No abstract

In this paper, we test the L2 Status Factor (Bardel & Falk, 2007) by examining to what extent Dutch secondary school students (13–15 years) prefer L2 English over L1 Dutch in L3 French acquisition, and we study the influence of L2 education by comparing an English immersion curriculum vs. a regular Dutch curriculum. We investigate verb placement in declarative root clauses, viz. V-to-T movement, where the finite verb moves to T in French but not in English and V-to-C movement, in which the V2-rule applies in Dutch but not in French. We report data from a Grammaticality Judgement Task. The results indicate that in the immersion group there is significantly more influence from English than from Dutch. In the regular group, the L1 and the L2 are both important sources of transfer.

Purpose: This study investigates heritage speakers of Spanish in the Netherlands regarding their knowledge of Spanish mood. Previous research has demonstrated that heritage speakers of Spanish in the US have problems with mood, especially subjunctive mood and particularly in contexts where choice of mood is variable and depends on semantic and pragmatic factors. Moreover, heritage speakers are often reported to experience fewer problems with oral production tasks tapping into implicit knowledge than with judgment tasks targeting metalinguistic knowledge. This study aims to investigate whether these patterns can be confirmed for heritage speakers of Spanish in the Netherlands. Methodology: In all, 17 heritage speakers from the Netherlands and 18 monolingual speakers of Spanish completed a contextualized elicited production task. Each item contained a context targeting either indicative or subjunctive mood. Below each context followed the beginning of a sentence which the participants were instructed to complete. Both obligatory and variable uses of mood were included. The results were compared to findings from a contextualized scalar acceptability judgment task described in an earlier study using the same conditions and the same participants. Data and analysis: All responses were coded as felicitous or infelicitous given the accompanying context and were analyzed using mixed effects modeling. The results demonstrate that the heritage speakers are less accurate in their choice of mood than monolingual speakers, particularly on subjunctive mood and in variable contexts. Furthermore, heritage speakers deviated more from the monolingual patterns in the production task than in the judgment task. Findings/conclusion: These results confirm several patterns attested for heritage speakers of Spanish in the US, namely the increased vulnerability of subjunctive mood and in contexts where mood is not obligatorily selected. However, in contrast to previous literature, this study reports better performance on a metalinguistic judgment task than on an oral production task. This finding is attributed to differences in societal circumstances between both heritage speaker populations. Implications of the research: This study confirms the heterogeneity of heritage speakers as a population and emphasizes the importance of taking societal circumstances into consideration.

No abstract

No abstract

The present contribution proposes an analysis of adjectives that license non-modal infinitival relative clauses. I propose to reduce the uniqueness constraint on the noun phrase modified by non-modal infinitival relatives to licensing by a contrastive identificational focus. The contrastive component ensures that the licensing adjectives exclude the existence of a still higher or lower degree: uniqueness is due to selection of the endpoint of a scale. I further propose that superlatives and comparable modifiers are polysemous. In their positive use they assert a positive proposition and entail a negative one, in which case they function as identificational foci; in their negative use, on the other hand, they assert a negative proposition and entail a positive one, in which case they function as contrastive foci. The negative use of superlatives and equivalent modifiers licenses non-modal infinitival relatives, subjunctive relative clauses (e.g. in Romance) and negative polarity items like ever. The positive use of superlatives and comparable modifiers does not license non-modal infinitival relatives, subjunctive relative clauses, and negative polarity items, but only indicative relative clauses.

No abstract

No abstract