Variation in subject doubling in Homeland and Heritage Faetar

Abstract

This paper investigates subject doubling in Faetar, an endangered and understudied variety of Francoprovençal. Comparing Homeland speakers (i.e., speakers who were born and raised in Faeto) and Heritage speakers of the language (i.e., speakers who emigrated to Toronto, Canada after age 18, and their children), we find some striking differences. Our results show that subject doubling is grammatically constrained in the source variety: Homeland speakers favor doubling in new information contexts, while Heritage speakers do not. There is also evidence for a change in progress among Homeland speakers, with younger speakers using more subject doubling than older speakers. This change is not mirrored by the Heritage speakers. We propose that this is because the Heritage speakers left the Homeland either before or around the time that the youngest Homeland speakers in our sample were born, resulting in them having missed out on this change. This highlights that both Homeland and Heritage varieties are dynamic and may develop in different directions. Additionally, this study helps complete the picture previously reported for variation between overt (single or doubled) and null subjects in these two varieties: an ongoing decrease in null subject rates in the Homeland variety and stability in the Heritage variety (Nagy et al. 2018).