Research
The MAPS project has produced four complementary studies.
a) I evidenced the existence of recurring patterns in the multimodal (spoken, gestured, and drawn) descriptions of kinship relations, which capture specific social structures. Analyses of the speech, gesture, and drawings produced by 40 Paamese speakers who were asked to talk about their family in semi-guided kinship interviews revealed that lineality (i.e. mother’s side vs. father’s side) is lateralized in the speaker’s gesture space. In other words, kinship members of the speaker’s matriline are placed on the left side of the speaker’s body and those of the patriline are placed on their right side, when they are mentioned in speech. Moreover, when Paamese speakers describe marital relations, they make a distinctive sagittal gesture on the left-diagonal axis or on the right-diagonal axis depending on the gender of the referred relative (see Figure 1). I have been invited to give a guest lecture on these important findings at UC Berkeley in April 2022, at the University of Sydney in November 2022, and at the Århus University in February 2023. A paper reporting the results of this study has been submitted to tCognitive Science in January 2023, and is currently under review.
b) In the course of the MAPS project, I have investigated how sociolinguistic variables (like age, age of language acquisition, gender, place of residence, majority language pressure, multilingual language use and exposure) affect patterns of language change in Paamese and North Sámi. The results of this study show that the younger generations of both North Sámi and Paamese speakers use significantly more often a morphosyntactically simpler structure to express possession (Figure 2), and that this effect is amplified by a low degree of language use at school (Devylder, Janda, & Antonsen, in prep). The paper has been accepted for presentation at the (peer-reviewed) 16th International Cognitive Linguistics Association Conference in Düsseldorf (August 2023), at the time of submission of this final report, we are finalizing the analyses and expect to be able to submit the paper by July 2023 to the journal Language Change and Variation.
c) I am leading the very first investigation, which integrates instruments from multilingualism studies (e.g. the LEAP-Q questionnaire) to record fine-grained language learning profiles of speakers, in combination with the full strength of Network Science to map the structure of personal networks in Paamese society. Preliminary results based on the on-going data collection in Vanuatu show that members of the indigenous communities who have migrated to urban centres tend to have more fragmented networks, where an individual has separate clusters of social relations (one from work, one from home, one from a social activity, etc.). In contrast, the rural segments of the population have much denser personal networks (i.e. networks where everyone knows everybody else). We are testing the hypothesis according to which the structure of personal networks is a significant factor in patterns of language variation and change in multilingual indigenous societies. This is also the first investigation testing the Linguistic Niche Hypothesis ‘in the wild’ with data recorded from actual societies. Given the ground-breaking potential of this study, we aim to submit the corresponding paper to the high-impact journal Science by August 2023. I have been invited by the CNRS laboratory Dynamique du Language, Lyon, France to give a guest lecture on this study in May 2023.
d) The aim of the 4th study is to advance our understanding of patterns of language change and how it may be affected by social dynamics (such as the structure of personal networks) and cognitive constraints (such as distinct types and degrees of linguistic use and exposure). More specifically, in this study we are interested in investigating how speakers with various proficiencies can shape the language spoken in different types of social structures. We do this by running a so-called dyadic communication game combined with so-called micro-societies experiments. Micro-societies model social dynamics in a closed group of participants. In the Dothraki Experiment, participants are taught how to speak (some) Dothraki – a constructed language invented for the TV Show Game of Thrones – and use this knowledge to describe events to their partner, who has to choose the correct meaning from a series of pictures. This can simulate how languages evolve in different directions depending on the structure and proportion of low-proficient speakers of a society. We are currently piloting this study with my collaborators from Århus University in Denmark and plan to submit this paper in September 2023.
