Volume 10, Issue s2 - Special Issue: Cognitive mechanisms driving (contact-induced) language change; Guest Editors: Yela Schauwecker; Michael Percillier

This special issue focuses on the interaction of the disciplines of historical linguistics and psycholinguistics to obtain new insights into which cognitive factors are potentially relevant for language change. The contributions address questions related to the cognitive mechanisms at play, their evidence in historical data, who the agents of change may be, which experimental methods can be implemented to investigate language change, and how language change can be theoretically modeled in terms of cognitive mechanisms. In this introductory article, we first outline our aims by describing the call for papers and the workshop which laid the foundation for this special issue. We then provide a state of the art on the integration of research on cognitive mechanisms and language change before introducing the contributions and listing which of the central questions they address.

Contact between languages has become increasingly recognized as a major source of historical change, as linguistic properties are introduced from one language into another. Yet contact does not necessarily lead to such changes. In fact, arguably most of the properties that contrast between two languages in contact at a given place and time do not change. This paper argues that historical and contact linguistics should now look more systematically at different kinds of bilingualism rather than contact per se and should incorporate recent sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic findings from this literature, since these can help us understand both when change occurs and when it does not. In this context we build on the general model of bilingualism, CASP (short for “complex adaptive system principles”), proposed by Filipović and Hawkins and explore its predictions for whether and when changes will occur in one or the other language of a bilingual. In the event that the relevant speech community comprises monolinguals in addition to bilinguals, these changes may then spread to the wider community when social and demographic circumstances favor this. The paper gives illustrative data supporting CASP’s predictions for change in both language usage and grammar among bilinguals.

This study investigates the processing of evidentiality using an auditory sentence verification task in heritage speakers of Turkish residing in Sydney, Australia. Evidentiality is a grammatical category that marks the sources of information through which the speaker comes to know information regarding an event. Turkish obligatorily marks two distinct forms of direct and indirect evidentials. We compare the sensitivity to evidentiality-information source mismatches of the speakers of Turkish as a heritage language to Turkish speakers who were late arrivals to Australia. The results show that the heritage language speakers perform less accurately and with longer response times than late arrivals, and both the groups’ response accuracy is largely predicted by amount of exposure to Turkish during their development. The data suggest that heritage speakers of Turkish show insensitivity to evidentiality. Moreover, diminishing exposure to Turkish throughout heritage speakers’ development appears to be an important trigger for divergent attainment of evidentiality in Turkish heritage grammar.

When words are transferred from a source language into a target language, they may become conventionalized and appear to fully adopt target-language morphosyntactic behavior. Such words are traditionally regarded as borrowings. Even borrowings, however, are subject to probabilistic usage constraints, which we refer to as “accommodation biases” and which distinguish borrowings from native vocabulary. A case study is presented on accommodation biases in French-based verbs and adjectives in Middle English, showing that accommodation biases are robustly attested and can be diachronically persistent over long periods. In structural terms, accommodation biases resemble some of the familiar morphosyntactic constraints on code-switching. Combining the empirical evidence with theoretical argumentation, it is proposed that accommodation biases reflect a processing cost that is specifically associated with transferred items, and that arises from dual-language activation in bilingual speakers. Thus, accommodation biases indicate that even conventionalized borrowings may be more akin to code-switches than hitherto assumed.

The present study examines the diachronic consequence of a class of words that are superficially intransitive but that often have more than one possible underlying representation. We consider the hypothesis that structural underspecification and structure-based economy constraints on processing may drive a well-studied syntactic change in medieval French: the loss of directional/aspectual verb particles. A corpus-based approach demonstrates that, despite the prominence of Old French verb particles in the expression of motion events, they frequently occur in underspecified contexts for which a prepositional parse involving an implicit object is favored. The net result is very sparse unambiguous evidence for the conservative Old French grammar that underlies the particles.

This opinion paper considers the role of metalinguistic awareness as a cognitive factor in contact-induced change (CIC). Although research in neighboring fields – for example, language pedagogy and second and third language acquisition – has shown that metalinguistic awareness is a non-structural factor, but does interact with cross-linguistic influences, metalinguistic awareness and its connection to CIC have largely remained undiscussed in contact linguistics. The goal of this contribution is threefold: (i) to put metalinguistic awareness on the agenda in language contact research; (ii) to relate metalinguistic awareness and CIC; and (iii) to showcase how CIC might be linked to different language experiences. To narrow the structural scope, I examine changes in passive constructions and discuss what role metalinguistic awareness might have played in the different developments.