Adverb placement among heritage speakers of Spanish

Self Cite

Adjectives appear predominantly postnominally in Spanish, and when prenominal, cannot be interpreted as restrictive. We explore whether heritage speakers of Spanish have the same interpretive and ordering restriction as monolinguals. Twenty-two US college-age heritage speakers and 17 college-age monolinguals from Peru completed a rating task that manipulated word order and interpretation. Items varied in word order (Adj-N/N-Adj) and interpretation (restrictive-only, color and nationality adjectives, and ambiguous adjectives, restrictive and non-restrictive), all framed within a context that favored a restrictive interpretation. Both groups judged Adj-N orders lower than N-Adj orders, and restrictive adjectives lower in prenominal position than ambiguous adjectives. Consequently, we argue that heritage speakers (HS) have the relevant knowledge regarding word order and interpretation, and the interactions among the two properties. We propose a syntactic representation involving NP-raising for both groups, and suggest that in some cases, the higher copy of the NP is deleted, resulting in the linear order Adj-N. We also argue that this analysis may explain the range of individual variation across heritage speakers.

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Interpretation of Adjective-N Sequences in Spanish Heritage

Camacho

2018

Self Cite

“…This word order in English requires do-support (7e); otherwise, it will result in being ungrammatical (7d). Camacho and Kirova (2018) argue that this is the result of negation blocking the affixlowering process.…”

Section: Tp Carlos [T [Come +T [Vp [Advp Tranquilamente] V [Dp Su Alm...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This word order in English requires do-support (7e); otherwise, it will result in being ungrammatical (7d). Camacho and Kirova (2018) Bearing these differences between English and Spanish in mind, we investigated the placement of two types of adverbs from the categories mentioned above: manner and frequency. The selection of these two types of adverbs was motivated by their word order in both languages.…”

Section: Tp Carlos [T [Come +T [Vp [Advp Tranquilamente] V [Dp Su Alm...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Distribution of Manner and Frequency Adverbs in Child Heritage Speakers of Spanish

Gómez Alzate,

Cuza,

Camacho

et al. 2023

Self Cite

We investigate the acquisition of adverb placement in Spanish among school-age child heritage speakers of Spanish born and raised in the US by Mexican parents. We examine frequency and manner adverbs with negative and positive polarity and the potential role of cross-linguistic influence, dominance, and experience in the path and rate of development. Fourteen child heritage speakers of Spanish born and raised in the US and twenty-five Spanish monolingual children from Mexico completed an elicited production task. Results showed that the heritage children produced significantly fewer verb-raising structures compared to the monolingual children, leading to a higher proportion of pre-verbal adverb use and adverb-final use. The heritage children treated manner and frequency adverbs with negative and positive polarity significantly differently. We also found a strong correlation between dominance and experience in the probability of producing specific adverbial positions. In other words, common adverbial positions in English were more likely to be produced with higher dominance and experience in English; likewise, Spanish adverbial positions were more likely to be used with higher dominance and experience in Spanish. We argue for differential outcomes in child heritage grammar due to differences in the path and rate of language development as well as the role of dominance and experience in child heritage language acquisition.

“…In order to show the conflicting evidence that previous studies offered, we focus on only two studies that yielded almost opposite results. Camacho and Kirova (2018) examined verb-adverb word order in American heritage speakers of Spanish by using an acceptability judgment and a selection task. The heritage speakers showed a higher preference for the adverb-verb-object order in affirmative sentences, which is consistent with both Spanish and English grammars, compared to the behavior of a monolingual control group in the same task.…”

Section: Word Order In Heritage Varieties Of Polish and Other Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Schlyter (1993) and Blom (2010), for instance, report that bilingual children who receive a very unbalanced input from both of their languages develop a weaker language that displays a slower rate of acquisition and is more prone to structural transfer from the stronger (in our case, the majority) language. CLI from the stronger language at this stage can be explained as a strategy to maximize bilingual compatibility in cases of properties that exhibit structural overlap: bilingual children prefer options that are compatible with the structural analysis of both of their languages, i.e., they resort to an economical solution (Camacho and Kirova 2018). The stronger language, however, develops at the same speed and in a similar way as in monolingual children.…”

Section: Age Of Onset Effects: Simultaneous Bilinguals Vs Early Sequential Bilinguals (Rq3)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Word Order in Complex Verb Phrases in Heritage Polish Spoken in Germany

Brehmer

Sopata

2021

This paper deals with word order in complex verb phrases consisting of auxiliaries and infinitive complements in heritage Polish. In Polish, infinitive complements normally follow auxiliaries, but discontinuous structures occur if required by the information structure. We investigate the occurrence and evaluation of adjacent and discontinuous word order patterns in relation to (a) the chronological age at testing and (b) the age of onset of the acquisition of the majority language, German. Therefore, we distinguish between simultaneous bilinguals (2L1, n = 61), early sequential bilinguals (cL2, n = 41) and an age-matched monolingual control group (ML, n = 50). The data consist of elicited oral narratives as well as acceptability judgments. We found that both 2L1 and cL2 bilinguals differ from the ML, but the difference depends on the age at testing and the type of data (oral production or evaluation). While 2L1 bilinguals show a u-curve development, which is shaped by the interplay of delayed acquisition in childhood and attrition in early adulthood, cL2 bilinguals started to prefer discontinuous structures rather early. Only in adulthood do both groups converge and exhibit an overuse and over-acceptance of discontinuous structures compared to the ML, which is due to cross-linguistic influence from German. However, language-internal factors (such as clause structure) also turned out to impact the distribution of adjacent and discontinuous structures in heritage (and monolingual) Polish.