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SUMMARY:Bilingualism in the community: Code-switching and grammars in cont
 act - Catherine Travis (The Australian National University)
DTSTART:20190619T160000Z
DTEND:20190619T173000Z
UID:TALK126397@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Yixin Zhang
DESCRIPTION:Does the use of two languages by bilinguals inevitably bring a
 bout grammatical change? Does switching between languages serve as a catal
 yst in such change? It is widely held that linguistic code-switching inher
 ently promotes grammatical convergence – languages becoming more similar
  to each other through contact\; evidence for this\, however\, remains elu
 sive. In this talk\, we utilise variation patterns in speech to establish 
 quantitative diagnostics of grammatical similarity and difference.\n\nThe 
 community of study is a long-term Spanish-English bilingual community in n
 orthern New Mexico\, USA\, and the linguistic feature of interest is subje
 ct expression (variable in Spanish\, but near obligatory in English). Usin
 g a new bilingual corpus of English and Spanish spontaneously produced by 
 the same speakers\, we show how bilinguals’ two languages differ from ea
 ch other\, and align with their respective monolingual benchmarks. We conc
 lude\, then that grammatical change through contact is not a foregone conc
 lusion in bilingual communities\, where speakers are adept at keeping thei
 r languages together\, yet separate.\n
LOCATION:GR06/07\, Faculty of English\, 9 West Rd (Sidgwick Site)
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