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Description
The major objective of this project is to better understand the role of second-language acquisition on the diachronic evolution of language structure. Specifically, the research will investigate language use by New Speakers of two language varieties spoken within the Republic of Poland, Kashubian and Wymysorys, in order to better estimate the effect that these motivated individuals’ learning has on language structures at the speech-community level. New Speaker refers to an individual who has learned a language with little or no exposure in the home via educational programs outside the home after a community-level shift. A major point of departure for this research is the observation that New Speakers of minority languages tend to be situated in relatively prominent positions within minority language communities, thus they have an increased potential, compared to majority language learners, to provide model language behavior and influence norms at a wider speech-community level.
The working hypotheses of project are: (a) that linguistic entrenchment can be measured together with lexical and morphosyntactic variation in individual speakers, thereby allowing for an understanding of degrees of acquisition without relying on native-speaker patterns or prescriptive notions of language behavior; (b) that differential patterns of linguistic input between New Speakers and native speakers result in different patterns in lexical/structural entrenchment, which in turn result in differential usage patterns; and (c) frequently used lexical/structural patterns, whether produced by native or New Speakers, provide model input for continued adaptation and reorganization of communicative knowledge across the speech community.
Summary of project results
As a theoretical point of departure, the proposed research was rely on the concept of Linguistic Entrenchment, which refers to a cognitive process whereby individuals constantly reorganize and adapt communicative knowledge. Thanks to cognitive entrenchment of linguistic structures, people are able to unconsciously, automatically, and quickly understand and produce the structures of language. Since the main means of entrenchment is repetition and rehearsal of linguistic input, it is clear that entrenchment is intimately linked with the learning process; it also continues throughout the lifetime of every individual.
The working hypotheses of this project were that Linguistic Entrenchment (i.e. functional fluency) is the target of second language learning, and that entrenchment is measurable. Measuring entrenchment allowed us to understand whether variation in an individual’s linguistic structures, which do not match pedagogical or native speaker-like assumed targets, are fluid (i.e. due to an ongoing learning process) or whether they are stable characteristics of that individual’s idiolect.
These hypotheses were tested by examining language use among New Speakers of two minority languages in Poland, Kashubian and Wymysorys, that are considered endangered and have both recently seen an upsurge in revitalization activities. Language data was elicited from speakers of these languages in a highly structured and comparable way, multiple times with the same cohort of New Speakers. For the purpose of this project, individuals were considered New Speakers in the case when they take it upon themselves to learn and use a minority language, which was not the primary language of their socialization. New Speakers provided an interesting context for testing these hypotheses; since through the course of endangerment and revitalization, New Speakers have come to occupy a numerically and socially prominent role within the speech community(e.g. as language teachers, language rights activists, etc.). This means that stable idiosyncrasies of New Speakers are modeled to a larger proportion of the speech community than idiosyncarsies learners of large majority languages, providing input to the ongoing entrenchment process of New Speakers and non-New Speakers alike. By testing the above-mentioned hypotheses within the theoretical framework of Linguistic Entrenchment in New Speaker contexts, this research was direct evidence for the relationship between language learning and the development of idiosyncratic language varieties, as well as the conventionalization variant structures found in idiosyncratic varieties across the speech community.
Very generally, objectives set forth in the project plan have been met in terms of planned deliverables and scientific findings. Adapting to these challenges necessarily led to adjustments in implementation. For whatever reason, participation interests in the project were low in all target groups, despite out best efforts to recruit participants by advertising in personal networks and social media, as well as implementing a gift-card program to provide some incentive for participation. This means that the number of participants were lower than planned in all research target groups, leading to adjustments in the analytical strategy. For instance, we analyzed data synchronically rather than longitudinally and did not implement some of the more complex analytical techniques envisioned, involving multi regression and panel statistics, since the results of such exercises would not be meaningful considering the number of participants who contributed data sets.
Maintaining flexibility in project implementation throughout, however, allowed us to achieve additional objectives that were not envisioned in the original project plan.
These are:
• inclusion of unplanned data types, namely written Kashubian andWymysorys data, in analyses used in publications and archives
• integration of older spoken Kashubian and Wymysorys data collected by PI into project infrastructure, included in analyses used in publications and archives
• published more manuscripts than planned
• attended more conferences than planned
• development and release of open source software suite for building customizable remote data collection websites
• development and release of online Wymysorys corpus infrastructure
• release of open source program for transcribing audio with speech recognition APIs in Elan .eaf format
• creation of more data archives than planned – in part due to organization and reconsideration of privacy concerns, in part due to collection of unplanned data types
The main impact and implications of NESPOMILA project for linguistics as a discipline. Firstly, we illustrate the importance of New Speakers as a category of language uses who can reveal a great deal about the human language faculty and the ways in which multilingualism and language evolution are interrelated. As a concept, New Speaker is relatively recent and the majority of work in the ca. 20 year history of this concept has focused on the more sociological side of sociolinguistic research; our approach was novel in that we specifically investigated language use and grammatical structure among New Speakers with focus on what these speakers contribute to language evolution. All the NESPOMILA analyses were framed in Usage-based linguistics, which is not novel in and of itself, but we illustrated how the flexibility and more holistic nature of this approach can lead to more convincing conclusions based on relatively atheoretical empirical observations of language use.
The project adds to the body of Usagebased literature with unique case studies and progressive findings. Finally, the main research questions set out in the project aimed to investigate the relationship between multilingualism, language acquisition, and (contact-induced) language change. While in practice, these are treated as separate phenomena and studied under disciplinary isolation, our findings suggest that the same set of cognitive and social processes are responsible for both language acquisition and continuity of integral language structures on the one hand, and paradoxically evolution of language structure on the other. While the PI and CI would certainly advocate further testing of this idea, it offers potential repercussions that would advance our understanding of multilingual behavior at various levels; from effective language pedagogy, to how and why languages evolve, through a better understanding of how the most extreme products of language contact — pidgin and creole languages — come into being.