Complete acquisition in the heritage language: Evidence from indefiniteness in Turkish

Abstract

This study investigates whether adult Turkish heritage speakers are able to refer to entities in discourse as required by semantic contexts. The focus is on the contrasting properties of Turkish (L1) and German (L2) with respect to semantics of indefiniteness, i.e., specificity and partitivity. Turkish morphologically distinguishes between specific/nonspecific and partitive/nonpartitive contexts on the indefinite direct object while German does not. We hypothesized that the Turkish heritage speakers would overgeneralize the unmarked form (bir noun) since this is the default form used in German regardless of the context and also acceptable in all contexts in Turkish. We further hypothesized that, if they ever opt for the case marked form (bir noun+acc), they would also do so incorrectly in nonpartitive and nonspecific contexts. Turkish heritage speakers living in Germany (n= 35) could dissociate semantic contexts and made similar preferences to those of monolingual native speakers of Turkish (n= 30). Our findings suggest that native language (L1) can develop despite early onset of the L2 and be maintained on a par with monolingual norms despite the presence of competing structures in the L2. We will discuss how insights from heritage language development can contribute to discussions about the bilingual’s ability in L1; and limits and possibilities of bilingualism.