| Abstract |
This current dissertation examines bilingualism and constitutes a morphological and syntactic study of gender assignment and gender agreement among bilingual adult speakers in Italy and the United States, with Greek as their Heritage Language (HL).
In the initial section, the study provides a cross-linguistic overview of grammatical gender, along with detailed explanations of prevalent theories, inflectional classes, and gender agreement structures in the Greek language. Furthermore, it references cross-linguistic studies to explore how gender is acquired by monolingual, bilingual, and L2 Greek speakers.
The research aims to examine:
(a) whether there are any differences in gender assignment and gender agreement in different syntactic agreement structures (agreement within the Nominal Phrase or external to it) among HL speakers and speakers of the standard Greek language,
(b) if the HL speaker groups differ among themselves (Italian- Greek vs American- Greek),
(c) whether the (non) encoding of gender in their dominant languages (Italian and English, respectively) influences their linguistic behavior, and,
(d) if the morpho-phonological endings of nouns in Greek play a significant role for HL speakers in terms of assignment and agreement.
Based on these four main research questions, an online experiment was created.
7 Italian-Greek speakers, 8 American-Greek speakers, and 6 monolingual Greek speakers (control group) participated in the experiment. The experiment consisted of three different linguistic activities involving comprehension and production. The first was the Gender Assignment Activity, where participants had to assign the correct gender value (masculine, feminine, or neuter) to the noun they heard (78 inanimate nouns in the nominative singular case in Greek). The next linguistic activity was the Gender Agreement Activity, where participants had to judge grammatically the sentences they saw as correct or incorrect, with participants having to recognize the adjectival modifiers agreeing with the noun, both internally and externally to the Nominal Phrase. Finally, in the Story Narration Activity, participants watched a short video and had to describe what they saw in written and/or spoken Greek.
The results showed that the two HL speaker groups did not statistically differ from each other, and their performance was quite high (however below 90% accuracy) both in gender assignment and gender agreement. Furthermore, the lexical gender assignment process appeared to be easier for HL speakers compared to the syntactic gender agreement. Additionally, a slight advantage observed among Italian-Greek speakers in gender assignment, which supports the presence of a positive influence from one language (Italian) to the other (Greek). It also appeared that the morpho-phonological endings played a significant role in gender assignment and agreement, as heritage speakers assigned specific gender values to specific noun endings in the assignment task (e.g., the ending -os was often associated with masculine nouns). Finally, heritage speakers did not seem to face serious grammatical difficulties or problems in speech production.
|
Collections
