Coactivation in bilingual grammars: A computational account of code mixing

This article investigates the diachronic development of language mixing within noun phrases in the heritage language American Norwegian. By comparing data collected in the 1930s and 1940s with recently collected data, I present and discuss patterns showing systematic changes, specifically concerning the categories number and definiteness. Moreover, I propose two potential analyses of these patterns based on an exoskeletal approach to grammar. This theoretical framework crucially separates the abstract syntactic structure from its phonological exponents, and the analyses that are discussed consider both the structure and the exponents as the origins of the change.

Section: The Structure Of (American) Norwegian Noun Phrasesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Riksem¹

2017

“…This article focuses on some preliminary ideas on how to incorporate the role of storage and retrieval of units from different language components in two languages into our understanding of apparent variability in grammatical representations in bilinguals. It is important to state from the start that this proposal does not preclude the existence of gradient grammatical representations in bilinguals, understood as differences in coactivation of such representations (Goldrick et al 2016). 1 Rather, it focuses on how elements from different language components may be linked for storage purposes in the mind of the bilingual, although they may not necessarily reflect grammatical representations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…At the same time, it raises the question of how such factors may affect the development of bilingual grammars. Recently, these issues have been brought to the fore by researchers working on fields such as heritage language acquisition (Goldrick et al 2016;Sánchez 2017), attrition (Schmid and Köpke 2017), and second language acquisition (Kroll and Sunderman 2003;Tokowicz 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bilingual Alignments

Sánchez

2019

The issue of how to distinguish bilingual syntactic representations from processing preferences or strategies is addressed by postulating the concept of permeable bilingual alignments as memory storage devices that include information from different language components. Supporting evidence from phenomena such as the emergence of innovative mappings across different components (phonology, morphology, syntax, the lexicon, and information structure), bidirectional transfer, and frequency effects is presented, and some possible consequences of adopting this proposal are discussed.

“…(Myers-Scotton 1997, p. 111) (34) Spanish/Basque Creo que Jon etorri d-ela Think.1 C Jon come aux-C 'I think that Jon has come.' (Vergara 2018, p. 234) There is no general analysis of duplication in code-switching that I am aware of, but see (Vergara 2018) as well as (Goldrick et al 2016) for some intriguing ideas.…”

Section: (33) Shona/englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

Case, Concord and the Emergence of Default

López

2020

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.