Syntax and morphology in language attrition: a study of five bilingual expatriate Swedes

This paper explores the attrition of different aspects of Swedish grammar. Empirical data from five bilingual expatriate students, who have lost parts of their first language due to a deactualization of Swedish, are compared to data from monolingual Swedish aphasic patients. The results indicate that some aspects of the grammar may be more affected than others in language attrition. The bilingual students' noun phrase morphology had undergone attrition, but not their word order. The examples from the aphasics displayed the opposite pattern: for them, word order attrition was combined with unaffected noun phrase morphology. Attrition of Swedish grammar is also discussed in relation to markedness conditions.