ConfliGram · Conflicting Grammars: Gender among bilinguals in Mesoamerica and the Caucasus
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2019-07-01 → 2021-06-30
- EU contribution
- €184,708
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
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Results in brief
Conflicting Grammars: Gender among bilinguals in Mesoamerica and the Caucasus
The majority of the world's population speaks at least two languages, therefore it is vital that we use multilingual data to develop sound theories of language comprehension, processing and use. How individuals combine their languages in the same sentence or conversation - a practice known as code-switching - also helps us to understand the limits and possibilities inherent to human language. The main aim of the “ConfliGram” project was to investigate how an individual who speaks two languages, one possessing grammatical gender and one without, combines the two languages in a mixed nominal construction. To do this, I collected naturalistic and experimental data from two language pairs: Purepecha-Spanish, whose speakers live in Michoacán in western Mexico, and Tsova-Tush--Georgian, whose speakers can be found in one village in eastern Georgia. In both cases, one of the languages can be considered a minority language, Purepecha (isolate) and Tsova-Tush (Nakh-Daghestanian), while the other is the more dominant, national language, namely Spanish (Indo-European) and Georgian (Kartvelian) respectively. In the case of Purepecha-Spanish, the national language possesses a binary gender system (masculine/feminine), whereas in the Tsova-Tush--Georgian case, it is the minority language that has a gender system (five genders: masculine animate, feminine animate and three 'neuter' genders). Previous research shows that speakers of different language pairs deal with this grammatical conflict in different ways. This project therefore sought to answer the following research questions: i. What strategy or strategies do Purepecha-Spanish and Tsova-Tush--Georgian use for assigning gender to otherwise genderless nouns? ii. What role do age, gender, age of acquisition, language dominance and the sociolinguistic status of the languages play in the strategy or strategies adopted by these bilinguals? How do social and linguistic factors interact to affect and predict gender assignment strategies? iii. What implications do the findings of this project have for current theories of code-switching, in terms of production and comprehension? How can they help to refine current predictions of code-switching and bilingual grammar? By recognising code-switching as a natural, yet complex, phenomenon, we can also help to destigmatise it, as well as its occurrence in minority language contexts.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Languages differ with respect to the expression of grammatical gender. English lacks a grammatical gender distinction, using the same determiner the for both the room and the bread. Spanish, by contrast, marks gender, as in feminine la habitación ‘the room’ vs masculine el pan ‘the bread’. Bilinguals may speak one language with grammatical gender and one language without. When they mix these languages in the same phrase, known as code-switching, the strategy used to assign gender varies (e.g. el cookie or la cookie are both possible in Spanish-English). Existing accounts predict the language of the determiner in mixed noun phrases, but struggle to predict its gender. This project investigates how speakers deal with this gender assignment, using data from two typologically understudied language pairs: Purepecha-Spanish (Mexico) and Batsbi-Georgian (Georgia). Purepecha and Georgian have no grammatical gender, while Spanish has two genders and Batsbi has five, a more extensive system than any systematically studied to date. I will investigate the role of existing predictors of gender assignment, such as phonology and natural gender, and will introduce new variables, e.g. animacy and semantic domain. On the basis of naturalistic corpus data, I will design and run production and comprehension tasks probing the gender assignment strategies employed, testing the two main explanatory frameworks (Matrix Language, and minimalist). As both situations display patterns of dominant majority-minority language interaction, I will also investigate the social dimensions of code-switching, including behaviour and attitudes, identifying commonalities. This usage-based approach is in its infancy for lesser-studied minority languages, but results in high-quality, comparable data. Such data is necessary to bridge the gap with well-studied language pairs, to broaden our understanding of the individual languages, and to inform current models of code-switching and bilingual grammar.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE CNRS · ParisCoordinatorFrance
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union