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Morphosyntactic knowledge of clitics by Portuguese heritage bilinguals*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2014

ESTHER RINKE  and
CRISTINA FLORES
ESTHER RINKE*
Affiliation:
Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany
CRISTINA FLORES
Affiliation:
University of Minho, Portugal
*
Address for correspondence: Prof. Dr. Esther Rinke, Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Institut für romanische Sprachen und Literaturen, Grüneburgplatz 1, 60629 FrankfurtEsther.rinke@em.uni-frankfurt.de
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Abstract

This paper focuses on the linguistic competence of adult Portuguese–German bilinguals in their heritage language, European Portuguese (EP), which they acquired at home in early childhood in the context of German as the majority language. Based on a grammaticality judgment test, we investigate their morphosyntactic knowledge of clitics. The central questions are whether possible deviations from native monolinguals may be traced back to a) lack of contact with the formal register; b) reduced input after preschool age; and c) cross-linguistic influence. The results reveal qualitative differences between the heritage speakers and a group of monolingual controls in almost all test conditions. We conclude that although the linguistic knowledge of the heritage bilinguals investigated in this study differs from that of monolinguals, it is not “deficient” but “different” and “innovative”, because it is primarily based on the spoken variety of the language and because it promotes linguistic changes which are inherent in the speech of native monolinguals.

Keywords

cliticsEuropean Portuguesebilingual language acquisitionheritage speakers
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , October 2014 , pp. 681 - 699
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

This research was supported by a Portuguese–German cooperation grant, funded by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) and the CRUP (Council of Portuguese Universities) [grant numbers 50097448 and A-18/10 AI-A/09]. We would like to thank Pilar Barbosa and Tanja Kupisch for their help in preparing the tests.

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