Article Critique from SLA (LING 544)

TITLE OF ARTICLE: Understanding Heritage Languages

CITATION:  Polinsky, M., & Scontras, G. (2019). Understanding heritage languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (Cambridge University Press), 23(1), 4-20. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728919000245 

In their article titled “Understanding Heritage Languages,” Polinsky and Scontras develop a preliminary model of the nature of heritage-language grammar. The model predicts ways in which heritage languages will and will not depart from their baselines, or which aspects of grammar will be robust and those that will break. The purpose of the model is to show the reader how it could be helpful in the field of linguistic theory. Heritage languages are as informative to the understanding of grammar as the study of the monolingual standard. The authors hope that the intended audience of linguists will take this model as a starting point toward making progress in developing an even stronger model of heritage-language grammar.

After introducing the topic of heritage languages and its terminology, or in other words the unique properties of heritage language, Polinsky and Scontras organized the article into the following three parts (I will go into more detail about each later in this review):  

1.) Comparing and contrasting heritage speakers with L2 learners, child learners, and the adult forgetter population.

2.) Providing empirical observations on areas of resilience in heritage grammar, but also its vulnerable phenomena.

3.) Stating what motivated their model (triggers, outcomes, and implications).

The authors did a high-quality job with the first point of comparing heritage speakers with other similar groups. They presented both similarities and differences between heritage speakers, L2 learners, and child learners. They also showed how the adult forgetter population can be on a continuum with heritage speakers. Polinsky and Scontras organized their ideas well and were able to give clear explanations and examples from various languages, including Korean, Spanish, German, Chinese, and others. They provided in-text citations to those interested in reading more about each group of learners or those who need more explanations. At the end of this section, Polinsky and Scontras proposed that the baseline for heritage speakers should be the input that these speakers receive and not the monolingual “idealization.” This is an interesting thought, as usually the language of heritage speakers is compared to L1 speakers. The explanation they gave makes sense:  language already starts to change in the input heritage learners receive. In other words, parents pass on the heritage language with some changes in it.

When providing empirical observations on areas of resilience and vulnerabilities in heritage grammar, the authors provided even more examples and citations. The authors pointed out that it is important to examine areas of strength that heritage speakers display. It is not enough to study the ways in which they deviate from the “standard,” which is how many researchers are accustomed to thinking. Heritage speakers show resilience in some aspects of phonetics and phonology, lexicon, morphosyntax, and comprehension. The explanations the authors provided to unfamiliar words aided in understanding this complex section of the article. For example, the language concept of ‘relationships at a distance’ was new to me. Polinsky and Scontras first introduced the concept and then provided detailed examples from the Russian and Korean languages. In the end, I understood that heritage speakers tend to simplify difficult, or more advanced language concepts. I feel that if I wanted to study which language elements are stronger and weaker in heritage speakers, I could learn a lot by using the citations provided in this text.

After presenting the first two elements of the article, Polinsky and Scontras made a clear transition to explaining the points that motivated their model. They showed how there are triggers that affect divergence from the baseline in heritage speakers. Briefly, these triggers are the quantity and quality of input and the economy of online resources (Interface Hypothesis). Due to these triggers, Polinsky and Scontras hypothesize that heritage speakers demonstrate avoidance of ambiguity, resistance to irregularity, and the shrinking of structure. This brought the authors to the conclusion that less ambiguity, more regularity, and less structure make the heritage language more economical and more learner-friendly. This conclusion caught my attention, as I have not yet heard of such an explanation. I feel as though it is somewhat risky to create such a model, as it generalizes a topic with a lot of variety into a single model. However, I am still new to the study of heritage languages, and this model seems to be grounded in solid research. From what I have found so far, Maria Polinsky has done extensive research in this field. Furthermore, as a heritage speaker of Russian, I can agree that heritage speakers optimize their grammar under pressure from processing and learnability. 

In my current and future studies, I am interested in researching heritage-language grammar and pedagogy. I am particularly interested in Russian heritage speakers, so it was helpful that this article contained several examples from the Russian language. It was also assuring to see that there were examples from other languages, as sound overarching theories cannot be based on one or two languages. One key element I would like to use in my future studies is the concept of triggers on language divergence. I am interested in researching both input and the Interface Hypothesis. I believe that understanding these concepts will be useful in developing heritage-language pedagogy. The authors of “Understanding Heritage Languages” introduced a topic I am interested in, explained in detail some of its terminology, presented a working theory that allows for improvements, and provided me with an example of a well-written article.

Research Proposal from Research Methods (LING 530)

1. INTRODUCTION

The boundaries between a first and a second language, or native and foreign, are blurred for many learners. Among these are heritage speakers, who can provide valuable insight into language development. Defining the term “heritage speaker” (HS) is not easy because HS are not a homogeneous group and present a wide variety of proficiency. An oft-cited definition is given by Valdés (2000), who refers to HS as “individuals raised in homes where a language other than English is spoken and who are to some degree bilingual in English and the heritage language”. “English” can be substituted with any other dominant language. The definition of the word “bilingual” in this case could also be debated. However, the consensus is that the heritage language was acquired first, but not completely, because of a switch to another language (Polinsky & Kagan, 2007, p.3).

The study of HS is important for language acquisition research as it does not fit under first or second language acquisition, but is somewhere in between, or is something completely different. It is important for language teaching because instructors are finding that the needs of heritage learners are often unmet in foreign language classrooms. As it turns out, it is common for heritage students to enroll in foreign language classes that teach their heritage language (Brecht & Ingold, 1998, p. 4). Fortunately, heritage language programs are becoming more common in the United States, though much improvement is needed (pp. 3-4). 

This study focuses on Russian heritage speakers in the United States. Again, this is not an easily defined group, as Russian heritage speakers come from different post-Soviet countries and/or could be heritage speakers of other languages in addition to Russian. There are dialectal differences in the Russian they acquired. However, according to Maria Polinsky (1997a), dialect does not seem to influence American Russian, as “speakers from different geographical areas demonstrate similar patterns of structural attrition” (p. 373). By American Russian, Polinsky means “a reduced and reanalyzed version of Russian spoken in the United States by those speakers who became English-dominant in childhood” (Polinsky, 2006, p. 191). She and other researchers have found tendencies toward simplification of American Russian and other heritage languages (Polinsky & Scontras, 2019).

This study looks at the use of case inflections by American Russian speakers who either immigrated to the U.S. before age 10 or were born in the U.S. to Russian-speaking parents. Russian has a rich case system, which makes the language difficult to learn for foreign language students. Researchers are interested in finding out how difficult the case system is for HS. Even though previous studies demonstrated evidence of change in the use of case markings of HS, they produced conflicting results about details of this change. This study aims to fill a gap in research as to what extent this language change is happening.

2. LITERATURE REVIEW

The Russian language has a six-case system (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, instrumental, and prepositional). Most of the research on the use of case inflections by HS was reported by Maria Polinsky, who has done extensive research on various heritage languages, including Russian. Distance from monolingual communities, varieties of speakers, and the influence of the language(s) in the current environment of heritage speakers results in language change. Polinsky calls this language change “language attrition” (1997b). She makes a distinction between “forgetters” and “incomplete learners” (p. 88). In this study, participants are more incomplete learners than forgetters. She also clarifies that a first language is not always the primary language. 

“If an individual learns language A as his/her first language and speaks it predominantly as an adult, this language is both first and primary. If an individual dramatically reduces the use of his/her first language A and switches to using language B as the more important one, then A is characterized as this person’s first/secondary language, and B becomes the second/primary language” (Polinsky, 2006, p. 195). 

Heritage speakers hear the language of their heritage in their homes or their grandparents’ homes, but do not use the language in public places like schools and stores. They prefer to use the primary language with siblings. They usually only use the heritage language when prompted and many times as a second choice (Polinsky, 1997b, p.90). Often, they are not literate in their heritage language. It is important to note that even though first-generation adult immigrants (parents of many HS) maintain their first language as their primary, it still undergoes some changes, but not structural ones. The language of HS, on the other hand, undergoes structural changes.

In 1997, Polinsky reported that for languages that have a rich case system, there is evidence for significant “degeneration” of case systems when used by HS (1997b, p. 95). This means that when oblique cases are required, direct (nominative or absolutive) cases are used. She also wrote that “there is an apparent loss of case variation with copular verbs (the nominative wins) and under negation (the genitive of negation, an already weak feature in the spoken full languages, is either lost completely or only weakly retained)” (p. 96). Polinsky’s conclusion was that structural attrition is not a random process and suggested that “language attrition has a set course along which it progresses and that it is typologically consistent” (p. 119). Surprisingly, this study did not find a significant difference in the maintenance of a heritage language between speakers who were born into a L1 community and those who were born in the U.S. and between those who left the L1 community before age 7 and those who left after age 7 (p. 117).

In another report from the same year, Polinsky states that American Russian “abandons” the case system and is represented by a case shift rule (1997a, p. 375). The first rule is the loss of the instrumental case in predicative nominals and predicative adjectives and a switch to the exclusive use of the nominative. The absence of spontaneous passives, which requires the instrumental case, were also absent. Another study that investigated the use of cases by HS, done by Isurin and Ivanova-Sullivan (2008), also reported that there was a lack of instrumental case in predicative function (p. 81-82). They explain this as case errors in nouns and adjectives and a “lack of ‘direction-location’ distinction expressed by accusative and prepositional cases” (p 81-82). However, they noticed that when using personal pronouns, the instrumental case was replaced by the dative in some instances and accusative in others (pp. 77-78). 

The next observation by Polinsky (1997a) is the “erosion” of the accusative case and the elimination of the null element. In American Russian, the nominative is used in NPs and adjectives in a small clause, instead of the accusative (p. 377). Next, Polinsky reports on attrition of the genitive case. The genitive case has many uses in the Russian language, but she only focuses on a couple. It is interesting that monolingual speakers often replace the genitive of negation and the genitive of possession with the accusative case. More proficient HS speakers do the same, whereas less proficient speakers use the nominative (p. 377). There are instances when HS retain the genitive, but Polinsky suggests that they should be interpreted as “frozen form or a chunk, rather than a preposition-governed genitive” (p. 378). However, she states that the genitive governed by a numeral is well-retained in American English (p. 379). Isurin and Ivanova-Sullivan, however, argue against chunking (p. 84).

Next, Polinsky found that “American Russian abandons all preposition-governed obliques, replacing them by preposition with nominative, a combination non-existent [in the speech of monolinguals]" (1997a, p. 379), though she notes that there is some variation from speaker to speaker. Once again, the study done by Isurin and Ivanova-Sullivan (2008) resulted in something different; there was a presence of oblique case forms, but “a lack of grammatical competence as to how and when to use them” (p. 84). They also did not find any nominative case occurring after prepositions, though they acknowledge that it was present in Polinsky’s data (p. 84). While Polinsky argues that this is a step toward the complete disappearance of oblique cases, Isurin and Ivanova-Sullivan see a more complicated picture. 

Lastly, Polinsky suggests that there is an argument case shift. In monolingual speech, the main verbal arguments occur in nominative, accusative, and dative cases. In HS speech, the dative is replaced with the accusative, and the accusative with the nominative. The nominative stays nominative. “In other words, subject and direct object do not differ in the formal expression, and the accusative marking is retained as the marking of the second object” (p. 380). However, the dative is retained with pronouns, which could be a general tendency in heritage languages; “pronominal paradigms are retained longer than the nominal ones” (p. 381). 

Polinsky concludes that functions of other cases are also replaced by the nominative, but she does not state which ones. As a result, write Polinsky, “American Russian develops a two-case system (nominative and accusative). While the nominative becomes the multifunctional case, the accusative is specialized as the case of the indirect object and in some instances is used to encode the direct object” (p. 381). Again, Isurin and Ivanova-Sullivan report that they did not observe a reanalysis of the accusative for indirect objects. Even though they observed the replacement of one oblique case for another, they argued against generalizing the accusative as the only case for indirect objects (p. 84). They preferred to call it “confusion of oblique cases”, where the dative would be used instead of accusative, prepositional/dative instead of genitive, and instrumental instead of prepositional (p. 83-84). They also argued against the phrase “restructuring of cases”, used by Polinsky. Instead, they explained it as a “reanalysis of case functions such as direction, location, means, etc.” (p. .84). 

An important question all researchers bring up is what could influence the speech of heritage language? How much is “incomplete learning”, as Polinsky would say influencing language attrition? How much does the grammar of the primary/dominant language influence heritage language change? How much does loan translation, calquing, account for? Rakhilina, Vyrenkova, and Polinsky (2016) suggest that “when heritage speakers fail to find a proper Russian phrase to express their semantic intention, rather than turning to their dominant language, they build phrases of their own” (p. 5.). For example, they found instances when HS would use the instrumental case where it would not be used by a monolingual Russian speaker, but at the same time it would be with a different preposition than used in English (pp. 15-16).

In general, previous research shows that there is significant language change in the way HS in the United States use cases. However, the studies mentioned above came up with some contradictions in the evidence and more contradictions in interpretation of results. There could be several reasons for the different results. First, the studies included small participant pools. Second, it was not always clear how much language was obtained from each participant. Isurin and Ivanova-Sullivan only used 7 participants. Polinsky (1997a) interviewed 20 participants. Polinsky (1997b) interviewed speakers of different languages; 20 of them were American Russian speakers. It was unclear how many participants Rakhilina et. al. used in their study. They only mentioned that they examined 624 sentences produced by heritage speakers (p. 5). Even though this is a large number, it could all be from one speaker. To get more data on this topic, it would be important to conduct research on a larger participant pool. As suggested by some of the authors, it would also be important to conduct rigorous study using various collection modes. 

3. RESEARCH AREA

The way heritage speakers in the United States use Russian case inflections; general trends and signs of language retention and/or attrition.

4. METHODS

This study looks at the use of case inflections by American Russian adult speakers who either immigrated to the U.S. before age 10 or were born in the U.S. to Russian-speaking parents. Both participants who immigrated as children and those born in the U.S. to immigrants will be studied because based on previous research, these groups display very similar ways of using the heritage language. Unlike some previous studies, participants will not be selected from a university's Russian program. Not every American Russian speaker goes on to learn their heritage language at a university. The goal is to get a pool of American Russian speakers that represent the wider Russian heritage population in the U.S., instead of just those that study their heritage language. The author has connection to Slavic communities across the United States, so there should be no problem in finding participants.

Data collection will be done in person or on Zoom video chat. All conversations will be audio or video recorded. The following tools will be used:

Interviews with the participants on the topic of their family history, in Russian. The rationale is to get samples of American Russian speech, in addition to background information that might be used in comparing participants and/or obtaining inferential statistics. During the interview, the interviewer will ask follow-up questions based on the context. This is to make the conversation as natural as possible, which could lead to more authentic use of American Russian. Possible questions: 

1. Tell me about your family background.

2. Where did your family live before immigrating to the United States? How long ago was that? 

3. What kind of changes did your family experience after coming to the U.S.? How different has your family’s life become?

4. How many people are in your family? Tell me about your siblings. 

5. Where were you born and how old are you?

6. What language(s) did you grow up hearing and/or speaking? Where and from whom did you hear them?

7. How did you feel about speaking in Russian?

8. How much Russian do you use now? Where and with whom do you use it?

9. How do you feel about your proficiency in Russian? 

10. Have you ever studied Russian? If yes, tell me more about it.

11. Would you like your children to learn to speak in Russian? Why or why not? If yes, how will you achieve it?

12. What are your hobbies, interests, and job? 

A picture book with no written text. The participants will be asked to describe each page of the book in Russian. While the interviews mostly focus on the participant, this activity will take the focus away from the participant topics related to their life. Because the focus is now on something outside of the family, different types of case use examples could be elicited.

As suggested and done by several studies, participants will be asked to translate spoken sentences from English to Russian. The rationale is that this greater focus on the primary language could yield insight into the amount of primary language influence on sentence construction, and thus case use.

Judgements of grammaticality will not be used, except for describing case use. Even though grammaticality judgements are suggested by some studies, other studies that used this concluded that lower-proficiency speakers did not feel comfortable doing this task and even displayed some anxiety. 

The control group in this study will be Russian speakers from online corpora. They will not necessarily be monolingual, but they will be fluent in Russian, as they will be chosen based on their residence in Russia.

5. POSSIBLE IMPLICATIONS

The author is anticipating that interview length will vary from participant to participant; some might want to talk more, which will be encouraged, but not forced. The results of the study could support either one, several, or all the literature reviewed in this study. It will be important to carefully analyze each speech example, as there are instances when it can look like one case is replacing the other, but upon closer inspection it could be something else, as mentioned in earlier studies. Since it is sometimes difficult to tell exactly what kind of change happened in a certain speech example, it might also be a good idea to have a linguistic expert review the analysis and interpretations made by the author of this study. Having a colleague take a second look at the data would ensure sound interpretation.

This study will provide findings on case use by speakers whose primary and dominant language is English. While this could result in general trends about case use by heritage speakers, it might not necessarily represent case use by heritage speakers whose dominant language is not English. In the future, it will be important to study participants who live in countries where the dominant language is not English (like France, Israel, or Finland). Furthermore, English does not have as rich a case system as does Russian, which could affect case attrition to a greater degree than another language. Thus, it would be important to investigate if languages that have rich case systems, like Finish, influence Russian heritage speech in the same way that English does. Comparing results from Russian heritage speakers with different dominant languages could lead to new trends and theories first in the study of case attrition, and second language development in general.

REFERENCES

Brecht, R. D., & Ingold, C. W. (1998). Tapping a national resource: Heritage learners in the United States, ERIC Digest EDO-FL-98-12, ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics, Washington D.C., www.cal.org/ericcll/digest/brecht01.html 

Isurin, L., & Ivanova-Sullivan, T. (2008). Lost in between: the case of Russian heritage speakers. Heritage Language Journal, 6(6.1 (Spring, 2008)), 72–104. https://doi.org/10.46538/hlj.6.4 

Polinsky, M. (1997a). American Russian: Language loss meets language acquisition. Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics. 370-406. 

Polinsky, M. (1997b) Cross-linguistic parallels in language loss. Southwestern Journal of Linguistics 14: 87–125.

Polinsky, M. (2006). Incomplete Acquisition: American Russian. Journal of Slavic Linguistics, 14(2), 191–262. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24599616  

Polinsky, M. & Kagan, O. (2007). Heritage Languages: In the 'wild' and in the classroom. Language and Linguistics Compass. 1. 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2007.00022.x.

Polinsky, M., & Scontras, G. (2019). Understanding heritage languages. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (Cambridge University Press), 23(1), 4-20. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728919000245  

Rakhilina, E., Vyrenkova, A & Polinsky, M. (2016). Linguistic creativity in heritage speakers. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 1(1): 43. 1–29, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.90 

Valdés, G. (2000). The teaching of heritage languages: An introduction for Slavic-teaching professionals, ed. by Olga Kagan and Benjamin Rifkin. The Learning and Teaching of Slavic Languages and Cultures, 375-403. Bloomington, IN.: Slavica.