Chapter published in:
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 15: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 30, Frankfurt
Edited by Ingo Feldhausen, Martin Elsig, Imme Kuchenbrandt and Mareike Neuhaus
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 15] 2019
► pp. 36–52

Portuguese as a heritage language in contact with German and French

A comparative study on the acquisition of verbal mood

| Centro de Estudos Humanísticos/Universidade do Minho, Braga, Portugal
| Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, Centro de Linguística, Lisbon, Portugal
| Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage, UMR 5596, CNRS & Université de Lyon, France
| Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, Centro de Linguística, Lisbon, Portugal
| Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, Centro de Linguística, Lisbon, Portugal
This study focuses on the acquisition of verbal mood in complement clauses by two groups of heritage speakers of European Portuguese (EP) (7–16 years old) with similar sociolinguistic profiles and two different dominant languages, German and French. The production of finite complement clauses was elicited through a sentence completion task. By comparing two bilingual groups with different dominant languages (a Romance language with a subjunctive mood encoding the same semantic values as EP and a Germanic language with no similar linguistic category), we discuss the relative weight of cross-linguistic influence and of amount of exposure in bilingual acquisition. The results show protracted development of both bilingual groups concerning the subjunctive, with no negative effect observed in the bilingual speakers who are dominant in German. We conclude that cross-linguistic influence cannot explain this performance and suggest that amount of input plays a role.
Keywords: heritage speakers, protracted development, cross-linguistic influence, mood selection, complement clauses, European Portuguese
Published online: 09 October 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.15.02flo
References

References

de Almeida, Laetitia
2011 Acquisition de la structure syllabique en contexte de bilinguisme simultané portugais-francais. Unpublished Ph.D Thesis. Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal. http://​hdl​.handle​.net​/10451​/4972
Austin, Jennifer
2009 “Delay, interference and bilingual development: The acquisition of verbal morphology in children learning Basque and Spanish.” International Journal of Bilingualism 13(4):447–479. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Beauchemin, Cris, Christelle Hamel, and Patrick Simon
2015 Trajectoires et origines, enquête sur la diversité des populations en France. Paris: Ined (collection Grandes Enquêtes).Google Scholar
Costa, João, Alexandra Fiéis, and Maria Lobo
2015 “Input variability and late acquisition: Clitic misplacement in European Portuguese.” Lingua 161:10–26. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fabricius-Hansen, Cathrine, and Kjell J. Sæbø
2004 “In a mediative mood: The semantics of the German reportive subjunctive.” Natural Language Semantics 12(3):213–257. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Faneca, Rosa M.
2013 “Aprendizagem e representações do português língua de herança por lusodescendentes em França em contextos não formais.” Indagatio Didactica 5(3): 29–49.Google Scholar
Farkas, Donka
1992 “On the semantics of subjunctive complements.” In Romance Languages and Modern Linguistic Theory, edited by Paul Hirschbühler and Konrad Koerner, 71–104. Amsterdam: Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Flores, Cristina, Santos, Ana Lúcia, Jesus, Alice, and Marques, Rui
2017 “Age and input effects in the acquisition of mood in Heritage Portuguese.” Journal of Child Language 44 (4): 795–828. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Flores, Cristina, and Pilar Barbosa
2014 “When reduced input leads to delayed acquisition: a study on the acquisition of clitic placement by Portuguese heritage speakers.” International Journal of Bilingualism 18(3):304–325. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gathercole, Virginia C. M.
2007 “Miami and North Wales, so far and yet so near: A constructivist account of morphosyntactic development in bilingual children.” The International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 10(3): 224–247. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Giannakidou, Anastasia
1999 “Affective dependencies.” Linguistics and Philosophy 22: 367–421. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2013 “(Non)veridicality, evaluation, and event actualization: evidence from the subjunctive in relative clauses.” In Nonveridicality, Perspective, and Discourse Coherence, edited by Maite Taboada and Radoslava Tvranc, 17–47. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Godard, Danièle
2012 “Indicative and subjunctive mood in complement clauses: From formal semantics to grammar writing.” In Empirical issues in syntax and semantics 9, edited by Christopher Piñón, 129–148. Paris: Colloque de Syntaxe et Sémantique à Paris.Google Scholar
Jesus, Alice
2014 Aquisição do modo em orações completivas do Português Europeu: o papel dos traços de epistemicidade e veridicidade. Unpublished MA dissertation, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa.Google Scholar
Kanté, Issa
2010 “Mood and modality in finite noun complement clauses.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 15(2):267–290. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Knobloch, Clemens
2001 “Wie man den “den Konjunktiv” erwirbt.” In Grammatikalisierung, Spracherwerb und Schriftlichkeit, edited by Helmuth Feilke, Klaus-Peter Kappest, and Clemens Knobloch, 67–90. Tübingen: Niemeyer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Marques, Rui
2003 “Semantic and Pragmatic Constraints on Mood Selection.” In Meaning Through Language Contrast, Vol. 1, edited by Katarzyna M. Jaszczolt and Ken Turner, 129–146. Amsterdam: Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Montrul, Silvina
2009 “Knowledge of tense-aspect and mood in Spanish heritage speakers.” International Journal of Bilingualism 13(2):239–269. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2016 The acquisition of heritage languages. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
van Osch, Brechje, and Petra Sleeman
2016 “Spanish heritage speakers in the Netherlands: Linguistic patterns in the judgment and production of mood.” International Journal of Bilingualism. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, Johanne, and Fred Genesee
1996 “Syntactic acquisition in bilingual children: Autonomous or interdependent?” Studies in Second Language Acquisition 18(1):1–25. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Rodina, Yulia, and Marit Westergaard
2017 “Grammatical gender in bilingual Norwegian-Russian acquisition: The role of input and transparency.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 20(1):197–214. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Santos, Ana L., and Cristina Flores
2016 “Comparing heritage speakers and late L2-learners of European Portuguese: verb movement, VP ellipsis and adverb placement.” Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 6(3):308–340. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tsimpli, Ianthi
2014 “Early, late or very late? Timing acquisition and bilingualism.” Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 4(3):283–313. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Unsworth, Sharon
2012 “Testing for crosslinguistic influence and exposure effects in the bilingual acquisition of specific indefinite objects.” In Proceedings of the 36th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, edited by Alia, Biller K., Esther Y. Chung and Amelia E. Kimball, 633–645. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
2013 “Assessing the role of current and cumulative exposure in simultaneous bilingual acquisition: The case of Dutch gender.” Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 16(1):86–110. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Zifonun, Gisela, Ludger Hoffmann, Bruno Strecker, et al.
1997 Grammatik der deutschen Sprache. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter.Google Scholar