Discourse-sensitive clitic-doubled dislocations in heritage Spanish

• Published in: Lingua 2015-02, Vol.155, p.85-97
• Main Authors: Leal Méndez, Tania, Rothman, Jason, Slabakova, Roumyana
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Clitics; Heritage speakers; Interface hypothesis; Spanish; Syntax-discourse
• ISSN: 0024-3841; 1872-6135
• DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2014.01.002

•The CLLD construction relates a dislocated, clitic-doubled object to a discourse antecedent.•The appropriateness of this construction depends on monitoring discourse information.•Monolingual, bilingual natives, intermediate and advanced heritage speakers participated.•Neither attrition nor competence divergence among all groups were attested. This experimental study tests the predictions of the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011, 2012) using two constructions whose appropriateness depends on monitoring discourse information: Clitic Left Dislocation and Fronted Focus. Clitic Left Dislocation relates a dislocated and clitic-doubled object to an antecedent activated in previous discourse, while Fronted Focus does not relate the fronted constituent to a discourse antecedent. The Interface Hypothesis argues that speakers in language contact situations experience difficulties when they have to integrate syntactic with discourse information. We tested four groups of native speakers on these constructions: Spanish monolinguals, bilinguals with more than 7 years residence in the US, intermediate and advanced proficiency heritage speakers. Our findings suggest that attrition has not set in the adult L2 bilingual speakers, and that the heritage speakers perform similarly to the monolingual and the adult sequential bilingual natives.