Heritage speaker competence differences, language change and input type: inflected infinitives in Heritage Brazilian Portuguese

Rothman, J. (2007) Heritage speaker competence differences, language change and input type: inflected infinitives in Heritage Brazilian Portuguese. International Journal of Bilingualism, 11 (4). pp. 359-389. ISSN 1756-6878 doi: 10.1177/13670069070110040201

Abstract/Summary

It has been argued that colloquial dialects of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) have undergone significant linguistic change resulting in the loss of inflected infinitives (e.g., Pires, 2002, 2006). Since BP adults, at least educated ones, have complete knowledge of inflected infinitives, the implicit claim is that they are transmitted via formal education in the standard dialect. In the present article, I test one of the latent predictions of such claims; namely, the fact that heritage speakers of BP who lack formal education in the standard dialect should never develop native-like knowledge of inflected infinitives. In doing so, I highlight two significant implications (a) that heritage speaker grammars are a good source for testing dialectal variation and language change proposals and (b) incomplete acquisition and/or attrition are not the only sources of heritage language competence differences. Employing the syntactic and semantic tests of Rothman and Iverson (2007), I compare heritage speakers' knowledge to Rothman and Iverson's advanced adult L2 learners and educated native controls. Unlike the latter groups, the data for heritage speakers indicate that they do not have target knowledge of inflected infinitives, lending support to Pires' claims, suggesting that literacy plays a significant role in the acquisition of this grammatical property in BP.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/33091
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	No Reading authors. Back catalogue items Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Clinical Language Sciences Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Language and Cognition
Uncontrolled Keywords	heritage speakers, inflected infinitives, language change
Publisher	Sage
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