MARKING TOPIC OR MARKING CASE: A COMPARATIVE INVESTIGATION OF HERITAGE JAPANESE AND HERITAGE KOREAN

In this paper, we examine the relationship between grammatical and discourse-related domains of linguistic organization in heritage speakers by comparing their knowledge of categories mediated at different structural levels: grammatical case marking, which is mediated within the structure of the clause, and the marking of information structure, grammatically mediated at the syntax-discourse interface. To this end, we examine the knowledge of case and topic particles in heritage speakers and L2 learners of Japanese and Korean as assessed through a series of rating tasks. We find that heritage speakers in both languages experience different degrees of difficulty with elements that belong to different linguistic modules: phenomena which involve semantic and discourse computation are found to be more difficult than phenomena governed primarily by structural syntactic constraints. 1. Setting the stage Existing cross-linguistic studies of heritage languages have unraveled a range of grammatical properties that pose difficulties to heritage speakers, allowing us to make preliminary generalizations about the overall linguistic architecture of heritage speakers’ ∗ The authors thank Sun-Hee Bae, Shin Fukuda, Sandy Kim, Jenny Lee, Hiroki Nomoto, Steve SanPietro, Aika Taguchi, and three anonymous reviewers whose help with various aspects of this project is deeply appreciated. We are grateful to the audiences at the Sixth Heritage Language Research Institute, Chicago Bilingualism Forum, and the Center for Language Science at PennState for valuable comments on this work. The research presented here was supported by the Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL) at the University of Maryland, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at SUNY New Paltz, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, and the National Heritage Language Resource Center at UCLA. We are solely responsible for all the errors. Abbreviations: ACC—accusative; AND—adnominal; COMP—complementizer; CP— complementizer phrase; DECL—declarative; DP—determiner phrase; GEN—genitive; IP— inflectional phrase; NEG—negation; NOM—nominative; PASS—passive; PRS—present; TOP—topic.