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

Abel Cruz

doi:10.16995/glossa.5878

Abstract

In this paper I argue for a syntactic analysis to gender assignment in codeswitched speech. To sustain this claim, I examine gender assignment in Spanish Det(erminer)–English noun switches (i.e., el bishop ‘the.m’) in 76 sociolinguistic interviews of approximately one hour each from a bilingual community in Southern Arizona, U.S. (The CESA Corpus, Carvalho 2012). Based on the findings from this dataset, I demonstrate that the distribution of gender assignment in codeswitched speech poses a serious challenge to current models of the bilingual architecture rooted in the distinct-lexicons perspective (MacSwan 2000 et seq.). Rather, I show that biological gender (interpretable gender) plays a crucial role in the assignment mechanism and the representation of gender features in the bilingual architecture. Taking gender assignment as a case study, I outline a single-lexicon approach to the bilingual grammar compatible with a Late Insertion view of the morphosyntactic model (Halle &amp; Marantz 1993). In particular, I highlight the crucial relevance of a theme position at the morphological module to guide the bilingual speaker to the insertion of phonological matrices (language exponents) when codeswitching.

Highlights

I investigated the distribution of gender assignment in Spanish–English codeswitched speech and argued for a syntactic analysis to gender assignment in line with Kramer’s (2015) proposal of gender features in the grammar
New evidence on gender assignment stemming from a bilingual community in Southern Arizona, U.S documented in the CESA corpus (Carvalho 2012) was provided
While the distinct-lexicons perspective has been the standard assumption in formal approaches to bilingualism, the empirical evidence emerging from carefully designed psycholinguistic studies on codeswitching, and bilingualism more generally, renders such a view increasingly implausible (Kroll et al 2015)

Summary

Introduction

It is well documented that Spanish–English bilingual speakers assign gender to English nouns occurring in asymmetrical switches whereby the determiner phrase (DP) consists of a Spanish Det(erminer) and an English noun, as in examples (1) and (2):(1) a. era su primer clase [...] porque ella era una junior be-imp.3sg her first class [...] because she be-imp.3sg a.f junior ‘it was her first class because she was a junior’ (CESA024)b. sí, tengo un- pues ahorita tengo un stepson yes, have-prs.1sg um- well have-prs.1sg a.m stepson.‘yes, I have a stepson’ (CESA024)(2) a. él hasta a veces lo saco sin la leash ‘he [a dog] sometimes cl.acc take-pst.1sg out without the.f leash’‘sometimes I even take him [the dog] out without the leash’ (CESA028)b. y siempre tenía un wand [...] pero él cargaba el wand and always have-imp.3sg a.m wand [...] but he carry-imp.3sg the.m wand ‘and he always had a wand [...] but he would carry the wand’ (CESA020)In (1), the human-denoting nouns junior and stepson are assigned feminine (f) and masculine (m) gender, respectively. The English inanimate nouns leash and wand in (2) are assigned f and m gender morphologically manifested on the singular Spanish Dets el ‘the.m’ and la ‘the.f’. The morphological forms of the Dets in (1) and (2) suggest that bilingual speakers are uttering lexical entries from both languages, but crucially, they are applying a binary-gender system when determining the gender feature of English nouns occurring in codeswitched speech. The ubiquitous manifestation of gender features in Spanish–English codeswitched speech across bilingual communities is of particular interest because Spanish, but not English, has a robust gender system whereby masculine and feminine nouns are distributed approximately in the Spanish lexicon, regardless of whether or not a given noun has a human referent: masculine 53%, feminine 47% (Teschner & Russell 1984). If pronouns count as elements that agree, both Spanish and English exhibit grammatical gender but, crucially, only Spanish exhibits a robust gender system whereby every noun must encode gender information for syntactic agreement

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