This study analyzes the production of overt and null pronouns verbal agreement morphology and word order in heritage speakers of Tigrinya. I demonstrate that in spontaneous speech heritage speakers produce more overt pronouns where not pragmatically required than a native speaker which exemplifies the effects of English pragmatics on the maintenance of heritage Tigrinya and aligns with the existing literature. I argue from the elicited data that heritage speakers use more unexpected subject and object agreement morphology than a native speaker which also aligns with the existing literature. The spontaneous speech data does not support a strong conclusion about heritage agreement morphology due to the freedom in agreement for nouns with unstable gender in Tigrinya. In addition, based on this freedom of agreement and resulting mismatch in phi-features by object agreement markers and their referents I argue that these morphemes in Tigrinya are agreement markers and not doubled clitics. I analyze several instances of unexpected word order in one heritage speaker where they produced a left-headed VP which would be ungrammatical in Tigrinya but grammatical in English as an alternate grammatical representation that is the result of transfer from the dominant language.

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