Subject clitics in microcontact. A case study from heritage Friulian in Argentina and Brazil

Abstract

In this paper we present data from first generation immigrants (G1) and second and third generation heritage speakers of Friulian, a Rhaeto-Romance language spoken in North-Eastern Italy and also found in Argentina and Brazil. The target phenomenon is subject clitics (SCL s). We show that SCL s in heritage Friulian are in a process of being reanalyzed from being agreement markers to pronouns. While SCL s are obligatory in Friulian as spoken in Italy, they are often dropped in heritage Friulian in Argentina and Brazil; this phenomenon, we argue, needs to be interpreted as the drop of pronominal subjects, and not of agreement-like SCL s. We also demonstrate that the use of SCL s (reanalyzed as pronominal subjects) is conditioned both by grammatical factors (it happens more in some grammatical persons than in others) and by discourse factors (they are used more in the case of a continuation topic than in other topicalization contexts). This means that in heritage Friulian, discourse constraints on the expression of subjects are not being lost or weakened; in fact, against the general grammaticalization trend of pronominal forms, new discourse constraints are introduced.