Expanding structures while reducing mappings: Morphosyntactic complexity in agglutinating heritage languages

Abstract

Research on heritage language grammars to date provides overwhelming support for the general stability of their syntactic systems, while the status of their morphology can vary considerably. In this chapter we offer remarks on the morphological complexity of agglutinating heritage languages, taking a closer look at a number of phenomena in Labrador Inuttitut, Cherokee, and American Hungarian. Four important findings emerge from our review: First, these phenomena align with previously documented and observed patterns in heritage language morphology (Polinsky 2018, Putnam et al. 2021). Second, heritage language morphology maintains a significant degree of complexity, even in languages found to be in a moribund state (Bousquette & Putnam 2020). Third, adopting an exoskeletal approach to morphosyntactic decomposition and complexity (Lohndal & Putnam 2021), we observe trends towards larger syntactic structures (for lexicalization), and inversely a reduction in the inventory of exponency. Fourth, we observe a general trend in the “shrinking” of computational domains for lexicalization and movement operations.