Related publications

Turell, M. Teresa (ed) (2007). El Plurilingüismo en España. Publicacions de l’IULA. Monografíes 12. Barcelona: Institut Universitari de Lingüística Aplicada. Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Turell, M. Teresa (2007). Review of the book: Variation and Change in Spanish, by Ralph Penny, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2000). Spanish in Context, 4 (1). pp. 122-126.
Casesnoves Ferrer, Raquel, David Sankoff and M. Teresa Turell (2006). Linguistic shift and community language: the effect of demographic factors in the Valencian region, Balearic Islands and Catalonia. In Globalization and language in the Spanish-speaking world. Macro and micro perspectives. C. Mar-Molinero and M. Stewart (eds.). Palgrave. MacMillan. pp. 197-219.
Turell, M. Teresa. (2006). Variation and language contact along the speech/writing continuum. In In-roads of language. Essays in English Studies. I. Navarro and N. Alberola (eds.), Castelló: Universitat Jaume I. pp. 31-51.
Turell, M. Teresa (2004). Linguistic interaction patterns in Spanish Multilingual Cities: The Effect of Ethnicity and Migration Settlement. In Plurilinguismo, 10. Multilingual Cities. Perspectives and insights on languages and cultures in urban areas. R. Bombi and R. Fusco (eds.). Universidad de Udine: Centro Internazionale sul Plurilinguismo. pp. 541-559.

Ph.D dissertations and research papers

Ph.D. dissertation

Information packaging, language contact and linguistic change: structural calque in Catalan.

Montserrat Forcadell Guinjoan – Viva session: December 20, 2007 - Cum Laude.

This dissertation studies a structural innovation of a prosodic kind attested in current oral Catalan. This work draws on two main theoretical frameworks: information packaging and linguistic variation. The structure analysed is (a) “Hauríem de PASSAR d’això”, vs. (b) “N’hauríem de PASSAR, d’això”. While (b) presents the syntactic standard variant (dislocation), (a) presents the prosodic non-standard variant (accent-shift in situ) for the same function: the mapping of the theme-rheme partition onto sentence structure. It is proved that the phenomenon (a structural calque, according to the proposal also put forward in the dissertation) is progressing since the occurrence of (a) has increased over the two periods studied. The corpus, oral television production from non-spontaneous genres, shows that the phenomenon is going on unnoticed by linguistic advisors. It is argued that the existence of variation may lead to linguistic change. Contact with English and Spanish, which do have variant (a) as a standard strategy, and the occurrence of other non-standard prosodic phenomena also attested in the data may favour it.

Research papers

Canvi lingüístic en temps real a Petrer.

Orland Verdú Jover – Viva session: October 2007.

This research on the local variation of Catalan in Petrer (Alacant) analyses language variation in real time, focusing on a sound change in progress. The main aim is to define the extension and progress of this change by comparing the results in apparent time obtained by Montoya (1985), on the replacement of the palatal affricate voiced consonant by its corresponding voiceless sound, with those obtained in real time, with a time-span of more than 20 years. In order to determine whether this variable rule involved a cyclic phenomenon repeated generation after generation or whether this local variability in sound change has progressed in real time, we have gone back to the community and have applied a panel study survey by interviewing some of the informants recorded in apparent time and using the same instrument, that is, the same sociolinguistic interview that had been used in the past, with five stylistic contexts (from casual to formal settings), as suggested by Labov (1984) in order to represent stylistic variation. Preliminary results reveal that sound change has not stopped in real time. Quite the contrary, the same social group of speakers lead the change and more importantly, even older speakers who were reluctant to accept this palatal change 23 years ago, exhibit a higher tendency to apply the variable rule. However, the effect of stylistic context seems to be more significant in real time due linguistic planning policies.

Conferences

Brauli Montoya: Enquesta en temps real a Petrer.

XIV Col.loqui de l’Associació Internacional de Llengua i Literatura Catalanes. Budapest (Hungary). September, 4-9, 2006.

Orland Verdú: Variation in real time: a case of sound change in Catalan.

XVIII International Conference on Historical Linguistics. Montréal (Canada). August, 6-11, 2007.