Doing copying: Why typology doesn’t matter to language speakers

Babel, Anna M.; Pfänder, Stefan

doi:10.1515/9783110338454.239

Cited by 13 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“… 11 Upon closer inspection, Babel and Pfänder's ( 2014 ) hypothesis that typology does not play a dominant role in “copying” phenomena does not pose a serious challenge for our model. Their argument that “speakers' perceptions of differences or similarities between languages are crucial to their development and change” (p. 254) is an appeal to the importance of congruence between simultaneously active grammars.…”

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confidence: 91%

Integrated, Not Isolated: Defining Typological Proximity in an Integrated Multilingual Architecture

2018

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On the surface, bi- and multilingualism would seem to be an ideal context for exploring questions of typological proximity. The obvious intuition is that the more closely related two languages are, the easier it should be to implement the two languages in one mind. This is the starting point adopted here, but we immediately run into the difficulty that the overwhelming majority of cognitive, computational, and linguistic research on bi- and multilingualism exhibits a monolingual bias (i.e., where monolingual grammars are used as the standard of comparison for outputs from bilingual grammars). The primary questions so far have focused on how bilinguals balance and switch between their two languages, but our perspective on typology leads us to consider the nature of bi- and multi-lingual systems as a whole. Following an initial proposal from Hsin (2014), we conjecture that bilingual grammars are neither isolated, nor (completely) conjoined with one another in the bilingual mind, but rather exist as integrated source grammars that are further mitigated by a common, combined grammar (Cook, 2016; Goldrick et al., 2016a,b; Putnam and Klosinski, 2017). Here we conceive such a combined grammar in a parallel, distributed, and gradient architecture implemented in a shared vector-space model that employs compression through routinization and dimensionality reduction. We discuss the emergence of such representations and their function in the minds of bilinguals. This architecture aims to be consistent with empirical results on bilingual cognition and memory representations in computational cognitive architectures.

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confidence: 91%

Integrated, Not Isolated: Defining Typological Proximity in an Integrated Multilingual Architecture

2018

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“…Similarities between languages are constructed by speakers, who exploit instabilities and ambiguities of the language system in order to express grammatical categories or concepts that are relevant to them (Babel & Pfänder 2013). This case represents just such an opportunity.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Spanish perfect tenses, for example, participate in semantic classes such as evidentiality and mirativity (Feke 2004). These changes are only one of the consequences of reorganization of the Spanish verbal system around concepts that are grammatically encoded in Quechua, such as responsibility, novelty, and information source (Babel 2009;Babel & Pfänder 2013).…”

Section: Grammatical Background 21 Stress In Spanish and Quechuamentioning

confidence: 99%

Time and reminiscence in contact

Babel¹

2014

SiC

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The question of how and why change occurs is a persistent theme in research on language contact and sociolinguistics. In this article, I investigate the role of social context in producing change and maintenance in a contact variety of Andean Spanish. Two generations of speakers in a Quechua-Spanish contact zone in central Bolivia interpret stress shift on the first person imperfect past tense as a marker of the "reminiscent past. " An emergent but unstable grammatical distinction is entwined with lived experience and speakers' positioning as social actors. Both stability and change are produced by speakers through practice and are closely related to the iconization of contact features as symbols of social orientation and experience.

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“…This line of research argues that features perceived as structurally congruent are more likely to be subjected to contact‐induced change (Jarvis & Pavlenko, ; Palacios & Pfänder, ; Pfänder, Ennis, Soto, & Villegas, ). Based on Jarvis and Pavlenko's (, p.178) notion of “subjective similarities,” or similarities that L2 users perceive between the languages, Babel and Pfänder () adopted a social cognition approach to explain the various ways in which Quechua‐Spanish bilinguals use the Spanish imperfect tense form había. Using naturalistic data from Andean Spanish speakers in Central Bolivia, they show that había is used either as a tense/aspect or deitic marker; speakers mobilize this flexibility from uses common in Standard Spanish, Andean Spanish, or Quechua, in which the imperfect form may be used to shift speaker roles or to express surprise.…”

Section: “New” Trendsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The way speakers understand and construct linguistic congruence is a fruitful point of departure in understanding the speakers' agency in constructing a bilingual system and therefore provides more nuanced theorizations about contact phenomena: it not only informs us about the limits that typology imposes on contact‐induced mechanisms but also paints a clearer picture of the “complex, multivalent and often contradictory” outcomes of language contact (Babel & Pfänder, , p. 239). It is worth noting that perceived similarity does not necessarily imply awareness—that is, speakers may not be conscious of the fact that they are “building bridges” between the linguistic systems at their disposal.…”

Section: “New” Trendsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of linguistic ideologies in language contact situations

Rodríguez‐Ordóñez¹

2019

Language and Linguist. Compass

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The field of contact linguistics has long argued for the paramount importance of social factors in understanding the outcomes of linguistic contact. In contrast, linguistic ideologies have not played a central role in theories of language contact, though this has begun to change in recent decades. This article provides an account of early theorizations of linguistic ideologies and their increasingly important applications to the study of contact phenomena. A brief survey of more recent theoretical advancements with respect to ideologies and contact phenomena follows, paying special attention to studies in linguistic anthropology and variationist sociolinguistics. While recognizing the challenges inherent in the study of linguistic ideologies, this article argues that they should be at the foreground of contact linguistics. To this end, methodological tools for such study are presented, along with theoretical considerations and future directions.

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Doing copying: Why typology doesn’t matter to language speakers

Cited by 13 publications

References 0 publications

Integrated, Not Isolated: Defining Typological Proximity in an Integrated Multilingual Architecture

Integrated, Not Isolated: Defining Typological Proximity in an Integrated Multilingual Architecture

Time and reminiscence in contact

The role of linguistic ideologies in language contact situations

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