Chapter 2 Ultimate attainment in long-immersed heritage Italian immigrants: Syntactic and semantic knowledge of direct object clitics and partitive ne
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Pedro Guijarro Fuentes
Abstract
Previous studies on heritage language attrition indicate that being ex - posed to an L2 may have an impact on certain L1 features. Effect incidence levels depend, among other factors, on language competence and grammatical properties. Even if the topic has caught some scholarly attention in recent years, to date, how syntactic complexity may affect morphosyntactic knowledge structures has not been amply investigated. The main purpose of this chapter is to study whether, with unlike to interpretable (i.e., semantic) features, which have been proposed to be a locus of instability, uninterpretable (i.e., syntactic) features are less susceptible to heritage language attrition, and easier to acquire in the L2. To that end, this study investigated knowledge of direct object clitics and partitive ne in Italian in a range of pronominalization direct object constructions in first generation heritage Italian immigrants with considerable exposure to Spanish, that is, those who have been living in Spain for more than five years. Participants were administered, in both Italian and Spanish, a 70-item grammaticality judgement task that contained items with varying degrees of specificity, definiteness, and syntactic complexity. Results were compared to those of L1 (monolingual) Italian and L1 Spanish speakers. In addition, they completed a detailed ethnolinguistic questionnaire in which they were asked to specify their linguistic experience as well as a Spanish and/or Italian overall proficiency test. Results showed that Spanish monolingual speakers’ performance remained in line with the overall expectations and that first-generation heritage speakers of Italian performed like the L1 Spanish group for both semantic and syntactic features, which proved that syntactical representation and semantic knowledge had been fully acquired. Additionally, L2 exposure did not seem to influence the L1, since first-generation heritage participants’ results mirrored those of monolingual Italian speakers when judging the impossibility of object drop. These findings reveal that first-generation heritage Italian immigrants do not show instances of attrition in relation to the linguistic phenomenon under study, which has a direct impact on the “ unaltered” linguistic input that firstgeneration heritage speakers of Italian within this context may receive.
Abstract
Previous studies on heritage language attrition indicate that being ex - posed to an L2 may have an impact on certain L1 features. Effect incidence levels depend, among other factors, on language competence and grammatical properties. Even if the topic has caught some scholarly attention in recent years, to date, how syntactic complexity may affect morphosyntactic knowledge structures has not been amply investigated. The main purpose of this chapter is to study whether, with unlike to interpretable (i.e., semantic) features, which have been proposed to be a locus of instability, uninterpretable (i.e., syntactic) features are less susceptible to heritage language attrition, and easier to acquire in the L2. To that end, this study investigated knowledge of direct object clitics and partitive ne in Italian in a range of pronominalization direct object constructions in first generation heritage Italian immigrants with considerable exposure to Spanish, that is, those who have been living in Spain for more than five years. Participants were administered, in both Italian and Spanish, a 70-item grammaticality judgement task that contained items with varying degrees of specificity, definiteness, and syntactic complexity. Results were compared to those of L1 (monolingual) Italian and L1 Spanish speakers. In addition, they completed a detailed ethnolinguistic questionnaire in which they were asked to specify their linguistic experience as well as a Spanish and/or Italian overall proficiency test. Results showed that Spanish monolingual speakers’ performance remained in line with the overall expectations and that first-generation heritage speakers of Italian performed like the L1 Spanish group for both semantic and syntactic features, which proved that syntactical representation and semantic knowledge had been fully acquired. Additionally, L2 exposure did not seem to influence the L1, since first-generation heritage participants’ results mirrored those of monolingual Italian speakers when judging the impossibility of object drop. These findings reveal that first-generation heritage Italian immigrants do not show instances of attrition in relation to the linguistic phenomenon under study, which has a direct impact on the “ unaltered” linguistic input that firstgeneration heritage speakers of Italian within this context may receive.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments VII
- Contents IX
- List of figures XI
- List of tables XIII
- Introduction 1
- Chapter 1 Heritage language development: Dominant language transfer and the sociopolitical context 5
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Part I: Experimental studies
- Chapter 2 Ultimate attainment in long-immersed heritage Italian immigrants: Syntactic and semantic knowledge of direct object clitics and partitive ne 33
- Chapter 3 Grammatical competence in adult heritage speakers of Italian and adult immigrants: A comparative study 65
- Chapter 4 Ultimate attainment of gender in heritage and L2 Italian 95
- Chapter 5 Auxiliary selection in heritage speakers of Italian 127
- Chapter 6 The acquisition of syntactic structures in heritage Italian: Assessing the role of language exposure at critical periods 155
- Chapter 7 The expression of (deontic and epistemic) modality in Italian as heritage language in Germany 195
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Part II: Observational studies
- Chapter 8 Italian as heritage language in third generations on social networks: Morphosyntactic code-switching features 231
- Chapter 9 Discourse markers in heritage Italian spoken in Flanders 255
- Chapter 10 Auxiliary selection in Italo-Romance heritage languages: Argentina and the UK 289
- Conclusion and future directions 321
- Index 325
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments VII
- Contents IX
- List of figures XI
- List of tables XIII
- Introduction 1
- Chapter 1 Heritage language development: Dominant language transfer and the sociopolitical context 5
-
Part I: Experimental studies
- Chapter 2 Ultimate attainment in long-immersed heritage Italian immigrants: Syntactic and semantic knowledge of direct object clitics and partitive ne 33
- Chapter 3 Grammatical competence in adult heritage speakers of Italian and adult immigrants: A comparative study 65
- Chapter 4 Ultimate attainment of gender in heritage and L2 Italian 95
- Chapter 5 Auxiliary selection in heritage speakers of Italian 127
- Chapter 6 The acquisition of syntactic structures in heritage Italian: Assessing the role of language exposure at critical periods 155
- Chapter 7 The expression of (deontic and epistemic) modality in Italian as heritage language in Germany 195
-
Part II: Observational studies
- Chapter 8 Italian as heritage language in third generations on social networks: Morphosyntactic code-switching features 231
- Chapter 9 Discourse markers in heritage Italian spoken in Flanders 255
- Chapter 10 Auxiliary selection in Italo-Romance heritage languages: Argentina and the UK 289
- Conclusion and future directions 321
- Index 325
