Volume 62, Issue 3

In this paper we report on instances of innovative languaging in the spoken Turkish of bilingual children in Germany. Changes of Turkish mainly occur in areas of connectivity such as deictic/phoric expressions, wh -constructions, coordination, aspect, evidentiality, particles, and others. Contact-induced language change - is described in terms of functional reinterpretations of Standard Turkish linguistic forms, based on spoken German, - is seen as being motivated by 'catalysis′ in multilingual communication and - is explained by means of the theory of 'transpositions′ of linguistic procedures, as defined within the framework of functional-pragmatics. The article argues that the changes observed are so systematic in nature that it seems justified to speak of a new contact variety of Turkish.

The choice between using a Catalan word or a loanword from Spanish which contains a non-Catalan segment is conditioned by: i) whether the two words are cognates, ii) whether speakers have had schooling in Catalan, iii) the degree of Spanish usage in the district they live. When speakers modify the pronunciation of the Spanish word in order to avoid using non-Catalan segments, phonological adaptations are more often found in Spanish words which contain /θ/ than in those which contain /x/. Such a finding is explained in terms of the Principle of Feature Economy.

This paper reports on communicative strategies employed by Igbo-Nigerian immigrants living in the city of Padova (North-Eastern Italy). It proposes a new approach to the analysis of non-guided Second Language Acquisition (henceforth SLA). This approach treats immigrant speakers qua effective communication achievers. It focuses on communicative interaction, treating individual linguistic strategies as language innovations potentially initiating language change. It also sees non-guided SLA as a contact phenomenon and adopts a unified contact approach which puts all contact phenomena under the same umbrella.