Vortrag: Caught between Change and Contact

Version 4.2

Optional Agreement-Morphology in Heritage Finnish

This talk will argue for a more holistic view of what is responsible for syntactic language change in heritage languages, where the contact language cannot influence what element in syntax is changed, but does influence how it is changed. This will be illustrated with data on elicited optional agreement-morphology in temporal adverbial adjunct clauses in heritage Finnish in Sweden compared to Finnish-Swedes and native Finnish speakers with no proficiency in Swedish. In Standard Finnish the possessive-suffix marking subject-verb-agreement in temporal adverbial adjuncts is only optional under certain circumstances: Namely when the subject in the Adverbial adjunct is overt
The results presented here however show that when comparing a heritage Finnish speaking population in Sweden, a population of balanced early bilingual Finnish-Swedes in Finland, and native Finnish-speakers with no proficiency in Swedish, native Finns and Finnish-Swedes have similar rates of optionality that are less than those in the heritage population. However the heritage population and the Finnish-Swedes both have a majority of their variation occur even when the subject of the adverbial adjunct is covert, in contrast to the native Finnish-speakers. Thus, the element undergoing change in syntax is not affected by the contact language, but how it is changed is.

There are a number of adverbial clauses in Finnish that signal subject-verb-agreement through the usage of a possessive-suffix as used in 1) to express the possessor of the book. Note too that the possessive-suffix is only optional when the possessor is expressed overtly.

1a) Kirja-ni
Book-Px1S
‘My Book’

1b) Minun kirja-(ni)
My.GEN book-(Px1S)
‘My book’

Of these the temporal one is of interest as it is the only one of these where the literature cites it as being able to omit the possessive-suffix under certain conditions, (Vainikka& Brattico, 2010; Brattico& Huhmarniemi, 2015). This omission is only possible in Standard Finnish if the subject of the temporal adverbial clause is overt as below.

2a) Minä menin oluee-lle lue-ttua-ni läksyt
I went.1S beer-ALL read-TEMP-Px1S homework.PL
‘I went for a beer after reading the homework.’

2b) Minä menin oluee-lle minun lue-ttua-(ni)
I went.1S beer-ALL I.GEN read-TEMP-(Px1S)
läksyt
homework.PL
‘I went for a beer after me reading the homework.’

Previous research (Boyd& Andersson, 1991) already documented a complete omission of the possessive-suffix in nominal constructions such as 1) in Gothenburg-Finnish, so that the de facto only recorded from was 1b) without the possessive-suffix. Considering this development and introspective observations by the author that the possessive-suffix was lacking in temporal adverbials in his Stockholm-based Finnish, this research was carried out to see whether the lack of possessive –suffix agreement-morphology in heritage Finnish in Sweden was due to contact with Swedish or due to accelerated language change within the heritage community regardless of the contact language.
Participants were recruited from the heritage community in Stockholm and Helsinki-based native Finnish people with no proficiency in Swedish and Helsinki-based Finnish-Swedes. The latter served as a control group for the contact situation as this minority group consists of balanced early bilinguals as opposed to the heritage community where Swedish is the dominant language. The participants were then asked to do an elicitation task in which they were asked to repeat sentences that contained an error in either the Case of the direct object or in the semantics of the verb inside the temporal adverbial. Each stimuli changed whether the verb inside the adverbial had the possessive-suffix or not and the participants’ answers were recorded to determine whether and when they produced adverbials without the possessive-suffix.
The results are as shown below where the first numeral indicates actively changing the adverbial contra to the heard stimuli and the green second numeral indicates preserving the adverbial as heard in the stimuli. The results of this research indicated that the heritage speakers had an almost double rate of omitting the possessive-suffix in general and in actively omitting it against the form of the stimuli. Meanwhile the other two populations performed next to identically in both overall rate of omission and active omission. However when the environment in which these omissions took place was considered, then the heritage population patterned with the Finnish-Swedes in omitting a majority of the possessive-suffixes when there was no overt subject, while the Finnish population omitted subjects when an overt subject was present in the stimuli.
Based on this data I will suggest an explanation in which the omission of the possessive-suffix in general in heritage Finnish is not a result of contact as the rates of omission in the Finnish of Finnish-Swedes is almost identical to the Finnish population. Instead the ability to omit the possessive-suffix in heritage Finnish is due to its status as a heritage language. However, the environment the possessive-suffix can be omitted in is influenced by Swedish in the heritage language as this patterns with when the Finnish-Swedish population omits the possessive-suffix.

Info

Tag: 24.05.2019
Anfangszeit: 15:30
Dauer: 00:30
Raum: 103/ S69
Track: Theoretical Linguistics
Sprache: en

Programm StuTS 65