Receptive Knowledge of Transitivity Alternation by Korean Heritage Speakers

Abstract

Heritage speakers (HS) have historically been attributed with what they cannot do or what they have lost; however while heritage grammars are inevitably different from the monolingual variety, investigating HS knowledge and abilities can reveal much about their capacity for retention. This article investigates Korean HS living in the U.S. and their receptive knowledge of Korean transitivity alternation, specifically, whether they are able to retain a phonologically reduced transitivity marker that is not reinforced in the dominant language, a previous unstudied area of heritage grammar and a feature that does not exist in the speakers’ dominant language, English. Participants (N = 20) rated their acceptability judgment of four sentence conditions on a self-paced online assessment. In a second task, other participants (N = 14) translated the four sentence conditions into English. Results revealed a significant effect of sentence condition for the HS on their acceptability ratings, Wald χ2(3) = 61.133, p < .001, indicating that participants’ judgments of test sentences were significantly influenced by which category of sentence they were given. The HS also demonstrated keen distinctions between sentences with and without the transitivity marker in their translations. Overall, the study shows that Korean HS are able to retain this the transitivity marker.