ABSTRACT
The paper by Benmamoun, Montrul, and Polinsky (BMP) clearly outlines the importance and relevance of heritage languages for linguistic theory. A lot of generative work has focused on the first two questions, arguing for an innate biological capacity to acquire human languages. Noam Chomsky argues that the object of inquiry should be I-language, that is, our individual, internal and intensional tacit knowledge of language. One example of BMP's paper involves the distinction between lexical and functional categories. They argue that in general, "functional categories are relatively more vulnerable than lexical categories, although there is significant variation among the latter as well". Hawkins shows that bilingual speakers first produce the lexical argument structure domain of a sentence and then proceed to build additional structure based on evidence in the input. The dissociation between the argument structure domain of a sentence and the rest of the sentence provides a starting point for understanding other instances of language mixing.
