Formal approaches to complexity in heritage language grammars

Maria Polinsky (ed), Michael T. Putnam (ed)

Synopsis

This collective volume breaks new ground in studies of linguistic complexity by addressing this phenomenon in heritage languages. It dismisses with the conception that heritage languages are less complex than their baseline or homeland counterparts and shows complexity trade-offs at various levels of linguistic representation. The authors consider defining properties of complexity as a phenomenon, diagnostics of complexity, and the ways complexity is modeled, measured, or operationalized in language sciences. The chapters showcase several bilingual dyads and offer new empirical data on heritage language production and use.

Chapters

  • Linguistic complexity in heritage languages
    An introduction
    Maria Polinsky, Michael T. Putnam, Joe Salmons
    Chapter 1
  • Expressing diminutive meaning in Twi
    The role of complexity and language-specific preferences
    Felix Kpogo, Alexandra Elizabeth Kohut, Charles Chang
    Chapter 2
  • How different types of complexity can account for difficult structures in bilingual and monolingual language acquisition
    Esther Rinke, Cristina Flores, Jacopo Torregrossa
    Chapter 3
  • The complexity of word order change in a flexible system
    On stability and variation in heritage Russian word order
    Oksana Laleko
    Chapter 4
  • Expanding structures while reducing mappings
    Morphosyntactic complexity in agglutinating heritage languages
    Terje Lohndal, Michael T. Putnam
    Chapter 5
  • A multi-generational analysis of heritage language complexity
    Ashvini Varatharaj, Gregory Scontras, Naomi Nagy
    Chapter 6
  • Non-monotonic functional sequences
    A new metric for complexity in heritage languages
    Roberta D'Alessandro, Silvia Terenghi
    Chapter 7

Statistics

Formal approaches to complexity in heritage language grammars

Biographies

Maria Polinsky

Maria Polinsky is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park and Director of the National Heritage Research Center at UCLA. She is the founder and Director of several research field stations. Polinsky’s research combines theoretical syntactic work with in-depth investigation of understudied languages. She also has an active research program in heritage languages. She edited several handbooks including the Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics (2021), and she is the author of over a hundred scholarly articles and several books including Deconstructing Ergativity (2016) and Heritage Languages and Their Speakers (2018).

Michael T. Putnam

Michael T. Putnam is Professor of German & Linguistics at Penn State University and Visiting Professor of Linguistics at the University of Greenwich. Putnam’s research focuses on the structure of Germanic languages past and present, from both formal and experimental perspectives. He has a particular interest in the diasporic varieties of Germanic languages and issues related to bi/multilingualism more generally. He has edited several volumes and books, including the Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics (2020) (with B. Richard Page), and has authored dozens of other scholarly articles and books, such as The Structural Design of Language (2013) (with Thomas S. Stroik) and Unbounded Dependency Constructions: Theoretical and Experimental Perspectives (2021) (with Rui P. Chaves).

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Published

July 24, 2024
LaTeX source on GitHub

Series

Current Issues in Bilingualism

Online ISSN

2747-9927

Print ISSN

2747-9919
Cite as
Polinsky, Maria & Putnam, Michael T. (eds.). 2024. Formal approaches to complexity in heritage language grammars. (Current Issues in Bilingualism 3). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.12073160
Copyright (c) 2023 Maria Polinsky, Michael T. Putnam; Felix Kpogo, Joe Salmons, Alexandra Elizabeth Kohut, Charles Chang, Esther Rinke, Cristina Flores, Jacopo Torregrossa, Oksana Laleko, Terje Lohndal, Ashvini Varatharaj, Gregory Scontras, Naomi Nagy, Roberta D'Alessandro, Silvia Terenghi

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Details about the available publication format: PDF

PDF

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-96110-478-9

doi

10.5281/zenodo.12073160

Details about the available publication format: Hardcover

Hardcover

ISMN-13 (25)

978-3-98554-107-2

Physical Dimensions

180mm x 245mm