Discourse markers in heritage Italian spoken in Flanders

This paper offers an analysis of discourse markers (DMs) produced by speakers of Italian as a heritage language (HLS) in Flanders (Belgium), where the dominant language is Belgian Dutch. We compare the DMs used in spontaneous oral productions of HLS with those employed by monolingual native speakers of Italian (MonoL1S), and by students of Italian as a second language (L2S). We investigate how the DMs used by HLS differ from those used by MonoL1S and L2S, in terms of typology, frequency, pragmatic functions, and syntactic positions. Our findings provide different interesting insights on the relationship between the multiple linguistic systems in the mind of the multilingual speaker. As for the analysis of the data, firstly, no significant difference was found among the three groups of speakers in terms of the overall quantity of DMs used; however, the qualitative analysis reveals that HLS produce DMs mainly with an interactional function. We explain this result in light of the difference in the linguistic input that HLS receive with respect to L2S. Secondly, we found several code-switching phenomena in the DMs used both by HLS and L2S. However, it is especially among HLS that code-switched DMs are implemented as “metalanguaging” devices and/or as a way to lower the cognitive load during the interaction. We conclude the paper arguing that our findings provide evidence in favor of the simultaneous access hypothesis (Muysken 2000) and for the fact that bilingual speakers treat DMs as a unified category. Adding to the debate on the categorization of DMs, we propose that the boundaries of the “fuzzy” category of DMs can be found only by considering both their functional and formal characteristics, highlighting the need for a reconciliation between the “onomasiological” and the “semasiological” approaches to study DMs as a unified linguistic categor