Researcher in the project: «Multilingualism: Between Theory and Empirical Knowledge» (Višejezičnost: Između teorije i empirije, ViTE)

Research head: Marco Angster, Department of Linguistics, University of Zadar

Due to recent social and migration trends, bilingualism and multilingualism have today become a common phenomenon (cf. Hržica et al. 2015: 35). It can be said that multilingualism in contemporary society is "the norm rather than the exception" (Gosselin 2021: 1). On the one hand, the number of children exposed to multiple languages from birth is steadily growing (cf. e.g. Nicoladis and Montanari 2016, Batinić Angster and Angster 2022), on the other hand communities where multilingualism is part of daily life, such as the Walser-German minorities in north-western Italy, become endangered because one of the languages in the repertoire is a minority language and the number of its speakers is decreasing day by day (see, for example, Angster 2014, Angster and Gaeta 2021 on the situation of the Walser variety of Gressoney). Documenting and describing the language of both groups of speakers is therefore essential, as well as the analysis of certain phenomena that are characteristic of the linguistic ability of multilingual speakers. A phenomenon that manifests itself as a result of language contact – both at the level of the language community and in the mind of a bilingual/multilingual speaker – is code-switching, i.e. code-mixing. (Angster and Batinić Angster 2022). Code-switching is considered a “hallmark of bilingual processing” (Van Hell et al. 2019) and a speech style common to fluent bilingual speakers (MacSwan 2005). An insight into the linguistic literature (Grimstad 2009, Matras 2009, Muysken 2000) shows that the possibility of distinguishing between two phenomena is often discussed: code switching and borrowing. The goals of this project are to collect linguistic data of the mentioned two groups of speakers and to reexamine, on the basis of the empirical data issued from the corpus that will be created, the theoretical assumptions related to these two phenomena and to gain knowledge about the nature of (bi-/multi-)lingual ability.

Funding: University of Zadar

Duration of the project: October 2023 - September 2025

Member of the work group in the field of linguistics in the project

"Challenges for the social sciences and humanities: new study programs and the quality assurance system of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Zagreb"

(Izazovi za društvene i humanističke znanosti: novi studiji i sustav kvalitete Filozofskog fakulteta u Zagrebu)

In collaboration with eight higher education institutions, the project will develop seven occupational standards and eleven qualification standards. Based on the newly developed standards, the existing study programs in the field of psychology, linguistics, phonetics and English will be revised, along with the development of three completely new graduate study programs at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. To strengthen capacity, the project will educate about 160 members of teaching and non-teaching staff and aims at significantly improving the participating institutions' quality assurance system, significantly contributing to the efficiency and transparency of management.

Duration of the project: March 2019 - March 2022

Funding: European social fund

Researcher in the project: «Croatian in contact with other languages»

Research head: Jim Hlavač, Monash University, Australia

The aim of the project is to investigate contact phenomena between Croatian and German, as well as to explore the sociolinguistic situation of speakers of Croatian located in Germany. This project is conducted in cooperation with Lucija Šimičić.

The overall project (coordinated by Jim Hlavač) comprises the following countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, USA

In addition to information on Croatian-speakers in the different countries, empirical data about their language use is gathered and the speech of emigrants in these diaspora situations is analyzed.

Previous projects:

Researcher in the project: «Coordinated Research in the Experimental Morphosyntax of South Slavic Languages (EMSS)»

Research Head: Andrew Nevins, University College London, UK

The combinatorial possibilities provided by the unique number and gender morphology of the South Slavic languages create a rich array of morphosyntactic variability both within and across speakers in this language area. While a long dialectal tradition classifies local varieties in terms of lexical items (specifically, words for ‘what’), the present project aims to leverage experimental psycholinguistic research as a means of charting the morphosyntaxes of these languages. 

The research builds on methodology developed for Slovenian by the experimental morphologists, Andrew Nevins and Lanko Marušić, to be applied in parallel at the partner institutions using elicited production and comprehension tasks. The Network’s activities will yield research broadly applicable to understanding the effects of word order, topicality, prosody, and inflection on the choice of agreement controllers, and will bring clarity to incommensurable current descriptions of these phenomena based on non-experimental methods.

The Network  envisions a set of coordinated endeavours through research meetings, on-site expertise transfer, and digital resource sharing to foster a new set of collaborative partnerships addressing questions in geographically-based variation alongside morphosyntactic theory through the use of parallel research cooperation in experimental methods.

Webpage of the project: here

Funding Source: Leverhulme Trust, 2014-2018

Research head of the project “Transfer as a strategy in foreign language learning”

The project is based on the claim that, in the context of a growing societal need for multilingual competences, foreign language learning should take advantage of the rich knowledge and competence that learners already have when engaging in the acquisition of a new language. Focusing on the example of the word category of modal particles, which causes learning difficulties in German as a foreign language, the project seeks to gain insight both into the psycholinguistic process and into the linguistic foundation of language transfer. The project takes into consideration that the general transfer characteristic is that some elements and rules are transferable between languages while others are not.

Website: http://www.transfer-in-language-learning.net/

Funded by: Croatian Science Foundation (HRZZ) in the frame of the program "Installation Grants"

Researcher in the interdisciplinary project: “Signs of Identity”

Traditional positions define identity as a firmly structured, temporally stable entity. The project aims at reformulating and revising the concept of identity, taking the transdisciplinary scepticism of traditional positions as a starting point. The main hypothesis is that the phenomena subsumed under the term "identity" can be viewed as highly complex, sign-based processes in which the participants in communicative interactions negotiate a dynamic and multifaceted concept of the Self. More information: http://www.signsofidentity.de

Researcher in the project: “Grammaticalization and (inter)subjectification”

Project leader: Prof. Dr. Gabriele Diewald, Leibniz University Hannover

The linguistic research project "Grammaticalization and (inter)subjectification" is a five-year-cooperation (2007-2011) between five Belgian research institutes and the chair of Prof. Dr. Gabriele Diewald. It aims to contribute to current research efforts dealing with (the interaction between) the processes of grammaticalization (in the structural domain) and (inter)subjectification (in the semantic domain) in language change. More information: http://www.gabrielediewald.de/grammaticalization.htm