To be specified published in:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 7:1 (2017) ► pp. 1–32

Restrictions on definiteness in the grammars of German-Turkish heritage speakers

| University of Konstanz | The Arctic University of Norway
| University of Calgary
| Indiana University
| University of Hamburg
| McGill University
This paper reports on a study investigating restrictions on definiteness (the Definiteness Effect) in existential constructions in the two languages of Turkish heritage speakers in Germany. Turkish and German differ in how the Definiteness Effect plays out. Definite expressions in German may not occur in affirmative or negative existentials, whereas in Turkish the restriction applies only to affirmative existentials. Participants were adults and fell into two groups: simultaneous bilinguals (2L1) who acquired German before age 3 and early sequential bilinguals (2L1) who acquired German after age 4; there were also monolingual controls. The tasks involved acceptability judgments. Subjects were presented with contexts, each followed by a sentence to be judged, including grammatical and ungrammatical existentials. Results show that the bilinguals, regardless of age of acquisition, make judgments appropriate for each language. They reject definite expressions in negative existentials in German and accept them in Turkish, suggesting distinct grammars.
Keywords: definiteness effect, heritage speakers, Turkish-German bilingualism


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 01 March 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.13031.kup

Full-text

Restrictions on definiteness in the grammars of German-Turkish heritage speakers
Cited by

Cited by 8 other publications

Domínguez, Laura, Glyn Hicks & Roumyana Slabakova
2019. TERMINOLOGY CHOICE IN GENERATIVE ACQUISITION RESEARCH. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 41:2 ► pp. 241 ff. Crossref logo
Felser, Claudia
2020. Do processing resource limitations shape heritage language grammars?. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 23:1 ► pp. 23 ff. Crossref logo
Montanari, Elke G., Roman Abel, Lilia Tschudinovski & Barbara Graßer
2020.  In Lost in Transmission [Studies in Bilingualism, 59], ► pp. 152 ff. Crossref logo
Montrul, Silvina A.
2018.  In Meaning and Structure in Second Language Acquisition [Studies in Bilingualism, 55], ► pp. 149 ff. Crossref logo
Putnam, Michael T., Tanja Kupisch & Diego Pascual y Cabo
2018.  In Bilingual Cognition and Language [Studies in Bilingualism, 54], ► pp. 251 ff. Crossref logo
van Osch, García González, Hulk, Sleeman & Aalberse
2019. The Development of Subject Position in Dutch-Dominant Heritage Speakers of Spanish: From Age 9 to Adulthood. Languages 4:4 ► pp. 88 ff. Crossref logo
van Osch, Brechje & Petra Sleeman
2018. Spanish heritage speakers in the Netherlands: Linguistic patterns in the judgment and production of mood. International Journal of Bilingualism 22:5 ► pp. 513 ff. Crossref logo
Zhou, Jiangling, Ziyin Mai & Virginia Yip
2021. Bidirectional cross-linguistic influence in object realization in Cantonese–English bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 24:1 ► pp. 96 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 august 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

References
Bley-Vroman, R.
(1983) The comparative fallacy in interlanguage studies: the case of systematicity. Language Learning, 33, 1–17. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Chilla, S., & Babur, E.
(2010) Specific Language Impairment in Turkish-German successive bilingual children: Aspects of assessment and outcome. In S. Topbaş, & M. Yavaş (Eds.): Communication disorders in Turkish in monolingual and multilingual settings (pp. 352–368). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Czinglar, C.
(2002) Decomposing existence: Evidence from Germanic. In W. Abraham, & C. J.-W. Zwart (Eds.) (2002), Issues in Formal German(ic) Typology (pp. 245–254). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cook, V.
(1997) Monolingual bias in second language acquisition research. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 34, 35–50.Google Scholar
De Houwer, A.
(1990) The acquisition of two languages from birth. A case study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Eisenbeiss, S.
(2000) The Acquisition of the DP in German. In L. Rizzi, & M.-A. Friedemann (Eds.), Acquisition of Syntax. Issues in Developmental Linguistic (pp. 27–62). London: Longman.Google Scholar
Enç, M.
(1991) The semantics of specificity. Linguistic Inquiry, 22, 1–25.Google Scholar
Fürstenau, S., Gogolin, I. & Yağmur, K.
(Eds) (2003) Mehrsprachigkeit in Hamburg. Ergebnisse einer Sprachstanderhebung an den Grundschulen. Münster: Waxmann.Google Scholar
Garcia-Mayo, M., & Hawkins, R.
(Eds) (2009) Second language acquisition of articles: Empirical findings and theoretical implications. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Genesee, F.
1989 Early bilingual development: One language or two? Journal of Child Language, 16, 161–179. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Goad, H. & White, L.
(2004) Ultimate attainment of L2 inflection: effects of L1 prosodic structure. In S. Foster-Cohen, M. Sharwood Smith, A. Sorace, & M. Ota (Eds.), Eurosla Yearbook Vol 4 (pp. 119–145). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
(2009) Prosodic transfer and determiners in Turkish-English interlanguage. In N. Snape, Y-k. I. Leung, & M. Sharwood Smith (Eds), Representational deficits in L2 acquisition (pp. 1–26). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ionin, T., Ko, H., & Wexler, K.
(2004) Article semantics in L2 acquisition: The role of specificity. Language Acquisition, 12, 3–69. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kornfilt, J.
(1984) Case marking, agreement and empty categories in Turkish. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University.Google Scholar
(1997) Turkish. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Kupisch, T.
(2012) Generic subjects in the Italian of early German-Italian bilinguals and German learners of Italian as a second language. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15 (4), 736–756. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lardiere, D.
(2000) Mapping features to forms in second language acquisition. In J. Archibald (Ed.), Second language acquisition and linguistic theory (pp. 102–129). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
(2004) Knowledge of definiteness despite variable article omission in second language acquisition. In A. Brugos, L. Micciulla, & C. E. Smith (Eds.), Proceedings of the 28th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. (pp. 328–339). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Lyons, C.
(1999) Definiteness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Meisel, J. M.
(1986) Word order and case marking in early child language. Evidence from the simultaneous acquisition of two first languages: French and German. Linguistics, 24, 123–183. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Meisel, J.M.
(2007) Mehrsprachigkeit in der frühen Kindheit: Zur Rolle des Alters bei Erwerbsbeginn. In T. Anstatt (Ed.), Mehrsprachigkeit bei Kindern und Erwachsenen: Erwerb, Formen, Förderung (pp. 93–113), Tübingen: Attempto.Google Scholar
(2009) Second language acquisition in early childhood. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, 28(1), 5–34.Google Scholar
(2011) First and second language acquisition: Parallels and differences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Milsark, G.L.
(1977) Toward an explanation of certain peculiarities of the existential construction in English. Linguistic Analysis, 3, 1–29.Google Scholar
Montrul, S.
(2008) Incomplete acquisition on bilingualism: Re-examining the age-factor. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2011) Multiple interfaces and incomplete acquisition. Lingua, 121(4), 591–604. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Montrul, S. & Ionin, T.
(2010) Transfer effects in the interpretation of definite articles by Spanish heritage speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13 (4), 449–473. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Müller, N. & Hulk, A.
(2001) Crosslinguistic influence in bilingual language acquisition: Italian and French as recipient languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4, 1–22. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Özçelik, Ö.
(2011) Representation and acquisition of stress: the case of Turkish. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. McGill University.Google Scholar
Öztürk, B.
(2005) Case, referentiality and phrase structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pascual y Cabo, D., & Rothman, J.
(2012) The (il)logical problem of heritage speaker bilingualism and incomplete acquisition. Applied Linguistics, 33(4), 450–455. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, J. & Genesee, F.
(1996) Syntactic acquisition in bilingual children: autonomous or interdependent. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 18, 1–25. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pfaff, C. W.
(1992) The issue of grammaticalization in early German second language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 14, 273–296. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Polinsky, M.
(1997) American Russian: Language loss meets language acquisition. In E. Wayles Browne, N. Dornisch, N. Kondrashowva, & D. Ze (Eds.), Annual Workshop on Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics: The Cornell Meeting (1995) (pp. 370–406). Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Publishers.Google Scholar
Putnam, M., & Sánchez, L.
(2013) What’s so incomplete about incomplete acquisition? A prolegomenon to modeling heritage language grammars. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 3(4), 478–508. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Prévost, P., & White, L.
(2000) Missing surface inflection or impairment in second language acquisition? Evidence from tense and agreement. Second Language Research, 16, 103–133. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Rothman, J.
(2009) Understanding the Nature of Early Bilingualism: Romance Languages as Heritage Languages. International Journal of Bilingualism, 13, 155–163. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Rothweiler, M.
(2006) The acquisition of V2 and subordinate clauses in early successive acquisition of German. In C. Lleó (Ed.). Interfaces in Multilingualism: Acquisition, Representation and Processing (pp. 91–113). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2007) Bilingualer Spracherwerb und Zweitspracherwerb. In M. Steinbach (Ed.), Schnittstellen der germanistischen Linguistik (pp. 103–135). Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler.Google Scholar
Schönenberger, M.
(2011) Are Difficulties with the Prosodic Representation the Origin of Prolonged Article Omission? In J. Herschensohn, & D. Tanner (Eds.), Proceedings of the 11th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 2011) (pp. 135–142). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Schönenberger, M., Sterner, F., & Ruberg, T.
(2011) The Realization of Indirect Objects and Dative Case in German. In J. Herschensohn, & D. Tanner (Eds.), Proceedings of the 11th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 2011) (pp. 143–151). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Sorace, A.
(2011) Pinning down the concept of “interface” in bilingualism. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1(1), 1–34. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tsimpli, I.-M., & Mastropavlou, M.
(2007) Feature interpretability in L2 acquisition and SLI: Greek clitics and determiners. In J. Liceras, H. Zobl, & H. Goodluck (Eds.), The role of formal features in second language acquisition (pp. 142–183). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence ErlbaumGoogle Scholar
White, L.
(2003) Fossilization in steady state L2 grammars: persistent problems with inflectional morphology. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6, 129–141. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2008) Definiteness effects in the L2 English of Mandarin and Turkish speakers. In H. Chan, H. Jacob, & E. Kapia (Eds.) , Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 550,561). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
(2011) Second language acquisition at the interfaces, Lingua 121, 577–590. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
White, L., Belikova, A., Hagström, P., Kupisch, T. & Özcelik, Ö.
(2012) Restrictions on definiteness in second language acquisition. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 2(1), 54–89. CrossrefGoogle Scholar