welcome to the Contact, Cognition, & Change Lab!

How does language use influence language structure? How do languages change in multilingual contexts? How do language ideologies and policies influence language emergence and change?

Our lab investigates these questions using a variety of methods, including acceptability judgment experiments, pupilometry, language games, and sociolinguistic interviews.

Yourdanis Sedarous (PhD 2022) testing out our portable pupilometry setup

News!

Check out Felicia Bisnath's paper in the Journal of Language Contact!

Mouthing Constructions in 37 Signed LanguagesAbstract The descriptive contribution of this paper is a typology of mouthing constructions in 37 signed languages and an analysis of the ideologies and resources that affect their documentation. The languages are divided into two categories labelled deaf (n=26) and rural (n=11), that are defined based on socio-historical/-cultural properties, but which have been problematised for their conflation of multiple linguistic ecologies (Kusters, 2009: 200; Nyst, 2012; Reed, 2019; Safar, 2020). The analysis is used to argue that phenomena like mouthing are marginalised in documentation, as opposed to marginal, and that the deaf-rural divide tracks differences that are more related to issues of documentation than contexts of language use and emergence. The Semiotic Repertoires approach (Kusters et al., 2017) is used to motivate the unit of analysis, the mouthing construction, and Uniformitarianism in Creole linguistics (Mufwene, 2000; DeGraff, 2005) is used as a lens onto signed language typology.

Check out Emma Portugal's paper in Multilingua!

“Every word is a world”: loanword ideologies and linguistic purism in post-Soviet ArmeniaThrough the analysis of materials such as online articles, blogs, and radio broadcasts, this paper investigates linguistic purism toward Russian and English loanwords in the understudied context of post-Soviet Armenia. Our analysis finds that public commentators categorize potential loanwords as “borrowings” (փոխառություն [pʰokhaṛutʰyun]) if acceptable and “foreignisms” (օտարաբանություն [ōtarabanutʰyun]) if unacceptable, while also comparing these loanwords with acceptable and unacceptable Armenian equivalent words. In categorizing both loanwords and Armenian equivalents, commentators base their arguments on evaluative contrasts related to threats to the language, the desirability of word meaning and usage, and stylistic appropriateness. Though commentators situate themselves into opposing purist and moderate camps, differentiated by their tolerance of loanwords and classifications of individual words, the two camps rely on the same ideological framework of contrasts and use similar argumentation. Thus, while the debate invokes binary criteria for evaluating words, similar to those identified in other instances of linguistic purism, Armenian commentators themselves often defy binary categorization, falling along a fluid language-ideological continuum in which seemingly opposing commentators sometimes demonstrate striking similarities. Framed alongside prior studies of language ideologies in post-Soviet spaces, this evidence suggests that the loanword debate has a more symbolic than practical function in Armenia’s contemporary multilingual society.

see ROLE Collective Symposium presentations here!

Page updated

Report abuse