Gregory Scontras

Heritage language and linguistic theory.

This paper discusses a common reality in many cases of multilingualism: heritage speakers, or unbalanced bilinguals, simultaneous or sequential, who shifted early in childhood from one language (their heritage language) to their dominant language (the language of their speech community). To demonstrate the relevance of heritage linguistics to the study of linguistic competence more broadly defined, we present a series of case studies on heritage linguistics, documenting some of the deficits and abilities typical of heritage speakers, together with the broader theoretical questions they inform. We consider the reorganization of morphosyntactic feature systems, the reanalysis of atypical argument structure, the attrition of the syntax of relativization, and the simplification of scope interpretations; these phenomena implicate diverging trajectories and outcomes in the development of heritage speakers. The case studies also have practical and methodological implications for the study of multilingualism. We conclude by discussing more general concepts central to linguistic inquiry, in particular, complexity and native speaker competence.

Subjectivity Predicts Adjective Ordering Preferences

From English to Hungarian to Mokilese, speakers exhibit strong ordering preferences in multi-adjective strings: “the big blue box” sounds far more natural than “the blue big box.” We show that an adjective’s distance from the modified noun is predicted not by a rigid syntax, but by the adjective’s meaning: less subjective adjectives occur closer to the nouns they modify. This finding provides an example of a broad linguistic universal—adjective ordering preferences—emerging from general properties of cognition.

The differential representation of number and gender in Spanish

Abstract This paper investigates the geometry of phi-features, with a special emphasis on number and gender in Spanish. We address two sets of questions: (i) are number and gender bundled together or do they constitute separate categories, and (ii) does the internal feature composition of number and gender follow a single- or a multi-valued system? Given the lack of consensus on these issues based on primary data, we approach these questions experimentally, using the phenomenon of agreement attraction: a situation in which ungrammatical sequences are perceived as grammatical when one of the NPs is erroneously identified as determining agreement. Our results offer novel support in favor of an agreement model in which number and gender are in separte projections and are valued independently. In addition, our results indicate that number but not gender in Spanish is multi-valued.

Quantitatively Assessing the Development of Adjective Ordering Preferences Using Child-directed and Child-produced Speech Corpora

Using corpus analysis and quantitative approaches, we can see when more abstract underlying representations emerge for adjective ordering preferences: around age 4 It remains unclear when subjectivity overtakes lexical class; this likely depends on children’s development of the conceptual underpinnings of subjectivity, which occurs late (Foushee & Srinivasan, 2017) Given the input, which hypothesis is best at generating the produced data? What’s going on? We need to test which representation hypothesis best accounts for the data kids produce given their input