Individual variation in contact effects – stability, convergence, and divergence

Abstract

In this study, we investigate the contact effects of stability, convergence, and divergence regarding the use of the same linguistic construction in the same contact situation. To do that, we collected experimental production and judgment data by native German speakers living in the Netherlands regarding their usage of the complementizer um ‘to’ in German and compared those data to those of a control group of German speakers not in contact with Dutch. The results show that most speakers show evidence for some contact-induced language change in their German. At the same time, speakers seem to experience different contact effects, demonstrating that it is not the structural properties of the construction that result in one effect over the other, but rather factors that pertain to the individual speakers. In particular, we argue that speakers can either focus on the similarities or on the differences between their languages, to some extent driven by their attitudes towards their languages and language change, and then over-generalize these similarities or differences to new contexts. Overall, this result clearly underlines the importance of focusing on individual speakers as the initiators of language change, which is in line with a usage-based approach.