Increasing complexity to the end: On the history of a heritage language

The historical sociolinguistics of heritage languagesJoseph Salmons with Joshua Bousquette, Christine Evans, Benjamin Frey, Alyson Sewell, Samantha Litty, Mark Livengood, Felecia Lucht, Daniel Ntzel, Michael Putnam, Miranda Wilkerson, Brent Allen and many others

7th HiSoN Summer School, Metochi, GreeceAugust 20131Today: Issues and case studiesQuestions from last time?Language shift and substrate influencesDemographics of rapid shiftStructural effects and how they get transferred Complexity in heritage languagesSyntaxMorphologyYour questions

22Shift and its effects3German in Wisconsin, Hustisford

4Social, but real-world implications4Michael ReaganAll across the U.S., hordes of immigrants are chattering away in their native language and have no intention of learning English the all-but-official language of the United States .They are being enabled to defy the age-old custom of immigrants to our shores who made it one of their first priorities to learn to speak English and to teach their offspring to do likewise.It was a case of sink or swim. If you couldnt speak English, you couldnt get by, go to school, get a job, or become a citizen and vote.5Last paragraph is our focus. Citizenship and voting is simply wrong.

Similar views are assumed among scholars, but evidence hasnt been produced really. Intuitively very plausible.Were these true of Wisconsin Germans?Did they always learn English? One of the first priorities?Who were monolinguals?What was their basic demographic profile? Were they economically marginal? Were they Isolated in rural areas or in neighborhoods in town? How did they fit into the social structure? Did they belong to separate churches?Did they attend school? If so, how did they not learn English?People claim a lot about immigrants learning English, including historically, and we are simply looking at the historical record.

6PunchlineEastern Wisconsin, esp. the village of Hustisford, is a place where monolinguals might be expected to be marginal:Founded by Anglo-Americans (Yankees)Always had clear and elite English-speaking presence

Yet evidence strongly suggests a profoundly bilingual community that did not exclude Germans.From figurative to literal mapping intro community71910 Census: Else Kobow

Major data source because of 17Griffith Street, in townMore on her later.8Hustisford 1910: Some basicsLanguageKnew English96576%Only German31024%MonolingualsGenderM12741%F18359%Place of birthUS10835%Foreign-born20265%Immigration datePre-188011159%Unknown179%9Quant / qual[lots more on the social history, if thats of interest]

structural 91910 German Monolinguals

10Schools, jobs10Bethany Evangelical Lutheran Church1871: Resolution that all subjects in the church school be taught in German1872: Permission granted allowing instruction in reading and writing in English for the upper grades of the school1893: First mention of a sermon delivered in English (isolated event)

11Names from confirmation classes1899 Lillie Stewart1901 Adelheide Stewart1911 Walther Dyer1913 Chester Randall 1918 Mabel Baldwin

Randall NY, Maine, parents, two uncles, so anchored in Anglo comm.But no names from these classes match reported monolinguals.--St Michaels12Home Language13CategoriesDescriptions1. Exclusively Monolingual GermanAll adult members of the household were reported German monolinguals.2. German-SpeakingGerman was the only common language among adult members of the household. 3. Presumed BilingualAt least one member of the household was a reported German monolingual. 4. Possibly BilingualGerman was likely spoken alongside English although no member of the household was a reported German monolingual. This category represents potential bilinguals as based on kinships with reported German monolinguals. 5. Presumed Monolingual EnglishAll adult members of the household were presumed English monolinguals.

Where did they live?14

15Imposition and borrowingSpeaker preserves components of L1 in using L2, imposing features of L1 on L2.Typically more stable components, like phonetics, phonology, core syntax.

Speaker transfers features of L2 into L1, borrowing them.Typically less stable components, especially vocabulary.16Table 1: Apparent substrate features17FEATUREEXAMPLESOURCESTRAJECTORYAWARENESSImpositionFinal fortitionbeer[s]German, Dutch, Polishspreadingstigmatized earlierStoppingdem, dere, dosemany immigrant languagesrecessive stigmatized in most groupsPluralia tantuma scissorsGerman, Dutchstableapparently notDiscourse markingcome here onceGerman (Dutch)stableapparently notVerb-particle wanna come with?Pan-Germanicspreadinglittle or noneBorrowingContent lexiconbrat, berliner, oma, kaput, dummkopfGermanrecessive, a few spreadingyesTag questionsainna?, not?various lgs, these ex German recessiveyesExclamations etc. ach ya, halts maul, sieh mal, macht nichtsGermanrecessiveyes18Household Language Categories19101920N%N%1. Exclusively Monolingual German 4913%113%2. German-Speaking4011%216%3. Presumed Bilingual12834%349%4. Possibly Bilingual13235%27773%5. Presumed Monolingual English267%328%TOTAL375100%37899%Table 2: Rapid shiftFigure 2: Learning English? Hustisford 191019Wilkerson & Salmons in preparationFigure 3: And 1920?20Children? (1910 vs. 1920)21Heres where were going.21But it doesnt stop with shift 22Final laryngeal contrast23American English: bed betbed: more glottal pulsing, longer vowel (widely seen as the most important for voicing in American English.)bet: no pulsing, shorter vowelMany other cues German: Bad = batBad bath, bat asked for 3.sg.pret.Likely complete neutralization, but Kharlamov (2012) Wisc. English: incipient neutralization? Earlier discussions have been about phonetics, not contrast.23Southwestern chee[z]e(Richland Center)24

24DISCUSS THEN PLAYWave form: sinusoidalish pattern, consistency in wave shape and height

Southeastern cheese /z/ > [s](Muskego)25

25TURNING TO REAL TIME Trading relations: Purnell et al.

26American controls. REPP26

Change in cues, stable contrast in one eastern community27recall expectation27

Wisconsin immigration28MoreGermanLessGerman28What about fortition?Brieflicher Sprach und Unterricht fuer das Selbststudium Erwachsener: Englisch. von Dr. Carl van Dalen"Ganz besonders haben sich Deutsche bei der Aussprache stimmhafter[weicher] Endkonsonanten in Englischen zu ueberwachen. Im hochdeutschen klingt Gelb wie gelp ... Im Englischen jedochwerdenb,d,g,v,z,j, immer stimmhaft [weich] ausgesprochen also auch inAuslaute. Es sind also sorgfaeltig zu unterscheiden: bound -- (baun d), cub (koe b)"...

29Ahn"Aehnlich und doch ganz anders werden die, dem f, p entsprechenden konsonanten hervorgebracht. Spreche ich w, b richtig aus, so fuehlen zugleich die an den Kehlkopf gelegten Fingerspitzen, dass der Kehlkopf leise erzittert. Dieses Erzittern ruehrt her von den Schwingungen der in Kehlkopf angespannten Stimmeerzeugenden Stimmbaender. Ich hoere gleichzeitig mit w einen dumpfen vokalischen Laut: ich hoere, dass diese Konsonanten Stimmhaft sind. Ebenso stehen b,d,g,p,t,k sich gegenueber. Bei den stimmhaften Konsonanten b,d,g fuehle ich das Erzittern des Kehlkopfes, ich hoere die sie begleitende Stimme- bei den Stimmlosen p,t,k dagegen nicht"

30collection of these texts by Jennifer; doesnt correspond to how we actually DO IT in English!

But this is no longer a big issue in schools.30Conclusions31Demographics of community formation: Examination of households, neighborhoods, and institutions reveals late monolingualism rapid shift from German to English.Historical patterns of language use: ChildrenGerman or Yankeewere getting more non-native adult input than native-English input.Leads to German-influence English in the community.Doesnt stop after shift: features introduced into the pool can take off later.CLASSIC historical sociolinguistics case: Cant understand structural without social, social without structural, past without present, present without past.

31Complexity32The pointCommon claim: Languages in contact, obsolescent languages, heritage languages, creoles are all subject to simplification or at most maintain existing complexity.Our argument: Even an obsolescent heritage language in intense contact in a community where many people havent spoken it in decades shows clear increases in complexity.That holds, it seems, however you define complexity.Even examples of simplification often have unexpected explanations.

33Ntzel, Putnam33A closely related pointThe rhetoric about contact languages of virtually any sort creoles, heritage languages, obsolescent languages is about deficiency: attrition, incomplete acquisition, loss, not to mention interruption, lack, failure, absence, inability, and on and on.But language is about human cognition and were dealing with full and complete systems.DeGraff (2001:291): Creoles are reflections of our (species-uniform and species-specific) human biology, among the most beautiful and most wonderful [forms that] have been, and are being, evolved 34The war in creolistics > heritage language linguisticsBut we come ultimately to the biggest point about human language: how its anchored in cognition.Pinker on the necessity of complexity in grammar, by definition.34ComplexityCrystal (2003): Complexity includes both the formal internal structuring of linguistic units and the psychological difficulty in using or learning them. However, it has not yet proved feasible to establish independent measures of complexity defined in purely linguistic terms.Nettle (2012): The complexity of different components of the grammars of human languages can be quantified. For example, languages vary greatly in the size of their phonological inventories, and in the degree to which they make use of inflectional morphology.DeGraff (2001): Complexity is no simple matter. Roberge (1994): warns us to avoid simplistic hypotheses about contact and change.35TURN TO CASE STUDIES CASE FIRST35Some views on contact languagesBoas argues that obsolescent languages may simultaneously exhibit both simplifications and preservation of linguistic structures. (2009:4-5) Isnt something missing here?Complexification under language contact by additive borrowing Trudgill (2010a:301-309, 2010b:20-24) high-contact, long-term contact situations involving childhood language contact are likely to lead to complexification through the addition of features from other languages.

36Some testable points in here Has Wisconsin Heritage German simplified over time?Or has it preserved complexity?Or has it gained complexity?If the last, is it (only) by addition of features from contact languages or dialects?

37New inflectional morphologyComplementizer agreement in Wisconsin Heritage German38Complementizer agreementStandard Germanwenn du willstif you want to.2sg

wennihr wolltif yall want to.2pl

Dialectal German (esp. Southern, also W. Frisian, Dutch)wennst du willstif.2sgyou want to.2sg

wenntihr wolltif.2pl yall want to.2pl39Increased redundancy, increased inflection (bit complexity), more synthetic39Complexification: New inflectionIn what sense is C-agr more complex?Additional inflectionInflection is the one area where everybody seems to agree that loss comes with contact.Where did it come from?Probably present in a few input dialects, but certainly not all; pops up all over West GermanicSourcesJoshua Bousquette. 2013. Complementizer Agreement in Modern Varieties of West Germanic: A model of reanalysis and renewal. Ph.D. dissertation, UWMadison.Joshua Bousquette. Forthcoming. Complementizer Agreement in Heritage Varieties of Wisconsin German.40The pointC-agr has developed independentlyDiscontinuous communities and different languages in EuropeDiasporic communities like the Siebenbrger communities in Transylvania and Cimbrian in ItalyC-agr in Wisconsin shares SOME similarities with Continental varieties, but not ALLdifferent morphological distribution (WI restricted to 2-sg)Wisconsin attestations more closely resemble one another; they do not directly match any specific input dialect, which includes the dialects of their first generation ancestorsSpeakers acquire C-agr in Wisconsin when their European ancestors dialects did not have C-agrIndependent, parallel development?Result of dialect mixing?4141Example 1Wennsdu rauchen dustIf-you smoking do If you smoke

(Speaker J, Sheboygan, WI)42

5th generation speaker.42Example 2Wennsdu zu mein Haus kommst, dann kannst du Cake haben.

If you come to my house, then you can have cake.43

Speaker is 4th generation; great grandparents came from Prussia, born in 1832 and 1837. There is no clear indication why this speaker has C-agr in 2nd person singular, when none of the Low German dialects that comprised Prussia had or have C-agr. There was a portion of the Rheinland that was annexed by Prussia in 1815, however, and this region has widely-attested C-agr. That being said, the restriction of C-agr to 2nd person singular attested in this speaker is inconsistent with attestations of other Moselle-Franconian dialects that also have C-agr in 1st person plural (cf. Weise 1907)43Kannst du mir sagen afsdu morgen komms?Can you tell me if you will be arriving tomorrow?

(Speaker R, Fond du Lac County, WI)44This speaker is 3rd or 4th generation WI-German. He is Catholic, and exhibits also a number of linguistic features characteristic of the Rheinland, e.g. palatalization of ge- prefixes on participles, and unshifted t e.g. dat for that. His attested forms of C-agr appear to be consistent with 19th and early 20th century records of C-agr in Moselle-Franconian dialects, but like the rest of the consultants, speaker R has C-agr only in 2nd person singular and not in 1st person plural or second person plural, as is commonly attested for Continental C-agr varieties.44Take home on C agreementAdditional inflection, more synthetic.More redundancy.Subject marking on complementizers and other elements = non-prototypical inflection.Very incomplete paradigm.Highly unlikely that it was in input dialect for most speakers.Clearly no role for standard language (where this is very foreign)

45Null elements Multiple gap constructions in Wisconsin Heritage German46Parasitic gaps: English vs. German47[Which book]1 did you sell t1 without reading pg1? Sheboygan1 is a city that people like t1 when they visit pg1.

Welches Buch hast Du verkauft, ohne es/*pg zu lesen?Which book did you sell t1, without it to read

Sheboygan ist eine Stadt, die Leute gern haben, wenn sie sie/*pg besuchen. Sheboygan1 is a city that people like t1 when they it visit. -NOW, in this paper, we investigate L2 seepage in parasitic gap constructions-definition is still wideed-but well be assuming a simple notion of a p-gap as=a complex null element that depends on another null element in a different clause

-take a look at the two english examples above -but if you take a look at the german translations of these sentences, youll see that only the first gap is licensed, and the other gap must be filled47Gaps, dependencies in heritage lgs48heritage speakers have difficulty maintaining syntactic dependencies pertaining to a more abstract level of syntactic representation, what was traditionally termed deep structure. Especially low-proficiency heritage speakers have significant difficulties producing null elements. Polinsky & Kagan (2007:382) heritage speakers seem to have difficulty in establishing dependencies between items, especially if these dependencies are at a distance (Benmamoun et al. 2010: 36)-there has been a lot of RECENT work on heritage grammars--P&K hugely valuable work-and one such study by Polinsky & Kagan claims that HS have difficultly producing null elements due to their acquisitional process and resulting heritage speaker status48Overuse of overt elements, Polinsky & Kagan49a heritage speaker of Russian, 23 years old, acquisition of Russian as L1 interrupted at about age 5.

malcik # on imel sobaka i ljaguka. boy 3sg had dog.dc and frog.dcthe boy he had a dog and a frog

# on ljubit ego ljaguka 3sg likes his frog.dc he likes his frog-P & K support this claim by looking at a Russian heritage speaker who overuses overt elements-However, it is also possible that this speaker shows difficulty producing null elements due to the influence of English, and unfortunately, this example does not allow for us to test whether this speakers lack of null elements is a result of her heritage status, as P & K claim, or a result of English influence on her heritage variety

49Wisconsin Heritage GermanGapSheboygan [is e] Stadt die Leit gleichen wennse visit

No gapSheboygan ist eine stadt die de leute die da besuchen sehr gern haben

Complexification: New gapsGerman: no true parasitic gaps; English: gaps aplentyIn what sense is it more complex?Null elements harder to process, especially at a distanceWhere did it come from?In some sense surely from EnglishSourcesMichael Putnam, Joshua Bousquette, Nick Henry, Ben Frey, Daniel Ntzel, Joseph Salmons & Alyson Sewell. 2013. How deep is your syntax? Filler-gap dependencies in heritage language grammar. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 19.21-30.Various related forthcoming papers and manuscripts by our team.5152 Absence of p-gaps in heritage German would be consistent with previous work on HLs.Presence of p-gaps would be strikingly different.Further, if gaps occur, we expect them to be licensed in syntactically differentiated ways.The absence of p-gaps = continuation of German syntactic structures brought by settlers handed down to successive generations of learners= consistent with the lack of null elements claimed to be characteristic of other heritage language varieties, such as those examined by P&K.

The occurrence of gaps= a major innovation in comparison to the earlier syntax of these varieties= L1 heritage German speakers could then be said to have developed a grammar that licenses new kinds of gaps driven by their native competence in English, which does allow gapping

-We also acknowledge that the outcome could be more nuanced than simply the absence or presence of gaps, and we therefore suspect that if gaps do occur, they will occur in specific syntactic contexts52Engdahls Accessibility Hierarchy 53

-Engdahl makes predictions about the occurrence of p-gaps in various contexts, with the syntactic contexts at the top of the hierarchy being more likely to tolerate gapping, theyre more accessible, and the contexts at the bottom of the hierarchy being less likely to tolerate gapping, theyre least accessible

-we test three points along this implicational scale: clauses headed by manner adverbials, temporal adverbials, and relative pronounsAnd the prediction then is that, if these speakers heritage grammar does license gapping, then we would expect to find it most frequently in clauses headed by manner adverbials, and least frequently in relative clauses

- it should be noted that English speakers have variable judgments of the acceptability of p-gapping in English sentences-but for German its a much cleaner picture, with previous work on gapping and the native German speakers we consulted about our test sentences, showing agreement on the inacceptablitily of parasitic gapping in German53Test sentences for p-gaps54Manner 1. Which book did you sell without reading?Manner 2. Is that the girl he kissed without looking at?

Temporal 1. Sheboygan is a city that people like when they visit.Temporal 2. This is the food that you have to cook before eating.

Relative. This is the book that people who read really like.-we asked our consultants to translate these English sentences with gaps into their heritage German

54Do gaps follow Engdahls AH?55GappingNo gapping% gappingManner 119773.10%Manner 217965.40%Temp 12218.70%Temp 2112134.40%Relative1175.60%# to go along with fig 3-so we see the over 50% of the translations of the manner clauses contain gaps,-a much smaller percentage of the translations of the temporal clauses contain gaps-and the least amount of gapping occurs in the translation of the relative clause55Do gaps follow Engdahls AH?56fig 5-this suggests that these speakers DO produce gaps in their heritage German variety-but they also maintain an overwhelmingly German syntax-with gaps occurring in limited contexts, most robustly in untensed adjunct clauses headed by manner adverbials and less frequently in clauses headed by temporal adverbs and relative pronouns, as predicted by Engdahls hierarchy56controls manner adv. temporal adv. conditional relative conj. clause WiG-Eng bilinguals Eng monolinguals (G. sett.) Eng monolinguals (non-G. sett)-Green (WiG-English bilinguals) lower than purple and blue (Eng monolinguals)5758blue is younger (1980-1994), n=6green is older (1949-1966), n=358Take home on gapsHeritage speakers of German produce p-gaps in translation taskscontrast with European varieties contrast with claim that heritage speakers have difficultly producing null elementsOur speakers produce gaps far more at the more accessible end of Engdahls hierarchythey tend to restructure more at the less accessible endThis looks like an effect of L2 on L1, not the inability to produce null elements due to their heritage statusBUT tightly structured and indirect.

59Conclusions60ConclusionsThe complexity wars have raged hottest in creole studies, but they lurk everywhere in language contact.Theres a lot of work on and many more claims about simplicity metrics. Were looking not for overall measures, but change in particular areas.Choose your metric for simplicity or simplification, and weve got counterexamples from Wisconsin Heritage German.They arent just from English or directly from English.Even where they are from English or German dialects in some sense, they are quite different from English.61ConclusionsWe didnt actually set out to look for issues of complexity or simplicity, but the issues weve explored so far show a surprisingly clear directionality. Not all patterns probably work this way: MLU, passivization, etc. The contact > simplification game is just dumb; please stop.These varieties are full products of human cognitive abilities and function as such. 62C-agr is from outer space anyway.62Big pictureHertiage languages can provide incredibly rich data for historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, historical sociolinguistics and structural linguistics.Requires integrating different sets of data carefullly.Dative case: story isnt what it seemsDialect mixing: more and EARLIER than claimedShift: story not what it seems, but facts support path for German influenceComplexification: Plenty of it in a situation where simplification is claimed.63Your questions?64Thank[s]!Thanks to Luke Annear, Emily Claire, Alicia Groh, Mary Simonsen, Trini Stickle, Nick Williams.65