Linguistic Theory and the Analysis of Minority Languages: Native, Immigrant and Heritage Spanish

In this paper we aim to contribute to the emerging field of heritage studies by investigating whether Spanish heritage speakers in Canada, namely the second or subsequent generation of Spanish speakers who grew up as English-Spanish bilinguals, differ from native Spanish speakers (those who have always lived in a Spanish-speaking country) and from immigrant Spanish speakers (those who immigrated to Canada as adults) with respect to their grammatical competence and to their processing strategies. Taking as a point of departure recent proposals from linguistic theory, we provide a description of Spanish restrictive relative clauses with so-called resumptive pronouns (Es una mujer que nunca LA vimos llorar) in order to determine whether and how our three groups of speakers differ in terms of the grammatical intuitions and processing resources they display when confronted with this type of constructions. We discuss to what extent language attrition, influence from English (in the case of both immigrant and heritage speakers), or incomplete acquisition (in the case of heritage speakers) may be behind the characteristics of the immigrant and the heritage speakers' linguistic behaviour. We argue that sophisticated experimental tasks provide a better tool than global proficiency tests to compare these three groups of speakers. The ultimate aim of this study is to provide a framework for analyzing the status of the minority languages spoken by immigrant communities.