Aim and Scope
When speakers of different languages or language varieties interact, the languages or varieties they speak influence one another. This phenomenon is broadly known as language contact, and it leads to various paths of linguistic change and variation. In most cases, the direction of influence is unidirectional, such that one language or variety has greater influence on the other typically due to external factors, such as who has greater political or economic power. Therefore, the same language can be the one that influences another language or it can be the one that is influenced by it depending on where it is spoken, by whom and under what socio-economic, socio-political and cultural circumstances.
This workshop looks at Turkish both as a superstrate (influencer) and a substrate (influenced) language bringing together scholars in this field. In the former case, one has to consider the many minority languages of Turkey, some of which are in danger of extinction, and all are extremely understudied. In the latter case, Turkish as it has been spoken by Turkish migrants following the mass labor migration of the 1960s and the 1970s from Turkey to the industrial Europe, makes a case in point; linguists have been observing language change in real time just within a few generations.
Turkish is an Altaic language especially known for its head-final, agglutinative structure. However, little is known as to how this grammatical feature determines direction of change either in Turkish or in the other language it has been in contact with. Turkish is also known for its vowel harmony. Similarly, few studies have looked at how this phonological feature plays a role in sound change. Due the geographic location of Anatolia, numerous languages from diverse language families have come into contact in this part of the world: Kartvelian, Semitic, Indo-Iranian, Greek, Armenian, Germanic and Romance as well as Turkic, to name a few. Such rich linguistic history provides unique opportunities to better understand the linguistic and non-linguistic factors at play so that we have a clearer understanding of why languages change in the way they do and not in other ways, ultimately getting closer to finding an answer to the question: Can we predict language change?
Although it is impossible to answer such a broad question in a single workshop, it is important that linguists with diverse interests, such as phonology, morphology and syntax looking at the ways in which the same language interacts with other languages, talk to each other. This workshop is organized to fulfill this exact goal by bringing together those who have considered Turkish as a superstrate or a substrate, and in doing so, it is hoped that a long-lasting, fruitful, and surely, a collaborative conversation begins.
Speakers
| Faruk Akkuş | UMass, Amherst | Contact issues between Turkish and Anatolian Arabic/Kurdish
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| Metin Bağrıaçık, Ümit Atlamaz | Boğaziçi University | Contact-induced change of the DP internal word order across Asia Minor Greek
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| Maria Carmen Parafita Couto, Brechje van Osch, Janet Grijzenhout, Deniz Tat | Leiden University,
UiT |
Grammatical gender in Dutch-Turkish code-switching: production and acceptability
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| Balkız Öztürk & Ömer Demirok | Boğaziçi University | The Emergence of Clausal Nominalizations in Laz
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| Jaklin Kornfilt, Christoph Schröder, Kateryna Iefremenko, Cem Keskin
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Syracuse University,
University of Potsdam |
Aspects of clause combining in Turkish language contacts |
| Monika Lindauer & Janet Grijzenhout | University of Konstanz,
Leiden University |
Acquisition of German grammatical gender by child heritage speakers of Turkish |
| Beste Kamali | ZAS, Berlin | How to approach the postverbal field in German Turkish |
| Deniz Tat | UiT | Hybrid light verb constructions in Dutch Turkish |
| Bert Vaux | Cambridge | Vowel harmony and laryngeal contrasts in Armenian varieties |