Heritage speakers on the edge : Sentence final particle usage among heritage Cantonese speakers

This thesis investigates the use of sentence final particles (SFPs) in heritage Cantonese. Heritage speakers are early or sequential bilinguals who, in adulthood, are more proficient in the dominant language of their society than in their first, “heritage” language. Heritage speakers exhibit systematic divergence from the baseline (the language they were exposed to), a number of which can be attributed to greater trouble with certain domains. SFPs can serve as a lens into heritage grammar. These particles, attached to the end of sentences or utterances, perform a variety of functional and pragmatic functions. Given their abundance and ubiquity in colloquial Cantonese (Leung 1992; Kong 2013), SFPs are likely to be familiar to heritage speakers. However, interpretation of SFPs is sensitive to the context they appear in; as a result, it is often difficult to pinpoint their exact meanings. Additionally, absence of SFPs generally does not affect truth conditions or grammaticality of utterances, which leads to an appearance of optionality. Given that even native speakers and highly proficient bilingual speakers have trouble with optionality of phenomena at the interface of syntax and discourse (Sorace & Serratrice 2009), heritage speakers are predicted to have difficulty matching SFPs to the context and thus misuse or omit them inappropriately. Research on SFP usage among native speakers of Cantonese with aphasia (Kong 2013) inspired this investigation heritage speaker use of SFPs. The results confirm the prediction that heritage speakers use fewer particles on average. Though heritage and aphasic speaker perform similarly, a closer look reveals that the former have access to the full CP domain, unlike aphasic speakers (Platzack 2001). This implicates processing constraints as the culprit behind heritage speaker performance. The results also motivated a reanalysis of the particles aa3 and ne1, lowering their syntactic position from “Type 2” to “Type 1”.