Volume 9, Issue s2 - Special Issue: The expression of reference – acquisition, bilingualism and change in a cross-linguistic perspective; Editors: Christine Dimroth, Anna Jachimek, Klaus-Michael Köpcke

The article addresses the question of what happens to internal linguistic variability in a language contact situation by looking at how first-generation Russian immigrants in Germany use two variants of possessive pronouns (reflexive and non-reflexive) for referencing the subject. To what extent does the frequency of the variants, as well as linguistic constraints on their use, remain the same as in the monolingual variety, or change to converge with the structures of the majority language? A forced choice sentence completion task was conducted with 96 adult monolingual Russian and 96 adult bilingual Russian-German speakers to measure the frequency of both variants and the effect of animacy and referentiality of the possessum. The results reveal an increased frequency of the non-reflexive variant in bilingual Russian, indicating convergence with German. At the same time, bilingual speakers observe the same animacy and referentiality constraints on the possessive choice as monolinguals. The effect of linguistic constraints, however, is smaller than the influence of individual speaker-related variables. Overall, our study indicates that convergence in language contact affects the frequency but not the conditioning of the variants and only in some bilingual individuals.

The paper examines the extent to which bilingual children select lexical noun phrases and null and overt pronouns as referring expressions in their majority language German and their heritage language Polish. Both languages are similar regarding the availability of lexical noun phrases but differ in terms of the distribution of null and overt pronominal forms. Our focus lies on discourse contexts with a subject antecedent in the preceding clause, which require only light processing for both speaker and hearer due to the high accessibility of the intended subject referent. Drawing on experimental data from a picture story retelling task (MAIN) to investigate the distribution of referring expressions in the two languages compared to age-matched monolingual control groups, our results reveal that bilingual children are sensitive to crosslinguistic differences in the syntactic and discourse-pragmatic constraints that regulate the distribution of null and overt subjects in Polish and German, depending on the mode of speech (narrative or dialogic). Furthermore, there are no significant differences between the bilingual and monolingual children, irrespective of language and age group. Thus, our study cannot confirm findings of previous studies concerning the tendency of bilingual children to be either overspecific or underspecific in subject reference production.

The study examines the use of referring expressions in anaphoric contexts in a German-Polish bilingual child between age 2;0 to 4;0. The longitudinal corpus consists of 160 video recordings of spontaneous speech in both languages. There are fundamental differences in the way anaphoric reference is expressed in German and Polish. Speakers of German refer to discourse-given referents either with a definite NP, a personal or a demonstrative pronoun. Speakers of Polish – a pro drop language without articles – mostly use bare nouns or null pronouns. Overt pronouns and demonstrative determiners are restricted to specific information structure conditions. We found an overuse of overt pronouns and demonstrative determiners in Polish in comparison to a monolingual Polish child of the same age and also qualitative differences in the use of the relevant expressions. Despite the fact that the earliest child grammar in both languages rather resembles the Polish target (no articles, no pronouns), the reliable markers of discourse-givenness encountered in the German input are rapidly acquired and overextended to Polish, before the more implicit Polish system is in place.

This study offers new insights into the marking of (in)definiteness by Polish-German bilinguals. In contrast to monolinguals, some bilinguals speaking Polish use the demonstrative ten and the numeral jeden in contexts that are restricted to articles only. Both the distance that the speaker’s variety of Polish is from the norm to which they were exposed and pattern replication seem to play an important role in this context. For the analysis, a corpus was created from nine transcripts of interviews (2,253 word types and 10,311 word tokens) with Polish-German bilinguals recorded in 2006 and 2010 by using the AntConc toolkit. The findings indicate that bilingual speakers follow the pathways of grammaticalization from a demonstrative to a definite article and from a numeral to an indefinite article that have been established in cross-linguistic work: demonstratives and the numeral ‘one’ are common sources of grammaticalization. Therefore, I suggest that these structural changes can be explained as resulting from contact-induced grammaticalization.

The paper discusses the broad and seemingly diverse uses of the German D-pronoun. It is argued that the pronoun carries the invariant semantic feature [+distance] and that all its various uses are derived from this feature. That is, the D-pronoun expresses varying forms of distance between the referent of the pronoun and another discourse variable that functions as the perspectival center. The diverse uses of the D-pronoun arise from the specific ways in which the feature [+distance] is adapted to the relevant domain of application. Overall, the analysis considers seriously Jakobson’s proposal that the grammatical architecture of language is built on invariant semantic features.