New Speakers in a Multilingual Europe
Opportunities and Challenges
Project management
Bernadette O'Rourke (Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh, UK), Alexandre Duchêne (Head of working groupe "Transnational workers")
Team
Federica Diemoz (University of Neuchâtel), Matthias Grünert (University of Fribourg)
Globalisation, increased mobility and transnational networking transform the linguistic ecologies of contemporary societies. In this COST Action, the aim is to bring multilinguals into the focus of these processes by investigating the challenges and opportunities involved in acquiring, using and being understood as a “new speaker” of a language in the context of a multilingual Europe.
Motion at the linguistic border
On the influence of language dominance and language mode on the expression of motion in bilinguals (French-German)
Project management
Team
In the past 30 years, research on the linguistic expression of spatial relations has shed light on systematic structural and lexical differences between languages. One such difference concerns how some Romance and Germanic languages (e.g. French and German) describe how figures move in space. Whilst languages like French tend to express the path of movement by means of finite verbs, in German, uninflected elements such as verbal prefixes, adverbs or prepositions perform this function....