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Comprehension of Labrador Inuttitut Functional Morphology by Receptive Bilinguals

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Comprehension of Labrador Inuttitut Functional Morphology by Receptive Bilinguals Comprehension of Labrador Inuttitut functional morphology by receptive bilinguals by Marina Sherkina-Lieber A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Linguistics University of Toronto Copyright c 2011 by Marina Sherkina-Lieber Abstract Comprehension of Labrador Inuttitut functional morphology by receptive bilinguals Marina Sherkina-Lieber Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Linguistics University of Toronto 2011 This study examines knowledge of grammar by receptive bilinguals (RBs) - heritage speakers who describe themselves as capable of fluent comprehension in Labrador Inut- titut (an endangered dialect of Inuktitut), but of little or no speech production in it. Despite the growing research on incomplete acquisition, RBs have yet to be studied as a specific population. Participants (8 fluent bilinguals, 17 RBs, 3 low-proficiency RBs) performed a mor- pheme comprehension task and a grammaticality judgment task. General measures of their comprehension and production abilities included a story retelling task as an over- all assessment of comprehension, a vocabulary test, an elicited imitation task, and a production task. This data was complemented by language behaviour interviews. The results showed that RBs have good, though not perfect, comprehension and ba- sic vocabulary, but speech production is very difficult for them. They have grammatical knowledge, but it is incomplete: Knowledge of some structures is robust, and their com- prehension is fluent (past vs. future contrast, aspectual morphemes); others are missing (temporal remoteness degrees); and yet for others (case and agreement), RBs have the category and know its position in the word structure, but have difficulty connecting the features with the morphemes expressing them. These findings explain the significant asymmetry between comprehension and production in RBs: In comprehension, incom- plete knowledge may result in loss of some aspects of meaning, but in many cases it ii can be compensated for by pragmatic knowledge and extralinguistic context, while in production, it can result in the selection of an incorrect morpheme or inability to select a morpheme. Low-proficiency RBs have partial comprehension, small vocabulary, and almost no production. They do not understand most functional morphemes; however, they show knowledge of the basic properties such as the position of the obligatory agreement marker on the verb. This study provides data on an understudied language and an understudied popula- tion at the extreme end of unbalanced bilingualism. The findings have implications both for the psycholinguistics of bilingualism and for language revitalization, especially in the context of a language shift in indigenous language communities, where RBs are often the last generation to have competence in the indigenous language. iii Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank my co-advisors, Professor Alana Johns and Professor Ana-Teresa Perez-Leroux. It was a great pleasure to work with both of them, from the early discussions on how to start to co-authoring an article to the final stages of thesis writing. Alana told me about receptive bilinguals in Labrador at the time when I was choosing my thesis topic, and Ana supported my choice. Alana also collected, parsed and glossed Inuttitut stories that I used for the story retelling task, suggested an elicited imitation task as screening for receptive bilingualism, and acted as the third (expert) rater for the non-target answers in the word translation task. Ana, among other great ideas, suggested a story retelling task as a test of comprehension. I also would like to thank my third committee member, Professor Rena Helms-Park, for providing yet another perspective on my research. I express my gratitude to my External Examiner, Professor Maria Polinsky of Harvard University, who came to my defense in person all the way from Boston and asked stimulating questions, and to Professor Mihaela Pirvulescu who also served on my examination committee. I am very grateful to all my participants for finding time and courage to come for testing. I also wish to thank many Nain residents who helped me with this study. I am greatly indebted to Catharyn Andersen, who was the director of Torngˆasok Cultural Centre when I was preparing and conducting this study, for providing an office for testing, for help with advertisement, for accommodation and for food - especially caribou meat! I would also like to thank my language consultants, fluent speakers of Labrador Inuttitut: Alice Pilgrim, who helped me to create most of the test materials, and then was recorded reading them; Katie E. Winters, who created some of the stimuli for the elicited imitation task, composed and read Story 1, transcribed the results of the speech production tasks in Inuttitut, translated the transcripts of the picture description task and pointed out errors; Rita Andersen, who composed and read Story 2, and also helped me with some of the stimuli; Regina Saimat, who checked some of the materials. Special thanks to iv Rutie Dicker, the receptionist in Nunatsiavut Government, for her invaluable help with participant recruitment and scheduling. At the University of Toronto, I would like to thank Saila Michael, one of our Inuktitut language consultants, for the pre-test of sentences used in the grammaticality judgment tasks. I also thank Biruntha Sritharan, a research assistant of Ana-Teresa Perez-Leroux, for transcription of the story retelling task results. I wish to express my gratitude to Professor Ron Smyth, who, as my Master’s thesis advisor - long before I started my Ph.D. thesis - trained me to design, conduct and analyze experiments, and who has continued to help me with statistical analyses. I started my life at the Department of Linguistics as a syntactician, and I wish to thank professors Elisabeth Cowper and Diane Massam for helping to develop that side of me. I also thank Professor Michela Ippolito for discussions on the semantics of Inuttitut aspectual suffixes. Also, thank you to graduate students in the Department of Linguistics for making my Ph.D. life enjoyable. Tanya Slavin is such a great friend, and we share much more than interest in the syntax of indigenous languages. Very special thanks go to Sarah Clarke who was my fellow graduate researcher in Labrador (though working on a completely different project) on my first trip in 2007. In Labrador, we shared experience, discussions on Inuttitut, accommodation, and meals (from canned stew to fresh Arctic char; once we even shared a gull’s egg). Back in Toronto, Sarah was the English voice on recordings, the proofreader of English materials, and a second rater of the non-target asnwers in the word translation task. Also, thanks to Mike Barkey for company in Labrador during my 2008 trip. Midori Hayashi, Bettina Spreng, Christine Pittman, and Richard Compton share my interest in Inuktitut, and they are also fun to hang out with. I also thank Ailis Cournane, Liisa Duncan, Magda Goledzinowska, Vanessa Hardy, Kevin Heffernan, Bridget Jankowsky, Maria Kyriakaki, Catherine Macdonald, Beth MacLeod, Kenji Oda, Nattaya Piriyawiboon, Elham Rohany Rahbar, Ulyana Savchenko, Eugenia Suh - I have special memories about each of you, about little things you did that made me feel good. v Forgive me if I forgot anyone. And, of course, I thank my family for their loving support, without which I would not be able to finish this work. I thank my husband Zeev Lieber, for all kinds of support, thinkable and unthinkable (including a program for running the experiments). Thank you, my sweet little Hannah and Yana, for bearing with me when I had to work even though you wanted me to play with you; please stay balanced bilinguals when you grow up! I also thank my parents, Tanya & Gregory Sherkin; my husband’s parents, Luba and George Lieber; and my brother Alexander Sherkin and his wife Alena Sherkin - for a lot of things, and, of course, for babysitting. This study was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellowship, Ontario Graduate Scholarship, Northern Scien- tific Training Grants (2007-2008, 2008-2009) to me and by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) grant #410-2007-0979 to Alana Johns. vi Contents 1 Introduction: The problem 1 2 Incomplete language knowledge: Background 8 2.1 Introductionanddefinitions ......................... 8 2.2 Unbalanced bilingual acquisition in childhood . 11 2.3 Linguistic system and processing in an incompletely acquired language . 16 2.4 Lostorneveracquired?............................ 22 2.5 Incomplete acquisition versus adult L2 and attrition . .. 23 2.6 Overhearersandinternationaladoptees . ... 26 2.7 Receptive multilingualism: Mutually intelligible languages . 28 2.8 Productionversuscomprehension . 29 2.9 Languageattitudes .............................. 31 2.10Conclusion................................... 32 3 Labrador Inuttitut 34 3.1 Language situation in Nunatsiavut . 34 3.2 OverviewofthestructureofInuttitut . .. 39 3.3 The selection of linguistic variables . 44 3.4 Theoretical background on the variables selected . .... 46 3.4.1 Agreement............................... 46 3.4.2 Tense ................................. 48 vii 3.4.3 Aspect................................. 50 3.4.4 Case.................................. 53 3.4.5 Morphemeandwordorder . 54 3.5 AcquisitionofInuktitut ........................... 56 4 The study: Goals, method, participants
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