Die Nativierung des Standarddeutschen

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Pröll
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Social History ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
First Language ◽  
First Century ◽  
Time Study ◽  
Present Stage ◽  
German System ◽  
Transitional Phase

Abstract Presently, Standard German is in the process of becoming a nativized variety of German after centuries without native speakers. Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first century, an increasing number of speakers have acquired Standard German as a first language, marking an important transitional phase in its social history. The article first discusses this from a theoretical and socio-historical perspective before providing empirical evidence for this change: Drawing on data from an apparent time study (involving 142 participants aged 20 to 90) and an experimental elicitation (from 35 kindergartners), it documents that at the present stage two typologically distinct systems can be observed in Southern Germany: Both a non-standard suprasegmental system that allows stressed syllables to be light and the Standard German system that requires stressed syllables to be heavy exist and are used simultaneously. The analyses show an ongoing shift towards the Standard German syllable system, proving that the Standard German syllable system is indeed undergoing a nativization process. The article closes with implications for language teaching, variational linguistics and the typological assessment of German that arise from these findings.

scholarly journals Response article Full transfer vs. developmentally moderated transfer: a reply to Bohnacker

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 485-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manfred Pienemann ◽  
Gisela HÅkansson
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Language ◽  
First Language ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Verb Second ◽  
Initial State ◽  
L1 Transfer ◽  
Underlying Theory ◽  
Key Aspects

Ute Bohnacker's (2006) article on the acquisition of the verb second (V2) property in German by native speakers of Swedish (also a V2 language) is an attempted rebuttal of Håkansson et al.'s (2002) work on first language (L1) transfer and aspects of the underlying theory on which the work is based: Processability Theory (Pienemann, 1998). The article by Håkansson et al. presented empirical evidence from a similar population of learners (native language Swedish, target language German), showing that V2 is not transferred at the initial state. Unfortunately, Bohnacker misrepresents key aspects of our work on L1 transfer and, paradoxically, her own data constitute empirical evidence supporting our position, as we show in this response.

Evidence against a link between learning phonotactics and learning phonological alternations

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Youngah Do ◽  
Ping Hei Yeung
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
First Language ◽  
Vowel Harmony ◽  
The Other ◽  
Artificial Languages ◽  
Single Mechanism ◽  
Do So

Abstract Phonological alternations often happen to conform to phonotactic regularities, from which a single mechanism for phonotactics and alternations has been claimed. We note, however, that empirical evidence supporting the link between phonotactics and alternations comes only from English native speakers whose first language (L1) does exhibit phonotactically motivated alternation patterns. This article examines whether the link between phonotactics and alternations is universally available. To do so, we test learning of phonotactics and alternations with Cantonese native speakers, whose L1 provides no evidence for or against the link. We address learning of a vowel harmony pattern through the use of three artificial languages; one with a harmony pattern both within and across stems, another with a harmony pattern only across stems; and the other with a disharmony pattern within stems but harmony across stems. Learners successfully acquired harmony phonotactics according to input patterns, but they showed no difference in learning alternation patterns across the three languages. Our results suggest that the link between phonotactics and alternations might be language-specific: Only upon receiving L1 evidence, learners can use a unified mechanism to encode phonotactics and alternations.

Salvaging the Mother Tongue in Exile

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 187-204
Author(s):  
Tomás Espino Barrera
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
First Language ◽  
Language Attrition ◽  
The Past ◽  
Progressive Loss ◽  
First Language Attrition ◽  
Lost In Translation ◽  
Deliberate Effort ◽  
Deep Sense

The dramatic increase in the number of exiles and refugees in the past 100 years has generated a substantial amount of literature written in a second language as well as a heightened sensibility towards the progressive loss of fluency in the mother tongue. Confronted by what modern linguistics has termed ‘first-language attrition’, the writings of numerous exilic translingual authors exhibit a deep sense of trauma which is often expressed through metaphors of illness and death. At the same time, most of these writers make a deliberate effort to preserve what is left from the mother tongue by attempting to increase their exposure to poems, dictionaries or native speakers of the ‘dying’ language. The present paper examines a range of attitudes towards translingualism and first language attrition through the testimonies of several exilic authors and thinkers from different countries (Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Hannah Arendt's interviews, Jorge Semprún's Quel beau dimanche! and Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez, and Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation, among others). Special attention will be paid to the historical frameworks that encourage most of their salvaging operations by infusing the mother tongue with categories of affect and kinship.

Acquiring “Knowledge”—An Alternative Model

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avner Baz
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
First Language ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Empirical Science ◽  
First Language Acquisition ◽  
Method Of Cases ◽  
Striking Fact

The chapter argues that empirical studies of first-language acquisition lend support to the Wittgensteinian-Merleau-Pontian conception of language as against the prevailing conception that underwrites the method of cases in either its armchair or experimental version. It offers a non-representationalist model, inspired by the work of Michael Tomasello, for the acquisition of “knowledge,” with the aim of showing that we could fully account for the acquisition of this and other philosophically troublesome words without positing independently existing “items” to which these words refer. The chapter also aims at bringing out and underscoring the striking fact that, whereas many in contemporary analytic philosophy regard and present themselves as open and attentive to empirical science, they have often relied on a conception of language that has been supported by no empirical evidence.

The Revival of Quantification: Reflections on Old New Histories

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Steven Ruggles
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Second Wave

AbstractQuantitative historical analysis in the United States surged in three distinct waves. The first quantitative wave occurred as part of the “New History” that blossomed in the early twentieth century and disappeared in the 1940s and 1950s with the rise of consensus history. The second wave thrived from the 1960s to the 1980s during the ascendance of the New Economic History, the New Political History, and the New Social History, and died out during the “cultural turn” of the late twentieth century. The third wave of historical quantification—which I call the revival of quantification—emerged in the second decade of the twenty-first century and is still underway. I describe characteristics of each wave and discuss the historiographical context of the ebb and flow of quantification in history.

The processing of case in near-native Spanish

2015 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-307 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jill Jegerski
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
First Language ◽  
Differential Object Marking ◽  
L2 Processing ◽  
Case Marker ◽  
Object Marking ◽  
Case Markers ◽  
Ditransitive Constructions

This article reports a study that sought to determine whether non-native sentence comprehension can show sensitivity to two different types of Spanish case marking. Sensitivity to case violations was generally more robust with indirect objects in ditransitive constructions than with differential object marking of animate direct objects, even among native speakers of Spanish, which probably reflects linguistic differences in the two types of case. In addition, the overall outcome of two experiments shows that second language (L2) processing can integrate case information, but that, unlike with native processing, attention to a case marker may depend on the presence of a preverbal clitic as an additional cue to the types of postverbal arguments that might occur in a stimulus. Specifically, L2 readers showed no sensitivity to differential object marking with a in the absence of clitics in the first experiment, with stimuli such as Verónica visita al/el presidente todos los meses ‘Veronica visits the[ACC/NOM]president every month’, but the L2 readers in the second experiment showed native-like sensitivity to the same marker when the object it marked was doubled by the clitic lo, as in Verónica lo visita al/el presidente todos los meses. With indirect objects, on the other hand, sensitivity to case markers was native-like in both experiments, although indirect objects were also always doubled by the preverbal clitic le. The apparent first language / second language contrast suggests differences in processing strategy, whereby non-native processing of morphosyntax may rely more on the predictability of forms than does native processing.

Linking past and present

AILA Review ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 55-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antje Wilton ◽  
Holger Wochele
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Folk Linguistics ◽  
Language Issues

In this paper, we focus on comments on language issues from a historical perspective. The concept of the layperson (non-linguist) is discussed to identify laypeople and lay comments in history when the modern concept of a linguist did not yet exist. Two studies show how the historical perspective complements modern research on folk linguistics. Firstly, historical comments about Latin will be put in relation to comments about English, focusing on their roles as linguae francae and exploring the potential and application of the ‘Latin Analogy’. Secondly, an analysis of language appraisal texts of French and Romanian from 1500 to the present shows that the topoi used are still reflected in today’s perception of the languages by their native speakers, affecting the attractiveness of the languages for second language learners.

Examining individual variation in learner production data: A few programmatic pointers for corpus-based analyses using the example of adverbial clause ordering

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Stefan Th. Gries ◽  
Stefanie Wulff
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
First Language ◽  
Main Clause ◽  
Subordinate Clause ◽  
Production Data ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Chinese Learners ◽  
Adverbial Clauses ◽  
Adverbial Clause ◽  
Temporal Adverbial

ABSTRACT This study examines the variable positioning of a finite adverbial subordinate clause and its main clause with the subordinate clause either preceding or following the main clause in native versus nonnative English. Specifically, we contrast causal, concessive, conditional, and temporal adverbial clauses produced by German and Chinese learners of English with those produced by native speakers. We examined 2,362 attestations from the Chinese and German subsections of the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger, Dagneaux, Meunier, & Paquot, 2009) and from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (Granger, 1998). All instances were annotated for the ordering, the subordinate clause type, the lengths of the main and subordinate clauses, the first language of the speakers, the conjunction used, and the file it originated from (as a proxy for the speaker producing the sentence so as to be able to study individual and lexical variation). The results of a two-step regression modeling protocol suggest that learners behave most nativelike with causal clauses and struggle most with conditional and concessive clauses; in addition, learners make more non-nativelike choices when the main and subordinate clause are of about equal length.

First language effects on the identification and evaluation of second language speech

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-194
Author(s):  
Anne-France Pinget
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Environmental Factors ◽  
Language Proficiency ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
First Language ◽  
Language Aptitude ◽  
Content Type ◽  
It Impacts ◽  
Language Effects

Abstract In Belgium, Dutch as spoken by Francophone learners is relatively frequent in political, commercial or educational contexts. While the characteristics of this second language (L2) variety have been studied extensively, there is to date no systematic report of how it is evaluated by either native speakers of Dutch or non-natives. Previous studies conducted in other language contexts have found that non-natives tend to be very critical towards L2 accents similar to their own. The main goal of the present study is to investigate the extent to which the listener’s first language (L1) impacts ratings of the fluency, accentedness and comprehensibility of L2 Dutch as spoken by Francophone learners and how it impacts the identification of the speakers’ L1. Specifically, we compared ratings by three groups of listeners: Francophone learners of Dutch, native speakers of Belgian Dutch and native speakers of Netherlandic Dutch. Moreover, the extent to which three additional cognitive and environmental factors influence L2 ratings is examined: listeners’ familiarity with the L2 variety, their language aptitude and language proficiency. The results show that the majority of native and non-native listeners recognized the speakers’ L1 (French). Non-native listeners perceived L2 speech as less fluent, less comprehensible and more accented than natives did, which corroborates the previously reported critical attitudes towards a shared L2 accent. Moreover, subtle differences in accent and fluency ratings were found between the Netherlandic Dutch and the Belgian Dutch listeners. No clear effects of other cognitive and environmental factors appeared in the ratings.

scholarly journals The Relevance of Language as a Predictor of the Will for Independence in Catalonia in 1996 and 2020

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 426-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordi Argelaguet
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
First Language ◽  
Reform Process ◽  
Place Of Birth ◽  
Powerful Predictor ◽  
Exogenous Variables ◽  
The Will ◽  
Logistic Regressions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Secessionist Movement

The Catalan secessionist parties, if added together, have won all the elections to the Parliament of Catalonia from 2010 to 2021. Their voters have been increasingly mobilized since the start of the controversial reform process of the Statute of Autonomy (2004–2010). The aim of this article is twofold. First, it intends to test whether language is the strongest predictor in preferring independence in two separate and distinct moments, 1996 and 2020. And second, to assess whether its strength has changed—and how—between both years. Only the most exogenous variables to the dependent variable are used in each of two logistic regressions to avoid problems of endogeneity: sex, age, size of town of residence, place of birth of the individual and of their parents, first language (L1), and educational level. Among them, L1 was—and still is—the most powerful predictor, although it is not entirely determinative. The secessionist movement not only gathers a plurality of Catalan native speakers, but it receives a not insignificant level of support among those who have Spanish as their L1. Conversely, the unionist group, despite being composed primarily by people who have Spanish as their L1 and have their family origins outside Catalonia, has a native Catalan-speaking minority inside. This imperfect division, which is based on ethnolinguistic alignments—and whose relevance cannot be neglected—alleviates the likelihood of an ethnic-based conflict.

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