Abstract
Syntactic change in contact is generally explained as a result of cognitive, structural/typological, or sociolinguistic factors. However, the relative weight of these factors in shaping the outputs of contact is yet to be assessed. In this paper, we propose a microcontact approach to the study of change in contact, focusing on microsyntactic points of variation across multiple language pairs that are structurally very close. We show that this approach makes it possible to more accurately identify some of the factors that are involved in change. By considering three case studies centered on the syntax of subjects, objects, and indexicals, we show that the outputs of syntactic change in microcontact diverge from what is expected under otherwise solid generalizations (avoidance of indeterminacy, avoidance of silence, the Interface Hypothesis, a tendency towards simplification, and the general stability of the indexical domain) regarding change in contact. Microcontact offers a finer-grained point of observation, allowing us to go beyond broader typological assumptions and to focus on the link between structure and cognition. The results of our case studies demonstrate that the outputs of change in contact are an interplay between cognitive and structural factors (see also Muysken 2013 for additional processing considerations), and that the micro-variational dimension is crucial in drawing a precise picture of heritage language syntax.
Highlights
Heritage speakers (“HSs”) of a language are speakers who learnt that language in a naturalistic setting from early infancy and consistently spoke it at home, but who subsequently underwent extensive exposure to a different language, that of the wider society, and over time became dominant in it (Rothman 2009; Polinsky 2018a for an overview)
We introduce in greater detail the generalizations that have been proposed to account for a wide variety of instances of syntactic change in heritage language (HL)/bilingualism, along with our contradictory data, to form three case studies: “Avoid indeterminacy” and Differential Object Marking (DOM) (Section 3); the Interface Hypothesis, “Avoid silence”, and the tendency to simplification with subject and object data (Section 4); and the stability of the indexical domain with data from the D and T domains (Section 5)
We have shown that microsyntactic variation offers an important additional set of data for understanding what is involved in change; it allows holistic typological considerations to be factored out in order to focus solely on structural factors
Summary
Heritage speakers (“HSs”) of a language are speakers who learnt that language in a naturalistic setting from early infancy and consistently spoke it at home, but who subsequently underwent extensive exposure to a different language, that of the wider society, and over time became dominant in it (Rothman 2009; Polinsky 2018a for an overview). The fact that some phenomena involving discourse and information structure tend to weaken in HLs is taken to mean that HSs do not master the interplay between syntax and discourse-related information (Generalization 3, GEN3) Data from both subject and object domains contradict this generalization, as far as microcontact is concerned.
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