Differential object marking in child heritage Romanian in Italy: Is language change accelerated under conditions of language contact?
Differential object marking in child heritage Romanian in Italy: Is language change accelerated under conditions of language contact?

Summary/Abstract: Language acquisition can drive language change. Incipient changes tend to get amplified to rates higher than those in the input (Cournane 2019). According to some authors, such amplification is accelerated under conditions of language contact (Kupisch & Polinsky 2021). Other authors argue that not every type of language change is accelerated under conditions of language contact (Avram et al. 2021a,b, 2023a). This study aims to contribute to this debate investigating the acquisition of differential object marking (DOM) in child heritage Romanian in Italy. The Romanian DOM system is undergoing a change, from a system which allows two DOM markers to one which uses exclusively one of them. The data come from a corpus of 52 narratives of child heritage speakers of Romanian. Results indicate that child heritage speakers do not advance the language change attested in contemporary Romanian, supporting the view that not every language change in progress gets amplified in language contact situations.

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