Subject Clitics in Microcontact: A Case Study from Heritage Friulian in Argentina and Brazil

Abstract

In this paper we present data from first generation immigrants (G1) and second and third generation heritage speakers of Friulian, a Rhaeto-Romance language spoken in North-Eastern Italy and also found in Argentina and Brazil. The target phenomenon is subject clitics (SCL s). We show that SCL s in heritage Friulian are in a process of being reanalyzed from being agreement markers to pronouns. While SCL s are obligatory in Friulian as spoken in Italy, they are often dropped in heritage Friulian in Argentina and Brazil; this phenomenon, we argue, needs to be interpreted as the drop of pronominal subjects, and not of agreement-like SCL s. We also demonstrate that the use of SCL s (reanalyzed as pronominal subjects) is conditioned both by grammatical factors (it happens more in some grammatical persons than in others) and by discourse factors (they are used more in the case of a continuation topic than in other topicalization contexts). This means that in heritage Friulian, discourse constraints on the expression of subjects are not being lost or weakened; in fact, against the general grammaticalization trend of pronominal forms, new discourse constraints are introduced.

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“…Another interesting related phenomenon that further supports this point is the emergence of null subjects in structural environments that differ from the baseline (or previous the speech patterns of previous generations, when such data is available for comparison), such as those found in heritage Friulian in Brazil and Argentina. Frasson et al (2021) show that HSs of Friulian introduce null subjects in topic continuation contexts by dropping the pronominal subject clitic in contexts in which it would be expressed in the baseline. These findings contradict the general assumption that HLs tend to be simplified with respect to the corresponding baseline varieties, as the degree of complexity in some of their structural phenomena is equivalent-if not higher-than the corresponding baseline grammar.…”

“…The grammars to which we compare the HLs are today's grammars, but the input that HSs received is a grammar from several years, if not centuries, ago, which might be different from the contemporary language spoken in the country of origin. An extreme example of this is heritage Friulian described in Frasson et al (2021). To begin with, all Friulian speakers in Italy are bilingual (similar to the current day situation in Catalan), so there is no monolingual baseline grammar for comparison (see the previous section).…”

“…Therefore, comparing the data from people who left Italy in the 1960s with contemporary Friulian is methodologically precarious, as Friulian has evolved independently since. According to Frasson et al (2021), the best solution is to compare the HSs grammars of today to the Friulian from the time when the emigration wave started (i.e., from the 1950s and 1960s).…”

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“…The forced-choice task also contained items targeting subject clitics (see Frasson & D'Alessandro & van Osch 2021), for which the participants were asked to choose between a minimal pair with and without the subject clitic. There were 15 speakers of Friulian who participated in this task: 8…”

“…I got sixty credits.' However, Frasson & D'Alessandro & van Osch (2021) show that in heritage varieties of Friulian spoken in microcontact situations in Argentina and Brazil, subject clitics display occasional pronominal behavior, in that they can be dropped in the second conjunct of coordinated structures (14b), while this is impossible in the homeland variety ( 14a 2021) observe a two-step development: agreement clitics are not mere φ-bundles like in the homeland variety, but are full pronouns. These pronouns are then dropped, creating a pro-drop context that is not present in the homeland grammar.…”