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• Abbas Benmamoun: General and theoretical issues in the study of heritage languages 

The trajectory of heritage speakers is usually characterized by (sometimes limited) early exposure to their heritage language, transition to the dominant language in the community and society, and loss or attrition of various aspects of the first/heritage language. Recent research on heritage languages has reenergized debates about long standing questions in theoretical linguistics and language acquisition, questions such as the notion of native speaker, role of input, language universals, role of language contact and transfer, second and third language acquisition, etc. In this lecture series/course, we will discuss key morphological, morphosyntactic, and syntactic aspects of heritage languages and contrast heritage speakers with native speakers and second language learners.

• Silvina Montrul : The acquisition of heritage languages

Heritage speakers are individuals exposed to a minority language at home since childhood but educated predominantly in the societal majority language. The linguistic development of heritage speakers is relevant for linguistics, education and language policies. This course will offer an overview of recent research and outstanding issues in the emerging field of heritage language acquisition with the objective to discuss and understand empirical research on the nature of heritage language learners’ linguistic competence, processing, and use of the minority language, and to understand the specific linguistic needs of this population. Topics include issues of culture and identity in different heritage language communities, first, second and bilingual acquisition from childhood to adulthood, the role of school in heritage language maintenance and loss, the nature of the adult heritage language speakers linguistic knowledge, comparison of heritage language learners and L2 learners, heritage language learners in the classroom, implications for language programs and language policy. The course will focus on discussing experimental and case studies of heritage speakers of different languages (Spanish, Russian, French, English, German, Arabic, Turkish, Korean, Japanese, etc.) and sociolinguistic contexts, approached from different theoretical perspectives (syntactic theory, phonological theory, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, sociolinguistics).

• Maria Polinsky : Heritage languages from a theoretical and experimental perspective

This course is about heritage languages and their speakers—individuals who are raised speaking a minority language at home but are exposed to a dominant, majority language outside the home. This dominant language becomes their main language in adolescence and adulthood. The minority language, despite being first in the order of acquisition, is not learned in full; this incompletely acquired language is referred to as heritage language. The study of heritage languages provide researchers with a novel tool for understanding how a grammar can be acquired under minimal input: what constitutes bare grammar, what constitutes sufficient if minimal input, and what are the areas of strength and vulnerability in language?

• Henry Davis & Lisa Matthewson : Explorations in the syntax and semantics of Pacific Northwest languages

In this course, we will explore the challenges and opportunities of investigating complex syntactic and semantic issues in the endangered indigenous languages of the Pacific Northwest region of North America (including the Salish and Tsimshianic language families). After an introduction to the languages, we will explore four topics in detail: quantification, tense, modality, and focus. For each one, we will not only present our findings and their theoretical implications, but also discuss the field methodologies we have employed to reach our conclusions. The course should be of broad interest to fieldworkers, those who work on understudied languages, and anyone interested in methodological issues in syntax and semantics.

Workshops

• Outi Bat-El : Universal principles in phonology

What are universal principles? This is the first question we will ask in the workshop, given that the notion of universal principles is subject different interpretations. Are they language specific or general cognitive principles? Is the learnability of universal principles facilitated by a biological mechanism or does it involve just statistical learning?      It is often difficult to tease apart universal principles from frequency effects, because the phonological structures promoted by universal principles are usually those that are most frequent in languages. We will state the conditions required to support universal principles and provide examples from language acquisition and psycholinguistics. Finally, we will address universal principles in the context of Heritage Linguistics, asking how this field of research can contribute to the debate.

• Bèrtran Ôbrée : Local minority languages: the case of gallo

Gallo is a Romance language spoken in Haute-Bretagne. We will discuss issues in the study of gallo and its adaptation to modern times, when written language has been generalized and is widely available on a daily basis. The programme includes:

• • Overview of gallo and its current social and political situation
  • Oral surveys in the linguistic study of gallo
  • A few phonological features of gallo
  • Orthographic issues and strategies developed by Chubri

• Anne Dagnac & Mélanie Jouitteau : Syntactic transmission in ultraminorized contexts: Case study in Breton and Picard

Mélanie Jouitteau and Anne Dagnac present two case studies of intergenerational transmission of rare syntactic facts in two different contexts in Celtic and Romance in social contexts where the speakers receive both massive counter-input, and impoverished stimuli in the language. The first case study shows how some rare and never yet described Breton dialectal features pass on from traditional speakers to grand-children. The first phenomenon is verbal agreement with a postverbal subject (Plougerneau), the second is binding of various possessive pronouns by an impersonal agreement marker (Lesneven/Kerlouan), and the last one is high idiosyncrasy in the derivation of collective nouns by singulatives and double plurals. None of these facts are described in available grammars. Transmission is evidenced despite massive counter evidence provided by the written standard, the schooling system, and the available literature. This is particularly spectacular considering the intervening generation of parents being either non-speakers or neo-speakers, and the very poor time of exposure to the elderly. The hypothesis put forward is that children let themselves be more influenced by the syntactic structures produced by so-called traditional speakers, and discriminate toward insecure speakers, neo-speakers or speakers of neighbouring varieties. The second case study focuses on Picard, one of the Oïl languages that have coexisted for centuries with French, often being assimilated with regional or social varieties of it with which, to a large extent, it forms a continuum. Picard shows interesting original syntactic features: some appear to be shared by several Oïl languages, others only by various dialects of the same Oïl language,while some appear to be locally restricted. This opens a series of questions, one of which is whether we can trace the paths of their transmission. Are the ultra local features the remnants of a larger phenomenon that has been lost in neighboring areas? Are they the core locus of a partial dissemination? Have they been transmitted only locally? We will discuss the resources and means that can help us answer this question, and their respective limits. In this perspective, we will examine three properties of different geographical scale, that, at first sight, could be syntactically correlated: (i) the presence of Doubly Filled Comp (DFC) WH questions, as in (1), in which the WH-expression is followed by a complementizer, a feature common to most Oïl dialects (ii) the presence of a complementizer following another item, for instance in adjunct clauses, as in (2), a much less pervasive construction in the Oïl varieties; (iii) Double Complementizer Constructions (DCC), in which two instances of the complementizer can frame a left-peripheral constituent, as in (3), which is found in a small sub-area of Picard.

1. [u k tə vˈɑː], Où que te vas ? (ALF5)  [DFC] ‘Where are you going?’
2. [kã k õ̜n e swɛ õ̜n e l gozje sɔː], Quand qu’on a soif on a le gosier sec (ALF7) [X que] ‘When you’re thirsty, your throat is dry’
3. Car v’là qu’ tout près d’ nous qu’ all’ s’avanche (R89) [DCC] ‘Because suddenly she comes next to us’

•  Ricardo Etxepare:  (Weak) emergent properties in language contact

Some of the most recent work on language contact provides striking examples of what we could qualify as weak emergence (Bedau, 1997) in the domain of language development : cases in which the grammatical outcome of linguistic contact results in properties which are unexpected from the point of view of the interacting linguistic systems. Thus, work like Aboh’s (2015) convincingly shows that a substantial part of the syntactic structure of creoles (an extreme case of contact-induced change) follows from the selective recombination of syntactic features made available by the languages involved in the contact situation, in ways which are novel with regard to the source languages, but which are nevertheless channeled by general constraints on syntactic configurations. Weak emergent properties are also observed in recent work on Code-switching, as in the well documented use of light verb constructions which are otherwise unattested in either of the languages present in the switch (e.g. Vilbazo and Lopez, 2011 ; Veenstra, 2016). Similar emergent properties arise also in the domain of intonational phonology : bilingual speakers of Spanish and Quechua have developed a distinct regional type of Andean Spanish, with a particular intonational pattern for focused sentences in their Spanish that resembles neither the Quechua one, nor the one in the surrounding varieties of Spanish (Lipski, 2012). Weak emergence is a particularly clear instance of the poverty of stimulus problem at the heart of generative linguistics, and an illustrative case of the mediating role of grammatical principles in bilingual language development. The workshop will constitute a showcase for some of the work that is being done in this perspective and a forum for discussion of the relevant factors involved in contact related change as well as the theoretical models required to explain it.