Project P8 (RUEG)

The project is part of the Research Unit "Emerging Grammars in Language Contact Situations: A Comparative Approach" (RUEG2). This project investigates the dynamics in the linguistic expression of information structure in the repertoires of heritage language speakers. Its research questions directly emerge from pertinent findings from the first phase of the Research Unit “Emerging Grammars” (RUEG1). The project will investigate three areas relevant for information structure: (i) introduction of new referents, (ii) topic constructions, and (iii) focus and prosody. We will investigate these phenomena in selected subcorpora of the RUEG corpus, which comprises mono- and bilingual speakers of German, English, Russian, Greek and Turkish. The intricate interplay of (morpho)syntax and intonation for the expression of information structure has been shown to be open to new developments in the language contact contexts in which we collected data in RUEG1. In this project, we will make information structure the central focus of our research, investigating the interplay of information structure with syntax and intonation in a comparative perspective, and relating our research questions to the new Joint Ventures (short: ‘JV”) of the Research Unit:

• What linguistic developments characterise heritage speakers’ repertoires in the linguistic expression of information structure? (→ JV4)
• What role do different communicative situations play for linguistic patterns or variation in this domain? (→ JV5)
• What impact does language contact and bilingualism have for the emergence of new linguistic means and/or patterns in the linguistic expression of information structure? (→ JV6)

P8-internal meetings:

RUEG-internal retreats and workshops attended by P8:

23.06.2021 (online retreat)

Topic: Workshop on RUEG Corpus Structure and Use

This RUEG internal workshop addressed the architecture of our RUEG corpus and possible research questions related to our data. Martin Klotz and Gajaneh Hartz from the Project Pc introduced the corpus tool ANNIS along with its query language. An important aspect was to draw from prior work and research questions within the past years. Attendees were encouraged to engage with the corpus and practiced helpful queries. There was also time to talk about specific research questions by the individual projects. It was also the first time the prosodic sub corpus was presented for the whole RUEG group. The workshop brought together new and long-standing RUEG members following the kick-off meeting in April.

16.04.2021 (online retreat)

Topic: Kick-off Meeting RUEG2

During this retreat the whole RUEG2 group met for the first time, including PIs, PhDs and student assistants. A key aspect was to get to know each other and discuss future plans within the second research phase of RUEG2. The speakers Heike Wiese and Shanley Allen along with the coordinator Pia Linscheid presented the timeline for RUEG2, and chaired discussions on a collective publication and additional experiments. The new project Pt concerned with transfer of RUEG related findings introduced itself to the whole group. The Project Pc presented the current state of the RUEG corpus along with further steps for the upcoming release. In a separate meeting of P8 the following common research topics were discussed: “Left dislocation” and “Prosody of V3 constructions.” The team from Stuttgart additionally discussed the “Prosody of contrastive adjectives“.

Conferences:

• 09.07.2021 Research colloquium “Phonology,” University of Stuttgart.

Topic of the presentation: Intonation of yes-no questions by heritage speakers of Russian in the US and Germany (Zuban, Yulia, Rathcke Tamara & Sabine Zerbian).

Yulia Zuban presented the study on intonation of yes-no questions by heritage speakers of Russian residing in the US and Germany (further HSs) that was carried out together with Tamara Rathcke and Sabine Zerbian. The results of the study revealed that, on the one hand, HSs of both groups were similar to the monolingual speakers regarding the intonation pattern of yes-no questions (i.e., placement of the nuclear pitch accent and its type). On the other hand, HSs significantly differed from monolingual speakers in some terms (e.g., HSs produced significantly more pitch accents than monolinguals on the subject and object constituents, HSs in the US produced upstepped accents on the verb significantly more frequently compared to the monolinguals). The results of the study are discussed with reference to the linguistic knowledge of Russian by HSs.

• 14.06.2021 Course "Herkunftssprachen" at the institute of German linguistics, University of Stuttgart.

Topic of the presentation: RUEG Project. Word order in heritage Russian: What drives the difference between heritage speakers and monolinguals? (Yulia Zuban)

Yulia Zuban gave a talk about the RUEG project (ist goals, methodology, topics, investigated languages, etc) and word order in heritage Russian in the US. The results of the word order study revealed that heritage speakers in the US differed from monolinguals regarding the frequency of some word orders (SVO and OVS), but not the others (SOV, OSV). Heritage speakers produced significantly more SVO and less OVS orders than monolinguals, but they only did so in some particular situations, i.e., written and formal. The differences between heritage speakers and monolinguals could not be easily attributed to transfer from English, but they are rather a result of lack of formal instruction of heritage speakers in Russian.

• 18.06.2021 Research colloquium “Phonology,” University of Stuttgart.

Topic of the presentation: Word order, information structure and intonation in heritage Russian in the U.S (Yulia Zuban)

Yulia Zuban presented some of her results for the dissertation related to the word order, information structure and word order in heritage Russian in the US. The results of the study revealed that heritage speakers (further HSs) and monolinguals were similar regarding the distribution of frequent referent combinations across frequent word orders. However, two groups significantly differed from each other regarding the frequency of the contextually infelicitous combinations of referents (new-before-given). Specifically, HSs produced significantly more contextually infelicitous combinations of referents than monolinguals across different word orders as well as in SVO order separately. Besides, HSs were found to produce new-before-given referents in every communicative situation showing some register-levelling processes. Monolinguals produced new-before-given referents in almost every situation except for the formal written possibly showing some language internal developments. Alternatively, monolinguals could have been influenced by the type of formal speech elicited in the study. Finally, HSs and monolinguals used similar prosodic strategies to express new preverbal contextually infelicitous subjects in the SVO utterances. HSs were similar to the monolinguals probably due to an ample input in spoken Russian that they received from birth. The results of the study are discussed with reference to the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace 2011, Sorace & Serratrice 2009).

• 07.06.2021-10.06.2021 Thirteenth Heritage Language Virtual Research Institute (online) (https://nhlrc.ucla.edu/nhlrc/event/14722)
• Topic of the poster: Word order in heritage Russian: Transfer effects? (Yulia Zuban, Maria Martynova, Luka Szucsich, Sabine Zerbian & Natalia Gagarina).

Yulia Zuban and Maria Martynova presented a poster on the word order patterns of heritage speakers of Russian in the US and Germany as well as monolingual speakers of Russian. A special emphasis was given to the methodology of the study as well as the explanation and discussion of the results that could not be easily attributed to language transfer.

• 04-29.04.2021 Manchester Forum in Linguistics (online) (https://mfilconf.wordpress.com/programme/)
• Topic of the presentation: Word order in heritage Russian: Transfer effects? (Maria Martynova, Yulia Zuban, Luka Szucsich, Sabine Zerbian & Natalia Gagarina)

Maria Martynova and Yulia Zuban gave a talk on the word order patterns produced by the heritage speakers of Russian in the US, Germany and monolingual speakers of Russian. The results of the study showed that heritage speakers in Germany did not differ from the monolingual speakers of Russian. However, the heritage speakers in the US differed from monolinguals by generally producing significantly more SVO orders. Split of the clauses into main and embedded revealed further interesting results. In main clauses heritage speakers in the US and monolinguals were similar to each other. In embedded clauses, however, heritage speakers in the US significantly differed from monolinguals by predominantly producing SVO orders. The increase of SVO could not be easily attributed to the transfer effects from English, instead it might rather be a result of syntactic complexity which favors the unmarked SVO order, and which is amplified by the language contact situation.