Un nase or una nase? What gender marking within switched DPs reveals about the architecture of the bilingual language faculty

Abstract

In his model of the architecture of the bilingual mind, MacSwan (1999, 2000) proposes to allow all kinds of code-switching as long as the grammars of the two languages involved are respected. Following this approach, we claim that mixed DPs uttered by bilingual children are well-formed. Particularly, we think that the analysis of gender assignment in mixed DPs will shed light on how the two lexicons of bilinguals interact. Looking at spontaneous speech from Italian/German children (age 1; 8–5), we predict that the gender of the noun will be switched together with the noun. As a consequence, the gender encoded on the determiner will correspond to the noun's gender although the determiner is from the other language and the equivalent noun in that language may have a different gender. We argue that this occurs because gender is an abstract lexical feature of nouns which is stored in the lexicon and thus reject the view that gender is a functional head in syntax. Further, we will discuss recent neuro-linguistic results which concern gender representation and relate these to our findings on gender selection in bilingual children's mixed DPs.