Doctoral Dissertation Research: Linguistic transfer in a contact variety of Spanish: Gender agreement production and attitudes

Georgetown University, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

This project analyzes non-standard forms of language use that arise in sustained language contact scenarios. Using elicited and spontaneous language production, the effects of implicit and explicit langauge attitudes are also analyzed. Languages that are in sustained contact often experience language change that is the result of one language on the other. These transfer effects may occur for grammatical features that are present in one language but absent in the other. This difference may give rise to the increased use of non-standard forms as compared to non-contact varieties of the same langauge. This research contributes to the understanding and description of non-standard language use in a large scale analysis that systematically investigates language use across levels of education, bilingual profiles, generations, and location. By examining such non-standard language use, this research contributes important empirical data on whether smaller minority languages can have transfer effects on a majority language. Prior observations on non-standard language use in contact settings have traditionally related non-standard forms to lower levels of education. This project tests this claim by investigating age, native language, language of schooling, level of education, as well as linguistic contexts. To investigate non-standard forms, speakers engage in a 45-minute-long semi-structured sociolinguistic interview. Participants’ implicit attitudes towards non-standard agreement are examined in an experimental task where they hear standard and non-standard forms, while rating what they hear. Explicit language attitudes are measured by participants' response to two explicit questions on their attitudes towards non-standard language use. The data obtained from this research provides a rich data set with comprehensive information on the social and linguistic factors that influence non-standard language variants, as well as the influence of language attitudes on production. This research contributes to a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying language change in contact scenarios. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.