Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Linguistics

Advisor

Gita Martohardjono

Committee Members

Jon Nissenbaum

Kyle Gorman

Subject Categories

Linguistics

Keywords

Georgian, heritage language acquisition, morphosyntax, pronoun dropping

Abstract

This dissertation presents three research articles united in the goal of describing the Georgian language as it is spoken by heritage speakers in the Brooklyn diaspora. The Georgian heritage speaker subjects recruited for these studies were children due to immigration patterns at the time when experimental data was collected. Their production of morphosyntactic inflection and pronouns is compared to adult and child homeland speakers.

Heritage speakers of Georgian demonstrate the following divergences from homeland and standard language comparisons. Nominal case inflection is most affected in heritage production, as heritage speakers use a default case or collapse Georgian's split-ergative and inverse case paradigms. Verbal agreement diverges from standard forms particularly with respect to plural marking. Heritage speakers also drop pronouns at an increased rate, using fewer overt pronouns than is evidenced in homeland varieties.

These differences indicate restructuring in the grammatical development of Heritage Georgian such that linguistic structures are simplified, resulting in a streamlined grammar that arguably eases mental processing load for the heritage speaker. The results presented herein both confirm and extend existing theories of bilingual and heritage grammars while highlighting the need for increasing the diversity of languages in the empirical coverage of the field of heritage language acquisition.

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