Carol Wollman Pfaff

Freie Universität Berlin | FUB

For more than 50 years, linguists in countries with multilingual minority populations have argued for a positive stance toward bilingual/ multilingual development, a stance we wholeheartedly support. Nonetheless, in the context of the discussion of the minority languages in contact settings, the standard of comparison is frequently (monolingual) va...

Heritage language bilingualism refers to contexts where a minority language spoken at home is (one of) the first native language(s) of an individual who grows up and typically becomes dominant in the societal majority language. Heritage language bilinguals often wind up with grammatical systems that differ in interesting ways from dominant-native s...

This paper presents an overview of the linguistic analyses developed in the MULTILIT project and the processing of the oral and written texts collected. The project investigates the language abilities of multilingual children and adolescents, in particular, those who have Turkish and/or Kurdish as a mother tongue. A further aim of the project is to...

Plurilingual communication is common practice in most urban areas. Societal domains such as business and science nowadays see themselves as international, and plurilingual communication is the rule rather than the exception. But how do other players in critical domains of modern societies, and more specifically, in education react to this situation...

There is a steadily growing body of research on the language of bilinguals in countries with large immigrant or indigenous minorities. In the USA, Hispanic groups have received much attention in recent years and in Europe, migrants from Mediterranean countries or from former colonies and their children have been the focus of many projects. At the c...

Since the 1960s, Western Europe has been host to a large Turkish immigrant community. While many such communities shift to the majority language in the space of a few generations, language maintenance is remarkably successful in this community. This is partially because of continuing immigration, but it is also typical of a transnational identity t...

In this volume, the results of a number of empirical studies of the development of narrative construction within a multilingual context are presented and discussed. It is explored what operating principles underlie the process of narrative production in L1 and L2. Developmental relations between form and function will be studied across a broad rang...

This paper treats the development of the expression of grammatical categories in German in the early second language acquisition of Turkish and German children attending a bilingual day-care center in a multilingual speech community in Berlin. We examine case and gender marking on noun phrases and pronouns and tense/aspect and agreement marking on...

A study of the acquisition of Turkish and German by immigrant children in West Germany addressed three issues: (1) the role of cognitive development and age of learning in the process of language acquisition, (2) the role of transfer between languages, and (3) the effects of greater or lesser contact with native speakers of the two languages being...

This paper reviews the work on sociolinguistic aspects of the recent immigration of foreign workers and their families from Southern Europe and the Mediterranean countries of the Middle East and North Africa to West Germany. The continued presence of these foreigners presents almost laboratory conditions for the investigation of the initial and sub...

From the point of view of linguists interested in pidginization, creolization, or other language contact phenomena, the continued presence of large numbers of southern European and North African foreign workers (called Gastaibeitei in Germany) and their families in northern European countries presents almost laboratory conditions for the investigat...

Mixture of Spanish and English, whether in isolated loan words or in code-switching of clauses and sentences, while socially motivated, is subject to clear linguistic constraints. Quantitative analysis of mixing in conversations of Mexican-Americans suggests specific functional constraints to express tense/aspect/mood and subject/object relationshi...

William S. Hall and Roy O. Freedle. Culture and Language: The Black American Experience. New York: Halsted Press, 1975. 191 pp. Tables, figures, bibliography and index. $10.95.

Pfaff (1973, 1975) reports on 81 low- and middle-income first-grade Black children who produced multiple instances of linguistic variables by answering questions about a set of pictures and telling the story of Goldilocks and the three bears. No models were given of the linguistic variables under investigation, which included a number of third pers...

Thirty Black and Anglo kindergarten children from lower and middle income neighborhoods were asked to respond to three different tasks in an effort to investigate seven phonological and syntactical features of Black English and to determine the utility of each elicitation procedure. The interviews consisted of three production tasks which required...

This paper documents a coding system developed to facilitate the investigation of linguistic variation in Black English. The rationale for employment of such a system is given. The use of the coding system in a study of child Black English is described and the codes for 41 phonological and syntactic variables investigated in the study are presented...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Los Angeles, 1973. Bibliography : leaves 197-201. Microfilm. s