L. Cornips

Cognitive Advantages of Bilingual Children in Different Sociolinguistic Contexts

Many studies have shown that bilingual children outperform monolinguals on tasks testing executive functioning, but other studies have not revealed any effect of bilingualism. In this study we compared three groups of bilingual children in the Netherlands, aged 6–7 years, with a monolingual control group. We were specifically interested in testing whether the bilingual cognitive advantage is modulated by the sociolinguistic context of language use. All three bilingual groups were exposed to a minority language besides the nation’s dominant language (Dutch). Two bilingual groups were exposed to a regional language (Frisian, Limburgish), and a third bilingual group was exposed to a migrant language (Polish). All children participated in two working memory tasks (verbal, visuospatial) and two attention tasks (selective attention, interference suppression). Bilingual children outperformed monolinguals on selective attention. The cognitive effect of bilingualism was most clearly present in the Frisian-Dutch group and in a subgroup of migrant children who were relatively proficient in Polish. The effect was less robust in the Limburgish-Dutch sample. Investigation of the response patterns of the flanker test, testing interference suppression, suggested that bilingual children more often show an effect of response competition than the monolingual children, demonstrating that bilingual children attend to different aspects of the task than monolingual children. No bilingualism effects emerged for verbal and visuospatial working memory.

The politics of labelling youth vernaculars in the Netherlands and Belgium

This chapter critically analyses the labelling of youthful language use in Belgium and the Netherlands. Urban youthful speech practices have in recent years been assigned a variety of labels, some of which have gained currency among insiders as well as outsiders. Linguists have not infrequently contributed to (the success of) this labelling process through their scholarly descriptions and public communication about their work (see e.g. Labov 1969, 1972a, on ‘Black English vernacular’ or ‘ebonics’). We argue, however, that regardless of the terms chosen, the practice of labelling language use has epistemological and ideological implications that must be addressed in sociolinguistic research. Our chapter presents two case studies to illustrate this. The first shows how linguists’ labels can begin to live lives of their own as they are ideologized in public discourse (cf. Chapter 2). The second demonstrates how an ostensibly technical labelling attempt may be resisted and de-neutralized by those who are labelled. We suggest that making a principled distinction between labels as ethnographic facts and labels as professional acts is a prerequisite for engaging with the intricacies of labelling youth vernaculars.

The verb krijgen ‘to get’ as an undative verb

Abstract This article will argue that the typology of verbs currently assumed in generative grammar has an incidental gap; we would expect that besides dyadic verbs with two internal arguments, in which the theme argument surfaces as subject, there are also dyadic verbs with two internal arguments, in which the goal argument surfaces as subject. We will show that such verbs do indeed exist and are instantiated by the verb krijgen ‘to get’ and its cognates hebben and houden ‘to keep’. We will call these verbs undative verbs given that they are characterized by the fact that they can assign accusative, but not dative case. We will further provide a discussion of the syntactic behavior of the krijgen-passive and what we will call the semicopular construction in (so-called standard and nonstandard) Dutch in order to show that these case properties of the main verbs krijgen, hebben and houden are also present in their uses as auxiliary and semicopular verbs.

Taalcultuur: Talen in beweging

This paper aims to encourage the interdisciplinary study of ‘languageculture,’ an approach to language and culture in which ideology, linguistic and cultural forms, as well as praxis are studied in relation to another (cf. Cornips et al 2012). It focuses on the construction of local and regional identities in Limburg and the linguistic political context of this Southern-Netherlands region where people are strongly aware of their linguistic distinctiveness. This contribution addresses the impact of globalization processes and mobility of speakers resulting in new and complex patterns of cultural and linguistic encounters. Since globalization does not only affect dominant areas, we need a new understanding of language and identities in peripheral areas in Europe (cf. Cornips et al. 2012). Although dialects are traditionally seen and analyzed as something that anchor people in a local context, speakers have become translocal i.e. people and the ways in which they speak are on the move (cf. Quist 2010). In this paper, in contrast to dialectology and dialect atlases based on modern linguistic theoretical insights like the Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects (SAND), place is not conceived in objective, physical terms but instead as an emic, culturally defined category (Johnstone 2004). The process of place-making provides insight in how people categorize themselves and others through languagecultural practices.