Measure Phrases in Spanish Second Language Learners and Heritage Speakers *

The linguistic repertoires of second language (L2) learners and heritage speakers (HS) have been compared, in the recent past, to better understand the processes of language acquisition, the possibility of transfer from the dominant language, the differing communicative practices, and mental grammars of these two broadly defined groups (e.g. Montrul, 2010; Showstack, 2017). While research has demonstrated that the Spanish of adult HS differs from the Spanish of monolinguals of the same age group, and that there is a great deal of diversity within the HS group, these differences need further exploration. In addition to contributing to formal linguistics, such studies are also important to heritage language (HL) pedagogy because they show how the pedagogical needs of HS differ from those of L2 learners (Bayram, Prada, Pascual y Cabo, and Rothman, 2016). In a study of Spanish clitics, Montrul (2010) found that HS had clear advantages over L2 learners in some areas but concluded that both groups showed effects of English in some areas, particularly at the interface between syntax and semantics/pragmatics. While it is difficult to determine whether a given linguistic feature does indeed exhibit crosslinguistic influence (Silva-Corvalán, 1993) and scholars in applied linguistics caution against classifying similarities to English in bilingual speech as a deficit (García, 2009; Showstack, 2017), further research is needed on the mental grammars and linguistic production of L2 learners and HS at the syntax/semantics interface to understand the effects of different bilingual learning contexts on the linguistic repertoires of speakers from these two groups. For Spanish HS and L2 learners, one syntactic/semantic feature that merits further investigation is measure phrases (e.g. five inches, two pounds), because syntax/semantics research suggests that they are realized differently in Spanish and English. Measure phrases are often taken to be modifiers of gradable adjectives (such as tall). In degree expressions, they measure an amount or a difference on a scale. In English, measure phrases appear with both the positive form of the adjective or the comparative form of the adjective as in (1).