Doctoral Dissertation Research: Presentational Focus in Heritage and Monolingual Spanish

Focused constituents receive prominence in some overt way, such as main sentence stress or a change in word order. The complex interplay of prosody, syntax, and context involved in realizing focus has been the subject of a considerable amount of research in modern linguistics, because it touches on important issues concerning the relationship between linguistic subsystems. The role of the different strategies for focus marking varies from language to language. Some languages primarily use word order (e.g. Czech, Hungarian, Spanish) while other languages primarily use stress (e.g. English), though both stress and word order may play a role in a given language. This opens up two research agendas: (i) how to model this variation from a universalist perspective, and (ii) what strategies end up being represented in the grammars of bilingual speakers. The aim of this dissertation research is to investigate presentational focus in the Spanish of monolingual Spanish speakers as compared to US-born Spanish/English bilinguals, commonly called heritage speakers of Spanish. Spanish and English realize focus in different ways. English generally shifts the main sentence stress to the focused constituent in situ, whereas Spanish employs word order alterations to make the focused constitutent sentence-final, where it receives main stress. Since the grammars of heritage speakers are different than those of monolinguals, these Spanish/English bilinguals may use different strategies to realize focus in Spanish than do monolingual speakers. Psycholinguistic experiments will be conducted to explore differences between the bilingual and monolingual groups, with the goal of developing a model of their grammatical systems. This project will not only shed light on the theoretical issues surrounding the realization of the focus of the sentence but also increase our understanding of the linguistic systems of bilingual individuals. The results of this research may eventually have an impact on foreign language and bilingual education. This project will also support the graduate training of a promising scientist.