Abstract
This paper examines the morphological integration of nouns in bilingual children’s code-switching to investigate whether children adhere to constraints posited for adult code-switching. The changing nature of grammars in development makes the Matrix Language Frame a moving target; permeability between languages in bilinguals undermines the concept of a monolingual grammatical frame. The data analysed consist of 630 diary entries with code-switching and structural transfer from two children (aged 2;10–7;2 and 6;6–11;0) bilingual in Estonian and English, languages which differ in morphological richness and the inflectional role of stem changes. The data reveal code-switching with late system morphemes, variability in stem selection and word order incongruence. Constituent order is analysed in utterances with and without code-switching, and the frame is shown to draw sometimes on both languages, raising questions about the MLF, which is meant to derive from the grammar of one language. If clauses without code-switched elements display non-standard morpheme order, then there is no reason to expect code-switching to follow a standard order, nor is it reasonable to assume a monolingual target grammar. Complex morphological integration of code-switches and interaction between the two languages are discussed.
Highlights
The bilingual practice of code-switching has been shown, over several decades of research, to consist in systematic linguistic behavior, rather than arbitrary or incompetent language usage.Bilinguals make use of their linguistic resources according to socio-pragmatic motivation, following grammatical patterns, there is disagreement as to how universal the code-switching patterns are, and how to describe the systematicity
This paper applies to the dataset of bilingual child utterances two fundamental principles proposed in the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) and 4M models: (1) the System Morpheme Principle (SMP), which predicts that only the Matrix Language (ML) will contribute late system morphemes indicating grammatical relations within mixed language constituents, and (2) the Morpheme Order Principle (MOP), which says that the linear order of morphemes will follow the ML
The content words in the subordinate clause are Estonian, the ML can be identified as English: English provides all the grammatical morphemes, and the clause itself is embedded in an English-language main clause, during an English-medium conversation
Summary
The bilingual practice of code-switching has been shown, over several decades of research, to consist in systematic linguistic behavior, rather than arbitrary or incompetent language usage. Because the MLF and 4M models have amassed empirical support and are more systematically elaborated than other models of code-switching, these are chosen here as a framework to compare the child data to, but it should be noted that these were not proposed by the authors as descriptions of child language. Developments in usage-based language acquisition research and linguistics more broadly suggest that in general, we are in need of more dynamic, probabilistic models to account for variability in usage across individuals and over the life course; models of code-switching need to become more flexible and dynamic in order to account for numerous sources of variability, including typological differences in language pairs and variation in language profiles of bilinguals. The critique implicit in this study applies to any code-switching models which base their claims on assumptions of monolingual clausal representations
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