Séminaire Terrains, Analyse et COmparaison des Langues (TACOL)
La prochaine séance de notre séminaire TACOL aura lieu lundi 22 mai à 14h30, sur place (salle de réunion 311, Campus CNRS de Villejuif) et sur Zoom.
Nous aurons le plaisir d’écouter Maria Khachaturyan (postdoc, University of Helsinki).
Titre de la présentation :
Contact-induced variation in reflexivity marking: convergence, divergence and social meaning
Résumé :
It is commonly assumed in language contact studies that languages spoken by multilinguals become more like one another, which leads to long-term convergence between the languages. This does not lead to a sweeping linguistic uniformity, however: there is still an incredible linguistic diversity across the world’s languages. This diversity is partly due to an opposite process — the process of diversification of neighboring languages which was called “neighbor opposition” (Evans 2019).
However, while the results of convergence and diversification are rather well studied, little is known about the complex and contradictory process of convergence and divergence and the role of social factors in it.
In this talk, I present my ongoing study of language contact between the Mano and the Kpelle languages of Guinea and show how, despite the potential of convergence, languages remain distinct. Focusing on variation in reflexive marking, an additional question I raise concerns differences in domains affected by convergence and divergence.
Specifically, I discuss whether contact-induced variation in grammatical patterns can have social meaning on a par with linguistic features with concrete exponents, such as phonetic, morphological or lexical variables.
