Previous research on heritage speaker (HS) bilingualism suggests, not without controversy, that certain properties of HSs’ grammars, mainly discursive properties, can result in divergent grammatical outcomes in adulthood be it as a result of incomplete acquisition or attrition. This study contributes to this line of research by examining whether HSs’ word order configurations with Spanish double object constructions reflect compliance with the pragmatic (End-Focus Principle) and syntactic related factors (End-Weight Principle) that regulate word order in Spanish. To this end, two groups of HSs with different proficiency levels in Spanish as well as a bilingual and a monolingual control group, all of Mexican origin, completed an acceptability judgment task. HSs’ performance on this task shows that their knowledge of the discursive nuances associated with constituent order remains as robust as their knowledge of the syntactic factors associated with this phenomenon. Our findings therefore suggest that this linguistic domain may not be subject to so-called incomplete acquisition or L1 attrition.
Amaral, L., & Roeper, T. (2014). Multiple grammars and second language representation. Second Language Research, 30(1), 3–36.
Arnold, J., Wasow, T., Losongco, A., & Ginstrom, R. (2000). Heaviness vs. newness: The effects of structural complexity and discourse status on constituent ordering. Language, 76(1), 28–55.
Beavers, J., & C. Nishida. (2010). The Spanish dative alternation revisited. In S. Colina, A. Olarrea, & A. M. Carvalho (Eds.), Romance Linguistics 2009: Selected Papers from the 39th Linguistic Symposium of Romance Languages (pp. 217–230). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Behaghel, O. (1909/10). Beziehungen zwischen Umfang und Reihenfolge von Satzgliedern. Indogermanische Forschungen, 251, 110–142.
Bellosta Colbe, V. von. (2005). Variación sintáctica en el “role and reference grammar”: La posición de los complementos en las oraciones ditransitivas. In G. Knauer & V. von Bellosta Colbe (Eds.), Variación sintáctica en español: Un reto para las teorías de la sintaxis; [sección 8 del XIII Congreso de la Asociación Alemana de Hispanistas (Universität Leipzig, 08.-11.03.2001)] (pp. 97–116). Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Bever, T. G. (1970). The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In J. R. Hayes (Ed.), Cognition and the development of language (pp. 279–362). New York: Wiley and Sons.
Bleam, T. (2003). Properties of the double object construction in Spanish. In R. Núñez- Cedeño, L. López, and R. Cameron (Eds.), A Romance perspective on language knowledge and use (pp. 233–252). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bock, J. K. (1986). Meaning, sound, and syntax: Lexical priming in sentence production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1241, 575–86.
Bock, J. K. (1987). An effect of the accessibility of word forms on sentence structures. Journal of Memory and Language, 261, 119–37.
Bock, J. K., & Irwin, D. E. (1980). Syntactic effects of information availability in sentence production. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19(4), 467–484.
Bolinger, D. (1954). Meaningful word order in Spanish. Boletín de Filología, 71, 45–56.
Carreira, M. (2004). Seeking explanatory adequacy: A dual approach to understanding the term “heritage language learner”. Heritage Language Journal, 2(1), 1–25.
Chafe, W. L. (1976). Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics and point of view. In Li, C. N. (Ed.), Subject and topic (pp. 27–55). New York: Academic Press.
Choi, H. -W. (2009). Ordering a left-branching language: Heaviness vs. givenness. Korean Society for Language and Information, 131, 39–56.
Chomsky, N. (1975). The logical structure of linguistic theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Delbecque, N. (1991). El orden de los sintagmas: la posición del regente; estudio de la variación sintáctica en una perspectiva cognitiva y probabilista. Salamanca: Ed. Univ.de Salamanca.
Demonte, V. (1995). Dative alternation in Spanish. Probus, 71, 5–30.
Domínguez, L. (2004). Mapping focus: the syntax and prosody of focus in Spanish. PhD Dissertation. Boston University.
Ducar, C. (2012). SHL learners attitudes and motivations: Reconciling opposing forces. In S. Beaudrie & M. Fairclough, (Eds.), Spanish as a heritage language in the U.S.: State of the science (pp.253–282). Washington, D.C: Georgetown University Press.
Erteschik-Shir, N. (2007). Information structure: The syntax-discourse interface. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1983). The modularity of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Firbas, J. (1992). Functional sentence perspective in written and spoken communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ferreira, V., & Yoshita, H. (2003). Given-new ordering effects on the production of scrambled sentences in Japanese. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 32(6), 669–692.
Frazier, L., & Fodor, J. D. (1978). The sausage machine: A two-stage parsing model. Cognition, 61, 291–325.
Geluykens, R. (1991). Information flow in English conversation: a new approach to the given-new distinction. In E. Ventola (Ed.), Functional and systemic linguistics: Approaches and uses (pp.141–167). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Gibson, E. (1997). Syntactic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cambridge, MA: MIT, MS.
Gundel, J. K. (1988). Universals of topic-comment structure In M. Hammond, E. Moravczik, & J. Wirth (Eds.), Studies in syntactic typology (pp. 209–239). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Gundel, J. K., Hedberg, N., & Zacharski, R. (1993). Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language, 691, 274–307.
Hawkins, J. A. (1990). A parsing theory of word order universals. Linguistic Inquiry, 211, 223–61.
Hawkins, J. A. (1994). A performance theory of word order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heidinger, S. (2013). Information focus, syntactic weight and postverbal constituent order in Spanish. Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics, 2(2), 159–190.
Hoot, B. (2012). Presentational focus in heritage and monolingual Spanish. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Illinois at Chicago.
Jackendoff, R., & Wittenberg, E. (2014). What you can say without syntax: A hierarchy of grammatical complexity. In F. Newmeyer & L. Preston (Eds.), Measuring grammatical complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kaiser, E., & Trueswell, J. C. (2004). The role of discourse context in the processing of a flexible word-order language. Cognition, 94(2), 113–147.
Kayne, R. (1984). Correctedness and binary branching. Dordrecht: Foris.
Kimball, J. (1973). Seven principles of surface structure parsing in natural language. Cognition, 21, 15–47.
Klein, W., & Perdue, C. (1997). The basic variety (or: Couldn’t natural languages be much simpler?). Second Language Research, 13(4), 301–347.
López, L. (2009). A derivational syntax for information structure. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lozano, C., & Mendikoetxea, A. (2010). Interface conditions on postverbal subjects: A corpus study of L2 English. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13(4), 475–497.
Masullo, P. J. (1992). Incorporation and case theory in Spanish: a cross-linguistic perspective. PhD dissertation, University of Washington.
Montrul, S. (2004). Subject and object expression in Spanish heritage speakers: A case of morphosyntactic convergence. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 7(2), 125–142.
Pascual y Cabo, D. (2015). Issues in Spanish heritage morpho-syntax. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 8 (2), 389–401.
Pascual y Cabo, D., & Rothman, J. (2012). The (il)logical problem of heritage speaker bilingualism and incomplete acquisition. Applied Linguistics, 33 (4), 1–7.
Parafita Couto, M. C., Mueller Gathercole, V. C., & Stadthagen-González, H. (2015). Interface strategies in monolingual and end-state L2 Spanish grammars are not that different. Frontiers in Psychology, 51, 1–17.
Park, K. -S. (2011). Information structure and dative word order in adult L2 learners. In J. Herschensohn & D. Tanner (Eds.), Proceedings of the 11th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 2011) (pp. 101–109). Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Park, K. -S., & Schwartz, B. (2012). L1 Korean L2ers’ sensitivity to givenness in the English dative alternation. In A. K. Biller, E. Y. Chung & A. E. Kimball (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 414–426). Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Pineda, A. (2013). Double object constructions and dative/accusative alternations in Spanish and Catalan: A unified account. Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics, 2(1), 57–115.
Pires, A., & Rothman, J. (2009). Disentangling sources of incomplete acquisition: An explanation for competence divergence across heritage grammars. International Journal of Bilingualism, 13(2), 211–38.
Polinsky, M., & Kagan, O. (2007). Heritage languages: In the ‘wild’ and in the classroom. Language and Linguistics Compass, 11, 368–395.
Potowski, K. (2012). Identity and heritage learners: Moving beyond essentializations. In S. Beaudrie & Fairclough, M. (Eds.), Spanish as a heritage language in the US: State of the science (pp. 283–304). Washington D.C: Georgetown University Press.
Prada Pérez, A de., & Pascual y Cabo, D. (2012). Interface heritage speech across proficiencies: Unaccusativity, focus, and subject position in Spanish. In K. Geeslin & M. Díaz-Campos (Eds.), Proceedings of the Hispanic Linguistic Symposium (pp. 308–318). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Prince, E. (1981). Towards a taxonomy of given-new information. In P. Cole (Ed.), Radical pragmatics (pp. 223–256). New York: Academic Press.
Pylkkänen, L. (2002). Introducing arguments. PhD Dissertation, MIT.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (1985). A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman.
Reinhart, T. (1981). Pragmatics and linguistics: An analysis of sentence topics in pragmatics and philosophy I. Philosophica anc Studia Philosophica Gandensia Gent, 27(1), 53–94.
Rosenbach, A. (2005). Animacy versus weight as determinants of grammatical variation in English. Language, 811, 613–644.
Romero, J. (1997). Construcciones de doble objeto y gramática universal. PhD dissertation, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
Rothman, J., & Iverson, M. (2008). Poverty of the stimulus and L2 epistemology: Considering L2 knowledge of aspectual phrasal semantics. Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 15(4), 270–314.
Siewierska, A. (1993). Syntactic weight vs information structure and word order variation in Polish. Journal of Linguistics, 291, 233–265.
Siewierska, A. (1995). On the interplay of factors in the determination of word order. In J. Jacobs, A. von Stechow, W. Sternefeld & T. Vennemann, (Eds.), Syntax: An international handbook of contemporary research / Ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung (pp. 826–846). Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Slobin, D. (1985). Crosslinguistic evidence for the language-making capacity. In D. Slonin (Ed.), The Crosslinguistic study of language acquisition, Vol. II1 (pp. 1157–1256). Hillsdale: Erlbaum.
Sorace, A., & Filiaci, F. (2006). Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian. Second Language Research, 22(3), 339–368.
Taboada, M. (1995). Theme markedness in English and Spanish: A systemic-functional approach. Ms., Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Thuilier, J. (2012). Contraintes préférentielles et ordre des mots en français. PhD dissertation. Paris, Université Paris Diderot.
Tomlin, R. S. (1998). Mapping conceptual representations into linguistic representations: The role of attention in grammar. In J. Nuyts, and E. Pederson (Eds.), With language in mind (pp. 162–89). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Uriagereka, J. (1988). On government. PhD dissertation. University of Connecticut.
Valverde Ibáñez, M. d. P. (2009). Descripción cuantitativa del orden de las funciones clausales argumentales en español. PhD dissertation. Universidad de Santiago de Compostela.
VanPatten, B. (1996). Input processing and grammar instruction: Theory and research. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
VanPatten, B. (2000). Thirty years of input. In B. Swierzbin, F. Morris, Anderson, M., Klee, C. & E. Tarone (Eds.), Social and cognitive factors in second language acquisition: Selected Proceedings of the 1999 Second Language Research Forum (pp. 287–311). Somerville: Cascadilla Press.
Wasow, T. (1997a). Remarks on grammatical weight. Language Variation and Change, 91, 81–105.
Wasow, T. (1997b). End-weight from the speaker’s perspective. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 26(3), 347–361.
Wasow, T. (2002). Postverbal behavior. Stanford, CA: CSLI.
Zapata, G. C., Sánchez, L., & Toribio, A. J. (2005). Contact and contracting Spanish. International Journal of Bilingualism, 9(3–4), 377–395.
Zubizarreta, M. L. (1998). Prosody, focus and word order. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Laleko, Oksana
2022. Word order and information structure in heritage and L2 Russian: Focus and unaccusativity effects in subject inversion. International Journal of Bilingualism 26:6 ► pp. 749 ff.
Hoot, Bradley & Tania Leal
2020. Processing subject focus across two Spanish varieties. Probus 32:1 ► pp. 93 ff.
Hoot, Bradley & Tania Leal
2023. Resilience and vulnerability of discourse-conditioned word order in heritage Spanish. Applied Psycholinguistics 44:5 ► pp. 668 ff.
Hoot, Bradley, Tania Leal & Emilie Destruel
2020. Object focus marking in Spanish: An investigation using three tasks. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 5:1
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 26 december 2024. 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.