Volume 24, Issue 3

Romanica Cracoviensia

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Description

The publication of this volume was financed by the Jagiellonian University in Kraków – Faculty of Philology of the Jagiellonian University.

Cover design: Dorota Heliasz

Licence: CC BY

Editorial team

Editor of issue 3 Alexandru Mardale

Editor-in-Chief Wacław Rapak

Deputy Editor-in-Chief Jakub Kornhauser, Tomasz Krupa

Issue content

Heritage languages are not weak! How bilinguals benefit from language diversity

Laia Arnaus Gil, Johanna Stahnke, Isabel Silva Colaco, Natascha Müller

Romanica Cracoviensia, Volume 24, Issue 3, First view

Bilingual children’s first two languages are often characterized as majority languages (ML) and heritage (HL) languages, since they can develop in a different pace: the HL becomes the ‘weak’ language with increasing age, especially when time outside the family increases. Our study compares longitudinal data of seven French-German/Italian children (age range 1;4-5;4) who acquire French as an HL or ML with the respective groups of monolingual peers. Language competence was assessed via MLU. The main results are: Surprisingly, HL French develops similarly to ML French and monolingual French. By contrast, German and Italian as HLs develop less target-like than their monolingual peers and as ML languages. We explain these results on the basis of language diversity and variety of contacts.

Langues d’héritage – traits généraux et tendances de développement. Le cas du roumain d’héritage parlé en France

Larisa Avram, Alexandru Mardale, Elena Soare

Romanica Cracoviensia, Volume 24, Issue 3, First view

This article addresses the significance of studying heritage languages in Europe, as well as their general developmental trends, offering the example of heritage Romanian spoken in France. We present in particular some results of a project (International Research Network), funded by CNRS and conducted in France since 2020. This involves a situation of linguistic contact where both languages - the dominant language and the heritage language - are Romance languages. The studies undertaken within the framework of this project focus on the syntax and morphology of heritage Romanian in school-age children (6-14 years old), and document the existence of vulnerability points particularly at the syntax-morphology and syntax-discourse interfaces. We discuss here the results concerning case marking and differential object marking.

A Non-Deficit Perspective on Heritage Language Acquisition: The Case of Portuguese

Acrisio Pires, Cecilia Solís-Barroso

Romanica Cracoviensia, Volume 24, Issue 3, First view

This paper reviews findings of some studies of heritage Portuguese bilingualism (both European and Brazilian Portuguese), with a focus on morphosyntax, and reflects on some theoretical observations about heritage bilingualism. We conclude that there is mostly successful heritage language acquisition among the heritage speakers considered in each study, although one can still observe variability depending on the linguistic phenomenon, similarly to what happens in other speaker communities. The picture emerging from these studies indicates that there is no overarching trend towards incomplete acquisition, reduced ‘complexity’ or simplification across linguistic domains. This is particularly relevant regarding appeal to incomplete acquisition, given that it is not possible to apply such a concept formally and epistemologically, because one cannot define deterministically what counts as a complete grammatical system (Pires 2011).

Complex Knowledge of Complex Sentences: A Review of Passives in Heritage Spanish

Silvina Montrul

Romanica Cracoviensia, Volume 24, Issue 3, First view

Passive sentences in Spanish come in different varieties and present complexity at the syntactic, semantic and morphological level. This study reviews research showing that child and adult heritage speakers of Spanish develop basic knowledge of these complex sentences early on, even when these are not very frequent in spoken input, but they may be less efficient than baseline speakers interpreting different word orders, gender agreement, the semantics of the by-phrase, and the aspectual interpretation of the copulas ser and estar. Accuracy with the production and comprehension of passives is related to proficiency in the heritage language, and literacy experience enhances the acquisition of all the complexities of verbal passives in Spanish

On the early acquisition of (null) subjects in Catalan as a heritage language

Laia Arnaus Gil, Amelia Jiménez-Gaspar

Romanica Cracoviensia, Volume 24, Issue 3, First view

Languages vary as to whether subjects must be overtly expressed. Much research has focused on how this phenomenon is acquired by monolingual and simultaneous bilingual children. For the latter, numerous studies have examined the acquisition of (null) subjects in Romance-English bilingual children. Just a few studies have considered the simultaneous acquisition of German and Spanish/Catalan, the former being recently described as a partial and the latter as consistent null subject languages. Our results with thirty Catalan-German children (Ø 5;8) living in Germany indicate that null subject rates, on average, are similar to the monolingual group and are independent of language dominance. Results on (a) subject type, position and (b) age, language dominance, HL-proficiency are examined.

Overt pronouns are challenging: subject realization in written narratives of Portuguese-French bilingual school-age children

Cristina Flores, Esther Rinke

Romanica Cracoviensia, Volume 24, Issue 3, First view

This paper examines the use of referential expressions in the subject position in European Portuguese (EP) in a corpus of narratives written by two groups of Portuguese-speaking school-age children: monolingually-raised children living in Portugal and bilingual French-Portuguese children living in Switzerland. We focus on the children's choice of null and overt subjects, considering both the syntactic context (inter- and intrasentential) and the pragmatic context (topic continuity and topic shift). Additionally, we explore potential age and proficiency effects within the group of bilinguals. Results show an overuse of overt pronouns in intersentential topic continuity contexts in the narratives of the bilingual children, modulated by proficiency and age. This confirms that potential changes to heritage language grammars in EP may affect, in particular, the use of overt subject pronouns. The overuse of strong pronouns reflects that their acquisition is challenging for monolingual and for bilingual children alike, probably due to the complexity and variability of overt subject pronouns in the adult grammar.

Perfective Auxiliary Selection in heritage Italo-Romance

Luigi Andriani, Roberta D’Alessandro

Romanica Cracoviensia, Volume 24, Issue 3, First view

This paper discusses two mechanisms of auxiliary selection (intransitive and person-driven splits) from heritage Italo-Romance varieties (Venetan, Abruzzese, and Apulo-Barese) in contact with Spanish, Portuguese, and English in the Americas. The data, obtained from 26 speakers through a completion task and integrated by spontaneous speech, present instances of auxiliary HAVE that diverge from baseline/homeland varieties. The article also presents some observations on phono-syntactic processes that may block or trigger change.

Słowa kluczowe: Heritage Language, Majority Language, Mean Length of Utterance, French, German, Italian, heritage language, Romance language, syntax, morphosyntax, case, differential object marking, heritage speakers, Brazilian Portuguese, Europe Portuguese, morphosyntax, acquisition, heritage speakers, Spanish, verbal passives, adjectival passives, literacy, Catalan as a heritage language, German, (null) subject property, null subjects, overt pronouns, syntactic context, pragmatic constraints, European Portuguese, heritage languages, Heritage Italo-Romance, Auxiliary Selection, Split Intransitivity, Person-driven Split

Funding information

The publication of this volume was financed by the Jagiellonian University in Kraków – Faculty of Philology of the Jagiellonian University.