Languages in contact commonly leave an imprint on one other. The most straightforward of these imprints to identify is MAT-borrowing, which results in clearly identifiable lexical items of one language (the donor language) being used in utterances of another language (the recipient language). This stands in contrast with PAT-borrowing, which does not involve any such incorporation of “other language” material but rather results in the reshaping of existing structures of the recipient language on the model of the donor language. This type of language change is therefore arguably more “invisible” to speakers since no easily identifiable “other language” material is present.

This study presents a detailed examination of PAT-borrowing in Guernésiais, the Norman variety spoken in Guernsey (British Channel Islands), which is now at an advanced state of language shift. It also highlights a major difference between MAT- and PAT-borrowing, namely that, whereas MAT-borrowing can only be explained with reference to the dominant language, PAT-borrowing can on occasion admit an internal explanation.

This study examined the variability of language profiles in Spanish–English bilingual children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). The data included 529 children between the ages of 5 and 10 years. Eighty-eight of these children were identified as having DLD. A latent profile analysis was conducted based on children’s morphosyntax and semantics performance in Spanish and English. The optimal model identified five different profiles, illustrating the heterogeneity in bilingual development. Children with DLD were observed across all profiles, but most were classified in the only two profiles where lower morphosyntax than semantic performance was observed across languages. These results show the variability in both bilingual children with and without DLD. Additionally, the hallmark deficit of DLD in morphosyntax was confirmed, with the morphological weakness being observed in each of the bilingual children’s languages. Children’s background factors (age, maternal education and language exposure) were associated with profile characteristics.

To determine the source of transfer in third language acquisition (L3A), we tested the effects of grammatical feature typology and L2 Spanish proficiency on the comprehension and production of grammatical [gender] and [number] in the early stages of L3A of Portuguese. We distinguish between the two features based on their participation in the lexical-conceptual structure of the lemma and its interaction with the morpho-syntactic derivation. L1 English speakers were tested on their knowledge of the features in both their L2 and their L3 through a grammaticality judgment task and an elicited production task. Results show that L3 learners transfer only some features, specifically [gender] rather than [number], suggesting a fine-grained divide in feature compositionality between the structural ([gender]) and semantic ([number]) features. We also found facilitative transfer only after a threshold acquisition in L2, in support of the Threshold Hypothesis. For beneficial transfer of a feature, mere knowledge of the L2 structure was found to be sufficient. However, a higher generalized L2 proficiency threshold was found to predict high L3 accuracy.

We investigate the effects of age and first language (L1) on the acquisition of verb morphology in L2 English by Chinese and Russian children learning English as a foreign language in EFL schools in Shanghai and Moscow. We tested children 5 years after they started their EFL classes and considered two groups in each country: one group started EFL classes at the age of 4 and was tested at the age of 9, while the other group started at 7 and was tested at 12. We assessed the production of 3SG-agreement and past tense using two elicited production tasks (TEGI). Our results show that later starters consistently outperform earlier starters. Unexpectedly, Chinese children showed higher accuracy with 3SG-agreement than their Russian counterparts. Finally, learners were more accurate with regular past tense than 3SG-agreement.

Bollywood films, the highly commercial films by Indian producers for Indian audiences, have always been Hindi-dominant, and despite the increased incorporation of English over time, the speech of urban elite main characters remains Hindi matrix. This is at odds with the code-switching patterns of urban elites in other Indian media, such as chat shows, and spoken conversation, where switching among such speakers is often English dominant. Young urban elites may use English in isolation; their Bollywood equivalents sometimes do so also, but always with standard syntax. In this article we show how for Bollywood films, English without code-switching typically occurs in the speech of anglicised minorities such as Goan Catholics; furthermore, their English is indexed by the morphosyntactic features of Indian English. This contrasts with usage outside film, where Indian English features have been shown to be broadly distributed. This conservatism of Bollywood speech reflects conflicting attitudes towards an endonormative variety of English within India.

Recent approaches to heritage languages have sought to identify explanations for variability in heritage grammars. The present study explores variable patterns of Spanish differential object marking (DOM) in 40 heritage Spanish speakers (HSs) from the United States and 28 Spanish-dominant bilingual speakers (SDSs) from Mexico. Participants completed a picture description task including human, animal and inanimate direct objects. Both groups exhibited patterns of DOM following the Animacy Scale. However, HSs showed lower DOM rates and greater individual variability with human referents compared to SDSs, even when individual differences in language dominance were considered. Conversely, SDSs produced lower rates of DOM with inanimate objects than HSs. DOM use was constrained by verb-specific animacy biases across animacy conditions and speaker groups. These findings reveal that Spanish HSs maintain baseline-like variable patterns of DOM. Moreover, HSs may advance language change in predictable directions based on patterns of variation present in the baseline variety.

Factors which impact bilingual language development can often interact with different language features. The current study teases apart the impact of internal and external factors (chronological age, length of exposure, L2 richness, L2 use at home, maternal education and maternal L2 proficiency) across linguistic domains and features (vocabulary, morphology and syntax). Participants were 40 Arabic-speaking sequential bilinguals acquiring English (5;7-12;2, M = 8;4). Length of exposure predicted vocabulary and morphology, while chronological age predicted syntax. L2 richness also predicted vocabulary and syntax, although the impact on syntax was selective across structures. This split between syntax on the one hand, and vocabulary and morphology on the other, reflects the more embedded properties of the former; this contrasts with vocabulary and morphology, where transfer from the L1 and L2 may be more strongly dependent on the availability of shared forms across languages. Further implications are considered for sequential bilinguals in education contexts.

Using data from the understudied language Gιsιɖa Anii, we provide a formal analysis of irrealis that builds on the framework of modality proposed in Giannakidou and Mari. In particular, we propose that Anii has an irrealis modal morpheme whose meaning is that the speaker does not believe that the proposition is true at a particular time. This gives irrealis, at least in Anii, a negatively biased meaning. Giannakidou and Mari propose that the subjunctive in European languages is a positively biased modal but find no evidence in their data for a corresponding negatively biased one. However, in expanding their approach to a completely unrelated language, we show that modal bias can also be negative, filling in the paradigmatic gap left open by Giannakidou and Mari’s work. We also illustrate the utility of analyzing irrealis (in relation to the concept of veridicality) as a morphosyntactic and semantic category with a status similar to tense and aspect. Our formal analysis accounts for the obligatory realization of irrealis in a wide range of semantic contexts in Anii, including future tense, negation, and wishes, and shows how irrealis can be composed with other clausal elements. We suggest that reality status, which we analyze as (non)-veridicality, is obligatorily present in the Anii clause and discuss the implications of this for other languages.

English morphosyntactic agreement, such as determiner–noun agreement in These cabs broke down and noun–verb agreement in The cabs break down, has a few interesting properties that enable us to investigate whether agreement has a psycholinguistic function, that is, whether it helps the listener process linguistic information expressed by a speaker. The present project relies on these properties in a perception experiment, examines the two aforementioned types of English agreement, and aims at analyzing whether and how native English listeners benefit from agreement. The two types of agreement were contrasted with cases without any overtly agreeing elements (e.g. The cabs broke down). Native speakers of English with normal hearing heard short English sentences in quiet and in more or less intense white noise and were requested to indicate whether the second word of the sentence (e.g. These cabs broke down) was a singular or plural noun. Accuracy was entered as the response variable in the binomial logistic regression model. Results showed that overt determiner–noun agreement clearly increased response accuracy, while noun–verb agreement had at best marginal effects. The findings are interpreted against the background of functional aspects of linguistic structures in English, in the context of unfavorable listening conditions in particular.

This study investigated the morphosyntax of adjectival concord in case and number and subject-verb person agreement by monolingual and bilingual speakers of Russian. The main focus of the study is on the potential factors that may trigger divergence between Heritage Language (HL) speakers and those speakers who are dominant in that language, be they monolingual or bilingual. We considered the effects of cross-linguistic influence; limited input (as indexed by Age of Onset of Bilingualism, AOB), and working-memory limitations. An auditory offline grammaticality judgment task was performed by 119 adult participants split into four groups: (1) Monolingual Russian-speaking controls (MonoControl), (2) Immigrant Controls, that is, Russian-Hebrew bilinguals with AOB after the age of 13 (IMMControl); (3) bilinguals with AOB between 5–13 (BL-Late); and (4) bilinguals with AOB before the age of 5 (BL-Early). The latter group represents HL speakers. We did not find effects of cross-linguistic influence or extra memory load; at the same time, the effects of AOB were robust. Additionally, HL speakers (BL-Early group) differed from the other groups in poor performance on adjectival concord, but patterned with the others on person agreement, which indicates that the feature [person] is more robust than other agreement/concord features in HL grammars.