Culturally Specific Messaging and the Explanation of Contact in Impacted Bilinguals

Dados Bibliográficos

ID5900780
AutoresRicardo Otheguy (0000-0002-0970-4544, City University of New York, autor correspondente)
Ano2023
Volume8
Fascículo3
Páginas185
Data de publicação2023-08-03
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoLanguages (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2226-471X • E-ISSN: 2226-471X
EditoraMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/languages8030185
OpenAlexW4385520779
IdiomaEN
Referências citadas11

A sketch is offered of a framework that would abandon the familiar notion of a language and the accompanying question of whether it has changed under contact. The framework would focus instead on speakers and on the linguistic consequences of people contact. Speakers in contact settings are not failing or deviating from a language's norm while attempting to say the same things that are said in non-contact settings; rather, they are succeeding at saying different things. New arrivals face vast differences in the conceptualization of referents between their home precursor setting and the new encounter setting. These differences in conceptualization give rise to large numbers of changes in what speakers say. In most cases, these new things they say are just that, new speech or new messaging with no change in the grammar. But in a minority of cases, the new messaging does have linguistic, that is, grammatical consequences. Changes in the grammars of people in contact thus result not only, and perhaps not primarily, from formal copying or modeling but are responses to new conceptualizations prevailing in the new environment. The distinction between expressions reflecting only new conceptualizations, and those reflecting new conceptualizations and new grammar carries theoretical implications for the way linguists think about the grammars of bilinguals. And it carries applied implications for the way educators think about the linguistic performance of bilingual students, especially in social settings where they are minoritized. Data are drawn from the speech of Latin Americans and their descendants in New York City and other U.S. locales

Conceptualization · Copying · Focus (optics · Grammar · Language contact · Linguistics · Rule-based machine translation · Sketch · Sociology · Computer Science · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation