Chapter 11. Differential Object Marking in Romanian as a heritage language

Bidirectional cross-linguistic influence on DOM in Romanian-Spanish bilinguals

“…Acceptability data in both Spanish and Romanian showed that, while their DOM in Spanish reveals signs of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) from Romanian, their acceptability of DOM in Romanian did not show signs of attrition. Consistently with previous studies (Chamorro et al, 2016;Montrul & Bateman, 2020), DOM seems to be resistant to L1 attrition.…”

“…In addition, the effects of productive vocabulary knowledge, as measured by the MiNT, on the Romanian data reinforce the claim that the bilinguals’ productive knowledge is different from the RMs.’ This incipient stage of L1 attrition, attested as CLI from their L2 into their L1 in their production, may be the result of being in a language contact situation with Spanish, language with animacy-driven DOM. In contrast, Montrul and Bateman (2020) found differences in the DOM of Romanian heritage speakers while the Romanian-English bilinguals who acquired English after puberty did not show signs of CLI in their production. Therefore, it can be argued that the CLI shown in the Romanian spoken by the bilinguals in this study derives from their L2 DOM.…”

“…Montrul and Bateman (2020) took a closer look at Romanian DOM and examined its acquisition in heritage speakers of Romanian and Romanian long-term immigrants in the United States. The authors collected their data via an oral narrative task and found that, while heritage speakers made omission errors, long-term immigrants did not show signs of attrition in their L1 DOM.…”

Attrition, addition, and age

“…At the same time, they also correctly accepted marked animate, specific objects. These patterns also obtained in language production, where some speakers omitted DOM to various degrees, producing both correctly marked objects and incorrectly unmarked objects (Montrul and Sánchez Walker, 2013; Montrul et al, 2019; Montrul and Bateman, in press).…”

Addressing Challenges in Formal Research on Moribund Heritage Languages: A Path Forward

“…A similar development has been observed in some Italo-Romance varieties in Argentina and Brazil Andriani et al ( 2021 ). Southern Italo-Romance varieties display DOM, which has often been found to be recessive in heritage populations (see, e.g., Montrul, 2004 ; Montrul and Bowles, 2009 ; Montrul and Sánchez-Walker, 2013 ; Montrul et al, 2015 ; Montrul and Bateman, 2020 ) and could therefore be expected to be recessive also in heritage Southern-Italian varieties. Recent work by Andriani et al ( 2021 ) show that this previous hypothesis does not hold, and that DOM is instead extended to uses that are not attested in the Italian baseline varieties, similar to the findings of Yager et al ( 2015 ).…”