ERIC Number: EJ831319
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2009-Jan
Pages: 19
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1366-7289
EISSN: N/A
Innovative Constructions in Dutch Turkish: An Assessment of Ongoing Contact-Induced Change
Dogruöz, A. Seza; Backus, Ad
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, v12 n1 p41-63 Jan 2009
Turkish as spoken in the Netherlands (NL-Turkish) sounds "different" (unconventional) to Turkish speakers in Turkey (TR-Turkish). We claim that this is due to structural contact-induced change that is, however, located within specific lexically complex units copied from Dutch. This article investigates structural change in NL-Turkish through analyses of spoken corpora collected in the bilingual Turkish community in the Netherlands and in a monolingual community in Turkey. The analyses reveal that at the current stage of contact, NL-Turkish is not copying Dutch syntax as such, but rather translates lexically complex individual units into Turkish. Perceived semantic equivalence between Dutch units and their Turkish equivalents plays a crucial role in this translation process. Counter to expectations, the TR-Turkish data also contained unconventional units, though they differed in type, and were much less frequent than those in NL-Turkish. We conclude that synchronic variation in individual NL-Turkish units can contain the seeds of future syntactic change, which will only be visible after an increase in the type and token frequency of the changing units.
Descriptors: Semantics, Syntax, Translation, Monolingualism, Foreign Countries, English, Morphemes, Indo European Languages, Turkish, Innovation, Oral Language, Computational Linguistics, Language Variation
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Netherlands
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A