Chapter 7 The expression of (deontic and epistemic) modality in Italian as heritage language in Germany

Abstract

In spite of the enormous increase of investigation of heritage languages (HL) and their acquisition in various grammatical domains and language combinations, there are still strongly understudied bilingual speaker groups and linguistic domains. They include modality at the semantic/pragmatic interface representing a challenge with its cognitive requirements and linguistic realization of modal values. Italian-German bilingual heritage speakers, acquiring the same cognitive requisites as monolingual speakers, find a large array of different lexical (modal verbs and adverbs) and morphological means (particularly subjunctive and conditional mood) to express (different types of) modality in Italian, only partly shared by German. Different means and modal values represent a challenge and potentially cause cross-linguistic influence, leading to the use of a restricted set of modal expressions in their heritage language. Our paper therefore compares the use of the different linguistic means in both monolingual Italian (n=10) and bilingual German-Italian (heritage, n=16) adult speakers in semi-structured interview data where (partially elicited) longer discourse units particularly favor the expression of wishes, inferences and conjectures. Our quantitative and qualitative analysis does not show that HS perform generally different from monolingual speakers. Instead of cross-linguistic evidence, fluency of speech is positively correlated with the use of subjunctive imperfect and some modal adverbs in both speaker groups.