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31 - Heritage Language Forms

from Part 5 - Sociolinguistic and Geographical Approaches

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2024

By
Oksana Laleko
Edited by
Danko Šipka  and
Wayles Browne
Danko Šipka
Affiliation:
Arizona State University
Wayles Browne
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
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Summary

The chapter presents a broad overview of current research on the formal properties of Slavic languages developing in heritage language settings. Representative studies on heritage Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Serbian, and Croatian are synthesized along the following grammatical dimensions. In the nominal and verbal domains, I review properties of the heritage Slavic case and gender systems and the encoding of temporal distinctions through aspect and tense morphology. At the levels of sentence organization and discourse structure, I survey word order change pertaining to the syntax of clitics and the placement of clausal constituents to convey information-structural distinctions. The concluding discussion identifies the key overarching principles underlying the changes attested across the surveyed linguistic varieties and outlines directions for future studies in heritage Slavic linguistics.

Keywords

heritage languagebilingualismattritionmorphosyntaxcasegenderaspectword order

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Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Slavic Linguistics , pp. 657 - 674
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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