Abstract

NOVA, Manuela Casa. Pronominal clitic placement in european portuguese by portuguese heritage speakers living in france. Diacrítica [online]. 2015, vol.29, n.1, pp.113-145. ISSN 0807-8967.

The present study aims to determine the role of language transfer in the acquisition of Portuguese as a heritage language by a group of 18 heritage speakers of European Portuguese (EP) living in France, on the basis of a word order test focused on clitic placement in EP. Since French is a language with clitic pronouns, the predominant position of which is proclitic, the performance of Luso-French heritage speakers is compared with a group of monolingual speakers with the same age (7-12 years). The results show that heritage speakers of Portuguese acquire the system of clitic pronouns in Portuguese in a similar way as monolingual speakers, although the process takes longer, even because they reveal susceptible to the phenomenon of language transfer. The results also indicate the influence of age, since older speakers achieve better results. Moreover even though the length of exposure to the heritage language may condition certain skills throughout the acquisition process, it doesn't have as much weight as the age factor.

Keywords : bilingualism; heritage language; cliticization; enclisis; proclisis.

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