Crosslingual Language Varieties: A Multifaceted Investigation

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Most people in the world today use more than one language in the course of their daily lives, and it is estimated that most children today grow up with exposure to two or more languages. Multilingualism has been recognized as an educational and social goal, especially bythe European Union. In addition to individual multilingualism, culture, technology and information are increasingly characterized by a globalization of resources, mediated by translation of materials originating in a wide variety of languages. This innovative andinterdisciplinary proposal brings together researchers and methods from corpus linguistics, psycho-linguistics and computer science to achieve a better understanding of how individuals use the various languages at their disposal. The findings of the proposed researchcould then be used to inform language education and Translation studies. The proposed research program will simultaneously investigate several varieties of the language produced by bilinguals using the same set of multi-disciplinary methods in order to establish common characteristics as well as meaningful differences among thesevarieties. We will use qualitative and quantitative computational methods on language corpora and complement our findings with psycholinguistic experiments. We will uniformly investigate various manifestations of crosslingual language varieties, including both translations and the language of non-native speakers at different levels of expertise and proficiency. These varieties will be contrasted with the language ofnative speakers producing original (i.e. not translated) utterances. In particular, we will address the following research questions: (i) What characteristics are common to the various crosslingual language varieties and distinguish them from native language? (ii) Whatproperties distinguish crosslingual language varieties from each other? (iii) Are such differences language-pair specific, or are they "universal"'? Answers to these questions will forward our understanding of the cognitive and computational processes supporting crosslingual language varieties, and will illuminate the specific circumstances that lead to similarities and differences between individuals and language settings. The proposed research is novel in two important ways: (i) we will address several crosslingual language varieties, including translations and advanced non-native language, under a unifyingumbrella, whereas existing approaches typically focus only on a single variety; and (ii) we will utilize three different and complementary methodologies (statistical analysis of large corpora with a modeling component, fine-grained linguistic analysis of deeply annotatedsmaller corpora, and psycholinguistic experiments) to investigate these language varieties. This broad approach, which cuts across established disciplinary boundaries, holds the promise of going beyond previous findings, and having a strong theoretical and practicalimpact.