Tilburg University, The Netherlands
TP115: Attractiveness: empirical and theoretical perspectives
Turkish as spoken in the Netherlands (NL-Turkish) sounds ‘different’ (unconventional) to Turkish speakers in Turkey (TR-Turkish). This study investigates structural change in NL-Turkish through analyses of spoken corpora collected in the bilingual Turkish community in the Netherlands and in a monolingual community in Turkey.
The analyses reveal that at the current stage of contact, NL-Turkish is not copying Dutch syntax as such, but rather translates lexically complex individual units into Turkish. Perceived semantic equivalence between Dutch units and their Turkish equivalents plays a crucial role in this translation process.
Although synchronic variation in individual NL-Turkish units can contain the seeds of future syntactic change, it will only be visible after an increase in the type and token frequency of the individual changing units.
Session: Themed Panel (part 1)
Attractiveness: empirical and theoretical perspectives
Thursday, April 3, 2008, 13:45-15:15
room: 01