Variation in finite verb placement in heritage Iowa Low German: The role of prosodic integration and information structure
Open Access
- Author:
- Rocker, Maike
- Graduate Program:
- German (PHD)
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 16, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Carrie Jackson, Major Field Member
Richard Page, Major Field Member
Joshua Brown, Special Member
Daniel Purdy, Program Head/Chair
Michael Putnam, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Matthew Carlson, Outside Unit & Field Member
Rena Cacoullos, Co-Chair & Dissertation Advisor - Keywords:
- Verb placement variation
Communal language change
Heritage Low German
Prosody
Information structure - Abstract:
- Finite verb placement in German(ic) contact languages has received heightened attention in recent years. In particular, the occurrence of main clauses with two preverbal constituents instead of the “canonical” only one, or verb-third word order (V3), has attracted researchers’ interest especially for Germanic contact varieties. Although previous studies of V3 in urban vernaculars, heritage languages and monolingual populations have used a variety of different methodologies, and proposed an abundance of theoretical approaches, to date, there has been no study (1) using variationist methodology, (2) exploring the contributions of prosody and information-structure to V3 syntax, (3) offering a longitudinal perspective, and (4) focusing on heritage Low German in the United States. This dissertation seeks to fill these gaps. The dissertation is based on a total of 58 interviews recorded in 1998 and 2018/19 with 46 heritage East Frisian Low German speakers from Grundy County and surrounding counties in Iowa, USA. The community was established in the USA in the mid-19th century and is now acutely endangered by communal language shift to English as the majority language. In addition to a detailed sociolinguistic history of this speech community, the dissertation presents a quantitative description of the linguistic and social factors contributing to the use of V3-structures. A statistical analysis of more than 2000 main clauses confirms the presence of a sentence-initial adverbial (i.e. a temporal adverb) to be the most significant constraint on V3-structures. The exploration of a more narrowly defined data-set of more than 600 main clauses with sentence-initial adverbials reveals both linguistic and social factors contributing to the variable use of V3-structures. Most notably, V3-structures are most strongly favored by prosodically separated adverbials which occur in a preceding intonation unit from the finite main verb and/or are followed by a pause. An additional factor that favors V3-structures is greater prosodic weight (i.e., more preverbal syllables). These prosodically separated adverbials may serve to highlight a contrast between information from the previous discourse and new (contrary) information in the subsequent intonation unit, and seem to be consciously employed as effective narrative devices by the speakers. Also promoting V3 are verbs conjugated in the present tense. From a more exploratory survey of the data, it emerges that V3-structures are preferred in longer, uninterrupted narrations, where a narrative present tense may be used as a storytelling strategy. Moreover, V3-structures may be more frequently used when the subject has been mentioned in the 10 preceding intonation units but importantly is different from the subject referent in the immediately preceding intonation unit. In other words, V3-structures seem to be more likely, if the subject is topical and accessible but needs to be “reactivated” after an utterance with a different subject referent. Concerning the social factors, it is shown that men use V3-structures markedly more often than women and that the usage of V3-structures increased over time, both with regard to speakers’ year of birth and between the two points of data collections. Nevertheless, because the usage of V3-structures remains constrained by linguistic factors and is systematically motivated by discourse-pragmatic needs, these structures do not occur arbitrarily. Thus, the observed verb placement variation seems to be part of an ongoing communal language change.