Is Structural Priming a Possible Mechanism of Language Change in Heritage Language Grammars?

Event Start Date: September 25, 2023 4:00 PM
Event End Date: September 25, 2023 5:00 PM

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Is Structural Priming a Possible Mechanism of Language Change in Heritage Language Grammars?
presentation by Dr. Silvina Montrul
Monday, September 25 | 4:00 pm | Pugh Hall 170

Is Structural Priming a Possible Mechanism of Language Change in Heritage Language Grammars? Some Evidence from Accusative Clitic Doubling in Spanish

Silvina Montrul
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

The language of heritage language speakers who are second generation immigrants is characterized by variability and structural innovations compared to the baseline grammars of first generation immigrants. Many factors contribute to these differences, including age of acquisition of the majority language, amount of input, exposure and use of the heritage language during childhood and adolescence, and limited to no literacy in the heritage language, among many others. At the linguistic level, structural variability is uneven, affecting certain linguistic domains (morphosyntax) more than others (phonology). Although transfer or crosslinguistic influence from the majority language on the minority language cannot be ruled out as an important factor shaping heritage grammars, in this talk I consider the potential role of structural priming with structures that do not exist in the majority language as a potential mechanism for language change at the individual level. I focus on accusative clitic doubling (the co-occurrence of an object NP and a referring clitic in the same clause) as in (1), because this is a variable feature present in some Spanish varieties (Perú, Rioplatense Spanish), but ungrammatical in others (Mexican, Peninsular Spanish), which only accept and use (2).

1 Lo vi a Juan en la pescadería.
[him] [I saw] [DOM] [Juan] [in] [the fish shop]
“I saw Juan at the fish shop.”

2 Vi a Juan en la pescadería
[I saw] [DOM] [Juan] [in] [the fish shop]
“I saw Juan at the fish shop.”

The research questions I address are 1) how flexible are the grammars of heritage speakers compared to baseline speakers? and 2) to what extent heritage speakers adopt grammars not present in the majority language but attested in the diachronic development and in other varieties of their heritage language? I will present results from off-line acceptability judgment experiments with clitic doubling and new results from ongoing experiments with structural priming in oral production, showing that 1) heritage speakers are more accepting of innovative structures than baseline speakers (i.e., their grammars are more flexible) and 2) they are more sensitive than baseline speakers to structural priming (i.e., they can consider structures present in other varieties).