s - Wyższa Szkoła Filologiczna we Wrocławiu

108
Pablo Irizarri van Suchtelen
proficiency had a tendency (though non-significant) to use less External Possessor
Constructions (EPC) with doubled dative clitics. Instead, they used more
possessive constructions (like example [4b]), and “dative clitic only” strategies
than the monolinguals. The latter result seems unexpected, as it still would constitute
dative EPC. Montrul does not address this observation, however.
Using a grammatical judgment task, Silvina Montrul and Melissa Bowles
(2009) found that heritage speakers had unstable knowledge of Experiencer
datives with psychological verbs. They showed subjects grammatical sentences
in which the Experiencer NP was a-marked, and ungrammatical sentences
without a-marking. Heritage speakers had a relatively high acceptance of (ungrammatical)
Experiencer NPs without a.
Almeida Jacqueline Toribio and Carlos Nye (2006) also let their subjects
judge grammatical and ungrammatical sentences with dative Experiencers, and
additionally administered a sentence-completion task. They found that heritage
speakers, with their high rates of acceptance and production of ungrammatical
constructions, displayed two main tendencies: (1) mapping of subject properties,
such as control of verb agreement and no a-marking, to the Experiencer
and object properties to the Theme (including a-marking and accusative pronominalization)
and (2) SVO order: Subject-Experiencer in preverbal position.
Montrul (2004), Montrul & Bowles (2009) and Toribio & Nye (2006),
working within a generative framework, interpreted the heritage speakers’ tendencies
to restructure Experiencer datives and to produce less clitic doubled
EPC’s (although recall that clitic-only EPC’s remain unexplained) as evidence
for the vulnerability of the syntax-semantic and syntax-pragmatic interfaces, in
line with other research conducted, for example Antonella Sorace (2004), Ianthi
Maria Tsimpli (2001). Precisely these aspects are affected because they are
expressions of inherent (marked) case, regulated by interpretable (semantic and
pragmatic) features, as opposed to structural case, which is a purely syntactic
phenomenon. Thus, with the erosion of the semantic and pragmatic features,
convergence to English can take over. Furthermore, Montrul (2004) argues that
this process occurs during the acquisition period in childhood.
Important is that the other side of the hypothesis, namely the robustness of
uninterpretable features, is indeed confirmed. When the dative case is structural,
as in ditransitive Recipient-Theme constructions, the devices for marking dative
remain stable. Montrul (2004) found that with typical indirect objects, production
rates of “clitic only” and “clitic doubling” were very similar between
monolinguals and heritage speakers. Silva-Corvalán (1994) did not find evidence
either for contact-induced change in the realization of dative clitics in
typical contexts. She found that in a total of 2822 required contexts for clitics,
including dative constructions, heritage speakers only omitted 71, constituting
2,5%.