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Syntactic-Semantic Analysis of the Emergence of Novel English-Persian Bilingual Complex Predicates
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Poster A92 in Poster Session A, Tuesday, October 24, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Sarah Saneei1,2, Razieh Shojaei3, Valentina Borghesani1; 1Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Université de Genève, Genève, 1205, CH, 2Lemanic Neuroscience Doctoral School of the Universities of Geneva and Lausanne, 3Institute of Linguistics, Leipzig University
While none can deny how rapidly our communicative environment is changing as a result of technological advances, we lack formal investigations of the mechanisms leading to the technology-driven emergence of novel linguistic structures. Worldwide, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have introduced novel terms or refined the meaning of existing ones like tweet or unfollow, leading, for non-English speaking users, to peculiar code-switching instances. Hence, studying the effects of the current digital revolution holds the potential of deepening our understanding of how languages are not mutually exclusive during naturalistic communication, and of how human communication might develop propelled by cultural plasticity. We analyzed syntactic and semantic properties of 42 different bilingual complex predicates (BCPs) retrieved from 3500 Persian-speaking tweets (LSCP dataset, Khojasteh et al. 2020) in which users discussed 34 different Instagram activities, such as ‘post gozashtan’ lit. “to put a post”. This is the ideal dataset as it allows investigation of a relatively new fixture (i.e, Instagram activities discussed on Twitter) in Persian, a language with a long history of highly productive BCPs, dating back to the seventh century borrowing Arabic nominals (Dabir-Moghaddam,1997). We observe the formation of novel predicates, where the English verb is used as it is in the application (without changing its tense), with the addition of a conjugated Persian light verb, e.g., ‘seen kard’ lit. “she did seen”. In 26% of the tweets, we notice the formation of new simple verbs such as ‘belikeam’ (i.e., I like): be- (Persian subjunctive marker) + like (English verb) + -am (Persian suffix). The use of new simple verbs disproves Bateni (2008). The same English word can be paired with different verbs in diverse conversational scenarios: for example, individuals use “to suggest” with ‘dadan’ (to give) as ‘suggest dadan’ in daily code-switching, and with ‘kardan’ (to do) as ‘suggest kardan’ on social media. Comparing Twitter and Instagram, a clear departure from language economy appears: the same concept, e.g., “reply”, is expressed differently, e.g., 'zadan' lit. “to hit” used on Twitter, 'dadan' lit. “to give” on Instagram. Overall, this study reveals the complex dynamics leading to the emergence of novel BCPs in Persian, influenced by cultural factors (i.e., the use of different social media platforms) as well as the interaction with English per se. This study is thus a proof of concept of how large scale naturalistic dataset retrieved from social media can elucidate the mechanisms by which language is evolving and shed light onto future developments of humans’ most precious capacity.
Topic Areas: Computational Approaches, Meaning: Lexical Semantics