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.

Aims and Objectives: The aim of this introductory chapter to Effects of Limited Input, a Special Issue of the International Journal of Bilingualism, is to give a brief overview of how the topic of limited linguistic input is situated within the study of bilingualism and language contact. The seven chapters—which present samples of the varied circumstances in which bilinguals acquire, use, maintain, and sometimes suppress areas of their languages—are introduced. Research Questions: The authors of this collection address the following kinds of questions: What are the circumstances—and consequences—of limited linguistic input? What kinds of changes are likely or unlikely to happen when the amount of input is low and stylistically reduced? How meager can the input be for some degree of functional bilingualism to still develop? Design/Methodology: The methods used in the seven articles in this collection vary; they include case studies, observations, speech-rate measurements, oral narration tasks, comparisons of production vs. comprehension, and longitudinal approaches. Data and Analysis: The studies in this collection draw from a wide variety of data sets, including bilingual corpora and naturally occurring or elicited speech. The data come from children, youth, and adults, from various languages and language contact settings, and from populations with varying degrees of bilingualism. Findings/Conclusions: We argue that limited input is not restricted to bilingual situations alone; it relates also to the mastering of monolingual registers. The key argument of this introductory chapter is that limited input is the rule, not the exception, as it is very rare to find a language contact situation wherein all contact varieties are equally represented in the input that speakers receive. Therefore, we argue against the theoretical notion of “balanced bilingualism” as a realistic outcome of bilingualism and claim that variations in the circumstances of language exposure will naturally lead to different consequences and configurations in the outcomes of bilingual acquisition. One inevitable outcome is language change. Originality: All the articles in this collection are original, providing new angles to the complex topic of variation in speakers’ access to their languages in contact settings. Significance: The authors of this collection look at various aspects of language contact situations through the lens of limited input. This emphasis allows us to view bilingualism as a special case of monolingual register variation and reject the concept of “balanced bilingualism.”

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Aims and objectives: The aim of this study is to investigate language contact from a usage-based perspective. In particular, we test the explanatory power of a schematicity continuum, one of the central assumptions within usage-based approaches, in regard to these contact effects. In doing so, we aim to better understand how schematicity influences language transfer as well as learn more about the cognitive mechanism of schematicity itself. Design: The empirical focus of this study is on native German speakers living in the Netherlands who tend to experience a lot of language transfer from their second language Dutch to their native language German. The experiment consists of a production task containing constructions that differ in regard to their potential level of schematicity (i.e., lexically specific, partially schematic, fully schematic) and in the type of transfer that they might trigger (i.e., covert and overt transfer). Data and analysis: We compare production data of native German speakers living in the Netherlands (N = 60) with those of a control group of speakers not in contact with Dutch (N = 60), to establish whether the language use of these two groups differs. In addition, we analyze both speaker and item variation for the different constructions. Findings/conclusions: The speakers with Dutch contact show a number of contact effects, such as covert and overt transfer as well as hypercorrection regarding the use of certain constructions. Originality: The variation analysis reveals individual differences in how speakers use the different constructions. Some of these differences can be attributed to their mental levels of schematicity. Significance/implications: The study shows that transfer depends on schematicity. In doing so, it provides direct evidence for different levels of schematicity in speakers' mental representations, demonstrating the usefulness of studying cognitive mechanisms within a language contact setting.

Various non-standard language varieties in the Netherlands traditionally allow for the use of masculine personal subject pronouns (i.e. regionally distinct variants of hij ‘he’) in reference to women. While this practice is well-documented within Dutch dialectology, especially during the twentieth century, it is unclear to what extent this feature still exists nowadays. Moreover, the use of masculine subject forms for female reference has not previously been described for Limburgian dialects. This paper offers a start to filling these gaps, by providing insight into the contemporary use of ‘he’ for women in Dutch dialects, with a specific focus on occurrences in Dutch Limburg. We report on a Twitter query and three interviews, showing (i) that the use of ‘he’ for women still exists in various Dutch dialects, and (ii) how native speakers of a Limburgian dialect use and perceive this feature of their dialect.

This paper targets the division of labor between borrowed English forms and heritage alternatives in Belgian-Dutch youth language. Through lexical semantic analysis of a youth-language corpus containing over 450,000 private instant messages, the choice for English or Dutch person-reference nouns (e.g. Eng. girlfriend, loser, sister; Du. vriendin, sukkel, zus) is studied at three levels of semasiological granularity. First, at the level of the semantic field as a whole, Dutch appears to have the strongest foothold, accounting for over 75 % of the types and over 85 % of the tokens referencing people. Second, coarse-grained semantic-feature annotation reveals that Dutch retains its dominant position in all identified semantic subcategories of person-reference nouns although some hubs of English are also attested. Third, an in-depth analysis of the selection between the near-synonyms sis, sister, zus, zusje and zuster in the corpus indicates socio-pragmatic differentiation between the English and Dutch terms, English being used more for (affective) address and for friends, Dutch being reserved for reference and for proper kin. Overall, our study indicates the potential of a three-tiered onomasiological approach: the results of the three case studies show both similarities, in the systematically stronger foothold of Dutch at all levels of analysis, and differences, in the semantic specialization for English progressively uncovered from the first to the third sub-study.

This paper explores the different ways in which speakers of Limburgian think and feel about sociopragmatic pronouns in their dialect, in which women can traditionally be referred to with both ziej ‘she’ and het ‘she’ (lit. ‘it’). Previous research revealed variation between speakers regarding the use of het, which appears to be associated with differences in interpretation and evaluation. This study investigates this further by analyzing how individual speakers evaluate non-feminine pronouns for women. Our data show that many speakers have a relatively high level of awareness, discussing four key themes: (i) how female reference in Limburgian differs from that of Dutch; (ii) the appropriateness of using the pronouns for certain referents and/or in certain social situations; (iii) the various connotations the pronouns may have; and (iv) how they navigate between-speaker differences regarding pronoun evaluation in daily life. Importantly, this high level of awareness is not present in all speakers. These results indicate that the use or non-use of the pronoun het for female referents may be conditioned by cognitive automaticity for some speakers, and by a conscious, emotionally charged consideration about its desirability for others. Our findings, therefore, suggest the importance of integrating cognition and sociality in linguistic theorizing.

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: This study compares transfer from Dutch to German by native Dutch speakers who learned German as a second language (forward transfer: L1 to L2) and by native German speakers who are living in the Netherlands (reverse transfer: L2 to L1). The aim of this comparison is to see whether both groups experience the same kind of transfer (i.e., transferring the Dutch preference for prepositional phrases in the postfield position to German) and whether the extent of transfer depends on their language use. Design/methodology/approach: We compiled a corpus (2,908,154 words) consisting of German e-mails written by native Dutch speakers ( n = 21) and native German speakers living in the Netherlands ( n = 9). In addition, speakers filled in the BLP (bilingual language profile) test. Data and analysis: The corpus was analyzed for the speakers’ placement of prepositional phrases, and we linked their answers on the BLP test to their language use in the corpus data. Findings/conclusions: Our data show that the native Dutch speakers use the postfield position more frequently in their German than the native German speakers do. Besides, for both groups, the postfield use was related to the speakers’ use of Dutch as well as German varieties that are influenced by Dutch. Originality: This study directly compares forward and reverse transfer using a large corpus of written German texts, and it links both types of transfer to the speakers’ language use. In doing so, the study shows that the mechanism of entrenchment is likely to underlie transfer in both cases. Significance/implications: The results of this study are in line with a usage-based approach: there is extensive individual variation between speakers regarding their extent of transfer, which partly can be attributed to the speakers’ language use, both in the case of forward and reverse transfer.

Input-output effects have been the subject of keen research for several decades in the study of monolingual acquisition from a usage-based perspective (Ambridge & Lieven, 2011). However, for bilingual acquisition, similar studies are only beginning to emerge. One major challenge for such studies is to explain why young children switch between their two languages (e.g., Ich bin ready 'I am' ready) even when they hear no such switching in their input. This article reviews a strand of recent studies in children aged two to three to explain this apparent paradox. It dem-onstrates how the focus on one aspect of input, the child's own prior speech, can explain how and why code-switching occurs. The article examines a range of psycholinguistic processes, showing how they drive variation in children's use of mixed utterances. Its main contribution lies in its summative value and the recommendations made for future research in early code-switching.

Bilingual speakers of typologically closely related languages tend to frequently experience language transfer, which suggests that similarity between languages is likely to play an important role in the transfer process. In this paper, we explore how three different types of similarity affect transfer of light verb constructions ( lvc s), such as take a walk or set an alarm , from Dutch to German by native German speakers living in the Netherlands, namely: (a) similarity to existing constructions, (b) surface similarity based on whether the noun in the lvc is a cognate in Dutch and German, and (c) similarity in the light verb’s collocational contexts. The results suggest that all three types of similarity influence transfer: speakers add similar constructions to their language and they drop existing ones that happen to be less similar, ultimately facilitating convergence across the speakers’ languages.

Usage-based approaches have become increasingly important in research on language acquisition and recently also in bilingual first language acquisition. Lexically specific patterns, such as What's this? and frame-and-slot patterns, such as [I want X] play an important role in language acquisition scenarios. The ubiquity of such conventionalized chunks and frame-and-slot patterns supports the idea that children construct their early utterances out of concrete pieces they have heard and stored before. To investigate the emergence of patterns in children's speech the traceback method has been developed, which accounts for the composition of utterances by relying on previously acquired material. Recently, the traceback method has also been applied to code-mixed utterances in bilingual children testing the assumption that bilingual utterances are structured around a frame-and-slot pattern in which the open slot is filled by (a) word(s) from the other language, e.g., [where is X] as in where is das feuer 'where is the fire'. In this paper we want to present how the empirical use of the traceback method, and the general adoption of a usage-based theoretical perspective, can shed new lights on the study of bilingual phenomena, such as code-mixing.

Abstract This study puts the usage-based assumption that our linguistic knowledge is based on usage to the test. To do so, we explore individual variation in speakers’ language use as established based on corpus data – both in terms of frequency of use (as a proxy for entrenchment) and productivity of use (as a proxy for schematization) – and link this variation to the same participants’ responses in an experimental judgment task. The empirical focus is on transfer by native German speakers living in the Netherlands, who oftentimes experience transfer from their second language Dutch to their native language German regarding the placement of prepositional phrases. The analyses show a large amount of variation in both the corpus and experimental data with a strong link across data types: individual speakers’ usage – but not the usage by other speakers – is a significant predictor for the speakers’ judgments. These results strongly suggest that, in line with a usage-based approach, variation between speakers in experimental tasks is linked to their variation in usage. At the same time, such usage-based predictions do not explain all of the variation, suggesting that other individual factors are also at play in such experimental tasks.

The influence of usage frequency, and particularly of linguistic similarity on human linguistic behavior and linguistic change in situations of language contact are well documented in contact linguistics literature. However, a theoretical framework capable of unifying the various explanations, which are usually couched in either structuralist, sociolinguistic, or psycholinguistic parlance, is still lacking. In this introductory article we argue that a usage-based approach to language organization and linguistic behavior suits this purpose well and that the study of language contact phenomena will benefit from the adoption of this theoretical perspective. The article sketches an outline of usage-based linguistics, proposes ways to analyze language contact phenomena in this framework, and summarizes the major findings of the individual contributions to the special issue, which not only demonstrate that contact phenomena are usefully studied from the usage-based perspective, but document that taking a usage-based approach reveals new aspects of old phenomena.

Codeswitching in the Turkish migration settings in Western Europe has been studied almost since the beginning of the labor migration that formed these communities. The patterns of codeswitching have gradually become more complex, which is demonstrated with reference to data from the Netherlands. Initially it was limited to the insertion of Dutch words into Turkish utterances, largely needed to fill lexical gaps. Gradually, as a new generation grew up with Dutch education, living most of their lives in a Dutch social environment, codeswitching patterns grew in complexity, with an increase in alternation between Dutch and Turkish utterances. Often, these and other patterns are attested in the speech of the same people at the same time, within a single conversation: they represent a bilingual speech style. The most recent investigations into Turkish-Dutch codeswitching show how this increasing intensity of bilingualism in the community has led to increasing integration of the languages in everyday in-group bilingual speech. Of all switches, a relatively small percentage is taken up by the insertion of content words into either language; yet, codeswitching is not always straightforward alternation between Turkish and Dutch utterances. Instead, utterances often contain chunks from both languages. This phenomenon will be illustrated in this article and explained through a usage-based perspective that privileges a processing-based over a structuralist account, but crucially ties this account to an understanding of the social motivations that make this kind of bilingual speech possible, or even desired.

Language is an essential part of psychotherapeutic work. In psychotherapy involving more than one language and/or culture, acknowledging the impact of the therapist’s and the client’s language(s) can facilitate achieving the most beneficial therapeutic process and outcome. The field has witnessed a surge in interdisciplinary work combining research methods from multilingualism and psychotherapy. This research aims to investigate the role of multilingualism in emotion expression and interpretation in psychotherapy offered by multilingual/multicultural therapists. Ten individual semi-structured interviews with therapists in the Netherlands focused on therapists’ experience of working as a multilingual/multicultural therapist with culturally and linguistically diverse clients. Thematic analysis of the results showed that language choice influenced the therapeutic process and its outcome in terms of discussing emotional topics, establishing and maintaining rapport with the client, and managing linguistic and cultural differences. Linguistic awareness of therapists allows them to manage the linguistic and cultural issues that inevitably arise in encounters with multilingual/multicultural clients.

In this paper, we report on a study of gender reference in Limburgian, specifically the use of the neuter subject pronoun het ‘she’ (lit. ‘it’) to refer to a female referent. This pronoun is used in addition to the feminine pronoun ze ‘she’. We investigate the role of the referent’s social and grammatical characteristics in the variation between grammatically feminine and ‘non-feminine’ (nf; i.e., neuter and masculine) pronouns in two experiments. First, we test the effect of a referent’s age in a language production study, in which 41 native speakers participated. The results of this study indicate that speakers use het more often to refer to younger than to older women. Second, we use an acceptability judgment task (N = 72) to assess whether the preference for non-feminine pronouns for younger women might be explained by grammatical agreement with non-feminine antecedent nouns (e.g., grammatically neuter maedje ‘girl’). The results indicate that this is not the case: het is preferred as a pronoun for younger but not older women, regardless of an antecedent noun’s grammatical gender. We conclude that the variation in pronoun gender in Limburgian is a socio-pragmatic phenomenon, and we offer suggestions for future research in this area.

Abstract Following a usage-based approach to language acquisition, lexically specific patterns are considered to be important building blocks for language productivity and feature heavily both in child-directed speech and in the early speech of children (Arnon, Inbal & Morten H. Christiansen. 2017. The role of multiword building blocks in explaining L1-L2 differences. Topics in Cognitive Science 9(3). 621–636; Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press). In order to account for patterns, the traceback method has been widely applied in research on first language acquisition to test the hypothesis that children’s utterances can be accounted for on the basis of a limited inventory of chunks and partially schematic units (Lieven, Elena, Dorothé Salomo & Michael Tomasello. 2009. Two-year-old children’s production of multiword utterances: A usage-based analysis. Cognitive Linguistics 20(3). 481–508). In the current study, we applied the method to code-mixed utterances (n = 1,506) of three German-English bilingual children between 2 and 4 years of age to investigate individual differences in each child’s own inventory of patterns in relation to their input settings. It was shown that units such as I see X as in I see a Kelle ‘I see a trowel’ could be traced back to the child’s own previous productions. More importantly, we see that each child’s inventory of constructions draws heavily on multiword chunks that are strongly dependent on the children’s language input situations.

This paper investigates the role of input in the code-mixing (CM) of a German-English bilingual child between the age of 2;3 until 3;11. Supporting a usage-based approach to linguistic theory, multiword units are shown to play an important role in language acquisition scenarios, both in the input children receive as well as in their own early language production. The current study combines findings from Child-directed-speech (CDS) and children's output to investigate whether utterance-initial, multiword units in the code-mixing of a German-English bilingual child can be traced back to patterns found in the input. The findings reveal that a large proportion of the child code-mixed (78%) and parental input (59%) data instantiate the selection of multiword units. Additionally, we found that many of the units used by the child (74%) correlate with units in the parental input suggesting that bilingual children construct their code-mixed utterances on the basis of both concrete lexical strings and partially schematic patterns they have heard before.