Project Details
Projekt
The heritage speaker lexicon: dynamics and interfaces
Subject Area
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 313607803
Project P11 investigates stable and dynamic properties of the bilingual lexicon of adolescent and adult speakers of German and English as well as speakers of German as a heritage language in a North American context. Based on RUEG’s shared data (a corpus of elicited spoken and written, formal and informal reports on a fictive accident), canonical and non-canonical lexical properties will be compared with (a) the productions of monolingual speakers of German and English, and (b) with majority English and majority German speakers with heritage languages other than German (i.e. Turkish, Greek, Russian). There is abundant empirical evidence that the bilingual language system is fundamentally non-selective for language, and that there is constant competition between lexical items from the two languages in a bilingual speaker. P11 investigates on lexical combinatorics, lexical innovations, and productive word formation patterns. In accordance with these goals, RUEG’s open access cross-linguistic corpus will be augmented by additional tiers with qualitative annotations of lexical phenomena in different registers (+/-formal, spoken vs. written). P11 contributes to the common goals in RUEG2 by (i) establishing lexical and morphological inventories and their combinatorial properties, (ii) analyzing the use of lexical material in different registers, (iii) identifying online lexical interactions within and across languages.Empirically and theoretically, P11 concentrates on two kinds of dynamic processes: emergent properties involving the lexicon at internal and external interfaces as well as lexical coactivation and monitoring in speech production.
DFG Programme
Research Units
