Variation and language attitudes in Yurakaré: Setting out for a cross-linguistic perspective
Final Report Abstract
In this project, I set out to investigate variation and language attitudes in Yurakaré, a language isolate spoken by around 2,000 people in central Bolivia. A surprising finding regarding the nature of variability in the language is that sociolinguistic variation that can be linked to demographic factors does not appear to be overabundant. This insight pushed me to investigate other ways of looking at variability. Studying the local unfolding of lexical variation across utterance-response pairs, I demonstrate that speakers’ choices of lexical items are not independent of one another in conversation. In repetitional responses, speakers are more likely to reuse a non-conventionalized element from Spanish that occurred in the initial utterance than to replace it with an alternative Yurakaré term. On this basis, I proposed that repetitional responses constitute an interactional affordance for linguistic transmission. This idea led to the initiation of a new research group at the University of Cologne investigating the role of repetitional responses in language change (with Eugen Hill, Martin Becker and Pascal Coenen, funded by the FORUM line of the Excellent Research Support Programme of the University of Cologne). Another result of the project was that the frequency of use of non-conventionalized material from Spanish is not fixed for a speaker but rather varies according to the situation, contributing to expressing variable degrees of purist attitudes in interaction (Gipper to appear b). Moreover, it has been found that the ongoing language shift in the community from Yurakaré to Spanish is accompanied by a shift in language ontology on which attitudes are contingent. In another article, I show that speakers create lexical and grammatical variability in the low-diversity system of framing reported speech and thought relying predominantly on one single verb, ta ‘say’ (article currently under review). I furthermore contributed to a co-authored paper that demonstrates that inter-individual variability should be taken into account in corpus-typological studies in addition to language, in particular for variables that are semantic rather than structural in nature. Moreover, the development of eLAC (https://elac.uni-koeln.de/) was initiated, a platform for mobile access to data in the Language Archive Cologne to enable access to the data for speech communities. In collaboration with Yurakaré speaker and language activist Jeremías Ballivián Torrico, we laid the foundation for future investigations of variability in Yurakaré. Different types of data were collected for this purpose. Sociolinguistic interviews were conducted with 28 people, most of them in Yurakaré and Spanish (with additional funding from the Global South Studies Center, University of Cologne). In addition, we collected word list readings with 70 speakers to enable a large-scale investigation of vowel variation in the language as well as cross-linguistic comparison. We also contributed data to DoReCo (Language Documentation Reference Corpora, http://doreco.info/) to enable the study of phonetic variation in discourse in Yurakaré and cross-linguistically.
Publications
- Dialekt und Slang am Amazonas: Wie funktioniert Variation in kleinen Sprachen? Research brochure 2016/17 of the Philosophische Fakultät (Faculty of Arts and Humanities), University of Cologne, pp. 12–13
Gipper, Sonja
- Beyond committing and presupposing in Yurakaré conversations: Investigating the interactional functions of epistemic markers through their sequential distributions. Folia Linguistica 54(2). 371–404
Gipper, Sonja
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1515/flin-2020-2043) - Repeating responses as a conversational affordance for linguistic transmission: Evidence from Yurakaré conversations. Studies in Language 44(2). 281–326
Gipper, Sonja
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.19041.gip) - La construcción interaccional de las actitudes lingüísticas de purismo: Variación en el uso de elementos en castellano en conversaciones entre bilingües yurakarécastellano. In: Martina Schrader-Kniffki & Julia Montamayor Gracia (eds.), Espacios de contacto en la hispanofonía. Español y lenguas indígenas en el mundo globalizado. Bern et al.: Peter Lang, 2021,
Gipper, Sonja
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.3726/b18430 https://dx.doi.org/ 10.3726/b18430 https://dx.doi.org/10.3726/b18430) - Assertive content questions in Yurakaré conversations: Using indisputable facts to justify disputable claims, actions, and stances. Journal of Pragmatics, Vol. 202. 2022, pp. 28-47.
Gipper, Sonja
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2022.09.006) - Language vs. Individuals in cross-linguistic corpus typology. Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication, 25.2022: Geoffrey Haig, Stefan Schnell & Frank Seifart (eds.), Doing corpus-based typology with spoken language data: State of the art, pp. 179-232. Honululu: University of Hawai'i Press.
Barth, Danielle, Nicholas Evans, I Wayan Arka, Henrik Bergqvist, Diana Forker, Sonja Gipper, Gabrielle Hodge, Eri Kashima, Yuki Kasuga, Carine Kawakami, Yukinori Kimoto, Dominique Knuchel, Norikazu Kogura, Keita Kurabe, John Mansfield, Heiko Narrog, Desak Putu Eka Pratiwi, Saskia van Putten, Chikako Senge & Olena Tykhostup
- The expression of directed caused accompanied motion events in Yurakaré: Semantics, pragmatics, and interactional variability. In: Anna Margetts, Birgit Hellwig & Sonja Riesberg (eds.): Caused Accompanied Motion: Bringing and taking events in a cross-linguistic perspective. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 101–146.
Gipper, Sonja
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.134.05gip) - Tracing Ontological Shift in Interaction: The Role of Language Labels in the Co-Construction of Language Attitudes Among Yurakaré People.
Journal of Postcolonial Linguistics 6. 2022, Special Issue: Postcolonial sociolinguistics, pp.125-159.
Gipper, Sonja
