Lecture: Maria Polinsky

Gender agreement and gender assignment in heritage grammars

Sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and the Vowels and Agreement Project (L. Colantoni and A.T. Pèrez-Leroux).

This talk presents and analyzes differences in gender agreement between heritage languages and the baseline. Within the realm of morphology, gender agreement is among the often-cited areas of divergence between heritage and baseline speakers. In contrast, agreement in person is rarely problematic in heritage languages. After presenting empirical data illustrating this divergence, I will address the following questions: (1) what can explain the asymmetry between the features [person] and [gender] in heritage grammar agreement? (2) what is the status of the feature [number] in heritage grammars? In the process of addressing these questions, I will additionally consider whether the heritage data shed new light on existing theories of morphological gender and of the lexicon more broadly.