Despite the rapid development of Heritage Language (hereafter HL) research and recent surge of interest in HL grammar, the sphere of speech act pragmatics remains somewhat neglected (but see Dubinina & Malamud 2017 Pinto & Raschio 2007; Taguchi et al. 2013). According to Polinsky and Kagan (2007) limited knowledge of formal registers is considered one of the common characteristics of HL speakers. Thus HL speakers may have to resort to some new strategies which might be borrowed from their dominant language and present crosslinguistic influence. Up to now no research has been conducted on the speech act of requesting among HL-Russian speakers in contact with Hebrew as the Societal Language (hereafter SL). The current study investigated request realization in HL-Russian in contact with Hebrew. Russian and Hebrew differ in request realization (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989) thus providing an excellent opportunity to study HL-grammar-formation mechanisms in the domain of pragmatics. We considered effects of cross-linguistic influence and Age of Onset (AoO) of the SL (here Hebrew) acquisition. For these purposes 4 groups (n=52) were recruited: three groups of adult Russian-Hebrew speakers of various Hebrew AoOs (before the age of 5 (HL-EARLY); between the ages of 5-13 (HL-LATE) after the age of 13 (BiControl)) and a control group of monolingual Russian speakers (MonoControl). A background questionnaire (see Meir & Polinsky 2019) was administered prior to the study to gather information on the amount of HL/SL exposure age at immigration to Israel language spoken at home / work degree of literacy in Russian HL and SL proficiency. The study elicited twenty requests in formal and informal contexts. Each set of ten scenarios comprised five female-oriented and five male-oriented requests. The use of socially-differential forms of address (TY-VY  ‘Tu–Vous’) the syntactic realizations of requests (Imperatives Questions Declarative) the use of politeness marker pozhalujsta ‘please’ and the use of negative particle ‘ne’ were analyzed to tap into the transfer from Hebrew. The results showed group differences across the four measures of analysis. The HL-EARLY group overused TY forms and politeness marker pozhalujsta ‘please’ in both contexts while underusing negative particle ‘ne’. With respect to syntactic realization HL-EARLY group showed no differentiation between the two contexts and favored interrogatives whereas the controls chose imperatives in informal and interrogatives in formal contexts. This can be seen as the lack of knowledge of the prototypical Russian requests and transfer from Hebrew where indirectness is associated with interrogative sentences. The findings unfold the emergence of new conventions in request formation under the influence of Hebrew and these effects of transfer are amplified by lower AoOs. 

View slides here.