Carol Pfaff, born in San Francisco, California, USA, in 1944. Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor of Linguistics at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin.
Fellow (1 September 1995 – 30 June 1996)
During my NIAS year I focused my attention on work connected with a longitudinal study I directed on the language development of young Turkish/German bilingual children in Berlin. The goal of this study is to link the children’s development of morphosyntactic structures of the two languages with their developing communicative skills and strategies within the framework of a bilingual community in the process of language shift from Turkish to German.
While at NIAS, I analysed data from this study in four new areas: two related to language mixing, two in the area of syntactic development in both languages: negation and morphosyntax and function of finite and non-finite verbs.
Aspects of this work were reported in lectures at international conferences and workshops at NIAS and elsewhere in the Netherlands and in the United States. These will appear as articles and the material incorporated as chapters in my book, “Bilingual Language Acquisition and Use in a Migrant Community: The Turkish and German of Preschool and Early School-Age Children in Berlin”.