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Dative constructions in the Spanish of heritage speakers in the Netherlands 115
4. Discussion and conclusion
The first table may lead to the impression that indeed, the bilinguals’ use of
protoypical dative constructions is stable, whereas that of non-prototypical ones
is not. And that this is probably a convergent change not solely caused by incomplete
acquisition, as it affects not only the heritage speakers (the G2) but
also late bilinguals (the G1).
However, a closer look at the data revealed that much depends on what kind
of “dative” one considers, what kind of “heritage speaker” and what kind of
“non-prototypical”.
To start with the latter, when considering the non-prototypical roles separately,
it turned out that the differences between bilinguals and monolinguals
was small and non-significant, except for Experiencers. This category accounted
for the significant differences in overall non-protoypical dative rates of
the high input G2 and the G1 with the monolinguals. This could suggest that
dative encoding of Experiencers may indeed be unstable, regardless of acquisition
profile. However, this label contained a small and linguistically heterogeneous
sample. A closer and perhaps theoretically better grounded investigation
of these bilinguals’ dative Experiencers could be interesting for the future.
Those who did use much less non-prototypical datives than the monolinguals
were Carola, Dennis, Iván and Gabriel. Although, similar to the others,
they were fairly proficient and used Spanish regularly, they shared the characteristic
that they reported low childhood exposure. One could argue then, that
only in the case of low exposure, non-prototypical dative constructions become
unstable, while the prototypical ones remain intact.
However, this would still be a too broad conclusion, as the data showed that
this group also deviated within the encoding strategies for Recipients. The “low
input” G2 seemed to prefer clitic-less a-marking here. The literature also provides
some indications that a-marking is a more stable aspect of (typical) dative
constructions than the clitic. Montrul & Bowles (2010), showed that the bare a-NP
was accepted slightly more by heritage speakers than the clitic doubled a-NP in
a grammatical judgment task, whereas this was the other way round for monolinguals.
Montrul (2004) found that her lowest proficiency heritage speaker
group had a higher production rate of clitic-less a-marking (14,6% of indirect
objects) than advanced heritage speakers (0%) and monolinguals (2,5%).
I hypothesize that the “low input” group’s deviation in the encoding of all
semantic roles has to do with a more general instability of clitic indexing, caused
by incomplete acquisition. Studies on the L1 acquisition of Spanish
(Domínguez 2003; Montrul, 2004; Reglero & Ticio, 2003) provide evidence
that clitics appear rather suddenly in children’s speech around age 2. The “high
input” G2 did not go to preschool or kindergarten before the age of 2, meaning
that they predominantly heard Spanish, and thus were exposed to lots of clitics,