Acceso usuarios
Robin M. Queen
In this study, I examine how three preadolescent, Turkish-German bilingual girls use intonational resources from both of their languages as one strategy for organizing monologic narratives. In so doing, I show that the bilingual narrators make strategic use of phrase-final tunes that have their origins in the speakers' (and their community's) bilingualism. In particular, these speakers utilize two phrase-final rises that differ in their frequency of occurrence, acoustic, phonological and functional characteristics. The contrasts in the rises taken in conjunction with the contrasts between rises, levels and falls provide the speakers with conventionalized strategies for cueing specific narrative contexts. These conventionalized strategies represent a fusion of Turkish and German intonational patterns into a single intonational grammar and form part of the bilingual linguistic and discursive repertoire. As such they also represent one locus of contact-related language change.
