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SUMMARY:The onset of borrowing: Somali and English - Jeanette Sakel\, Univ
 ersity of the West of England
DTSTART:20131017T160000Z
DTEND:20131017T173000Z
UID:TALK47220@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Alison Biggs
DESCRIPTION:Over the last decade\, we have gained numerous new insights in
 to the types and frequencies of loans. Large typological surveys\, includi
 ng Matras & Sakel (2007) on grammatical borrowing\, Haspelmath & Tadmor (2
 009) on lexical borrowing and most recently Michaelis et al. (2013) on pid
 gin and creole languages have given us insights into frequent\, or even ty
 pical loans across the languages of the world and across different contact
  situations.\n\nYet\, we still know little about why these tendencies exis
 t\, and how most of these loans have come about\, for which we would need 
 to look at ongoing language change. We can only theorise about specific fo
 rms\, e.g. Matras’ (2009) sub-hierarchy of borrowing but > or > and\, wh
 ich he convincingly links to speakers’ language processing during monito
 ring and directing tasks. The contact situations in these surveys are gene
 rally well established\, often with “stable” bilingualism and distribu
 tions of languages across various domains. For example\, in the Matras & S
 akel (2007) study\, we deliberately excluded instances of new contact phen
 omena and second language acquisition.\n\nOne of the reasons for this is\,
  of course\, that ongoing contact situations are highly changeable\, and t
 hat it is difficult to study these phenomena systematically. One speaker m
 ay do something they’ll never do again. A new structure may be picked up
  by others – or not. Yet\, the types of loans that appear at this stage\
 , and whether they become integrated into a language\, can shed further li
 ght on the underlying mechanisms of language contact.\n \nIn this talk\, I
  focus on one specific situation of ongoing contact\, namely the language 
 use of speakers of Somali heritage in Britain. I look at bidirectional tra
 nsfer and contact phenomena in Somali and English\, seeking to identify wh
 ich grammatical categories are affected by contact in both languages\, and
  across different generations of speakers.\n\nAmong the larger immigrant l
 anguages in Britain\, Somali is relatively new. Prior to the beginning of 
 the civil war in the early 1990s\, there were much smaller numbers of peop
 le of Somali heritage in Britain. Today\, Somali is one of the major immig
 rant languages\, in particular in the some areas of the country. The speak
 ers differ substantially across the generations\, with older first generat
 ion speakers usually acquiring English\, while the younger first generatio
 n and second generation show signs of incomplete acquisition of Somali.\n\
 nI will be focusing on the interference in and acquisition of subordinatio
 n structures of speakers of different generations and immigration backgrou
 nds\, looking at the mechanisms behind borrowing subordination structures 
 from other languages\, and the ways in which these are employed.
LOCATION:GR06/7 English Faculty\, Sidgwick Site
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