The HLVC project applies consistent methods of data collection, analysis, and interpretation to a range of languages and dependent variables. This is meant to mitigate the pattern of diverse findings from diverse studies that may partially result from diverse methods. This chapter therefore describes how the corpus is constructed, focusing on the cross-linguistic, cross-generational, and multi-method design, and gives details about recruiting, recording, and transcription of the sociolinguistic interview, the ethnic orientation questionnaire, the picture description task, and the consent procedure. It then describes the workflow for data processing and metadata construction, describing both how the corpus is organized (to be useful to additional researchers) and how we have analyzed variation of a number of variables to date. These include prodrop, case-marking, VOT, and (r) across multiple languages, apocope and differential object marking in Italian, and tone mergers, classifiers, motion-even marking, denasalization (an element of so-called lazy pronunciation, 懶音 laan5 jam1), and vowel space in Cantonese. It details the methods of analyzing ethnic orientation and several proxies for fluency (speech rate, vocabulary size, language-switching measures). Finally, it describes the methods used for constructing and comparing mixed-effects models for cross-variety comparisons in order to distinguish contact-induced change, internal change, and identity-marking variation.

Chapter 8 focuses on ditransitive verbs, which have a direct and an indirect object. In English, ditransitive verbs participate in the double object construction as well as in a prepositional dative construction. Most second language learners of English, whose language does not have a double object construction, find these structures difficult to acquire. In Spanish, direct and indirect object pronouns are clitics and appear preverbally in certain contexts. Some dative clitic constructions are like the English double object construction. Some direct objects are marked with a preposition in Spanish, which also causes significant difficulty to learners. The first part of the chapter focuses on the acquisition of the double object construction in English and covers foundational intervention studies on this topic. The second part of the chapter turns to the expression of objects in Spanish and presents classroom and lab intervention studies promoting the acquisition of accusative and dative clitic pronouns and of Differential Object Marking in second language learners and heritage speakers.

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.

This chapter discusses diverse typological, corpus-based and experimental evidence related to differential argument marking of subject and object. The different types of evidence converge, supporting the efficiency-based interpretation of differential marking based on the principle of negative correlation between accessibility and costs. This chapter provides a novel contribution to this well-explored topic because the intuitions about the causes that lead to the emergence of cross-linguistic patterns are captured in the form of measurable probabilities that can be found in corpus data. Of particular importance here are conditional probabilities of the role given the referential features of arguments, which determine the accessibility of the intended role interpretation. This chapter also demonstrates that we can disentangle some competing explanations of differential marking using experiments with artificial language learning and communication.

Prototypically, the central participants of the event are packaged as the core arguments of the predicate. The information packaging of participants in events need not follow this pattern. The prototypical packaging represents the basic voice construction; nonprototypical packagings represent different types of nonbasic voice constructions. The basic and nonbasic voice constructions involve a system of strategies: nonbasic voice constructions are differentiated from basic voice construction to different degrees, ranging from just word order differences to differences in the type of argument phrase a participant is encoded in. Passive--inverse constructions are used for a P (patient-like) participant that is more salient than the A (agent-like) participant; differential object (and subject) marking are similar in function. Antipassive constructions are used for a P participant that is even less salient than a prototypical P participant, and that is expressed by an oblique argument phrase or an incorporated noun (if it is expressed at all).

In this chapter, we discuss three classes of phenomena that are captured by the terms dependency and licensing, in clauses and nominal expressions: (i) the structural relation between a lexical head (e.g., V, N, A) and the functional structure projected by it such as the relation between a verb and an auxiliary or between a noun and a determiner; (ii) the selectional relation between a lexical head and the constituents that are combined with it to satisfy its argument structure, as in the case of the verb and the direct object; and (iii) the structural relation created by two different constituents that share the same referential index. In the third case, we observe two major types: a constituent is displaced, as in the case of the subject of a passive clause or a wh-constituent; or two constituents share the same referent but have different functions in the clause (or in different clauses), as is the case of pronouns and their antecedents. The dependencies dealt with in the first two cases are ‘local’, while the others can be long distance. Most of the analyses of the dependency phenomena relate the relative richness in inflexional morphology to variation in word order, argument marking, agreement, and the realization of pronominal reference.

This chapter provides an overview of the research on semantics and related interface phenomena in heritage language grammars, focusing on three main questions: (i) whether the phenomena under investigation are subject to incomplete acquisition and/or attrition in heritage language grammars; (ii) whether heritage language grammars are subject to cross-linguistic influence from the dominant language; and (iii) whether interface phenomena are particularly vulnerable in incomplete acquisition and/or attrition. These questions are investigated in four linguistic domains that fall at the interface between syntax and semantics where there has been a substantial body of research with heritage speakers: semantics of the verbal domain, such as tense/aspect and unaccusativity; semantics of the nominal domain, such as definiteness and genericity; semantics of subject and object expression, including binding and case-marking; and quantifier semantics.

Chapter 5 deals with (asymmetric) differential object marking (DOM), a phenomenon occurring in over 300 languages whereby the object of a verb can be either marked or unmarked for morphological case, depending on a number of factors. These factors have to do with the individuation/prominence of the object, often its definiteness, specificity and animacy value. The chapter begins with illustrations of the phenomenon in several languages, showing its sensitivity to different properties of the object. The reasoning behind DOM is then discussed. Two specific proposals are considered: one treats DOM as a signal of higher transitivity; the other views it as a disambiguation mechanism whereby a non-prototypical object is marked and, as a result, not confused with the subject. In addition to features of the object, properties of the verb have been argued to play a role in DOM; this relation is considered in a separate section. Further, several cross-linguistic analyses of the phenomenon are reviewed.

Finally, Chapter 11 is concerned with alternating pairs of constructions, such as active and passive clauses and singular and plural nouns, which are commonly analyzed as paradigmatic alternatives of particular grammatical categories such as voice and number. Crucially, paradigmatic alternatives of this type are often asymmetrical in the sense that the less frequent member of an alternating pair of constructions is marked by an extra morpheme (e.g., a voice or number marker). Linguistic typologists refer to this asymmetry by the notion of markedness and have argued that frequency accounts for the occurrence of the extra marker. Chapter 11 presents a network analysis of the encoding asymmetries of grammatical categories based on research from typology and psycholinguistics. While the proposed account applies to a large number of categories (e.g., voice, number, tense, aspect, case), the chapter is primarily concerned with a phenomenon known as differential object marking, which has played a key role in recent typological and psycholinguistic research on grammatical relations.

Every construction has a particular ecological location in the grammar network that is defined by its relationship to other constructions in the system. Since the relationships between constructions are similar to those between lexemes, Chapter 10 begins with a short discussion of psycholinguistic research on the mental lexicon, which is commonly analyzed as an activation network (Dell 1986). There is abundant evidence that lexical access is influenced by several interacting factors including frequency, priming, similarity and neighborhood density, or family size. Considering research on sentences processing, L1 acquisition and language change, the chapter argues that the availability, or accessibility, of constructions is influenced by the same factors as lexical access, that is, by frequency, priming, similarity and neighborhood density, supporting the hypothesis that lexemes and constructions are organized in similar ways. Specifically, the chapter argues that grammar includes “construction families” that influence the use and the development of syntactic patterns (Diessel and Tomasello 2005; Wells et al. 2009).