Italo-German Heritage Speakers: Negative Concord and Double Negation

This thesis investigates negation systems in Italo–German heritage speakers, focusing on the interaction between Italian negative concord and German double negation. Drawing on theoretical approaches to grammaticalization and Jespersen’s Cycle, the study compares the diachronic and synchronic development of negation in Italian, Northern Italian dialects, and German. This historical perspective provides the theoretical framework for the empirical analysis, showing how the different negation systems evolved over time and how their structural properties may interact in bilingual contexts. The empirical analysis is based on data collected from heritage speakers exposed to both Italian and German, through a grammaticality judgment task. The aim is to investigate how asymmetrical bilingualism between two distinct negation systems shapes the structure of negative system. The results show that heritage speakers often develop hybrid patterns that combine features of both languages, revealing processes of cross-linguistic influence, structural convergence, and contact-induced change.