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Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 7:1 (2017) ► pp.1–32
Article

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
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Turkish heritage speakers in Germany and age of onset
  • 3.The Definiteness Effect
    • 3.1Definiteness effects in English
    • 3.2Definiteness effects in German
    • 3.3Definiteness effects in Turkish
  • 4.Previous research on definiteness in L2 and bilingual acquisition
  • 5.Experiment
    • 5.1Participants
    • 5.2Task
    • 5.3Sentence types: German version
    • 5.4Sentence types: Turkish version
    • 5.5Data analysis
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1Monolingual German vs. monolingual Turkish
    • 6.2Monolingual vs. bilingual German
    • 6.3Monolingual vs. bilingual Turkish
    • 6.4Bilingual German vs. bilingual Turkish
    • 6.5Summary
  • 7.Discussion
  • Notes
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 1 March 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.13031.kup
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