Abstract
The present article reassesses some available data regarding word-internal language mixing (Spanish–German) involving verbs and nouns. The empirical generalization is that Spanish roots can be combined with German verbalizers, but not vice versa. Data of this type highlight the sophisticated knowledge of the underlying representations that code-switching bilinguals must have of both contributing grammars and, in turn, how these contribute to the formation of the grammar that underlies their rule-governed systems for amalgamating them. Despite agreeing with the general conclusions of González-Vilbazo and López’s 2011 study regarding what the data tell us about code-switching more generally, we refine their analysis to better capture the patterns. Our proposal is that these mixtures are the only instances where the structural and lexical properties of verbal exponents used in both languages overlap, parting ways with previous analyses based on the possible zero nature of Spanish verbalizers or the absence of conjugation classes in German.
Highlights
While essential bilingual type categorizing factors,1 such as age-of-acquisition and social context, map onto general trends pertaining to predictions for linguistic development and outcomes, they are insufficient to explain why individual bilingual grammars reflect the degrees of variation from one another we observe, much less why particular grammatical innovations in bilingual grammars are constrained the way they seemingly are
Considering all this, a challenge for bilingualism studies focusing on formal linguistic descriptions of bilingual grammars is to determine how to deal with the many complexities fairly, Academic Editors: Artemis Alexiadou and Terje Lohndal
This article has argued that the asymmetry found in Esplugisch verbalizations follows once each one of the affixes involved in the structure, and its role, is identified
Summary
Previous ones or, alternatively, the novel one we advance —turns out to have the best degree of descriptive and explanatory adequacy it is important to note that all agree on a crucial non-trivial point: the descriptive facts of the evidence itself shows systematicity to Esplugisch and contribute to the evidence base highlighting the complexities of bilingual grammars and the non-random nature to their well-formedness. The devil, as it were, is in the details of answering the specific question of why only one amalgamation pattern is attested (grammatical) when at first glance both potentially could be. We believe that the present analysis highlights even further the sophisticated knowledge that (these) bilinguals must have regarding both the contributing grammars to the novel emerging variety, reinforcing the notion that code-switching/mixing is not a compensatory strategy of bilinguals to fill in gaps in knowledge in one or both languages they command
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