Project Details
Projekt
Priming in contact-setting bilinguals and monolinguals as a driver of language change
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Helen Engemann
Subject Area
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 437487447
This project investigates structural priming across different speaker populations and environments to test its potential as a psycholinguistic mechanism underlying contact-induced language change. The overarching objective is to establish a causal link between transient changes in individuals’ language processing and lasting diachronic changes at the societal level. Specifically, the project’s objective is to investigate whether priming effects in different speaker populations can account for both actuation and transmission of linguistic innovations, leading to lasting changes in the structure of the input. The underlying hypothesis to be tested is that the social and psycholinguistic conditions inherent in language contact settings and in adolescent age are particularly conducive to language change. The proposed work packages are designed to simulate successive stages in contact-induced language change, i.e., the chain assumed in the RU from input adjustments in speakers’ processing and production to changes in the structure of the output at the community level. To do so, each work package adopts a different priming technique, each of which provides insights into different aspects of processing, assumed to play different roles in language change.The project addresses the above hypotheses with respect to motion constructions in German-Italian simultaneous bilingualism in the high-contact setting of South Tyrol (Northern Italy) as compared to the low-contact setting of Germany. This language pair is chosen because of the typologically hybrid status of Italian, licensing a substantial number of structural variants. This unique situation provides an ideal basis for testing hypotheses regarding priming. It allows the project to investigate the extent to which language contact at an individual and/or community level can shape speakers’processing and production patterns via priming mechanisms. If priming underlies language change, it should be possible to induce between-language priming of motion constructions in Italian-German bilinguals. Crucially, Italian is argued to be currently undergoing language change in the domain of motion, making it an ideal candidate for testing whether contact settings act as catalysts. If they do, then speakers in South Tyrol should display stronger priming than those in Germany. In order to identify plausible agents of change, participants are compared with respect to the nature of priming effects across three dimensions: language background (bilinguals vs. monolinguals); language setting (high-contact vs. low-contact) and age (adolescents vs. adults). The rationale is that different speaker populations may play a differential role at different stages of language change, which this approach will thus enable us to pinpoint.
DFG Programme
Research Units
