Projects

Contact-induced language change in Italian-French bilinguals: a cross-linguistic structural priming study (Cassarà A. & van Dijk C., accepted)

The project investigates short-term and long-term outcomes of structural priming in speakers of a language variety that has been into close contact with another language for over generations. Specifically, it focuses on the variety of Italian spoken in the Aosta Valley, an officially bilingual region where both Italian and French are present in everyday communication (Raimondi, 2006). Of particular interest to our study are differences between Italian and French in auxiliary selection and focus realization. 

The outcomes of this study will shed light on contact-induced language change in a language variety that has been in sustained contact with another language for centuries and on a potential mechanism of language change, namely cross-linguistic structural priming. As such, this study directly puts proposals about the role of structural priming in language contact settings to the test and, crucially, goes beyond the level of the individual bilingual speaker.