|
Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT. In a Georgia (U.S.A.) community, Latin American immigrants' Spanish/English bilingual patterns include monolingual Spanish and English turns, codeswitched turns, and turns showing grammatical convergence. The data are analyzed within Myers-Scotton's (1993 [1997], 2002) Matrix Language Frame model. This paper focuses on the convergence data, especially the data of two Peruvian boys in the community. In line with English morphosyntactic structure, verbs in Spanish sometimes lose their finite forms, with subject pronouns providing the needed information, definite articles lose gender/number distinction, and Spanish word order conforms to English word order. Spanish utterances unaffected by English are more frequent, however, than utterances affected grammatically by English, even for the two Peruvian boys, the speakers who converge most frequently. There is, therefore, competing intra-speaker variation between LI word strings with standard L1 grammatical patterns and L1 word strings with L2-influenced grammatical patterns. These findings imply the need for future studies to explore factors other than lack of access to target L1 models to explain the convergence.
INTRODUCTION. When two language groups live, work, and attend schools in the same community, processes of language change are almost inevitable. This study reports on how Spanish is influenced by contact with English in a recently established Hispanic speech community in Northeast Georgia. This community began to emerge in the 1980s in Habersham County, Georgia, and parts of two bordering counties, Banks and Stephens.
Language contact, that is, the contact of different lexical and grammatical systems, produces various kinds of change, including CODESWITCHING (CS) and BORROWING, as well as language maintenance or change from SHIFT and/or CONVERGENCE. Codeswitching is the alternation between different languages. Shift is the replacement (as the main language used) of the first or dominant language (L1) in a bilingual community with the second or non-dominant language (L2). Convergence is the use of grammatical patterns from more than one language in the same sentence even when all the morphemes are from one language.
The focus of this study is on grammatical (structural) convergence by two Peruvian boys, members of the Hispanic community previously mentioned. The background for the discussion of convergence is Myers-Scotton's (1993 [1997], 2002) MATRIX LANGUAGE FRAME (MLF) model. The results show that while these two boys produce large percentages of sentences showing grammatical convergence, they produce more monolingual sentences (some Spanish and some English) uninfluenced by the other language. This reflects a robust variation between L 1 word strings employing standard L 1 grammatical patterns and L 1 word strings employing grammatical patterns influenced by L2. The focus of this study is, therefore, the patterns of morphosyntactic variation of individual speakers who are bilingual in Spanish and English; the implications for the study of grammatical changes in language contact in general will be treated as well.
It is often assumed that convergence is the result of lack of access to the target language. Myers-Scotton (1997:257), for example, states that 'In monolingual proficient speech ... the lexical structure framing a relevant CP comes from the relevant single language', but that 'in bilingual speech where speaker proficiency is problematic in the "target" [language]..., lexical structure may have multiple sources'. (1) I employ the term CONVERGENCE to indicate multiple sources for lexical structure.
One problem in my approach may be that PROFICIENCY has not been comprehensively defined. Myers-Scotton (2002:25), for example, states that 'bilinguals almost never have equal proficiency in their languages' and that researchers specializing in second language acquisition 'have yet to come up with an all-encompassing definition of what it means to be proficient in a language'. This paper is not an attempt to define PROFICIENCY even though I present many instances of what I term PROFICIENT USAGE in both Spanish and English.
The data of this study show more instances from the same speaker in one day of standard Spanish and English utterances than nonstandard ones in both languages. (2) Therefore, lack of access to standard language models or targets is inadequate to explain the convergence features in these data.
1. THE MATRIX LANGUAGE FRAME MODEL. From Myers-Scotton's (1993 [1997], 2002) Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model of CS it is assumed that every clause has a matrix language. The MLF model is based on two major hierarchies: (a) the MATRIX LANGUAGE (ML) versus EMBEDDED LANGUAGE (EL) hierarchy and (b) the SYSTEM MORPHEME versus CONTENT MORPHEME hierarchy. The first hierarchy assumes that every utterance has a ML grammatical frame into which morphemes may be inserted or embedded whether they derive from one or more than one language. The ML frame in classic CS is from one language. (3) The ML frame dictates word order. Therefore, an inherent asymmetry exists between the ML and the EL language: the ML takes precedence.
This asymmetry between the two languages is further illustrated by the second hierarchy, which assumes that all morphemes are either content or system morphemes. Content morphemes assign and receive thematic roles while system morphemes do not. Content morphemes usually include nouns, verb stems, and descriptive adjectives while system morphemes usually include inflections and determiners. Single morphemes embedded into the ML will usually be content morphemes because system morphemes, with few exceptions, come from the ML. I will not distinguish among the different types of system morphemes in this paper. However, the interested reader is referred to Myers-Scotton and Jake (2000) and Myers-Scotton (2002). (4) Example 1 illustrates the MLF model. Note that the ML is Spanish and that a content morpheme, swimmin ', but no system morpheme from English is inserted into the ML Spanish frame.
(1) MEXICAN MALE, AGE 13 (PARTICIPANT 24) (5)
Maestro y a onde vamos a ir al teacher and to where go.1PL.PRES (6) [phi] gO.INF to.the swimmin' onde onde swimming where where 'Teacher, and where are we going to go swimming where where ...?'
2. CONVERGENCE. Structural changes, including modifications in word order or borrowing or deletion of some system morphemes, may indicate a COMPOSITE ML frame and structural convergence of one language toward the other and/or ML TURNOVER as a last step (Myers-Scotton 1993 [1997], 2002). ML turnover is the complete replacement of one language as the ML with the other in a bilingual context, either in the speech of one individual or of an entire speech community. On the other hand, a composite ML takes abstract grammatical structure, with surface (morphological realization) consequences, from more than one language. (7) A composite ML results from CONVERGENCE, which is here defined as the use in the same utterance of grammatical structure from at least two languages, even in cases in which all the morphemes are from just one of the languages (Myers-Scotton 1993 [1997], 2002). For example, convergence obtains if word order is altered and/or system morphemes are deleted in a sentence with morphemes from one of the languages by analogy with the other language. Convergence does not imply categorically that one language will eventually turn completely into the other but rather that one language is influenced grammatically by the other.
To some researchers, convergence indicates an established grammatical change throughout a community in one language by influence from contact with another language. Thomason (2001), for example, defines convergence as a 'process through which two or more languages in contact change to become more like each other' (262) and adds that convergence frequently implies changes across a 'geographical region' (269). Myers-Scotton (2002) summarizes the perspective of Thomason and other researchers: 'convergence is generally considered to show up in an entire community of speakers' (172). However, the community of interest in this study is recent, and convergence in the speech of some individuals has not had sufficient time to diffuse throughout the entire community. Therefore, convergence in this study refers to the speech patterns of individuals with no implication regarding further diffusion within the community.
The convergence data in this paper are from children who have lived most of their lives in the U.S. Therefore, distinguishing convergence from ATTRITION, or loss of grammatical structure in a language, such as in adult contact-influenced speech, will not be an issue. Even though researchers like Myers-Scotton (2002:164) see attrition and convergence in very similar terms structurally, for researchers who see more differences than she between the two phenomena, the data of this study are easier to classify as convergence.
What is sometimes referred to in the literature as TRANSFER or INTERFERENCE can be explained in terms of structural convergence, as shown in examples 2-5. (8) Example 2 illustrates an utterance comprised totally of Spanish morphemes but with some abstract grammatical structure from English. The nonstandard use of the verb ganar 'to...
|
