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Pablo Irizarri van Suchtelen
relative dominance of the languages involved – one can uncover global patterns
of what are more or less probable paths of structural development. Thus, for
instance, a scenario of language shift leads to other types of linguistic change
than a scenario of language maintenance, as Sarah Grey Thomason Terrence
Kaufman, (1988) point out in their work on Language Contact, Creolization,
and Genetic Linguistics.
Synchronic research has made important contributions to understanding
contact-induced change. One of them is making clear that the curiosities found
in the diachronic literature do not arise overnight. Structural change in a bilingual
setting often starts as subtle shifts in the distribution of existing forms
across the repertoire of speakers and eventually speech communities, rather than
the immediate introduction of alien forms. An example is the increase in use of
overt subject pronouns in heritage Spanish.
While in monolingual Spanish overt subject pronouns are only permitted
under specific pragmatic constraints, bilinguals tend to violate these constraints,
as their use of overt subject pronouns starts to resemble more that of English, in
which it is the norm; worth considering are here the studies of Ricardo Otheguy,
Ana Cella Zentella and David Livert (2007) on language and dialect contact in
Spanish in New York. Instead of borrowability, What is more, Carmen Silva-
Corvalán (1993) speaks, for example, in favor of the permeability of grammar
emphasizing the gradual nature of cross-linguistic influence.
An important issue in synchronic contact research concerns the acquisition
setting. Some bilinguals acquire a minority language as their mother tongue and
use it as a home language throughout their childhood, while increasingly using
a majority language from the moment they start going to school. These bilinguals
are often referred to as heritage speakers and are subject of an emerging
field of linguistic research, which has been summarized recently by Elabbas
Benmamoun, Silvina Montrul, Maria Polinsky (2010) under the label of heritage
linguistics.
Heritage speakers are an interesting category, because their mother tongue
not only becomes increasingly prone to instability and permeation of crosslinguistic
influence as the majority language becomes more dominant, but in
many cases they acquire it incompletely. It is particularly challenging in synchronic
contact research to disentangle contributions of convergence, incomplete
acquisition and attrition to contact-induced change.
The research project Traces of Contact funded by the European Research
Council, 2 brings together linguists working on diachronic and synchronic issues,
adopting a scenario approach. The present study is part of the subproject Multilingual
Netherlands, which studies ongoing language contact in heritage language
communities. The situation in the Netherlands, presented in the studies
2
Available at: http://www.ru.nl/linc/projects/erc-traces-contact