The Restructuring of Inflectional Morphology in Heritage ...

[Pages:37]The Restructuring of Inflectional Morphology in Heritage Georgian

Cass Lowry and LeeAnn S. Stevens The Graduate Center, CUNY

Eleventh Heritage Language Research Institute University of New Mexico 11 June 2019

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Heritage inflectional morphology

Benmamoun, Montrul & Polinsky (2013)

More Divergent

Case, Number, Gender, etc.

Nominal domain

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Object Agreement Subject Agreement Aspect Tense

Baseline language

11th Heritage Language Research Institute - Lowry & Stevens

Verbal domain

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Cross-linguistic evidence

? Nominal inflection > Verbal inflection

? Hindi (Montrul et al. 2012) ? Russian (Polinsky 2006) ? Hungarian (Fenyvesi 2000; de Groot 2005) ? Arabic (Albirini et al. 2013) ? Georgian ???

Baseline Georgian

man me

da-m-i-nax-a

3SG.ERG 1SG.NOM PRV-1-VER-see-3SG.PST

`She saw me.'

? Object agreement > Subject agreement

? Hungarian (Bolonyai 2007; Fenyvesi 2000, 2005) ? Georgian ???

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Heritage Georgian

Georgians Obtaining Lawful Permanent Resident Status by Year (1992-2015)

Number of New Residents

1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

? Relatively recent immigrant community in the US

? Heritage speakers are mostly children

2000 1800 1600 1400 1200 1000

800 600 400 200

0

1992

early 00's

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Year

U.S. Department of Homeland Security (2017)

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Heritage Georgian

? Relatively recent immigrant community in the US

? Heritage speakers are mostly children

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Montrul (2016)

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Present Study

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Research Questions

1) Does grammatical restructuring in Heritage Georgian follow the cross-linguistic cline observed in the HL literature?

Nominal Case > Object Agreement > Subject Agreement

2) What individual variables predict grammatical restructuring in child Georgian heritage speakers?

? Fluency? (e.g., Polinsky 2008) ? Lexical knowledge? (e.g., Polinsky 2006) ? Age?

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Participants

? 33 Georgian-Americans (Heritage Speakers) in Brooklyn, NYC

? 26 Early Arrival Ages 3;10-16;1 (M=8;7, SD=3;1)

? 21 born in the US ? 5 born in Georgia, age of arrival < 6 (M=3;5, SD=1;10)

? 7 Late Arrival Ages 9;8?24 (M=16;1, SD=5;9)

? born in Georgia, age of arrival 7-14 (M=9;3, SD=2;4)

? 30 Georgians in Tbilisi and Gori area

? Ages 5;5-14;2 (M=8;7, SD=2;6)

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