This paper investigates gender agreement mismatches between nominal expressions and the targets of agreement they control in two groups (adults and adolescents) of Heritage Greek speakers in the USA. On the basis of language production data elicited via a narration task, we show that USA Greek Heritage speakers, unlike monolingual controls, show mismatches in gender agreement. We will show that the mismatches observed differ with respect to the agreement target between groups, i.e., noun phrase internal agreement seems more affected in the adolescent group, while personal pronouns appear equally affected. We will argue that these patterns suggest retreat to default gender, namely neuter in Greek. Neuter emerges as default when no agreement pattern can be established. As adult speakers show less mismatches, we will explore the reasons why speakers improve across the life span.

This paper investigates the use of kati “some” by Greek Heritage Speakers (HSs) in comparison to monolinguals. While all Greek determiners are marked for gender, case, and number, and agree with their nominal complement, kati is an exception, as it lacks agreement and combines only with plural nouns. Building on the existing literature, we show that its function is to remain vague about the number of individuals/entities denoted. Our hypothesis is that vague language (VL) is a feature of informal conversations and of the spoken language. To this end, we conducted a study in which Heritage Speakers of Greek and monolingual speakers of Greek participated in a production task held in two distinct settings and modalities. In addition, we performed corpus searches to see how both monolingual and Heritage Speakers use kati. The results show that monolingual speakers do indeed prefer kati in the informal register, while Heritage Speakers overgeneralize its use across registers. Our findings confirm the use of vague language in informal registers and oral modality and support claims in the literature on register levelling by Heritage Speakers. Focusing on monolinguals’ repertoire, a judgment task with different levels of formality was additionally performed. These results in principle align with our hypothesis and signal that neither frequency nor other informality contexts trigger a higher rate for kati.

Approximative constructions present special interest for acquisition due to the counterfactual and scalar inferences they give rise to. In this paper we investigate the acquisition of Greek approximatives by heritage speakers in Germany and the USA. We show that while in English and German there is a single lexical item encoding counterfactuality and scalarity, in Greek there are two lexical items which, as we show, have different interpretations. In view of this difference, we test whether the crosslinguistic differences and the interface nature of approximative constructions affect their representation in heritage language. We present a production study and a comprehension study of approximative constructions. Our findings suggest that the two heritage groups do not diverge from the monolingual group in the domain of approximative constructions.

Research on different populations of heritage speakers (HSs) has demonstrated that these speakers (i) frequently produce fewer adjectives, and (ii) produce more errors in nominal concord than in subject–verb agreement. The first point, (i), has been attributed in the literature to the optionality of adjectives and to the fact that adjectives characterize the literary language and HSs lack familiarity with this register. The second point, (ii), is viewed by other researchers as supporting theories that treat nominal concord as being different from subject–verb agreement. In this paper, we contribute data on production of adjectives and agreement asymmetries with adjectives from heritage Greek. We show that these cannot be viewed as supporting claims with respect to (i) but conclude that nominal concord and subject–verb agreement involve different mechanisms. We furthermore explore ways to account for a slight contrast we observe between prenominal and postnominal agreement.

In this paper, we examine the narrowing of register variation in the domain of verbal aspect in the production of aspect by two different age groups of Greek heritage speakers (HSs), adolescents and adults, which we compared to their monolingual peers. We first identify a previously undocumented case of register variation for the expression of perfective aspect in Greek. Both HSs and monolingual speakers have at their disposal synthetic and analytic forms, the latter built on the basis of light verbs, to express grammatical aspect, and specifically perfective aspect. While monolinguals make use of this alternation to signal register variation, with periphrastic constructions used in informal settings and in the oral mode, HSs behave differently. Both adolescent and adult HSs generalize periphrastic constructions across formal and informal communicative situations, thus showing a case of register variation narrowing. The fact that periphrastic constructions are associated with perfective aspect is due to aspect levelling: HSs overgeneralize the use of the perfective aspect.