Syntactic aspects in contact with Spanish language in the case of heritage Croatian speakers in Argentina

In the present work we propose to analyze the Croatian-Spanish syntactic phenomena in the speech of Croatian migrants in Santa Fe (Argentina) based on a corpus of semi-structured interviews, collected first-hand in field work. This research is part of a broader investigation (Bilic 2022) that studies the processes of change and the phenomena of contact with Spanish - its phonological, morphosyntactic and lexical aspects- within the framework of studies on heritage languages and languages in contact, in migratory contexts. In Argentina, Croatian is the heritage language of several generations of migrants, it is a minority language that is learned in the domestic and family environment. The aim of this study is to determine which characteristics can be attributed to the influence of Spanish, and which changes that can be assigned to the situation of linguistic loss. The noun and verbal phrases followed by the simple and the complex sentence will be analyzed. In the simple sentence, we shall highlight the relationship between the subject and the predicate, as well as the status of the auxiliary verb. In the complex sentence, we shall be focusing on the coordinate and subordinate clauses, in particular, the relative, temporal and conditional clauses. The status and frequency of conjunctions, the absence of subordination mechanisms and conditional constructions, as well as the phenomena of simplification and generalization, will also be studied.