Over, Under and Around: Spanish Heritage Speakers’ Production (and Avoidance) of Subjunctive Mood

Abstract

The present study explores the subjunctive mood production of 29 heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish (17 advanced proficiency and 12 intermediate proficiency) and 14 Spanish-dominant controls (SDCs). All participants completed a Contextualized Elicited Production Task (CEPT), which tested their oral production of both lexically-selected (intensional) and contextually-selected (polarity) mood morphology in Spanish. Between-group analyses of the CEPT reveal that the HSs diverge significantly from the SDCs in subjunctive production, specifically by underproducing, overproducing, and avoiding subjunctive mood morphology. Despite these differences, however, the HSs still exhibited sensitivity to mood, producing significantly more subjunctive mood in expected subjunctive contexts than in expected indicative contexts. Based on HSs’ knowledge of the subjunctive, which both resembles and also diverges from that of the SDCs, it is argued that categorizing HSs as having either acquired or not acquired mood in Spanish is descriptively and conceptually problematic.

The Late(r) Bird Gets the Verb? Effects of Age of Acquisition of English on Adult Heritage Speakers’ Knowledge of Subjunctive Mood in Spanish

“…Viner's study did not, however, test whether HSs' subjunctive production was affected by age-of-acquisition of English or Spanish-language proficiency, which was not tested independently. Giancaspro (2019), in the only other study to have tested HSs' knowledge of this property, reports similar variability, this time modulated by Spanish-language proficiency: Advanced-proficiency HSs, as classified by the DELE proficiency exam, produced subjunctive mood 88.9% of time with para que while intermediate-proficiency HSs produced subjunctive just 55.5% of the time in the same context, showing a markedly increased tendency to produce non-target indicative mood forms. Due to an unbalanced, and relatively small, sample size, Giancaspro (2019) was unable to evaluate potential effects of age-of-acquisition of English.…”

“…Viner (2018), working with the same corpus described in the previous paragraph, reports that first-generation immigrants produce subjunctive only 84% of the time in non-presuppositional ARCs, suggesting that indicative mood morphology is gaining ground, even for first-generation immigrants, in this particular context. Unlike Viner (2018), however, Giancaspro (2019), finds that the New Jersey first-generation immigrants mentioned in the previous paragraph produce subjunctive mood categorically (100%) in non-presuppositional ARCs. Based on these two studies, then, it seems apparent that first-generation immigrants, despite occasionally producing indicative mood in non-presuppositional ARCs, continue to exhibit a sensitivity to mood that is consistent with, if not identical to, the description presented in Section 1.1.…”

“…Viner (2016), in a corpus analysis of spontaneous speech, reports that first-generation immigrants living in New York (age of arrival: 16+ years) produce subjunctive 100% of the time with para que. Giancaspro (2019), who tested subjunctive mood knowledge with para que via an elicited production task, reports equally categorical subjunctive mood production (100%) by first-generation immigrants (age of arrival: 12+ years) living in New Jersey. On the basis of these two studies, it seems fair to conclude that in first-generation varieties of US Spanish, para que continues to obligatorily select for subjunctive mood morphology, as outlined above.…”

“…Non-presuppositional ARCs, as shown by Viner (2018) and Giancaspro (2019), are an even more prominent locus of variability in US heritage Spanish. Working with the same participant group described in the previous paragraph, Viner (2018) found that HSs amplify the variable input that they receive from first-generation immigrants, producing subjunctive mood in just 64% of non-presuppositional ARCs.…”

“…With this broader purpose in mind, the present study sets out to evaluate the role of two related factors-age of acquisition of the societal language (English) and heritage language proficiency-in shaping (adult) HSs' productive and receptive knowledge of mood morphology in Spanish. Though many recent studies (e.g., Giancaspro 2017Giancaspro , 2019Montrul 2009;Montrul and Perpiñán 2011;Van Osch and Sleeman 2018;Perez-Cortes 2016;Torres 2018;Viner 2016Viner , 2017Viner , 2018; inter alia) have investigated HSs' production and comprehension of subjunctive mood in Spanish, none of these studies (to my knowledge) has compared the subjunctive mood competence of HSs with earlier and later ages of acquisition of the societal language, respectively. Furthermore, out of the few previous studies (Giancaspro 2019;Montrul 2009;Montrul and Perpiñán 2011;Perez-Cortes 2016) that have tested the impact of Spanish proficiency on HSs' subjunctive knowledge, none that I am aware of has controlled for participants' age of acquisition of English, raising questions about whether the proficiency effects that have been observed are driven (at least in part) by this second variable.…”