Tenth Heritage Language Research Institute

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Information status and word order in heritage and L2 Russian

The attainment and successful integration of discourse-pragmatic knowledge in the non-dominant language has repeatedly been identified as a problematic area for bilinguals, both across the proficiency spectrum and in distinct populations of speakers. In this talk, I compare adult heritage language (HL) speakers and late L2 learners on their word order strategies in Russian, a language in which the syntactic placement of constituents in a sentence reflects their information status in discourse. Experimental data from a series of scaled acceptability judgment tasks point to several areas in which the bilingual speakers’ ratings systematically differ from those in the baseline group, with significant contrasts also emerging between the HL and L2 groups. While L2 learners exhibit a nearly across-the-board preference for the canonical word order pattern, HL speakers’ ratings suggest a relatively more nuanced recognition of the information-structural (given or new), syntactic (heavy or light), and lexical (verb type) factors associated with the occurrence of inversion and object shift in Russian. Despite these selective advantages, HL speakers nevertheless exhibit systematic differences from baseline speakers with respect to both phenomena, particularly evident in contexts where the use of non-canonical orders follows from information-structural requirements.