Phonological convergence in a contracting language variety

Abstract

Most work investigating the role of convergence in situations of language attrition has focused on the morpho-syntactic restructuring of the dying language variety. A central concern of such research has been untangling the factors driving the restructuring with an eye towards establishing whether the changes observed are best viewed as externally driven or, by contrast, as internally motivated. A second and equally important concern of this research attempts to define the domains of the linguistic system that may be the most permeable to external influence. The present study provides a contribution to this line of research and sheds light on its two leading concerns from the domain of phonology and phonetics. Specifically, we present the results of an instrumental study of the phonological vowel system of Frenchville French and argue that this linguistic variety is undergoing a perceptually striking process of phonetic convergence with English that is motivated by the auditory and acoustic similarity between a subset of vowels in the contact languages. An interesting consequence of our analysis is that bilingual phonologies may become particularly permeable to inter-linguistic influence precisely where they are acoustically and perceptually unstable, and where they are already congruent to some degree.

Disentangling the effects of long-term language contact and individual bilingualism: The case of monophthongs in Welsh and English

“…Bullock and Gerfen (2004), for instance, have shown convergence towards English in the vowel system of French spoken in Frenchville, Pennsylvania. Similarly, Louden and Page (2005) found patterns of both convergence towards and divergence away from American English in the phonology of Pennsylvania German.…”

“…There is, of course, plenty of evidence for converging sound systems in the literature (Bullock & Gerfen, 2004;Campbell & Muntzel, 1989;Chang, 2009;Colantoni & Gurlekian, 2004;Louden & Page, 2005).…”

Multicompetence and native speaker variation in clausal packaging in Japanese

“…naming patterns (Ameel et al, 2005;Ameel et al, 2009), the production of deverbal compounds (Nicoladis, 2003), and semantic categorization (Gathercole and Moawad, 2010); the sound system, e.g. vowel production (Bullock and Gerfen, 2004), voice onset time (Kehoe et al, 2004;Zampini and Green, 2001), and intonation (Colantoni and Gurlekian, 2004); and syntax and syntax-related interfaces, e.g. verb placement (Döpke, 1998), adjective-noun order (Nicoladis, 2003), tense and aspect (Sanchez, 2004), and argument omission (Montrul, 2004;Müller, 2007;Müller and Hulk, 2001;Serratrice et al, 2004;Toribio, 2004;Yip and Matthews, 2000).…”

Optimality Theory and language death

“…Notably, Ola-Orie (2009) examines attritional changes in Trinidad Yoruba phonology, and shows that some "result from convergence and [others from] language acquisition reversal" (Orie, 2009), but not from incomplete acquisition of the language. Also, Bullock and Gerfen (2004) analyse Frenchville French, noting that "this linguistic variety is undergoing a perceptually striking process of phonetic convergence […] motivated by the auditory and acoustic similarity between a subset of vowels in the contact languages" (Bullock and Gerfen, 2004 : 95). The authors go on to say that "bilingual phonologies may [thus] become particularly permeable to inter-linguistic influence precisely where they are acoustically and perceptually unstable, and where they are already congruent to some degree" (Bullock and Gerfen, 2004 : 95).…”