Adding the microdimension to the study of language change in contact. Three case studies

Abstract

Syntactic change in contact is generally explained as a result of cognitive, structural/typological, or sociolinguistic factors. However, the relative weight of these factors in shaping the outputs of contact is yet to be assessed. In this paper, we propose a microcontact approach to the study of change in contact, focusing on microsyntactic points of variation across multiple language pairs that are structurally very close. We show that this approach makes it possible to more accurately identify some of the factors that are involved in change. By considering three case studies centered on the syntax of subjects, objects, and indexicals, we show that the outputs of syntactic change in microcontact diverge from what is expected under otherwise solid generalizations (avoidance of indeterminacy, avoidance of silence, the Interface Hypothesis, a tendency towards simplification, and the general stability of the indexical domain) regarding change in contact. Microcontact offers a finer-grained point of observation, allowing us to go beyond broader typological assumptions and to focus on the link between structure and cognition. The results of our case studies demonstrate that the outputs of change in contact are an interplay between cognitive and structural factors (see also Muysken 2013 for additional processing considerations), and that the micro-variational dimension is crucial in drawing a precise picture of heritage language syntax.

A complex solution to an unsolvable problem?

“…As the fieldworkers working in the Microcontact project 1 (D' Alessandro 2015, 2021) on heritage Italo-Romance varieties in the Americas realized very soon, no two speakers speak alike. Microvariation is pervasive, optionality exists in stable grammars, and this has repercussions on the database on which your analysis is built (Andriani et al 2022b).…”

Demonstrative Systems Are Not Affected by Contact: Evidence from Heritage Southern Italo-Romance

“…Therefore, in this work a different approach is pursued to the study of heritage varieties, to overcome these problems while still ensuring that the role of contact in determining properties of the heritage grammars, if any, is properly isolated and evaluated. This is achieved by comparing different heritage varieties of one and the same language in different immigration countries, that is, in contact with different dominant languages in a pairwise fashion, as per the microcontact methodology (see Andriani et al (2022b) for an overview). 2 For instance, this concretely amounts to comparing heritage Sicilian spoken in Argentina to heritage Sicilian spoken in Canada, and so on.…”

“…Concretely, the data presented here were collected on fieldwork (2019-2020) by interviewing heritage speakers of Sicilian and Abruzzese who were born in Argentina, Quebec, Belgium, and New York City. This set-up follows the microcontact approach to language change in contact (D'Alessandro 2021; Andriani et al 2022b) in encompassing several contact contexts and thereby allowing for a finer-grained assessment of whether demonstrative systems are vulnerable to language-specific contact-induced change or whether they can be regarded as fundamentally impermeable to contact. On the basis of comprehension and production data elicited by means of a picture-sentence matching task and a semi-guided production task, ternary demonstrative systems are shown to undergo a reduction in heritage varieties.…”

The syntax of subject pronouns in heritage languages

“…Most studies on heritage languages focussed on changes that led to reduction of complexity, convergence with the dominant language or levelling with other varieties of the heritage language (see Aalberse and Muysken, 2013, for an overview). Fewer studies (Trudgill, 2011;Shin, 2014;Andriani et al, 2022) discussed the complexification of the heritage system as a possible outcome of language contact. In With respect to the generation, Heine and Kuteva (2003) claim that there is a limited number of attested cases of complexification in heritage languages because this process cannot be completed in the span of one generation: many generations are necessary to complete it.…”