Adjective Placement in English/Spanish Mixed Determiner Phrases: Insights from Acceptability Judgments

Luis López,Irati De Nicolás

doi:10.3390/languages7010054

Abstract

The present study examines the relative order of noun-adjective sequences within code-switched Determiner Phrases. Several hypotheses have been considered: (i) Order is a property defined by the noun; (ii) it is a property defined by the adjective; (iii) it is a property governed by the carrier phrase. The studies that have investigated the issue all assume that the class of adjectives is homogeneous, but in fact, there exist several sub-classes of adjectives which in many languages, including Spanish, exhibit distinct ordering properties. We propose to add the variable ‘adjective type’ to our study and use code-switching of English/Spanish, two languages that differ in the position of adjectives, as our database. A total of thirty English/Spanish heritage speakers took part in an experiment. Our results show that both the language of the adjective and the carrier phrase are significant factors of word order in the noun phrase; on the other hand, the noun itself does not seem to play a role.

Highlights

English/Spanish Mixed DeterminerAdjective placement has attracted the attention of many authors (Arnaus Gil et al.2012; Cantone and MacSwan 2009; Parafita Couto et al 2015, 2017) and many studies have analyzed which element determines the adjective-noun order within the DeterminerPhrase (DP)
Quintanilla (2016) found that the adjective does while there is a rich line of research that argues that the matrix language (ML)/the carrier phrase has an effect on the noun-adjective order (Parafita Couto et al 2015, 2017)
The aim of this paper is to test if the noun (Arnaus Gil et al 2012), the adjective (Cantone and MacSwan 2009), or the Matrix Language (ML) (Parafita Couto et al 2015, 2017) determines the order of the DP by conducting a Spanish/English code-switching experiment

Summary

Introduction

English/Spanish Mixed DeterminerAdjective placement has attracted the attention of many authors (Arnaus Gil et al.2012; Cantone and MacSwan 2009; Parafita Couto et al 2015, 2017) and many studies have analyzed which element determines the adjective-noun order within the DeterminerPhrase (DP). Let us assume that the mechanisms of Concord express a grammatical relationship between a functional category that we may call a (belonging to the extended projection of the adjective) and another functional category which, following a long tradition, we may call n, the noun (see Marantz 1997 and much subsequent work). This grammatical relationship results in copying gender and number features from the noun onto a, as in the. Bartlett’s experiment was only tested with one German/Spanish bilingual and Di Sciullo (2014) did not experimentally test her theory

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion