Focus marking in monolingual and heritage Spanish:

Preliminary resultsUIC Bilingualism Forum

April 30, 2009

Contents Background Research Questions Experimental Design Results Conclusions & Future Directions

Background: Information Structure How sentences fit into the discourse

1) What happened? Broad Focusa) [John bought the newspaper]F.

b) #[John bought the newspaper]F.

2) Who bought the newspaper? Narrow subject focusa) #[John]F bought the newspaper.

b) [John]F bought the newspaper.

Background: Generalizations Focus marking strategies differ among

languages English: Main stress shift Spanish: Constituent order

Background: Generalizations Compare (3) and (4)

3) Who bought the newspaper?a) #[John]F bought the newspaper.

b) [John]F bought the newspaper.

c) *Bought the newspaper [John]F.

4) ¿Quién compró el periódico?a) #[Juan]F compró el periódico.

b) #[Juan]F compró el periódico.

c) Compró el periódico [Juan]F.

Background: Information Structure IS touches on semantics/pragmatics,

phonology, and syntax Many different models of IS

Phonology (Büring & Gutiérrez-Bravo 2001, Szendrői 2001, Zubizarreta 1998)

Syntax (López 2008) Semantics (Kučerová 2007) All of the above For an overview, see, inter alia, Casielles (2004),

Erteshik-Shir (2007), Reinhart (2006)

Background: Optimality Theory A good way to bring the different

components together and account for crosslinguistic variation is a principled system of ranked, violable constraints such as Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993)

OT also easily testable experimentally

Constraints FocusProminence (FP): Focus is most

prominent. (Büring & Gutiérrez-Bravo 2001)

EPP: Clauses have subjects. (Samek-Lodovici 2005)

Stay: No traces. (Samek-Lodovici 2005)

Align-iP: Stress is rightmost. (Samek-Lodovici 2005)

Proposed ranking for Spanish FP >> Align-iP >> EPP >> Stay (Büring & Gutiérrez-Bravo 2001,

Gutiérrez-Bravo 2002, Samek-Lodovici 2005)

Sample Tableau Context: Who bought the newspaper?

Background: Heritage Spanish "The term "heritage speaker" is used to refer to a student

who is raised in a home where a non-English language is spoken, who speaks or merely understands the heritage language, and who is to some degree bilingual in English and the heritage language." (Valdés 2000)

Heritage Spanish differs from monolingual Spanish in a variety of ways (e.g., T/M/A, gender agreement, unaccusativity and unergativity)

Differences attributed to contact with English, contact-induced acceleration of language-internal change (Silva-Corvalán 1994), incomplete acquisition (Montrul 2002, 2007; Zentella 1997), and attrition (Anderson 1999)

Research Questions

1. Do heritage speakers differ from monolinguals in how they realize narrow focus?

2. If so, how?

Experiment Pilot study Participants: 6 monolinguals, 4 heritage speakers Four tasks:

Felicity judgment task Forced choice felicity judgment task Guided production task Sentence construction production task

14 Contexts

Experiment: Example Context: Narrow Subject Focus Judgment

5) ¿Quién rompió el vaso?a) Rompió el vaso Fernando.

b) Fernando rompió el vaso.

Results: Average of PredictedFocus Type Monolingual Group Heritage Group

Object Adjunct 66.67% 56.25%

Subject Adjunct 55.93% 62.50%

Broad 87.50% 100.00%

Broad (w/PP) 100.00% 100.00%

Object 91.67% 87.50%

Object (w/PP) 37.50% 37.50%

PP (w/Object) 100.00% 100.00%

“Red Convertible” 45.83% 31.25%

Subject 25.00% 37.50%

Subject (w/ Clitic) 66.67% 60.00%

Subject (w/ Object & PP) 25.00% 12.50%

Subject (w/PP) 66.67% 68.75%

Verb 0.00% 0.00%

VP 83.33% 87.50%

Total 61.84% 61.76%

Results: Average of PredictedFocus Type Monolingual Group Heritage Group

Object Adjunct 66.67% 56.25%Subject Adjunct 55.93% 62.50%Broad 87.50% 100.00%Broad (w/PP) 100.00% 100.00%Object 91.67% 87.50%Object (w/PP) 37.50% 37.50%PP (w/Object) 100.00% 100.00%“Red Convertible” 45.83% 31.25%Subject 25.00% 37.50%Subject (w/ Clitic) 66.67% 60.00%Subject (w/ Object & PP) 25.00% 12.50%Subject (w/PP) 66.67% 68.75%Verb 0.00% 0.00%VP 83.33% 87.50%Total 61.84% 61.76%

Results: Canonical OrderFocus Type Monolingual Group Heritage Group

Broad 87.50% 100.00%

Broad (w/PP) 100.00% 100.00%

Object 91.67% 87.50%

PP (w/Object) 100.00% 100.00%

Verb 0.00% 0.00%

VP 83.33% 87.50%

Results: Canonical Order

Results All these contexts have canonical word and

stress patterns Except V focus, which has canonical order,

but not canonical stress

Narrow Verb Focus Example:

6) ¿Qué hizo tu padre con el carro?a. Mi padre [vendió]F el carro.

b. Mi padre el carro lo [vendió]F.

Both groups reject (b) 100% of the time

Results: Noncanonical word orderFocus Type Monolingual Group Heritage Group

Object (w/PP) 37.50% 37.50%

Subject 25.00% 37.50%

Subject (w/ Clitic) 66.67% 60.00%

Subject (w/ Object & PP) 25.00% 12.50%

Subject (w/PP) 66.67% 68.75%

Results: Noncanonical word order

Interesting Cases: Narrow Subject

ReferencesAnderson, R. 1999. Loss of gender agreement in L1 attrition: Preliminary results. Bilingual Research Journal 23:319-338.Büring, D., & Gutiérrez-Bravo, R. 2006. Focus-related constituent order without the NSR: A prosody-based crosslinguistic analysis. In M.

Séamas (Ed.), Syntax at Santa Cruz 3, 41-58.Casielles, E. 2004. The Syntax-Information Structure Interface. New York: Routledge.Erteshik-Shir, N. 2007. Information Structure. Oxford. Gutiérrez-Bravo, R. 2002. Focus, word order variation and intonation in Spanish and

English. In C. Wiltshire & J. Camps (Eds.), Romance phonology and variation (39-53). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Kučerová, I. 2007. The Syntax of Givenness. Doctoral dissertation, MIT.López, L. 2008. A Derivational Syntax for Information Structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Montrul, S. 2002. Incomplete acquisition and attrition of Spanish tense/aspect distinctions in adult bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and

Cognition 5(1).Montrul, S. 2007. Interpreting mood distinctions in Spanish as a heritage language. In K. Potowski & R. Cameron (Eds.), Spanish in contact:

Policy, social, and linguistic inquiries. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pp. 23-40. Prince, A., & Smolensky, P. 1993. Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar. Rutgers University Center for Cognitive

Science Technical Report 2.Reinhart, T. 2006. Interface Strategies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Samek-Lodovici, V. 2005. Prosody-syntax interaction in the expression of focus. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 23:687-755.Schwarzschild, R. 1999. Givenness, AvoidF and other constraints on the placement of accent. Natural language semantics 7: 141-177.Silva-Corvalán, C. 1994. Language contact and change: Spanish in Los Angeles. Oxford: Clarendon. Szendrői, K. 2001a. Focus and the syntax-phonology interface. UCL Dissertation.Valdés, G. (2000). Spanish for Native Speakers: AATSP Professional Development Series handbook for teachers K-16 (Vol. 1). New York,

NY: Harcourt College Publishers, p. 1. Zentella, A. C. 1997. Growing up bilingual. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Zubizarreta, M. L. 1998. Prosody, Focus, and Word Order. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.