This chapter brings together the findings from the three studies, which confirmed that Differential Object Marking (DOM) is a vulnerable grammatical area not only in Spanish, but also in Hindi and Romanian as heritage languages, subject to erosion under pressure from, English in this case. This chapter goes deeper into these overall trends, by comparing the three heritage speaker groups, on the one hand, and the three first-generation immigrant groups, on the other, on several background variables related to patterns of language use. A follow-up replication study with Spanish heritage speakers and immigrants from other countries in Latin America is reported, which confirm the attrition effects in the two generations of Mexican immigrants. It is claimed that his finding is strong evidence that while DOM omission may have started as a developmental outcome of heritage language acquisition, it may be on its way to becoming a stable dialectal feature of Spanish in the United States, suggesting language change with respect to DOM in Spanish. The roles of language internal and language external factors are discussed.

This chapter presents a more fine-grained analysis of why and how DOM vulnerability may have become more prevalent in Spanish than in Hindi and Romanian at the individual level. Specifically, linking language acquisition, language attrition and diachronic language change, it addresses the question of the potential relationship between the I-language of the heritage speakers and the E-language of the first-generation immigrants, who are often the heritage speakers’ main source of input. It presents follow-up studies of DOM in Spanish-speaking bilingual children and adults and their mothers and the results are not consistent with direct transmission of DOM omission from the first to the second-generation (the heritage speakers). It is suggested that that second-generation heritage speakers, who have as much difficulty mastering the morphology of their heritage language as typical L2 learners, can also change the grammars of the parental generation and be the innovators in the Spanish variety spoken in the United States.

In the last lecture we showed how “what is said” or conveyed in-and-by discourse indexically presumes upon or “indexically presupposes” certain conditions in the context of an emerging entextualization, revealed in the emerging metrical patterns of denotational information organized by deixis, repetition, parallelism (repetition with semantic substitutions), and on occasion by metricalizing discourse markers (Schiffrin 1987) like so, well, yeah, et cetera.

Compared to second language speakers who acquired the language later in life, heritage speakers often show native patterns in many areas of their grammar. Nevertheless, heritage speakers’ ultimate attainment in early adulthood is characterized by significant variability in their overall linguistic proficiency of the heritage language, which often falls outside the range of variation seen in monolingually-raised native speakers. Their native language abilities are dissociated by receptive and productive linguistic skills and within the language modules themselves. This chapter provide examples of the structural changes and differences commonly found in heritage language grammars, compared to the grammars of first-generation immigrants, who speak the same variety as the heritage speakers and who are the most comparable baseline. Heritage grammars are characterized by structural simplification, influence of the dominant language and slow and labored language processing during comprehension and production. Quantity and quality of input may drive processes of language change across generations. Although it has been suggested that changes observed in first-generation immigrants due to attrition are directly transmitted to heritage speakers it is argued that direct transmission from first to second generation is unlikely when considering the interaction of the intensity of the exposure and age of acquisition.

As social scientists we study the events of communication so as to reveal something about the way the order of social formations is experienced and sometimes revealed to those within. We study both the way these formations are drawn into events in which those within attempt to coordinate one with another and how such events are part and parcel of how such social formations come into being, persist over historical time, and are transformed. We are devoted to the goal of giving an adequate account of how we “do things with words” and with other modalities of interpersonal behavior, looking “upward” and “outward” from particular events to the framing sociocultural structures that give meaning and value to event-bound particulars. The received wisdom for how to go about the study of such coordination is to start with individual communicative events, senders and receivers, and the informational messages that they transmit to each other. We, too, will begin there, though we will quickly see the narrowness and insufficiency of such an approach.

This chapter explores the relationship between language acquisition at the individual level and language change at the macro linguistic level. Given the semantic and pragmatic complexity of DOM cross-linguistically, the question arises as to how DOM is acquired by young children growing up in a monolingual environment. To what extent the semantic and pragmatic principles that guided diachronic developments constrain language development at the individual level? Language contact and bilingualism are often cited as critical factors in linguistic change at the macro-sociolinguistic level. Considering how DOM is acquired by different types of bilinguals and in different bilingual situations is critical to understand the link between language acquisition and language change. How language acquisition at the psycholinguistic level contributes to language change at the sociolinguistic and diachronic level, and the roles that both language internal (individual, cognitive factors) and language external (situational) factors play in the process and outcome of change are considered. Existing studies of DOM in L1 acquisition are discussed, followed by a critical review of studies in L2 and bilingual acquisition and in language change at the sociohistorical level. Monolingual children faithfully replicate the language they hear in the input while bilinguals are affected by dominant language transfer.

This chapter asks whether DOM—which is a vulnerable grammatical area in Spanish in the United States—is also vulnerable in Hindi as a heritage language. The results of the study presented in this chapter show that some Hindi heritage speakers also display omission of DOM in all tasks. But unlike what was found for the Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrants in the Spanish study discussed in the previous chapter, there is no indication of ongoing language change in the Hindi spoken in the homeland nor apparent signs of attrition of DOM in the Hindi-speaking adult immigrant group. The sociolinguistic characteristics of the Hindi/Urdu-speaking population in the United States is discussed. The results of the linguistic background questionnaire and the linguistic tasks (oral narrative task, elicited production task, written task, bimodal acceptability judgment task, auditory/written comprehension task) are presented and discussed.

Signification, circulation, and emanation are the three rubrics through which we analyzed enregisterment as a cultural process in the previous lecture. Recall that signification is the organization and interpretation of indexicality in the textuality of events, out of which registers emerge. Circulation is a metaphor for processes of interdiscursivity that move across events of communication, bringing registers together in various ways, forming myriad relationships across communicative events. The motive force of such dynamic connections among events is propulsive emanation, driven by processes of ideologically informed metapragmatics – templates or schemata for interpreting enregistered indexicality – as they emerge from and spread across institutional sites of value-creating ritual action.

This chapter discusses core assumptions in linguistics and language acquisition regarding monolingual and bilingual linguistic knowledge and presents a typology of native speakers that includes heritage speakers. Both layman and academic definitions of a native speaker are discussed, as well as recent research on individual differences in monolingually-raised native speakers related to level of education and other variables that are also relevant for an understanding of heritage speakers. The second introduces the concepts of bilingual and multilingual native speakers and balanced bilingualism, addressing the specific cultural, attitudinal, affective, and sociopolitical factors that affect the acquisition of a heritage language. Heritage speakers’ shift in language dominance with the onset of schooling in the majority language, if not earlier, contributes significantly to reduction in heritage language input and opportunities to use the language at a critical time for language development in childhood. Despite showing obvious changes in some aspects of their grammars, heritage speakers retain native-like abilities in several other aspects, compared to second language learners. The focus of this chapter, and of this book, is more on similarities and differences between heritage speakers and monolingually-raised native speakers than on what heritage speakers and second language learners tend to share.

This chapter adopts one simple yet crucial principle of rationality – the contextually adequate contrast of reasons – as an important path for the normative evaluation of polylogue. This principle is consistent with the basic polylogical idea that arguing for a position is always arguing against other incompatible positions. The key normative obligation of any arguer is thus that of defending the contrastive bestness of the position advanced. The basic principle of contrastive reason can be contextually determined relative to the constraints and affordances of place for argumentation. As such, the principle is translatable into a normative condition from which to evaluate argumentation in complex communication: make a relevant expansion of a disagreement space. It is then demonstrated how this approach explains the false dilemma as a polylogical fallacy that neither logical nor dialectical approaches can adequately handle. The usefulness of this approach for evaluating the role of place in the management of disagreement in polylogue is also illustrated. Finally, the chapter discusses the intriguing and often paradoxical relations between individual and collective rationality that polylogue framework foregrounds, in contrast to most extant normative approaches in argumentation theory.