Suzanne Werthiem, Center for Advanced Study of Language, University of Maryland/UCLA

The macro-, the micro-, and the morphosyntactic: Social context and influential grammar

The ethnographically and structurally informed study of synchronic performances of contracting languages can give new insight into the mechanisms and pathways of contact-induced change. In this talk, I present data from speech and writing in present-day Tatarstan produced by speakers of Tatar, a contracting language currently undergoing multigenerational shift. The linguistic repertoire of urban Tatar speakers, all bilinguals, can be arranged on a continuum of language mixing, with "pure" Tatar anchoring one end. This highly salient style is now limited to (mostly) out-group "performances" of ethnic identity, and the Tatar style used for everyday interpersonal interactions in which extensive code-switching is not appropriate is characterized by the insertion of Russian discourse-pragmatic words, words that come from different grammatical categories but all comment upon or structure discourse. While apparently not salient to either speakers or hearers, they significantly affect the grammatical structure of utterances in which they are produced -- the code-mixed words retain their Russian grammatical requirements, and the Tatar style produced is a grammatical "composite" filled with Russian lexical, semantic, and morphosyntactic patterns.

This Tatar pattern of language mixing is not an isolated case, as shown through a reanalysis of other studies involving contact between Turkic and Indo-European languages. Insights from this reanalysis are integrated into a new three-stage model of contact-induced change in which the code-mixing and eventual borrowing of dominant-language discourse-pragmatic words is key. This model derives from general linguistic principles, including theories of discourse markers and grammaticalization. Applicable to other minority-language situations, the model demonstrates that contact-induced change can only be understood in the context of interpersonal interactions and higher-level social structures, ideologies, and practices in which they are embedded.