No abstract

In the domain of motion event encoding, many of the world’s languages fall into one of two types: verb-framed (the path is encoded in the verb) or satellite-framed (the path is encoded outside the verb in a prefix, particle or adverbial while the verb contains information about the manner of movement). A number of studies have investigated the language usage of bilingual speakers or language learners to find evidence of a transfer of the typological pattern of the dominant/native language to the non-dominant/foreign language. These studies have largely failed to show evidence of a straightforward transfer, although more subtle effects on usage have occasionally been observed. In this paper, we report the results of a corpus study comparing two groups of speakers of the urban German ethnolect “Kiezdeutsch”: one with a monolingual German background and one with a bilingual Turkish-German background. We find no significant differences in their preference for path or manner verbs, which is consistent with other studies. However, in comparison with the monolingual German group, the Turkish-German group prefer semantically light motion verbs and they avoid the combination of manner verbs with path satellites. This is consistent with the fact that the analogous construction is ungrammatical in verb-framed languages like Turkish. In other words, we find variation within “Kiezdeutsch” that can be explained by a transfer of usage preferences from the background language.

At first glance, subject-verb-agreement seems to be straightforward in German: In the case of simplex NPs, the subject always agrees with the verb syntactically in person and number. However, with coordinated NPs in subject position, there is considerable variation in usage. If both conjuncts are singular NPs, the verb may display singular agreement - as would be expected, since coordinated structures inherit their syntactic properties from their individual components - but much more frequently, the verb displays plural agreement. On the basis of the LIMAS-corpus, a one-million-word corpus of written German, I will show that there is systematic variation between the two options. Among the determining factors are the position of the verb (preceding or following the subject), the type of NP (pronoun, proper name, lexical NP) and the internal syntactic structure of the subject (coordination of full NPs vs. coordination of partial NPs sharing a determiner, and definiteness vs. indefiniteness of the coordinated parts of the subject). I will discuss the results from the perspective of usage-based approaches and argue for an integration of semantic, pragmatic, and frequency factors in any theoretical approach to grammar.

The encoding of motion is a particularly interesting domain of German-Turkish language contact. German is a “satellite-framed language” that easily combines manner-of-motion verbs with path expressions outside of the verb stem. Turkish, on the other hand, is considered a “verb-framed language”, where the combination of semantically heavy manner-of-motion verbs with path expressions does not occur. In a sentence acceptability study with monolingual Turkish and bilingual German-Turkish students, we tested the acceptability of Turkish sentences which violate the canonical Turkish structure to different degrees. Bilingual Turkish-German speakers more readily accepted combinations of semantically heavy manner-of-motion verbs and path expressions than the monolingual Turkish speakers. The difference did not show in combinations of semantically light manner-of-motion verbs and Path devices. We conclude that we cannot speak of ad-hoc transfer or a general “insecurity” in the Turkish of Turkish-German bilinguals. Rather, the results show evidence for the development of new grammatical patterns in heritage Turkish in Germany, influenced by the characteristic encoding patterns of German.

It is generally assumed that the typological characteristics of a language regarding the encoding of motion events have an influence on the usage preferences of native speakers of this language. These preferences could also be reflected in a second language with different typological characteristics. This chapter deals with the question of how motion events are encoded in the L2 German by native speakers of Turkish and how they differ in their preferences from monolingual speakers of German. I show that there are subtle differences between varieties in the encoding of motion events. However, these differences can be described more appropriately in terms of specific preferred and avoided construction types and differing semantic complexity than in the satellite- vs. verb-framed distinction.