Moribund Germanic Heritage Languages in North America: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Findings

262 Pages·2015·1.287 MB·

by  B. Richard Page, Michael Putnam

Moribund Germanic Heritage Languages in North America
Empirical Approaches to
Linguistic Theory
Series Editor
Brian D. Joseph (The Ohio State University, USA)
Editorial Board
Artemis Alexiadou (University of Stuttgart, Germany)
Harald Baayen (University of Alberta, Canada)
Pier Marco Bertinetto (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy)
Kirk Hazen (West Virginia University, Morgantown, USA)
Maria Polinsky (Harvard University, Cambridge, USA)

VOLUME 8
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ealt
Moribund Germanic Heritage
Languages in North America
Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Findings
Edited by
B. Richard Page and Michael T. Putnam
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moribund Germanic heritage languages in North America : theoretical perspectives and empirical findings /
Edited by B. Richard Page and Michael T. Putnam.
  pages cm. — (Empirical approaches to linguistic theory ; 8)
 Includes index.
 ISBN 978-90-04-28960-4 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-29021-1 (e-book) 1. Germanic
languages—History—North America. 2. Germanic languages—Variation—History—North America.
3. Germanic languages—Morphology—North America. 4. Language obsolescence—North America.
5. Language maintenance—North America. 6. Historical linguistics—North America. I. Page, B. Richard.
II. Putnam, Michael T.
 PD75.M67 2015
 430.097—dc23
2014049191
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issn 2210-6243
isbn 978-90-04-28960-4 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-29021-1 (e-book)
Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.
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Contents
Editor’s Preface  vii
1 Researching Moribund Germanic Heritage Languages: Theoretical and
Empirical Challenges and Rewards  1
B. Richard Page and Michael T. Putnam
2 A Syntactic Model for the Analysis of Language Mixing Phenomena:
American Norwegian and Beyond  12
Tor A. Åfarli
3 An Early Stage of the Historical Development of Complementizer
Agreement: Evidence from Wisconsin Heritage German  34
Joshua Bousquette
4 Verb Second and Finiteness Morphology in Norwegian Heritage
Language of the American Midwest  64
Kristin Melum Eide and Arnstein Hjelde
5 Where Discourse Structure and a Heritage Language Meet: Oral History
Interviews of Swedish Americans  102
Angela Falk
6 Noun Phrase Case Shift in Volga German Varieties on the Great Plains
of Kansas  133
William D. Keel
7 Incomplete Acquisition and Verb Placement in Heritage
Scandinavian  153
Ida Larsson and Janne Bondi Johannessen
8 Language Shift, Religious Identity, and Phonological Traces of
Pennsylvania German in Pennsylvania English: The Laxing of Unstressed
/i/ among Pennsylvania German Anabaptists  190
B. Richard Page
vi contents
9 Minimizing (Interface) Domains: The Loss of Long-Distance Binding
in North American Icelandic  203
Michael T. Putnam and Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir
10 Sociolinguistic and Syntactic Variation in Wisconsin German
Narratives  224
Alyson Sewell
Index of Authors Cited  251
Editor’s Preface
In my Editor’s Preface for other volumes I have often noted that a particular
volume is the first of this or the first of that, which I am able to do in this still
relatively early phase of the Empirical Approaches to Linguistic Theory series.
Soon of course I will run out of “firsts” but thankfully I can use that trope for
the present volume, as it is the first multi-author edited work that we are pub-
lishing in the series. As such, it signals our interest in such works, as long as
they meet, as this volume does, the series criteria of being at once empirical
and theoretical.
In this case, the empirical side of the volume is obvious: editors B. Richard
Page and Michael T. Putnam have gathered eight papers, bundled them
together with an interesting and revealing introductory essay, and have thereby
formed a collection that is very data-rich overall, drawing on the wealth of
material on heritage varieties of several of the modern Germanic languages.
Heritage languages, as language forms associated with special sociolinguistic
circumstances involving emigrés and their children, are coming into their own
as an important object of study, as recognized not only by the existence of a
journal dedicated to such languages (Heritage Language Journal, www.heritage
languages.org) but also by this very series, through our publication of Tanya
Ivanova-Sullivan’s Theoretical and Experimental Aspects of Syntax-Discourse
Interface in Heritage Grammars in 2014 as our volume number 6.1
Heritage languages offer intriguing possibilities for theoreticians, as they are
a phenomenon that linguistic theories ought to have something to say about,
involving as they do language learning under special familial circumstances.
But they are also fraught with possible traps, as the data they represent has to
be filtered through the many variables of individual families’ lives and situa-
tions. The papers in this volume do a fine job of bringing out these theoretical,
and methodological, issues while building on a solid empirical base.
Even if definite answers are not always forthcoming, merely asking the right
questions, as these papers do, is a real contribution in itself. It is thus with great
pleasure that I include this volume in the series.
Brian D. Joseph
EALT Series Managing Editor
Columbus, Ohio USA
10 December 2014
1 I am cheating a bit by mentioning this volume here, but due to a production timetable that
clashed with travels of mine, I was unable to get a preface written for it; thus, this retrospec-
tive mention is the best I can do for now (but better late than never!).

Chapter 1
Researching Moribund Germanic Heritage
Languages: Theoretical and Empirical Challenges
and Rewards
B. Richard Page and Michael T. Putnam
1 The Multilingual Challenge
Heritage languages have recently become a major topic of interest among lin-
guists, explored for their implications for linguistic theory, especially in terms
of acquisition, attrition and change. Speakers of heritage languages are typi-
cally multilingual and usually more proficient in the dominant language of
the society than in their heritage language. Clearly, there are a myriad of addi-
tional factors that must be taken into account in multilingual investigations,
including (but obviously not limited to) issues such as, priming effects, lan-
guage dominance, age of onset of exposure to a given language, sociolinguistic
parameters of a speech community, and various speech acts and pragmatic
effects of natural occurring discourse. Following Rothman (2009: 156), we clas-
sify a heritage language as follows:
A language qualifies as a heritage language if it is a language spoken at
home or otherwise readily available to young children, and crucially this
language is not a dominant language of the larger (national) society. Like
the acquisition of a primary language in monolingual situations and the
acquisition of two or more languages in situations of societal bilingual-
ism/multilingualism, the heritage language is acquired on the basis of
an interaction with naturalistic input and whatever in-born linguistic
mechanisms are at play in any instance of child language acquisition.
Differently, however, there is the possibility that quantitative and quali-
tative differences in heritage language input and the introduction, influ-
ence of the societal majority language, and differences in literacy and
formal education can result in what on the surface seems to be arrested
development of the heritage language or attrition in adult bilingual
knowledge. (italics in the original)
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004�90���_00�
2 Page and Putnam
For most, if not all, of these heritage language grammar speakers, the socially-
dominant L2 has become, throughout the course of their individual lives as well
as the shared life of the community in which they reside, the most dominant,
frequently used/activated grammar. Perhaps the most central issue involv-
ing research into heritage language grammars pertains to the question of the
permanence of linguistic knowledge initially acquired during childhood. We
agree with Schmid (2010:1) who states: “[O]nce a speaker has attained a stable
(monolingual) command of his or her first language, large areas of this knowl-
edge appear to be so entrenched that they are affected to a surprisingly small
degree by non-use and non-exposure, even if the speaker has lived in a migrant
setting for several decades.” Of course, this claim cannot be extended univer-
sally to all heritage language grammars nor all domains of linguistic knowl-
edge. If (linguistic) knowledge once acquired can be lost or altered throughout
the course of a lifespan, questions pertaining to which units of grammar are
more prone to attrition than others immediately come to the forefront. It is
also important to recognize, as pointed out by Schmid and Köpke (2007), that
even in first-language (L1) attrition situations, changes in the grammatical sys-
tems of bi/multilingual grammars are not always unidirectional (i.e., there are
times when the recessive grammar can influence and alter the more dominant
one). The typological make-up of the multiple grammars can also play a deci-
sive role in affecting the heritage language grammar. Grosjean (2008: 63) com-
ments on the challenge of gaining a more detailed insight into the underlying
linguistic and cognitive mechanisms responsible for the “seeping through” of
aspects of the more dominant competing grammar into the recessive grammar
of multilingual speakers.
The contributions in this volume investigate primarily the grammars of
moribund Germanic heritage languages spoken in the Midwestern United
States and the Manitoba Providence of Canada. In many respects, these mori-
bund varieties of heritage languages vary significantly from other heritage
languages that have been the focus of previous theoretical and experimental
work. Research on heritage language grammars has concentrated on second
and third generation speakers of a language (for example, Spanish or Russian),
with the first generation, usually, but not always, being native speakers of the
language under investigation. The contributions of this volume contribute to
this rapidly growing literature on heritage linguistics and bilingualism in gen-
eral, presenting challenging findings that require us, as scholars, to broaden
our horizons with respect to research in this domain.
Research on multilingual grammars forces us to revisit Chomsky’s (1957,
1965) initial charge—at least as far as coming to grips with aspects of the
competence grammar of natural human language is concerned—that a produc-
tive linguistic research program should focus on and explicate the properties