Exploring individual variation in Turkish heritage speakers’ complex linguistic productions: Evidence from discourse markers

Abstract

Research in multilingual speakers is often compared to monolingual baselines which are commonly treated as if they were homogeneous across speakers. Despite recent research showing that this homogeneity does not hold, this reproduces nativespeakerism and monolingualism. In our study, we want to analyze the use of discourse markers in three different speaker groups of Turkish, and analyze extensively the variation between and within those groups. We interpret discourse markers as speech planning events, and distinguish between macro-planning utterance-initially, as well as micro-planning within an utterance. Both planning events are hypothesized to be more frequent with heritage speakers. The study also focusses on individual variation within those groups.