Word Order in Complex Verb Phrases in Heritage Polish Spoken in Germany

Languages

Bernhard Brehmer¹  Aldona Sopata² 

[1] Department of Linguistics, University of Konstanz, 78464 Konstanz, Germany;Institute of Applied Linguistics, Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań, 61-712 Poznań, Poland;

关键词: heritage linguistics;    Polish;    German;    word order;    cross-linguistic influence;    simultaneous bilinguals;   

DOI  :  10.3390/languages6020070

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

This paper deals with word order in complex verb phrases consisting of auxiliaries and infinitive complements in heritage Polish. In Polish, infinitive complements normally follow auxiliaries, but discontinuous structures occur if required by the information structure. We investigate the occurrence and evaluation of adjacent and discontinuous word order patterns in relation to (a) the chronological age at testing and (b) the age of onset of the acquisition of the majority language, German. Therefore, we distinguish between simultaneous bilinguals (2L1, n = 61), early sequential bilinguals (cL2, n = 41) and an age-matched monolingual control group (ML, n = 50). The data consist of elicited oral narratives as well as acceptability judgments. We found that both 2L1 and cL2 bilinguals differ from the ML, but the difference depends on the age at testing and the type of data (oral production or evaluation). While 2L1 bilinguals show a u-curve development, which is shaped by the interplay of delayed acquisition in childhood and attrition in early adulthood, cL2 bilinguals started to prefer discontinuous structures rather early. Only in adulthood do both groups converge and exhibit an overuse and over-acceptance of discontinuous structures compared to the ML, which is due to cross-linguistic influence from German. However, language-internal factors (such as clause structure) also turned out to impact the distribution of adjacent and discontinuous structures in heritage (and monolingual) Polish.

【 授权许可】

Unknown