Language is a dynamic and adaptive system, continuously shaped and thus continuously changing based on language users’ interactions, social environments, and cognitive mechanisms. Language contact (i.e., the co-existence and interaction of two or more linguistic systems within individuals or communities) has been recognized historically as a primary source of change. Particularly in bilingual language contact, speakers are systematically exposed to two distinct grammatical systems, constantly shifting between languages and often transferring properties from one language into another. Such transfer can lead among others to the emergence of non-canonical/ungrammatical syntactic structures, hereafter referred to as structural innovations. Structural innovations are particularly crucial to explore in the framework of contact-induced change, as they provide insights into the conditions and constraints of language change processes. However, to better understand how language change occurs and develops in contact situations, we need to investigate the psycholinguistic mechanisms underlying them. On this basis, the present dissertation investigates how bilingual speakers cognitively adapt to structural innovations in their input and how this might lead to potential longer-term language change in a community/society. All studies of this dissertation tested Canadian French-English bilinguals, a population situated in an officially bilingual, yet extremely diverse, environment where language contact has been a persistent historical reality. Each study focuses on a different stage or manifestation of adaptation –whether through changes in speakers’ perception (acceptability judgments), online processing, or production– and together they provide a multidimensional picture of how structural innovations might enter and/or stabilize in bilingual grammars, setting the ground for language change.
Foteini Maria Karkaletsou (Thu,) studied this question.