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Dative constructions in the Spanish of heritage speakers in the Netherlands 105
Babylon aan de Noordzee. Nieuwe Talen in Nederland edited by Guus Extra,
Jan Jaap De Ruijter (2001) provides ample opportunities for discussing this
particular type of bilingualism – presumably a common one throughout history
– to be studied in real time. Immigrant languages such as Turkish, Moroccan
Arabic, Tarifit Berber, Sranantongo (among others) are spoken in large, dynamic
communities, consisting of several generations of bilinguals. Spanish, the
language examined also by one of the authors in this collective book, is a little
studied heritage language in the Netherlands. The language of the group chosen
here had – to my knowledge – not been studied before: Chilean immigrants in
the Netherlands.
The first generation of Chileans arrived in the Netherlands in the 1970s
from a monolingual, monodialectal environment and were exposed to Dutch
and other varieties of Spanish. Their children, the second generation, grew up in
a multilingual environment and now use Chilean Spanish as a heritage language
to varying degrees.
The present study is an exploration into the stability of dative constructions
in the Spanish of bilinguals with different acquisition histories. First, I will present
the research problem: the bilingual’s confrontation with dative constructions
in Spanish and Dutch. Then I will discuss relevant previous research. Finally,
I will present the method, results and a discussion of my findings.
2. Research problem
2.1. Datives in contact
In Spanish, indirect object marking can take different forms:
[1a] El niño da un libro a la niña
PP
[1b] El niño le da un libro a la niña
cl
PP
[1c] El niño le da un libro
cl
‘The boy gives a book to the girl’
‘The boy gives a book to the girl’
‘The boy gives her a book’
The indirect object can be marked with the preposition a (often translatable
as “to”), as in [1 0], indexed by a dative clitic, as in [1c], or both, as in [1b]. The
latter construction is usually called clitic doubling. The semantic roles that can
(or must) be encoded with a dative construction are diverse, as examples [2a–
2e] show.
[2a] Le da una mochila al chico
RECIPIENT
‘He gives a backpack to the boy’
[2b] El ratón le quita el bombo
HUMAN SOURCE
Literally: ‘The mouse takes him away the drum’