This article brings to light an important variable involved in explaining a type of competence divergence in an instance of bilingual acquisition: heritage speaker (HS) bilingualism. We present results of experiments with European Portuguese (EP) heritage speakers (HSs), showing that they have full morpho-syntactic and semantic competence of inflected infinitives, similar to EP monolinguals. We show this constitutes clear evidence of competence mismatches between heritage speakers of European and Brazilian Portuguese, comparing our results to Rothman’s (2007) experimental evidence that Brazilian Portuguese (BP) heritage speakers lack knowledge of inflected infinitives. These comparative results are especially relevant because inflected infinitives were argued (Pires, 2002, 2006) to have been lost in colloquial BP dialects, although educated monolinguals demonstrate target competence. Neither incomplete acquisition nor attrition hinders the acquisition of inflected infinitives by European Portuguese HSs, raising questions regarding

Abstract.  This paper investigates the syntax of clausal gerunds—a class of gerunds that can have either a null subject or an overt DP Case‐marked with accusative or nominative. First, it addresses the difficulty of accounting for gerunds that allow both null and overt subjects in principles and parameters/minimalist approaches to Case and control. Second, the paper explores the existence of a common structure for the two clausal gerunds, supported by the absence of empirical distinctions in their feature specification, especially regarding tense. Third, the paper introduces new observations about the distribution of clausal gerunds and argues that the complex alternations and restrictions on their distribution results from the interaction between Case and Agreement valuation, the limited possibility of A‐movement out of a clausal gerund, and convergence considerations resulting from the existence of distinct numerations.

This study contributes to a central debate within contemporary generative second language (L2) theorizing: the extent to which adult learners are (un)able to acquire new functional features that result in a L2 grammar that is mentally structured like the native target (see White, 2003). The adult acquisition of L2 nominal phi-features is explored, with focus on the syntactic and semantic reflexes in the related domain of adjective placement in two experimental groups: English-speaking intermediate (n= 21) and advanced (n= 24) learners of Spanish, as compared to a native-speaker control group (n= 15). Results show that, on some of the tasks, the intermediate L2 learners appear to have acquired the syntactic properties of the Spanish determiner phrase but, on other tasks, to show some delay with the semantic reflexes of prenominal and postnominal adjectives. Crucially, however, our data demonstrate full convergence by all advanced learners and thus provide evidence in contra the predictions of representational deficit accounts (e.g., Hawkins & Chan, 1997; Hawkins & Franceschina, 2004; Hawkins & Hattori, 2006).

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This paper explores ways to synthesize methods from generative linguistics and historical linguistics to develop explanatory criteria that need to be satisfied by different attempts to carry out syntactic reconstruction. It addresses various questions such as (i) the need to define exactly what it means to reconstruct a language; (ii) characterizing the formal entities that count as the basic elements in the analysis of the empirical evidence for syntactic reconstruction, and whether the units of analysis and the elements that need to be reconstructed are formal entities of the same kind; (iii) whether it is possible to establish general principles for reconstructing syntax; (iv) to which extent the methodology adopted for the reconstruction of other properties of a linguistic system can be applied successfully to the reconstruction of syntax; and (v) identifying methodological criteria to assess the success of a syntactic reconstruction, and devise empirical tests for the reconstruction model.