Abstract
This study investigates how syntactic and discourse features of Chinese sentence-final particles (the question particle ba and the suggestion particle ba) are reconfigured in Chinese heritage grammars. It has been argued that features of the Chinese particles ba are present in English but are configured differently. An acceptability judgment task, a discourse completion task, and a translation task were adopted in this study. In total, 35 Chinese heritage speakers and 18 Chinese native speakers took part in this study. The results show that none of the heritage speaker groups had any problem in configuring the discourse feature of the suggestion particle ba and the syntactic features of the question particle ba. However, none of them could successfully reconfigure the discourse feature of the question particle ba. It seems that the effects of dominant language transfer, reduced Chinese input, and limited processing resources play roles in the reconfiguration of discourse features in heritage grammars. As compared to previous L2 studies regarding the same phenomenon, heritage speakers with more and early Chinese input seem to have advantages over L2 learners in terms of syntactic features. L2 learners are found to be slightly better than heritage speakers in terms of reconfiguring some discourse properties.
Highlights
Heritage speakers are those simultaneous or sequential bilinguals whose weaker language corresponds to the minority language of their society and whose stronger language is the dominant language of that society (Polinsky 2018b
Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT): Syntactic Features of the Question SFP ba Participants were first screened by their acceptance of control sentences
This study investigated the representations of features of suggestion and question SFPs ba in the grammars of English-dominant Chinese heritage speakers
Summary
Heritage speakers are those simultaneous or sequential bilinguals whose weaker language corresponds to the minority language of their society and whose stronger language is the dominant language of that society (Polinsky 2018b). Heritage speakers are those simultaneous or sequential bilinguals whose weaker language corresponds to the minority language of their society and whose stronger language is the dominant language of that society (Polinsky 2018b)1 These speakers’ acquisition of their heritage language is considered an important issue in the field of language acquisition, as it bridges L1 and L2 acquisition. It is difficult to obtain a clear-cut definition of heritage language speakers. Polinsky (2018b) has reviewed several major arguments and pointed out that her definition tries to tie together different dimensions such as early bilingualism, simultaneous and sequential acquisition, and the unbalanced relationship between the two languages. For more definitions and discussions, please see Valdés (2000), Fishman (2001), Rothman (2009), and Kupisch and Rothman (2018), among others
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