Download or read book Morphosyntactic Variation and Change in Wisconsin Heritage German written by Lisa Marie Yager and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation provides a descriptive analysis of nominal case morphology in Wisconsin Heritage German (WHG) and documents the emergence of case marking strategies in line with patterns from Differential Object Marking (Bossong 1982, 1983). In languages with DOM, nominal objects are differentiated from subjects through overt case marking based on an implicational hierarchy of semantic features. While DOM is a common phenomenon, the case marking system in European Standard German is not structured around these patterns. These findings indicate that an innovative reanalysis of the case marking system has taken place in these heritage language grammars. The current study draws on data from recorded interviews with 21 WHG-speaking consultants from east-central Wisconsin. While case syncretism and loss of the dative case is widely reported for many Heritage German varieties, it is not unique to these situations and can be traced throughout the history of Germanic. This study takes a comprehensive approach to investigating this phenomenon by documenting realized case forms and the variation this entails. It further explores relationships between morphosyntactic and semantic features rather than viewing a single morphological phenomenon in isolation. The findings of this analysis cannot be easily explained in terms of 'attrition' and 'incomplete acquisition'. More broadly, those notions can be problematic by framing the heritage language in terms of what it is lacking rather than viewing it as a full grammar. Putnam & Sánchez (2013) have called for a new model based on feature activation rather than input. Such a model could account for cross-speaker variation as well as the possibility of restructuring and reanalysis in the emergent heritage language grammar. By taking a more comprehensive approach to analyzing the nominal case system in WHG, this study has uncovered case marking strategies that correspond with DOM patterns. These findings provide evidence for innovative reanalysis in the case system around semantic features. While this dissertation contributes to our understanding of nominal case morphology in Heritage German, it also demonstrates a need for a model of heritage language acquisition and maintenance that can account for the underlying processes leading to variation, reanalysis, and innovation.