The grammar of displacement in Cantonese heritage speakers

Abstract

This study investigates the grammar of displacement in Cantonese heritage speakers using the ‘fruit carts’ elicited production paradigm (Gómez Gallo et al., 2010). The production data of two groups of Cantonese heritage speakers is compared with that of Cantonese native speakers in the use of alternative constructions to express displacement. The first group consists of 13 heritage speakers who were either born or raised in the UK or USA since early childhood whereas the second group consists of 10 heritage speakers who have been living in the UK since secondary school. Heritage speakers have been found to have problems in word order (Albirini et al., 2011; Polinsky, 2006, 2009). It was hypothesized that the Cantonese heritage speakers would show differences from the Cantonese native speakers in the structures they use to encode displacement in Cantonese. Subjects were asked to instruct the experimenter to move virtual objects around in a production task. Of special interest is the ZOENG-construction (comparable to Mandarin BA) where the direct object go pinggwo ‘the apple’ is placed before the verb, and ZOENG highlights the direct object as the topic at the discoursal level as in (1). (1) Ngo5 zoeng1 go3 ping4gwo2 fong3 hai2 saam1gok3jing4 jap6bin6 I displace CL apple put at triangle inside ‘I put the apple inside the triangle.’ We show that while Cantonese native speakers tend to use ZOENG-constructions, Cantonese heritage speakers tend not to use ZOENG-constructions but prefer topicalized sentences and multiple short utterances with canonical SVO word order. This finding echoes that of Polinsky et al. (2010) who showed that Mandarin heritage speakers have limited control of the BA-construction, and use multiple short utterances with canonical SVO word order. These strategies can be interpreted psycholinguistically as means to minimize processing domains (Hawkins, 2004). We discuss possible factors which may underlie the observed phenomena, including incomplete acquisition, attrition and reverse transfer from English to Cantonese. Our study provides evidence for a vulnerable domain in heritage language development.