Article published in:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 6:3 (2016) ► pp. 308–340

Comparing heritage speakers and late L2-learners of European Portuguese

verb movement, VP ellipsis and adverb placement

| Universidade de Lisboa / CLUL, Portugal
| Universidade do Minho / CEHUM, Portugal

This study compares the performance of Portuguese-German heritage children and adult L2 speakers of European Portuguese whose L1 is German with respect to two aspects of grammar, adverb placement and VP-ellipsis, which depend on a core syntactic property of the language, verb movement. The results show that both groups have acquired V-to-I and adverb placement, showing no influence of a V2 grammar. Performance in the VP-ellipsis task is more complex: heritage children produce VP-ellipsis at the level of controls, as opposed to L2 speakers; however, both L2 and heritage speakers show that cross-linguistic influence may produce a preference for pronoun substitution over VP-ellipsis in a task asking for redundancy resolution. Nevertheless, given that overall results show that heritage children perform at the level of L1 children, we take our results to support approaches to heritage bilingualism which suggest the development of an intact grammar in childhood.

Keywords: Heritage speakers, L2, VP-ellipsis, verb movement, Portuguese, German
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Heritage language and L2 acquisition
  • 3.Verb movement, VP-ellipsis and different types of possible cross-linguistic effects
    • 3.1Verb movement in EP and German and the distribution of adverbs
    • 3.2Avoiding redundancy in EP and German and the particular case of (VP-)ellipsis
    • 3.3Verb movement, VP-ellipsis and different types of cross-linguistic influence effects: some resulting research questions
  • 4.Method
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2Procedure and tasks
      • 4.2.1Sentence reordering task
      • 4.2.2Grammaticality judgment task
      • 4.2.3Elicited production task
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Distribution of adverbs
      • 5.1.1Grammaticality judgment task
      • 5.1.2Sentence reordering task
    • 5.2Production of VP-ellipsis
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 February 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.14006.san
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