Dynamics of discourse organisation in language contact

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This project investigates the dynamics of discourse organisation in the language use of heritage speakers and of monolingual speakers of English, German, and Turkish, based on promising findings from the first phase of various projects of the Research Unit “Emerging Grammars” (RUEG1). Contact-linguistic settings will cover Turkish in contact with German, English, and Kurdish; German in contact with Turkish, Kurdish, English, Russian, and Greek; and English in contact with Turkish, German, Russian, and Greek. In collaboration with the other RUEG projects we will conduct further comparisons with corpus data from Russian and Greek (as majority languages and as heritage languages in Germany and the U.S.). We will investigate the organisation of discourse at the level of lexical items, clauses, and macrostructure, by targeting discourse markers, event relating, and openings/closings. Linguistic means involved in the organisation of discourse have proved to be particularly open to new developments in language contact, and especially so in heritage language contexts. In the proposed project, we will investigate the dynamics of discourse organisation in detail within the new Joint Ventures of RUEG2.