Überlegungen zu Sprachkompetenz und -abbau in Wiedererzählungen aus dem Israelkorpus

Retellings, i.e. narrative reproductions or recontextualisations of a story told by the same speaker in a different context, have been gaining increasing attention in different research domains, e.g. in psychological and linguistic studies, with the latter mostly focusing on the lexical-syntactic characteristics of different versions of the same story. Tests based on oral and written retold stories are also used as an assessment tool of children’s language competence. Yet, to our knowledge, no previous studies have used spontaneous retellings to explore adults’ language competence in longitudinal perspective. This article presents first (methodological) reflections on the investigation of language competence and language attrition in retellings occurring in interviews with second generation German-speaking migrants in Israel, which were collected within the frame of the so-called Israel corpus. The analysis specifically focuses on the interview with RB as a representative of those speakers who, after the loss of their parents and other family members, no longer speak German daily. The study shows that a multilevel analysis is needed, taking both the lexico-syntactic and the prosodic level into consideration, in order to account for the complex and multidimensional linguistic situation of the second generation interviewees.