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:

Upcoming: 11.03-15.03.2024: RUEG Farewell retreat

At the last RUEG retreat we will make final conclusions about the projects and discuss further directions after RUEG.

26.09-28.09.2023 RUEG Conference 2023 - Linguistic Variability in Heritage Language Research

This RUEG conference took place in Berlin at the Humboldt University of Berlin. P8 actively participated in the organisation of the conference with Sabine Zerbian and Yulia Zuban being among the members of the Organising Committee and Sabine Zerbian, Shanley Allen, Oliver Bunk and Tatiana Pashkova being among the members of the Scientific Committee.

The first conference day addressed the general audience with the goal to answer the questions about heritage languages by different experts such as scientists, polititians, parents and teachers. The second conference day dealt with Speaker Repertoires and Intra-individual Variability as well as Methodological Advances in studying heritage speakers. The third conference day focused on Baselines and Variations. Also, a poster session was held during the third conference day. The members of P8 presented two posters, one on the prosodically-annotated corpus of spontaneous narrations in mono- and heritage Russian and the other one on Left dislocation in heritage Russian, and majority English and German.

29.03-31.03 RUEG Retreat in Essen

At this retreat we discussed the RUEG collective volume in detail, i.e., deadlines, contributions, contents of the chapters. Every RUEG project gave an update on the ongoing progress. P8 has been busy with various topics such as Left dislocation in heritage Russian and majority English and German, referent introduction in majority English and lexical diversity index in all languages investigated in RUEG. The last day of the retreat was devoted to the discussion of further career paths at a university in connection to family and care obligations.

04.10.2022-07.10.2022 RUEG Retreat in Berlin

During this retreat in Berlin, our group discussed the perception of stress in noun phrases in heritage Russian. Over the past six months, a full-fledged experiment was conducted on the gorilla platform. The results of the study were presented and discussed.

The second topic that was discussed in our group was Left Dislocation (LD) in Russian. After analyzing the annotated files, we identified that LD is a feature of speech in both mono- and heritage Russian speakers with quantitative differences between mono- and heritage speakers. Specifically, more heritage speakers produce LDs compared to monolingual speakers. Furthermore, LDs are in general produced more often by heritage speakers.

02.05.2022-13.05.2022 RUEG Method Weeks

This method week introduced several major themes aimed at improving our corpus work, as well as our writing, presentation and publication skills. We had various seminars on academic writing, scientific publications and professional presentations. Besides, ANNIS and its functions were introduced. The main concepts of ANNIS Query Language and simple queries were repeated and new functions were presented. We were explained how to search for metadata and export and integrate them. Also, we were shown how to build regular expressions. Three more days were devoted to learn how to write research papers in R Markdown.

05.04.2022-08.04.2022 RUEG Retreat in Eggersdorf (Brandenburg)

At this retreat in Brandenburg, P8 presented different topics such as prosodic realizations of V3, contrastive adjectives and specificity and definiteness. The Stuttgart group presented a trial version of the gorilla platform experiment designed to explore the topic of contrastive adjectives. The first participants were recruited: two Russian monolinguals and two Russian heritage speakers. The next step of our group will be to find all participants and conduct an experiment.

02.04.2022 Zotero introduction

This online meeting introduced the Zotero client, which allows you to collect, organize, annotate, cite and share research. Its main functions were shown, as well as answers to questions from the audience.

03.12.2021 Workshop with Ad Backus (UBA)

During this workshop the concept of the Usage-Based Approach was discussed. This approach focuses on studying habits, conventions, and violations of expected patterns. The approach is useful for studying human behavior in different fields, including humanities, social and natural science. The workshop also discussed the integration of this method into the work of RUEG.

05.10.2021-08.10.2021 RUEG Retreat in Frankenstein

Frankenstein hosted the first offline retreat since the lockdown. Our group presented four main topics for discussion: (a) referent tracking in heritage speakers‘ majority English, (b) prosodic realization of V3 declaratives in German, (c) Prosody of contrastive adjectives in the RUEG corpus, (c) Left Dislocations in English, German, and Russian.

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“.

Zerbian, S., Zuban, Y., Böttcher, M., & Bunk, O. (in press). Intonation in heritage languages. In A. Shanley et al. (Eds.). Linguistic dynamics in heritage speakers. Berlin: Language Science Press.

Bunk, O., Allen, S., Zerbian, S., Pashkova, T., Zuban, Y., Conti, E. (in press). Word order dynamics in language contact. In S. Allen et al. (Eds.). Linguistic dynamics in heritage speakers. Berlin: Language Science Press.

Martynova, M., Zuban, Y., Szucsich, L., & Gagarina, N. (in press). OV/VO word order in heritage Russian: is transfer at play? Journal of Slavic Linguistics.

Zerbian, S., Zuban, Y., & Klotz, M. (2024). Intonational Features of Spontaneous Narrations in Monolingual and Heritage Russian in the U.S.-An Exploration of the RUEG Corpus. Languages, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9010002.

Zuban, Y., Rathcke, T., & Zerbian, S. (2023). Do Different Majority Languages Lead to Different Intonational Grammars? A Case Study of Yes/No-Questions in Heritage Russian. Heritage Language Journal, 20(1), 1-43. https://doi.org/10.1163/15507076-bja10016

Wiese, H., Alexiadou, A., Allen, S., Bunk, O., Gagarina, N., Iefremenko, K., Martynova, M., Pashkova, T., Rizou, V., Schroeder, C., Shadrova, A., Szucsich, L., Tracy, R., Tsehaye, W., Zerbian, S., Zuban, Y. (2022). Heritage Speakers as Part of the Native Language Continuum. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.717973.

Zerbian, S., Böttcher, M., Zuban, Y. 2022. Prosody of contrastive adjectives in mono-
and bilingual speakers of English and Russian: a corpus study. Proc. Speech Prosody 2022, Lisbon, Portugal, 812-816. https://doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2022-165.

Böttcher, M. (2022). A Comparison of Pitch Accent Patterns in Contrastive Adjective+Noun Structures in Bilingual Englishes. In Proc. 11th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2022, Lisbon, Portugal, 807-811. https://doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2022-164.

Böttcher, M. 2021. Semantic vs Prosodic Prominence – Pronoun Realisation in mono-
and bilingual English. In Proc. 1 st International Conference on Tone and Intonation 2021,
Sønderborg, Denmark, 127-131. https://doi:10.21437/TAI.2021-26. 

Zuban, Y., Martynova, M., Zerbian, S., Szucsich, L., & Gagarina, N. (2021). Word order in heritage Russian: clause type and majority language matter - Порядок слов в эритажном русском: влияние типа клаузы и языка окружения. Russian Linguistics, 45: 253-281, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-021-09246-1. 

• 12-13.10.2023 Voices in Contexts, University of Cologne

Topic of the poster: Unexpected use of referents in heritage Russian (Zuban Yulia)

Yulia Zuban presented a poster on unexpected use of referents by heritage speakers (HSs) of Russian in the US and Germany. The results of the study showed that all speaker groups sometimes produced new referents noncanonically, i.e., violating the “given-before-new” principle, but HSs of both groups did so more frequently than monolinguals. Furthermore, HSs of both groups produced new-given combinations across every investigated formality and mode while monolinguals almost did not produce such combinations in the formal written scenario (only one occurrence). As for the intonation of S_newVO_given utterances_, there was a great variation within one speaker group and across the groups, i.e., the majority of the utterances of all speaker groups had a different intonational contour.

The results of the study can be possibly explained by the global contact-induced developments that manifest themselves as a general feature of being bilingual (see Zuban et al. 2023; Zerbian et al. 2022 for similar conclusions) as well as by the register-levelling processes that may be caused by the lack of formal instruction in Russian (e.g. Alexiadou et al. 2022; Schroeder et al. accepted). Finally, the lack of the preferred intonational contour in S_newVO_given utterances unsurprisingly shows the unexpected status of such instances.

• 26-28.09.2023 Linguistic Variability in Heritage Language Research, Humboldt University, Berlin

Topic of the poster: Left Dislocation in contact: The case of Russian (Zuban Yulia, Pashkova Tatiana, Conti Erika, Lee Hannah, Allen Shanley, Bunk Oliver & Sabine Zerbian)

Tatiana Pashkova presented a poster on production of left dislocations (LDs) in heritage Russian. The study presented the first preliminary comparative analysis of LDs in heritage Russian, majority English and German of Russian heritage speakers (HSs) in the US and Germany. Previous research (Zerbian et al., submitted) based on the RUEG corpus (Wiese et al., 2021) has shown that LDs occur more often in the productions of HSs of Russian compared to monolingually-raised speakers of Russian. However, it is still unclear whether this dynamicity can be accounted for by the cross-linguistic influence from the HSs’ majority languages English and German. Alternatively, we can hypothesize that the difference between Russian HSs and monolinguals stems from a general bilingual pattern: perhaps, HSs use LDs to segment their utterances and decrease the cognitive load, irrespective of the majority language. To address this gap, we present a comparative corpus analysis of LDs in heritage Russian, majority English and German of Russian heritage speakers in the USA and Germany.

• 26-28.09.2023 Linguistic Variability in Heritage Language Research, Humboldt University, Berlin

Topic of the poster: Prosodically-annotated corpus of spontaneous narrations in mono- and heritage Russian (Zerbian Sabine, Zuban Yulia & Martin Klotz)

Sabine Zerbian and colleagues presented a poster about the prosodically-annotated RuPro-corpus, which is a subcorpus of the RUEG corpus (Wiese et al., 2021), collected and annotated by the collaborative research unit “Emerging Grammars.” The RuPro-subcorpus contains formal and informal spoken data of about 25k word tokens produced by monolingual and heritage speakers (HSs) of Russian residing in the US. The RuPro-subcorpus was used to investigate global intonational features such as the length of intonation phrases (IPs), types and number of pitch accents (PAs) and final boundary tones (FBTs).

It was found that the speaker groups did not differ in the inventory of PAs and FBTs. However, they did differ in the length of IPs, with HSs showing shorter IPs in the informal situations. Both groups also differed concerning the number of PAs used on content words, with HSs producing more PAs than monolingually-raised speakers. The results are discussed with respect to register differentiation and differences in prosodic density across both speaker groups.

• 08-10.06.2023 The Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium (Olinco), Czechia

Topic of the presentation: Intonation of heritage speakers of Russian (Zuban Yulia)

Yulia Zuban presented some of the results of her dissertation related to global intonational patterns in heritage Russian in the US. The study showed that heritage speakers (HSs) and monolinguals were similar to each other in the systemic dimension by having a similar inventory of pitch accents (PAs) and final boundary tones (FBTs), but the two groups were different in the frequency dimension (e.g., female HSs produced more H* PAs and fewer rising PAs than monolingual female speakers). Formality was important for some intonational patterns, but only for the monolingual speakers and not for the HSs (i.e., more high FBTs in the formal situation). HSs and monolinguals differed from each other, but this difference was always modulated by additional factors such as gender and formality (e.g., HSs produced more PAs than monolinguals, but they only did so in the informal situations).

While some results could be linked to the possible transfer from English (e.g., the choice of the H* and rising PAs in female HSs) the other results could not. The absence of formality differentiation in HSs can stem from the lack of formal instruction in Russian (in line with Schroeder et al., forthcoming; Alexiadou et al., 2022). An increased number of PAs by HSs can be a general feature of bilingual speakers (Goble 2016; Zuban et al., 2020; Zuban et al., 2023).

• 29-30.05.2023 Heritage Languages at the Crossroads, Istanbul, Turkey

Topic of the poster: The role of communicative situations in word order choice in heritage Russian (Zuban Yulia)

Yulia Zuban presented some of the results of her dissertation related to the influence of different formalities (formal vs. informal) and modes (spoken vs. written) on word order in heritage Russian in the US. First, the results of the study revealed that some word orders were influenced by formality and mode in narrations of heritage speakers (HSs) and monolinguals in a similar manner. For instance, SOV order was more frequent in the informal and spoken situations compared to the formal and written ones. Second, the two groups were found to differ from each other regarding their choice of some word orders. HSs produced more SVO utterances in the written mode than monolinguals, but the two groups did not differ from each in the spoken mode. Besides, HSs produced fewer OVS orders in the formal situations than monolinguals, but there was no difference between the groups in the informal situations.

The abovedescribed results showed that HSs did not differ from monolinguals across the board, but only in the formal and written situations. Thus, the differences between the two groups may be attributed to the differences in the language situations rather than the effect of language contact (confirming previous studies, e.g., Rothman 2007, Kupisch & Rothman, 2018).

• 07-10.03.2023 The 45th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS 2023), University of Cologne

Topic of the presentation: Syntactic and prosodic expression of information status by heritage speakers of Russian (Zuban Yulia)

Yulia Zuban presented some of the results of her dissertation related to the syntactic and prosodic expression of information status by heritage speakers (HSs) of Russian in the US. The results of the study show that both HSs and monolinguals sometimes produce new referents noncanonically, i.e., violating the “given-before-new” principle, but HSs do so more frequently than monolinguals across different word orders. As for intonation, the pitch accent type on the new noncanonical subjects in SVO utternces was examined. It was found that both speaker groups mostly produced rising accents followed by H* accents.

• December 2022 The lecture Series MA-EASEL: Current Approaches in Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart

Topic of the presentation: Do different majority languages lead to different intonational grammars? A case study of yes-no questions in Heritage Russian (Zuban Yulia, Rathcke Tamara & Sabine Zerbian)

Yulia Zuban gave a talk about the intonation of yes-no questions (YNQs) produced by heritage speakers (HSs) of Russian residing in the US and Germany as well as by monolingual speakers of Russian. The study draws upon the results of a production task where the participants were asked to produce ten YNQs with different syntactic structures (SV or SVO).

The results of the study revealed that, on the one hand, HSs were similar to monolinguals regarding some intonational features of YNQs (e.g., all speaker groups generally placed the main prominence on the verb as it is expected in Standard Russian). On the other hand, HSs of both groups differed from the monolinguals regarding the accentuation of subject and object constituents with the HSs accentuating them significantly more frequently than monolingual speakers. Further, HSs in the US were found to differ from the monolingual speakers and the HSs in Germany regarding the phonetic implementation of pitch accents (i.e., upstepped accents on the verb and the alignment of rising accents in intransitive sentences) and final boundary tones.

The findings could not be easily attributed to the transfer from English or German. Some of the findings (e.g., frequent accentuation by HSs) are discussed with reference to the general effect of bilingualism while some other findings (e.g., upstepped accents on the verb by the HSs in the US) are discussed as a potential group strategy to cope with tonal crowding.

• 20-21.10. 2022 Heritage language syntax 3, Paris, France

Topic of the presentation: Syntactic complexity in heritage Russian: Communicative situations matter, language contact does not (Martynova Maria, Zuban Yulia, Szucsich Luka & Natalia Gagarina)

Maria Martynova and Yulia Zuban gave a talk about the use of embedded clauses by heritage speakers (HSs) of Russian in the US and Germany taking the effects of different formalities (formal vs. informal) and modes (spoken vs. written) into consideration. The results of the study reveal significant effects of mode and formality across all groups, but no effect of bilingualism, i.e., HSs of both groups and monolingual speakers of Russian show a similar use of embedded clauses.

• 18-20.05.2022 Heritage Languages around the World, Lisbon, Portugal

Topic of the poster: Referent introduction in heritage Russian and heritage Turkish (Zuban Yulia, Zerbian Sabine, Iefremenko Kateryna & Christoph Schroeder)

Christoph Schroeder presented a poster on the topic of referent introduction in heritage Russian and Turkish. The results of the study showed that both heritage speakers (HSs) and monolingually-raised speakers produce unexpected (according to literature) instances of new referent placement, i.e., post-verbal for Turkish, and violating the “given-before-new” principle pattern in Russian. The analysis also indicated that HSs produced noncanonically placed referents more frequently compared to the monolinguals. However, since monolingually-raised speakers were also found to place new referents noncanonically, such placement of new referents cannot be attributed to the speech of HSs, but is rather the result of internal development in the languages. Besides, the results for Turkish also indicated that while monolingually-raised speakers produced noncanonically placed referents in the informal settings, HSs placed them in every communicative situation. Such finding might point at register levelling in HSs of Turkish.

• 18-20.05.2022 Heritage Languages around the World, Lisbon, Portugal

Topic of the presentation: OV/VO placement in heritage Russian in Germany and the U.S.: Internal Change vs. Transfer (Martynova Maria, Zuban Yulia, Szucsich Luka & Natalia Gagarina)

Maria Martynova and Yulia Zuban gave a talk about the placement of OV/VO word orders in heritage Russian in Germany and the US taking object role (noun vs. pronoun), clause type (main vs. embedded) as well as proficiency of heritage speakers (HSs) into account. The languages involved in the study (i.e., Russian, English and German) differ with respect to word order and effects of information structure. The study discusses the results in light of possible transfer effects from the majority languages English and German and with respect to the Internal Dynamics Hypothesis (Poplack & Levey 2010) which posits that linguistic phenomena in heritage languages may be due to internal developments rather than transfer from majority languages.

• 23-26.05.2022 The11th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2022, Lisbon, Portugal

Topic of the poster: Prosody of contrastive adjectives in mono- and bilingual speakers of English and Russian: a corpus study (Zerbian Sabine, Böttcher Marlene & Yulia Zuban)

Sabine Zerbian and collegues presented the study on prosodic expression of contrastive adjectives by monolingual speakers of Russian and American English as well as heritage speakers (HSs) of Russian with the majority language (ML) English. The study uses the RUEG corpus (Wiese et al., 2021) of semi-spontaneous formal and informal narrations. It was found (among other things) that HSs frequently produced double accents (on the contrastively focused adjective and a noun) in both heritage Russian and majority English (although to a lesser extent in English than in Russian) instead of one single accent (on the contrastive adjective) that is expected in monolingual Russian and English. Such results were interpreted as a possible effect of bilingualism and an attempt of HSs to be more explicit and avoid ambiguities by producing more pronounced accent patterns.

• 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? (Zuban Yulia)

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 US (Zuban Yulia)

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)

Topic of the poster: Word order in heritage Russian: Transfer effects? (Zuban Yulia, Martynova Maria, Szucsich Luka, Zerbian Sabine & 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.

• 05.2021 Roundtable on the Prosody of Pronouns, Goethe Universität Frankfurt

Topic of the presentation: Stress Assignment on Pronouns in German Prepositional Phrases - Evidence from read and spontaneous speech (Böttcher Marlene, Schubö Fabian & Sabine Zerbian)

The study investigates stress realisations on pronouns in spontaneous speech and in a controlled production study. Based on pilot data from the RUEG corpus (Wiese et al., 2016/17) we showed that stressed pronouns occur in instances where (i) intonational phrases do not contain lexical categories such as noun or verb, or (ii) they are a complement to a preposition (Zerbian & Böttcher, 2019). Based on the results of the controlled production study we showed that the preposition type (directional vs non-directional) influences the stress assignment on pronominal and lexical complements in such a PP construction.

• 04-29.04.2021 Manchester Forum in Linguistics (online)

Topic of the presentation: Word order in heritage Russian: Transfer effects? (Martynova Maria, Zuban Yulia, Szucsich, Luka, Zerbian Sabine & 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.

Courses:

Winter term 2023/2024: Grammatical aspects in Heritage Languages. Advanced course, University of Stuttgart. Lecturer: Yulia Zuban.

Winter term 2021/2022: Phonology in Heritage Languages. MA course, University of Stuttgart. Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Sabine Zerbian

BA/MA/Doctoral Theses:

Zuban, Yulia. (submitted). Word order choice, expression of information status and global intonation patterns in heritage Russian. PhD thesis, University of Stuttgart.

Türker, Halid. 2023. VOT in mono- and bilingual English. MA thesis, University of Stuttgart.

Schöpf, Alina. 2022. Linksversetzung bei monolingualen und bilingualen russischen Sprechern. BA thesis, University of Stuttgart.

Böttcher, Marlene. 2021. The Prosody of Contrastive Adjectives in Mono- and Bilingual English. MA thesis, University of Stuttgart.