Expression of (in)definiteness in Polish-German bilinguals: an example of contact-induced grammaticalization

Abstract

AbstractThis study offers new insights into the marking of (in)definiteness by Polish-German bilinguals. In contrast to monolinguals, some bilinguals speaking Polish use the demonstrativetenand the numeraljedenin contexts that are restricted to articles only. Both the distance that the speaker’s variety of Polish is from the norm to which they were exposed and pattern replication seem to play an important role in this context. For the analysis, a corpus was created from nine transcripts of interviews (2,253 word types and 10,311 word tokens) with Polish-German bilinguals recorded in 2006 and 2010 by using the AntConc toolkit. The findings indicate that bilingual speakers follow the pathways of grammaticalization from a demonstrative to a definite article and from a numeral to an indefinite article that have been established in cross-linguistic work: demonstratives and the numeral ‘one’ are common sources of grammaticalization. Therefore, I suggest that these structural changes can be explained as resulting from contact-induced grammaticalization.