Abstract
Research treats divergences between monolingual and heritage grammars in terms of performance—‘L1 attrition,’ e.g., lexical retrieval—or competence—‘incomplete acquisition’, e.g., lack of overt tense markers (e.g., Polinsky, 1995; Sorace, 2004; Montrul, 2008; Schmid, 2010). One classic difference between monolingual and Heritage German is reduction in morphological case in the latter, especially loss of dative marking. Our evidence from several Heritage German varieties suggests that speakers have not merely lost case, but rather developed innovative structures to mark it. More specifically, Heritage German speakers produce dative forms in line with established patterns of Differential Object Marking (Bossong, 1985, 1991; Aissen, 2003), suggesting a reallocated mapping of case. We take this as evidence for innovative reanalysis in heritage grammars (Putnam and Sánchez, 2013). Following Kamp and Reyle (1993) and Wechsler (2011, 2014), the dative adopts a more indexical discourse function, forging a tighter connection between morphosyntax and semantic properties. Moribund grammars deploy linguistic resources in novel ways, a finding which can help move us beyond simple narratives of ‘attrition’ and ‘incomplete acquisition.’
Highlights
Most research on the grammar of bilinguals known as ‘heritage speakers’ is framed in terms of what speakers cannot do, compared to monolingual speakers of their heritage languages, and research typically accounts for these deficiencies in terms of ‘incomplete acquisition’ and/or ‘attrition’ (e.g., Benmamoun et al, 2013 and responses to them in the same journal issue)
The section gives a brief overview of German case and apparent case reductions in heritage German (‘speech islands’) and for Germanic more generally. §2 introduces ‘incomplete acquisition’ and ‘attrition’ as they have been applied to reductions in inflectional morphology among heritage language speakers, along with data on L1 German case acquisition. §3 presents methods and data from a set of heritage German varieties: §3.1 for Texas German, §3.2 for three varieties from Wisconsin and §3.3 for some initial data on Misionero German (MG) from South America. §4 concludes
Differential Object Marking (DOM) effects, we propose, play a very different role in Heritage German: Ostensible loss of dative can be better seen as reanalysis of old morphological/syntactic case marking into a new system of variable DOM
Summary
Most research on the grammar of bilinguals known as ‘heritage speakers’ is framed in terms of what speakers cannot (or can no longer) do, compared to monolingual speakers of their heritage languages, and research typically accounts for these deficiencies in terms of ‘incomplete acquisition’ and/or ‘attrition’ (e.g., Benmamoun et al, 2013 and responses to them in the same journal issue). Many German varieties have three nominal cases (nominative, accusative, dative) and one common scenario is that morphological dative, historically present across Germanic and still present in Standard German (SG) and other varieties, appears to be lost, leaving a nominative-oblique system This shift has happened in European varieties and heritage varieties. ‘Incomplete acquisition’ (Montrul, 2008), understood essentially as the arrested development of certain features of the heritage language (see below), is an unlikely culprit in this process since most speakers in the present study were monolingual speakers of German until around age six, well after when dative would have normally been learned, around age three (Eisenbeiss et al, 2009). The section gives a brief overview of German case and apparent case reductions in heritage German (‘speech islands’) and for Germanic more generally. §2 introduces ‘incomplete acquisition’ and ‘attrition’ as they have been applied to reductions in inflectional morphology among heritage language speakers, along with data on L1 German case acquisition. §3 presents methods and data from a set of heritage German varieties: §3.1 for Texas German, §3.2 for three varieties from Wisconsin and §3.3 for some initial data on Misionero German (MG) from South America. §4 concludes
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