Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

5.2.2026 [zoom]
Natalia Meir (Bar-Ilan): The Case of the Accusative Case in Heritage Russian

This talk examines the representation and processing of the accusative case in heritage Russian, drawing on evidence from child and adult bilingual speakers of Russian and Hebrew (e.g., Janssen & Meir, 2018; Meir, Avramenko, & Verkhovtceva, 2021). The accusative case provides a particularly revealing testing ground for heritage grammars due to systematic cross-linguistic differences in object marking. Russian employs a structural morphological case system, sensitive to gender and animacy, realized through inflectional suffixes, whereas Hebrew uses differential object marking, expressed by a prenominal particle preceding definite noun phrases.Using a multi-method approach (such as elicited and spontaneous production, grammaticality judgments, eye-tracking, and ERP measures), I show that accusative marking is vulnerable in heritage Russian across modalities and age groups (Janssen & Meir, 2018; Meir et al., 2021; Meir, Parshina, & Sekerina, 2024). The findings reveal asymmetries between underlying morphosyntactic knowledge and surface realization, modulated by animacy, gender, and cross-linguistic influence, displaying patterns that are characteristic of heritage language grammars (Polinsky, 2018). These results are discussed within theoretical accounts of heritage language representation, particularly the Feature Re-Assembly Hypothesis, and contribute to a broader understanding of how core grammatical features are shaped by bilingual experience across the lifespan.