University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2008 Aspects of First Language Attrition: A Case Study of German Immigrants in East Tennessee Raluca Mihaela Negrisanu University of Tennessee - Knoxville Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the German Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Negrisanu, Raluca Mihaela, "Aspects of First Language Attrition: A Case Study of German Immigrants in East Tennessee. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2008. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/367 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Raluca Mihaela Negrisanu entitled "Aspects of First Language Attrition: A Case Study of German Immigrants in East Tennessee." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Modern Foreign Languages. Chauncey J. Mellor, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Ilona Leki, Dolly Juanita Young, Nike Arnold Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Raluca Mihaela Negrisanu entitled “Aspects of First Language Attrition: A Case Study of German Immigrants in East Tennessee.” I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Modern Foreign Languages.. Chauncey J. Mellor, Major Professor We have read this [dissertation or thesis] and recommend its acceptance: Ilona Leki Dolly Juanita Young Nike Arnold Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official student records.) ASPECTS OF FIRST LANGUAGE ATTRITION: A CASE STUDY OF GERMAN IMMIGRANTS IN EAST TENNESSEE A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Raluca Mihaela Negrisanu May 2008 Copyright © 2008 by Raluca Mihaela Negrisanu All rights reserved iii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my parents Mihail N. Negrisanu and Gabriela D. Negrisanu, great role models and supporting friends, to my brother Razvan Negrisanu and to my multilingual husband Catalin Manolache and bilingual daughter Alexandra Manolache, for always loving me, believing in me, inspiring me, bearing the hard times while writing my dissertation, and encouraging me to reach higher in order to achieve my goals. iv Kuliko jezikou človīg znâ, Taliko človīg vaļâ. However many languages a person knows, That’s how much a person is worth. (Old Croatian saying in Thomason, 2000) v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Growing up in Timisoara in the Banat region of Romania, I was well aware of a local saying; “a real Bănăţean has to know at least three languages,” out of the four languages spoken in the region: Romanian, German, Hungarian and Serbian. Probably, this is why my “monolingual Romanian” parents decided that I will need to know at least a second language. My first encounter with German at the age of four was in the German kindergarten and since then German became my second language. I would like to thank my parents Mihai and Gabriela Negrisanu for their smart decision, even if I did not quite understood then, why I had to learn another language. I am deeply indebted to my dissertation supervisor Prof. Dr. Chauncey Mellor, whose help, stimulating suggestions and encouragement helped me all the time during my study, data collection, analyzing of the data and writing of this dissertation. I would like to express my gratitude to all those who gave me the possibility to complete this dissertation and have helped and supported me in this long voyage through Graduate School. I want to thank my committee members Professors Ilona Leki, Dolly Young and Nike Arnold for their guidance, mentoring and valuable suggestions on my research and writing of the dissertation. I have furthermore to thank Associate Professor Dr. Stefanie Ohnesorg for her continuous support and assistance during difficult times and throughout my Graduate School. I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Christina Goode, who offered me a graduate assistantship in the Innovative Technology Center at the University of Tennessee and vi great opportunities for professional development and enrichment and for being so supportive and understanding. My former colleagues from the German Department at the University of Tennessee, Maria Gallmeier, Zsuzsanna Roth and Ahmed Abdelrahman, and Harriette Spiegel and Sangeetha Swaminathan from ITC, I want to thank them for all their support, interest, and valuable hints and for being such caring friends. I also want to thank Mrs. Ingrid McMillen for all her assistance with all the paperwork during my graduate student life. Thank you to my twenty-two American German informants from East Tennessee and to my twelve informants from Germany, who agreed so kindly to be part of the study and provided me with all the valuable data for my study. Without them this study could not have been possible. I am grateful for receiving the Maria Harris Award from the German Department at the University of Tennessee, which helped me cover the travel expenses to Germany. Especially, I would like to give my deepest thanks to my dear husband Catalin whose patient love and continuous caring enabled me to complete this work and to my mother-in-law Constanta, who patiently endured some of the hardest times during the writing of the dissertation, by taking care of my little daughter Alexandra. vii ABSTRACT This dissertation examines aspects of first language attrition (L1= German) in a second language (L2= English) environment. It sheds light on language contact and attrition research and focuses on first generation German immigrants to East Tennessee who were administered a series of tests to ascertain their language attrition to establish extralinguistic factors promoting or inhibiting it. The Study Group consisted of 22 German immigrants to the U.S., both men and women, aged between 27 and 68, who emigrated as late teens or adults and have been here for more than three years. The Control Group consisted of 12 German native speakers in Germany similar to the American informants in education level, age and gender. The informants from both groups were interviewed, given a questionnaire and asked to describe pictures into an audio recorder. They were also given a cloze/fill-in text targeting lexical items and the correct usage of specific L1 grammatical structures such as gender articles, formation of plurals and cases. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data from the Study Group revealed that L1 attrition is not severe, although extralinguistic variables such as age, time since immigration, level of education and amount of L1 contact, affect lexical retrieval and gender assignment, and case and plural marking. Statistical analysis of the cloze test data, picture description and interview indicated significant differences at the p<.05 level both in the lexical and morphological domains between subgroups (organized by variable) in the Study Group versus parallel ones in the Control Group. The qualitative data analysis showed that mostly social domains, such as shopping, viii daily routine, working settings or leisure activities, were affected by L2 transfer, borrowings or loan shifts. The lexical density test performed on the data revealed group differences between the Study and the Control groups. All the informants spontaneously used English words, phrases and loan translations in their German speech and all are aware of their code-switching, but only 17% view it negatively, while 40% have a neutral attitude towards this practice. The Study Group still highly values German language and culture. ix TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 1 2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND: LANGUAGE ATTRITION RESEARCH .... 6 2.1 Language attrition: General Observations ........................................................... 7 2.2 Language attrition: definitions and terms .......................................................... 11 Lexical changes in a language contact situation .................................................. 25 2.4 Linguistic changes in first language attrition and a brief German-English contrastive grammar overview ................................................................................ 29 Brief contrastive English –German grammar overview ....................................... 31 2.5 Psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic factors in language change ...................... 35 2.5 Objectives of the study and research questions ................................................. 41 Research questions ..............................................................................................