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Constructions in Contact: Constructional perspectives on contact phenomena in Germanic languages
Edited by Hans C. Boas and Steffen Höder
[Constructional Approaches to Language 24] 2018
► pp. 277–310

Frames change in language contact environments

A case study of schleichen (‘to sneak’) and kommen (‘to come’)

Based on the empirical data of 97 fourth-graders from three districts of Braunschweig in Germany, this paper investigates the possibility of changing semantic frames in multilingual communities. The focus of study is the verb field of self-motion. In a free-sorting task involving 52 verbs, Turkish-speaking students, in particular, placed the verbs schleichen (‘to sneak’) and kommen (‘to come’) in the same group. When explaining the perceived similarity they also used the word schleichen (‘to sneak’), in a specific grammatical construction that is not found in Standard German. This paper suggests that semantic frames may change along with grammatical constructions when typologically distinct languages come into close contact.

Keywords: Frame Semantics, language contact, semantic change, free-sorting, migration linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1.Frame Semantics and FrameNet
    • 2.2Moving across languages
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1The Free Sorting Method
    • 3.2Participants: Districts and background data
    • 3.3The List of motion verbs
    • 3.4Sorting procedure & analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Dendrograms
    • 4.2Logistic regression analysis
  • 5.Follow-up measure: Participant Feedback
    • 5.1.Video stimuli and Procedure
    • 5.2Student feedback
  • 6.The suggested frame change
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.24.09hun
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