Subject Clitics in Microcontact: A Case Study from Heritage Friulian in Argentina and Brazil

Alberto Frasson,Brechje Van Osch,Roberta D’Alessandro

doi:10.1163/15507076-12340001

Alberto Frasson, Brechje Van Osch + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1163/15507076-12340001

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Abstract

Abstract In this paper we present data from first generation immigrants (G1) and second and third generation heritage speakers of Friulian, a Rhaeto-Romance language spoken in North-Eastern Italy and also found in Argentina and Brazil. The target phenomenon is subject clitics (SCL s). We show that SCL s in heritage Friulian are in a process of being reanalyzed from being agreement markers to pronouns. While SCL s are obligatory in Friulian as spoken in Italy, they are often dropped in heritage Friulian in Argentina and Brazil; this phenomenon, we argue, needs to be interpreted as the drop of pronominal subjects, and not of agreement-like SCL s. We also demonstrate that the use of SCL s (reanalyzed as pronominal subjects) is conditioned both by grammatical factors (it happens more in some grammatical persons than in others) and by discourse factors (they are used more in the case of a continuation topic than in other topicalization contexts). This means that in heritage Friulian, discourse constraints on the expression of subjects are not being lost or weakened; in fact, against the general grammaticalization trend of pronominal forms, new discourse constraints are introduced.

Highlights

This article is concerned with language change in contact, in particular in situations of unbalanced bilingualism, such as the case of first-generation immigrants and heritage speakers (HS s).The ever-growing field of heritage language studies has far revealed several generalizations regarding heritage grammars (i.e., Benmamoun, Montrul & Polinsky, 2013; Montrul, 2016; Polinsky, 2018)
While we cannot provide conclusive evidence that the same reanalysis from clitics to weak pronouns is taking place in heritage Friulian, in this article we show that Friulian subject clitics (SCL s) do display pronominal behavior, since they are not licensed in the context of doubling of a lexical or pronominal subject except when these are clearly topicalized (Section 6.1, Table 4); besides, SCL s can be dropped in the second conjunct in coordinated structures (Section 6,1, Table 6) and the restriction on their
6.1 Forced-Choice Task The forced-choice task confirmed our expectation that clitics are undergoing a process of reanalysis as pronouns8 as shown in Tables 3–6: SCL s in items marked with an asterisk (*) display a pronominal behavior and are not grammatical in Friulian as described in previous studies on this variety

Summary

Introduction

This article is concerned with language change in contact, in particular in situations of unbalanced bilingualism, such as the case of first-generation immigrants and heritage speakers (HS s).The ever-growing field of heritage language studies has far revealed several generalizations regarding heritage grammars (i.e., Benmamoun, Montrul & Polinsky, 2013; Montrul, 2016; Polinsky, 2018). Already at the beginning of this century, various researchers observed that phenomena pertaining to the C-domain are vulnerable in bilingual acquisition (Hulk & Müller, 2000). This observation led to the formulation of the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace & Filiaci, 2006; Sorace, 2011), which claims that constructions in which syntax interacts with other language modules, such as discourse and pragmatics, are vulnerable in bilingual populations. Several studies on bilinguals whose weaker language is pro-drop have shown that, while these speakers have some command of the syntactic constraints related to the distribution of null subjects, they tend to overuse overt subjects in discourse contexts where null subjects are expected (e.g., Sorace & Filiaci, 2006; Sorace & Serratrice, 2009)

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