Looking for contact-induced language change: Converbs in heritage Turkish

Abstract

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions:The aim of the study is to contribute to the debate about a possible contact-induced change in the heritage language and to examine whether there is contact-induced language change at the morpho-syntactic level in Turkish spoken in Germany. We focus on the perception and use of the converbs –Ip and –IncA in heritage Turkish.Design/methodology/approach:The perception and production of the converbs –Ip and –IncA by 30 German–Turkish bilinguals, who were born and have resided in Germany, are compared with those of the control group.Data and analysis:Two tasks are used in the study: a grammaticality judgement task and a picture-story description task. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are utilized.Findings/conclusions:The analysis of the perception of the converbs by the participants revealed that the bilinguals’ perception of the grammatical constructions with –IncA and of the ungrammatical constructions with –Ip and –IncA differed significantly from that of the monolinguals; however, the perception of the grammatical constructions with –Ip was found to be similar between the bilingual and monolingual groups. The analysis of the production of the converbs by the bilingual participants showed that they tended to use the converbs significantly less than the monolingual control group did. The qualitative analysis of the production task also revealed that there were several cases in the use of the converbs that could be considered as ungrammatical and/or unconventional.