TY - JOUR
T1 - Losing their (passive) voice
T2 - Syntactic neutralization in heritage german
AU - Putnam, Michael T.
AU - Salmons, Joseph
N1 - Funding Information:
* This manuscript reports ongoing research on syntactic complexity and change in American heritage varieties of German. It grew from fieldwork by the first author who originally drafted an initial argument, developed further with the second author. This research was partially funded by generous financial support from the Max Kade Foundation for German-American Studies. We thank the following for comments and suggestions: Joshua Bousquette, John Hale, Géraldine Legendre, Monica Macaulay, Richard Page, Alyson Sewell, and Tom Stroik. We are particularly grateful for the constructive input from the editors of this journal and two anonymous readers. The usual disclaimers apply.
PY - 2013/1/1
Y1 - 2013/1/1
N2 - This paper reports initial findings on the apparent loss of passive voice constructions in Moundridge Schweitzer German, a moribund enclave dialect spoken in South Central Kansas. The dialect once had three agent-suppressing constructions; today speakers produce only an impersonal construction but marginally recognize one passive construction in comprehension tasks. Comparative and internal evidence suggests a clear path for this development qua syntactic extension. Empirically, numerous heritage and moribund languages lose passive constructions, and our account appears extendable to those settings in ways that illuminate some claims about heritage language syntax. The synchronic outcomes are easily modeled using the notion of syntactic neutralization, and we argue that a neutralization approach to syntactic ineffability has significant advantages over a NULL PARSE approach. Since the latter is Optimality Theory (OT)-specific, we model our findings in OT. Because neutralization is a framework-independent concept, our findings have broader ramifications.
AB - This paper reports initial findings on the apparent loss of passive voice constructions in Moundridge Schweitzer German, a moribund enclave dialect spoken in South Central Kansas. The dialect once had three agent-suppressing constructions; today speakers produce only an impersonal construction but marginally recognize one passive construction in comprehension tasks. Comparative and internal evidence suggests a clear path for this development qua syntactic extension. Empirically, numerous heritage and moribund languages lose passive constructions, and our account appears extendable to those settings in ways that illuminate some claims about heritage language syntax. The synchronic outcomes are easily modeled using the notion of syntactic neutralization, and we argue that a neutralization approach to syntactic ineffability has significant advantages over a NULL PARSE approach. Since the latter is Optimality Theory (OT)-specific, we model our findings in OT. Because neutralization is a framework-independent concept, our findings have broader ramifications.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84989380168&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84989380168&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1075/lab.3.2.05put
DO - 10.1075/lab.3.2.05put
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84989380168
SN - 1879-9264
VL - 3
SP - 233
EP - 252
JO - Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
JF - Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
IS - 2
ER -