Transparency-conditioned valency alternations in Heritage Laz

Abstract

The often-noted endangered status of Laz (South Caucasian) spoken in Türkiye (Haznedar et al. 2018) has not been systematically and empirically studied with reference to actual linguistic data produced by younger generation heritage speakers. To fill in this gap and identify the vulnerable aspects of Laz grammar when acquired as a heritage language (Montrul 2016; Polinsky 2018) I carried out one free production task and two grammatically oriented tasks (production via translation; and comprehension via grammaticality judgment task). Focusing on the patterns of valency changing operations in Heritage Laz, this study shows that the significant erosion of the syncretic i- marker in Laz provides evidence for its semantically vacuous nature (Eren 2021) rather than a voice marker (Lacroix 2012) or a verbal pronominal (Öztürk & Taylan 2014, 2017; Öztürk 2021). The erosion of this marker is expected given the Interface Hypothesis (Tsimpli & Sorace 2006) along with the Principle of Transparency (Aalberse et al. 2019), both of which were previously shown to regulate heritage grammars.