Project Details
Projekt
Clause structure in heritage German
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Rosemarie Tracy
Subject Area
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Term
from 2018 to 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 313607803
P5 investigates the competence and performance of speakers of heritage German, i.e., of minority-language speakers with one or both parents German immigrants. Our main focus will be on heritage speakers who were born in the U.S. or who moved there in infancy. Hence German is one of their simultaneous first languages (2L1), or it had a headstart as L1, with English, the majority language, close at its heels as an early second language (age of onset of exposure no later than 2-3). P5 will concentrate on factors relevant to the organization of clauses (especially with respect to word order, argument structure, morphosyntactic features expressing finiteness and case), paying close attention to their potentially fuzzy edges. P5 will compare German heritage repertoires in the U.S. with Namibian German data made available by P6. The integration of heritage German within the overall language spectrum of RUEG allows us to investigate the effects of majority vs. minority status on the varieties of German accessible to and spoken by, bilingual speakers in comparison with the repertoires of monolingual speakers of German. The inclusion of minority German in Namibia will enable us to compare the role of different sociolinguistic settings and attitudes towards individual and societal multilingualism. In line with the other RUEG projects, P5 seeks to identify systematic non-canonical phenomena diverging qualitatively and/or quantitatively from the formal and informal, spoken and written repertoires of age-matched majority speakers of German (Joint venture I, Language Change Hypothesis). P5 will explore the theoretical relevance of interfaces between syntactic and other levels (external vs. internal interfaces, Joint Venture II, Interface Hypothesis) and will contribute to the differentiation of contact-induced vs. internally motivated change (Joint Venture III, Internal Dynamics Hypothesis). P5 will also compare heritage-German speakers with first-generation German-Americans in order to determine which novel properties are already foreshadowed within the lifetime of pre-heritage bilingual speakers.
DFG Programme
Research Units
