Convergence in the domains of static spatial relations and events of putting and taking. Evidence from bilingual speakers of Romansh and German

Abstract

In this article the way bilinguals handle differing semantic categories in their two languages will be investigated. Drawing on bilingual data from multilingual speakers of Romansh as well as from speakers of (Swiss) German, the tensions that emerge from ‘conflicting habits’ in the two languages are analyzed in the semantic domain of spatial relations. A particular focus will lie on spatial categories that differ across the two languages, e.g. the regular usage of several different verbs of putting in German vs. one general verb in Romansh. The analyses show differing degrees and different ways of reducing these tensions (convergence) in the bilingual subjects. Data from the domain of putting and taking events are analyzed, and multiple comparisons (cross-linguistic between speakers, cross-linguistic within speakers, variation in the responses to individual stimuli, etc.) are carried out. Measures of consensus vs. dissent are presented, allowing for comparisons of semantic categories, languages, and idiolects.

Keywords:

• bilingualism
• convergence
• caused motion
• Romansh
• German
• spatial expressions

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Silvana Derungs for her great help with the data collection. Thanks to Elisabeth Dutton for her valuable comments on a draft version of this article.

Notes

1. The term German is ambiguous in this context: The Romansh are proficient not only in the local Alemannic dialect (Bündnerdeutsch), but also, at least to some extent, in the Swiss variety of the German standard language. In the data collected the Romansh informants were free to use either of these two German languages.

2. There are at least three competing terms used in the literature to refer to the verbs under investigation here, caused-motion verbs (Ochsenbauer and Engemann 2011), placement verbs (Alferink and Gullberg 2014), and caused posture verbs (Lemmens 2007).

3. Put boot on foot, take a candle out of a candle stand, take a cucumber out a recorder case, take hand out of hole, take flower out of hair, take rag out of car exhaust, put a hat on head.

4. 7× legen for the put apple in bowl stimulus and 4× stellen for the put cup on table stimulus in Table 4.

5. Speaker 13 did not wish to participate in the second data elicitation.

6. Stimuli: put candle into a candle stand, plastic cup on table with mouth, armload of books on table, saucer on top of cup, box up on shelf, a hat on head, apple in bowl, stone into pot of water, a fistful of rice on a plate, stone into pocket, pen in a hole, head into a bucket, banana on table with long tongs, cup on table, rope over tree branch, hand into hole in tree, celery bunch into a recorder case, flower into hair, take bag of corn from table, and move to chair.

7. Exceptions: stimuli put a hat on head where setzen (‘to sit’ [trans.]) is selected and take bag of corn from table and move to chair for which nehmen (‘to take’) is used because the speaker only verbalizes the first part of the event.