Abstract
This paper investigates gender agreement mismatches between nominal expressions and the targets of agreement they control in two groups (adults and adolescents) of Heritage Greek speakers in the USA. On the basis of language production data elicited via a narration task, we show that USA Greek Heritage speakers, unlike monolingual controls, show mismatches in gender agreement. We will show that the mismatches observed differ with respect to the agreement target between groups, i.e., noun phrase internal agreement seems more affected in the adolescent group, while personal pronouns appear equally affected. We will argue that these patterns suggest retreat to default gender, namely neuter in Greek. Neuter emerges as default when no agreement pattern can be established. As adult speakers show less mismatches, we will explore the reasons why speakers improve across the life span.
Highlights
IntroductionWe never find the reverse situation, where semantic agreement would be required in attributive position but not in the predicate.”
Examples such as (29) are interesting as they come from an adolescent speaker, who consistently avoids determiners, and they point to wrong gender assignment but preservation of the declension classes (DCs) information,13 as has been noted for American Norwegian by Lohndal and Westergaard (2016)
We argued that gender agreement mismatches in the USA Greek Heritage speakers (HSs) production data show that speakers resort to neuter gender, which is the default in Greek
Summary
We never find the reverse situation, where semantic agreement would be required in attributive position but not in the predicate.” This led Corbett to propose the Agreement Hierarchy in 2 and to propose that possible agreement patterns are constrained as in. Recent work on gender in general and on Greek in particular has adopted this view, see, e.g., Kramer (2015), Alexiadou (2017), and Markopoulos (2018) Adopting these insights and the hierarchical nominal structure put forth in Borer (2005), we assume the nominal structure in (17): In this structure, D hosts the definite article, #P introduces quantity readings and is responsible for the emergence of ‘individual’ interpretations, DivP is the locus of plurality and divides undivided mass, while nP is the locus of gender and DC features.
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