![]() ![]() Put simply, the majority of speakers and speaking contexts fail to meet the admittedly idealized criteria above. Still, Chomsky's counsel necessarily excludes from study a wide swath of the world's language users, communities, and even languages. A great deal of progress has been made to move beyond “grammars” in the traditional sense-comprehensive descriptions of language-specific regularities and their exceptions-to grammar in the Chomskyan sense: the rules and processes that generate those regularities in the first place. The rapid ascension of formal linguistics over the intervening five decades has demonstrated the success of this focused approach to the study of language (for a similar line of discussion, see Lohndal, 2013). Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance. 4) provides an early description of the obstacle to be overcome: “The problem for the linguist, as well as for the child learning the language, is to determine from the data of performance the underlying system of rules that has been mastered by the speaker-hearer and that he puts to use in actual performance.” Chomsky also provides an early characterization of one strategy for meeting this obstacle, focusing the linguist's attention on idealized, untainted language users: But extra-linguistic factors influence performance, so linguists help themselves to various domain restrictions in an attempt to limit noise in the translation from competence to performance. The investigation of grammar is necessarily a circuitous enterprise: we observe linguistic competence through linguistic performance, the situation-specific deployment of grammar. Grammar informs and determines linguistic behavior linguists study grammar by studying the behavior of speakers and making generalizations about the idealized state of mind of these speakers. Grammar cannot get loaded onto a microscope slide or set upon a scale it gets accessed through its effects on naturally-developing speakers who employ the grammar in their native language du jour. The object of study, linguistic competence, or grammar, instantiates in and emerges from the brains of human speakers. ![]() Since its inception, the generative tradition within linguistic theory has concerned itself primarily with monolingual speakers in its quest for what we know when we know (a) language. We conclude by discussing more general concepts central to linguistic inquiry, in particular, complexity and native speaker competence. The case studies also have practical and methodological implications for the study of multilingualism. We consider the reorganization of morphosyntactic feature systems, the reanalysis of atypical argument structure, the attrition of the syntax of relativization, and the simplification of scope interpretations these phenomena implicate diverging trajectories and outcomes in the development of heritage speakers. To demonstrate the relevance of heritage linguistics to the study of linguistic competence more broadly defined, we present a series of case studies on heritage linguistics, documenting some of the deficits and abilities typical of heritage speakers, together with the broader theoretical questions they inform. This paper discusses a common reality in many cases of multilingualism: heritage speakers, or unbalanced bilinguals, simultaneous or sequential, who shifted early in childhood from one language (their heritage language) to their dominant language (the language of their speech community). 2Department of Linguistics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.1Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.Gregory Scontras 1 *, Zuzanna Fuchs 2 and Maria Polinsky 2
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