Code-switching Data Research Articles

Units in code switching: evidence for multimorphemic elements in the lexicon

Studies of insertional code switching frequently include examples in which combinations of several words from the embedded language occur together in matrix-language clauses. In this paper, a range of such constructions are analyzed as multimorphemic lexical units. Such units are a central, yet neglected, element of grammar, which blur the distinction between syntax and lexicon. The paper identifies several types of unit in bilingual code-switching data, including inserted plural nouns, compound nouns, adjective-noun and verb-object collocations, and idioms, and provides evidence for their widespread involvement in insertional code switching. Independent evidence for unit status comes from their frequently observed semantic noncompositionality and other semantic and morphosyntactic features. Recognition of the lexical status of these chunks may contribute to a unified theory of code switching.

The Bilingual Mental Lexicon and Speech Production Process

The Chinese/English intrasentential code-switching data provide evidence that the bilingual mental lexicon involves language contact between language-specific semantic/pragmatic feature bundles. Lemmas in the mental lexicon are tagged for specific languages and contain semantic, syntactic, and morphological information about lexemes. In a bilingual mode, the speaker makes choices at the preverbal level of lexical-conceptual structure, and these choices activate the lemmas in the mental lexicon for the speaker's preverbal message to be morphosyntactically realized at the functional level of predicate-argument structure. The result will be language-specific surface forms at the positional level of morphological realization patterns. The languages involved in the bilingual's mixed speech are never equally activated, with one language projecting the sentential frame and the other supplying a particular type of morphemes for the speaker's communicative intentions.

Accessing bilingual code-switching competence

The present work is inspired by an interest in the syntactic regularities that underlie language alternations in Spanish-English bilingual speech, and the methodologies that may prove most reliable and informative in this exploration. Accordingly, it attends to the conceptual and methodological issues that must be addressed and surmounted, and taking account of these concerns, presents new methodologies for gathering codeswitching data. The robust findings attest to the validity of the methodologies and of the elicited data, affording a valuable source of facts for further research.

The architecture of the bilingual language faculty: evidence from intrasentential code switching

In this article, the author addresses the question of how the mind represents two languages in simultaneous bilingualism. Some linguistic theories of intrasentential code switching are reviewed, with a focus on the Minimalist approach of MacSwan (1999b); the author concludes that evidence from code switching suggests that bilinguals have discrete and separate Lexicons for the languages they speak, each with its own internal principles of word formation, as well as separate phonological systems. However, the author argues that computational resources common to the two languages generate monolingual and bilingual syntactic derivations alike. Advantages of the Minimalist Program for the analysis of code switching data are discussed at some length.