The beginnings of language loss in discourse: A study of American Lithuanian

This dissertation compares discourse structure in two varieties Lithuanian and argues that speakers of Full Lithuanian sense incoherence in American Lithuanian, not because of grammatical change in the transplanted variety, but because distinct registers in Full Lithuanian are merging in American Lithuanian, forcing readers and interlocutors to rely less on text and more on context than it is necessary in the full variety. In Lithuania, Lithuanian functions as the sole language across a wide range of social situations, whereas American Lithuanian functions in an extremely narrow range of social situations. As a result, registers of American Lithuanian are less differentiated in discourse structure than registers of Full Lithuanian. This study demonstrates that, alongside and possibly preceding grammatical changes characteristic of early attrition, the distributional frequencies of particular discourse features across the registers of sociolinguistic interviews and newspaper reports are more significant than grammatical changes in signaling attrition. The notion of register is used to analyze changes in the discourse patterns characteristic of spoken and written varieties of the languages. Information structure, referent accessibility, and grammatical reference are examined in order to determine the characteristic discourse patters in the varieties. Differences in the frequencies of such textual features show that distinct registers of the "healthy" language are merging in the attrited language and, in particular, that registers exhibiting greater explicitness in Full Lithuanian rely on greater contextual familiarity in American Lithuanian, thus merging written and spoken registers. The shrinkage of discourse strategies constitutes an early and hitherto unnoted form of language attrition.