Series | LiVVaL. Linguaggio e Variazione | Variation in Language
Edited book | Heritage Languages and Variation
Chapter | Gender Agreement in Heritage Serbian: A First Study
Gender Agreement in Heritage Serbian: A First Study
Abstract
This study investigates nine child heritage speakers’ gender agreement in Serbian, with German being the dominant language. We hypothesized that our participants will display different stages of the gender system development found with (Slavic) monolinguals and bilinguals, in which low-frequent non-canonical grammatical suffixes get to be interpreted as regular, canonical endings, resulting in attributive agreement errors among speakers. The results from an elicited production task confirm that speakers rely on morphophonological cues to determine noun gender, the lower their proficiency is. On the other hand, the advanced speakers exposed agreement patterns similar to our monolingual control group. Expectedly, the overall age was found to have a positive effect (when the proficiency is not disparate), as both older child bilinguals and monolinguals (7‑10) demonstrated a more target-like gender agreement system. Finally, our findings show that the advanced participants utilized a three-gender system, slightly simplified than the elaborate one found with monolinguals, while the lowest-ranked subjects exposed a two-gender system (masculine vs. feminine).
Submitted: July 27, 2023 | Accepted: Nov. 16, 2023 | Published July 18, 2024 | Language: en
Keywords Canonicity • Language acquisition • Heritage language • Gender agreement • German • Serbian
Copyright © 2024 Ana Krstic, Branimir Stankovic. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-800-2/002
