Abstract
In the literature, the term code-mixing/switching refers to instances of language mixing in which speakers/signers combine properties of two or more languages in their utterances. Such a linguistic behavior is typically discussed in the context of multilinguals, and experts commonly focus on the form of language mixing/switching and its cross-linguistic commonalities. Not much is known, however, about how the knowledge of code-mixing comes about. How come any speaker/signer having access to more than one externalization channel (spoken or signed) code-mixes spontaneously? Likewise, why do both neurotypical speakers/signers and certain neuro-atypical speakers/signers produce structurally similar mixing types? This paper offers some answers to these questions arguing that the cognitive process underlying code-mixing is a basic property of the human learning device: recombination, a fully automated cognitive process. Recombination is innate: it allows learners to select relevant linguistic features from heterogeneous inputs, and recombine them into new syntactic objects as part of their mental grammars whose extensions, arguably individual idiolects, represents what Aboh (2015b,a, 2019b) characterizes as hybrid grammars.
Highlights
Over the past decades, there has been an increasing interest in multilingualism and its implications for the study of language, language use, and cognition
We can conclude from this discussion that the cognitive process underlying code-mixing is extremely resilient, and appears
This would suggest that even though the capacity to code-mix is present in all S-learners, mono-lingual/modal and multilingual/modal alike, it may go unnoticed when speakers/signers operate on closely related vocabulary items
Summary
There has been an increasing interest in multilingualism and its implications for the study of language, language use, and cognition. 1) definition, I use the term code-mixing to mean all cases in which aspects of lexical items and/or grammatical items of different languages/varieties are combined into a single linguistic expression4 In terms of this definition, and as already mentioned in section Introduction, examples (1) and (2) indicate that the neuro-typical and the neuro-atypical speakers behave : their utterances involve comparable switching points:. This study further reports that some patients can engage in what Muysken (1981b) defined as relexifiation: a cognitive process by which speakers spell out the grammar of one language drawing on lexical items from a different language (cf Mous, 2003) Such examples are given in (4), which the authors argue are built on the Malayalam equivalents suggested below each sentence. Media Lengua dimas-ta llubi-pi-ga, no patient lost this capacity and produced combinations of signs and unrelated spoken words
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