Explicitness of referring expressions in heritage speakers’ majority English

Abstract

Several studies on heritage speakers’ (HSs) majority language (ML) have indicated that HSs might be more explicit than monolingually-raised speakers (MSs) of this language. A reason for this might be HSs’ frequent communication with L2 speakers of the ML (e.g., HSs’ parents), which is an under-explored source of influence on the ML. However, explicitness in the ML has not been systematically addressed yet, and studies pointing to HSs’ higher explicitness are scarce.

Filling this gap, we conducted two studies analyzing referring expressions produced by German, Greek, Russian, and Turkish HSs in majority English as well as English MSs in formal and informal narratives. Results indicated that Russian and Turkish HSs were more explicit in informal narratives: they used more noun-headed NPs than English MSs (Study 1). This aligns with the reasoning that HSs’ explicitness stems from frequent communication with L2 speakers since HSs and L2 speakers usually interact in informal settings. However, we found no evidence of HSs’ higher explicitness in the use of pronouns and null anaphora (Study 1) or modified referring expressions (Study 2). Overall, our findings confirm HSs’ higher explicitness in some ML areas compared to MSs, although the effect appears limited to certain phenomena and speaker groups.