Headedness, Again

Linguistic

Reanalysis in Adult Heritage Language: A Case for Attrition.

This study presents and analyzes the comprehension of relative clauses in child and adult speakers of Russian, comparing monolingual controls with Russian heritage speakers (HSs) who are English-dominant. Monolingual and bilingual children demonstrate full adultlike mastery of relative clauses. Adult HSs, however, are significantly different from the monolingual adult controls and from the child HS group. This divergent performance indicates that the adult heritage grammar is not a product of the fossilization of child language. Instead, it suggests that forms existing in the baseline undergo gradual attrition over the life span of a HS. This result is consistent with observations on narrative structure in child and adult HSs (Polinsky 2008b ). Evidence from word order facts suggests that relative clause reanalysis in adult HSs cannot be attributed to transfer from English.Linguistic

Gender Under Incomplete Acquisition: Heritage Speakers’ Knowledge of Noun Categorization

Linguistic

Linguistic Typology and Formal Grammar

Linguistic

Clause structure and adjuncts in Austronesian languages (Review)

Linguistic

Heritage Languages

Linguistic

Why Not Heritage Speakers?

Linguistic

The Syntax and Semantics of Wanting in Indonesian

The Indonesian verbs mau and ingin ‘want’ look like typical control verbs. When they are followed by a passive predicate however, an additional, unexpected interpretation arises. The sentence Siti mau/ingin di-cium oleh Ali means ‘Siti wants to be kissed by Ali’ but also ‘Ali wants to kiss Siti’. We call the latter interpretation Crossed Control (CC). In CC, the wanter is not the surface subject of ‘want’ but an oblique element in the complement clause and the surface subject is the theme of the embedded predicate and not an argument of ‘want’. For the syntax of CC, we reject clause union and backward control analyses and propose that ‘want’ in this construction is an auxiliary/raising verb that does not assign an external θ-role. We then propose that the control interpretation is encoded in the lexical semantics of the auxiliary. ‘Want’ takes a propositional argument but forces the volitional participant in this event to be construed as an experiencer of wanting. We hypothesize that this approach can be extended to volitional constructions in other languages.Linguistic

Against Covert A-Movement in Russian Unaccusatives

Linguistic

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