A Minimalist Approach to Intrasentential Code Switching

Language Mixing and Diachronic Change: American Norwegian Noun Phrases Then and Now

“…See [1] for discussion of these terms and how they relate to each other. From a formal perspective, there are two main ways of approaching and analyzing language mixing: to posit special constraints to account for mixing data [29,30], or to assume that mixing is constrained by the same principles as monolingual speech [31][32][33][34][35][36][37]. In the literature, the latter approach is referred to as a Null Theory [31] or constraint-free approach to language mixing [33].…”

“…These approaches are all motivated by monolingual data, meaning that they are not specially designed to handle language mixing, but do nevertheless prove to be good analytical tools for bilingual grammars. The specific model employed in the current article relates mainly to the works by Borer [31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43], Åfarli [44], Lohndal [46,47], and Marantz [38,39]. Additionally, the current approach also incorporates insights from Distributed Morphology (DM), e.g., [49][50][51], especially concerning the process of late insertion, which I will discuss below.…”

Code-Switching by Phase

“…The only articles that we are aware of that use phases productively are [3][4][5]. This is despite the eloquent argumentation proposed by Mahootian [6] and MacSwan [7] that any restrictions we find on code-switching should be accounted for using the same tools that we use to account for any other phenomenon of linguistic competence. Despite the conspicuous scarcity of phase theory in code-switching research, we believe that phases can be very useful in resolving some long-standing empirical puzzles.…”

“…They may even have more than one PF, as MacSwan argues [7], although this is a complex matter since PF is itself a complex grammatical module (see [33] for a discussion of PF in bilingual grammars). 4 Let us adopt the simple assumption that bilingual speakers have multiple PFs.…”

Corpus et alternance codique : que peut nous apprendre une approche comparative ?

“…La recherche sur le mélange des langues dans la conversation bilingue a longtemps reposé sur l'analyse d'énoncés inventés par les linguistes, et sur des jugements intuitifs d'acceptabilité (MacSwan, 1999). Nous inscrivant dans une tendance plus récente reposant sur l'étude de faits de langue qui ne sont plus pris isolément mais replacés dans leur contexte de production, nous souhaitons démontrer que la recherche sur corpus est un outil indispensable pour la compréhension des phénomènes d'alternance codique chez les locuteurs bilingues, bien qu'étant insuffisant pour produire un appareil théorique infaillible.…”