scholarly journals Stable and vulnerable domains in Germanic heritage languages

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 503-526
Author(s):  
Marit Westergaard ◽  
Tanja Kupisch

This paper provides an overview of Germanic languages as heritage languages, i.e. languages acquired naturalistically by children in parts of the world where these languages are not the majority language. Summarizing research on different types of heritage speakers of Danish, German, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish, we identify certain stable and vulnerable domains. We focus on the so far best studied areas, word order and grammatical gender, adding evidence from other lesser studied domains, such as definiteness and phonology. We propose that in addition to the linguistic make-up of the phenomena in question, the size of the heritage community and, relatedly, opportunities to use the language need to be taken into account. The latter may explain, for example, why moribund varieties of German and the Scandinavian languages in North America appear to be less stable than the language of second-generation heritage speakers in Europe.

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 441-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janne Bondi Johannessen ◽  
Ida Larsson

Previous studies on gender in Scandinavian heritage languages in America have looked at noun-phrase internal agreement. It has been shown that some heritage speakers have non-target gender agreement, but this has been interpreted in different ways by different researchers. This paper presents a study of pronominal gender in Heritage Norwegian and Swedish, using existing recordings and a small experiment that elicits pronouns. It is shown that the use of pronominal forms is largely target-like, and that the heritage speakers make gender distinctions. There is, however, some evidence of two competing systems in the data, and there is a shift towards a two-gender system, arguably due to koinéization.


Subject The cultivation and use of cannabis in China. Significance China’s drug policies are some of the toughest in the world. They are strictly enforced and do not differentiate between different types of banned substances. However, China has recently liberalised production of cannabidiol (CBD), a mildly psychoactive chemical extracted from cannabis that is used both medicinally and recreationally. Increased global demand has caused the industry to boom in China. Impacts China will do more to battle marijuana use in the face of liberalisation in other countries; further crackdowns are likely. China may ask authorities in countries with more liberal drug laws to help prevent trafficking to China. China will remain the dominant producer of hemp globally, despite increases in production in North America and Europe.


2020 ◽  
pp. 004728752092231
Author(s):  
Wei-Jue Huang ◽  
Chun-Chu Chen

Leisure and tourism constitute important means for migrants to keep in touch with their homeland. This study is the first to investigate the relationship between the leisure and tourism activities of contemporary migrants in a transnational social field. Overseas Chinese residing in North America were surveyed to compare transnational leisure participation and travel behavior across five migrant generations, and examine the effects of transnational leisure on travel behavior and intention. A U-shaped pattern was found in respondents’ media-based and event-based transnational leisure, frequency of travel, and intention to visit China, with the second generation being the lowest. Media-based leisure influenced the first and 1.5-generations’ number of homeland trips whereas event-based leisure influenced that of the second, third, and fourth-plus generations. Overall, there is a positive relationship between transnational leisure and diaspora tourism, and different types of transnational leisure have varying effects on the travel behavior and intention of different generations.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-227
Author(s):  
Ziyin Mai ◽  
Xiangjun Deng

Abstract This study investigates effects of selective vulnerability and dominant language transfer in heritage grammar. Mandarin Chinese has a shì…de cleft construction, which, despite its superficial similarities with the it-cleft in English, is subject to additional conditions. Four experimental tasks elicited eighteen adult heritage speakers’ implicit knowledge of the word order and the temporal, telicity and discourse conditions associated with the Chinese cleft. The heritage speakers demonstrated target-like representation of the conditions. Meanwhile, their sensitivity to the telicity and discourse conditions is weaker than that of native speakers in Beijing, suggesting selective vulnerability in the heritage grammar. By comparing the heritage speakers with adult second language learners of Chinese, we concluded that the vulnerability of the heritage grammar in the discourse domain did not result from cross-linguistic influence from English. In different types of Chinese-English bilinguals, the dominant language affects the weaker language in different ways.


Author(s):  
Marit Westergaard ◽  
Terje Lohndal ◽  
Björn Lundquist

Abstract This paper discusses possible attrition of verb second (V2) word order in Norwegian heritage language by investigating a corpus of spontaneous speech produced by 50 2nd–4th generation heritage speakers in North America. The study confirms previous findings that V2 word order is generally stable in heritage situations, but nevertheless finds approximately 10% V2 violations. The cases of non-V2 word order are argued to be due to lack of activation of the heritage language grammar, making it vulnerable to crosslinguistic influence from the speakers’ dominant language. This crosslinguistic influence does not simply replace V2 by non-V2, but is argued to operate more indirectly, affecting (a) the distribution of contexts for V2 word order, and (b) introducing two new distinctions into the heritage language, one (indirectly) based on a similar distinction in the dominant language (a difference between adverbs and negation with respect to verb movement), the other based on frequency of initial elements triggering V2 in non-subject-initial declaratives. Together, these findings also indicate that crosslinguistic influence affects different contexts of V2 differently, providing support for analyses that treat V2 word order as the result of many smaller rules.


Author(s):  
Andrew M Gill

Los hablantes de herencia, es decir, las personas que hablan una lengua desde el nacimiento que acaba convirtiéndose en una lengua no dominante con el tiempo, constituyen un grupo tradicionalmente poco estudiado; sin embargo, últimamente está recibiendo mayor atención. Un área que ha emergido en los últimos años es la realización del género gramatical en las lenguas de herencia. Las investigaciones previas indican que existe una diferencia significativa entre los hispanohablantes nativos y los de herencia (Montrul, 2014; Valenzuela et al., 2012); por tanto, el propósito de este estudio es contribuir a la literatura de los hablantes de herencia. En el presente estudio, se dividió a 43 participantes hispanohablantes en grupos dependiendo de si eran nativos o de herencia. Cada participante llevó a cabo una Elicited Oral Production Task. Los resultados demuestran que los hablantes de herencia tienden a cometer un número de fallos de género significativamente mayor que los hablantes nativos y que usan ciertas estrategias, como la autocorrección, significativamente más que los nativos para evitar cometer dichos fallos. Los resultados del estudio respaldan las conclusiones de investigaciones previas, que indican que los hablantes de herencia no realizan el género gramatical de manera nativa. Heritage speakers, that is, speakers of a language that is spoken since birth but becomes a non-dominant language over time, are classically an understudied group. However, in the field of linguistics, the subfield of heritage speakers is rapidly expanding. Specifically, the realization of grammatical gender in heritage languages has not been studied extensively until just recently. Previous research indicates that a significant difference exists between native and heritage speakers of Spanish (Montrul, 2014; Valenzuela et al., 2012); thus, the purpose of this study is to contribute to the literature of this growing subfield. In the present study, 43 Spanish-speaking participants were divided into groups depending on whether they were native or heritage speakers. Each of the participants carried out an Elicited Oral Production Task. Results demonstrate that heritage speakers tend to make significantly more gender errors than native speakers and that heritage speakers also utilize certain strategies, like self-correction, significantly more than native speakers in order to avoid committing these errors. Results from this study support the findings in previous research, which indicate that heritage speakers are not native-like in their realization of grammatical gender.


2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Kohn

This article explores the meanings embedded in the production, consumption, and symbolic positioning of turkey and pumpkin pie, foods closely associated with the American ritual feast of Thanksgiving. An analysis of turkey and pumpkin pie recipes used and adapted by first- and second-generation immigrants in north America, and by north Americans living abroad, throws into relief complex relations between food production, food consumption and the complexities of lived and often multiple sociocultural identifications. Through sharing the experiences, memories and associations evoked by individuals in the production of holiday recipes, I argue that ideas about ‘tradition’ and a desire to celebrate family and community through the ritual of baking, serving and consuming a ‘standard’ Thanksgiving holiday meal allow one to feel part of an imagined global American community. At the same time these details demonstrate celebration of individual and familial distinctiveness that is traced to (sometimes contested) memories of childhood and/or ethnic background, as well as to exploration, innovation and experience in the world at large through travel, migration and imagination.


Author(s):  
Y. Arockia Suganthi ◽  
Chitra K. ◽  
J. Magelin Mary

Dengue fever is a painful mosquito-borne infection caused by different types of virus in various localities of the world. There is no particular medicine or vaccine to treat person suffering from dengue fever. Dengue viruses are transmitted by the bite of female Aedes (Ae) mosquitoes. Dengue fever viruses are mainly transmitted by Aedes which can be active in tropical or subtropical climates. Aedes Aegypti is the key step to avoid infection transmission to save millions of people in all over the world. This paper provides a standard guideline in the planning of dengue prevention and control measures. At the same time gives the priorities including clinical management and hospitalized dengue patients have to address essentially.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document