Chapter 9
Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual grammars
Evidence from gender assignment in unilingual Dutch and mixed speech
This study reports on grammatical gender assignment in elicited production data from heritage
speakers of Turkish, Papiamento, and Spanish in the Netherlands. We investigate the role of cross-linguistic influence
from the heritage language onto the societal language by comparing three heritage languages that differ in terms of
the properties of the nominal domain, including gender. Determiner-adjective-noun constructions were elicited by means
of a Director-Matcher task (Gullberg, Indefrey, & Muysken, 2009), which
was performed both in a unilingual Dutch mode, and in a code-switching mode from Dutch to the heritage language. The
results show that all groups tend to overgeneralize the common gender in the Dutch unilingual mode. Strikingly, the
performance of heritage speakers of Spanish was more target-like than the Papiamento and Turkish speakers, which may
be due to the fact that Spanish is the only language that has a grammatical gender system. In code-switching mode,
most speakers tend to assign common gender to inserted nouns, but some speakers also apply a gender assignment
strategy based on the translation equivalent of the noun in Dutch, or produce a postnominal adjective construction
with an uninflected adjective. An analysis of extra-linguistic variables demonstrated that gender assignment
strategies seem to be determined to some extent by the degree of dominance in the societal language.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The nominal domain in Dutch, Spanish, Turkish and Papiamento
- 3.The Turkish-, Spanish- and Papiamento-speaking communities in the Netherlands
- 4.Dutch gender in bilinguals
- 5.Gender in code-switching
- 6.Research questions and hypotheses
- 7.Methodology
- 7.1Procedure
- 7.2Materials
- 7.3Participants
- 7.4Coding
- 8.Analysis and results
- 8.1Unilingual Dutch mode
- 8.1.1Extralinguistic variables
- 8.2Code-switching mode
- 8.2.1Extralinguistic variables
- 9.Discussion and conclusion
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
References
-
Appendix
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