First language attrition and linguistic creativity

Abstract

The empirical base for this article is the speech that adult migrants produce in their first language (L1) after they have lived several years in the new country. The speakers all migrated after puberty, and thus had a “fully” developed L1 at the onset of migration. The aim is to examine whether the impact of L1 attrition restricts itself to the speakers' control over their lexicon, or whether it may also affect their marking of grammatical distinctions. The examples analyzed illustrate that the migrant speakers may choose nonconventional solutions not only in their expression of declarative content, but also in their organization of linguistic structure. Hence, the data indicate that the boundary between lexical and grammatical information should not be regarded as totally discrete in the case of L1 attrition. The sampled speakers' L1 is Serbian or Croatian 1 and their second language (L2) is Norwegian.