Volume 57, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Language contact and linguistic dynamics: speakers, speaker groups, and linguistic structures; Guest Editors: Esme Winter-Froemel, Sandra Ellena and Stefanie Goldschmitt

The introductory paper to the special issue summarises key aspects of contact-related linguistic dynamics such as the communicative interfaces of modern complex societies, the multi-layered textual and discoursal repertoire of their speaker groups and the role of the speakers’ cognitive mechanisms, social identity, and interactional strategies in settings of language contact. Giving an overview of the contributions, it aims to connect classic topics of language contact research with recent theoretical and methodological approaches investigated in the papers, and to highlight interconnections and interdisciplinary links that can stimulate further research on linguistic variation and change.

This article deals with languaging, a manifestation of language contact often found in tourism communication. It is understood as the use of local language in tourism texts written in the language of the tourists. After a review of previous research on languaging and its functions within tourism communication and on the contact linguistic status of languaging units and their mediation in the text, an analysis of a corpus consisting of four general German guidebooks on the northern Italian region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia is carried out with regard to how the examples of languaging found therein are distributed between the different guides and within each guidebook. Previous studies have already pointed out that the distribution in the guides is not uniform. The analysis is based on the work on text genres by Fandrych and Thurmair, according to which travel guides are large texts with four subtext genres, namely orientation texts, sightseeing texts, advice texts and in-depth texts, each of which fulfils certain dominant functions, has certain linguistic structures and deals with certain topics. The research questions posed are: what is the quantitative distribution of languaging evidence in the analysed guidebooks, and do certain semantic-functional types of languaging occur preferentially or even exclusively in certain subtext genres?

In many non-English-speaking countries, English loanwords in job ads seem to be very common. The question is whether this linguistic choice is advantageous, especially when the job advertised does not involve working in an international environment. Previous research of English loanwords in job ads has revealed that their effect in terms of the evaluation of the company, the job and the ad is limited if effects can be shown at all. Suggestions that English loanwords draw readers’ attention because this language choice deviates from what readers expect and, in addition, take more processing time (because they are foreign) lack empirical evidence. The eye-tracking and behavioural data of our experiment did not provide any empirical evidence for the attention-drawing function of English loanwords nor an influence on their effectiveness in job ads geared to graduate students in Germany. We suggest that loanwords need a certain amount of processing to be identified as foreign. This means they are different from other salient cues that were shown to draw readers’ attention because they are not subject to automatic processes. In addition, our participants were sufficiently proficient in English so that differences in processing time were not reflected in their eye-movement data.

Previous research has highlighted that the use of lexical borrowings is often accompanied by metalinguistic elements that have been analysed as flags or alterity markers. This paper aims to investigate the use of these markers from a usage-based perspective, focusing on their functions in communication. It will first be argued that lexical borrowings may pose certain challenges to recipient-language speakers; these challenges will be rephrased as features of reduced accessibility. The notion of reduced accessibility will be elaborated by commenting on both form-related aspects concerning the items’ conformity with respect to the RL system (pronunciation, spelling, morphology) and content-related aspects concerning semantic transparency as defined in diachronic cognitive onomasiology. It will then be argued that in addition to the function of alterity marking, the markers also serve to enhance the accessibility of lexical borrowings. A revised categorisation of three types of relevant meta-information techniques will be proposed (flagging, metalinguistic comments, frame information). A survey on the use of recent anglicisms in French and Italian newspaper articles will reveal how the use of meta-information techniques can be seen as a strategy to communicatively negotiate and facilitate the use of borrowed items. Finally, implications of the usage-based approach to alterity marking and enhancing accessibility will be discussed.

This paper contributes to the ongoing Cognitive Linguistic turn in research on lexical borrowing: rather than searching for objective and universal linguistic criteria to demarcate different contact phenomena, we prioritize language users’ subjective perception of contact-induced change. In particular, combining insights from folk linguistics and social role theory, this paper presents the results from a survey targeting 177 Belgian Dutch respondents’ expectations on the use of English loanwords. The survey uncovers variation in these expectations, depending on the age of the projected speaker (RQ1), on the social role of the projected speaker (RQ2), and whether (unexpected) use of English by projected social role actors leads to negative evaluations (RQ3). Results reveal shared expectations regarding the use of English loans by age, with a perceived peak in late adolescence. Regarding the use of English by social role actors, we find high anticipated use of English loans for modern roles (e.g. rapper, gamer), whilst the expectation on English use for public (e.g. primary school teacher) and traditional roles (e.g. farmer) is significantly lower. Finally, our results indicate that role violation only seems to trigger negative evaluations when the role actor is a public figure with social responsibility. The discussion reflects on the implications of the results, contrasting the top-down or bottom-up emergence of shared beliefs on speaker groups and contact-induced variation.

This study aims to contribute new insight into the study of languages in contact by comparing the implicit and explicit general language attitudes of bilingual individuals towards their first and second language in health communication in a multilingual society, through a combination of survey and experimental methods. We investigated to what extent 358 L1 Catalan and 338 L1 Spanish speakers in Catalonia differed in their general attitudes to Catalan and Spanish (explicit language attitudes) and in their reactions to the use of these languages in health advertising, specifically in an advertisement promoting COVID-19 vaccination (implicit language attitudes). This is the first study of its kind in a European multilingual context. Based on accommodation theory and theory related to first-language preference, participants were expected to prefer their L1 and the L1 advertisement. Findings offer support for first-language preference in terms of general language attitudes. However, the language of the ad and participants’ first language had little impact on ad-related response. There were no effects of language on attitude towards the ad, attitude towards vaccination and vaccination intention, but the L1 Catalan participants felt the Catalan ad had more appropriate language and expressed more cultural respect than the Spanish ad. Thus, in the current study, explicit language attitudes revealed first-language preference, while implicit language attitudes did so to a limited extent.

This paper targets the division of labor between borrowed English forms and heritage alternatives in Belgian-Dutch youth language. Through lexical semantic analysis of a youth-language corpus containing over 450,000 private instant messages, the choice for English or Dutch person-reference nouns (e.g. Eng. girlfriend , loser , sister ; Du. vriendin , sukkel , zus ) is studied at three levels of semasiological granularity. First, at the level of the semantic field as a whole, Dutch appears to have the strongest foothold, accounting for over 75 % of the types and over 85 % of the tokens referencing people. Second, coarse-grained semantic-feature annotation reveals that Dutch retains its dominant position in all identified semantic subcategories of person-reference nouns although some hubs of English are also attested. Third, an in-depth analysis of the selection between the near-synonyms sis , sister , zus , zusje and zuster in the corpus indicates socio-pragmatic differentiation between the English and Dutch terms, English being used more for (affective) address and for friends, Dutch being reserved for reference and for proper kin. Overall, our study indicates the potential of a three-tiered onomasiological approach: the results of the three case studies show both similarities, in the systematically stronger foothold of Dutch at all levels of analysis, and differences, in the semantic specialization for English progressively uncovered from the first to the third sub-study.

The effects of language contact on semantic and syntactic properties of verbs can be considered as not yet extensively studied. This contribution is concerned with French as a typical verb-framed language that cannot freely combine manner verbs with result-denoting arguments within the VP. Drawing on creation events, the study explores if restrictions can loosen, and lexicalization preferences change when French is in contact to a satellite-framed language like English. Judgment data from bilingual speakers of Canadian French (CaFr) are compared to data from speakers of Hexagonal French (HFr). The analysis addresses how selective copying from English is relevant for the acceptability of different VPs and considers how the factors of individual and social language dominance might influence the judgments within the CaFr group. The results show that French manner verbs and direct objects can be coerced into creation readings in both test groups as long as only the selectional restrictions of a particular verb have to be adapted. When, however, a general constraint of French has to be overridden to arrive at a creation reading, acceptability is higher in the CaFr group, who can resort to combinatorial copying from English. Furthermore, VPs in which manner is not lexicalized in the verb are somewhat more accepted in the HFr group than in the CaFr group. Within the CaFr group, certain cases of satellite framing are judged somewhat better by speakers from an English dominant region, while VPs without a manner verb reach slightly higher scores among speakers from Quebec. It is thus shown how structural and speaker-related factors can affect the acceptability of event descriptions in language contact.

The article deals with how English deverbal nouns with the suffix - ing have been imported into Italian. The focus is on the semantic characteristics of these borrowed nouns in Italian and, in particular, on the question of whether they have been borrowed not as simple sign-concept pairings but with argument and event structure. In previous research, it has been claimed that argument and event structure need to be licensed by some overt functional element. Hence, borrowed deverbal nouns should have argument structure and event structure only if they have an overt affix, in other words, only if the forms are not borrowed holistically as unsegmented words but retain internal morphological structure, implying that morphological borrowing of the affix has occurred. When a foreign affix combines with native bases of the recipient language, this is often considered an important criterion for morphological borrowing, which is clearly not the case for the suffix - ing in Italian. Here, it will be shown that contrary to expectation, numerous occurrences with argument and event structure may be found in a large Italian web corpus for a sample of English deverbal nouns ending in - ing , borrowed into (certain registers) of Italian.