(English below)
10 ноября 2026 года в 18:30 состоится очередное заседание семинара по языковым контактам. Выступит Мария Семеновна Полинская (University of Maryland) с докладом “Competing grammatical representations in bilinguals: A typology, with evidence from Tz’utujil and Russian”.
Семинар пройдет онлайн. За получением ссылки следует обращаться к Егору Владимировичу Кашкину (egorka1988@gmail.com).
Аннотация доступна ниже в английской версии объявления.
The next meeting of the seminar on language contact will take place on 10 November 2026 at 18:30 (Moscow time). Maria Polinsky (University of Maryland) will give a talk entitled “Competing grammatical representations in bilinguals: A typology, with evidence from Tz’utujil and Russian”.
The seminar will be held online. If you need the link to participate, please contact Egor Kashkin (egorka1988@gmail.com).
Abstract
Many surface strings can be derived by more than one grammatical analysis, reflecting different underlying representations. When speakers control different analyses of a given construction, grammatical competition arises. In the existing terminological tradition, such grammatical competition is referred to as multiple grammars (MGs; Kroch 1989, Roeper 1999, Polinsky 2025, 2026). MGs can be distributed across a population in three ways. With shared MGs, every speaker has all the analyses and deploys them in a principled way. Under competing MGs, each speaker has only one of the analyses. Finally, in the case of partial MGs, some speakers have several analyses and others only one. In every case, the learner’s input underdetermines the grammar, and the way learners arrive at a particular representation constitutes a core question linguists must address.
The indeterminacy in the learner’s input is especially acute under bilingualism, where input is more limited and each language may have its own distribution of underlying representations. In theory, bilingual learners may match their input, reduce MGs to a single grammar, redistribute them (for example, from shared to partial), or expand a single grammar into several. This contradicts the common assumption that bilingual grammars simply become simpler.
I will discuss these theoretical positions illustrating them by number agreement in Santiago Tz’utujil (Lyskawa & Ranero 2022) and several constructions in heritage Russian, as spoken by English-dominant bilinguals: exceptive constructions with кроме как and binding in relative clauses (Polinsky 2025).
References
Kroch, A. (1989). Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change, 1, 199–244.
Lyskawa, P., & Ranero, R. (2022). Optional agreement as successful/failed Agree. Linguistic Variation, 22, 209–267.
Roeper, T. (2003). Multiple grammars, feature-attraction, Pied-Piping, and the question: Is AGR inside TP? Manuscript, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Polinsky, M. (2025). Heritage language gaps. In M. Putnam, R. D’Alessandro, & S. Terenghi (Eds.), Heritage languages and syntactic theory, 73–107. Oxford University Press.
Polinsky, M. (2026). Multiple grammars within linguistic populations: Distributions and theoretical implications. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 16, 101-128.