The Syntax–Pragmatics Interface in Heritage Languages: The Use of anche (“Also”) in German Heritage Speakers of Italian

Abstract

This paper deals with the use of anche (“also”) by German heritage speakers of Italian (“IHSs”). Previous research showed that anche and its German counterpart auch share many features but also display language-specific characteristics. According to previous research on bilingualism, heritage speakers show cross-linguistic influence (“CLI”) when a linguistic phenomenon is at the syntax–pragmatics interface and there is a partial overlap in the two languages at stake. Therefore, we expect the use of anche in IHSs to be influenced by CLI. By analysing data from a semi-spontaneous corpus, we investigate the production of anche in order to understand which factors shape the grammar of the IHSs. Our results indicate that a subset of IHSs uses anche in the same way as in homeland Italian. The other informants display CLI effects of different types: on the one hand, they have two positions in the clausal structure for anche dedicated to different syntactic–pragmatic contexts, as in German, and they overextend the use of anche as a modal particle. On the other hand, the intonational properties of anche are not affected by CLI.