Miriam Meyerhoff, Erik Schleef Lynn Clark

1. Miriam Meyerhoff*, Erik Schleef� & Lynn Clark*

2. Polish immigration to the UK In 2004, ten new members were admitted to the EU. Poland was the largest ascension state Poland has contributed most a recent wave of immigration to the UK Language contact situation between Polish and English throughout the UK

3. Polish adolescents The adolescent generation of Polish migrants can help us to understand who immigrants become in the initial stages of contact They are adaptable and in constant contact with native school-age population Migrant children exist in a �research void� (Ackers and Stalford 2004: 1) What do Polish adolescents do with (sociolinguistically constrained) variation in their L2?

4. Sociolinguistics and second language acquisition Adamson & Regan (1991) � first look at variable acquisition of native speaker patterns; (ing) variation among Vietnamese and Cambodian learners of English in the US. The majority of research on this question examines the acquisition of variation in French (esp. in Canada) examples: Uritechu et al. (2004); Mougeon et al. (2004); Nagy et al. (2004); Howard et al. (2006) L2 speakers can often display �partial mastery� of the native-speaker norms of variation

5. Research question Are Polish adolescent immigrants acquiring the same constraints on variation as their local peer group? Possible outcomes: Replication of significant constraints and ordering of factors within those constraints Replication of significant constraints but different internal ordering of the factors No replication of the significant constraints

6. Methods Linguistic data (interview and reading passage) collected from 16 Polish adolescents from Edinburgh 21 Polish adolescents from London 21 Edinburgh-born adolescents 24 London-born adolescents Perception data collected using the verbal guise technique (Ladegaard, 1998). See Clark (2009, in prep) All linguistic data orthographically transcribed using ELAN (www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/elan) All instances of (ing) : [??] ~[??] were extracted and coded � 1833 tokens of (ing) in Edinburgh; 1556 tokens of (ing) in London.

7. Previous findings on (ing) variation in English Usual linguistic constraints on (ing) Grammatical conditioning (Labov 2001: 79) Regressive homorganic assimilation (Houston 1985) [British English] Progressive homorganic dissimilation (Houston 1985) [British English] Priming (Abramowicz 2007) Usual social constraints on (ing) Socioeconomic class (Labov 2001, chapter 3) Stylistic effects (Labov 2001, chapter 3) Gender effects (Labov 2001: chapter 8)

8. Constraints operating on (ing) among Edinburgh-born adolescents

9. Constraints operating on (ing) among London-born adolescents

10. Frequency of variants of (ing)

11. Hypotheses Possible outcomes: Replication of significant constraints and ordering of factors within those constraints Replication of significant constraints but different internal ordering of the factors No replication of the significant constraints Result: Combination of all three strategies

13. Grammatical category constraints in Edinburgh Grammatical conditioning of (ing) among Edinburgh adolescents Grammatical conditioning of (ing) among Edinburgh-Polish adolescents

16. Grammatical category constraints for Polish adolescents in London Grammatical conditioning of (ing) (Labov 2001: 88) Grammatical conditioning of (ing) among London-Polish adolescents

17. Returning to the research question Q: Are Polish adolescent immigrants acquiring the same constraints on variation as their local peer group? Yes, maybe... some constraints are replicated completely, some are altered and some are rejected/replaced BUT... The most common tendency for Polish adolescents living in Edinburgh and London is �re-interpretation�.

18. Discussion Language contact and variationist linguistics Discrimination between different kinds of transfer type weak transfer same factor groups are significant, order may be different strong transfer same factor groups are significant, order of them is the same internal ordering of constraints within each factor group (Meyerhoff 2009, Buchstaller & D�Arcy 2008) Short-term contact phenomena exhibiting the same sorts of outcomes as long-term language/dialect contact ......

19. Acknowledgements �Thank-yous� go to: the ESRC for funding this research (RES-000-22-3244) our participants in Edinburgh and London for kindly donating their time and voices the staff at Tynecastle High School in Edinburgh and Elthorne Park High School in London for helping us organise the data collection during school hours. Maddie Appleton, Elsbeth Helfer and Dave Arnold for their transcription work on the corpus

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