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.
Highlights
Current mainstream linguistic theory has been built upon language data obtained from native speakers of a large sample of the world’s diverse languages
Acceptability ratings were collected for each sentence, and the mean and standard deviation were calculated for each participant across all conditions in order to identify any outliers
The late bilinguals’ preference for analogical gender might reflect a difference in their attitude compared to simultaneous bilinguals, such that the former group attributes greater importance to preserving “French” properties when mixing their languages, spending more time deciding what their preference is, and applying analogical gender preferentially. These results suggest that the self-paced reading times of mixed determiner phrase (DP) do reflect conscious, strategic preferences to a certain extent
Summary
Current mainstream linguistic theory has been built upon language data obtained from native speakers of a large sample of the world’s diverse languages. What is often overlooked is that most people in the world speak more than one language, and that such speakers often combine elements from both of their languages within a single utterance, and sometimes even within a single word This type of language mixing is spontaneous in that it is not possible to predict when a switch or insertion will occur; it is highly constrained (Lipski 1978; Pfaff 1979; Poplack 1980; Woolford 1983).. MacSwan (2005) accounts for this asymmetry based on Moro’s (2001) analysis, which takes a minimalist point of view with lexicalist assumptions They propose that mixed DPs such as the casa crash because a Spanish N cannot successfully value and delete the uninterpretable features of an English D “in one fell swoop”. These can be valued and deleted, leading to convergence (MacSwan 2005)
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