Bilingualism and syntactic change in Pennsylvania German

This study examines problems of linguistic variation and change in Pennsylvania German (PG) society. In general, there are two major subgroups of PG society, the plain, consisting of members of conservative Anabaptist sects (Old Order Mennonites, Old Order Amish), and the nonplain. This social dichotomy is reflected linguistically in the increasing syntactic divergence of the plain variety of PG (PPG) from the nonplain (NPG) determined by the stable bilingual relationship between PPG and American English (AE).; In Part I we establish the theoretical framework for our study. We begin in Chapter 1 by defining stable bilingualism as a specific language contact situation characterized by long term maintenance of the languages involved. The primary linguistic consequence of stable bilingualism is the syntactic convergence of the contacting languages, which we illustrate with reference to previous work in dialect geography and areal linguistics. In Chapter 2 we continue by describing processes of syntactic change, both internally (system-) and externally (contact-) induced, and correlate stable bilingualism with these processes.; In Part II we describe the sociolinguistics of Pennsylvania German society. Chapter 3 focusses on the formation and evolution of PG in its social context, and shows how the dialect has been preserved in the plain community, while the nonplain community has undergone the gradual transition to AE monolingualism. Chapter 4 explains this difference in language maintenance by applying the model of stable bilingualism and illustrates how the nonplain community is generally less stable than the plain. As predicted in Part I, the stable bilingual contact situation between PPG and AE results in the syntactic convergence of the two languages.; In Part III we present evidence of syntactic change in PPG. What we find is that certain areas of PPG syntax are more susceptible to change under the influence of AE than others. Specifically, case and tense show the greatest tendency to converge toward AE, while word order patterns are generally less likely to do so. Further, we note that convergence occurs more significantly at the abstract level of function and meaning, than at the level of form.