RG 2537: Emerging grammars in language contact situations: A comparative approach

The Research Unit “Emerging Grammars in Language Contact Situations: A Comparative Approach” (in short: “RUEG”) plans to investigate the linguistic systems and linguistic resources of bilingual speakers from families with an immigrant history, “heritage speakers”, in both of their languages (heritage and majority language) across formal and informal, written and spoken communicative situations. Taking a distinctly competence-oriented perspective on linguistic repertoires, we will study noncanonical phenomena as indicators of new grammatical options, and analyse their grammatical structure.We will investigate speakers of Russian, Turkish, and Greek as heritage languages in Germany and the U.S., in addition to German as a heritage language in the US, as well as monolingual controls for majority and heritage languages. We will collect data using a unified methodology in order to elicit comparable naturalistic data from different registers (“Language Situations”). This data will be integrated in a shared corpus, and analysed comparatively in close collaboration among the different projects.All projects will contribute to three “Joint Ventures”. These Joint Ventures organise research activities in RUEG and are guided by three key hypotheses that provide the overall conceptual frame for investigations in all projects. By doing so, we will target(1) the development of new dialects vs. incomplete acquisition or erosion (“Language Change Hypothesis”),(2) the relevance of external vs. internal grammatical interfaces (“Interface Hypothesis”), and(3) the distinction of contact-induced vs. language-internal change and variation (“Internal Dynamics Hypothesis”). As a result of our collaborative research, we expect new insights into the special dynamics of language variation, language change, and linguistic repertoires in contact situations; the modelling of noncanonical structures in the grammatical system; and new impulses for the investigation of heritage speakers and speakers’ resources in general.