Conference Programme 

Thursday April 10

 

9:00-9:15

Welcome and announcements 

prof. dr. Paul .M.G. Emmelkamp, Rector of the NIAS
Enoch O. Aboh and Liliane Haegeman
(University of Amsterdam and Ghent University)

9:15-10:00

Salikoko S. Mufwene (The University of Chicago): Primary Linguistic Data, the Feature Pool, and “Language Acquisition” as a Misnomer

I will extrapolate my (2001) notion of FEATURE POOL to “language acquisition” in a non-contact setting. Capitalizing on differences between IDIOLECTS, I submit that all languages as communal constructs avail heterogeneous feature pools which generate COMPETITION, on which the language learner acts as a SELECTION agent, favoring some variants over other alternatives under the pressure of various ECOLOGICAL FACTORS. Thus, the language learner constructs his/her personal system that enables him/her to interpret other speakers successfully and to produce utterances that are intelligible to them, but he/she does not acquire a pre-existing system. Otherwise, which one out of so many idiolects? Besides, from a complexity theory perspective, these are all moving targets that are reshaped over and over again by current interactions. Then, what does PARAMETER-SETTING mean? Is it a gradual or saltatory process? How does it handle intra-systemic typological variation? How can creolistics help address these questions and more?

10:00-10:45

Umberto Ansaldo (University of Hong Kong): Metatypy and language genesis

In this talk I first review the notion of metatypy originally developed to account for the dynamics of typological congruence typically observed in linguistic areas. I discuss the acquisitional rationale underlying the concept of metatypy as interactions between L1 and L2 in terms of shift and erosion. I then move to the genesis of Sri Lanka Malay and argue that this language developed through a process of metatypy involving three different languages. Based on this I suggest that typological convergence is a significant process in the formation of new grammars, in linguistic areas as well as creole-like settings.

10:45-11:00

Coffee/tea break

11:00-11:45

Stef Slembrouck (Ghent University): Category-defying linguistic hybridity. Are we in need of a position “beyond” language as more traditionally understood?

Contemporary conditions of globalization-related multilingualism and migration-affected language use have drawn our attention to linguistic phenomena which tend to be understood in terms of ‘switching’, ‘mixing’ and ‘shifting’ – e.g. Pennycook’s notion of metrolingualism. In recent decades, similar problems of categorization have been raised by the contemporary transformed relationships between varieties of one and the same language – e.g. “tussentaal”, “estuary English”, etc. Called into question are the categories of “a language” and a “language variety”, as the tendencies of hybridity have both been characterized by regularities which (viewed from one angle) warrant a claim to variety status, while also displaying degrees of variability and apparent internal inconsistency which raise the question whether the observed regularities are perhaps not better understood in terms quite different from the traditional notion of a “language variety”. My own background is in interactional and discourse analysis. There one generally appears not too worried by the language theoretical implications of hybridity, as the key concern is with understanding its socio-cultural determinants and the communicative efficacies enabled by it (mostly understood – admittedly, often one-sidedly understood - in terms of language/identity). However, the unattended observation remains that category-defying descriptions beg the existence of categories thus positioned, if only for the purposes of making the descriptive point of hybridity itself. In addition, the question of “what is (a) language?” is hardly addressed at all, let alone that a new or alternative conceptualization is being proposed. In my paper, I want to concentrate on competing perspectives and avenues of explanation for coming to terms with the contemporary challenges posed by hybrid forms of language use. Are we irrevocably reaching a point where we are saying that it is no longer necessary to define language, as the idea of separately identifiable languages and language varieties appears to evaporate and runs the risk of becoming irrelevant to a project of understanding the role of language use in social interaction in the contemporary world? If that is the conclusion, where is our object of enquiry? What alternatives, if any, can be proposed?

11:45-12:30

Thomas Roeper (University of Massachusetts): Minimal Multiple Grammars: What Permits and Constrains Use of Representations Across languages?

We discuss how minimalist concepts can constrain Multiple Grammars and their extension across grammars. Representations that are "Transferrable" should be simple and abstract (refer to Maximal Projections). Therefore they will: a) Entail a Single Module b) Allow No parentheses or optionality c) Avoid Lexical Exceptions. We extend these notions of simplicity to account for: interaction with LF, conflicts with other modules (case assignment), and the role of lexical subcategorization.
In particular, we consider the V2 representation and conditions for its acquisition and extension, in particular, how far the English rule of inversion with quotation is like German V2: "nothing" said Bill. We note, following Breuning (2013) that we have: "nothing" yelled out Bill but not: "nothing" yelled Bill out. We predict that German L2 learners of English may not see this restriction. This requires a recognition of XP YP vP as the abstract representation of the rule in English. This will be further discussed in light of a concept of Default grammars and a Self-correcting mechanism of language acquisition, under the assumption that children's first forms are Unlabelled Adjunctions. We can then make predictions about how L2 learners may approach new input in the same fashion.

12:30-14:00

Lunch

14:00-14:45

Fred Weerman (University of Amsterdam): Variation and age effects

On the one hand the huge variation found in language variants has undermined the ideal of the good-old GB parameters of the 1980s. On the other hand the age effects that have also been found suggest that what these parameters were supposed to explain is real. I will discuss some examples that motivate that children’s sensitivity to form differences in very early stages allows them to recognize not only entirely language-specific patterns, but as a consequence also possible abstract features behind these patterns as soon as this sensitivity interacts with the computational system. If the sensitivity becomes weaker as an age effect, so will the possibility to trigger the abstract features, leading to different sorts of variation.

14:45:15:30

Liisa Buelens and Tijs D'Hulster (Ghent University): The Flemish External Possessor – On the edge of acceptability

In addition to the (internal) nominal ways of expressing possession in Standard Dutch, certain Flemish spoken varieties have a structure similar to the doubling construction (1a), in which the possessor is external to the pronoun-possessee complex (1b).

1. a ‘t moest  lukken  dat [Emma haar velo]  toen juste kapot  was.
       it had-to happen that Emma her bicycle then just  broken was

    b ‘t moest  lukken  dat [Emma] toen juste [haar velo] kapot  was.
       it had-to happen that Emma   then just   her bicycle broken was   

       ‘It so happened that Emma’s bicycle was broken just then’

In a magnitude estimation norming test we studied the acceptability of this External Possessor pattern in tussentaal in West-Flanders and Antwerp (i.e. in the spoken variety in between Standard Dutch and dialect). The results show that this pattern is not as restricted to West Flanders as we had initially expected and that there is more variability in its acceptability scores than with the internal possessor patterns. The data suggests patterns of inter speaker variation that are not determined by dialect region.

 

15:30-15:45

Coffee/tea break

15:45-16:30

Alison Henry (University of Ulster): Acquiring language from variable input: the acquisition of negative concord in Belfast English

This paper reports on a study of 8 children acquiring English in Belfast, where they are exposed to input containing both standard English forms and structures from the local dialect. We report that when exposed to variable forms, children in general acquire both forms, but they do not emerge together; sometimes the standard form is acquired first and sometimes the local form. In particular we will focus on the acquisition of negation, where children acquiring English in Belfast, whose input contains variable use of negative concord, for an extended period use only the standard English forms without negative concord before later also using negative concord forms. Negative concord forms emerge comparatively late, and interestingly they appear no earlier than the ‘intrusive’ negative concord forms which are reported to be used by L1 learners of English (such as Adam (Brown 1973) even when their input does not include negative concord. We suggest that features such as negative concord arise at a natural point in the acquisition of English, but are rapidly lost by learners not acquiring a negative concord variety, while they are retained in those whose input contains negative concord.

16:30-17:15

Susan Pintzuk (University of York): Language change as grammar competition for bilingual speakers

In this talk I demonstrate that some instances of language change involve competition between linguistic variants that do not coexist in stable varieties of languages. For example, in the history of English, the language changed from OV to VO, with individual authors using both variants in the same text. While the choice of OV versus VO in any particular context is governed by factors such as weight/complexity and information structure, I show that the change from OV to VO over time is independent of these influences. Since the difference between OV and VO languages is generally analyzed as a difference in the setting of a UG parameter or feature (e.g. the headedness of VP or vP, or the presence or absence of an EPP feature), the change from OV to VO has been characterized as grammar competition, and speakers ‘bilingual’ in the sense that they use both parameter variants.

17:15-18:15

Discussion: Michel DeGraff

19:00

Dinner

Friday April 11

 

9:15-10:00

Manuela Schönenberger (University of Geneva and University of Oldenburg): Article omission in German by successive bilingual Turkish-German children and article drop in colloquial German

This study focusses on article production by Turkish-German children, who were first exposed to German upon entry to kindergarten in Hamburg at around the age of 3. Turkish does not have articles, but it has an indefiniteness marker (unstressed bir). These children, who were video recorded between the ages of 3;6 and 5;6, initially often drop articles, but after ca. 10 months the omission rate drops to around 20% and then stays at this level until the end of the recordings. This kind of levelling is not found in monolingual German children. In colloquial German, articles can be dropped, but it is difficult to elicit these data. The contexts most often affected seem to be DPs that are topicalized and DPs in light-verb constructions, e.g. (den) Führerschein machen 'get (a) driving licence'. Article omission in the children’s data does not look like article drop, but since these children must be exposed to speakers who drop articles their acquisition of correct article use may be hindered.

 

10:00-10:45

Cécile B. Vigouroux (Simon Fraser University & Collegium de Lyon): The Role of Ideology in Assessing Speakers’ Language Acquisition: The Case of Français tirailleur

My presentation seeks to analyze the role of ideology in assessing the acquisition of French by Senegalese infantrymen between 1914 and 1945. Most of the data available on this alleged military French variety are second-hand written representations found in literary books (e.g., colonial literature), comic books, travelers’ reports, and a training booklet for French officers. These sources are precious to linguists, because they illustrate the multiscalar ideologies that invented this variety, especially: 1) race-based prejudice on the putative simplicity of African languages and superiority of European languages, which can be traced back to the 19th century linguistic taxonomy; 2) the significance of social ideologies in accounts of second language acquisition; and 3) European negative stereotypes on the mental capacity of Africans, supposedly ill-equipped to process the structural complexities or sophistication of European languages.

10:45-11:00

Coffee/tea break

10:50-11:20

Ianthi Tsimpli (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki & University of Reading) and Maria Andreou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki): Bilingual acquisition in different contexts: home vs. majority language

The role of input in bilingualism is considered one of the most important factors which may account for linguistic performance in bilingual speakers. We consider new evidence from Greek-German bilingual children, 8-12 years old who differ in terms of: majority language (country of residence Greece or Germany), home language (minority language only or mixed) and degree of bi-literacy (language of education). Lexical and syntactic measures of performance in a variety of tasks will be considered in relation to the above input variables.

 

11:45-12:30

Pieter Muysken (Radboud, Nijmegen): Re-evaluating code-switching typologies

In this paper I try to systematically evaluate the different typologies of code-switching that have been proposed. I will try make a principled distinction (needed in any case) between phenomena and processes, more so than in earlier work of mine (Muysken 2000, 2013). I will return to a fairly conservative position and try to argue that the distinction between alternation and insertion suffices, but cannot be replaced by the distinction between switching and borrowing, as in Poplack's work.

12:30-14:00

Lunch

14:00-14:45

Caterina Donati (Sapienza University of Rome) and Chiara Branchini (Ca'Foscari University of Venice): Mixed Utterances in a Bimodal Setting

Bimodal bilinguals do not Code Switch (CS): they do not stop speaking to sign or vice versa, but rather sign and talk simultaneously, so called Code Blending (CB). This means that CB can tell a lot on the general phenomenon of bilingualism, being what CS looks like when usual articulatory constraints are suspended.
We will discuss the patterns emerged from two kinds of data: 1) some naturalistic data from a corpus of CB produced by 6 Italian/Italian Sign Language (LIS) KODAs aged 8-10 to provide the research questions and guide the inquiry; 2) grammatical judgments and elicited production data from 2 trained Italian/LIS CODA informants to answer the questions and provide fine grained analyses. We will show that CB tells us that there are indeed two radically different kinds of mixed utterances, requiring two very different involvements of the two lexicons/grammars implicated.

14:45-15:30

Terje Lohndal and Tor Anders Åfarli (Norwegian University of Science and Technology): Language Mixing and Language Contact: The Case of Dakkhini

Most theories of language mixing are not prepared to analyze cases where the mix is the outcome of sustained long-term contact where a new language has evolved, and where the speakers are not necessarily bilingual in each of the languages that are historically blended. The latter scenario obtains in several of the older South Asian contact/convergence languages, e.g., the Dakkhini language, which is a centuries old contact language (mainly spoken in Andhra Pradesh) involving Telugu and Hindi/Urdu (Khan 1974, Mohiddin 1980, Mustafa 2000). According to Arora (2004), Telugu basically provides the grammatical structure of the language (although there are some exceptions that we will discuss), thus constituting the matrix language, whereas Hindi/Urdu provides most of the lexical and functional morphemes. That is, Hindi/Urdu seems to be a language embedded in Telugu structures. This talk will present a new theory of language mixing which we will argue is ideally suited to analyze cases like Dakkhini.

15:30-15:45

Coffee/tea break

15:45-17:00

Discussion: Michel DeGraff

17:00-17:15

Closing