Heritage, Second-Language and Native Speakers’ Intuitions on Deictic Verbs in Spanish: Beyond the Linguist’s Intuitions

Abstract

Abstract Previous analyses of the Spanish deictic verbs venir ‘to come’, ir ‘to go’, traer ‘to bring’ and llevar ‘to take’ have drawn upon Fillmore’s (1975) series of lectures on deixis in noting that speakers of Spanish forbid the use of the verbs venir and traer to express movement towards the hearer. Under this egocentric view (Beinhauer, 1940; Ibañez, 1983), the Spanish verbs venir and traer can only be used to describe movement towards the speaker’s location. Little experimental research has been done, however, to confirm the extent to which heritage and second language (L2) speakers of the language conform to this pattern. The present study gathered data on the deictic preferences of bilingual, heritage speakers of Spanish and English (HS) and compared this data with that of L2 and monolingual native speakers of Spanish (NS). 74 participants, consisting of 12 NS, 34 HS, and 29 L2 speakers, assessed the grammaticality of 20 stimulus items that contained prescriptively correct and incorrect usages of the deictic verbs venir, traer, llevar and ir. Both HS and L2 speakers made significantly more errors than NS when the direction expressed in the stimulus was oriented towards the hearer, suggesting both groups may benefit from instruction on this topic.