Differential Object Marking in Spanish, Hindi and Romanian Heritage Speakers

西班牙语、印地语和罗马尼亚传统语言使用者的差异对象标记

• 批准号: 0917593
• 负责人: Silvina Montrul
• 金额: $ 30.34万
• 依托单位: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-08-15 至 2013-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0917593&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Differential; Object; Marking; Spanish; Hindi

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Heritage speakers are adults who grew up hearing and even speaking a language other English but who are now more comfortable in English. Recent studies of heritage speakers have documented incomplete acquisition of aspects of inflectional morphology and syntax. This project investigates heritage languages as linguistic systems in their own right and their accompanying patterns of incomplete acquisition. The research questions addressed are 1) Which specific aspects of a native speaker's full grammar are systematically affected under incomplete acquisition and 2) What language-internal and language-external factors contribute to the vulnerability of particular grammatical features? The project investigates these questions with respect to the domain of Differential Object Marking (DOM): the overt morphological marking of some direct objects. Previous results demonstrate the fragility of DOM and dative case marking in Spanish heritage speakers. This research will study DOM in Spanish, Hindi and Romanian heritage speakers. These three languages were chosen because the salience of the DOM marker varies: it is a vocalic preposition in Spanish (a), a syllabic preposition in Romanian (pe), and a syllabic post-position in Hindi (-ko). The project will test the hypothesis that the acoustic salience of the object marker contributes to its erosion or retention in these heritage languages. Experimental data will be collected from native speakers with full command of the language, and heritage speakers of each language who were born in or immigrated to the United States in childhood. Extensive language background questionnaires and oral/written production, comprehension and grammaticality judgment tasks will be used. The study is one of the first theoretically informed large-scale investigations of the acquisition of DOM in different heritage languages, and the first study on Hindi and Romanian heritage speakers. Since the experimental design includes a sizable number of fluent native speakers of Spanish, Hindi and Romanian, the results will also add to existing studies of DOM.This research will impact Spanish, Hindi and Romanian linguistics, and linguistic theory in general. More centrally, it will have theoretical implications for first language acquisition and language maintenance/loss in bilingual settings. It will shed light on the range of early bilingual acquisition as a function of age and linguistic environment. It will provide information on how age of second language acquisition affects linguistic competence in heritage language speakers. Most importantly, by identifying what heritage speakers retain from childhood, what biographical factors contribute to language maintenance, as well as potential linguistic gaps in their knowledge, the results will inform the teaching of heritage languages. Heritage language instruction is a new field in urgent need of solid basic research findings from which to build sound pedagogical materials.

该奖项是根据2009年《美国复苏和再投资法案》(Public Law 111-5)资助的。传承人是成年人，他们从小就听甚至说英语以外的语言，但现在用英语更自如。最近对遗产说话者的研究记录了对屈折词法和句法方面的不完整习得。本项目调查作为语言系统的遗产语言本身及其伴随的不完全习得模式。研究问题包括：1)本族语者完整语法的哪些具体方面在不完全习得下受到系统性的影响；2)哪些语言内部和语言外部因素导致了特定语法特征的脆弱性？该项目针对差异对象标记(DOM)领域中的这些问题进行了研究：一些直接对象的显式形态标记。以前的结果表明，在西班牙语传统使用者中，DOM和与格标记是脆弱的。这项研究将研究说西班牙语、印地语和罗马尼亚语的DOM。之所以选择这三种语言，是因为DOM标记的突出程度各不相同：西班牙语中的发音介词(A)，罗马尼亚语中的音节介词(Pe)，以及印地语中的音节后置位置(-ko)。该项目将检验这样一种假设，即对象标记的声学突显有助于其在这些传统语言中的侵蚀或保留。实验数据将从完全掌握这种语言的母语者和童年时期在美国出生或移民到美国的每种语言的传统使用者那里收集。将使用广泛的语言背景调查问卷和口头/书面产出、理解和语法判断任务。这项研究是关于以不同的遗产语言获得DOM的第一次理论上知情的大规模调查之一，也是第一次对说印地语和罗马尼亚遗产的人进行的研究。由于实验设计包括相当数量的以西班牙语、印地语和罗马尼亚语为母语的流利的人，这一结果也将增加对DOM的现有研究。这项研究将影响西班牙语、印地语和罗马尼亚语语言学，以及整个语言学理论。更重要的是，它将对双语环境下的第一语言习得和语言维持/丧失产生理论上的影响。它将阐明早期双语习得的范围随着年龄和语言环境的变化而变化。它将提供有关第二语言习得年龄如何影响说传统语言的人的语言能力的信息。最重要的是，通过确定说话者从小保留了哪些遗产，哪些传记因素有助于保持语言，以及他们的知识中可能存在的语言差距，结果将为遗产语言的教学提供信息。遗产语言教学是一个新的领域，迫切需要扎实的基础研究成果，以建立健全的教学材料。