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  8. 2017

Invited Talk | Terje Lohndal

27 March 2017

Time: 4:00 - 6:00pm
Venue: Laws 2.09

We are pleased to welcome Terje Lohndal (NTNU) to give a special invited talk at QMUL. Title and abstract below.

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Theoretical Aspects of Heritage Language Syntax: A Case Study of American Norwegian

This talk will present a case study of the heritage language American Norwegian, which is a contact variety of Norwegian spoken in the US (Haugen 1953, Hjelde 1992). The empirical domain will be verb placement, in particular the Verb Second (V2) property characteristic of European Norwegian, based on data from a newly created corpus of 50 speakers of American Norwegian (Johannessen 2015a).

    It is well known that varieties of Germanic do not display a strict V2 system whereby the finite verb is in the second position in main clauses. Dialects in e.g., Norway and Belgium display a rich pattern of variation (Westergaard & Vangsnes 2005, Westergaard 2009; Haegeman & Greco 2016), and modern urban vernaculars (often called ethnolects) often do not have V2 (see Walkden 2017, Wiese et al. to appear for recent overviews).

    The first part of this talk will investigate how the distribution of V2 and non-V2 in American Norwegian is related to the production of relevant V2 contexts. Strømsvåg (2013), Eide & Hjelde (2015), & Johannessen (2015b) have shown that V2 is vulnerable for some American Norwegian speakers. Based on joint work with Marit Westergaard, I will show that the lower the proportion of the context for V2, the more non-target consistent word order (aka. V3) is produced – arguably due to contact with a language that has a different distribution of contexts. V2 attrition is therefore the result of a severe reduction in the cues for this word order in the heritage language.

    In the second part, based on joint work with Artemis Alexiadou, I will compare Germanic heritage languages with Germanic urban vernaculars, demonstrating that similar processes and structures are in place in both varieties. This raises questions concerning the emergence of new grammars and the nature of heritage grammars specifically. I will discuss two possible avenues: the creation of ‘hybrid grammars’ (Aboh 2015) or retreat to a ‘default system’ (Benmamoun, Montrul & Polinsky 2013, Scontras, Fuchs & Polinsky 2015).

    Taken together, the two parts illustrate how heritage languages provide important evidence concerning the structure of verb placement and its variation, the emergence of new varieties, and the nature of linguistic change.

 

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