Cover not available
Article published In:
Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 31:2 (2018) ► pp.437–466

On focus and weight in Spanish as a heritage language

| University of Memphis
| University of Florida
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.
Keywords: Spanish as a heritage language, word order, syntax-pragmatics interface, End-Focus Principle, End-Weight Principle
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background information
    • 2.1Theoretical issues: End-Focus Principle and End-Weight Principle
    • 2.2Double object constructions: The dative alternation
    • 2.3Acquisition studies
    • 2.4Motivation and research questions
  • 3.The study
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Methodology
    • 3.3Results
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/resla.16021.gom
References
Amaral, L., & Roeper, T.
(2014) Multiple grammars and second language representation. Second Language Research, 30(1), 3–36. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Behaghel, O.
(1909/10) Beziehungen zwischen Umfang und Reihenfolge von Satzgliedern. Indogermanische Forschungen, 251, 110–142.Google Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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.Google Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bock, J. K.
(1986) Meaning, sound, and syntax: Lexical priming in sentence production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1241, 575–86.Google Scholar
(1987) An effect of the accessibility of word forms on sentence structures. Journal of Memory and Language, 261, 119–37. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bolinger, D.
(1954) Meaningful word order in Spanish. Boletín de Filología, 71, 45–56.Google Scholar
Carreira, M.
(2004) Seeking explanatory adequacy: A dual approach to understanding the term “heritage language learner”. Heritage Language Journal, 2(1), 1–25.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Choi, H. -W.
(2009) Ordering a left-branching language: Heaviness vs. givenness. Korean Society for Language and Information, 131, 39–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, N.
(1975) The logical structure of linguistic theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Cuervo, M. C.
(2003) Structural asymmetries but same word order: the dative alternation in Spanish. In A. M. Di Sciullo (Ed.), Asymmetry in grammar. Volume 1: Syntax and semantics (pp.117–144). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Demonte, V.
(1995) Dative alternation in Spanish. Probus, 71, 5–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Domínguez, L.
(2004) Mapping focus: the syntax and prosody of focus in Spanish. PhD Dissertation. Boston University.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Erteschik-Shir, N.
(2007) Information structure: The syntax-discourse interface. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fodor, J. A.
(1983) The modularity of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Firbas, J.
(1992) Functional sentence perspective in written and spoken communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Frazier, L., & Fodor, J. D.
(1978) The sausage machine: A two-stage parsing model. Cognition, 61, 291–325. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gibson, E.
(1997) Syntactic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cambridge, MA: MIT, MS.Google Scholar
Gómez Soler, I.
(2014) Beyond interfaces: Pragmatic development vs. syntactic deficiencies in the L2 acquisition of reverse psychological predicates. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 4(4), 494–525. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gundel, J. K., Hedberg, N., & Zacharski, R.
(1993) Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language, 691, 274–307. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, J. A.
(1990) A parsing theory of word order universals. Linguistic Inquiry, 211, 223–61.Google Scholar
(1994) A performance theory of word order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Heidinger, S.
(2013) Information focus, syntactic weight and postverbal constituent order in Spanish. Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics, 2(2), 159–190. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hoot, B.
(2012) Presentational focus in heritage and monolingual Spanish. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Illinois at Chicago.Google Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kayne, R.
(1984) Correctedness and binary branching. Dordrecht: Foris. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kimball, J.
(1973) Seven principles of surface structure parsing in natural language. Cognition, 21, 15–47. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Klein, W., & Perdue, C.
(1997) The basic variety (or: Couldn’t natural languages be much simpler?). Second Language Research, 13(4), 301–347. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leal Méndez, T., Rothman, J., & Slabakova, R.
(2015) Discourse-sensitive clitic-doubled dislocations in heritage Spanish. Lingua, 1551, 85–97. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leal, T., Destruel, E., & Hoot, B.
(2017) The realization of information focus in monolingual and bilingual native Spanish. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 8(2), 217-251. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
López, L.
(2009) A derivational syntax for information structure. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lozano, C., & Mendikoetxea, A.
(2010) Interface conditions on postverbal subjects: A corpus study of L2 English. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 13(4), 475–497. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Masullo, P. J.
(1992) Incorporation and case theory in Spanish: a cross-linguistic perspective. PhD dissertation, University of Washington.Google Scholar
Montrul, S.
(2004) Subject and object expression in Spanish heritage speakers: A case of morphosyntactic convergence. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 7(2), 125–142. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2008) Incomplete acquisition in bilingualism. Re-examining the age factor. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2010) Current issues in heritage language acquisition. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 30 1, 3-23.Google Scholar
(2016) The acquisition of heritage languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Montrul, S., & Polinsky, M.
(2011) Why not heritage speakers? Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1(1), 58–62. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Ortega-Santos, I.
(2016) Focus-related operations at the right edge in Spanish: Subjects and ellipsis (Vol. 71). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pascual y Cabo, D.
(2015) Issues in Spanish heritage morpho-syntax. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 8 (2), 389–401. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pascual y Cabo, D., & Rothman, J.
(2012) The (il)logical problem of heritage speaker bilingualism and incomplete acquisition. Applied Linguistics, 33 (4), 1–7.Google Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Parra, M. L.
(2016) Understanding identity among Spanish heritage learners. In D. Pascual y Cabo (Ed.), Advances in Spanish as a Heritage Language (pp.177–204). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2011) An integrated perspective on comparative bilingual differences. Beyond the interface problem? Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1(1), 74–78. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Polinsky, M., & Kagan, O.
(2007) Heritage languages: In the ‘wild’ and in the classroom. Language and Linguistics Compass, 11, 368–395. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Prince, E.
(1981) Towards a taxonomy of given-new information. In P. Cole (Ed.), Radical pragmatics (pp. 223–256). New York: Academic Press.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), 476–506. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pylkkänen, L.
(2002) Introducing arguments. PhD Dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J.
(1985) A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Rosenbach, A.
(2005) Animacy versus weight as determinants of grammatical variation in English. Language, 811, 613–644. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Romero, J.
(1997) Construcciones de doble objeto y gramática universal. PhD dissertation, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.Google Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Siewierska, A.
(1993) Syntactic weight vs information structure and word order variation in Polish. Journal of Linguistics, 291, 233–265. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(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.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Sorace, A., & Filiaci, F.
(2006) Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian. Second Language Research, 22(3), 339–368. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sorace, A.
(2011) Pinning down the concept of “interface” in bilingualism. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1(1), 1–33. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2012) Pinning down the concept of interface in bilingual development: A reply to peer commentaries. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 2(2), 209–217. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taboada, M.
(1995) Theme markedness in English and Spanish: A systemic-functional approach. Ms., Universidad Complutense de Madrid.Google Scholar
Thuilier, J.
(2012) Contraintes préférentielles et ordre des mots en français. PhD dissertation. Paris, Université Paris Diderot.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Toribio, J., & Nye, C.
(2006) Restructuring of reverse psychological predicate in bilingual Spanish. In J. Montreuil & C. Nishida (Eds.), New perspectives in Romance linguistics (pp. 263–277). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Uriagereka, J.
(1988) On government. PhD dissertation. University of Connecticut.Google Scholar
Valverde Ibáñez, M. d. P.
(2009) Descripción cuantitativa del orden de las funciones clausales argumentales en español. PhD dissertation. Universidad de Santiago de Compostela.Google Scholar
VanPatten, B.
(1996) Input processing and grammar instruction: Theory and research. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
(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.Google Scholar
Wasow, T.
(1997a) Remarks on grammatical weight. Language Variation and Change, 91, 81–105. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(1997b) End-weight from the speaker’s perspective. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 26(3), 347–361. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2002) Postverbal behavior. Stanford, CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
Zapata, G. C., Sánchez, L., & Toribio, A. J.
(2005) Contact and contracting Spanish. International Journal of Bilingualism, 9(3–4), 377–395. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zubizarreta, M. L.
(1998) Prosody, focus and word order. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

Hoot, Bradley & Tania Leal
2020. Processing subject focus across two Spanish varieties. Probus 32:1 ► pp. 93 ff. DOI logo
Hoot, Bradley & Tania Leal
2023. Resilience and vulnerability of discourse-conditioned word order in heritage Spanish. Applied Psycholinguistics 44:5 ► pp. 668 ff. DOI logo
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 DOI logo
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. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 10 november 2023. 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.