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Share Paper 3539

Verbal Aspect in Heritage Greek across Majority Languages: A Preliminary Study
Vasiliki Rizou
39-48 (complete paper or proceedings contents)

Abstract

The phenomenon under investigation in the present study is verbal aspect in Heritage Greek in two different Heritage speaker (henceforth HSs) groups (Germany and USA) in two different ages (adolescence and adulthood). The aim is to observe the accuracy rates in an elicited production task and to explore canonical and non-canonical patterns in the use of verbal aspect through a narration task. By manipulating the setting of the elicitation process, the interaction between the grammatical phenomenon of aspect and the different registers is able to be detected. In general, Greek HSs in Germany performed more accurately and monolingual-like than Greek HSs in the US. A factor that doesn't seem to play a role is the parameter of register. Meta-linguistic data, which haven't been included in the present analysis, might affect their performance on verbal aspect. Furthermore, the different encoding of aspect in the majority language seems to affect the performance of aspect in the heritage language, but this is something that needs further exploration.

Published in

Selected Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Immigrant Languages in the Americas (WILA 10)
edited by Arnstein Hjelde and Åshild Søfteland
Table of contents
Printed edition: $240.00