Word order and information structure in heritage and L2 Russian: Focus and unaccusativity effects in subject inversion

Abstract

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: The study’s main objective is to investigate the effects of information structure and verb type on the acceptability of canonical and non-canonical word order patterns in baseline, heritage, and L2 Russian in a controlled experimental setting. In particular, the study examines the bilinguals’ sensitivity to extralinguistic (subject focus) and intralinguistic (unaccusativity) triggers of subject–verb inversion in Russian. Design/methodology/approach: The study employs a contextualized acceptability judgment task with unaccusative, unergative, and transitive predicates. In each condition, ratings for SV(O) and (O)VS structures are elicited in broad-focus and narrow-subject-focus contexts. Data and analysis: Data come from adult English-Russian bilinguals: heritage speakers at two proficiency levels ( n = 27) and L2 learners ( n = 15), compared to monolingual Russian speakers ( n = 15). Welch’s unequal variances t-tests are utilized in the statistical analysis of the results. Findings/conclusions: Bilinguals generally under-accept inverted structures. With intransitive predicates, heritage speakers in the higher proficiency group are sensitive to the effects of unaccusativity, but not focus, on the occurrence of VS orders. However, with transitive predicates, higher proficiency heritage speakers demonstrate a target-like contrast in their ratings of OVS structures under broad and narrow focus. No clear effects of unaccusativity or focus are attested in the lower proficiency heritage or L2 speakers’ judgments of inverted orders. Originality: This is the first study to compare the effects of unaccusativity and focus on word order variation in baseline, heritage, and L2 Russian and to examine subject focus in both intransitive and transitive structures. Significance/Implications: The differential effects of subject focus obtained in the intransitive and transitive conditions indicate that heritage speakers do not experience a generalized difficulty with information-structure marking through word order. While intralinguistic word order cues seem more accessible to early bilinguals than extralinguistic cues, heritage speakers are able to attend to the latter when their visibility is enhanced in discourse.

Resilience and vulnerability of discourse-conditioned word order in heritage Spanish

“…To test for "intergenerational attrition," we compared the results of our baseline speakers to those of monolingual Mexican Spanish speakers reported previously , 2022. We find no evidence suggesting that baseline speakers differed from monolingual Spanish speakers for any of the phenomena we report here.…”

“…However, in the judgment experiment, object-final VPPO was more likely to be chosen under object focus than under PP focus, an effect consistent with an association between focus and final position, and which cannot be explained by transfer from English, in which VPPO is largely ungrammatical (excepting heavy NP-shift, see note 1). Furthermore, the advantage in processing canonical orders is not unique to the heritage speakers: both the baseline speakers and a monolingual group we previously examined , 2022 show the same strong preference for canonical orders, which cannot be the result of transfer from English (at least for the monolinguals).…”

“…First, we compared baseline speakers' results to those of monolingual Mexican Spanish speakers previously reported , 2022. We find no evidence suggesting the baseline speakers differ from monolingual Spanish speakers.…”

“…Following Gutiérrez-Bravo (2020), we avoided V-initial sentences by embedding them inside a carrier phrase. To ensure that the theta roles were not predictable, subjects and objects were both [human] DPs, and we first designed a norming task that tested plausibility and reversibility of 54 lexicalizations (previously reported in , 2022. Of these, 32 were retained (8 per cell) and then distributed across four lists.…”

Russian heritage language development in narrative contexts: Evidence from pre- and primary-school children in Norway, Germany, and the UK

“…In the past two decades, a large number of studies have appeared around the world reporting data from child and adult heritage speakers of Russian with different societal majority languages (English, German, Hebrew, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Latvian, Spanish, and Dutch among others). Thus, to date there is considerable knowledge about the linguistic behavior and competence in RHL at early and later stages of language development (Dieser, 2009;Polinsky, and Maria., 2008;Laleko, 2010Laleko, , 2022Schwartz et al, 2015;Brehmer and Kurbangulova, 2017;Rodina, 2017;Gagarina et al, 2021;Krüger, 2021;Meir and Janssen, 2021;Otwinowska et al, 2021;among others). The available observations come primarily from specific case studies.…”