Syntactic attrition and linguistic

change: Potential parallels and differences

Sigríður Björnsdóttir, University of Maryland, College Park

Roadmap slide

Heritage languages as an window for the study of the nature of case-marking and agreement in grammar.

Case-marking and gender agreement in a longitudinal case-study corpus reflecting attrition.

Syntactic attrition and diachronic linguistic change.

Heritage languages and linguistic theory

Native-speaker competence has been the focus of generative linguistic theory.

Heritage languages are usually the first languages to be acquired by heritage speakers.

Heritage language speakers pattern both with L1 and L2 speakers, making them an interesting population for study.

Case-marking and agreement are those modules of grammar typically most affected in heritage speakers.

What shapes heritage languages?

Incomplete acquisition The heritage speaker does not receive sufficient input for the first language in childhood and never fully acquires the grammar.

Attrition The heritage speaker fully acquires the first language in childhood but his/her competence deteriorates with time, at least partly due to the influence of the dominant language.

The effect of attrition on heritage grammars is more controversial because of how difficult it is to prove that a given speaker in fact truly acquired the first language in childhood.

The data under consideration

Letters of a bilingual heritage speakers of Icelandic 1908-1929 (just over 82,000 words) that have been compiled into a case-study corpus.

The speaker under consideration was a woman born to Icelandic immigrants in North-Dakota and the letters indicate that she fully acquired Icelandic when she was young.

The speaker started a family with an English-speaking man and did not use Icelandic on a regular basis in her adult years.

The letters are all written to the same recipient, a close relative of her parents in Iceland.

The distribution of data in time

Time period Number of letters

Words

1908-1929 7 4,768

1930’s 25 12,324

1940’s 7 4,630

1950’s 43 26,690

1960’s 51 23,367

1970’s 27 9,832

1980’s 1 83

3 stages of development

1. period -1908-1929: Native-like proficiency.

2. period-1930-1949: Native-like proficiency with sporadic errors in case-marking and gender agreement.

3. period-1950-1980: Sporadic errors in case-marking and gender agreement become more pervasive.

General directionDative replaces genitive, most notably on object PPs and on the attributive genitive.

A bias toward a 2-gender system (masculine and neuter).

Language change across the lifespan2 potentially unrelated questions:

What is the nature/rate of change in the speakers’ grammar?

What is the nature of diachronic language change (more generally)?

Are there any interesting parallels between the development of the speaker’s grammar and diachronic change (w.r.t. to the development of Icelandic, Faroese and the Mainland Scandinavian languages).

Two hypotheses:The “irregular hypothesis” Syntactic attrition is uninformative about the nature of linguistic change.

The “regular” hypothesis Syntactic attrition is informative about the nature of linguistic change.

Diachronic development of case-

markingCase-marking in Icelandic, Faroese and the Mainland Scandinavian languages (MSC) reflect 3 different stages of diachronic development.

MSC only retains the nominative and accusative. dative only preserved in object position of PPs in a few dialects in Norway (e.g. Romsdal-norsk).

Faroese retains the dative only in thematic role of recipient or beneficiary and has completely almost completely lost the genitive.

Icelandic retains both the dative and genitive, although the genitive is on the decline especially as the object of PPs.

2 ways of “simplifying” the

case system Structural case gradually takes over lexical case (MSC, ongoing development in Faroese).The thematic or semantic regularity of lexical case is broadened at the expense of quirky case (i.e. as in Icelandic).

The “irregular” hypothesis

The attrited speaker’s case-marking and gender agreement errors are essentially “irregular”.

The errors reflect extra-linguistic factors, such as working memory.

Prediction: Most errors should occur in long-distance dependencies.

With respect to case-marking, there is no correlation between how a speaker acquires case and how he/she “loses”

Syntactic attrition does not reflect diachronic language change or vice versa.

The “regular” hypothesis

The attrited speaker’s errors in case-marking and gender agreement are in some way systematic.

Errors in long-distance dependencies should not occur more frequently than errors within the DP or the clause.

There is a correlation between how a speaker acquires case and how he/she loses case.

Prediction: Cases that are acquired late in childhood should be most affected by attrition (i.e. genitive in Icelandic).

Syntactic attrition has interesting parallels with diachronic language change.

The genitive in the case-study corpus

Object of PPs: Dative replaces genitive.Is this a trend that changes over time or is this kind of variation already present from the earliest years? (see graph I)

The attributive genitive: Dative replaces the genitive.1st occurrences in the 2nd period of writing on the possessive genitive.

In the 3rd period of writing, dative replaces genitive on full DPs in addition to the possessive genitive.

Object of verbs: Only 4 instances of a verb governing the genitive in the 3rd period:

1 instance of a PP phrase instead of genitive

3 instances of the dative replacing the genitive

This is clearly a new development in the speaker’s grammar

Genitive on prepositions

Graph I: % of dative replacing genitive on the 3 most common prepositions in Icelandic in the case-study corpus

The attributive genitive

% errors0

5

10

15

20

25

1908-19291930-19491950-1980

Graph 2: % of occurrence of the dative replacing the genitive on the attributive

genitive.

Examples of the dative replacing the

genitiveJeg sakna svo mikið brjefunum frá þér

I miss so much the letters-DAT.PL. from you.

‘I really miss receiving your letters.’

á milli brefum okkar

in between letters-DAT.PL. our

‘between our letters.’

Examples of dative replacing the

genitiveFaðir okkur

father-NOM.SG. our-DAT.PL.

‘our father’

o hamingjuóskumbréf

happy-wishes-DAT.PL. letters

‘greeting cards’

(Icelandic has genitive compounding)

Dative

Dative remains robust both on subjects (experiencers) and objects throughout the entire writing time.

Only a few instances of accusative/nominative replacing dative on the objects of verbs or PPs.

By contrast, there are many isolated instances with different verbs where dative replaces the accusative, even where one would not expect the dative for thematic reasons (e.g. in the role of recipient or beneficiary).

Why is dative so robust? The most salient case?

Examples of dative replacing accusative

Jeg hafði gaman af að fá litlu vasabókinni

I had fun of to receive little-DAT.SG. notebook-DAT.SG.

‘I liked to receive the little notebook.’

o Margir hafa lofast til að kaupa bókinni.Many have promised to buy the book-DAT.SG.

‘Many people have promised to buy the book.’

Case-matching violations

Case-matching violations are not attested until the last 30 years.

50 instances within object DPs of PPs.5 instances within object DPs of verbs.17 instances in co-ordinate constructions.

Case-matching violations

Agreement violations within the DP:Wrong inflectional ending over-generalized on a possessive pronoun, adjective or the noun itself within the DP.

The noun’s inflectional ending over-generalized on a possessive pronoun or adjective within the DP.

Agreement violations in co-ordinate constructions:

a) Structural Case (with exceptions) overgeneralized on the either of the 2 coordinated DPs.

b) The noun’s inflectional ending over-generalized on a possessive pronoun or adjective within either of the two DPs.

Case-matching violations within the

DPa) Hann er dáinn fyrir nokkrum árin.

He is dead for a few-DAT.PL. years-NOM/ACC.PL.

‘He is been dead for a few years now.’

í þessum nýja hlut þessarar stórborg.

in this-DAT.SG. new.-DAT.SG. part-ACC.SG this- GEN.SG. bigtown-NOM/ACC.-SG.

‘In this new part of town.’o b) Elsie May er nú á seinasti ári á Háskóla

Elsie is now on last-? year-DAT.SG. of university.

‘Elsie May is currently in her last year of University.’

Case-agreement violations in co-

ordinate constructionsa) Jeg óska ykkur Laugu gleðilegra páska

og góða lýðan.

I wish you Lauga happy Easter-GEN. and good health-ACC.

‘I wish you and Lauga happy Easter and good health.’

o b) þá hefur hann gefið okkur heilsa og krafta.

then has he given us health-NOM. and strength- ACC.

Some more interesting cases…Með Magnúsi, Þorstein og Gróa.

with Magnus-DAT, Thorstein-ACC and Groa-NOM.

‘with Magnus, Thorstein and Groa.’

o Kæra þökk fyrir bréfið þitt og þessum fallegum frímerkjum.

Dear thanks for letter-ACC.SG. your-ACC.SG and these-DAT.SG. pretty-DAT.SG. stamps-DAT.SG.

‘Many thanks for your letter and those lovely stamps.’

Parallels to diachronic

developmentResembles the development in Icelandic and Faroese w.r.t. to the genitive.

Dative/genitive least preserved on prepositions, in contrast to the development in MSC dialects where Dative is best preserved on object PPs.

The genitive is still present in the speaker’s writing despite significant % of “errors”.

Structural Case (Nom/Acc) is almost never over-generalized except in case-matching violations.

Gender agreement: Overview

No gender agreement violations (GAV) in the 1st period.

16 instances of GAV in the 2nd period:Masculine/neuter over-generalized in all instances.

130 instances of GAV in the 3rd period:82 instances of GAV within the DP.

48 instances of GAV on a pronoun.

GAV within the DP

Imba er guðhrætt kona.

Imba-Fem.SG. is a god-fearing-Neut.SG. Woman.

‘Imba is a god-fearing woman.’

Það er bágt að það sje svona mikill hatur.

It is bad that it is-SUBJ. that much-Masc.SG. hate-Fem.SG.

‘It is a pity that there’s so much hate.’

Jeg sá íslenzkan prjónadót hingað og þangað.

I saw Icelandic-Masc.SG.ACC. wool things-Neut.SG.ACC. Here and there.

‘I saw Icelandic wool things here and there.’

GAV on pronouns

Henni líkar sú vinna og það borgar nokkuð vel.

She likes that-Fem.SG.NOM. job-Fem.SG.Nom. and it-Neut.SG.NOM. pays rather well.

‘She likes that job and it pays rather well.’

o Það er alveg nýr siður að kjósa konur í svona djáknanefnd, enn það hafa verið í mörg ár í líknarsvafnaðarnefnd.

‘It is a brand new custom to elect women in these kind of committees, but it has been elected for many years in the baking committees.’

GAV: Summary

The majority of GAV occur within DPs.

Masculine and neuter replace the feminine. There is therefore a bias towards the unmarked gender (Masc./neut. in Icelandic).

No instances of the feminine being over-generalized. The marked gender (fem. in Icelandic) suffers most.

When GAV occurs on pronouns, neuter singular is overgeneralized regardless of the gender/number of the DP it co-refers with.

GAV and diachronic development of

genderThe speaker’s GAV indicate that she is re-organizing her grammar into a 2-gender system instead of the original 3-gender system.

A marked bias towards masculine and neuter:In Faroese, neuter is the unmarked gender.

In Icelandic, it is disputable whether masculine or neuter is the unmarked gender (although it has standardly been assumed to be masculine).

MSC languages have developed a 2-gender system out of the original Old Norse 3-gender system.

SummaryThe “errors” w.r.t. to case-marking reflect a systematic change, where the dative replaces the genitive. The other cases remain intact.

Genitive is acquired late in Icelandic child language (Sigurdardottir 2002).

Potential support for the “regular hypothesis”.

The errors never outweigh target forms.How informative are the errors really? Are they merely production errors?

Case-matching violations may indicate processing difficulties.

Potential support for the “irregular hypothesis”

Summary

The majority of errors w.r.t. to case-marking and gender agreement occur within the DP and not in long distance dependencies.

There is a marked bias toward the masculine and the neuter.

Potential support for the “regular hypothesis”

A good chunk of gender-agreement violations occur on referential pronouns.

Potential support for the “irregular hypothesis”

Takk fyrir!