Final Report Summary - CONTACTS (Traces of contact: Language contact studies and historical linguistics)
This project aims to establish criteria by which results from language contact studies can be used to strengthen the field of historical linguistics. It does so by applying the scenario model for language contact studies to a number of concrete settings, which differ widely in their level of aggregation and dime depth: the languages of the Amazonian fringe in South America, the complex multilingual setting of the Republic of Suriname, the multilingual interaction of immigrant groups in the Netherlands, and two groups of multilingual individuals. New methods from structural phylogenetics are employed, and the same linguistic variables (TMA and evidentiality marking, argument realization) is studied in the various projects. In the various projects, use is made from a shared questionnaire and shared visual stimuli in elicitation experiments, so that comparable data can be gathered. By applying the scenario model at various levels of aggregation, a more principled link between language contact studies and historical linguistics can be established.
Having reached the end of the grant period for this project, I am very pleased to say that it has been very successful overall. There were five components:
• Deep time South America
• The multilingual development of Suriname
• Heritage languages in multilingual Netherlands
• Multilingual processing and convergence
• Digitization and computational modelling
All five components are yielding important results, and there is significant synergy between the different components. Support from Radboud University Nijmegen was very good. Many of the young researchers trained in the project are finding interesting positions on the labour market. We have not yet completed all the publications from this project, but we are well under way.
Having reached the end of the grant period for this project, I am very pleased to say that it has been very successful overall. There were five components:
• Deep time South America
• The multilingual development of Suriname
• Heritage languages in multilingual Netherlands
• Multilingual processing and convergence
• Digitization and computational modelling
All five components are yielding important results, and there is significant synergy between the different components. Support from Radboud University Nijmegen was very good. Many of the young researchers trained in the project are finding interesting positions on the labour market. We have not yet completed all the publications from this project, but we are well under way.