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15 - Heritage Language Research and Theoretical Linguistics

from Part II - Research Approaches to Heritage Languages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2021

By
Elabbas Benmamoun
Edited by
Silvina Montrul  and
Maria Polinsky
Silvina Montrul
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Maria Polinsky
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park
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Summary

Our understanding of the syntax of natural language and syntactic aspects that obtain across languages and other aspects that display variation has greatly benefited from research on a large number of languages representing a diversity of language families learned natively in their own contexts. We have a better understanding, for example, of the complexity of word order, agreement, case, questions, relative clauses, anaphoric dependencies, etc. As our empirical generalizations continue to be sharpened and refined, the Generative approach, particularly in its Minimalist version, has also been focusing on isolating properties of core syntax, such as Merge (both Internal and External) and the features and units that go into building syntactic structure and driving the different syntactic dependencies. Research on heritage languages has the potential to contribute to that debate. This chapter discusses some of the results of that research and its implications for the debate about Merge, movement, and the notion of root as an essential building block of syntactic structure.

Keywords

MergeMinimalist Programmovementword orderrootphrase structure
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics , pp. 375 - 398
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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