Social factor comparisons of noun and verb insertion patterns in Spanish and English bilingual clauses

Daniel Smith

doi:10.7203/normas.6.8153

Abstract

This paper compares noun and verb insertion in bilingual clauses in a Spanish and English bilingual data corpus collected in northeast Georgia (U.S.A.). Even though Myers-Scotton and Jake (2014) have given grammatical reasons why verbs theoretically can be as easily inserted as nouns, most bilingual data corpora, from many different language contact settings, show that far more nouns than verbs of one language are inserted into clauses of the other language. The northeast Georgia Hispanic community data set examined here is no exception. Analysis of the northeast Georgia data reveal that some social factors are associated with higher EL verb use. Children, who have more English proficiency in general than adults, insert more verbs into bilingual clauses than adults. Female gender, higher socio-economic status, and other than Mexican national origin are also associated with higher EL verb use.

Highlights

This study examines the discrepancy between noun and verb insertions in bilingual language contact
In this paper verb and noun insertions are explained within the Matrix Language Frame (MLF), 4-M, and Abstract Level models (Myers-Scotton 2002, Myers-Scotton and Jake 2014).Myers-Scotton and Jake (2014) have shown that verbs can be inserted similar to nouns and that grammatical restrictions for verbs are more flexible than once thought.In light of this finding, the present study compares noun and verb insertion patterns in a Spanish and English bilingual data corpus collected in northeast Georgia (U.S.A.) along with social factors associated with these patterns in order to shed additional light on the discrepancy between verb insertions and noun insertions
Myers-Scotton's MLF and 4-M models help to explain the appearance of single nouns and verbs from one language in a clause of phrase of another language.The 4-Morpheme (4-M) model (MyersScotton and Jake 2000a,b; Myers-Scotton 2002) classifies the morphemes of all human languages into four classes: (1) content morphemes and three types of system or grammatical morphemes, (2) early system morphemes, (3) late system bridge morphemes, and (4) late system outsider morphemes.According to Myers-Scotton’s (1993 [1997], 2002) Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model, in a language contact setting, the matrix language (ML) provides most of the system morphemes, especially the late ones, but content morphemes may freely come from either language and content morphemes from one language which are insterted into clauses of another langauge are embedded language (EL) morphemes

Summary

INTRODUCTION

This study examines the discrepancy between noun and verb insertions in bilingual language contact. Bilingual data sets in previous research (for example Jake 1998, Wei 2000, Smith and Morales 2013) support these models. This asymmetry is related to which language is the matrix language and the crucial difference between early system morphemes and late system morphemes. The Abstract Level model (Myers-Scotton 2002, 2014, Myers-Scotton and Jake 1995) extends the explanation of the production of single nouns and verbs in bilingual phrases and clauses by proposing three levels of "abstract lexical structure":(1) "lexical-conceptual structure," theextralinguistic semantic and pragmatic content coded into a lexical item; (2) "predicate-argument structure," the structure which relates lexical items to each other in phrase and sentence structure; and (3) "the level of morphological realization patterns," the level of morpheme realization in phonological form of the previous underlying levels.Content morphemes such as nouns and verbs are directly elected at the first abstract level of lexical-conceptul structure

THE GRAMMATICAL FACTORS OF EL VERB INSERTION COMPARED TO EL NOUN INSERTION

DESCRIPTION OF THE POPULATION OF THE SPEAKER DATA

Findings

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR