PATH
Preservation and Adaptation in Turkish as a Heritage Language
A Natural Laboratory in a Small Dutch Town
About the Project
Languages exhibit changes occurring within only a couple of generations in bilingual situations, especially in those cases where the affected language is a heritage language. At the same time, speakers of heritage languages preserve particular properties of the dialect they speak, such as in cases that result from migration, being geographically isolated from the native context of their language. In order to provide a description and explanation of contact-induced language change on the one hand, and isolation-induced dialect preservation on the other, PATH examines the degree to which cognitive and external factors play a role in variation and change in Turkish as a heritage language. In order to do so, it closely examines a variety of morpho-phonological, lexical and syntactic properties of a micro-dialect of Turkish spoken in the eastern Black Sea coast of Turkey as it has been preserved by a community in a small town in the North Brabant province of the Netherlands. This project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie SkÅ‚odowska Curie grant agreement No. 843131.
Summary
The European experience cannot be fully described without any reference to bilingualism. New language pairs continue to emerge as a result of migration both within the EU and from outside into the EU. Differences in individual experiences as well as societal, national and regional practices result in massive variation in bilingual outcomes, making it difficult to test the degree to which any potential factor causes such variation. PATH aims to reduce some of this variation by controlling for the regional dialect factor. Accordingly, it looks at aspects of the bilingual grammar of Turkish-Dutch speakers who migrated from a particular region of Turkey where a unique micro-dialect of Turkish is spoken. Speakers of this language variety moved to a small town in The Netherlands in the 1960s and 1970s to work at a nearby steel factory. This close-knit community of Turkish speakers makes a unique natural laboratory, and thus, provides the researcher with an opportunity to test variation across generations as Turkish and Dutch languages interact on a daily basis by keeping factors related to dialectal variation as well as certain social background variables constant.
Results 1
Nominalizations in Contact Situations: Underived Nominals with Argument Structure in Turkish
In this study, I revisit the claim that nominals denoting complex events must derive from discernible verbal stems and must be headed by an overt nominalizer. I show that Turkish has a set of nominals, crucially of foreign origin, which provides counter-evidence to both claims. From the perspective of Turkish grammar, they are morphologically noncompositional, manifesting neither a detectable verbal basis nor an overt nominalizer although they are categorically complex event nominals. Since (zero-)derived nominals of Turkic origin do not allow argument structure, the puzzling makeup of underived complex event nominals in question boils down to their loan word nature. I show that their behavior is different from both derived nominals as well as gerundive nominals in important ways. I claim that they are defective nominalizations lacking an nP representation. After reviewing previous accounts of these nominals, I consider three syntactic approaches to word derivation, which differ in their theoretical assumptions only in granularity, and conclude that the Spanning approach of Bye and Svenonius provides us with a conceptually superior account.
Results 2
Experiment 1: Do Dutch Middleas Leak into Turkish in contact situations?
Bilingual light verb constructions (LVCs) provide a perfect testing ground for theoretical claims about argument structure. Because bilingual LVCs typically contain a lexical verb from one language and a light verb from the other (bezoeken yapmak 'to visit' Dutch+ Turkish), they permit a testable context to shed (unique) light on how the labor between lexical content and its syntactic scaffolding is divided. This study reports results of an oral acceptability judgment task conducted with heritage speakers (HSs) of Turkish living in a Dutch town. The participants were asked to rate sentences with LVCs with dispositional middle semantics, comprised of a Dutch lexical verb and a Turkish light verb heading an unergative, an unaccusative or a canonical passive structure. Dutch has dispositional middles, which are underlyingly unergative constructions. Turkish does not have such middle constructions. Instead, passive constructions, used together with the aorist aspect and a manner adverb, give rise to similar generic readings. Our results show that participants reject unergative sentences with dispositional middle semantics while they rate unaccusative or canonical passive equivalents as acceptable, showing a clear preference for non-active Voice (Turkish-like) rather than active Voice (Dutch-like). This suggests that argument structure does not project from the Dutch verb but it is instead contributed by syntax, providing support for Neo-constructionist accounts of argument structure. (Manuscript in progress)
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This website will be updated once more results become available (case in code-switching, voice onset time and lenition in heritage varieties, and more).
FACT: Workshop on Formal Approaches to Contact in/with Turkish
May 19-20, 2022 Tromsø, Norway
DAY 1:
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Contact issues between Turkish and Anatolian Arabic/Kurdish, Faruk AkkuÅŸ (UMass, Amherst)
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Differential Object Marking in Asia Minor Greek Revisited, Metin BaÄŸrıaçık & Ümit Atlamaz (BoÄŸaziçi University)
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The Emergence of Clausal Nominalizations in Laz, Ömer Demirok & Balkız Öztürk (BoÄŸaziçi University)
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How to approach the postverbal field in German Turkish, Beste Kamali (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)
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The emergence of vowel harmony in Armenian dialects: Turkic influence, endogeny, or all ofthe above? Bert Vaux (Cambridge)
DAY 2:
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Aspects of clause combining in Turkish language contacts, Cem Keskin, Kateryna Iefremenko, Jaklin Kornfilt & Christoph Schroeder, (University of Potsdam & Syracuse University)
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Grammatical gender in Dutch-Turkish code-switching: production and acceptability, Maria Carmen Parafita Couto, Brechje van Osch, Janet Grijzenhout & Deniz Tat (Leiden University & UiT)
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Acquisition of German grammatical gender by child heritage speakers of Turkish, Monika Lindauer & Janet Grijzenhout (University of Konstanz & Leiden University)
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Do Turkish-Dutch Bilingual Grammars have dispositional middles? Deniz Tat (UiT & Leiden University)
Address
Leiden Institute for Area Studies
Matthias de Vrieshof 4
2311 BZ Leiden
Phone
+31-71-527-7100
