Vortrag: Methods to detect contact-induced language change in Spanish

Checking in with postnominal 'alguno' in Spanish and 'algum' in Portuguese

When working on language change, it is difficult to decide if a phenomenon of language change is the result of language contact or internal language change. This is true especially in the case of languages of the same language family in contact as it is the case for Romance languages as Aranese, Spanish and Portuguese.
In this talk, the underlying question is the following: How can we detect contact-induced language change in Spanish? In particular, how do we do that when Spanish is in contact with another Romance language such as Portuguese? I will show that sociolinguistic factors play a central role in this topic; also, that syntactic analyses can only help partly to detect external language change.

Brinkmann (accepted; 2018) analyses data of contact-induced language change in Maya and combines Sorace (2011) and Heine & Kuteva (2009) to obtain a more complete theory. Maya and Spanish are languages from very different language families. Therefore, detecting Spanish influences in Maya seems to be a different task than finding influences from one Romance language in another, e.g., Spanish influences within Aranese.
Winkelmann (1989) compares the language use of people in the Val d’Aran (Spain) and neighboring regions in Spain and France. By comparing language tokens of different regions and of speakers of different ages, Winkelmann (1989) concludes which structures in Aranese are influenced by language contact with neighbor varieties (e.g., Spanish, Catalan, or Occitan varieties). Another conclusion refers to the question of which structures are solely the result of internal language change. However, this method has some problems concerning the differentiation between language contact and internal language change of Romance languages as they all derive from Latin and, therefore, can have similar developments even without language contact.
In this talk, I compare methods on contact-induced language change (see Brinkmann, accepted; 2018; Heine & Kuteva 2009; Sorace 2011; Winkelmann 1989). Furthermore, I check how these methods work on a phenomenon that exists in Portuguese and Spanish, i.e., combinations of nouns and postnominal algum (1a) and alguno (1b) using data that stems from the Corpus do Português (CdP) and Corpus del Español (CdE) and prior studies on this phenomenon (see Martins 2015a, 2015b).

(1) a. não é problema algum (Portuguese)
not is problem no
‚it’s no problem (at all)‘ (CdP 2018: NOW)

b. no tiene problema alguno (Spanish)
not has problem no
‚it is no problem (at all)’ (CdE 2018: NOW)

The focus of this talk lies on syntactic properties in language change and the interface to sociolinguistics.

References
Brinkmann, Lisa Marie. 2018. Sprachkontakt Maya und Spanisch: Zur Bedeutung der kontaktinduzierten Grammatikalisierung in Maya. Unveröffentlichte Masterarbeit. Hamburg: Universität Hamburg.
Brinkmann, Lisa Marie. accepted. „Sprachkontakt Spanisch und Maya: Eine Feldstudie in Yucatán zur kontaktinduzierten Grammatikalisierung in Maya“, promptus - Würzburger Beiträge zur Romanistik.
Heine, Bernd & Kuteva, Tania. 2009. “On contact-induced grammaticalization”, Studies in Language 27(3), 529–572.
Martins, Ana Maria. 2015a. “Negation and NPI composition inside DP”, in: Biberauer, Theresa & Walkden, George (eds), Syntax over Time: Lexical, Morphological and Information- Structural Interactions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 102–122.
Martins, Ana Maria. 2015b. “Ordem de palavras e polaridade: inversão nominal negativa com algum/alguno e nenhum“. Diacrítica 29: 401–428.
Sorace, Antonella. 2011. “Pinning down the concept of interface in bilingual development.”, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 1(2), 1–33.
Winkelmann, Otto. 1989. Untersuchungen zur Sprachvariation des Gaskognischen im Val d’Aran (Zentralpyrenäen). Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Corpora
CdE: Corpus del Español. 2001-2018. Davies, Mark, https://www.corpusdelespanol.org (Last access: 10/17/21).
> Corpus del Español: NOW. 2018. https://www.corpusdelespanol.org/now/ (Last access: 10/17/21).
CdP: Corpus do Português. 2006-2018. Davies, Mark, https://www.corpusdoportugues.org (Last access: 10/17/21).
> Corpus do Português: NOW. 2018. https://www.corpusdoportugues.org/now/ (Last access: 10/17/21).

Info

Tag: 20.11.2021
Anfangszeit: 14:00
Dauer: 00:30
Raum: 👾
Track: Theoretical Linguistics
Sprache: en

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