Language Mixing in the Nominal Phrase: Implications of a Distributed Morphology Perspective

Abstract

This paper investigates a pattern found in Spanish-English mixed language corpora whereby it is common to switch from a Spanish determiner to an English noun (e.g., la house, 'the house'), but rare to switch from an English determiner to a Spanish noun (e.g., the casa, 'the house'). Unlike previous theoretical accounts of this asymmetry, that which is proposed here follows assumptions of the Distributed Morphology (DM) framework, specifically those regarding the relationship between grammatical gender and nominal declension class in Spanish. Crucially, and again in contrast to previous accounts, it is demonstrated that this approach predicts no such asymmetry for French-English. This hypothesis is tested experimentally using an acceptability judgment task with self-paced reading, and as expected, no evidence is found for an asymmetry. This experiment is also used to test predictions regarding how English nominal roots in mixed nominal phrases are assigned grammatical gender, and the impact of language background factors such as age of acquisition. Evidence is found that bilinguals attempt to assign analogical gender if possible, but that late sequential bilinguals have a stronger preference for this option than do simultaneous bilinguals.

A syntactic approach to gender assignment in Spanish–English bilingual speech

“…A note on previous accounts to gender assignment in codeswitched speech framed within Late Insertion is in order here. At first glance, the analysis in (13) seems to resemble Burkholder's (2018) proposal of gender assignment in Spanish Det-English noun switches, but it is fundamentally different. Burkholder (2018) argued that a Spanish-English bilingual speaker has two List 1s (and two List 2s) in the (duplicated) bilingual lexicon, and that a binary uninterpretable [±f] feature represents gender in codeswitched speech, namely because her analysis is based on grammatical gender in Spanish, that is, biological gender is not considered.…”

“…At first glance, the analysis in (13) seems to resemble Burkholder's (2018) proposal of gender assignment in Spanish Det-English noun switches, but it is fundamentally different. Burkholder (2018) argued that a Spanish-English bilingual speaker has two List 1s (and two List 2s) in the (duplicated) bilingual lexicon, and that a binary uninterpretable [±f] feature represents gender in codeswitched speech, namely because her analysis is based on grammatical gender in Spanish, that is, biological gender is not considered. Burkholder further proposed that a bilingual speaker can merge a √ like '√house' in la house with a Spanish n hosting As for gender assignment in codeswitched speech as in la key, López suggested that the English noun key can spell out the complement of n [+f] in analogy to its Spanish feminine counterpart llave.…”

Bilingualism as a first language: language dominance and crosslinguistic influence

“…2 Even though the two lexicons proposal is intrinsic to MacSwan's model, a distributed morphology account can dispense with the two lexicons requirement, as was timidly suggested in Liceras, Fernández Fuertes, Perales, Pérez-Tattam, and Spradlin (2008, footnote 8) and recently argued for by Burkholder (2018).…”

The role of grammatical gender in Spanish-English switched DPs and copula constructions..

“…The joint activation and constant interaction of the two languages may result into codeswitching, a bilingual phenomenon which arises in contexts where languages are in contact. Since it cannot be considered a mere slip of the tongue but an inherent ability of bilinguals, codeswitching has been used to explore how the properties of the two languages interact in the bilingual mind (e.g., Arnaus Gil et al, 2012;Burkholder, 2018;Fairchild & Van Hell, 2017;Fernández Fuertes et al, 2019;Jorschick et al, 2011;Liceras et al, 2008Liceras et al, , 2016Valenzuela et al, 2012). This bilingual phenomenon has been defined as "the ability to alternate between languages in an unchanged setting, often within the same utterance" (Bullock & Toribio, 2009, p. 2) or simply as a "back-and-forth motion between two languages" (López, 2018, p. 2).…”

“…Recently, there has been an increasing interest in incorporating other constraintfree approaches, such as the non-lexicalist approach, in the study of codeswitching with the belief that previous models (i.e., the MLF model or the MP) fell short in explaining certain switched sequences, such as word-internal switches (Åfarli, 2015;Åfarli & Subbarao, 2019;Alexiadou & Lohndal, 2018;González-Vilbazo & López, 2011) or because these proposals were too restrictive to analyze switches within, for example, the DP (Burkholder, 2018;Grimstad et al, 2018;López, 2020;Riksem, 2018).…”