Ponente: Silvina Montrul (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

Data: 16 gener 2024

Hora: 12:00

Lloc: sala 55.309 (Edifici Tànger, Campus Poblenou)/Zoom

Silvina Montrul is the Marjorie Roberts Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor in the Departments of Spanish and Portuguese and of Linguistics at the U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and directs the Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism Lab. She is co-editor of the journal Second Language Research and has authored several books, including The Acquisition of Spanish (2004), Incomplete Acquisition in Bilingualism (2008), El bilingüismo en el mundo hispanohablante (2013), The Acquisition of Heritage Languages (2016), Second Language Acquisition: Introducing Intervention Research (2022), with Tania Ionin. Her book Native Speakers Interrupted (2022) has received the 2024 L. Bloomfield book award from the Linguistic Society of America.

Native Speakers, Interrupted advances our understanding of heritage language development and change. The potential role of bilingual speakers in the process of historical language change has been widely entertained in linguistics. With novel empirical data from three immigrant languages in the United States, the book demonstrates how heritage speakers drive morphosyntactic changes, when certain environmental characteristics are met. This book presents the results of a major experimental research project investigating variability in the expression of Differential Object Marking in Hindi-, Spanish- and Romanian-speaking immigrants in the United States across generations as well as cross-generational data from native speakers in the homeland. Montrul considers the relationship between social and cognitive factors and timing in language acquisition, bilingualism, and language change. It defends the hypothesis that changes observed in the grammars of heritage speakers are unlikely directly transmitted by the parental generation. Rather, heritage speakers may reinforce, and even drive, incipient attrition in the parental generation.