Esther Rinke

Scopus Publications

Indefinite object drop is lexically constrained
Carlos Martínez-García, Esther Rinke, and Nelli Kerezova
Open Library of the Humanities
This paper discusses the lexical constraints regulating the occurrence of indefinite null objects in European Spanish in comparison to European Portuguese. Based on previous research and corpus data, we suggest that the distribution of indefinite null objects is determined by the lexical constraints governing the distribution of object bare nouns. We propose that a predicate’s ability to allow for certain types of bare nouns predicts its capacity to permit corresponding indefinite null objects. Specifically, predicates that allow for object bare plurals and object mass nouns also allow for indefinite null objects referring to these types of bare nouns, while those permitting bare singulars allow for indefinite null objects referring to all types of bare nouns. Conversely, predicates that do not allow for any kind of object bare nouns do also not allow for indefinite null objects. The theoretical advantage of this proposal is that the distribution of indefinite object drop in Spanish is derived from the distribution of object bare nouns, not from a newly posited grammatical mechanism. Additionally, we propose a universal implicational hierarchy wherein languages with fewer restrictions on object bare nouns are more likely to allow for indefinite null objects. Our examination of European Portuguese data shows that EP is more permissive with regard to indefinite null objects and supports this hierarchy account, demonstrating its applicability to crosslinguistic patterns of different types of null objects and object bare nouns.

Null objects in Polish heritage language acquisition in contact with German
Aldona Sopata, Esther Rinke, and Cristina Flores
SAGE Publications
Aims and objectives: This study investigates the acquisition of referential expressions for direct objects by child heritage speakers of Polish living in Germany. Our main research questions are how object expression develops in bilingual children and whether their path or pace of acquisition differs from monolingual children. Methodology: We investigate the use of referential expressions in an elicited production task. In all, 39 Polish-German bilingual children participated in the test. Data and analysis: We compare the data of four age groups of bilingual children – 3- to 4-year-olds, 5- to 6-year-olds, 7- to 8-year-olds, and 9- to 10-year-olds – to each other and to monolingual children at the respective ages. For the analysis of participants’ responses, we ran a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) with a multinominal dependent variable. Findings: The results show that child heritage language (HL) speakers of Polish display knowledge of semantic and pragmatic constraints of object realization from early stages on. However, from age 5 and up to age 9 to 10, they still produce high rates of inappropriate null objects and show a deceleration in the development of this knowledge, compared to monolingual children. This protracted development is attributed to reduced input in the HL, mainly due to the enrolment in the majority language school. Originality: This study is the first to investigate the development of referential expressions for direct objects in child heritage speakers of Polish in the age span 3 to 10 years. Significance: The study relates the higher rates of null objects in the bilingual production to the varying degrees of exposure to the HL during language development. Deceleration in the pace of object acquisition by the HL speakers at the age of 5 to 6 years is attributed to a prolonged stage of acquisition of integrating rules of syntactic and pragmatic knowledge.

An experimental study on the loss of VS order in monolingual and bilingual speakers of Brazilian Portuguese
Esther Rinke, Cristina Flores, Priscila Oliveira, and Liliana Correia
Walter de Gruyter GmbH
Abstract This paper presents an experimental approach to subject inversion in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). We investigated the acceptability of SV and VS sentences by two groups of speakers: monolingually-raised and bilingual heritage speakers of BP, using acceptability judgment tasks to test the effect of verb type, definiteness and pragmatic context. Results confirm that BP lost VS order with the exception of unaccusative constructions. Both speaker groups accept SV orders in all contexts, rejecting VS in sentences with transitive and unergative verbs. With respect to unaccusative verbs, pragmatic context and definiteness play a role in the acceptance of VS structures: with narrow focus on the subject, monolingual speakers accept VS order with definite and indefinite postverbal subjects. However, in all-new contexts, they tend to reject definite postverbal subjects. Given this differential behavior in the two contexts, we assume that BP exhibits two different syntactic positions for postverbal subjects in unaccusative constructions. Heritage speakers of BP are generally stricter in rejecting VS order. They do not allow for postverbal definite subjects in VS clauses independent of pragmatic context, indicating that they are progressively eliminating a residual postverbal focus position in unaccusative constructions. We take this as another indication that heritage speakers may promote and accelerate ongoing diachronic change.

OVERT PRONOUNS ARE CHALLENGING: SUBJECT REALIZATION IN WRITTEN NARRATIVES OF PORTUGUESE-FRENCH BILINGUAL SCHOOL-AGE CHILDREN
Cristina Flores and Esther Rinke
Uniwersytet Jagiellonski - Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego
This paper examines the use of referential expressions in the subject position in European Portuguese (EP) in a corpus of narratives written by two groups of Portuguese-speaking school-age children: monolingually-raised children living in Portugal and bilingual French-Portuguese children living in Switzerland. We focus on the children’s choice of null and overt subjects, considering both the syntactic context (inter- and intrasentential) and the pragmatic context (topic continuity and topic shift). Additionally, we explore potential age and proficiency effects within the group of bilinguals. Results show an overuse of overt pronouns in intersentential topic continuity contexts in the narratives of the bilingual children, modulated by proficiency and age. This confirms that potential changes to heritage language grammars in EP may affect, in particular, the use of overt subject pronouns. The overuse of strong pronouns reflects that their acquisition is challenging for monolingual and for bilingual children alike, probably due to the complexity and variability of overt subject pronouns in the adult grammar.

How unique is the linguistic situation of endangered language speakers?
Aldona Sopata, Esther Rinke, and Cristina Flores
John Benjamins Publishing Company

Pinning down the interaction between animacy and syntactic function in the interpretation of German and Italian personal and demonstrative pronouns
Markus Bader, Jacopo Torregrossa, and Esther Rinke
Informa UK Limited
ABSTRACT This article investigates how animacy in interaction with the syntactic function of a referent’s antecedent determines the interpretation of different types of pronouns and demonstratives in German and Italian. The results of a sentence continuation task conducted in both languages show that Italian null pronouns and German p-pronouns have a strong tendency to refer to a preceding subject, but only if its referent is animate. With inanimate subjects, both forms tend to refer to the animate referent in object position, showing that animacy enhances a referent’s accessibility more than the syntactic function of its previous mention. Demonstratives in German and Italian generally tend to refer to object antecedents, a tendency that is also influenced by the animacy of the referent, especially in German. The cross-linguistic comparison reveals that the effect of animacy is overall stronger in German than in Italian, suggesting that across languages, different forms may show a different sensitivity to syntactic function and animacy.

Diachronic change and variation in use: Judgments of clitic doubling in Peninsular vs. Rioplatense Spanish
Esther Rinke, Sol Lago, and Carolina Andrea Gattei
Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
Previous studies have demonstrated that in spontaneous speech, Rioplatense Spanish speakers—in contrast to speakers of Peninsular Spanish—sometimes produce clitic-doubled accusative nominal objects. If this contrast between varieties reflects different grammatical systems, it would be expected to also affect the acceptability of clitic doubling across varieties. We tested this hypothesis in a judgment study that compared the acceptability of dative and accusative clitic-doubled objects between Rioplatense and Peninsular Spanish speakers. Speakers of both varieties showed similar preferences with dative clitic doubling, consistent with previous work. By contrast, accusative clitic doubling was highly acceptable in Rioplatense Spanish, but not in Peninsular Spanish. Based on accounts of the diachronic development of clitic doubling, we argue that the Rioplatense speakers exhibit a diachronically advanced behavior compared to Peninsular Spanish speakers.

What modulates the acquisition of difficult structures in a heritage language? A study on Portuguese in contact with French, German and Italian
Jacopo Torregrossa, Cristina Flores, and Esther Rinke
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
AbstractSeveral studies on heritage language (HL) acquisition investigate a single linguistic structure, showing how language exposure or cross-linguistic effects affect its acquisition. Here, we consider HL speaking children's mastery of several linguistic structures using a cloze-test. We examine how their language competence is affected by language exposure variables and age. We tested 180 children between the ages of 8 and 16, living in Switzerland and speaking European Portuguese as HL and French, German or Italian as their societal language. The items of the cloze-test cluster around two levels of difficulty, with the items at the second level corresponding to structures that are acquired late in Portuguese monolingual acquisition. Older age and a greater amount of formal instruction in the HL lead to better performance. The role of the amount of formal instruction varies based on the level of difficulty of the target structures. Cross-linguistic influence does not affect the results.

To hón ich imma insistieat Syntactic stability in heritage Hunsrückisch German spoken in Brazil
Cristina Flores, Esther Rinke, and Claudia Wagner
John Benjamins Publishing Company
AbstractThis paper investigates syntactic variation in Hunsrückisch German, spoken in a language enclave in South Brazil over eight generations. The aim is to analyse whether this heritage language maintains asymmetric verb placement, i.e. verb-second in main clauses and verb-final in subordinate clauses, a prominent syntactic feature of German varieties. The analysis is based on a sample of 5000 sentences, produced by participants belonging to two generations of Hunsrückisch speakers: 10 older speakers (age: 55–75), and 10 younger adults (age: 25–40). The results show a general stability of asymmetric verb placement in both speaker groups, as has also been observed for other German language islands. This stability is a consequence of the active use of this minority language, not only by the older, but also by the younger generation of speakers, who are dominant in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Variation to verb-second and verb-final order is conditioned by the same factors as in colloquial and dialectal German, and cannot be attributed to cross-linguistic influence from BP.

Multiple perspectives on the bilingual competence of Portuguese-descendant children living in Switzerland: Linguistics in dialogue with didactics
Cristina Flores, Maria Lurdes Gonçalves, Esther Rinke, and Jacopo Torregrossa
University of Minho
O presente artigo apresenta os resultados de um estudo empírico sobre a competência bilingue de 180 crianças lusodescendentes, residentes em três áreas linguísticas da Suíça (alemã, francesa e italiana). Com recurso a um cloze test e a um questionário parental detalhado, os resultados mostram que o desenvolvimento do português, a língua de herança (LH) dos participantes, é moldado pela quantidade e o tipo de contacto com a LH no seio da família. Mostra-se, também, que a proficiência em ambas as línguas está positivamente correlacionada, desconstruindo a conceção subtrativa do bilinguismo migratório. Complementarmente, foram recolhidas as opiniões dos professores do Ensino Português no Estrangeiro (EPE) Suíça, do Camões - Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua, através de um questionário e de uma oficina de formação, realçando a necessidade de diálogo triangular entre a investigação científica sobre aquisição da linguagem, a prática didática e a gestão linguística no seio de famílias portuguesas na diáspora.

Language separation and stable syntactic knowledge: verbs and verb phrases in bilingual children’s narratives
Cristina Flores, Esther Rinke, Jacopo Torregrossa, and Daniel Weingärtner
Open Library of the Humanities
The present study analyses written narratives of 60 Portuguese-German bilingual children between 8 and 15 years living in Switzerland, in both their languages. Portuguese is the children&rsquo;s heritage language (HL) and German the environmental language. The analysis focusses on the children&rsquo;s lexical, morphological and structural knowledge in the verb domain (verb types, agreement morphology, verbal tense, word order within the VP, orthography) and aims to determine the role of language dominance, general proficiency, current age and age of onset of bilingualism (AoO) in bilingual language acquisition at later stages of development (i.e., at school-age). The results show that the bilingual children display stable syntactic and morphological knowledge in both their languages. Lexical knowledge is positively correlated with age and proficiency. Morphological and syntactic deviations are residual in both languages and not correlated with AoO. No effects of cross-linguistic influence are observed. We only find performance differences between the Portuguese and the German corpus at the level of orthography. We conclude that in the analysed age span children have received enough exposure to both languages to develop stable morphological and syntactic knowledge, at least in the verb domain.

Portuguese as heritage language in germany—a linguistic perspective
Esther Rinke and Cristina Flores
MDPI AG
This article provides a comprehensive overview of the contribution of linguistic research on Portuguese as a heritage language in Germany to the general understanding of heritage language development. From 1955 to 1973, nearly 166,000 Portuguese migrants found work in Germany as so-called ‘guest workers’ (Gastarbeiter). Because the aim of many Portuguese migrant families was to return to Portugal, their children met relatively good conditions for the acquisition of their heritage language. Nonetheless, second-generation heritage speakers (HSs) show some linguistic particularities in comparison to monolingual Portuguese speakers in Portugal. Based on the results of previous research, we show that the following factors shape the linguistic knowledge of this group of bilinguals: (1) Restricted exposure to the heritage language may cause a delay in the development of certain linguistic structures, (2) deviations from the standard norm may be related to the lack of formal education and the primacy of the colloquial register and (3) heritage bilinguals may accelerate ongoing diachronic development. We argue that apparent effects of influence from the environmental language can often have alternative explanations.

Dialectal Variation in European Portuguese Central Vowel Perception
Valerie Horn, Esther Rinke, and Cristina Flores
Open Library of the Humanities
The present paper aims at providing empirical evidence for dialectal variation concerning the perception of the central vowel [ɐ] in European Portuguese (EP). More concretely, this study compares the perception of the contrast between [a] and [ɐ] by native speakers of two varieties of EP: 23 speakers of a northern Portuguese dialect (from the city of Braga) and 23 speakers of the Littoral Center variety of EP (from the city of Lisbon, defined as Standard European Portuguese (SEP)). Based on a discrimination test, the results show that the two groups of speakers differ with respect to the perception of the contrast between the two central vowels under investigation. The speakers of the northern variety differentiate less between the two central vowels compared to the speakers from Lisbon.

Possessive modifiers in serbian: Coreference with clitics and strong pronouns
Sanja Srdanović and Esther Rinke
Project MUSE
Abstract:On the basis of experimental evidence this paper shows that in Serbian pre-nominal possessive modifiers modifying a noun phrase in subject position can be interpreted as coreferential with a clitic or a strong pronoun in object position. This finding speaks against a condition B violation in these contexts as has been assumed in previous analyses of Serbian (cf. Despić 2013). It implies that possessive noun phrases in article-languages like English and articleless languages like Serbian may receive a parallel analysis (Universal DP hypothesis, Bašić 2004; Progovac 1998): in both languages, the modifier occupies a position in the noun phrase structure from where it does not c-command out of the noun phrase, leading to free covaluation in these contexts (cf. Reinhart 2006). Interestingly, clitics are more likely than strong pronouns to be interpreted as coreferential with the possessive modifier in our test. This may be attributed to the fact that clitic forms in general are more easily bound in non-c-command configurations. In addition, the discourse conditions in the test, where the possessor represented given information, could have contributed to the fact that it was more likely associated with a clitic than with a strong pronoun.

Acquiring the distribution of null and overt direct objects in European Portuguese
Cristina Flores, Esther Rinke, and Aldona Sopata
Open Library of the Humanities
This article investigates the L1 acquisition of different types of direct objects in European Portuguese (EP). Previous research has revealed that although children have early syntactic and pragmatic knowledge of objects across languages, the adequate use of pronouns and null objects is protracted in the acquisition of EP (Costa et al. 2012). The present study shows that children acquiring the distribution of direct objects are aware of universal pragmatic hierarchies but struggle with the interpretation and feature bundles of null objects. Assuming that arguments are linked to left-peripheral C/edge linkers (Sigurðsson 2011), we argue that children need more time to discover the adult-like feature composition of null objects in EP because they involve phi-silent features. Relative accessibility (Ariel 1991) is universal and available early, whereas the absolute accessibility of null objects, i.e. their feature content, is acquired relatively late.

The relevance of language-internal variation in predicting heritage language grammars
Cristina Flores and Esther Rinke
Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Heritage Portuguese and heritage polish in contact with german: More evidence on the production of objects
Esther Rinke, Cristina Flores, and Aldona Sopata
MDPI AG
This paper compares the production of different types of direct objects by Portuguese–German and Polish–German bilingual school-aged children in their heritage languages (HLs), Polish and European Portuguese (EP). Given that the two target languages display identical options of object realization, our main research question is whether the two HLs develop in a similar way in bilingual children. More precisely, we aim at investigating whether bilingual children acquiring Polish and EP are sensitive to accessibility and animacy when realizing a direct object in their HL. The results of a production experiment show that this is indeed the case and that the two groups of bilinguals do not differ from each other, although they may overgeneralize null objects or full noun phrases to some extent. We conclude that the bilingual acquisition of object realization is guided by the relevant properties in the target languages and is not influenced by the contact language, German.

Clitic doubling in Peninsular and Rioplatense Spanish: a comparative corpus investigation
Esther Rinke, Martin Elsig, and Judith Wieprecht
Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
The current study compares the distribution of clitic doubling (CD) in two varieties of Spanish: Peninsular Spanish and Rioplatense Spanish. Based on two corpora of colloquial speech we investigate under which conditions CD with pronominal and nominal objects[1] is possible and which factors favour the occurrence of CD in the variable contexts.Based on a variationist analysis with Rbrul, we show that personal prounouns are almost categorically doubled in both corpora. The presence of dative case marking is a sufficient condition for CD to be possible with pronominal and nominal objects. This is in principle independent of semantic factors like definiteness, specificity and animacy, which also favour CD. In Rioplatense, CD of dative noun phrases is advanced in comparison to Peninsular Spanish as it is almost categorical and independent of the semantic specification of the object, whereas specificity still plays a role for CD of dative nominal objects in Peninsular Spanish. CD of accusative objects occurs less frequently and is more restricted. Non-personal pronouns show that definiteness is a necessary and decisive feature for CD of accusatives, indefinite non-personal pronouns cannot be doubled. In Buenos Aires, doubling of direct nominal objects also presupposes their definiteness (and specificity). DOM favours CD to occur, but it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for CD.Overall, our study confirms that the factors determining the distribution of CD can be ordered on an implicational (definiteness) scale and that CD has a wider distribution and is less restricted in Rioplatense Spanish in comparison to Peninsular Spanish. We conclude that this reflects that Rioplatense Spanish has reached a more advanced stage of CD on a grammaticalization cline than Peninsular Spanish[1] Throughout our paper, we use the terms pronominal and nominal objects in order to distinguish between pronouns and non-pronominal noun phrases in object position, although it is of course clear to us that pronouns are also nominal objects. We will also use the abbreviation DP (determiner phrase) to refer to non-pronominal noun phrases.

Another look at the interpretation of overt and null pronominal subjects in bilingual language acquisition: Heritage Portuguese in contact with German and Spanish
Esther Rinke and Cristina Flores
Open Library of the Humanities
This paper investigates the interpretation of overt and null subject pronouns in the heritage language (European Portuguese, EP) of Portuguese heritage bilinguals (children and teenagers) in Germany and Andorra with German (Ger) and Spanish/Catalan (Span/Cat) as environmental languages and compares it to the outcomes of age-matched monolingual Portuguese children and monolingual adults. The results of an offline sentence interpretation task show that all groups of speakers differentiate between overt and null subjects. They are also sensitive to the syntactic context (intrasentential vs. intersentential) and the directionality of the anaphoric relation (anaphoric vs. cataphoric), although to different degrees. We argue that the interpretation of differences between monolingual and bilingual speakers needs to take into account these different syntactic contexts of pronominal resolution in order to gain a better understanding of the role of language-internal factors and cross-linguistic influence (CLI). With respect to the latter, the comparison between the Ger-EP and the Span/Cat-EP groups reveals no differences between these populations and shows that for the speakers’ knowledge of anaphora resolution in EP it is not decisive whether the contact language is a null subject language or not (confirming thus the results in Sorace et al. 2009).

Editorial: Bilingual language development: The role of dominance
Cornelia Hamann, Esther Rinke, and Dobrinka Genevska-Hanke
Frontiers Media SA

Null objects in the spontaneous speech of monolingual and bilingual speakers of European Portuguese
Esther Rinke, Cristina Flores, and Pilar Barbosa
Walter de Gruyter GmbH
AbstractThis paper investigates object omissions in the spontaneous production of European Portuguese by second-generation Portuguese-German bilingual speakers and compares them to first-generation migrants, and two age-matched groups of monolingual speakers. The results show that bilingual speakers as well as the younger generation of monolinguals show a higher number of null objects in their speech than the two older generations. This may reflect an inter-generational development that favours null objects, which is independent of language contact. The analysis of the syntactic and semantic conditions determining the occurrence of null objects in the speech of the different groups reveals that the semantic properties of the null objects realized by the bilinguals, particularly the higher rates of animate and non-propositional null objects, show that they extend the semantic-pragmatic conditions of null object realization along a referential hierarchy. The bilingual speakers may reflect a language-internal pathway that appears to resemble a diachronic change observed in BP.

Designing a long lasting linguistic project: The case study of ASIt

Morphosyntactic knowledge of clitics by Portuguese heritage bilinguals
ESTHER RINKE and CRISTINA FLORES
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
This paper focuses on the linguistic competence of adult Portuguese–German bilinguals in their heritage language, European Portuguese (EP), which they acquired at home in early childhood in the context of German as the majority language. Based on a grammaticality judgment test, we investigate their morphosyntactic knowledge of clitics. The central questions are whether possible deviations from native monolinguals may be traced back to a) lack of contact with the formal register; b) reduced input after preschool age; and c) cross-linguistic influence. The results reveal qualitative differences between the heritage speakers and a group of monolingual controls in almost all test conditions. We conclude that although the linguistic knowledge of the heritage bilinguals investigated in this study differs from that of monolinguals, it is not “deficient” but “different” and “innovative”, because it is primarily based on the spoken variety of the language and because it promotes linguistic changes which are inherent in the speech of native monolinguals.

Language acquisition and change: A morphosyntactic perspective

The diachronic development of article-possessor complementarity in the history of Italian and Portuguese

Esther Rinke

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Scopus Publications