Innovative constructions in Dutch Turkish: An assessment of ongoing contact-induced change

A. Seza Doğruöz · Ad Backus

124 citations0/0 files storedBilingualism Language and Cognition

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity Language Development and Disorders Linguistics and Cultural Studies

Abstract

Turkish as spoken in the Netherlands (NL-Turkish) sounds “different” (unconventional) to Turkish speakers in Turkey (TR-Turkish). We claim that this is due to structural contact-induced change that is, however, located within specific lexically complex units copied from Dutch. This article investigates structural change in NL-Turkish through analyses of spoken corpora collected in the bilingual Turkish community in the Netherlands and in a monolingual community in Turkey. The analyses reveal that at the current stage of contact, NL-Turkish is not copying Dutch syntax as such, but rather translates lexically complex individual units into Turkish. Perceived semantic equivalence between Dutch units and their Turkish equivalents plays a crucial role in this translation process. Counter to expectations, the TR-Turkish data also contained unconventional units, though they differed in type, and were much less frequent than those in NL-Turkish. We conclude that synchronic variation in individual NL-Turkish units can contain the seeds of future syntactic change, which will only be visible after an increase in the type and token frequency of the changing units.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 124 citations exist upstream.

References

2003Constructing a language: a usage-based theory of language acquisition 1980Transitivity in Grammar and Discourse 2004Cognitive Linguistics 1994Information Structure and Sentence Form 1988Regularity and Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The Case of Let Alone 2001Radical Construction Grammar 2002Formulaic Language and the Lexicon 1953Languages in Contact. Findings and Problems

Cited by

2011Salient stages in contact-induced grammatical change: Evidence from synchronic vs. diachronic contact situations 2010Transfer of conceptualization patterns in bilinguals: The construal of motion events in Turkish and German 2014Bilingual Language Acquisition: Spanish and English in the First Six Years 2018Grammar is community-specific 2018Crosslinguistic Structural Priming as a Mechanism of Contact-Induced Language Change: Evidence from Papiamento-Dutch Bilinguals in Aruba and the Netherlands 2013Bilingual language development among the first generation Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.