Papers by Maike Rocker
Bergen Language and Linguistics Studies
This article reports initial results from an online survey in the East Frisian heritage community... more This article reports initial results from an online survey in the East Frisian heritage community in the United States, inquiring about remaining cultural and linguistic practices. Answers from 31 participants indicate a generally positive attitude towards the Low German heritage language, despite low self-reported productive and receptive proficiency. Community members show awareness of the ongoing and inevitable language shift to English but feel unable to stop the trend. This also manifests in terms of identity construction: while autochthonous minority language communities have been shown to employ emblematic language use as a postvernacular identity marker, East Frisian heritage in the U.S. is constructed mostly around church affiliation, food and tea traditions, shared values, and being “German.” Thus, this study opens the door for additional (comparative) studies on the development of postvernacular communities and the (diminished) role of language use in these groups.
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It is well-known that contact between speakers of different languages or varieties leads to dynam... more It is well-known that contact between speakers of different languages or varieties leads to dynamics in many respects. From a grammatical perspective, especially contact between closely related languages/varieties fosters contact-induced innovations. The evaluation of such innovations reveals speakers' attitudes and is in turn an important aspect of the sociolinguistic dynamics linked to language contact. In this volume, we assemble studies on such settings where typologically congruent languages are in contact, i.e. language contact within the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. Languages involved include Afrikaans, Danish, English, Frisian, (Low and High) German, and Yiddish. The main focus is on constellations where a variety of German is involved (which is why we use the term 'German(ic)' in this book). So far, studies on language contact with Germanic varieties have often been separated according to the different migration scenarios at hand, which ...
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This study examines 369 correspondence letters written between 1944 and 1971 to<br> the Ost... more This study examines 369 correspondence letters written between 1944 and 1971 to<br> the Ostfriesen-Zeitung (OZ), a newspaper published in Iowa for a group of Low<br> German-speaking East Frisian immigrants to the USA. Although readers typically<br> lived in small, rural Midwestern towns which were geographically dispersed, they<br> were highly interconnected and honored their shared roots. While the<br> correspondence letters are predominantly written in High German (HG) and typically report<br> news of more serious events (e.g., anniversaries, visits, or obituaries), Low German<br> (LG), which is usually a spoken language, was extended into the written domain by<br> some authors. Although the amount of LG usage is limited, its pragmatic purposes<br> are highly predictable. LG is used to refer to cultural concepts, in reported speech,<br> personal opinions and anecdotes, as well as in humoristic reference to other peo-<b...
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This study examines 369 correspondence letters written between 1944 and 1971 to the Ostfriesen-Ze... more This study examines 369 correspondence letters written between 1944 and 1971 to the Ostfriesen-Zeitung (OZ), a newspaper published in Iowa for a group of Low German-speaking East Frisian immigrants to the USA. Although readers typically lived in small, rural Midwestern towns which were geographically dispersed, they were highly interconnected and honored their shared roots. While the correspondence letters are predominantly written in High German (HG) and typically report news of more serious events (e.g., anniversaries, visits, or obituaries), Low German (LG), which is usually a spoken language, was extended into the written domain by some authors. Although the amount of LG usage is limited, its pragmatic purposes are highly predictable. LG is used to refer to cultural concepts, in reported speech, personal opinions and anecdotes, as well as in humoristic reference to other people. Through the OZ and the correspondence letters published in it, an East FrisianAmerican identity and a...
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The effects of contact-induced grammaticalization on the aspectual systems in bilinguals have bee... more The effects of contact-induced grammaticalization on the aspectual systems in bilinguals have been the primary focus of recent studies, with a particular focus on unbalanced bilinguals, e.g., heritage speakers; (Silva-Corvalán 1994; Koontz-Garboden 2004; Polinsky 2008; Montrul 2009; Laleko 2010; Shi 2011; Moro 2017). In this research note, we continue this trend by investigating the syntactic and semantic properties of the aspectualizer schtaerte ‘to start’ in the Pennsylvania Dutch vernacular spoken in Holmes County, Ohio. Consistent language contact between Pennsylvania Dutch (PD) and English (E) has taken place over the course of centuries, resulting in an L1 Pennsylvania Dutch population that is composed of diglossic bilinguals by the time they finish formal schooling at the age of 14. The steady borrowing and integration of the aspectualizer schtaerte ‘to start’ into PD is widely attested in discourse, while the aspectualizers uffheere ‘to stop’ and aahalde ‘to continue’ from t...
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Language in Society, 2020
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Thesis Chapters by Maike Rocker
Finite verb placement in German(ic) contact languages has received heightened attention in recent... more 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.
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Papers by Maike Rocker
Thesis Chapters by Maike Rocker
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.
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.