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Abstract A large percentage of the world’s languages – anywhere from 50 to 90% – are currently spoken in what we call shift ecologies, situations of unstable bi- or multilingualism where speakers, and in particular younger speakers, do not use their ancestral language but rather speak the majority language. The present paper addresses several interrelated questions with regard to the linguistic effects of bilingualism in such shift ecologies. These language ecologies are dynamic: language choices and preferences change, as do speakers’ proficiency levels. One result is multiple kinds of variation in these endangered language communities. Understanding change and shift requires a methodology for establishing a baseline; descriptive grammars rarely provide information about usage and multilingual language practices. An additional confounder is a range of linguistic variation: regional (dialectal); generational (language-internal change without contact or shift); contact-based (contact with or without shift); and proficiency-based (variation which develops as a result of differing levels of input and usage). Widespread, ongoing language shift today provides opportunities to examine the linguistic changes exhibited by shifting speakers, that is, to zero in on language change and loss in process, rather than as an end product.
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Evidence of syntactic convergence among Russian–Sakha bilinguals
This paper illustrates the implementation of two basic experiments to test word order changes in Russian and Sakha, languages in long–standing contact. We hypothesize that changes in word order may correlate with deeper structural changes and la nguage shift. The experiments show that some speakers are shifting from Sakha to Russian: 4 from a sample of 30 speakers could not produce texts in Sakha, and one third of the sample produced sentences with some errors. At the same time, there were a significant number of mistakes in the Russian production experiments, indicating interference from Sakha and/or imperfect learning. A sociolinguistic questionnaire showed a high level of accuracy between speakers’ self–assessment of their proficiency in each of the target languages as measured by the experiments shown here. Moreover, the simple experiments themselves revealed a number of other production errors and proved to be a reasonable indicator of less than fluent proficiency and of at least the initial stages of language shift.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1761551
- PAR ID:
- 10119067
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Suvremena lingvistika
- Volume:
- 45
- Issue:
- 87
- ISSN:
- 0586-0296
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract This chapter examines the "Silent Problem" in heritage languages (HLs) - the systematic difficulty heritage speakers experience with silent grammatical elements compared to their overt counterparts. Through analysis of null pronouns and gaps in relative clauses, the study reveals consistent patterns where heritage speakers show reduced sensitivity to silent elements in both comprehension and production. The research demonstrates that heritage speakers maintain the basic licensing conditions for null elements but exhibit altered interpretive strategies. They show a stronger preference for subject antecedents in anaphoric dependencies than baseline speakers, following what the author terms the "Position of Antecedent Strategy" (PAS) - consistently choosing the highest structural argument as the antecedent regardless of pronoun type (null or overt). A pilot study on Russian relative clauses using weak crossover (WCO) effects reveals that baseline speakers exhibit bimodal grammar patterns - some using A-bar movement, others using coindexation - while heritage speakers uniformly employ coindexation structures, suggesting a shift from syntactic to anaphoric dependencies. This represents a preference for "Merge over Move" operations in heritage grammars. The chapter identifies several factors contributing to these patterns: (1) reduced perceptual salience of silent elements, (2) heritage speakers' aversion to scalar principles in favor of equipollent oppositions, and (3) difficulty establishing long-distance dependencies. Production data shows heritage speakers often use resumptive pronouns instead of gaps in relative clauses, reflecting the general avoidance of silent elements. The study draws parallels between heritage languages and endangered languages, suggesting these patterns reflect universal consequences of reduced linguistic exposure. The findings contribute to understanding how grammatical representations restructure under conditions of limited input, with implications for theories of bilingual language development and syntactic processing.more » « less
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null (Ed.)Non-native speakers show difficulties with spoken word processing. Many studies attribute these difficulties to imprecise phonological encoding of words in the lexical memory. We test an alternative hypothesis: that some of these difficulties can arise from the non-native speakers' phonetic perception. We train a computational model of phonetic learning, which has no access to phonology, on either one or two languages. We first show that the model exhibits predictable behaviors on phone-level and word-level discrimination tasks. We then test the model on a spoken word processing task, showing that phonology may not be necessary to explain some of the word processing effects observed in non-native speakers. We run an additional analysis of the model's lexical representation space, showing that the two training languages are not fully separated in that space, similarly to the languages of a bilingual human speaker.more » « less
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When a language offers multiple options for expressing the same meaning, what principles govern a speaker’s choice? Two well-known principles proposed for explaining wideranging speaker preference are Uniform Information Density and Availability-Based Production. Here we test the predictions of these theories in a previously uninvestigated case of speaker choice. Russian has two ways of expressing the comparative: an EXPLICIT option (Ona bystree chem ja/She fast- COMP than me-NOM) and a GENITIVE option (Ona bystree menya/She fast-COMP me-GEN). We lay out several potential predictions of each theory for speaker choice in the Russian comparative construction, including effects of postcomparative word predictability, phrase length, syntactic complexity, and semantic association between the comparative adjective and subsequent noun. In a corpus study, we find that the explicit construction is used preferentially when the postcomparative noun phrase is longer, has a relative clause, and is less semantically associated with the comparative adjective. A follow-up production experiment using visual scene stimuli to elicit comparative sentences replicates the corpus finding that Russian native speakers prefer the explicit form when post-comparative phrases are longer. These findings offer no clear support for the predictions of Uniform Information Density, but are broadly supportive of Availability- Based Production, with the explicit option serving as an unreduced form that eases speakers’ planning of complex or lowavailability utterances. Code for this study is availablemore » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.22210/suvlin.2019.087.05
