Strange sounds, familiar words

Abstract

When communicating across closely related languages or varieties (e.g. in interdialectal communication or in regions such as Mainland Scandinavia), speakers have to learn how to decode words that show partial phonological differences from the equivalents in their L1. Although contact situations like these are rather common, interlingual decoding has scarcely been addressed in the CxG literature. As a contribution to this field of research, the paper discusses how (a particular stage in) emerging receptive multilingualism can be modelled from a CxG perspective. Specifically, it deals with the idea that repeated interlingual decoding generates partially schematic cross-linguistic constructions mirroring the speaker’s knowledge about sound correspondences, as suggested by Diasystematic Construction Grammar (Höder 2019).