Structural Priming, Levels of Awareness, and Agency in Contact-Induced Language Change

Abstract

This paper focuses on structural priming, levels of awareness, and agency in contact-induced language change, bringing insights from historical and anthropological linguistics together with psycholinguistic, processing-based approaches. We begin with a discussion of the relation between levels of awareness and agency in the linguistic literature, focusing on the work of Von Humboldt, Silverstein, Van Coetsem, and Trudgill. Then we turn to the psycholinguistic notion of structural priming, aiming to show that cross-linguistic structural priming is a plausible mechanism driving contact-induced language change, and explore the properties of priming and its relation to the levels of awareness discussion in the linguistic literature. We end with suggestions for future research to further elucidate the relation between structural priming, levels of awareness, and agency in contact-induced language change.

Individual differences in structural priming in bilingual and monolingual children: the influence of perspective-taking

“…Speakers can accommodate their speech by converging to the interlocutor, that is, adapting their speech to match that of the dialogue partner (Kootstra & Muysken, 2019). It has previously been argued that accommodation in the form of convergence is related to priming in conversation: both accommodation and priming suppose the adoption of linguistic elements of the interlocutor by the speaker (Kootstra & Muysken, 2019). Pickering and Garrod's (2004) Interactive Alignment Model matches the Communication Accommodation Theory particularly well.…”

“…In this approach, accommodation is defined as modifying one's language and communication behaviour to fit the social environment and to obtain a certain communicative goal (e.g., to facilitate comprehension; Gasiorek, 2015;Gasiorek et al, 2022;Zhang & Giles, 2018). Speakers can accommodate their speech by converging to the interlocutor, that is, adapting their speech to match that of the dialogue partner (Kootstra & Muysken, 2019). It has previously been argued that accommodation in the form of convergence is related to priming in conversation: both accommodation and priming suppose the adoption of linguistic elements of the interlocutor by the speaker (Kootstra & Muysken, 2019).…”

‘It’ Is Not for Everyone: Variation in Speakers’ Evaluation of Sociopragmatic Pronouns in Limburgian

“…That is, there was a statistically significant relationship between speakers' reported pronoun use and their actual use in a production task, suggesting that speakers are, at least to some degree, aware of their own pronoun use (Piepers et al 2023). Explicit awareness may affect the way people use a feature in non-systematic ways (Nycz 2016), guided by their personal beliefs and attitudes (Kootstra and Muysken 2019). Avoiding a feature felt to be offensive is likely to be easier when it is a content word than when it is a more grammaticalized part of speech, such as a pronoun or a grammatical pattern, given the high degree to which speakers rely on automatized production when it comes to grammar and function words (e.g., Christiansen and Chater 2016).…”