Wednesday 26th April 2023: Elizabeth Peterson

Remote language contact and pragmatic borrowing in Finland

1pm in Room 3.62 of the John Percival Building on Colum Drive and via Zoom

Language contact in the contemporary era is, predictably, in many ways constitutive of previously established language contact phenomena and outcomes. For example, “gesture-like devices” (Matras, 2020) such as discourse markers, interjections and expletives are at the top of the borrowing hierarchy in most (perhaps all) language contact setting, including the unidirectional contact that typifies contemporary language contact – that is, contact with English, in its current role as a widespread global language, serving as a source language for multiple, simultaneous receiving communities (Peterson, 2017).

While many earlier accounts of contact with English as a source language have focused primarily on domain-specific lexicon (Andersen et al., 2017), recent investigations of contemporary borrowing from English have been conducted within the auspices of pragmatic borrowing (Andersen, 2014), highlighting the social, pragmatic and linguistic functions of borrowed discourse-pragmatic forms. This presentation offers an overview of research conducted on pragmatic borrowings from English into contemporary, everyday Finnish, including English-sourced swear words (shit, damn) as well as affirmation (jees, jess ‘yes’) and politeness particles (pliis ‘please’).  The findings, investigated in the tradition of discourse-pragmatic variation studies, highlight that the English-sourced borrowings are integrated and become effectively Finnish, and that the borrowings serve as stylistic variants with heritage forms, often indexing features such as urbanicity and, to some extent, an association with women’s speech. The situation in contemporary Finland can be considered a representative example of language contact in other modern-day scenarios, with the added interest of noting contact phenomena between two genetically unrelated languages (ie, Finnish and English).

References

Andersen, G. (2014). Pragmatic borrowing. Journal of Pragmatics, 67, 17–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.03.005

Andersen, G., Furiassi, C., & Mišić Ilić, B. (2017). The pragmatic turn in studies of linguistic borrowing. Journal of Pragmatics, 113, 71–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2017.03.010

Matras, Y. (2020). Language contact (Second edition). Cambridge University Press.

Peterson, E. (2017). The nativization of pragmatic borrowings in remote language contact situations. Journal of Pragmatics, 113, 116–126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2017.02.012

This seminar will be hybrid although Elizabeth will be present and we encourage in-person attendance in Room 3.62 of the John Percival Building. To join online click here.