Objects of transitive verbs in Italian as a heritage language in contact with German

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Di Venanzio ◽  
Katrin Schmitz ◽  
Anna-Lena Scherger
Keyword(s):  
Heritage Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Heritage Languages ◽  
Native Languages ◽  
Ongoing Research ◽  
Speech Data ◽  
Transitive Verbs

This paper seeks to close a gap in the ongoing research on heritage languages (HL), their acquisition, and the nature of transfer in HL with a study on a hitherto understudied language combination, namely Italian heritage speakers (HS) raised in Germany with two native languages. The current study compares data from spontaneous speech of these HS with speech data from native speakers of Italian who immigrated to Germany as adults with German as L2, and Italian monolinguals. Analyses of Italian objects show that the HS reflect native knowledge about lexical options of object omissions and their pragmatic identification, and of object clitic use. The results indicate no evidence for covert transfer in regards to Italian object realization types. Finally, the study leads to the conclusion that Italian HS differ in fewer investigated aspects from Italian monolinguals than L1/L2 speakers.

Objects of transitive verbs in Italian as a heritage language in contact with German

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Di Venanzio ◽  
Katrin Schmitz ◽  
Anna-Lena Scherger
Keyword(s):  
Heritage Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Heritage Languages ◽  
Native Languages ◽  
Ongoing Research ◽  
Speech Data ◽  
Transitive Verbs

Abstract This paper seeks to close a gap in the ongoing research on heritage languages (HL), their acquisition, and the nature of transfer in HL with a study on a hitherto understudied language combination, namely Italian heritage speakers (HS) raised in Germany with two native languages. The current study compares data from spontaneous speech of these HS with speech data from native speakers of Italian who immigrated to Germany as adults with German as L2, and Italian monolinguals. Analyses of Italian objects reveal that the HS show native knowledge about lexical options of object omissions and their pragmatic identification, and of object clitic use. The results indicate no evidence for covert transfer with regard to Italian object realization types. Finally, the study leads to the conclusion that Italian HS differ in fewer investigated aspects from Italian monolinguals than L1/L2 speakers.

Introduction to Heritage Language Development

2019 ◽  
pp. 417-433
Author(s):  
Silvina Montrul ◽  
Maria Polinsky
Keyword(s):  
Heritage Language ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Age Of Onset ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Heritage Languages ◽  
First Generation Immigrants ◽  
Heritage Language Development

This chapter presents and analyses main factors that contribute to attrition in heritage languages. It shows that heritage speakers are a highly heterogeneous population from both a psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic point of view. In principle, their language can differ from the language of their input (baseline language, usually that of first-generation immigrants to a new country). The differences can be due to how the heritage language developed under reduced input conditions, interference from the dominant language (transfer) and innovations in the grammar, potential changes incipient in the input, and attrition proper. The latter is particularly apparent when the language of adult heritage speakers is compared with the language of bilingual children; such children outperform heritage speakers on a variety of linguistic properties. The critical factors that affect language change in heritage speakers include the age of onset of bilingualism and quantity/quality of input.

Emergent communicative norms in a contact language: Indirect requests in heritage Russian

Linguistics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Irina Y. Dubinina ◽  
Sophia A. Malamud
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
American English ◽  
Pragmatic Competence ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Heritage Languages ◽  
Communicative Strategies ◽  
Contact Language ◽  
Indirect Requests ◽  
Research Questions

AbstractThe present paper contributes to the study of speech act pragmatics, language contact, bilingualism, and heritage languages by bringing attention to the pragmatics of a contact language, heritage Russian (HR). The current study has a descriptive orientation, its main goal being to create a baseline for the pragmatic competence of speakers with incomplete acquisition of L1, which characterizes language contact in immigrant populations. We focus on communicative strategies and the choice of linguistic forms in requests made by heritage speakers of Russian, native speakers of full Russian, and native speakers of American English. The specific research questions explored in this study are: Is the linguistic variable – the form of polite requests – correlated with the population (speakers of HR vs. speakers of full Russian)? How do the differences play out? Do HR speakers have their own communicative norms? If yes, did these new norms develop under the influence of English or as a result of language-internal restructuring? We report that HR exhibits evidence of developing its own conventions for expressing polite requests which differ from the corresponding conventions in full Russian. Specifically, HR speakers use significantly more impersonal modals than monolingual native speakers of Russian in informal scenarios and rely on increased syntactic complexity to mark polite requests in formal scenarios. In indirect requests produced in both types of scenarios, HR speakers overuse the downgrader

scholarly journals Mixed-Heritage Individuals’ Encounters with Raciolinguistic Ideologies

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurora Tsai ◽  
Brenda Straka ◽  
Sarah Gaither
Keyword(s):  
High Pressure ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Heritage Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Work Environments ◽  
Standard English ◽  
Language Practices ◽  
Language Abilities ◽  
Heritage Languages ◽  
Mixed Heritage

Mixed-heritage individuals (MHIs) are known to face high levels of social exclusion. Here, we investigate how raciolinguistic ideologies related to one’s heritage language abilities add to these exclusionary experiences. The results from 293 MHIs reveal frequent experiences of marginalization from members of each of their heritage communities because their racial appearance and language practices are perceived as deviant and outside imagined ‘monoracial’ norms. Specifically, over half of respondents described experiences of exclusion for not speaking their minority heritage languages with the same accent or manner or fluency associated with ‘monoracial’ native speakers of their heritage languages or dialects. Another subset described high pressure to speak ‘proper English’ in White dominant work environments. These results extend past MHI work by empirically documenting the ‘monoracial-only’, monoglossic, and ‘Standard English’ ideologies that contribute to the continued social exclusion of MHIs.

scholarly journals Heritage language speakers in university education in Japan: Perspectives for an inclusive society.

Elia ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 86-125
Author(s):  
Veri Farina
Keyword(s):  
Educational System ◽  
Heritage Language ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
University Education ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Heritage Languages ◽  
University Level ◽  
The One ◽  
The University ◽  
Heritage Language Speakers

The educational system in Japan has traditionally been focused on the “one nation, one language” ideology. This has led to the marginalization of indigenous and immigrant languages. As a consequence, heritage speakers are dealing with the loss of their heritage languages. However, there are isolated movements addressing the maintenance of the heritage languages, though they haven’t had a long-lasting effect on the educational system. In an attempt to contribute to reversing this language and identity loss, we based our research on two main points: 1) the belief that creating an informed partnership will help heritage language speakers (HLS) to integrate in the mainstream education space (Cummins, 2014) and 2) confidence in the importance of interconnecting the isolated movements for language maintenance. Would it be possible to achieve it in the Japanese educational context? Can we start scaffolding this new structure of informed partnership from the university level? In order to try to prove this point of view successfully, this article describes the creation at the university level of a class about Heritage languages and speakers in Japan, inspired by the Content and Language Integrated Learning model (CLIL). This class was meant to support and interact with another class called “Spanish for heritage students” that was developed at the same university. The student population is 14, almost half of them with a heritage language or culture. The course duration was one semester. The contents that were selected to reach the class goals are mentioned, as well as some points of view regarding what should be done to shift the Japanese educational system from a homogeneous stance to a multicultural inclusive posture. And in such a short time we could evidence an evolution in students’ critical awareness of the current immigrants’ heritage language and cultural situation in Japan. Working with specific vocabulary, reading from authentic sources, discussing contemporary articles among them, they could give shape to their thoughts in Spanish in order to express their opinions and possible solutions to this important matter.

Variable V2 in Norwegian heritage language

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marit Westergaard ◽  
Terje Lohndal ◽  
Björn Lundquist
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Heritage Language ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
The Other ◽  
Verb Second ◽  
Verb Movement ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Dominant Language ◽  
Crosslinguistic Influence

Abstract This paper discusses possible attrition of verb second (V2) word order in Norwegian heritage language by investigating a corpus of spontaneous speech produced by 50 2nd–4th generation heritage speakers in North America. The study confirms previous findings that V2 word order is generally stable in heritage situations, but nevertheless finds approximately 10% V2 violations. The cases of non-V2 word order are argued to be due to lack of activation of the heritage language grammar, making it vulnerable to crosslinguistic influence from the speakers’ dominant language. This crosslinguistic influence does not simply replace V2 by non-V2, but is argued to operate more indirectly, affecting (a) the distribution of contexts for V2 word order, and (b) introducing two new distinctions into the heritage language, one (indirectly) based on a similar distinction in the dominant language (a difference between adverbs and negation with respect to verb movement), the other based on frequency of initial elements triggering V2 in non-subject-initial declaratives. Together, these findings also indicate that crosslinguistic influence affects different contexts of V2 differently, providing support for analyses that treat V2 word order as the result of many smaller rules.

Knowledge of Forms of Address in Polish Heritage Speakers

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-144
Author(s):  
Izolda Wolski-Moskoff
Keyword(s):  
Heritage Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Verbal Morphology ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Limited Knowledge ◽  
The Social ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Third Person

Limited knowledge of formal registers has been deemed one of the common characteristics of heritage speakers (Polinsky & Kagan, 2007). Because their exposure to the heritage language is generally limited to contact with immediate family, the language of heritage speakers may lack the elements normally acquired in formal settings. Polish formal forms of address, i.e., addressing all strangers and non-relative adults as pan “mister” or pani “madam,” as well as all the grammatical rules governing their use, such as third-person verbal morphology and the vocative case, are examples of such elements. The present study investigated receptive knowledge of formal forms of address in Polish heritage speakers in the United States. In this study, nine heritage speakers, four L2 learners, and six native speakers of Polish judged the acceptability of utterances addressed to various persons in various formal situations. The results indicate that heritage speakers exhibit limited knowledge of formal forms of address, both in terms of the grammar involved and the social contexts that call for them – with the latter divergence, in particular, potentially attributable to transfer from English. The responses of heritage speakers differ significantly not only from those of native speakers, but also of L2 learners of Polish, who outperformed heritage speakers in this task. Since the use of formal forms of address and the vocative case in contemporary Polish is limited to formal settings, the limited knowledge of these forms in heritage speakers may result from the insufficient input they receive.

An Exploratory Study of Heritage Spanish Rhotics

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Kissling
Keyword(s):  
Language Learners ◽  
Heritage Language ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Phonetic Variation ◽  
Methodological Challenges ◽  
Phonetic Features ◽  
New Research ◽  
Language Profiles

When speaking their heritage language, heritage speakers typically sound much like other “native speakers.” However, recent studies have found that heritage speakers (HSs) are highly variable and produce a range of more and less “native-like” phonetic features. In an effort to stimulate productive new research in this area, this article addresses some of the methodological challenges of heritage language phonetics research, namely dealing with high variability and identifying the best predictors of that variability. A study on heritage Spanish rhotics is presented to elucidate those methodological challenges. The study took an exploratory, bottom-up approach to analyzing the rhotics produced by speakers of central Mexican and Salvadoran Spanish with different language profiles: HSs, traditional native speakers, long-term immigrants, and second language learners. The results suggested that overall between-group comparisons of means based on isolated acoustic features could be insufficiently informative. The study also evaluated the contribution of various linguistic (e.g., proficiency and use) and extralinguistic (e.g., cultural and ethnic identity) factors for identifying more homogeneous subgroups of HSs and found that the latter were useful for predicting phonetic variation.

Morphosyntactic Transfer from a Spoken Heritage Dialect to the Standard Variety

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-233
Author(s):  
Reem Faraj
Keyword(s):  
Heritage Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Control Groups ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Standard Arabic ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Third Person ◽  
Modern Standard

This study examines cases of morphosyntactic transfer from Syrian Arabic to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in the production of heritage speakers who are not only bilingual (L1 Syrian Arabic, L2 English), but also diglossic; Syrian Arabic is their heritage language (HL), and MSA is the form they learned in school. Two control groups, native speakers of Syrian Arabic and learners of MSA, were also included. The proposal presented here is that adolescent heritage speakers of Syrian Arabic have a more developed Syrian Arabic grammar, which results in- transfer to MSA, and that degree and duration of input-output and exposure to both varieties impact the type and number of non-target forms in the production of the studied heritage group. The goal is to find the extent of such transfer, how it is manifested, and whether it is also related to sentence and subject type or other factors. The focus of this study is verbs in SV and VS sentences in MSA, where the subject is a nominal DP and the verb is in the third person. The agreement patterns in VS and SV sentences are asymmetrical in MSA but they are not in Syrian Arabic. The SV order in MSA reflects different agreement patterns with both genders and all three numbers, whereas in Syrian Arabic there is one default non-singular verb form. In this paper I provide a formal account of the differences among the agreement patterns in MSA and Syrian Arabic within the Minimalist framework. Using this approach, a morphosyntactic transfer of agreement features from Syrian Arabic to MSA is argued to be a transfer of T0 features. The results demonstrate that errors in the MSA verb produced by the heritage speakers differ from those of MSA learners and that more than half of the heritage speakers’ errors are compatible with morphosyntactic agreement forms in Syrian Arabic. These findings provide evidence for transfer from Syrian Arabic to MSA. It is possible that when three linguistic systems are competing (L1, L2, and L3) and where L1 is the most dominant, L2 is less developed than L1 but more developed than L3, and L2 and L3 are typologically close, transfer takes place from L2 to L3. More research to address this question is needed. The study contributes to the understanding of agreement in heritage speakers’ production and the phenomenon of transfer in bilingual and diglossic situations.

scholarly journals Resultative constructions in heritage Ambon Malay in the Netherlands

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 78-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca R. Moro
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Frequency Distribution ◽  
Heritage Language ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Variable Domain ◽  
Transfer Effects ◽  
Heritage Speakers ◽  
Resultative Constructions ◽  
Prepositional Phrases ◽  
Verb Serialization

Domains where languages have two or more competing syntactic constructions expressing the same meaning may be problematic for bilingual heritage speakers. One such variable domain is the resultative constructions in heritage Ambon Malay, a variety spoken in the Netherlands by Dutch-Ambon Malay bilinguals. In Ambon Malay, resultatives are expressed mostly by means of verb serialization (SVC), although resultative prepositional phrases (PP) and adjectival phrases (AP) also occur. In Dutch, resultative constructions usually involve verb particles, PPs and APs. This overlap of structures poses the conditions for transfer effects between the two languages. The frequency distribution of SVCs, PPs and APs is investigated in semi-spontaneous speech from heritage speakers of Ambon Malay and compared to that of baseline speakers. Heritage speakers show an increase in the frequency of constructions shared by both languages (PPs and APs), while they underuse the constructions attested only in the heritage language (SVC).

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document