Marking Topic or Marking Case: A Comparative Investigation of Heritage Japanese and Heritage Korean

In this paper, we examine the relationship between grammatical and discourse-related domains of linguistic organization in heritage speakers by comparing their knowledge of categories mediated at different structural levels: grammatical case marking, which is mediated within the structure of the clause, and the marking of information structure, grammatically mediated at the syntax-discourse interface. To this end, we examine the knowledge of case and topic particles in heritage speakers and L2 learners of Japanese and Korean as assessed through a series of rating tasks. We find that heritage speakers in both languages experience different degrees of difficulty with elements that belong to different linguistic modules: phenomena which involve semantic and discourse computation are found to be more difficult than phenomena governed primarily by structural syntactic constraints.Linguistic

What Errors Can't Tell Us About Heritage Grammars: On Covert Restructuring of Aspect in Russian

The paper examines covert restructuring of the aspectual system of Russian in the context of heritage acquisition, i.e. systematic grammatical reorganization not manifested in overt errors. The interaction between VP-level aspectuality and sentential aspect is examined in the data from high-proficiency heritage speakers and baseline speakers of Russian. While the two grammars largely converge at the VP level (particularly in atelic contexts), they differ with respect to how sentential aspect is expressed, suggesting that the differences lie at the syntax-pragmatics interface: heritage grammar diverges from the baseline grammar in those contexts where syntactic knowledge must be integrated with discourse-pragmatic knowledge

Marking topic or marking case: A comparative investigation of Heritage Japanese and Heritage Korean

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