July 2024: NSF grant for collaborative work on bilingualism
With Naomi Shin and Rosa Vallejos-Yopán (University of New Mexico), I received an NSF grant of $494,659 supporting our project titled “The effects of interlocutor distance in the grammars of bilingual communities.” My role in this project is as a senior collaborator.
The Project Summary reads, in part, as follows:
Nominal demonstratives like this/that are central spoken-language tools for managing attention in face-to-face interaction. Though they exist in all languages, demonstratives vary enormously across languages in number and meaning. This project focuses on one dimension of the cross-linguistic diversity of demonstratives: addressee effects. Given the link between demonstratives and attention management, pragmatic theory predicts that all demonstrative systems should be sensitive to relationships between the addressee and the demonstrative referent. Yet research has found the opposite: addressee effects seem to shape demonstrative use in some, but not all, languages. We now need to account for these unexpected differences – and specifically, to determine whether they arise from the size of languages’ demonstrative inventories or from variation between different types of addressee effects.
With this aim, this study investigates nominal demonstrative use in three bilingual communities: Ticuna-Spanish and Secoya-Spanish bilinguals in the Amazon, and Spanish-English bilinguals in New Mexico. Ticuna and Secoya are unrelated, endangered Indigenous languages. Participants are tested in Spanish and their other language, yielding four study languages – Spanish, English, Secoya, and Ticuna. Ticuna has four demonstratives, Secoya has three, and English has two. Some Spanish varieties have three demonstratives, others two. Because of this wide variation, comparing across the languages will transform our understanding of how inventory size shapes demonstrative use.
Our experiments zero in on two types of addressee effects two types of addressee effects: addressee location and addressee attention. Addressee location effects, such as the use of particular demonstratives to express addressee-referent proximity, are predicted to occur mainly in languages with larger demonstrative inventories. In contrast, given demonstratives’ function of managing attention, addressee attention effects may be more universal. Besides testing these predictions, the project’s focus on bilingualism will also inform our understanding of conceptual convergence, or crosslinguistic influence stemming from how speakers use language to encode their conceptualizations of the world. Bilinguals have already been shown to transfer spatial frames of reference between their languages; the same may apply to conceptualizations reflecting addressee effects on demonstratives.