Chapter published in:
Dynamics of Linguistic Diversity
Edited by Hagen Peukert and Ingrid Gogolin
[Hamburg Studies on Linguistic Diversity 6] 2017
► pp. 143–162

Dominant language transfer in heritage languages

Redefining the ‘structural’, and the ‘transfer’ in ‘structural transfer’

| Radboud University
Heritage languages (HL), like other contact varieties, are subject to considerable transfer. However, the question remains of whether structures are really transferred from one language to another. Two case studies, one about datives in heritage Spanish, and the other about resultatives in heritage Ambon Malay, serve as a basis for discussion around the nature of structural transfer in HLs. The main conclusion is that structural transfer can be characterized as a redistribution of already available structures, driven by lexical and conceptual properties. In order to account for this, we explain structural transfer in terms of cross-linguistic activation in a psycholinguistic model inspired by Hartsuiker et al. (2004).
Keywords: bilingualism, heritage languages, Spanish, Malay, datives, resultatives, structural transfer
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Two case studies
    • Datives in Spanish
    • Resultatives in Ambon Malay
  • Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 May 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/hsld.6.08mor
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