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We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on equal grounds. We targeted comparable language use in bilingual and monolingual speakers, crucially covering broader repertoires than just formal language. A main database was the open-access RUEG corpus, which covers comparable informal vs. formal and spoken vs. written productions by adolescent and adult bilinguals with heritage-Greek, -Russian, and -Turkish in Germany and the United States and with heritage-German in the United States, and matching data from monolinguals in Germany, the United States, Greece, Russia, and Turkey. Our main results lie in three areas. (1) We found non-canonical patterns not only in bilingual, but also in monolingual speakers, including patterns that have so far been considered absent from native grammars, in domains of morphology, syntax, intonation, and pragmatics. (2) We found a degree of lexical and morphosyntactic inter-speaker variability in monolinguals that was sometimes higher than that of bilinguals, further challenging the model of the streamlined native speaker. (3) In majority language use, non-canonical patterns were dominant in spoken and/or informal registers, and this was true for monolinguals and bilinguals. In some cases, bilingual speakers were leading quantitatively. In heritage settings where the language was not part of formal schooling, we found tendencies of register leveling, presumably due to the fact that speakers had limited access to formal registers of the heritage language. Our findings thus indicate possible quantitative differences and different register distributions rather than distinct grammatical patterns in bilingual and monolingual speakers. This supports the integration of heritage speakers into the native-speaker continuum. Approaching heritage speakers from this perspective helps us to better understand the empirical data and can shed light on language variation and change in native grammars. Furthermore, our findings for monolinguals lead us to reconsider the state-of-the art on majority languages, given recurring evidence for non-canonical patterns that deviate from what has been assumed in the literature so far, and might have been attributed to bilingualism had we not included informal and spoken registers in monolinguals and bilinguals alike.

This paper traces the acquisition of case morphology and isolates taskstructure variables which influence the course of development. The central factors to be discussed belong to both the language periphery of German (fusion within the specifier system ofNPs, homonymy, degree of perceptual similarity, idiosyncracies) and complexities involving parameters and principles of core grammar (government, abstract case assignment, etc.). It is claimed that the learner constructs the morphological case system by searching for correlations across various linguistic subsystems. The relative straightforwardness with which individual cases correlate with formal grammatical principles turns out to be a reliable index of the difficulties encountered by the learner.

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Wege zur komplexen SyntaxGegenstand des Aufsatzes ist der Erwerb komplexer Satzstrukturen des Deutschen im Kindesalter. Es wird gezeigt, daß das Ausmaß interindividueller und intraindividueller Variation größer ist, als in der Spracherwerbsforschung bisher angenommen wurde. Auf der Grundlage jüngerer Entwicklungen in der Syntaxtheorie werden einige einfache Prinzipien identifiziert, die für diese Variation und die jeweiligen Erwerbsverläufe verantwortlich gemacht werden können. Dabei wird versucht, eine Perspektive zu entwickeln, innerhalb derer linguistische Theorie und Spracherwerbsforschung empirisch relevant aufeinander bezogen werden können.Ja dd bügelbrett war da gestanden und da hab ich runter des geschmeißt da war hoffentlich kein ding da drauf wo tut man bügeln und is nich kaputtgegang. (Benny 3;9.12: Schilderung eines komplexen Tathergangs)