The Syntax-Pragmatics Interface in Language Loss: Covert Restructuring of Aspect in Heritage Russian A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Oksana Vladislavovna Laleko IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Advisors: Dr. Nancy Stenson and Dr. Jeanette Gundel May 2010 © Oksana Vladislavovna Laleko, 2010 Acknowledgements My deepest gratitude goes to the speakers of Russian who participated in this study. Without their generous help, this work would simply not have been possible. I am grateful to my advisors, Nancy Stenson and Jeanette Gundel, for their constant support and encouragement, for their feedback on a gazillion of drafts and papers over the years, and for bringing out the linguist in me. I also thank Hooi-Ling Soh and JP Marcotte for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this dissertation. Of course, any remaining errors, should any be apparent, are my sole responsibility. Masha Polinsky, Maria Schweikert, Olga Kagan, Irina Dubinina, Victorina Lefebvre, and especially Irina Sekerina have worked true magic helping me with data collection, and I am so thankful for that. I also want to say thanks to many people whose contribution to this project has been less direct, but whose presence in my life has nevertheless been a substantial asset during the entire process, on and off the field. It is not possible to mention all of them here without turning this section into a full chapter, but I hope they already know who they are and how appreciated they are. I gratefully acknowledge the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship and Thesis Research Grant from the University of Minnesota. I thank all my teachers and my students, for inspiring me and for making me better at what I do. A very loving thanks goes to my husband for helping me with all technical aspects of this work and for teaching me that technology is our friend, despite all evidence to the contrary. This work would not have been possible without the love and support of my family, and I’d like to dedicate this dissertation to them. i Abstract Heritage grammars, linguistic varieties emerging in the context of intergenerational language loss, are known to diverge from the corresponding full- fledged baseline varieties in principled and systematic ways, as typically illustrated by errors made by heritage speakers in production. This dissertation examines covert restructuring of aspect in heritage Russian, a grammatical reorganization of the perfective-imperfective opposition not manifested in overt errors. The aspectual system instantiated in acrolectal varieties of heritage Russian is shown to exhibit signs of covert divergence from the baseline system at the interface between syntax and discourse- pragmatics, manifested in a reduction of pragmatically-conditioned functions of the imperfective aspect with total single events. This emerging restriction leads to a gradual shift from a privative aspectual opposition in baseline Russian, where imperfective is the unmarked member, to an opposition of the equipollent type. Experimental evidence presented suggests that heritage speakers differ from baseline Russian speakers in their use, acceptability ratings, and accuracy of interpretation of the imperfective aspect. In Russian, both aspects are compatible with completed events; however, aspectual competition is resolved in favor of the imperfective in the presence of discourse-pragmatic triggers that condition the general-factual functions of the imperfective: statement of fact, annulled result, thematicity and backgrounding. Assuming a multi-level approach to aspect, I maintain that the two aspectual systems converge on the level of the verbal predicate, where aspectual values of activities and accomplishments reflect compositional telicity, but diverge on the level of sentential aspect, where the contribution of telicity may be overridden by grammatical ii aspectual operators and discourse-pragmatic aspectual triggers. The restructuring of aspect in advanced heritage grammars affects the highest level of sentential structure, a domain in which syntactic information is mapped onto discourse-pragmatic information (the C-domain). In addressing the role of linguistic input in heritage language acquisition, the dissertation examines additional data from bilingual Russian-English speakers, including parents of heritage speakers. While bilingual speakers pattern with monolingual controls on comprehension tests, they differ from monolinguals in production of the imperfective with total single events, suggesting that competence divergence in advanced heritage grammars may be linked, across generations, to impoverished performance on C-domain properties. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................. i Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... iv List of Abbreviations ........................................................................................................ vii List of Tables ................................................................................................................... viii List of Figures .................................................................................................................... ix Chapter 1 Introduction ................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Heritage Grammars as Linguistic Systems .......................................................... 2 1.1.1 Who Are Heritage Speakers? ........................................................................ 4 1.1.2 E Pluribus Unum: The Heritage Continuum ............................................... 10 1.2 The Source(s) of Divergence .............................................................................. 14 1.2.1 Attrition ....................................................................................................... 16 1.2.2 Incomplete Acquisition ............................................................................... 18 1.2.3 A New Take on ‘Poverty of the Input’ ....................................................... 22 1.2.4 Cross-Linguistic Transfer ........................................................................... 25 1.2.5 Universal Principles .................................................................................... 33 1.3 Dissertation Goals and Structure ........................................................................ 35 Chapter 2 Heritage Russian Grammar at a Glance: Overt Restructuring ................... 44 2.1 Gender ................................................................................................................ 45 2.2 Case .................................................................................................................... 49 iv 2.3 Number Agreement ............................................................................................ 55 2.4 Prepositions ........................................................................................................ 62 2.5 Emergence of Overt Determiners ....................................................................... 66 2.6 Other Null Elements Used Overtly .................................................................... 71 2.7 Overt Elements Dropped .................................................................................... 74 2.8 The Subjunctive .................................................................................................. 79 2.9 Vocabulary ......................................................................................................... 81 2.10 Summary ......................................................................................................... 88 Chapter 3 Aspect as a Verbal Matter ........................................................................... 90 3.1 Lexical Aspect .................................................................................................... 91 3.1.1 Vendler (1957) ............................................................................................ 96 3.2 Viewpoint aspect ................................................................................................ 98 3.3 Lexical and Viewpoint Aspects at the Cross-Roads ........................................ 110 3.3.1 First Language Acquisition ....................................................................... 111 3.3.2 Second Language Acquisition .................................................................. 113 3.3.3 Heritage Language Acquisition ................................................................ 115 Chapter 4 Aspect and the Verbal Phrase ................................................................... 144 4.1 How ‘Lexical’ is Lexical Aspect? Telicity as a Compositional Notion ........... 145 4.1.1 Two Kinds of Telicity ............................................................................... 150 4.2 Aspect in Russian: Beyond the Verb ................................................................ 152 4.3 Aspect in Heritage Russian: Beyond Lexicalization ........................................ 159 v 4.3.1 Experiment 1: Sentence Construction ......................................................