Acceptability of Different Psychological Verbal Constructions by Heritage Spanish Speakers from California

This study set out to investigate whether US Heritage Spanish features a more streamlined verbal paradigm in psych verb constructions compared to standard varieties of Spanish, where HS speakers find an invariable third-person singular form acceptable with both singular and plural grammatical subjects. In standard Spanish, the semantic subjects of psych verbs are typically pre-verbal experiencers cast as oblique arguments in inverse predicates such as in me encantan los buhos ‘I love owls’. The translation of this sentence shows that equivalent English predicates are typically direct constructions. The data were gathered using an acceptability judgement questionnaire that was distributed to participants that fit into one of three groups: early bilingual heritage speakers of Spanish from California, advanced Spanish as L2 speakers, and non-bilingual native speakers of Spanish who had learnt English as an L2 as adults. The Heritage Spanish speakers in this group often patterned differently from both other groups, who surprisingly patterned together. We argue that this is due to L2 speakers’ mode of acquisition (formal and subject to prescriptive grammar), in comparison with Heritage Spanish speakers’ naturalistic acquisition. Specifically, we find evidence for a streamlining of the Spanish verbal paradigm not immediately attributed to English interference, and that in psych verb constructions, Heritage Spanish speakers more readily accept a third-person singular invariable verbal form. This differentiation of the verbal paradigm from standard Spanish use should be considered a bona fide linguistic change, but not proof of either incomplete acquisition or language attrition. Since Heritage Spanish speakers are, after all, native speakers of Spanish, this study shows that Heritage Spanish should be considered and studied as any other dialect of Spanish, with its distinctive grammatical features, and subject to variability and change.

Linking experiencer-subject psych verb constructions in Modern Greek

This paper focuses on the semantic properties and the syntactic behaviour of Modern Greek (hence MG) Experiencer-Subject Psych Verb Constructions (hence ESPVCs). MG ESPVCs include verbs like miso (hate), agapo (love), or latrevo (adore), which feature a nominative experiencer in agreement with the verb and an accusative theme (see examples (1)-(3)). MG ESPVCs include also predicates like fovame (fear), which feature an experiencer-subject in agreement with the verb and either an accusative theme (example (4)), or a theme as the object of a prepositional phrase (example (5)). We should underline here that examples (4) and (5) below convey the same meaning. That is, they do NOT differ semantically. O Gianis misi to sholio.the Gianis.N hate.3S the school.A"John hates school." O Gianis agapa tin Maria.the Gianis.N loves.3S the Maria.A"John loves Mary." O Gianis latrevi tin musiki.the Gianis.N adore.3S the music.A"John adores music." I Maria fovate tis kategides.the Maria.N fear.3S the storms.A"Maria is afraid of the storms." I Maria fovate me tis kategides.the Maria.N fear.3S with the storms.A"Maria is afraid of the storms." The challenge that constructions like the ones in (4) and (5) pose lies on the split syntactic realization of the "experienced" (hence EXPD) semantic role (i.e., the theme), which in constructions like (4) is syntactically realized as the object of the sentence, while in constructions like (5) it is syntactically realized as the object of a prepositional phrase. Our aim is to propose a unified linking account of the MG ESPVCs. This unified account is based on the assumption that the individual denoted by the object NP (or PP) of the MG ESPVCs is entailed to be semantically underspecified, and makes use of Wechsler's (1995) Notion Rule, Davis and Koenig's (2000) linking theory, as well as Markantonatou and Sadler's (1996) proposal for the linking of indirect arguments. References Davis, A.R. and J.-P. Koenig (2000). Linking as constraints on word classes in a hierarchical lexicon. Language 76, 56-91. Markantonatou, S. and L. Sadler (1996). Linking Indirect Arguments. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 9, 24-63. Wechsler, S. (1995). The Semantic Basis of Argument Structure. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Series: Dissertations in Linguistics, Joan Bresnan, Sharon Inkelas, William J. Poser, and Peter Sells (eds.).