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Since its independence in 1991, Ukraine’s language regime has evolved in a context of intense cultural heterogeneity. The most crucial element of the language situation in Ukraine concerns cohabitation and intermingling between Ukrainian and Russian language-oriented populations. Ukraine’s competitive state tradition produced a contested language regime. Formed at the crossroads of civilizations, it has been influenced by both East and West. The critical juncture of Ukraine’s independence marked a rupture with its past and generated a new language regime that actively embraced priority for the Ukrainian language. But because of its competitive state tradition, this language regime remained unsettled, solidifying only gradually and non-linearly. Inherited institutions that were both executive dominant and fragmented produced radical shifts when new elites took power. Through these shifts, Ukraine’s language regime has gradually coalesced around a dominant conception, though the tradition of competitiveness remains. Ukraine’s language regime reveals the embedded normative and institutional legacies of its experience under Russian and Soviet rule, as well as the reactive nationalism this imposition provoked. It continues to occupy a crossroads, pulled at once by East and West, paradoxically asserting the very monolingual nationalism perfected in Europe but now cautioned by appeals to minority language rights.
Heritage language speakers often feel discouraged from using their heritage language because they are told they do not speak it well. This book offsets such views by investigating heritage language variation and change across generations in eight languages spoken in Toronto. It introduces new methodology to help readers understand and apply variationist sociolinguistic approaches to quantitatively analyze spontaneous speech. This approach, based on a corpus of 400+ speakers, shows that variation and change across the grammar of heritage languages resemble the patterns in hegemonic majority languages, contrasting with the simplification/attrition patterns in experimental heritage language studies. Chapters compare patterns across generations, across languages, across ten variables in Cantonese, and between indexical and non-indexical patterns. Heritage language speakers are quoted, showing that this research increases heritage language usage and pride. Providing a tool for language revitalization, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in learning about and/or conducting research on heritage languages.
It has been widely recognized that how languages behave, particularly under conditions of contact with other languages, depends on their context. Using the Ethnolinguistic Vitality framework, this chapter describes the demographics, linguistic attitudes and institutional supports for heritage languages, defining the concepts and illustrating them with examples from Toronto, the context in which the HLVC project is conducted. Demographic information includes population sizes, language shift rates, and history of settlement in Toronto. Status information includes both reflections on the status of heritage languages, as a whole, in Canada and labels attributed to the specific varieties. The institutional support section reports on the number of language classes available for each language. The chapter also includes discussion of language policy, particularly for education, and the demographics of the university where the research is centered, enabling other researchers to best consider what aspects of the project might need adjusting for adaptation in other contexts.
This chapter reports on trends of continuity and divergence within the heritage generations examined and between heritage and homeland varieties. It discusses the degrees of similarities between the varieties in terms of (a) rates of use of innovative forms and (b) conditioning factors in the constraint hierarchy. The three variables examined are voice onset time (VOT, n=8,909), case-marking on nouns and pronouns (CASE, n=9,661), and variable presence of subject pronouns (PRODROP, n=9,190), each in three or more languages. The similarity in rates and conditioning effects across generations for (PRODROP), examined in seven languages, particularly contrasts with findings for this variable in experimental paradigms. Similarly, findings of little simplification or overgeneralization of the case system in three languages stands in contrast to the outcomes of several previous studies. (VOT) shows a drift toward (but not arriving at) English-like values for only some of the languages examined. For each variable, models are presented and interpreted; a table then details which aspects of the analysis contribute to the interpretation of stability and of each type of variation.
The variables examined in Chapters 5 and 6 show little evidence of being used for identity work. That is, they do not show (consistent) effects of ethnic orientation measures or speaker sex. This chapter explicitly contrasts variables that reflect indexicality (correlation to social factors) in homeland varieties to non-indexical variables. We begin by considering three indexical variables in Italian: (VOT) in unstressed-syllable contexts, (APOCOPE), and (R), illustrating the extent to which indexicality is maintained in the heritage variety. We find increasing use of the more standard variant only in (VOT). Furthermore, we find that younger speakers (both in homeland and heritage) favour the non-standard variant. We then compare the variable (R), the contrast between trill (or tap) and approximant variants, in Italian and Tagalog, where it has indexical value in the homeland varieties, to Russian and Ukrainian, where it does not. Finally, we consider two additional indexical variables: Cantonese denasalization and Korean VOT. We conclude by contrasting the behavior of homeland-indexicals in heritage varieties. The presence of indexical value in homeland varieties does not consistently influence outcomes in the heritage varieties.
This chapter draws cross-linguistic comparisons among the patterns reported in Chapter 5 for three linguistic variables that occur in at least three languages in the project: (VOT), (CASE), and (PRODROP). Conditioning factors, both linguistic and social, are discussed. Collapsing across rate and constraint hierarchy for each variable, we note any indication of change in either. Half the context we examine exhibit stability. Of the eight that indicate difference, half of these can be attributed to English (including both convergence and divergence). With few differences between homeland and heritage speakers to work with, we find few generalizations about what parts of the language, or which languages, change. We do see more change in one morphosyntactic variable, (CASE), than in the phonetic variable (VOT), but less in the other morphosyntactic variable (PRODROP).
This chapter discusses linguistic variation in Slavic languages by presenting an overview of the relationship between human communication in the society and the corresponding linguistic features. In this chapter we focus on the parameters of variation according to the language user, such as age or dialects, and according to the language use, such as communicative functions or communication styles, e.g. politeness. We cite both qualitative and quantitative methods for studying aspects of sociolinguistic variation. Examples are drawn from large corpora of two Slavic languages, Russian and Serbo-Croatian, with a particular focus on academic writing, news reporting, and reporting personal experience in social media, as well as from dictionaries and field studies.
The chapter considers gesture studies in relation to corpus linguistic work. The focus is on the Multimedia Russian Corpus (MURCO), part of the Russian National Corpus. The chapter includes a brief biography of the creator of this corpus, Elena Grishina. The compilation of the corpus out of a set of Russian classic feature films and recorded lectures is described as well as the methods of annotating it in detail. The gesture coding is not limited to manual/hand gestures, but also includes head gestures and use of eye gaze. The chapter considers the findings from the corpus, and reported in Grishina’s posthumously published volume on Russian gestures from a linguistic point of view. The categories include pointing gestures, representational gestures, auxiliary (discourse-structuring) gestures, and several cross-cutting categories, including gestures in relation to pragmatics and to grammatical categories, like verbal aspect. Additional consideration is given to other video corpora in English (and other languages) which are being used for gesture research, namely the UCLA NewsScape library being managed by the Red Hen Lab and the Television Archive.
We examined the production and perception of voiced versus voiceless obstruents by thirty-three adolescent heritage speakers of Polish and Russian. First, a word list task was used to elicit the production of voiced and voiceless plosives in word-initial position. Voice onset time (VOT) values for both sets of stops were compared to the values reported for monolingual Polish and Russian speakers. To investigate the perception of phoneme contrasts in the heritage language, we used an auditory phoneme discrimination task that contained ten minimal pairs of real and nonce words with contrasting voiced and voiceless obstruents. The results showed an almost perfect perceptual discrimination and a separation of voiced and voiceless plosives in production; however, the VOT values differed significantly from those of monolinguals. Both groups showed convergence of VOT values towards the values reported for fortis and lenis stops in the majority language (i.e., German), leading to a non-native accent in the heritage language.
This chapter argues that from late Stalinism to the Khrushchev Thaw (1941–1964), Eastern poets and orientalist translators inflected multinational and international translation with a distinctively Persianate ethics of love and hospitality. The chapter develops an account of a mid-century internationalist sentimentality grounded in translation, which prefigures subsequent attempts in feminist theory to reconfigure the patriarchal idea of translation as possessive love into a more receptive model of translation. The opening section challenges the established Soviet and Russian studies narrative in which multinational literature is said to have been invented in Russian translation, showing Eastern poets’ active involvement in programming their own reception. A series of case studies follow. One section considers the collaborations of Uzbek and Russian poets on bilingual poems of hospitality for the Jewish refugees flooding Tashkent during the Second World War. Another shows how the embedded sonnets of Romeo and Juliet were brought into the ghazal mode in Tajik translation. Another shows how the Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet’s theater adaptation of the classical romance Farhad and Shirin sparked Thaw literature debates in Russian and Turkic translations. Poets discussed include Ghafur Ghulam, Anna Akhmatova, Konstantin Simonov, and Zhala Isfahani.
This work compares the morphosyntactic properties of expressive suffixes in four European languages: Russian, German, Spanish and Greek. It shows that although these suffixes share the same expressive meaning, they differ significantly in their syntactic structure, namely in the manner and place of attachment in the syntactic tree. Thus, the Russian and Spanish expressive suffixes that refer to the size of a referent (or size suffixes) are syntactic modifiers, while the German size suffixes are syntactic heads. And in Greek, the two most productive expressive suffixes -ak and -ul have homophonous counterparts that possess contrasting syntactic properties: syntactic heads vs. syntactic modifiers. This shows that across languages as well as within single languages, such as Greek, there is no 1:1 correspondence between the meaning and the structure of expressive forms. These findings are further supported by two novel case studies of the homophonous suffixes -its (in Greek) and -ic (in Russian).
This study investigated the morphosyntax of adjectival concord in case and number and subject-verb person agreement by monolingual and bilingual speakers of Russian. The main focus of the study is on the potential factors that may trigger divergence between Heritage Language (HL) speakers and those speakers who are dominant in that language, be they monolingual or bilingual. We considered the effects of cross-linguistic influence; limited input (as indexed by Age of Onset of Bilingualism, AOB), and working-memory limitations. An auditory offline grammaticality judgment task was performed by 119 adult participants split into four groups: (1) Monolingual Russian-speaking controls (MonoControl), (2) Immigrant Controls, that is, Russian-Hebrew bilinguals with AOB after the age of 13 (IMMControl); (3) bilinguals with AOB between 5–13 (BL-Late); and (4) bilinguals with AOB before the age of 5 (BL-Early). The latter group represents HL speakers. We did not find effects of cross-linguistic influence or extra memory load; at the same time, the effects of AOB were robust. Additionally, HL speakers (BL-Early group) differed from the other groups in poor performance on adjectival concord, but patterned with the others on person agreement, which indicates that the feature [person] is more robust than other agreement/concord features in HL grammars.
This paper investigates the status of Negative Concord Items (NCIs) in three so-called Strict Negative Concord (NC) languages (namely, Greek, Romanian, and Russian). An experimental study was designed to gather evidence concerning the speakers’ acceptability and interpretation of sequences with argumental NCIs in subject, object, and both positions when dhen/nu/ne were not present. Our results show that NCIs are negative indefinites whose presence in a clausal domain is enough to assign a single negation reading to the whole sequence, thus arguing in support of the hypothesis that in NC structures the minimal semantic requirement to convey single negation is that one or more NCIs encoding a negative feature appear within a sentential domain. We argue that in these structures dhen/nu/ne are the instantiations of a negative feature [neg] disembodied from an indefinite negative NCI in order to obey a syntax–phonology interface constraint.
This chapter explicates the Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) theory of case assignment and outlines its OT implementation and its extension to instrumental case assignment and case syncretism. The ’non-OT’ theory of case assignment in RRG is a version of dependent case theory that assigns nominative, accusative, absolutive and ergative case in terms of the ranking of actor and undergoer, while its OT-based counterpart defines accusative, ergative, dative and instrumental case with reference to (non-)macrorole status, conflates nominative and absolutive as an any-argument case, and derives the variation of case syncretism from the case hierarchy of Silverstein (1980/1993).
Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.
This article addresses locality conditions on Negative Concord (NC) in Russian. We examine long-distance licensing of “negative” ni-pronouns in subject- and object-control infinitives. Existing theories of negative concord rely in one way or another on the movement of negative concord items (NCI): either as a direct licensing condition, or as a prerequisite for entering a local configuration with the licensor. Consequently, theories predict that ni-pronoun movement to the matrix clause (i.e., the local domain of the matrix licensor) would increase acceptability of ni-licensing. Using experimental data, we explore various linear positions available for ni-pronouns in the matrix clause and in embedded infinitival clauses. We show that movement is not required for long-distance licensing, and that derived positions of ni-pronouns are independent of ni-licensing. We argue that although ni-licensing and movement both obey locality constraints, they differ as to the type of locality required. This article presents evidence for recent proposals that movement and agreement have different properties with respect to locality constraints.
Notwithstanding remarkable phonological differences, the CV syllable is the most frequent syllable type in both Russian and Hebrew. This led to the prediction that the internal structure of the CVC syllable in the two languages, as reflected in phonological awareness tasks, might be similar. The study tested phonological awareness in two groups of monolingual kindergarteners: Hebrew-speaking (N = 35) and Russian-speaking (N = 20) in order to shed light on the underlying structure of the CVC syllable in the two languages. Phonological awareness tasks targeted awareness of the sub-syllabic structure (structured and unstructured) and phoneme awareness (initial and final). A linear mixed model analysis revealed that children in both groups showed greater facility with body-coda CV-C than with onset-rime C-VC syllable splitting and higher scores on final than on initial phoneme isolation tasks. The unstructured tasks also reflected the cohesion of the CV body in both languages. The findings demonstrate a similar internal representation of the CVC syllable in Russian and in Hebrew speakers as reflected in phonological awareness among preschoolers.
Behavioral psychology was immediately preceded by the reflexology of Russian physiology and the associationism of Thorndike. Physiological reflexology received a sound foundation with the works of Sechenov and Bekhterev, but it was Pavlov who proposed a comprehensive theory of conditioning. Watson’s behavioral formulation defined stimulus and response elements as the substitute to rid psychology of residual mentalistic constructs. Watson’s contemporaries, Holt, Weiss, Hunter, and Lashley, soon restored to behaviorism critical psychological activities. The logical positivist movement expressed an operational spirit and insured the initial success of the behaviorist model. Behavioral psychology expanded beyond the original formulations of Pavlov and Watson. Contemporary reflexology in Russia and in nearby countries expanded to include a wide range of psychological and physiological problems, led by such eminent scientists as Vygotsky, Luria, Konorski, Asratyan, and Beritashvili. In the United States, behaviorism moved through several intellectual stages, through the contributions of Guthrie, Tolman, Hull, and Skinner. A major application of behaviorism was the behavior modification model in clinical settings. Contemporary behaviorism remains a dominant but diffused force in psychology.
The purpose of this Cambridge Element is to bring together three subfields of the language sciences: cognitive, historical (diachronic), and Russian linguistics. Although diachrony has inspired a number of important works in recent years, historical linguistics is still underrepresented in cognitive linguistics, and the most influential publications mainly concern the history of English. This is an unfortunate bias, especially since its lack of morphological complexity makes English a typologically unusual language. In this Cambridge Element, the author demonstrates that Russian has a lot to offer the historically oriented cognitive linguist, given its well-documented history and complex phonology and morpho-syntax. Through seven case studies the author illustrates the relevance of four basic tenets of Cognitive Grammar: the cognitive, semiotic, network, and usage-based commitments.
Ukraine is the largest country by territory within the European continent and a global geopolitical flashpoint. At a time of trauma and transition, Ukrainian cultural producers have begun to confront questions of Ukraine’s national identity and linguistic diversity with new urgency and fresh perspective. This chapter sheds light on the evolving dynamic between multilingualism and identity in contemporary Ukrainian culture by employing the practices of both sociological and literary analysis. Through semi-structured interviews and close readings of prominent artistic texts, we focus on the ways in which Ukrainian cultural producers embrace linguistic diversity while simultaneously privileging the Ukrainian language and promoting national consolidation in wartime. This ‘practical multilingualism’ is particularly evident in literary and cinematic dialogues that feature characters discussing their belonging to Ukraine across languages. In the field of nationalism studies, such ‘scenes of talk’ (Herman 2006) invite a reassessment of the almost exclusive emphasis on narrative in analyses of the role of culture in the life of the nation.