A Rare Structure at the Syntax-Discourse Interface: Heritage and Spanish-Dominant Native Speakers Weigh In

Abstract

The present study examines knowledge of the discourse-appropriateness of Clitic Right Dislocation (CLRD) in a population of Heritage (HS) and Spanish-dominant Native Speakers in order to test the predictions of the Interface Hypothesis (IH; Sorace 2011). The IH predicts that speakers in language contact situations will experience difficulties with integrating information involving the interface of syntax and discourse modules. CLRD relates a dislocated constituent to a discourse antecedent, requiring integration of syntax and pragmatics. Results from an acceptability judgment task did not support the predictions of the IH. No statistical differences between the HSs’ performance and that of L1-dominant native speakers were evidenced when participants were presented with an offline task. Thus, our study did not find any evidence of “incomplete acquisition” (Montrul 2008) as it pertains to this specific linguistic structure.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to the editor and the reviewers for their thoughtful comments. We are also grateful to Luis López and Paula Kempchinsky. Our article benefited greatly from their judgments and comments. All errors are our own.

Notes

¹ As Domínguez (2007) notes, these restrictions (as well as other characteristics of the input) vary from child to child and may also depend on linguistic and nonlinguistic factors, including the language of the parents and siblings, preference in the use of a certain language, etc.

² Moreover, Carreira & Potowski (2011) underscore that HS-L2 learner juxtapositions should never be overall comparisons, but should be made for specific areas of grammar and tasks.

³ An anonymous reviewer rightly notes that “different” as opposed to “incomplete” is a matter of perspective. For example, for administrators/teachers who must comply with standards for education or employment, HSs’ language may be viewed as “incomplete” rather than simply “different.” While we acknowledge that this must, unfortunately, be the case for a sector of the population, we believe that from the point of view of descriptive and applied linguistics, “complying with a standard” should not be our starting point by default.

⁴ There has been substantial debate regarding the difficulty of determining which modules (and thus, interfaces) are involved in any given linguistic structure (see Montrul 2011 for an elaborate critique). We agree with Montrul (2011) that this is not a negligible problem. Sorace (2011) acknowledges this point herself, albeit without providing an alternative solution besides calling for additional research. Indeed, determining which interfaces are involved should be ascertained a priori, if the hypothesis is to be testable (see Gürel 2011). While we agree with the spirit of this critique, we believe that the methodology used to test the hypothesis can alleviate some of these concerns. For example, while CLRD involves agreement (therefore, it could be argued, the morphology-syntax interface), we do not test agreement per se. A production task could, at least in principle, conflate these factors.

⁵ We direct the reader to Sedano (2006) for the specific argumentation.

⁶ Given that López (2009) conjectured that CLRD might not be part of Mexican Spanish, we performed statistical tests (two-way repeated measure ANOVAs) in order to determine whether the Mexican Spanish speakers performed differently from the rest of the L1-dominant native Spanish speakers. We found no statistical differences between the Mexican group and the group including the rest of the L1-dominant native speakers. For this reason, we report the results of the L1-dominant native group as a whole.

⁷ Our materials included only third person accusative clitics, singular and plural (lo, la, los, las), because first and second person clitics (me, te, se, nos, os) overlap in form with the dative and reflexive clitics.

⁸ We did not include Peninsular Spanish L1-dominant native speakers because we predicted that HSs would be less familiar with them. In the background questionnaire, only one HS reported having a family member from Spain.

⁹ English translation by Margaret Jull Costa (Marías 2006).

¹⁰ Ten more lines of text intervene where the photo is referenced multiple times.