AGREEMENT VARIABILITY IN SPANISH AS A HERITAGE LANGUAGE: STUDY OF NOMINAL PHRASES

Heritage speakers in North Texas use the Spanish language as a family language, and English is the vehicular language. Spanish is used for colloquial speech, leaving aside formal register and writing. For this reason, competence in Spanish is not complete and there are specific problems with agreement within nominal phrases with three constituents (article, noun, and adjective). In this research, semi-structured interviews were given to heritage speakers from three sociolinguistic generations (G1, G2, and G3) in order to create an oral corpus. Twenty four interviews were analyzed to count the number of nominal phrases with three constituent in them and their relation to the variables of sociolinguistic generation, speaker's gender, item position related to the verb (pre-verbal, post-verbal, or isolated) and internal agreement (gender and number). Results show that the use of complex nominal phrases decreases while the internal disagreement increases in percentage when the sociolinguistic generation goes up.