Differential Object Marking (DOM) is vulnerable to change in heritage speakers of Spanish and heritage speakers of Hindi. DOM is also vulnerable to L1 attrition in Spanish-speaking first-generation immigrants but not in Hindi immigrants. This chapter examines DOM vulnerability in Romanian. The chapter describes the sociolinguistic characteristics of the Romanian-speaking population in the United, followed by a summary of the overall results of the linguistic background questionnaire and the linguistic tasks. The overall results show that, compared to the Spanish and Hindi-speaking populations, the Romanian-speaking population in the United States is far less numerous, yet their Romanian language skills remain relatively strong compared to the other two groups. The accuracy with DOM of the first-generation Romanian immigrants on all linguistic measures did not differ from those of the Romanian speakers in Romania. Just like in the Hindi study, there appears to be no evidence of language change in the homeland nor signs of attrition of this phenomenon in the first-generation adult immigrants sampled in this study. Yet, DOM and accusative clitic doubling (CD) were found to be somewhat vulnerable to omission in heritage speakers, especially in those exposed to English since birth or very early in life (the simultaneous bilinguals).

This chapter presents the motivation and methodology of a cross-linguistic and cross-generational study of DOM in Spanish, Hindi and Romanian as heritage languages. Innovative aspects of this project are the comparison of the same linguistic phenomenon cross-linguistically and in heritage languages that share the same majority language context and the inclusion of adult first generation immigrants to examine the cross-generational component. By including heritage speakers and first-generation immigrants as well as two generations of native speakers in the homeland, we examine whether changes with DOM are observed in both diaspora and homeland contexts, or only in the diaspora context. The purpose of this study was to elucidate the linguistic and situational factors that contribute to DOM erosion within and across languages. The rest of this chapter presents the research questions, more specific hypotheses and the overall methodology.

The study presented in this book focuses on the acquisition, maintenance and change of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish, English and Romanian in contact with English in the United States. Differential Object Marking (DOM) is the overt marking of some direct objects and is a widespread among languages of the world. DOM is an iconic procedure because the arguments that are overtly marked morphologically are more salient/prominent semantically or pragmatically than unmarked objects. This chapter describes how DOM is manifested in Spanish, Romanian and Hindi and presents current syntactic synchronic analyses of the phenomenon in these languages. The diachronic evolution of DOM in language contact situations is also discussed.

This chapter brings together the findings from the three studies, which confirmed that Differential Object Marking (DOM) is a vulnerable grammatical area not only in Spanish, but also in Hindi and Romanian as heritage languages, subject to erosion under pressure from, English in this case. This chapter goes deeper into these overall trends, by comparing the three heritage speaker groups, on the one hand, and the three first-generation immigrant groups, on the other, on several background variables related to patterns of language use. A follow-up replication study with Spanish heritage speakers and immigrants from other countries in Latin America is reported, which confirm the attrition effects in the two generations of Mexican immigrants. It is claimed that his finding is strong evidence that while DOM omission may have started as a developmental outcome of heritage language acquisition, it may be on its way to becoming a stable dialectal feature of Spanish in the United States, suggesting language change with respect to DOM in Spanish. The roles of language internal and language external factors are discussed.

The evolution of the Romance languages from Latin was significantly shaped by the numerous language contact environments, which resulted from conquest, colonization, and trade. This chapter traces the development of the largest Romance languages throughout Europe, with emphasis on the known or postulated effects of language contact. The chapter continues with an account of the spread of Spanish, Portuguese, and French to the Americas, together with the ensuing contacts with indigenous languages and languages of voluntary and involuntary immigration and the formation of Afro-Romance creole languages.

The Balkans were the first sprachbund (linguistic league, area, etc.) identified as a locus of contact-induced change owing to multi-lateral, multi-directional, mutual multilingualism to be identified as such. In this model, multilingualism is shared by speakers of the various languages, it is stable across generations, and it involves varied social groups. While no linguistic situation is unchanging, the combination of the factors mentioned here differentiates the sprachbund from other contact situations such as a diaspora, a colony, or that of endangered indigenous languages. Owing to the complexity of a sprachbund, the directionality of contact-induced change is not always discernible, nor is such directionality necessarily relevant, the point being the fact of convergence itself. This chapter defines the basic linguistic features relevant to the study of the Balkans as a linguistic area and also gives an overview of the linguistic study of the region. An important conclusion is the fact that the Balkan sprachbund continues to be a relevant lens through which language contact – both historical and ongoing – can be viewed.

This chapter concerns the proportional readings of many and most, for example, where many/most students are smart means ‘the ratio of smart students to non-smart students is high/greater than 1:1’. The authors argue for a GQ analysis of proportional most over Hackl’s adjectival analysis based on distributional differences between relative most (the most P) and proportional most (most P). This GQ analysis is also shown to be supported by morpho-syntactically complex realizations of proportional most, such as the Romanian cei mai mulţi ‘the.MPL more many.MPL’ and cele mai multe ‘the.FPL more many.FPL’. Turning to proportional many, they argue that it shares a syntactic position with cardinal many, namely, SpecMeasP below Det. For the semantics of proportional many, building on Solt’s degree-theoretic approach based on measure functions with a cardinality dimension, the authors propose that measure functions themselves can have a proportional interpretation, based on proportional scales, in which the measure of the entity across a certain dimension is evaluated with respect to the measure of a ‘whole’ in which that entity is included.