Um estudo comparativo sobre o conhecimento do sistema pronominal português por parte de falantes de português língua de herança e falantes de uma língua segunda

O objetivo do presente trabalho consiste em contribuir para a perceção das semelhanças e dissemelhanças entre três contextos de aquisição distintos: a aquisição do português em contexto monolingue, como língua de herança em contexto de bilinguismo precoce e como língua segunda em contexto de aquisição tardia. Serão apresentados os resultados de uma Tarefa de Juízos de Gramaticalidade (TJG), centrada no conhecimento de várias propriedades do sistema pronominal português, aplicado a três grupos distintos de falantes do português europeu, que representam os três tipos de aquisição do PE acima referidos

Migration und Mehrsprachigkeit in der Spracherwerbsforschung. Neuere Erkenntnisse aus dem Portugiesischen

Einleitung: Die linguistische Mehrsprachigkeitsforschung der letzten Jahrzehnte hat erfolgreich gezeigt, dass die menschliche Sprachfähigkeit für den Erwerb mehrerer Muttersprachen ausgelegt ist. Kinder, die von Geburt an mehr als eine Sprache erwerben, durchlaufen die gleichen Phasen des Spracherwerbs wie monolinguale Kinder und sind bereits sehr früh in der Lage, ihre Sprachen zu trennen (Meisel 2004). Dennoch hat die Forschung der letzten Jahre auch gezeigt, dass im Erwachsenenalter nicht alle mehrsprachig aufgewachsenen Menschen ihre Muttersprachen in gleicher Weise beherrschen und anwenden können. Im Mittelpunkt des Interesses stehen vor allem die so genannten Herkunftssprecher, die eine ihrer Muttersprachen im Kontext von Migration und einer dominanten Umgebungssprache erworben haben. Während der Begriff der Herkunftssprecher (‚heritage speaker‘) und die damit verbundenen Besonderheiten zunächst in den USA und aus der Perspektive von bildungs- und erziehungswissenschaftlichen Fragestellungen betrachtet wurden (Valdés 2014), ist diese Gruppe mehrsprachiger Sprecher in den letzten Jahren auch in den Fokus sprachwissenschaftlicher und europäischer Forschung gerückt. In diesem Kontext ist auch das Portugiesische als Herkunftssprache in Deutschland in den vergangenen Jahren Gegenstand verschiedener Studien geworden, deren Ziel die Beschreibung und Erklärung der Besonderheiten der Sprachkompetenz von bilingualen Herkunftssprechern ist. Insbesondere steht die Frage im Mittelpunkt, ob sich das sprachliche Wissen der Herkunftssprecher in systematischer Weise von dem monolingualer Sprecher unterscheidet und ob evtl. sogar davon ausgegangen werden kann, dass Herkunftssprecher in bestimmten sprachlichen Domänen ähnlich wie Zweitsprachlerner zu charakterisieren sind

Another look at the interpretation of overt and null pronominal subjects in bilingual language acquisition: Heritage Portuguese in contact with German and Spanish

This paper investigates the interpretation of overt and null subject pronouns in the heritage language (European Portuguese, EP) of Portuguese heritage bilinguals (children and teenagers) in Germany and Andorra with German (Ger) and Spanish/Catalan (Span/Cat) as environmental languages and compares it to the outcomes of age-matched monolingual Portuguese children and monolingual adults. The results of an offline sentence interpretation task show that all groups of speakers differentiate between overt and null subjects. They are also sensitive to the syntactic context (intrasentential vs. intersentential) and the directionality of the anaphoric relation (anaphoric vs. cataphoric), although to different degrees. We argue that the interpretation of differences between monolingual and bilingual speakers needs to take into account these different syntactic contexts of pronominal resolution in order to gain a better understanding of the role of language-internal factors and cross-linguistic influence (CLI). With respect to the latter, the comparison between the Ger-EP and the Span/Cat-EP groups reveals no differences between these populations and shows that for the speakers’ knowledge of anaphora resolution in EP it is not decisive whether the contact language is a null subject language or not (confirming thus the results in Sorace et al. 2009).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Portuguese as heritage language in Germany - a linguistic perspective

This article provides a comprehensive overview of the contribution of linguistic research on Portuguese as a heritage language in Germany to the general understanding of heritage language development. From 1955 to 1973, nearly 166,000 Portuguese migrants found work in Germany as so-called ‘guest workers’ (Gastarbeiter). Because the aim of many Portuguese migrant families was to return to Portugal, their children met relatively good conditions for the acquisition of their heritage language. Nonetheless, second-generation heritage speakers (HSs) show some linguistic particularities in comparison to monolingual Portuguese speakers in Portugal. Based on the results of previous research, we show that the following factors shape the linguistic knowledge of this group of bilinguals: (1) Restricted exposure to the heritage language may cause a delay in the development of certain linguistic structures, (2) deviations from the standard norm may be related to the lack of formal education and the primacy of the colloquial register and (3) heritage bilinguals may accelerate ongoing diachronic development. We argue that apparent effects of influence from the environmental language can often have alternative explanations

Factors constraining subject expression in european Portuguese spoken in Hamburg. A bi-generational corpus Investigation

The present study investigates subject expression in two generations of Portuguese migrants living in Hamburg, Germany. Based on a corpus of oral speech, we aim to assess whether second generation heritage speakers (HSs) differ from first generation migrants with respect to the factors constraining subject realisation/omission in European Portuguese (EP), a null subject language, in contact with German, a non-null subject language. The results do not reveal evidence in favour of ongoing language change, given that there are neither quantitative nor qualitative differences between the two generations of speakers. They show very similar overall rates of subject omission (around 67%) and they reveal sensitivity to the very same determining factors of subject pronoun realisation/omission, namely person and number, verb type, switch reference (topic continuity [TC]/topic shift [TS]) and distance. This finding is in line with previous corpus studies investigating the spontaneous speech of different generations of bilingual speakers or comparing monolingual and bilingual speakers of the same null subject language (e.g., Flores-Ferrán, 2004; Nagy, 2015). We conclude that language contact per se does not necessarily lead to a diverging grammar at an inter-generational level, as long as stable input conditions allow for the acquisition of the constraints that are valid for null subject languages

Comparing the outcomes of early and late acquisition of european portuguese: an analysis of morpho-syntactic and phonetic performance

The present paper compares the linguistic competence of German-Portuguese bilinguals with upper-intermediate German L2 learners (L2ers) of EP (European Portuguese) and with monolingual Portuguese speakers. The bilingual speakers are heritage speakers (HSs), who were raised bilingually with EP as the minority language and German as the majority language. The aim of our comparison is to verify in which way different input sources and maturational effects shape the speakers’ linguistic knowledge. The findings of two studies, one focused on the morpho-syntactic knowledge of clitics and the other on global accent, corroborate the assumption that L2ers and HSs behave differently, despite superficial similarities observed in the morpho-syntactic study. In contrast to that of the L2ers’, the accent of the HSs is perceived as being native-like, whereas their morpho-syntactic competence is mainly shaped by their dominant exposure to colloquial Portuguese and reduced contact with formal registers.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Clitic doubling in Peninsular and Rioplatense Spanish : a comparative corpus investigation

The current study compares the distribution of clitic doubling (CD) in two varieties of Spanish: Peninsular Spanish and Rioplatense Spanish. Based on two corpora of colloquial speech we investigate under which conditions CD with pronominal and nominal objects[1] is possible and which factors favour the occurrence of CD in the variable contexts.Based on a variationist analysis with Rbrul, we show that personal prounouns are almost categorically doubled in both corpora. The presence of dative case marking is a sufficient condition for CD to be possible with pronominal and nominal objects. This is in principle independent of semantic factors like definiteness, specificity and animacy, which also favour CD. In Rioplatense, CD of dative noun phrases is advanced in comparison to Peninsular Spanish as it is almost categorical and independent of the semantic specification of the object, whereas specificity still plays a role for CD of dative nominal objects in Peninsular Spanish. CD of accusative objects occurs less frequently and is more restricted. Non-personal pronouns show that definiteness is a necessary and decisive feature for CD of accusatives, indefinite non-personal pronouns cannot be doubled. In Buenos Aires, doubling of direct nominal objects also presupposes their definiteness (and specificity). DOM favours CD to occur, but it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for CD.Overall, our study confirms that the factors determining the distribution of CD can be ordered on an implicational (definiteness) scale and that CD has a wider distribution and is less restricted in Rioplatense Spanish in comparison to Peninsular Spanish. We conclude that this reflects that Rioplatense Spanish has reached a more advanced stage of CD on a grammaticalization cline than Peninsular Spanish[1] Throughout our paper, we use the terms pronominal and nominal objects in order to distinguish between pronouns and non-pronominal noun phrases in object position, although it is of course clear to us that pronouns are also nominal objects. We will also use the abbreviation DP (determiner phrase) to refer to non-pronominal noun phrases

Acquiring the distribution of null and overt direct objects in European Portuguese

This article investigates the L1 acquisition of different types of direct objects in European Portuguese (EP). Previous research has revealed that although children have early syntactic and pragmatic knowledge of objects across languages, the adequate use of pronouns and null objects is protracted in the acquisition of EP (Costa et al. 2012). The present study shows that children acquiring the distribution of direct objects are aware of universal pragmatic hierarchies but struggle with the interpretation and feature bundles of null objects. Assuming that arguments are linked to left-peripheral C/edge linkers (Sigurðsson 2011), we argue that children need more time to discover the adult-like feature composition of null objects in EP because they involve phi-silent features. Relative accessibility (Ariel 1991) is universal and available early, whereas the absolute accessibility of null objects, i.e. their feature content, is acquired relatively late.(undefined

Null objects in Polish heritage language acquisition in contact with German

Aims and objectives: This study investigates the acquisition of referential expressions for direct objects by child heritage speakers of Polish living in Germany. Our main research questions are how object expression develops in bilingual children and whether their path or pace of acquisition differs from monolingual children. Methodology: We investigate the use of referential expressions in an elicited production task. In all, 39 Polish-German bilingual children participated in the test. Data and analysis: We compare the data of four age groups of bilingual children – 3- to 4-year-olds, 5- to 6-year-olds, 7- to 8-year-olds, and 9- to 10-year-olds – to each other and to monolingual children at the respective ages. For the analysis of participants’ responses, we ran a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) with a multinominal dependent variable. Findings: The results show that child heritage language (HL) speakers of Polish display knowledge of semantic and pragmatic constraints of object realization from early stages on. However, from age 5 and up to age 9 to 10, they still produce high rates of inappropriate null objects and show a deceleration in the development of this knowledge, compared to monolingual children. This protracted development is attributed to reduced input in the HL, mainly due to the enrolment in the majority language school. Originality: This study is the first to investigate the development of referential expressions for direct objects in child heritage speakers of Polish in the age span 3 to 10 years. Significance: The study relates the higher rates of null objects in the bilingual production to the varying degrees of exposure to the HL during language development. Deceleration in the pace of object acquisition by the HL speakers at the age of 5 to 6 years is attributed to a prolonged stage of acquisition of integrating rules of syntactic and pragmatic knowledge

Dialectal variation in European Portuguese Central Vowel Perception

The present paper aims at providing empirical evidence for dialectal variation concerning the perception of the central vowel [ɐ] in European Portuguese (EP). More concretely, this study compares the perception of the contrast between [a] and [ɐ] by native speakers of two varieties of EP: 23 speakers of a northern Portuguese dialect (from the city of Braga) and 23 speakers of the Littoral Center variety of EP (from the city of Lisbon, defined as Standard European Portuguese (SEP)). Based on a discrimination test, the results show that the two groups of speakers differ with respect to the perception of the contrast between the two central vowels under investigation. The speakers of the northern variety differentiate less between the two central vowels compared to the speakers from Lisbon