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Dative constructions in the Spanish of heritage speakers in the Netherlands 107
straints that originally regulated the form’s use. Worth seeing, in this particular
contexts, are the research results Silva-Corvalán (2008) and Barbara E. Bullock
Almeida Jacqueline Toribio (2004). Because Spanish has both the dative and
the non-dative strategies, heritage speakers, as a consequence of activating
Dutch non-dative strategies all the time, may conceivably develop an increased
preference for non-dative strategies for encoding Possessors, Human Sources,
Experiencers and Interestees, in comparison to monolinguals. Let us consider
findings on dative constructions from the literature on heritage Spanish in the
US.
2.2. Previous findings in heritage language research
Silva-Corvalán (1994) has observed that many US born bilinguals, though
not frequently, use structures of the type given in example [4b], an example of
the possessor externally marked with a dative, whereas the standard Spanish
form would be [4a]:
[4a] ... y me dieron en la cara, y me quebraron la mandíbula
and me hit-3pl in the face, and me broke-3pl the jaw
[4b] ... y me dieron en la cara, y ø quebraron mi, mi jaw
and me hit-3pl in the face, and ø broke-3pl my, my jaw
... and they hit me in the face, and broke my, my jaw
(Silva-Corvalán, 1994: 139)
Silva-Corvalán points to the fact that a construction like [4b], without a dative,
would indeed be possible in standard Spanish, but only when the possessor has
a relatively low degree of involvement in the situation. Thus, she argues that
a sentence like Lavó mi pelo ‘He washed my hair’ would give rise to an interpretation
whereby the hair is washed separate from the head, while the owner is
not involved, e.g., after being cut. Rather odd of course, let alone the situation
of a jaw being broken without it being attached to the person.
The use of this type of construction, even though there is a high degree of
involvement of the possessor, is a violation of a semantic-pragmatic constraint.
Because English has only the construction without the dative, Silva-Corvalán
(1994) argues that there is cross-linguistic influence: the loss of the constraint is
triggered by the bilingual’s preference for equivalent structures in the two languages
and the fact that the English equivalent is not subject to the same semantic-pragmatic
constraints. However, it is important to note that she does not
consider to be dealing with a permeation by a foreign syntactic structure per se,
but rather a process of lexical change: it affects the constraints on possible arguments
of a set of verbs (cf. Silva-Corvalán 1994: 141).
Silvina Montrul (2004), in a story elicitation task with 24 heritage speakers
(i.e., not including first generation late bilinguals), found that those with low