| This dissertation examines the role of abstract lexical structure in first language attrition in a language contact setting. Framed within the extended Matrix Language Frame model, this study seeks to explain the patterns of linguistic variation that lead to language change in the speech of German immigrants under long-term contact with English. To do this, a group of six elderly bilingual German immigrants who have been living in the United States for at least 40 years were interviewed. These interviews took the form of informal conversations in the participant's native German dialect and generated approximately eight hours of linguistic data.;This dissertation argues that the changes occurring in the linguistic system of the German immigrants come from the innate organization of the mental lexicon and the way in which a linguistically-encoded message is generated. Under the psycholinguistic pressures of language contact, an individual's first language will be reorganized on the basis of how and when linguistic units become available to language production.;At an abstract level, there are four different types of morphemes that are projected at different levels of abstract structure. Furthermore, the lemmas supporting morphemes are composed of three levels of abstract lexical structure: lexical-conceptual structure, predicate-argument structure, morphological realization patterns. These levels of abstract structure may be split and recombined to from a composite structure.;The morphosyntactic features present in the immigrants' linguistic system indicate that the system has changed to the extent that a composite Matrix Language projects the grammatical frame. However, these effects are not uniform throughout the system. The data indicate that morphemes that are activated early in the production process, at the level of lexical-conceptual structure, are the most vulnerable to the effects of language attrition. Morphemes that are activated at a later stage, those that encode language-particular grammatical distinctions, are the most resistant to attrition. These findings challenge the results of a number of other language attrition studies that indicate that attrition is most evident in the early loss of distinctions such as case assignment, gender, and subject-verb agreement. |
