Esther Rinke

@uni-frankfurt.de

Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Linguistics/ Faculty of Modern Languages/Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
Goethe University Frankfurt

Esther Rinke


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https://researchid.co/esther.rinke

RESEARCH, TEACHING, or OTHER INTERESTS

Language and Linguistics
39

Scopus Publications

Scopus Publications

  • The other side of the coin: Linguistic complexity as a potential cause for selective reinforcement in the heritage language of returnee speakers
    Esther Rinke, Aldona Sopata
    Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 2026
  • Resumption in clitic left dislocation: An experimental study of Peninsular and Rioplatense Spanish
    Carolina A. Gattei, Gabriel Martínez Vera, Esther Rinke
    Journal of Linguistics, 2026
    This paper investigates the extent to which clitic resumption in clitic left dislocation (CLLD) of accusative and dative objects is compulsory in two varieties of Spanish, namely, Peninsular and Rioplatense Spanish. We report the findings of an acceptability judgment task that compares sentences with dislocated direct and indirect objects with and without resumption. The study is motivated by two observations in cases without dislocation. First, in Peninsular Spanish, clitic doubling with dative objects is optional but doubling of accusative objects is very marginal. Second, in Rioplatense Spanish, doubling of accusatives is available under specific conditions. Although the results confirm that resumption in CLLD structures is strongly preferred across varieties and object types, differences between dative vs. accusative clitics are reflected to some extent in CLLD structures in Peninsular Spanish. Concerning cross-dialectal differences between Peninsular vs. Rioplatense Spanish, we propose an account that relies on the availability of null accusative clitics in Rioplatense in contrast to Peninsular Spanish.
  • “a branca Schere” or “a tesoura weiβe”? Adjective placement in Portuguese–German code-switching by bilingual children and adolescents
    Cristina Flores, Esther Rinke, Jacopo Torregrossa, M. Carmen Parafita Couto
    Journal of Child Language, 2026
    This study investigates code-switching (CS) within the noun phrase in Portuguese–German bilingual children and adolescents (aged 8–16) in German-speaking Switzerland. Using an elicited imitation task with 49 participants, we examine how linguistic and extralinguistic factors shape CS behaviour. The experiment manipulated matrix language (German vs. Portuguese), insertion type (adjective vs. noun), and adjective position (prenominal vs. postnominal). The results show that CS strategies vary depending on the grammatical properties of the matrix language. In German, prenominal adjective position—regardless of the language of the inserted adjective—was the strongest predictor of repetition accuracy. In Portuguese, the language of the adjective played a central role. We propose the Constraint Integration Model to account for the interaction between matrix-language properties and lexical features. Additionally, older age and more positive attitudes towards German increased the likelihood of producing switched utterances.
  • Systematic and predictable variation in heritage grammars: The role of complexity, diachronic change, and linguistic ambiguity in the input
    Roberta D’Alessandro, Luigi Andriani, Alberto Frasson, Manuela Pinto, Luana Sorgini, Silvia Terenghi
    Heritage Languages and Syntactic Theory, 2025
    This first chapter presents an overview of the microcontact methodology and what is needed to compare as well as distinguish change in contact from change in diachrony, also known as endogenous change. After an outline of the methodology, the chapter shares findings from the project Microcontact. Language variation and change from the Italian heritage perspective, carried out at Utrecht University between 2017 and 2022. This project focused on various syntactic phenomena, encompassing both purely grammatical aspects and those situated at the intersection of grammar and discourse. In so doing, the chapter highlights the insights into grammatical theory that the microcontact methodology provides. Section 1.4 presents data from several phenomena, in contact and in diachrony: demonstratives, auxiliary selection, differential object marking, subject clitics, and null subjects. Section 1.5 highlights the main theoretical contributions of each of the four case studies. Section 1.6 concludes the chapter.
  • The relevance of instruction, language exposure and age for heritage children's development of complex morphosyntax: triangulating data from narratives and cloze-tests
    Jacopo Torregrossa, Cristina Flores, Esther Rinke
    Frontiers in Language Sciences, 2025
    For children speaking a heritage language, the onset of schooling may induce a shift in dominance of language exposure from the heritage language to the societal language. This shift may affect the acquisition of morphosyntactic structures in the heritage language, especially of those that, due to their morphosyntactic complexity, tend to be acquired in school age even by monolingual children. The present study investigates the morphosyntactic abilities of 59 children aged 7 to 16 living in Switzerland, speaking European Portuguese as heritage language and German as societal language. Children's morphosyntactic abilities were measured using a written cloze-test and a narration task. By triangulating the results from both tasks, we examined which factors influenced morphosyntactic development in the heritage language, focusing on the role of task type, age, amount of heritage language instruction and variety of heritage language exposure at home, and their interaction with the complexity of the target structures. The results revealed a clear effect of complexity, with more complex structures being produced less accurately, and a task effect, with narratives yielding fewer accurate productions than cloze-tests. Additionally, we found a general effect of age, particularly for less complex structures. Crucially, the amount of years attending heritage language classes emerged as a key factor in the mastery of the most complex structures, whereas the variety of exposure to the heritage language at home showed no significant effect. The results are discussed in terms of the importance of exposure to formal registers of European Portuguese, provided by the heritage language courses in Switzerland, for the consolidation of more complex morphosyntactic abilities.
  • Indefinite object drop is lexically constrained
    Carlos Martínez-García, Esther Rinke, Nelli Kerezova
    Glossa, 2025
    This paper discusses the lexical constraints regulating the occurrence of indefinite null objects in European Spanish in comparison to European Portuguese. Based on previous research and corpus data, we suggest that the distribution of indefinite null objects is determined by the lexical constraints governing the distribution of object bare nouns. We propose that a predicate’s ability to allow for certain types of bare nouns predicts its capacity to permit corresponding indefinite null objects. Specifically, predicates that allow for object bare plurals and object mass nouns also allow for indefinite null objects referring to these types of bare nouns, while those permitting bare singulars allow for indefinite null objects referring to all types of bare nouns. Conversely, predicates that do not allow for any kind of object bare nouns do also not allow for indefinite null objects. The theoretical advantage of this proposal is that the distribution of indefinite object drop in Spanish is derived from the distribution of object bare nouns, not from a newly posited grammatical mechanism. Additionally, we propose a universal implicational hierarchy wherein languages with fewer restrictions on object bare nouns are more likely to allow for indefinite null objects. Our examination of European Portuguese data shows that EP is more permissive with regard to indefinite null objects and supports this hierarchy account, demonstrating its applicability to crosslinguistic patterns of different types of null objects and object bare nouns.
  • The impact of change of environment on Polish-German returnees' childhood languages. Effects of attrition and reinforcement on lexical knowledge
    Cristina Flores, Aldona Sopata, Esther Rinke
    International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 2025
    This study investigates the effects of environmental change on the childhood languages of Polish-German returnees. 22 bilinguals, who spent their childhood in Germany and later moved back to Poland, completed a detailed background questionnaire and took both the German and Polish versions of a vocabulary test (LexTALE). The study aims to detect potential processes of attrition in German, the former dominant language, and reinforcement of Polish, the former heritage language, by analyzing the impact of extralinguistic variables. The results indicate a leveling of language dominance in returnees which may be caused by decline of proficiency in German and increased proficiency in Polish. Proficiency in German and in Polish is predicted by age at return, with speakers who returned during childhood showing higher degrees of proficiency in Polish and lower proficiency in German, and by length of residence in Poland: longer length of residence back in the country of origin leads to higher lexical proficiency in Polish, but surprisingly also in German. This indicates that lexical knowledge continues to develop during the speakers’ lifetime, even in contexts of reduced language use.
  • Are heritage speakers one step ahead in ongoing processes of diachronic change?: Comparing heritage speakers with speakers of two varieties of Portuguese in their comprehension of null object constructions
    Esther Rinke, Daniel M. K. Weingärtner, Cristina Flores, Mercedes Martinez Bruera, Andrea Listanti, Juliana Novo Gomes, Sol Lago
    Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 2025
    This study investigates whether heritage speakers of European Portuguese (EP) show a diachronically advanced behaviour in their comprehension of null object constructions. Based on a comprehension experiment, we compared heritage speakers to homeland speakers of EP, on the one hand and homeland speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) on the other, the latter representing a variety in which null objects have diachronically spread. Our results confirm significant differences between EP homeland speakers and the two other groups but not between heritage speakers and BP homeland speakers, indicating an acceleration of diachronic change in the heritage speaker group. In addition, our study confirms that null objects in islands are available to homeland speakers of EP, challenging earlier analyses of null objects in this variety.
  • Null objects in Polish heritage language acquisition in contact with German
    Aldona Sopata, Esther Rinke, Cristina Flores
    International Journal of Bilingualism, 2024
    Aims and objectives: This study investigates the acquisition of referential expressions for direct objects by child heritage speakers of Polish living in Germany. Our main research questions are how object expression develops in bilingual children and whether their path or pace of acquisition differs from monolingual children. Methodology: We investigate the use of referential expressions in an elicited production task. In all, 39 Polish-German bilingual children participated in the test. Data and analysis: We compare the data of four age groups of bilingual children – 3- to 4-year-olds, 5- to 6-year-olds, 7- to 8-year-olds, and 9- to 10-year-olds – to each other and to monolingual children at the respective ages. For the analysis of participants’ responses, we ran a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) with a multinominal dependent variable. Findings: The results show that child heritage language (HL) speakers of Polish display knowledge of semantic and pragmatic constraints of object realization from early stages on. However, from age 5 and up to age 9 to 10, they still produce high rates of inappropriate null objects and show a deceleration in the development of this knowledge, compared to monolingual children. This protracted development is attributed to reduced input in the HL, mainly due to the enrolment in the majority language school. Originality: This study is the first to investigate the development of referential expressions for direct objects in child heritage speakers of Polish in the age span 3 to 10 years. Significance: The study relates the higher rates of null objects in the bilingual production to the varying degrees of exposure to the HL during language development. Deceleration in the pace of object acquisition by the HL speakers at the age of 5 to 6 years is attributed to a prolonged stage of acquisition of integrating rules of syntactic and pragmatic knowledge.
  • OVERT PRONOUNS ARE CHALLENGING: SUBJECT REALIZATION IN WRITTEN NARRATIVES OF PORTUGUESE-FRENCH BILINGUAL SCHOOL-AGE CHILDREN
    Cristina Flores, Esther Rinke
    Romanica Cracoviensia, 2024
    This paper examines the use of referential expressions in the subject position in European Portuguese (EP) in a corpus of narratives written by two groups of Portuguese-speaking school-age children: monolingually-raised children living in Portugal and bilingual French-Portuguese children living in Switzerland. We focus on the children’s choice of null and overt subjects, considering both the syntactic context (inter- and intrasentential) and the pragmatic context (topic continuity and topic shift). Additionally, we explore potential age and proficiency effects within the group of bilinguals. Results show an overuse of overt pronouns in intersentential topic continuity contexts in the narratives of the bilingual children, modulated by proficiency and age. This confirms that potential changes to heritage language grammars in EP may affect, in particular, the use of overt subject pronouns. The overuse of strong pronouns reflects that their acquisition is challenging for monolingual and for bilingual children alike, probably due to the complexity and variability of overt subject pronouns in the adult grammar.
  • An experimental study on the loss of VS order in monolingual and bilingual speakers of Brazilian Portuguese
    Esther Rinke, Cristina Flores, Priscila Oliveira, Liliana Correia
    Probus, 2024
  • How unique is the linguistic situation of endangered language speakers?
    Aldona Sopata, Esther Rinke, Cristina Flores
    Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 2023
  • What modulates the acquisition of difficult structures in a heritage language? A study on Portuguese in contact with French, German and Italian
    Jacopo Torregrossa, Cristina Flores, Esther Rinke
    Bilingualism, 2023
  • Diachronic change and variation in use: Judgments of clitic doubling in Peninsular vs. Rioplatense Spanish
    Esther Rinke, Sol Lago, Carolina Andrea Gattei
    Isogloss, 2023
  • Pinning down the interaction between animacy and syntactic function in the interpretation of German and Italian personal and demonstrative pronouns
    Markus Bader, Jacopo Torregrossa, Esther Rinke
    Discourse Processes, 2023
  • To hón ich imma insistieat Syntactic stability in heritage Hunsrückisch German spoken in Brazil
    Cristina Flores, Esther Rinke, Claudia Wagner
    Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 2022
  • Multiple perspectives on the bilingual competence of Portuguese-descendant children living in Switzerland: Linguistics in dialogue with didactics
    Cristina Flores, Maria Lurdes Gonçalves, Esther Rinke, Jacopo Torregrossa
    Revista Portuguesa De Educacao, 2022
  • Language separation and stable syntactic knowledge: verbs and verb phrases in bilingual children’s narratives
    Cristina Flores, Esther Rinke, Jacopo Torregrossa, Daniel Weingärtner
    Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 2022
  • Portuguese as heritage language in germany—a linguistic perspective
    Esther Rinke, Cristina Flores
    Languages, 2021
  • Dialectal Variation in European Portuguese Central Vowel Perception
    Valerie Horn, Esther Rinke, Cristina Flores
    Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 2020
  • The relevance of language-internal variation in predicting heritage language grammars
    Cristina Flores, Esther Rinke
    Bilingualism, 2020
  • Possessive modifiers in serbian: Coreference with clitics and strong pronouns
    Sanja Srdanović, Esther Rinke
    Journal of Slavic Linguistics, 2020
  • Acquiring the distribution of null and overt direct objects in European Portuguese
    Cristina Flores, Esther Rinke, Aldona Sopata
    Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 2020
  • Heritage Portuguese and heritage polish in contact with german: More evidence on the production of objects
    Esther Rinke, Cristina Flores, Aldona Sopata
    Languages, 2019
  • Another look at the interpretation of overt and null pronominal subjects in bilingual language acquisition: Heritage Portuguese in contact with German and Spanish
    Esther Rinke, Cristina Flores
    Glossa, 2019
  • Editorial: Bilingual language development: The role of dominance
    Cornelia Hamann, Esther Rinke, Dobrinka Genevska-Hanke
    Frontiers in Psychology, 2019
  • Clitic doubling in Peninsular and Rioplatense Spanish: a comparative corpus investigation
    Esther Rinke, Martin Elsig, Judith Wieprecht
    Isogloss, 2019
  • Null objects in the spontaneous speech of monolingual and bilingual speakers of European Portuguese
    Esther Rinke, Cristina Flores, Pilar Barbosa
    Probus, 2018
  • The role of the interfaces in syntactic change
    Manual of Grammatical Interfaces in Romance, 2016
  • Designing a long lasting linguistic project: The case study of ASIt
    Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation Lrec 2016, 2016
  • Morphosyntactic knowledge of clitics by Portuguese heritage bilinguals
    ESTHER RINKE, CRISTINA FLORES
    Bilingualism, 2014
  • Language acquisition and change: A morphosyntactic perspective
    Language Acquisition and Change A Morphosyntactic Perspective, 2013
  • The diachronic development of article-possessor complementarity in the history of Italian and Portuguese
    Linguistic Universals and Language Variation, 2011
  • On the licensing of null subjects in Old French
    Esther Rinke
    Syntactic Structures and Morphological Information, 2011
  • The combination of defi nite article and possessive pronoun in the history of Portuguese
    Estudos De Linguistica Galega, 2010
  • Quantitative evidence and diachronic syntax
    Esther Rinke, Martin Elsig
    Lingua, 2010
  • Introduction
    Gisella Ferraresi, Esther Rinke
    Stuf Language Typology and Universals, 2010
  • Information Packaging and the Rise of Clitic Doubling in the History of Spanish
    Christoph Gabriel, Esther Rinke
    Diachronic Studies on Information Structure Language Acquisition and Change, 2010
  • Introduction
    Gisella Ferraresi, Esther Rinke
    Stuf Language Typology and Universals, 2009