Eventive and stative passives and copula selection in Canadian and American heritage speaker Spanish Elena Valenzuela 1 , Michael Iverson 2 , Jason Rothman 3 , Kristina Borg 1 , Diego Pascual y Cabo 4 and Manuela Pinto 5 1 University of Ottawa / 2 Macquarie University / 3 University of Reading / 4 Texas Tech University / 5 Utrecht University Spanish captures the diference between eventive and stative passives via an obligatory choice between two copula; verbal passives take the copula ser and adjectival passives take the copula estar. In this study, we compare and con- trast US and Canadian heritage speakers of Spanish on their knowledge of this diference in relation to copula choice in Spanish. he backgrounds of the target groups difer signiicantly from each other in that only one of them, the Canadian group, has grown up in a societal multilingual environment. We dis- cuss the results as being supportive of two non-mutually exclusive explanation factors: (a) French facilitates (bootstraps) the acquisition of eventive and stative passives and/or (b) the US/Canadian HS diferences (e.g. status of bilingual- ism and the languages at stake) is a relection of the uniqueness of the language contact situations and the efects this has on the input HSs receive. Keywords: copula, heritage speakers, ser , estar , bilingualism, syntax, passives 1. Introduction 1 he present study adds to the growing body of formal linguistic studies on heritage language acquisition (see Benmamoun, Montrul & Polinsky, 2013 for review) by examining knowledge of the stative and eventive passives in Spanish as a heri- tage language, inclusive of diferences in their distribution and copula selection 1. he following abbreviations have been used: be (SER) for Spanish ‘ser’ and be (ESTAR) for Spanish ‘estar’; pret for the preterit tense and imp for the imperfect tense. doi 10.1075/ihll.5.10val © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company