Glossa: A journal of general linguistics, 2016, 1(1), 1-29., 2016
This paper presents and analyzes lexical and syntactic evidence from heritage Russian as spoken b... more This paper presents and analyzes lexical and syntactic evidence from heritage Russian as spoken by bilinguals dominant in American English. The data come from the Russian Learner Corpus, a new resource of spoken and written materials produced by heritage re-learners and L2 learners of Russian. The paper focuses on lexical deviations from baseline Russian at a single-and multi-word level, which we divide further into transfer-based structures and novel creations, showing that the latter are used by heritage speakers, but generally not freely available to L2 learners. In constructing innovative expressions, heritage speakers follow general principles of compositionality. As a result, such innovative expressions are more semantically transparent than their correlates in the baseline or dominant language. We contend that semantically transparent, compositional patterns are based on structures that are universally available across languages. However, L2 speakers resort to these universal strategies for creating novel phrases much less often than heritage speakers. In their linguistic creativity, heritage speakers' utterances parallel those of L1 child learners rather than L2 speakers.
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Papers by Maria Polinsky
This handbook presents facts and descriptions of the languages written by experts. The first half of the book is an introduction to the languages, with the linguistic profiles enriched by demographic research about their speakers. It features overviews of the main language families as well as detailed grammatical descriptions of several individual languages. The second half of the book delves more deeply into theoretical analyses of features, such as agreement, ellipsis, and discourse properties, which are found in some languages of the Caucasus. Promising areas for future research are highlighted throughout the handbook, which will be of interest to linguists of all subfields.
The book begins with an analysis of syntactic ergativity, which as Polinsky argues, is a manifestation of the PP-ergative type. Polinsky discusses diagnostic properties that define PPs in general and then goes to show that a subset of ergative expressions fit the profile of PPs. Several alternative analyses have been proposed to account for syntactic ergativity; the book presents and outlines these analyses and offers further considerations in support of the PP-ergativity approach. The book then discusses the second type, DP-ergative languages, and traces the diachronic connection between the two types.
The book includes two chapters illustrating paradigm PP-ergative and DP-ergative languages: Tongan and Tsez. The data used in these descriptions come from Polinsky's original fieldwork hence presenting new empirical facts from both languages.