Corinne Kasper (UChicago): The Use of the Conjunct in New Varieties of Potawatomi

Please join us in Wieboldt Hall 111 on Friday, October 4 at 3:00 PM for the first LVC meeting of the Autumn Quarter! Our very own Corinne Kasper will be presenting on what the use of the conjunct verbal construction by L2 speakers of Potawatomi can tell us about contact-induced language change.

The Use of the Conjunct in New Varieties of Potawatomi

Previous analyses of Potawatomi have done little to document the varied use of the conjunct in naturalistic conversations and even fewer have discussed L2 varieties of Potawatomi (see Welcher, 2003 for discussion of ‘everyday discourse’). In this paper, I investigate the manners in which non-Native varieties of Potawatomi use the conjunct in naturalistic conversation. The focus on these varieties is borne out of an additional aim to document New Potawatomi (O’Rourke, Pujolar, & Ramallo, 2015). Each of the speakers in this study have devoted much of their lives to learning Potawatomi after the critical period has passed. For that reason, and early exposure to the language in social and cultural settings, I propose that the grammars represented here exist on a continuum between heritage and new varieties (Aalberse, Backus, & Muysken, 2019; Polinsky & Scontras, 2020; Rodriguez-Ordon ̃ez, Kasstan, & O’Rourke, 2022). This paper links the emerging New Potawatomi to literature on contact-induced language change and language maintenance, since the conjunct forms are now trending toward a more restricted distribution than earlier data show (Kantarovich, Grenoble, Vinokurova, & Nesterova, 2021).

For L1 Potawatomi, the conjunct order has a number of distributions and discourse functions. Though naturalistic conversation data is unavailable, the conjunct is attested in “everyday discourse” in complement phrases, complements to subordinating particles, relative clauses, conditional clauses, and as adverbs. Additionally, in each of those environments a particular realization of the conjunct is expected; either plain, changed, or alongside the é- complementizer (Welcher, 2003; Kasper, 2023).

Based on the literature on contact-induced change for minority languages, we expect some simplification in New Potawatomi varieties. For example, that is the case for the éwi- forms of the conjunct, as the most frequently attested in the dataset, evidenced in (1) below. Further, I propose that the distribution suggests the function of e ́wi- now serves a similar function as the English infinitive for these L2 New speakers.

(1)
Wégwnithë mine nedwéndëmen      é-wi-ketyak
what    and   want.TI.CONJ.2SG.  C-FUT-talk.AI.CONJ.1PL
‘What else do you want us to talk about?’ [W-2024-6-5]

Though this innovation implies a level of simplification in multiclausal sentences, the conjunct is still attested in the same environments as in L1 speech. For example, these speakers also use the expected realization of the conjunct across subordination, complementation, relative clauses, and in many adverbial contexts. Bearing in mind that comparison to L1 data and the over representation of éwi-, this paper provides a first glance at what is maintained and what is innovative in New Potawatomi.

The data for this project will be collected through fieldwork this summer. The goal of my presentation at LVC is to outline the background, methods, and hypotheses, and to discuss challenges in the design of production and perception experiments. Any suggestions and feedback would be greatly appreciated!

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