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Code switching and the complement/adjunct distinction
Abstract
Belazi, Rubin, and Toribio (1994) propose two universal syntactic constraints on intrasentential code switching: the Functional Head Constraint, which prohibits switches between functional heads and their complements, and the Word-Grammar Integrity Corollary, which requires all words of a language to obey that language's grammar in code-switching contexts. After rejecting both constraints on empirical as well as conceptual grounds, this article outlines an alternative analysis that relies only on general principles of phrase structure and rejects constraints specific to code switching. The analysis proposed provides strong support for the projection of syntactic structure from the lexicon and the complement/adjunct distinction.
... Worse still, the Functional Head Constraint does not stand up to empirical tests from other data in the literature. Both Bhatt (1995) and Mahootian and Santorini (1996) 52 cite numerous counter-examples from various language-pairs. The following examples are found in Mahootian and Santorini (1996). ...
... Both Bhatt (1995) and Mahootian and Santorini (1996) 52 cite numerous counter-examples from various language-pairs. The following examples are found in Mahootian and Santorini (1996). ...
... No instances of code-switching between NEG and the following VP are attested in Santorini and Mahootian (1996) or Bhatt (1995 -English, Teng 1993) In addition to these data, there are some very well-documented corpora in which code switching consistently takes place between functional heads and their complements. For instance, in Halmari's (1993Halmari's ( , 1997 corpus of Finnish-English, the majority of code switching instances cited take place between determiners and nouns (Halmari 1997: 91-94 come from a lot of language-pairs, far more than the ones which Belazi et al. (1994) observed in formulating the Functional Head Constraint. ...
This dissertation argues for the position that code-switching utterances are constrained by the same set of mechanisms as those which govern monolingual utterances. While this thesis is in line with more recent code-switching theories (e.g. Belazi et al. 1994, MacSwan 1997, Mahootian 1993), this dissertation differs from those works in making two specific claims: Firstly, functional categories and lexical categories exhibit different syntactic behaviour in code-switching. Secondly, codeswitching is subject to the same principles not only in syntax, but also in production and pragmatics. Chapter 2 presents a critical review of constraints and processing models previously proposed in the literature. It is suggested that in view of the vast variety of data, no existing model is completely adequate. Nevertheless, it is argued that a model which does not postulate syntactic constraints (along the lines of Mahootian 1993, MacSwan 1997) or production principles (along the lines of de Bot 1992) specific to code switching is to be preferred on cognitive and theoretical grounds. Chapter 3 concerns word order between lexical heads and their complements in code-switching. It is shown that the language of a lexical head (i.e. noun or verb) may or may not determine the word order of its complement. Chapter 4 investigates word order between functional heads and their complements in code-switching. Contrary to the case with lexical categories, the language of functional heads (e.g. D, I and C) is shown to determine the word order of their complements in code-switching. It is proposed that word order between heads (lexical or functional) and complements is governed by head-parameters, and the difference between lexical heads and functional heads is due to their differential processing and production in terms of Levelt's (1989) algorithm. Chapter 5 investigates the selection properties of functional categories in codeswitching, with special reference to Cantonese-English. Contrary to the Functional Head Constraint (Belazi et al. 1994), it is shown that code-switching can occur freely between functional heads and their complements, provided that the c-selection requirements of the functional heads are satisfied. Chapter 6 investigates the selection properties of lexical categories in code-switching, again with special reference to Cantonese-English. It is shown that "language-specific" c-selection properties need not be observed: a Cantonese verb may take an English DP whereas an English verb may take a Cantonese demonstrative phrase (DemP). Similar phenomena are drawn from other language-pairs involving a language with morphological case and a language without morphological case. The difference between functional categories and lexical categories in their selection properties is again explained in terms of the different production processes they undergo. Chapter 7 is devoted to prepositions which have been problematic in terms of their status as a functional category or a lexical category. Based on the behaviour of prepositions in code-switching, it is suggested that prepositions display a dual character. It is proposed that prepositions may well point to the fact that the conventional dichotomy between functional categories and lexical categories is not a primitive one in the lexicon. Chapter 8 looks at code-switching in a wider perspective. and explores the pragmatic determinants of code-switching in the light of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995). It is argued that many types of code-switching (e.g. repetitions, quotations, etc.) are motivated by the desire to optimize the "relevance" of a message, with "relevance" as defined in Relevance Theory.
... Word order offers a striking illustration of the ability of bilingual data to provide a unique insight into linguistic structure. Previous studies relying on cs data have shed light notably on adjective-noun order [2,3], and object-verb 10 order [4,5]. In those studies, contrasting properties of languages involved in cs are investigated to isolate elements in the structure which influence word order. ...
... As C 0 is a functional head, this constraint would predict that switching between a complementiser and the TP will not occur. While much counter-evidence to the functional head constraint has been put forward (see among others [4] for switches between a variety of 415 heads and their complement and [46, p. 310] for C 0 /TP switches), González-Vilbazo [47] argues that switching between C 0 and TP specifically is illicit, at least for the Spanish-German code-switching community he investigated. Hoot [48], on the other hand, argues that a switch may be licit or illicit in English-Spanish cs depending on the grammatical constructions. ...
... • the relation between language of the finite verb (i.e. T 0 ) and word order [4,25,28] As was the case in table 1, the conditions in table 2 are grouped according to predicted grammaticality. Conditions B and E are expected to be the most grammatical. ...
This paper aims to show that the mainstream Generative analysis for verb second (V2) languages – a functional head, C⁰, is responsible for V2 word order – does not hold up to scrutiny when confronted with bilingual data. Dutch-English code-switched data were used to investigate V2 word order in the main clause – but also svo/sov word order in the subordinate clause, an issue that has relevance to the question at hand – using an acceptability judgment task to test how native bilinguals judge code-switched sentences in a verb second context and subordinate clauses. Novel results with regards to V2 word order are presented in combination with a corroboration of established patterns for subordinate clause word order. The results indicate that the language of the finite verb determines word order in both main and subordinate clauses.
... To date, the existing studies (Dussias 1997;Mahootian and Santorini 1996;Toribio 2001a, b) mainly focused on the theoretical validity of FHC, which seemed to make the story rather controversial. Some studies (e.g., Toribio 2001a, b) did verify the theoretical predictions of FHC in the grammatical judgment task (Toribio 2001b), or the computational modeling (Li and Fung 2014a, b); while a series of psycholinguistic studies made by colleagues (e.g., Dussias 1997, 2003;Guzzardo Tamargo et al. 2016), or others (e.g., MacSwan 2014; Mahootian and Santorini 1996) did not, suggesting that the FHC fails to account for some exceptional cases of CS. ...
... To date, the existing studies (Dussias 1997;Mahootian and Santorini 1996;Toribio 2001a, b) mainly focused on the theoretical validity of FHC, which seemed to make the story rather controversial. Some studies (e.g., Toribio 2001a, b) did verify the theoretical predictions of FHC in the grammatical judgment task (Toribio 2001b), or the computational modeling (Li and Fung 2014a, b); while a series of psycholinguistic studies made by colleagues (e.g., Dussias 1997, 2003;Guzzardo Tamargo et al. 2016), or others (e.g., MacSwan 2014; Mahootian and Santorini 1996) did not, suggesting that the FHC fails to account for some exceptional cases of CS. Until now, systematic CS studies between Chinese and English that testify the validity of FHC are quite in short supply, which can be taken as one of the crucial points of departure in the present study. ...
... Firstly, the deficiency of the FHC theory per se leads to the present results. Although the FHC (e.g., Belazi et al. 1994;Bhatt 1997;Dussias 1997Dussias , 2003Giancaspro 2013Giancaspro , 2015Mahootian and Santorini 1996;Mesthrie 2002;Toribio 2001a, b) is so influential that some studies (e.g., Bhatt 2016;Guzzardo Tamargo et al. 2016) still attempt to examine its theoretical predictions even in recent years, its theoretical stance has been all the more challenged and even abandoned by some researchers (see, e.g., Mahootian and Santorini 1996;Macswan 2005c; MacSwan 2014 for the critical comments). For instance, for arguing its theoretical demerits, MacSwan (2005c: 63-64) summarized two conceptual problems: First, since language feature discussed before is not independently motivated from any other linguistic phenomenon, language feature such as [+Chinese] or [+English] can only serve to re-label the language facts. ...
To investigate the grammatical constraints of code-switching (CS hereafter) under the disputes of the constraint-based account versus the constraint-free account, the effects of functional category onCS have long been investigated in the existing studies.Thus, the present study, by asking 47 participants to take part in an eye-movement experiment, examined the potential effects of functional category on Chinese–English CS. We found that differential switch costs at varying code-switched conditions as well as robust switch effects that last from the early to the late stage. The findings could tentatively give rise to the theoretical predictions of the minimalist program, a representative of the constraint-free account rather than the functional head constraint, a typical representative of the constraint-based account. Moreover, such switch effects might initiate from the early to the very late stage in terms of time-course of CS processing.
... Section 6.1 briefly looks at monolingual dependencies, Section 6.2 compares monolingual L1 dependencies with mixed dependencies with an L1 head, and Section 6.3 compares monolingual L2 dependencies with mixed dependencies with an L2 head. The findings support the main idea outlined in the Section 5, the DH, and related findings from the code-switching literature (Treffers-Daller 1994, Mahootian and Santorini 1996, Muysken 2000. The column entries of Table 3 demonstrate that different dependency types have different mean distances (Liu et al. 2009: 170); the rows show that MDDs differ cross-linguistically (Liu 2008(Liu , 2009 and that the German/English bilinguals' grammars seem to be intact in terms of topological fields: there are no English left-dependent objects (nor x-comps). ...
... That English post-dependent adjuncts are, on average, two words further away from their German head than monolingual German ones supports the notion that code-switching is favoured in adjoined peripheral positions (Treffers-Daller 1998, Mahootian andSantorini 1996, Muysken 2000), as in Example (3). (3) *MEL: ...
... This seems to render the retrieval of features of the L2 head (e.g. its language) from memory more difficult and lead to the significantly larger number of mixed long distance syntactic relation with an L2 head in both corpora. The findings from the German/English data presented in Table 8 and those from the Chinese/English Treebank (Table 9) also support the notion that code-mixing is favoured in peripheral and adjoined positions (Treffers-Daller 1994, Mahootian and Santorini 1996, Mysken 2000. ...
Closely related words tend to be close together in monolingual language use. This paper suggests that this is different in bilingual language use. The Distance Hypothesis (DH) proposes that long dependency distances between syntactically related units facilitate bilingual code-switching. We test the DH on a 9,023 word German/English and a 19,766 word Chinese/English corpus. Both corpora support the DH in that they present longer mixed dependencies than monolingual ones. Selected major dependency types (subject, object , adjunct) also have longer dependency distances when the head word and its dependent are from different languages. We discuss how processing motivations behind the DH make it a potentially viable motivator for bili n-gual language use.
... The code-switching literature (Mahootian & Santorini 1996;Treffers-Daller 1994) proposes that switching of head-complement relations is more restrictive than the switching of adjunction structures. In the corpus this study is based on the difference between monolingual and switched complement and adjunct relations 6 is highly significant (Χ 2 = 6.82, df = 1, p = 0.009), but there are more switched complements than adjuncts. ...
... In the corpus this study is based on the difference between monolingual and switched complement and adjunct relations 6 is highly significant (Χ 2 = 6.82, df = 1, p = 0.009), but there are more switched complements than adjuncts. Overall, Mahootian & Santorini's (1996) and Treffers-Daller's (1994) hypotheses that adjuncts are more easily switched than complements are thus not substantiated by the present analysis, but a more fine-grained analysis of grammatical relations is required for a clearer picture to emerge. ...
... If I distinguish between code-switches and borrowings and classify all English nouns that enter syntactic relations with German heads as borrowings, the complement versus adjunct distinction simply becomes not significant (Χ 2 = 0.416, df = 1, p = 0.838). So even if I take all potential borrowings out of the equation, Mahootian & Santorini's (1996) and Treffers-Daller's (1994) hypotheses that adjuncts are more easily switched than complements are not substantiated by the present analysis. ...
This volume contains a selection of papers from the 4th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 4), which was held at the University of Cyprus from June 17th–19th 2007. The variety of theoretical frameworks and methodological perspectives (from Generative Grammar, Word Grammar, Government Phonology, Optimality Theory and Distributed Morphology to quantitative, Labovian and ethnographic approaches to variation and change, real and apparent time studies, phonetic analysis and metatheoretical papers on quantitative analysis), as well as the sheer number of linguistic varieties examined, attest both to the breadth and scope of the conference and to its status as a meeting-place for synchronic and diachronic linguistic description and theoretical exploration. One of the major themes running through the volume is the explicit concern with methodological refinement. Almost all the contributions address issues of methodology in various aspects of data collection and analysis, be they questionnaire surveys and interview data, spoken or written corpora, real- and apparent-time studies, dialect atlases and maps, statistical models or software. Alongside methodological issues, and especially with regard to the treatment of historical data, many of the papers in the volume explicitly address theoretical issues, for example the relative weighting of linguistic/systemic, cognitive and discourse factors in the exploration of language variation and change.
... With negative and positive evidence from Urdu/English intra-sentential code-switching data, the paper attempts to determine the empirical adequacy of two contrasting proposals regarding the placement of complements in mixed sentences. Although Mahootian and Santorini (1996) and Chan (2008) employ different theoretical frameworks, they uniformly reject the possibility of a 'third' grammar and attempt to account for the data in terms of existing apparatus. Employing Tree Adjoining Grammar as framework, Mahootian and Santorini (1996) claim that lexical categories as heads of elementary trees determine the position of their complements whereas Chan (2008), working in Principle and Parameters Theory, proposes that functional categories being associated with a particular value of head-parameter determine placement of their respective complements. ...
... Although Mahootian and Santorini (1996) and Chan (2008) employ different theoretical frameworks, they uniformly reject the possibility of a 'third' grammar and attempt to account for the data in terms of existing apparatus. Employing Tree Adjoining Grammar as framework, Mahootian and Santorini (1996) claim that lexical categories as heads of elementary trees determine the position of their complements whereas Chan (2008), working in Principle and Parameters Theory, proposes that functional categories being associated with a particular value of head-parameter determine placement of their respective complements. The paper rejects both the proposals with counter-evidence from the corpus of Urdu/English code-switching. ...
... The paper rejects both the proposals with counter-evidence from the corpus of Urdu/English code-switching. The pre-head placement of complements selected by English Vs and Ns in mixed sentences contradict Mahootian and Santorini's (1996) proposal regarding lexical heads whereas post-head placement of complement TPs and placement of complement PPs/PosPs in projections without overt functional heads pose challenges to Chan's proposal regarding the distinction between lexical and functional categories. Thus, with empirical evidence, the paper rejects both the proposals regarding placement of complements in code-switched data. ...
... Bahasa yang digunakan oleh penutur menunjukkan dampak situasi sosial dan psikologis. Penelitian ini menggunakan landasan teori dalam terminologi sosiolinguistik, yakni teori tentang komunitas tutur (Herisetyanti & Suharyati, 2019;Raymonda et al., 2016), bilingualisme (Gumperz, 1967;Woolford, 1983), alih kode yang terdiri atas alih kode internal dan ekstern (Mahootian & Santorini, 1996;Wijana, 2022a;Woolford, 1983;Young, 2009), campur kode yang terbagi atas campuran kode positif dan campuran kode negatif (Mahootian & Santorini, 1996;Nishimura, 1990;Wijana, 2022a), dan ragam tingkat tutur (Herisetyanti & Suharyati, 2019). ...
... Bahasa yang digunakan oleh penutur menunjukkan dampak situasi sosial dan psikologis. Penelitian ini menggunakan landasan teori dalam terminologi sosiolinguistik, yakni teori tentang komunitas tutur (Herisetyanti & Suharyati, 2019;Raymonda et al., 2016), bilingualisme (Gumperz, 1967;Woolford, 1983), alih kode yang terdiri atas alih kode internal dan ekstern (Mahootian & Santorini, 1996;Wijana, 2022a;Woolford, 1983;Young, 2009), campur kode yang terbagi atas campuran kode positif dan campuran kode negatif (Mahootian & Santorini, 1996;Nishimura, 1990;Wijana, 2022a), dan ragam tingkat tutur (Herisetyanti & Suharyati, 2019). ...
Language as a means of human interaction is related to human speech acts, especially in the use and selection of language when communicating. Traders in the market are identical to using certain language codes to sell their goods to attract buyers. Using speech codes during buying and selling transactions shows the trader's self-identity in the market environment. Market traders use various speech codes to talk to buyers. This paper focuses on the speech codes the traders use to convince customers. This research uses a descriptive qualitative research method. The research data source comes from the speech of market traders, especially herbal medicine traders in the Magetan Market. The data were collected with the support of recording, note-taking, and interview techniques. The data analysis starts by grouping the speech data based on the speech code used and then analyzing the speech code based on the problem formulation. The results of this study show that traders in the market interacting with buyers use speech codes of Javanese 'ngoko' and 'krama' and Indonesian. In addition, jamu sellers also code-switch and code-mix in communicating with buyers.
... Although earlier research on CS constraints received ample criticism due to the extensive counterevidence in different language pairs (for counterexamples to CS constraints, see Belazi et al., 1994;Berk-Seligson, 1986;Chan, 1998;Di Sciullo et al., 1986;Edwards & Gardner-Chloros, 2004;Jacobson, 1998, p.56-64;Mahootian & Santorini, 1996;Moyer, 1992;Myers-Scotton, 1993;Muysken, 2000;Pandit, 1990;Romaine, 1989;Toribio, 2001), it must be pointed out that that these seminal works were instrumental in demonstrating that intra-sentential CS is not "a grammarless mixture of two languages" (Grosjean, 1982, p.146), as some had believed (e.g., Labov, 1972, p.457;Lance, 1975, p.143), but rather a rule-governed phenomenon. The general concensus among scholars today is that CS among bi/multilinguals is systematic (Ritchie & Bhatia, 2004, p.339;Toribio, 2004). ...
... While the latter approach is a recent development of earlier attempts to account for CS data within a generative framework (e.g., Mahootian & Santorini, 1996), the former is a productionbased, abstract model that was specifically proposed to account for intra-sentential CS data. ...
... We further assume that while in English the head of the NP is D (Abney, 1987), in Hebrew the head of the NP is the D+N, and the D in Hebrew is a feature of the N (Borer, 1999;Danon, 2001Danon, , 2008. In terms of PPs (Di Sciullo et al., 1986;Mahootian, 1996;Mahootian & Santorini, 1996), it follows that in English the P selects the DET, while in Hebrew the P selects the DET+N. A codeswitch resulting in an English P with a subsequent Hebrew DET+N should be less likely than a Hebrew P with a subsequent Hebrew DET+N. ...
... In an English P+DET+N construction, the P governs the DET, a free morpheme. When, however, the codeswitch is a Hebrew DET (a bound, cliticized morpheme), the expectation of a free-standing complement of the P is not met (Abney, 1987;Borer, 1999;Danon, 2001Danon, , 2008Mahootian & Santorini, 1996). Thus, we expect better performance on CS-P in English sentences than in Hebrew sentences, and better performance on CS-DET+N in Hebrew sentences than in English sentences. ...
Aims and Research Questions
Codeswitching (CS) was investigated among English-Hebrew bilingual preschool children in a sentence repetition task focusing on switching at different points in prepositional phrases (PPs). We asked the extent to which sentence repetition accuracy differed (1) as a function of the switch site in the PP and (2) as a function of directionality, English-to-Hebrew versus Hebrew-to-English CS.
Design/Methodology
English/first language (L1)-Hebrew/second language (L2), sequential bilingual children ( N = 65), ages 5;5–6;5, participated. Thirty-six English and 36 Hebrew stimulus sentences were matched for semantic content and syntax. English stimulus sentences contained switches to Hebrew; Hebrew stimuli contained switches to English. Six ‘switch’ conditions were examined: a single codeswitched noun (N), a determiner–noun switch (DET+N), a codeswitched preposition (P), a preposition–determiner switch (P+DET), a switch of the entire PP (P+DET+N), and a no-switch condition.
Data and Analysis
Audio recordings were transcribed and coded. Full sentence repetition was coded as correct/incorrect. The number of errors and the proportion of CS errors were computed. A 6 × 2 repeated-measures analysis of variance examined the effects of switch site within the PP and directionality (L1-to-L2 versus L2-to-L1).
Findings/Conclusions
Accuracy was highest for the non-switched, N, and P+DET+N conditions. Accuracy was lowest for DET+N switches in English sentences, and for P switches in Hebrew sentences, and these two conditions showed the highest proportion of CS errors. The findings show evidence for a hierarchy of processing costs and directionality differences, which are interpreted in terms of contrastive typological features, particularly definiteness marking in the two languages, English by a free morpheme, and Hebrew by a bound clitic.
... Also it would add a new tagging mechanism over and above the indexing system already described. Apart from posing a potential problem for explaining how codeswitching works, where consistency is disrupted, language tagging turns out to be an unnecessary complication (see also Mahootian & Santorini, 1996;MacSwan, 2013). ...
... We say 'legitimately' because demands of real-time processing can result in ungrammatical utterances, reflecting inclusion of grammatically inappropriate but highly active representations at the expense of appropriate but less active alternatives.Mahootian & Santorini, 1996;Myers-Scotton, 1993, ...
An account of code-switching should be a direct consequence of an understanding of representation and processing in the individual mind, rather than a separate domain of its own. In the absence of such an account, most studies have developed hypotheses strictly within a specific research domain. This paper seeks to apply to code-switching a reasonably well-developed account of the multilingual mind, the MOGUL framework, within which more specific accounts can be developed. After briefly summarizing the framework, we describe representation and processing as realized in MOGUL, focusing on aspects having particular relevance to code-switching, including social factors involved in switching but as seen in terms of their place in a cognitive system. We then show how a promising approach to code-switching can be derived from this general framework. Some specific examples of code-switching are analyzed, though the primary goal is to show the merits of a broader perspective.
... To sum up, though we are aware that more data would be necessary to draw more definitive conclusions, our research has shown that Italian-German and Italian-English speakers accept mixed compounds, and their grammatical judgments are not random but follow the grammatical restrictions at work in monolingual speech, in line with the Null Hypothesis of Code-Switching (Mahootian and Santorini 1996). ...
This pilot work analyses the acceptability of mixed compound words in code-switching contexts. In particular, we will discuss mixed Italian-German and Italian-English compounds, i.e. cases of mixing among languages where the process of compounding follows different rules for what concerns the position of the head, as well as inflection issues. An Acceptability Judgment Task featuring different types of mixed compounds has been administered to two groups of participants, who are either bilingual or highly fluent in the two languages involved (Italian-German or Italian-English). Our conclusion is that it is overall possible to have mixed compounds. However, the two groups provide different judgments. For the Italian-German language pair, the possibility of mixed compounds is severely constrained, especially because of the different head-modifier parameters exhibited by the two languages and the interference of gender inflection. Though the English language patterns with German with regard to the head-modifier parameter, Italian-English participants accept a much higher number of combinations; indeed the fact that both Italian and English exhibit exocentric compounds, and that gender features do not interfere with judgments, might favour acceptability.
... To illustrate, the Functional Head Constraint extended Abney's (1987) proposal that functional heads such as determiners and complementizers are generally required to select the features of their complement (a process that Abney refers to as f-selection) to include language index in bilingual speech as one of the features being checked. However, proponents of constraint-free accounts (Mahootian & Santorini, 1996;MacSwan, 1999) criticized these approaches as introducing bilingualspecific machinery, thus questioning its universality within the language faculty. Constraint-free approaches instead propose that bilingual codeswitching should be fully accountable simply by the grammatical properties of the participating languages. ...
... This means that NLP experiments often use annotations that are too coarse to be linguistically informative with regard to C-S. Constraint-free theories (Mahootian and Santorini, 1996;MacSwan, 2000) hold that nothing restricts switching apart from the grammatical requirements of the contributing languages. Testing such theories in NLP experiments would require syntactically parsed corpora that are rare for mixed language data (Partanen et al., 2018). ...
The analysis of data in which multiple languages are represented has gained popularity among computational linguists in recent years. So far, much of this research focuses mainly on the improvement of computational methods and largely ignores linguistic and social aspects of C-S discussed across a wide range of languages within the long-established literature in linguistics. To fill this gap, we offer a survey of code-switching (C-S) covering the literature in linguistics with a reflection on the key issues in language technologies. From the linguistic perspective, we provide an overview of structural and functional patterns of C-S focusing on the literature from European and Indian contexts as highly multilingual areas. From the language technologies perspective, we discuss how massive language models fail to represent diverse C-S types due to lack of appropriate training data, lack of robust evaluation benchmarks for C-S (across multilingual situations and types of C-S) and lack of end-to-end systems that cover sociolinguistic aspects of C-S as well. Our survey will be a step towards an outcome of mutual benefit for computational scientists and linguists with a shared interest in multilingualism and C-S.
... This underlines how the matrix language (Italian) governs syntactic rules, in line with Myers-Scotton's (1993, 2002 assumptions: indeed, the mixed left-headed endocentric compound in (28a) shows internal inflection as if it were a monolingual Italian compound. 32 To sum up, our data seem to be in line with the null hypothesis of code-switching (Mahootian and Santorini 1996): indeed, no extra rules-apart from those which regulate the grammar of the two languages-are needed in order to explain the restrictions that we have recorded in our study of mixed compounds. ...
In this work, we investigate a special type of CS below word level, which is observed in mixed compound words. In particular, we discuss mixed Italian–German compounds; this combination is particularly interesting since, in the two languages, the process of compounding follows different rules for what concerns the position of the head, as well as gender and number inflection. An Acceptability Judgment Task was administered to some bilingual speakers, who assessed the acceptability of mixed compounds inserted in both German and Italian clauses. Our conclusion is that it is possible to have mixed compounds, though this option is severely constrained, especially because of the different word order parameters exhibited by the two languages.
... Despite skepticism by some researchers (e.g., Bentahila & Davies, 1983;Bhatt, 1997;Clyne, 1987;Maamootian, 1993;Mahootian & Santorini, 1996;Malik, 2017;Sebba, 1998), grammatical constraints on intra-sentential language switching have been robustly demonstrated for many bilingual configurations, although the details vary according to the specific languages involved. To the extent to which sensitivity to disfavored combinations is an integral component of bilingual grammars, whether as an add-on or as a simple consequence of bilingualism, this can potentially serve as a surrogate measure of the robustness Lipski Heritage Language Journal 18 (2021) 1-34 of the total bilingual system. ...
This study examines sensitivity to putative grammatical constraints on intra-sentential code-switching, viewed as a relative measure of attainment in heritage bilingual grammars. This is exemplified by a series of interactive tasks carried out with heritage Portuguese speakers in Misiones Province, Argentina. The results demonstrate the viability of deploying a range of experimental techniques in field settings with heritage speakers who do not engage in habitual code switching.
... (28). It is also abundant in the code-switching literature (Pfaff 1979;Ewing 1984;Azuma 1993;Mahootian & Santorini 1996;Gonzalez-Vilbazo & López 2011). ...
Classic linguistic models, such as Chomsky’s minimalist schematization of the human language faculty, were typically based on a ‘monolingual ideal’. More recently, models have been extended to bilingual cognition. For instance, MacSwan (2000) posited that bilinguals possess a single syntactic computational system and, crucially, two (or more) phonological grammars. The current paper examines this possible architecture of the bilingual language faculty by using code-switching data, since this type of speech is unique to bilingual and multilingual individuals. Specifically, the natural speech of Maria, a habitual Spanish-English code-switcher from the Bangor Miami Corpus, was examined. For the interface of phonology, an analysis was completed on the frequency of syllabic structures used by Maria. Phonotactics were examined as Spanish and English impose differential restrictions on complex onsets and codas. The results indicated that Maria’s language of use impacted the phonotactics of her speech, but that the context of use (unilingual or code-switched) did not. This suggests that Maria was alternating between two independent phonological grammars when she was code-switching. For the interface of morphosyntax, syntactic dependencies within Maria’s code-switched speech and past literature were consulted. The evidence illustrates that syntactic dependencies are indeed established within code-switched sentences, indicating that such constructions are derived from a single syntactic subset. Thus, the quantitative and qualitative results from this paper wholly support MacSwan’s original conjectures regarding the bilingual language faculty: bilingual cognition appears to be composed of a single computational system which builds multi-language syntactic structures, and more than one phonological grammar.
... One such model proposed after observing Marathi-English bilinguals theorized a closed-class constraint; closed-class items such as determiners, prepositions, etc. can not be switched (Joshi, 1985). However, looking a different language pairs found violations of that constraint, such as Farsi-English (Mahootian & Santorini, 1996) and Italian-French (Di Sciullo et al., 1986). ...
Bilingualism is prevalent, with over half of the population of the world being bilingual. While bilinguals have traditionally been viewed as having two separate languages, modern views of language suggest that languages are not completely separate in the mind. This is especially evident in cases of intrasentential code-switching, when a speaker switches languages mid-sentence. Such points are of interest because they represent cases when the languages are activated simultaneously. This dissertation expands our understanding of multi-language representation by investigating whether some grammatical representations generated by Spanish-English bilinguals and Spanish L2 language learners during reading are specific to the input language used to create the representation, or whether those representations are language-independent. Using eye-tracking, we measured reading times on nouns in grammatical (determiner-noun) and ungrammatical (adverb-noun) contexts, in both same language and mixed language pairs, as participants performed a two-string lexical decision task. Experiment 1 found that bilinguals read nouns faster following determiners than adverbs. Crucially, this grammatical predictability effect did not interact with the same/mixed language variable. This suggests that grammatical predictability in this context is language-independent, not affected by language nor the presence of a language switch. Experiment 2 found a similar pattern for Spanish language learners, though it was not significant. When the data for Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 were combined, there was a main effect of grammaticality that did not interact with language congruency, suggesting that language-independent predictions influenced reading times for both bilinguals and language learners. Experiment 3 took into account categorical ambiguity, i.e., that the same word can belong to more than one grammatical class. We computed two conditional probabilities over abstract grammatical categories to represent grammaticality in a more fine-grained way, allowing syntactic category ambiguity. Participants read the second word faster as its probability given the category of the first word increased. This grammatical predictability effect was language-independent, in that it was not modulated by a language switch. Overall, this dissertation provides an in-depth investigation into multi-language representation and grammatical predictability in Spanish/English bilinguals, focusing on syntactic sequences that have the same word order in the two languages. Our results most strongly support the shared syntax view of bilingual language representation, having found language-independent grammatical predictability across experiments.
... This means that NLP experiments often use annotations that are too coarse to be linguistically informative with regard to C-S. Constraint-free theories (Mahootian and Santorini, 1996;MacSwan, 2000) hold that nothing restricts switching apart from the grammatical requirements of the contributing languages. Testing such theories in NLP experiments would require syntactically parsed corpora that are rare for mixed language data (Partanen et al., 2018). ...
... An earlier proposal by Santorini and Mahootian (1995) and Mahootian and Santorini (1996) postulated that all combinations of adjectives and nouns are possible because only heads determine the position of their complements, and adjectives are nominal adjuncts. This proposal was disputed in the literature, but recently DiSciullo (2014) argued along similar lines that code-switching is possible in modification sites. ...
How do production and comprehension processes interact in the bilingual brain during language interaction? Most experimental and theoretical research in psycholinguistics to date has focused on investigating the mechanisms that underlie language production and language comprehension separately. Only recently have researchers started emphasizing the importance of reconciling the two modalities into a unified account through the investigation of possible connections between the two systems. Authored by key researchers in psycholinguistics, neuroscience, and language development, this volume encompasses state of the art research on the relation between production and comprehension processes in bilingual children and adults. Articles highlight the most recent methodological approaches, as well as a variety of language pairs and linguistic structures. Indispensable for students and researchers working in the areas of language acquisition and processing, neurolinguistics, and experimental linguistics, this volume will also appeal to educators and clinicians focusing on language development and processing in multilingual children and adults. Originally published as special issue of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:4/5 (2019).
... As previously suggested (e.g., Stadthagen-González et al., 2017), our results do not lend support to the suggestion that it is only one of the theoretical proposals (either the ML or the language of the adjective) that regulates the relative order of adjectives and nouns in code-switched nominal constructions. Santorini and Mahootian (1995) and Mahootian and Santorini (1996) proposed all combinations of adjectives and nouns are possible. In line with Pablos et al. (2018), however, our data do not support this earlier proposal either. ...
Here, we used event-related potentials to test the predictions of two prominent accounts of code-switching in bilinguals: The Matrix Language Framework (MLF; Myers-Scotton, 1993) and an application of the Minimalist Programme (MP; Cantone and MacSwan, 2009). We focused on the relative order of the noun with respect to the adjective in mixed Welsh–English nominal constructions given the clear contrast between pre- and post-nominal adjective position between Welsh and English. MP would predict that the language of the adjective should determine felicitous word order (i.e., English adjectives should appear pre-nominally and Welsh adjectives post-nominally). In contrast, MLF contends that it is the language of the finite verb inflexion rather than that of a particular word that governs felicitous word order. To assess the predictions of the two models, we constructed sentences featuring a code-switch between the adjective and the noun, that complied with either English or Welsh word-order. Highly proficient Welsh–English bilinguals made semantic acceptability judgements upon reading the last word of sentences which could violate MP assumptions, MLF assumptions, both assumptions, or neither. Behaviourally, MP violations had no significant effect, whereas MLF violations induced an average drop of 11% in acceptability judgements. Neurophysiologically, MP violations elicited a significant Left Anterior Negativity (LAN) modulation, whereas MLF violations modulated both P600 and LAN mean amplitudes. In addition, there was a significant interaction between MP and MLF status in the P600 range: When MP was violated, MLF status did not matter, and when MP criteria were met, MLF violations resulted in a P600 modulation. This interaction possibly reflects a general preference for noun over adjective insertions, and may provide support for MLF over MP at a global sentence processing level. Model predictions also manifested differently in each of the matrix languages (MLs): When the ML was Welsh, MP and MLF violations elicited greater P600 mean amplitudes than MP and MLF adherences, however, this pattern was not observed when the ML was English. We discuss methodological considerations relating to the neuroscientific study of code-switching, and the extent to which our results shed light on adjective-noun code-switching beyond findings from production and experimental-behavioural studies.
... (2) a. • Although there have been influential approaches to CS (e.g. Di Sciullo, Muysken and Singh 1986, Belazi, Rubin and Toribio 1994, Mahootian and Santorini 1996, MacSwan 1999, González-Vilbazo and López 2012, none have specifically looked at the categorization of pronouns ...
... Nevertheless, prior work already identified counterexamples that violate the Functional Head Constraint, with language switches occurring in the boundary of the functional head and its complement (e.g. Mahootian & Santorini, 1996 on Farsi-English, and Nishimura 1985 on Japanese-English). In the following subsections, we show that Spanish-Korean CS also violates the FHC. ...
‘Code-switching’ (CS) refers to language-mixing where individuals who speak two or more languages switch from one to another, often mid-sentence. Several morpho-syntactic constraints governing when switches happen have been proposed in prior work, mostly on Spanish-English CS (e.g. Timm, 1975; Pfaff, 1979; Poplack, 1980). However, what happens when the languages are typologically different? This is the case with Spanish-Korean CS, which has not been systematically investigated. Korean and Spanish differ in many respects, including clause structure/word order, absence/presence of articles, and morphology (Korean: agglutinative, Spanish: fusional) (Kwon, 2012; Bosque, Demonte, Lázaro, Pavón & Española, 1999). For the present study, balanced Spanish-Korean bilinguals were interviewed to obtain a naturalistic corpus of CS. Strikingly, we find that many constraints proposed for Spanish-English CS do not hold for Spanish-Korean. Specifically, there are three main ways that Spanish-Korean CS violates the constraints proposed for Spanish-English: (i) in contexts involving word order/clause structure, (ii) on the level of nouns and (iii) on the level of morphemes. Crucially, the violations are not random: We suggest that they stem from the typological differences between Korean and Spanish. This work highlights the empirical and theoretical benefits of including typologically diverse language pairs when investigating CS.
... Durante las dos últimas décadas, este modelo originó un amplio debate con respecto a la existencia o no, de una lengua matriz, en los casos de cambio de código intraoracional. Algunos autores como Mahootian y Santorini (1996) sostienen que las gramáticas de ambas lenguas influyen en el mismo grado en la construcción de las estructuras sintácticas observables en las situaciones de cambio de código (Ducar, 2003: 21). ...
... The choice of which language appears in italics is random. 2 Nonetheless, sometimes scholars have expressed doubts that reliable acceptability judgments on code-switching can be obtained (Gardner-Chloros 2009;Mahootian and Santorini 1996). However, it is clear to me that enough literature has been published on various aspects of the formal syntax and morphology of code-switching with a variety of methods of data elicitation that this question should be put to rest definitely (for additional discussion on acceptability judgments and Languages 2020, 5, 12 4 of 40 Finally, let me end this section with a few words on data collection, a controversial issue in code-switching research (see, for instance, the contributions in (Gullberg et al. 2009;Munarriz-Ibarrola et al. 2018)). ...
This article provides initial evidence that the head K, which may spell out as case morphology, drives the operations of concord within the noun phrase. Evidence for this claim comes from three code-switching varieties: Basque/Spanish, German/Turkish and Russian/Kazakh. By placing the switch at the border between case morphology and the rest of the noun phrase the properties of K can be isolated and inspected. We find that if K is drawn from the lexicon of a non-concord language, constituents within the noun phrase adopt a default morphology. It is suggested that the data presented in this paper provide evidence for approaches that take Concord to be a form of Agree (probe, goal) and against an approach that takes it to be the result of feature percolation from the bottom up. An analysis of default morphology is proposed that argues that default forms are inserted as vocabulary items in syntactic terminals that, as a result of a failure of Agree, are populated with unvalued features.
... Most proffered examples and counter-examples of code-switching restrictions based on grammatical categories run afoul of language-specific factors that confound the search for constraints on language mixing (e.g., Mahootian and Santorini 1996;Prince and Pintzuk [1983] 2000; Woolford 1983). For example, although general similarities can be observed, head-to-head structural comparison between Spanish and English subject pronouns is not feasible, because Spanish is a "null-subject" language in which verb inflection is sufficient to identify the subject of a sentence, whereas in English, subject pronouns must be overtly expressed. ...
This study examines the processing of two putatively problematic intra-sentential code-switching configurations, following subject pronouns and interrogatives, in a bilingual speech community in which there are no confounding grammatical differences. The languages are Ecuadoran Quichua and the mixed language known as Media Lengua, consisting of the entire Quichua morphosyntactic system but with all lexical roots replaced by their Spanish counterparts. In eye-tracking processing experiments utilizing the visual world paradigm with auditorily presented stimuli, Quichua–Media Lengua bilinguals identified the languages more quickly after pronouns and interrogatives than after lexical items, while acknowledgement of code-switches after pronouns and interrogatives was delayed in comparison with switches following lexical items. The facilitation effect of pronouns and interrogatives evidently provokes a surprise reaction when they are immediately followed by items from another language, and this relative delay may play a role in the low acceptability of code-switched utterances that otherwise violate no grammatical constraints.
... For example, Jake, Myers-Scotton and Gross (2002) provide quantitative evidence of this situation from a Spanish-English corpus which includes 93.8% of the switched constituents to be Noun Phrases (NPs). A plethora of studies (for an overview, see e.g., Herring, Deuchar, Couto, & Quintanilla, 2010) show that nominal constructions are the most common type of insertion because they do not trigger structural conflicts or violations of syntactic rules of the host language in a variety of structures such as when the nominal element is modified by an adjective phrase (e.g., Pfaff, 1979) or headed by a determiner (e.g., Fairchild & Van Hell, 2017), a verb or other case assigners (e.g., Mahootian & Santorini, 1996). ...
This study examines the morphosyntactic constraints on Cree-English intrasentential codeswitching involving mixed nominal expressions to test the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model. The MLF model is one of the most influential frameworks in the field of contact linguistics used in the study of grammatical aspects of codeswitching and other contact-induced phenomena. The three principles associated with MLF, viz., the Matrix Language Principle, the Asymmetry Principle and the Uniform Structure Principle, were tested on data consisting of 10 video recordings (constituting of 323 tokens of English nouns in mixed utterances) collected from the speech of a Cree child, aged 04;06 - 06;00. The data is drawn from Pile’s (2018) thesis which is based on the data collected from the Chisasibi Child Language Acquisition Study (CCLAS). The results of the analyses suggest general support for the three principles since, in the entire data set, not a single counter example has been recorded. The Cree-English bilingual data appears asymmetrical in structure, where the Matrix Language, namely Cree, provides morpheme order and outsider late system morphemes, and consequently, is responsible for the well-formedness and morphosyntactic frame of bilingual clauses..
... El rasgo de lengua del núcleo funcional, entonces, debe coincidir con el del núcleo léxico que tome como complemento. Mahootian (1993) y Mahootian y Santorini (1996) han presentado datos que discuten la restricción de núcleo funcional. Estas autoras también centran su análisis en la relación de los núcleos con sus complementos, pero de un modo mucho más general y abstracto, apelando a una teoría nula del CC (null theory of code-switching). ...
... These findings are confirmed in linguistic research eliciting intuitions on constructed stimuli (Toribio, 2001). There are also observed directional effects in natural C-S, most notably with respect to the DET-N boundary; a switch generally follows a determiner in only one of the component languages (Joshi, 1982;Mahootian and Santorini, 1996;Blokzijl et al., 2017;Parafita Couto and Gullberg, 2017). In Spanish-English switches at this syntactic juncture, Spanish DET is consistently followed by an English bare noun regardless of which language is the ML (Bullock et al., 2018). ...
... An earlier proposal by Santorini and Mahootian (1995) and Mahootian and Santorini (1996) postulated that all combinations of adjectives and nouns are possible because only heads determine the position of their complements, and adjectives are nominal adjuncts. This proposal was disputed in the literature, but recently DiSciullo (2014) argued along similar lines that code-switching is possible in modification sites. ...
In Papiamento-Dutch bilingual speech, the nominal construction is a potential 'conflict site' if there is an adjective from one language and a noun from the other. Adjective position is pre-nominal in Dutch (cf. rode wijn 'red wine') but post-nominal in Papiamento (cf. biña kòrá 'wine red'). We test predictions concerning the mechanisms underpinning word order in noun-adjective switches derived from three accounts: (i) the adjective determines word order (Cantone & MacSwan, 2009), (ii) the matrix language determines word order (Myers-Scotton, 1993, 2002), and (iii) either order is possible (Di Sciullo, 2014). An analysis of spontaneous Papiamento-Dutch code-switching production (Parafita Couto & Gullberg, 2017) could not distinguish between these predictions. We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to measure online comprehension of code-switched utterances. We discuss how our results inform the three theoretical accounts and we relate them to syntactic coactivation and the production-comprehension link.
... Algunas de estas restricciones aparentes provienen de diferencias sintácticas fundamentales entre el inglés y el español: por ejemplo, el español permite sujetos nulos, mientras que el inglés requiere sujetos patentes; los interrogativos y negativos en inglés suelen requerir el apoyo del verbo auxiliar do, etc. Algunos investigadores han propuesto que los cambios intra-oracionales solo pueden ocurrir cuando las estructuras gramaticales de las dos lenguas son congruentes, tanto antes como después del cambio (Poplack 1980;Lipski 1977Lipski , 1978Lipski , 1982Lipski , 1985; por lo tanto, no está claro si las restricciones postuladas responden a características universales de los pronombres, interrogativos, negativos, etc., o si son consecuencias de la falta de compatibilidad morfosintáctica entre determinadas lenguas (p. ej., Clyne 1987;Mahootian y Santorini 1996). En una investigación preliminar, para determinar si las restricciones postuladas sobreviven en la ausencia de discrepancias gramaticales, Lipski (2016a) realizó experimentos psicolingüísticos entre hablantes bilingües en Ecuador, cuyas lenguas eran quichua y chaupi lengua (media lengua), una lengua mixta con morfosintaxis del quichua pero con casi todas las raíces derivadas del español, incluso los pronombres, interrogativos y negativos (Muysken 1979(Muysken , 1981Gómez Rendón 2008). ...
This article presents the results of three interactive experiments carried out among bilingual speakers (Castillian-Portuguese) in the Argentinian province of Misiones, in order to investigate if some of the syntactic restrictions postulated for the intra-sentence code switching are also valid for so similar languages. The key contexts for language switching are: after subject pronouns, negative and interrogative, and between auxiliary verb and infinitive. The results suggest a correlation between partial permeability of syntactic restrictions and genealogical distance.
... Además, es posible que los datos de producción no reflejen fielmente los juicios de los participantes. Algunos investigadores del tema han constatado que los bilingües a veces producen, sin darse cuenta, las mismas alternancias que juzgan negativamente (Mahootian y Santorini 1996;Pandit 1990;Pfaff 1979;Sankoff, Poplack y Vanniarajan 1990). Además del análisis de la producción de los bilingües en PR, el examen de la comprensión de distintos tipos de alternancia de códigos podría expandir la investigación del fenómeno en esta sociedad. ...
... Our results do not lend support to the suggestion that it is just the matrix language or the language of the adjective that determine the relative order of adjectives and nouns in code-switched nominal constructions. An earlier proposal by Santorini and Mahootian (1995) and Mahootian and Santorini (1996) is also not supported by our data. They postulated that all combinations of adjectives and nouns are possible because only heads determine the position of its complements, and adjectives are nominal adjuncts. ...
Objectives
Spanish and English contrast in adjective–noun word order: for example, brown dress (English) vs. vestido marrón (‘dress brown’, Spanish). According to the Matrix Language model ( MLF) word order in code-switched sentences must be compatible with the word order of the matrix language, but working within the minimalist program (MP), Cantone and MacSwan arrived at the descriptive generalization that the position of the noun phrase relative to the adjective is determined by the adjective’s language. Our aim is to evaluate the predictions derived from these two models regarding adjective–noun order in Spanish–English code-switched sentences.
Methodology
We contrasted the predictions from both models regarding the acceptability of code-switched sentences with different adjective–noun orders that were compatible with the MP, the MLF, both, or none. Acceptability was assessed in Experiment 1 with a 5-point Likert and in Experiment 2 with a 2-Alternative Forced Choice (2AFC) task.
Data and analysis
Data from both experiments were subjected to linear mixed model analyses. Results from the 2AFC task were also analyzed using Thurstone’s law of comparative judgment.
Conclusions
We found an additive effect in which both the language of the verb and the language of the adjective determine word order.
Originality
Both experiments examine adjective–noun word order in English–Spanish code-switched sentences. Experiment 2 represents a novel application of Thurstone’s law of comparative judgements to the study of linguistic acceptability which yielded clearer results than Likert scales. We found convincing evidence that neither the MLF nor the MP can fully account for the acceptability of adjective–noun switches.
Implications
We suggest that advances in our understanding of grammaticality in code-switching will be achieved by combining the insights of the two frameworks instead of considering them in isolation, or by espousing a probabilistic model of code-switching.
... The search for grammatical constraints on intra sentential codeswitching exemplifies the grammatical perspective (e.g. DiSciullo et al 1986;Poplack 1989;Belazi, Rubin & Toribio 1994;Mahootian & Santorini 1996;Myers-Scotton 1993) while the study of the social meaning of particular codeswitches exemplifies the interactional perspective (e.g. Gumperz 1982;Heller 1982Heller ,1994. ...
... A lot of the English predicative adjectives are also very close to their German head; and so are the English objects that depend on German clause final / SOV verbs. The fact that English postdependent adjuncts are almost three times as far away from their German head as monolingual post-dependent adjuncts seems to support Treffers-Daller (1994), Mahootian and Santorini (1996) and Muysken (2000), i.e. that code-mixing is favoured in adjoined peripheral positions. (6) *MEL: nein # ich bin draussen # as per usual. ...
This paper addresses the questions why and where, i.e. in which dependency relations, multilingual speakers are likely to code-switch. Code-switching (CS) is the linguistic behaviour of producing or comprehending language which is composed of lexical items and grammatical structures from two (or more) languages. This paper proposes that long dependency distances between syntactically related units facilitate code-switching (Distance Hypothesis DH). Dependency distance is defined as the number of words intervening between a head and a dependent. The DH is tested on two data sets from typologically different language pairs: a 93,235 word corpus of German/English monolingual and code-switched conversations analyzed in Word Grammar (WG), and a 19,766 word Treebank of Chinese/English mono-and bilingual speech. The data sets support the DH in general and on specific syntactic functions. In ongoing work the DH is being tested further on Welsh/English and Spanish/English corpora and experimentally.
Code switching is a challenging problem in literary translation due to the multiplicity of codes employed in the source text. One of the challenges here is that the target audience may not know the second code used during code switching. To retain the code switching – as a stylistic element – one may need to employ multiple target languages. Furthermore, the translator faces the dilemma of either doing away with the code switching or employing a new instance of code switching, probably at the cost of adding new meanings or dimensions and connotations to the text. This paper looks at strategies to tackle code switching within a novel using the example of Jerry Pinto’s Murder in Mahim (2017). Although this novel has been written in Indian English, it has several passages where one finds use of Hindi, Marathi or Bambaiyya. These include code switched words or phrases within a sentence and complete sentences offering a wide spectrum. This paper looks at the solutions provided in the Marathi translation (2019) by Pranav Sakhadeo. A new set of challenges would arise while translating the novel from Indian English to German as the (German speaking) target readers may not be aware of the phrases used in Hindi, Marathi, and Bambaiyya. Strategies are briefly discussed to translate selected passages into German retaining the code switching followed by further generalisation of the results towards a theoretical perspective.
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In our increasingly multilingual modern world, understanding how languages beyond the first are acquired and processed at a brain level is essential to design evidence-based teaching, clinical interventions and language policy. Written by a team of world-leading experts in a wide range of disciplines within cognitive science, this Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the study of third (and more) language acquisition and processing. It features 30 approachable chapters covering topics such as multilingual language acquisition, education, language maintenance and language loss, multilingual code-switching, ageing in the multilingual brain, and many more. Each chapter provides an accessible overview of the state of the art in its topic, while offering comprehensive access to the specialized literature, through carefully curated citations. It also serves as a methodological resource for researchers in the field, offering chapters on methods such as case studies, corpora, artificial language systems or statistical modelling of multilingual data.
Contact between French and Martinican Creole (MC) takes place in a society where bilingualism is the standard, in a situation of constant language mixing. French and MC, although related, show significant typological divergences on some specific features, e.g. the order between noun and definite determiner in the noun phrase, or the use of a linker to mark a possessive embedded noun phrase. In this paper, I explore the possible combination of the different values of these features in mixed noun phrases occurring in corpora. I inquire about the possible parameters which may influence the outcome and explain the relative frequencies of these different combinations. It appears that there is a partially common pool of elementary structures. Many utterances fall into the category termed by Muysken (2000) ‘congruent lexicalization’. I also observe that apparent complex double embeddings have an internal logic, as they result from adjunction of multi-word modifiers. Finally I propose a model which accounts for the observed occurrences by postulating a level in the speech generation process where language itself is underspecified, and where it is in a position to be specified on the fly by contextual factors, coming either from the lexicon or from the constructional frame.
This research attempts to describe and analyze some linguistic practices among Algerian students resulting from contact between Oran Arabic and French. Indeed, this study is based mainly on a double orientation. The first approach appears to be descriptive/ analytic, and tries to apply the theoretical and empirical foundations of the insertional models proposed by Myers-Scotton on a corpus realized among university students recorded in different speech situations even if university remains the major context (formal setting). The second approach seems to be interpretive principally based on quantitative and qualitative methods in order to test the empirical validity and the explanatory power of Myers-Scotton’s insertional models.The main idea underlying this research seeks to establish a link between the asymmetry in the different patterns of Oran Arabic/French Code-Switching realized by bilingual students showing varying degrees of bilinguality, and the asymmetry with regard to the organization of the various system and content morphemes in the mental lexicon.Despite the structural explanations of the dueling languages permitting the alternation from French to Oran Arabic and vice versa, other factors appear to be influential in shaping of mixed constructions, namely the speakers’ competence in the languages involved in t the mixed constructions, the pragmatic intentions of the interlocutors when producing mixed constituents, embedded islands and internal islands as well as the speakers’ attitudes towards the languages involved in bilingual speech.In fact, this research is basically founded on a corpus of spontaneous conversations recorded among some Algerian bilingual/plurilingual students. The analysis of the students’ productions tries to demonstrate the directionality of code-switching in an Algerian context where the emplacement, the distribution and the status of the syntactic categories/structures were investigated when French and Oran Arabic have been shown as Matrix or Embedded Languages in the corpus.Unlike other researches on code-switching and mainly studies undertaken by Ziamari, which targeted the correlation of the specificities of code-switching Moroccan Arabic/ French to fact of urbanity, this research aims to demonstrate that the linguistic dynamism due to Oran Arab/French duality is the result of a particular practice that distinguishes a community of practice (that of bilingual students) from other linguistic communities. For this purpose, the context (university) as an urban structure cannot be the only trigger of code-switching if the pragmatic intentions of the interlocutors do not favor this linguistic act.The results obtained in this research showed that the insertion of French constructions in a morphosyntactic frame governed by OrA as a matrix language is characterized by a predominance of certain structures, namely noun phrase islands, mixed nominal constituents, and inflectional phrases. Also, the results showed an asymmetry in the roles assigned to languages involved in CS (Arabic and French Oran in this case). Oran Arabic appears as the matrix language in most mixed-codes whereas French’s role was limited to an embedded language despite the abundance of embedded structures from this language.The insertional models which constitute the theoretical framework of this research provide consistent elements of answers to many questions raised in this study. These models treating issues relevant to syntax and cognition indicate a flexibility of analysis and facilitate the understanding of complex linguistic phenomena generated by plurilingualism. Notwithstanding, other avenues of exploration appear to be completive to this research should target the application of the basic principles of Myers-Scotton’s models by adopting a didactic perspective where problems of the acquisition of French and English syntactic categories and larger constructions, error analysis, and problems of interference would be discussed.
The aim of present study is to refute „Functional Head Constraints‟ (Hedi M. Belazi Edward J. Rubin Almeida Jacqueline Toribio, 1994) on theoretical grounds. It envisages that code switching is disallowed within functional heads (C, T and D) and complement of the functional heads (TP, VP and NP). For this purpose, the empirical data demonstrates that CS freely occurs within functional head and its complement. Employing Minimalist Program (1995) as theoretical framework, it states that Faculty of Human language (FoL) is comprised of two components: invariant Computational System of Human language (CHL) and language dependent Lexicon. Lexicon is a store-house of categories: Lexical and Functional. They are bundles of morphologically encoded features. (Marantz, 1993) CHL computes derivation from top to down on the basis of these features to satisfy the interface conditions FI-Full Interpretation (Chomsky, 1995). Under the assumption of FHC, if we assume that functional head determines its respective complement through the same process as it subscribed in monolingual; it means that CHL is not unanimous about categories. In this way, the status of Universality, invariant and blindness about (CHL) has been violated and no functional head constraint no fusion linearization expression has been observed in code switching pairs Urdu-English.
This paper explores the impact of globalization, and the consequent re-ordering of indexicalities associated with different languages and linguistic practices, on the sociolinguistic repertoires and behaviors of Farsi-English bilingual Iranians in Iran. I focus on the participants’ Farsi-English Code-switching (CS) practices and their positionings toward CS in naturally-occurring conversations to examine how they use CS in their differentiation patterns and identity performances. Drawing on ethnographically-grounded discourse analysis, I demonstrate the speakers’ resort to newer, more nuanced differentiation patterns on the basis of phonology in Farsi-English CS practices. I argue that the recent visibility and wide accessibility of English in Iran through globalization, especially the Internet, has led speakers to states of anxiety to secure their profit of distinction. I elaborate on how, in the new re-ordered linguistic market, speakers take up CS with English phonological preservation, and the “authenticity” of the preservation, as the main resource with which they fulfill acts of differentiation and perform their (upper)middle-classness and/or elite status. The study has implications for the scholarship on CS and globalization as it calls for more nuanced and dynamic approaches towards CS and highlights the significance of investigating the impact of globalization on the everyday sociolinguistic practices of an understudied community. (Globalization, linguistic markets, indexicality, Farsi-English code-switching, identity performance).
Some languages have a fixed subject position, while others are more flexible. Languages like English require pre-verbal subjects; languages like Spanish allow subjects in postverbal position. Because this difference clusters with several linguistic properties distinguishing the two languages, subjects in Spanish and English have been a perennial issue in linguistic theory, touching central problems like the EPP, the nature of cross-linguistic variation, and the relationship between core functional heads. Our project contributes a novel source of evidence to these debates: Spanish/English code-switching. Code-switching, the use of two languages in one utterance, combines the languages’ lexical items and their attendant syntactic features in a single derivation. Because code-switching, like all natural language, is rule-governed, researchers can exploit judgments about the well-formedness of code-switched sentences to draw conclusions about the combinations of features they represent. We report on a formal judgment experiment testing subject position in Spanish/English code-switching as a function of the presence of two functional heads known (from monolingual evidence) to affect subject placement: the C(omplementizer) and T(ense) heads. By manipulating which head appears in which language, we test the availability of post-verbal subjects under different feature combinations. Our results show that post-verbal subjects are only available when both C and T are in Spanish; neither Spanish head alone is sufficient. This finding suggests that the features regulating subject position stem from neither head alone, which is problematic for traditional approaches to the EPP as a feature of T but in line with other recent research on null subjects.
This volume compiles eight original chapters dedicated to different topics within bilingual grammar and processing with special focus on code-switching. Three main features unify the contributions to this volume. First, they focus on making a contribution to our understanding of the human language within a coherent theoretical framework; second, they understand that a complete theory of the human language needs to include data from bilinguals’ I-languages; and third, they are committed to obtaining reliable data following experimental protocols.
This volume comprises cutting edge research on language contact and change. The chapters present a wide scope of settings in which Spanish is in contact with other languages, such as Catalan, English, and Quechua; a large breadth of geographical areas (e.g., United States, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina); and varied participant groups, ranging from dialect contacts, second-language learners and heritage speakers to balanced bilinguals and code-switchers. Taken together, the chapters provide rich empirical descriptions of data pertaining to different levels of language, diverse – naturalistic and experimental – methodological approaches to data collection, as well as theoretical implications of the findings. The interdisciplinary perspective adopted by the authors contributes to the linguistic analysis and offers important insights into theoretical linguistics in general, and into theories of sociolinguistics, language variation, bilingualism, and second language acquisition.
This chapter points to the relevance of Herschensohn’s Constructionist view of second language acquisition for the study of bilingual language mixing. In elaborating Constructionism, Herschensohn (2000) argues that the assembling of the lexicon and its attendant features constitutes the major task of the learner. The articulation of the bilingual lexicon is also invoked in formulating the Functional Head Constraint (Belazi et al. 1994), which characterizes patterns of switching in proficient bilinguals and in second language learners by appeal to the matching and checking of features, including language. While the validity of the language feature has been disputed, we underscore the positive consequences of tagging lexical items with a language label, as we move towards recruiting computational tools for effectively exploiting bilingual corpora. We provide evidence of the benefits of language tagging in quantifying language mixing profiles and in classifying bilingual phenomena such as code-switching versus borrowing.
This paper investigates the effects of code-switching on the dependency distance and the word order of the dependencies with lexical heads and noun dependents, using data from a Chinese–English code-mixed treebank. It is found that (1) except the object relation, mixed dependencies with English lexical heads and Chinese noun dependents present shorter dependency distances than monolingual ones; (2) mixed dependencies with Chinese lexical heads and English noun dependents present longer dependency distances than monolingual ones; (3) word order differences are mainly found in the adverbial dependencies with verb heads and noun dependents, or with English preposition heads and Chinese noun dependents. These findings suggest that: (1) the heads, either the first language or the second language, tend to have greater influence on the dependency distance of the mixed dependencies; (2) the word order of the mixed dependencies is greatly influenced by the first language and the dependents tend to play the greater role.
The study aims to challenge Minimalist model of intra-sentential CS on theoretical grounds. It argues that his conception of CS as a 'union' of, at least, two lexically-encoded grammars (Gs) constrained by the requirements of 'mixed Gs' is a Minimalist version of the Equivalence Constraint. It argues that the logical consequence of employing the Minimalist Program as theoretical framework is to view CS, instead, as 'mixing' of, at least, two language-specific halves (Lexicons) through the language-independent Computational System of Human Language (CHL) to produce a 'well-formed' grammatical structure which is externally counted as an expression of one and only one G; hence, no 'hybrid' expressions, no 'mixed Gs'. Likewise, MacSwan's Phonological Form Disjunction Theorem is conceptually redundant as the default design of the CHL itself restricts CS within X⁰, and, consequently, turns out to be as much an unmotivated CS-specific grammatical postulate as is the Free Morpheme Constraint a CS-specific constraint. With its elimination, the differences between monolingual and bilingual linguistic competence are logically reduced only to an additional L, enabling a bilingual speaker to produce an infinite number of well-formed sentences which are counted as expressions of either Gx or Gy.
This volume provides a sample of the most recent studies on Spanish-English codeswitching both in the Caribbean and among bilinguals in the United States. In thirteen chapters, it brings together the work of leading scholars representing diverse disciplinary perspectives within linguistics, including psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, theoretical linguistics, and applied linguistics, as well as various methodological approaches, such as the collection of naturalistic oral and written data, the use of reading comprehension tasks, the elicitation of acceptability judgments, and computational methods. The volume surpasses the limits of different fields in order to enable a rich characterization of the cognitive, linguistic, and socio-pragmatic factors that affect codeswitching, therefore, leading interested students, professors, and researchers to a better understanding of the regularities governing Spanish-English codeswitches, the representation and processing of codeswitches in the bilingual brain, the interaction between bilinguals’ languages and their mutual influence during linguistic expression.
This study investigates the relationship between intra-sentential codeswitching restrictions after subject pronouns, negative elements, and interrogatives and language-specific syntactic structures. Data are presented from two languages that have non-cognate lexicons but share identical phrase structure and syntactic mechanisms and exactly the
same
grammatical morphemes
except for
pronouns, negators, and interrogative words. The languages are the Quichua of Imbabura province, Ecuador and Ecuadorian Media Lengua (ML), consisting of Quichua morphosyntax with Spanish-derived lexical roots. Bilingual participants carried out un-timed acceptability judgment and language-identification tasks and concurrent memory-loaded repetition on utterances in Quichua, ML, and various mixtures of Quichua and ML. The acceptability and classification data show a main effect for category of single-word switches (significant differences for lexical vs. interrogative, negative, and for acceptability, pronoun) and repetition data show significant differences between lexical vs. interrogatives and negators. Third-person pronouns (which require an explicit antecedent) also differ significantly from lexical items. Logical-semantic factors may contribute to code-switching restrictions.
Aim and research question
The aim of this study is to test Macswan’s ((1999). A minimalist approach to intrasentential code switching. New York, NY: Garland; (2000). The architecture of the bilingual language faculty: Evidence from intrasentential code-switching. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 3, 37–54; (2005). Codeswitching and generative grammar: A critique of the MLF model and some remarks on “modified minimalism”. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 8, 1–22.) PF Disjunction Theorem (PFDT), which was proposed based on Chomsky’s ((1995). The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.) minimalist programme, to answer the following question: Is code-switching (CS) behaviour governed by CS-specific grammar or an innate mechanism that produces monolingual and bilingual utterances in our language faculty?
Methodology
A quantitative approach was adopted to test the PFDT with the Southern Min/Mandarin CS data.
Data and analysis
811 lexical items extracted from 343 bilingual clauses in my Southern Min/Mandarin CS corpus, and almost no violation against this model (i.e., a word-internal switch) was found, except one example that was regarded as the informant’s slip of tongue.
Findings/conclusions
The results of this study confirm the prediction of the PFDT that phonological systems cannot be mixed within a word.
Originality
Although the morphosyntactic structures and in some cases the pronunciations of morphemes are identical, tonal differences of these two languages still prohibit word-internal switches.
Significance/implications
This study thus supports the PFDT and argues that CS behaviour is governed by a single innate mechanism that governs both monolingual and bilingual language production and that the so-called CS-specific grammar/mechanism is not necessary.
Nous présentons les résultats d’une étude empirique du discours mixte arabe marocain/français dont le but est de situer ce discours par rapport aux théories de l’emprunt et de l’alternance. Nous nous basons en grande partie sur l’analyse quantitative de la distribution des contextes syntaxiques où se juxtaposent des éléments des deux langues.
Whereas recent research on code-switching has focussed largely on the search for syntactic constraints, this paper argues that more attention should be paid to the influence of social and psychological variables on switching patterns. A comparison of the discourse of two types of Moroccan bilingual reveals striking differences in the types of switch used. An attempt is made to relate the patterns favoured by each group to aspects of their language background, in particular to the contrast between balanced bilinguals and those dominant in one language.
This study provides a critical review of the syntactic study of code-mixing with particular reference to the syntactic constraints paradigm. It examines seven major surface constraints deemed to have universal applicability and shows on the basis of cross-linguistic data that none of them is universal. It is argued in the light of this finding that the postulation of universal syntactic constraints on code-mixing may be premature and that the constraint-oriented theory to the study of this phenomenon is descriptively inadequate because it fails to explicate its socio-psycholinguistics. The study maintains that factors such as degree of multilinguality, who speaks what variety of language to whom, when, and for what reason are crucial parameters in the formulation of an adequate theory of code-switching and code-mixing. To achieve this objective, it is suggested that researchers integrate in their analysis three different but interrelated types of data: structural, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic.
This paper considers the structure of infinitives in Belfast English, which allows a wide range of infinitives to be preceded by for to. It is argued that the for of for to is the complementizer for, which differs from standard English for in being able to cliticize to to. This accounts for a number of features of infinitives in the dialect, including the placement of negation and the possibility of the infinitival subject preceding for. The implications of this analysis for the structure of infinitives in general is discussed, in particular in relation to the subcategorization of verbs which take infinitival complements.
The recent syntactic literature contains three major proposals concerning the syntactic status of adnominal adjectives: 1.(1) that they are heads,2.(2) that they are phrasal adjuncts, and3.(3) that they do not form a uniform class.
Given this lack of consensus, it is not surprising that the distribution of adnominal adjectives had remained an unsolved problem in the study of intrasentential codeswitching. In this paper, we propose a solution by exploiting the formal model of intrasentential codeswitching developed in Mahootian (1993), which is based on the null hypothesis that codeswitching sequences are not subject to structural constraints beyond the general principles of phrase structure that govern monolingual sequences. We first show that a blanket treatment of adnominal adjectives as heads is untenable, and then argue that the distribution of adnominal adjectives described in the codeswitching literature provides a new source of evidence in favor of the view that there are two distinct classes of adjectives. We review a number of alternative treatments proposed in the codeswitching literature and show that our analysis is preferable.