This dissertation explores language transfer by native German speakers living in the Netherlands, who often experience extensive transfer from their second language Dutch to their native language German. For example, they might start to use loan translations like *Hintername (‘behind name’ instead of Nachname ‘after name’ based on Dutch achternaam) or *Fliegfeld (‘flyfield’ instead of Flughafen ‘flyport’ based on Dutch vliegveld). They might also apply Dutch grammar patterns to their German, resulting in innovative uses of grammatical elements or in word order patterns in German.
To investigate this language transfer, this dissertation employs a multi-method approach, combining experimental, survey, corpus, and focusgroup data. The results demonstrate that speakers’ language use is affected by an interplay between automaticity and agency. On the one hand, speakers’ language use is largely driven by several cognitive, automatic mechanisms, such as entrenchment, categorization, and generalization. On the other hand, speakers can show agency and can try to alter what is automatically activated for them, for instance by keeping lists of transfer examples or by speaking more slowly to reflect on their language use.
Taken together, the results of this dissertation advance the development of a usage-based framework in linguistic research: they illustrate how such a framework can fruitfully be applied to explain speakers’ language use in a language contact setting, they underline the importance of individual variation, and they demonstrate the need to account for both the cognitive and social factors that together drive our language use.
