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

This talk will present an overview of the current state of formal research on Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian (BCMS) spoken as a heritage language (by second-generation speakers) in Germany. A special focus will be put on agreement and case, as phenomena that encode a relationship between two constituents, which show a great degree of variation in heritage languages. Despite the vast knowledge gained over the years, the literature still harbours a great amount of disagreement on how agreement and case should be analysed even in monolingual systems: do they involve syntactic or postsyntactic operations; are features copied/valued/shared/checked; are features primitive, binary, or hierarchical; are case and agreement a result of a single operation, or different operations or processes? BCMS presents an especially fertile ground for the exploration of such issues due to great variability present in its agreement patterns (see e.g. Wechsler and Zlatić 2003, Corbett 1979, Willer-Gold et al. 2016, Despic 2017, Puškar 2017, Arsenijević 2021). In the grammars of heritage speakers, these phenomena have been identified as vulnerable, showing properties such as loss of inflectional morphology, overmarking or overregularization, due to language contact at macrolevel (between two languages) and at microlevel (between two grammars in a single speaker’s mind). Taking a heritage language as a system in its own right instead of treating it as somehow simplified or incomplete (Domínguez et al. 2019 vs. Bayram et al. 2019; Cabo and Rothman 2012), and treating a heritage speaker as a native speaker (Kupisch 2013; Rothman and Treffers-Daller 2014; Kupisch and Rothman 2018; Tsehaye et al. 2021;Wiese et al. 2021), the novel research project outlined in this talk will aim at identifying non-canonical patterns of agreement and case present in heritage BCMS, asking the question whether bilingual grammars differ from monolingual ones and how they can be formally modelled. Through identifying factors that affect agreement and case, I will explore the causes of variation under language contact through the lens of The Interface Hypothesis (Sorace 2011) and language-specific and global Complexity (Polinsky, Putnam & Salmons 2024). In sum, I will present a project that looks at heritage grammars as providing an enrichment of insights into syntactic theory and explores the extent to which natural grammar can or cannot generate particular constructions.