XII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2020

Shana Poplack is a distinguished University Professor in the linguistics department of the University of Ottawa and three time holder of the Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in Linguistics.

Many of Poplack's studies are connected with language contact (examining multiple language pairs). As a rule, they have demonstrated that borrowing has no lasting structural effects on a recipient language and that many changes attributed to language contact can be alternately explained by internal language change.

In 2018 Oxford University Press published her book called “Borrowing: Loanwords in the Speech Community and in the Grammar”. Building on more than three decades of original research based on vast quantities of spontaneous performance data and a highly ramified analytical apparatus, Shana Poplack characterizes the phenomenon of lexical borrowing in the speech community and in the grammar, both synchronically and diachronically. Attacking some of the most contentious issue in language mixing research empirically, her book tests hypotheses about established loanwords, nonce borrowings and code-switches on a wealth of unique datasets on typologically similar and distinct language pairs. A major focus is the detailed analysis of integration: the principal mechanism underlying the borrowing process. Though the shape the borrowed form assumes may be colored by community convention, Poplack shows that the act of transforming donor-language elements into native material is universal.

During three years as a researcher at the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, City University of New York, her studies of code-switching among Puerto Ricans in New York initiated her characterization of universal patterns of intrasentential language mixing, and demonstrated that fluent code-mixing is a bilingual skill rather than a defect.

As principal investigator Shana Poplack made the research about change in Quebec with her co-Investigator James A. Walker. Their objective in the research was to scientifically test the claim that Quebec English was undergoing change as a result of contact with French. In contrast with previous work, their focus was on the spoken language, specifically on the variable tense/aspect structures contained therein.

Results contributed not only to elucidating the mechanisms of contact-induced change in a variety of sociodemographic situations, but also, more generally, to characterizing Canadian English, a national variety which has been lamented as highly “underdescribed.”

Much of Poplack's recent work investigates the question of whether the grammatical prescriptions of Standard French are stable, invariant, and consistent.

Working on the paper called “Searching for standard French: The construction and mining of the Recueil historique des grammaires du français” Poplack and Lidia Gabriela Jarmasz, Nathalie Dion and Nicole Rosen have described a massive and ongoing project to identify, through grammarians’ injunctions, the constitution of “Standard French”. The Recueil historique des grammaires du français is the first large-scale, diachronically comprehensive corpus of French grammars which is readily exploitable for the purposes of systematic analysis. Its originality lies in the possibility it affords to ascertain the existence of prior variability, date it, and determine the conditions under which grammarians accept or condemn variant uses.

In 1981, Poplack moved to the University of Ottawa, where she assembled, transcribed, and concordanced a mega-corpus of informal conversations among French speakers in the Canadian national capital region, providing her and many other researchers with an extraordinary research resource on contemporary vernacular French.

In Poplack’s research paper called “The care and handling of a mega-corpus: the Ottawa-Hull French project” a large, high-quality data base was constructed, reconciling the aim of community representativeness with that of obtaining a wide range of speech styles from each speaker, and which is easily and efficiently accessible to systematic study through computerized data management.

In 1984 Poplack wrote a paper called “Variable concord and sentential plural marking in Puerto Rican Spanish” which was a part of a research project on Intergenerational Perspectives on Bilingualism supported by the National Institute of Education under NIE-G- 78-0091, and by the Ford Foundation. The study examines the interaction between (s) and (n) deletion processes in the same sentence while still taking account of other contextual indicators of plurality.

In 2007 Shana Poplack and Anne St-Amand worked on “A real-time window on 19^th century vernacular French: The Récits du français québécois d’autrefois”. This article describes the construction of a corpus of spoken French with a time depth of a century and a half, the Récits du français québécois d’autrefois (RFQ).

Working with Elisabete Malvar, Shana Poplack has represented the article called “Elucidating the transition period in linguistic change: The expression of the future in Brazilian Portuguese”. Their paper examines the trajectory of a spectacular change in the development of future temporal reference in Brazilian Portuguese over five centuries. Focusing on four competing exponents of futurity, they have shown how the incoming form gradually expropriates the preferred contexts of the older variants, prior to ousting them from the sector.

Poplack's work on the origins of African American Vernacular is based on evidence from elderly descendants of American slaves recorded during fieldwork in isolated communities in the Samaná Peninsula, Dominican Republic (Samana English) and in Nova Scotia.This showed widespread retention of syntactic and morphological features (including the entire tense and aspect system) from earlier British and colonial English, contrary to previous theories attributing such features to a widespread early American creole. Thus, Shana Poplack can be called a world-renowned and outstanding sociolinguist.

Список использованной литературы

Poplack Sh.Borrowing: Loanwords in the Speech Community and in the Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Poplack Sh., Jarmasz L., Dion N., Rosen N. Searching for "Standard French": the construction and mining of theRecueil historique des grammaires du français. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 1, 1, 2015. 13-56 pp.

Poplack Sh., The care and handling of a mega-corpus: the Ottawa-Hull project. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1989. 411-451 pp.

Poplack, Sh., Variable concord and sentential plural marking in Puerto Rican Spanish. The Hispanic Review 52, 2, 1984. 205-222 pp.

Poplack, Sh.,St-Amand A.A real-time window on 19th century vernacular French: The Récits du français québécois d’autrefois. Language in Society 36, 5, 2007. 707-734 pp.

Poplack, Sh.,Malvar E.Elucidating the transition period in linguistic change. Probus 19, 1, 2007. 121-169 pp.

ShanaPoplack. Режим доступа: http://www.sociolinguistics.uottawa.ca/shanapoplack/