Abstract
ABSTRACT This paper examines how heritage Korean speakers acquire/maintain syntactic properties of licensing of negative polarity items (npis) in heritage Korean (cf. binding in Kim, Montrul, & Yoon, 2009). Korean and English allow local licensing of object npis, whereas, unlike English, Korean does not allow long-distance licensing of embedded object npis. In a grammaticality judgment task, the properties of the Korean npi, amwuto “anyone” were investigated. Adult heritage Korean speakers in two different groups, based on their ages of acquisition of English, were at intermediate or advanced proficiency. Results showed that both heritage Korean groups fully acquired shared properties of local licensing of object npis. The accuracy rate of heritage Korean speakers was overall as high as that of native speakers (nk). However, regardless of a mostly advanced level of proficiency, both heritage Korean groups incompletely acquired parametrically different properties of long-distance licensing of the embedded object npis, which exhibited potential transfer effects from the dominant language. Comparing the two different heritage Korean groups, age effects were not found in the acquisition of npi licensing in Korean, not predicted from the results of the Korean proficiency test.
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