A project on the role of emotions in linguistic behavior and language change

Predicting contact-induced language change has been an ambitious yet largely unsuccessful task in linguistics. Among the possible reasons for this is the actuation problem (Weinreich, Labov & Herzog 1968), namely our inability to determine why a change in a particular structural feature takes place in a given language at a given time, rather than in a different language or at a different time, and the central role of social factors, seen as inherently unpredictable (Thomason & Kaufmann 1988). Furthermore, while language change can be observed in historic dimensions, we can only hypothesize about the social or psychological dimensions of language use in the past, since language change is a long-term phenomenon and individual human linguistic actions are short-term phenomena. 

Our project aims to deliver a strongly predictive theory of language change by introducing a novel, highly interdisciplinary approach in which language attitudes to linguistic material are measured using sociolinguistic and neuroscientific methodology. The premise is that the role of social and psychological factors in contact-induced language change is key, and the hypothesis is that, among these factors, emotional attitudes to language play a decisive role. We hypothesize that conscious and non-conscious emotional attitudes towards linguistic elements will impose pressure on the linguistic system, leading to predictable language change. 

The project will test the main hypothesis by focusing on a rare sociolinguistic phenomenon, termed linguistic conversion that has been unfolding in Ukraine as a reaction to Russia’s war of aggression wherein bilingual speakers of Ukrainian and Russian and those for whom Russian is the primary language of communication give up the language entirely and make a categorical switch to Ukrainian. This highly unusual sociolinguistic situation presents a unique opportunity for testing the proposed theory of emotionally driven language change precisely because the observed strength of emotional attitudes to language in this case should make it possible to study the relevant processes as they are unfolding at a level of detail hardly available for observation before. 

This highly interdisciplinary project, housed at the Institute of Psychology, will involve close collaboration with the Institute of Linguistics at the University of Graz, with graduate students in Linguistics and Psychology employed in the project doing their PhD research in one of the two Institutes. The project presents a unique opportunity for interested MA students to get involved in interdisciplinary research, informed by psychological, psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic and generative linguistic research methods.