ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to bring together the fields of second language (L2) reference, heritage language learning, and corpus linguistics, in a corpus-based investigation of referential movement in the writing of foreign L2 vs. heritage learners of Korean. Heritage language speakers (HLS) are ‘the children of immigrants born in the host country or immigrant children who arrived in the host country some time in childhood. The chapter explores how Korean HLS and L2 learners of Korean both manage referential movement in the target language. It shows how native Korean speakers manage referential movement, before presenting predictions as to how foreign and heritage language learners might manage this process. The approach to referential movement follows Ariel’s Accessibility Theory, which accounts for the speakers’/writers’ choice of referring expressions in terms of their estimation of how ‘accessible’ a referent is for the listener at any given time in the discourse.
