10,11, 38, 39, 98 Ukraine 67 Universal Grammar (UG) 6, 88, 89

104 Vago, Robert M. 9, 56, 88, 89, 94, 96,97,98 van de Mond, Anneke 9, 95 Vater, Heinz 70,96 Viberg, Ake 95,96 Vilna 22 Waas, Margit 9 , 1 0 , 3 5 , 59,98 Wagner, Klaus 80,98 Wasco 14,58,67 Weinberg, Sydney Stahl 58, 59,60,63,98 Weinreich, Max 12,62,98 Weinreich, Uriel 7,10, 12, 37, 52, 99 Weltens, Bert 9,94 West Palm Beach 19,21 Wexler, Paul 97,99 Wodak-Leodolter, Ruth 9,94 Workman's Circle. See Arbeter-Ring World War I 15,62,65,85 World War II 2 1 , 8 1 , 8 5 yeshiva (Jewish religious insititution of higher learning) 60 Yiddishists 59,65 Yiddishkeit 18, 19,61 YIVO 26,96,99 YIVO (Institute for Jewish Research 96,98, 99 Zentella, Ana Celia 20, 99 zhargon (Yiddish) 62 Zionism 59