Abstract
The study offers novel evidence on the grammar and processing of clitic placement in heritage languages. Building on earlier findings of divergent clitic placement in heritage European Portuguese and Serbian, this study extends this line of inquiry to Bulgarian, a language where clitic placement is subject to strong prosodic constraints. We found that, in heritage Bulgarian, clitic placement is processed and rated differently than in the baseline, and we asked whether such clitic misplacement results from the transfer from the dominant language or follows from language-internal reanalysis. We used a self-paced listening task and an aural acceptability rating task with 13 English-dominant, highly proficient heritage speakers and 22 monolingual speakers of Bulgarian. Heritage speakers of Bulgarian process and rate the grammatical proclitic and ungrammatical enclitic clitic positions as equally acceptable, and we contend that this pattern is due to language-internal reanalysis. We suggest that the trigger for such reanalysis is the overgeneralization of the prosodic Strong Start Constraint from the left edge of the clause to any position in the sentence.
Highlights
Object clitics are of special interest to theoretical linguistics and language acquisition due to their morphosyntactic and prosodic complexity
We present novel evidence for divergence in the processing of clitic placement by adult heritage speakers (: HSs) of Bulgarian, a language where prosody constrains that placement
Using online and offline comprehension tasks, we show that, clitics are resilient in Heritage Bulgarian (HB), there is overgeneralization of the prosodic constraints, which leads to a lack of discrimination in processing and equal acceptance of ungrammatical and grammatical clitic positions
Summary
Object clitics are of special interest to theoretical linguistics and language acquisition due to their morphosyntactic and prosodic complexity. Clitic realization has been studied extensively in the L1 acquisition of Romance (Perez-Leroux et al 2017) and Slavic languages (Mykhaylyk and Sopata 2016; Radeva-Bork 2012; Varlokosta et al 2016) It represents a continuous process of knowledge integration, which reaches target, regardless of initial period(s) of clitic omission in some languages, such as French, Italian, and Catalan (for an overview, see Grohmann and Neokleous 2015; Ionin and Radeva-Bork 2017). Consistent clitic misplacement has been documented only in European Portuguese and Cypriot Greek (Costa et al 2015; Grohmann and Neokleous 2015; Neokleous 2015) These languages show protracted development of clitic placement in the direction of enclitic bias, that is, the use of post-verbal clitics (enclitics) in contexts that require pre-verbal clitics (proclitics). Such behavior was attributed by some to the complexity of the input and the properties of lexical items and syntactic contexts (Duarte and Matos 2000; Petinou and Terzi 2009)
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