A Comparative Study of Bilingual Verb Phrases in Ewe-English and Gengbe-French Codeswitching

Abstract

This article describes contact phenomena between two closely related varieties of the Gbe language cluster Ewe and Gengbe each with a Germanic and a Romance language. The focus is on a comparison of verb phrases in Ewe-English codeswitching, spoken in Ghana, and Gengbe-French codeswitching, spoken in Togo. It is the first qualitative comparative study of this kind although quite a number of local (West African) languages are in contact with English and French. It finds that because the two varieties of Gbe are morphosyntactically similar, there are remarkable morphosyntactic similarities between bilingual clauses containing English verbs and those containing French verbs. English/French verbs with the same transitivity value which assign the same set of thematic roles to their arguments occur in slots in Ewe/Gengbe-based clauses where Ewe/Gengbe verbs with those subcategorization features also occur. The explanation for this pattern, from the perspective of the Matrix Language Frame model, is that during codeswitching English and French verbs are treated as if they belong to the class of Ewe and Gengbe verbs which share their subcategorization features. Assuming language production to be modular (in the sense of Myers-Scotton 1993, 2002), it is argued that the pattern is illustrative of a kind of composite codeswitching (Amuzu 2005a, 2010, and in print) by which abstract grammatical information from one language about verbs from that language—here English or French—is consistently mapped onto surface structure through the grammatical resources of another language, here Ewe or Gengbe.