Dr E. Jamieson

Abstract

There has been traditionally little communication and consensus between the field of language attrition, and variationist sociolinguists investigating accommodation and dialect change, despite shared interest in the outcomes of language and dialect contact. In this talk, I look to bridging this divide. I outline how a model of grammatical attrition (specifically, Hicks & Domínguez’s (2020) Attrition via Acquisition model) can be used to predict where and how morphosyntactic change as a result of dialect contact may occur, enhancing existing sociolinguistic predictions. I present results from a study investigating two properties of Belfast English in the grammars of 30 Standard Southern British English speakers who have been living in Belfast for, on average, 25 years. For these speakers, there is no use or acceptance of the Northern Subject Rule, but individual-level use and acceptance of embedded inverted questions. I show how greater specification of the grammatical attrition model with relevant factors from sociolinguistics can account for the results of the study at hand, concluding there is more to be gained from these fields working together than remaining disparate.

This is joint work with Laura Domínguez, Glyn Hicks (Southampton) and Monika Schmid (York).

Biography

Dr E. Jamieson is a research associate at the University of York. They work on the ORA-funded BILDEV project, modelling bottom-up and top-down grammatical knowledge across different contexts of bilingual development.

E. was previously a postdoctoral researcher on the Vulnerable Native Grammars project at the University of Southampton, and on the Scots Syntax Atlas project at the University of Glasgow.

Dr Jamieson is broadly interested in syntactic variation and change, and the consequences that phenomena like dialect variation and grammatical attrition have for models of generative grammar.