Linguistics Colloquium

March 3, 2022 | 3:30PM
1155 E 60th, Room 140C

Native Speakers, Interrupted

Differential Object Marking and Language Change in Heritage Languages

Silvina Montrul

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

 

The potential role of bilingual speakers in the process of historical language change has been widely entertained in linguistics. This talk is about how immigrants change their language, and whether there is continuous or broken transmission across generations. With novel empirical data from three immigrant languages in the United States, I show how heritage speakers (second-generation immigrants) drive morphosyntactic changes, when certain environmental characteristics are met. I present the final analysis of a major experimental research project investigating variability in the expression of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Hindi-, Spanish- and Romanian-speaking immigrants in the United States across generations as well as cross-generational data from native speakers in the homeland. I consider the relationship between social and cognitive factors and timing in language acquisition, bilingualism, and language change. I argue that the changes observed in the grammars of heritage speakers, such as omission of DOM in required contexts, are unlikely directly transmitted by first-generation immigrants. Rather, heritage speakers may reinforce, and even drive, incipient attrition in the parental generation.