Linguistic term paper

Ling C140. Fall 2019 G. Silvestri, Oct 8

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Code-switching

1. Definition Code-Switching (CS): “the alternate use of two languages either within a single sentence or between sentences” (Simpson 2001) 2. Types of code-switching A. Extra-sentential switching / tag-insertion CS at the periphery of sentences, insertion of 'tag'-like elements such as ‘You know…’ and ‘I mean…’ (1) a. I mean, c’est un idiot, ce mec! (Fr-En) ‘I mean, he’s an idiot, this guy!’ b. Non è giusto, I think… (It-En) ‘This is not right, I think’ c. I'm going to take the car now, daijobu daroo? (En-Jap) ‘I'm going to take the car now, ok?’ d. Ellos son de México, y así los criaron, you know. (Sp-En) ‘They’re from Mexico, and that’s how they raised them, you know.’ B. Inter-sentential code-switching CS at clause boundaries (2) a. Sometimes I start a sentence in English y termino en español. (En-Sp) ‘Sometimes I start a sentence in English and I finish in Spanish.’ b. Non capisco che vuole, that funny kid (It-En) ‘I do not understand what thaf funny kid wants’ c. Johann hat mir gesagt, that you were going to leave. (En-Ger) ‘Johann told me you were going to leave.’ d. Chigum ton-u/ ops-nunde, I can't buy it. (Kor-En) ‘As I don’t have any money now, I can’t buy it.’

§ Inter-sentential switching: greater fluency in both languages than tag-insertion, as major portions of the utterance conform to the rules of each language

§ C. Intra-sentential code-switching - CS within clause boundaries - the greatest bilingual skill; avoided by all but the most fluent bilinguals (3) a. Women zuotian qu kan de movie was really amazing! (Man-En) ‘The movie we went to see yesterday was really amazing.’ b. Il ristorante you mentioned non è buono (Eng-It).

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‘The restaurant you mentioned is not good’ c. II a envoyé the book you gave him à sa mere. (Fr-En) ‘He sent the book you gave him to his mother.’ d. What do you call it Nihongo-de? (En-Jap) ‘What do you call it in Japanese.’ e. Bueno, in other words, el flight que sale de Chicago around three o’clock. (Sp-En) ‘Ok, in other words, the flight which leaves from Chicago around 3 o'clock.’ Examples of advanced code-switching from speakers of English-Japanese (4a) and English-Catalan (4b): (4) a. B.C. ni iku toki, hikooki de yomau to omatte kara, I bought it. I haven't finished it yet, and it's hard, because me-nanka, moa han nanka yomu ta cover-to-cover yomanakattara, if I stop doka-de, I forget the story. One week later, yomu desha, I've got to go back! ‘When I went to B.C., I thought I would read it, so I bought it. I haven't finished it yet, and it's hard, because a person like me, when I read a book, if don't read it cover-to-cover, I forget the story. One week later, when I read it again, I've got to go back.’ b. El que et vaig dir és el que crec que defines you. A més a més crec que ets sensitive, emotional, have strong personality. Però això són coses que millor jutjar en persona. Potser per a Swedish person ets molt emocional, però per a Guatemalan person no… Jo no ho posaria perquè dona la idea de que ets abnormally emotional (i.e. coocoo!!!). ‘What I told you is what I think defines you. Moreover, I think you’re sensitive, emotional, have strong personality. But those are things that it’s better to judge in person. Maybe for a Swedish person you’re very emotional, but not for a Guatemalan person… I wouldn’t put that, because it gives the impression that you’re abnormally emotional (i.e. coocoo!!!)’ 3. Distinguishing Code-switching from other contact phenomena A. Borrowing words/expressions from the ‘guest’/‘source’ language occurs embedded in the ‘host’/‘target’ language • words adapted to have the regular morphological, syntactic, and phonological properties of the host/target language § Some borrowings fully established in the monolingual language, adapted to the host/target language phonology, e.g. basubaru ‘baseball’ in Japanese § Some borrowings fully established in the monolingual language, but not yet adapted to the host/target language phonology, e.g. Sauvignon blanc [so.vi.ɲɔ̃ˈblɑ̃] in French, [sou.vi.njɔ̃̍ blɑ̃n(k)] in English. § Some borrowings not known to monolinguals, spontaneously used by bilinguals with

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host/target language pronunciation e.g. Spanish troca ‘truck’, lonchar ‘to have lunch’ (Chicano Spanish) - difficult to distinguish “new” code-switches from “established” loan words in synchronic data! • CS: unadapted use of elements from one language together with those of another language in separate sequences • In real CS: - two linguistic codes or systems - elements from one language are not adapted to conform to the linguistic properties of a second language. (5) a. Today I’m going to [hɒŋ.ˈkʰɒŋ]! (‘Hong Kong’ is borrowed) Today I’m going to [hoeŋ1.kɔŋ2]! (‘Hong Kong’ is a code-switch) b. I love [bə.ˈɹi.ɾoʊs] (‘burrito’ is borrowed) I love [bu.ˈri.tos] (‘burrito’ is a code-switch) c. Leo un [ma.ɣa.ˈsin] (‘magazin’ is borrowed) Leo un [ˈmæg.ə.zin] (‘magazin’ is code-switched) B. Loan translations or Calques usage of morphemes in language A as result of the literal translation of one or more elements in a semantically equivalent expression in language B - (unshared) meaning is from language B and everything else is from language A (6) a. escuela alta (Chicano Spanish) school high ‘high school’ (cf. Spanish secundaria ‘secondary’) b. Te llamo para atrás (Chicano Spanish) 2SG.ACC call to back ‘I call you back’ (cf. Spanish te llamo ‘I call you’/ te devuelvo la llamada ‘I return your call’) • Borrowings and loan translations: conventional usage and/or combinations in the receiving language lexicon 4. Grammatical constraints on code-switching • An incontrovertible example of CS: English-Spanish bilingual title of Poplack’s (1980) seminal article (7) Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español. ‘Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish and I finish in Spanish.’ • However, not all code-switched sentences are equally attested or acceptable to among bilinguals (8):

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(8) a. *Sometimes yo will empezar a oración in inglés and termino in español. b. *Sometimes I’ll empezar una oración en inglés y I finish in Spanish. c. *A veces yo will start a sentence in English and I termino en español. o Each of these is judged as ungrammatical by bilingual speakers v CS: not random mixing of two languages v CS reflects the skillful manipulation of two language systems for various communicative functions 4.1. Poplack’s model (1978-1980) • Poplack studied 20 Puerto Rican bilingual speakers in El Barrio in East Harlem; the oldest continuous Puerto Rican settlement in NY • Subjects and data: - AOA: 0-6; 7-12; 13-17 - 50% were Spanish dominant; 10% were English dominant, and 40% balanced bilinguals - All spent at least 10 years in the US - 66 hours of tape-recorded speech - 1,835 CS utterances. A. The free morpheme constraint Codes may be switched after any constituent in discourse provided that constituent is not a bound morpheme - including idioms (9) a. una buena excuse ‘a good excuse’ b. *eat-iendo ‘eat-ing’ (but cf. flipando ‘flipp-ing’) c. *Cross your dedos! ‘Cross your fingers!’ B. The Equivalence Constraint CS occur at points in discourse where juxtaposition of LA and LB elements does not violate a syntactic rule of either language - if the surface structures of the two languages map onto each other o a switch is inhibited from occurring within a constituent generated by a rule from one language which is not shared by the other o Figure 1: - dotted lines indicate permissible switch points - arrows indicate ways in which constituents from two languages map onto each other (The speaker's utterance in (C))

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Figure 1. Permissible code-switching points - CS may occur after I but not immediately after told (*told le, *le told, *him dije, *dije him) - CS may occur after eso but not immediately after would (*la bring, bring la, trajera it, it trajera). o CS may also not occur if the selectional properties of a verb are violated by switching to another language. E.g. (10): (10) a. *El man que came ayer wants John comprar a car nuevo. the man who came yesterday wants John buy-INF a car new ‘The man who came yesterday wants John to buy a new car’ b. The man that came yesterday quiere que Juan compre a new car. the man who came yesterday wants that John buy-SBJV a car new ‘The man who came yesterday wants John to buy a new car’ - Sentence (10a) violates the equivalence constraint: bit applies an English infinitival complement rule, which is not shared by Spanish, to the VP complement (see also Belazi et al.’s [1994] Functional Head Constraint) - According to Poplack, the DP ‘a car nuevo’ (and ‘a nuevo car’ / ‘a coche new’, ‘a nuevo coche’) are ruled out because the combinations are ungrammatical in at least one of the languages involved (c.f. Cantone & MacSwan 2009 below) • CS always permitted when the sentence would be grammatical (if translated) in both L1 and L2 (Poplack found no violations of these constraints) • CS indicates a large degree of competence in both languages: speakers need to know the rules of both languages and where they map onto one another • This model is either not restrictive enough or too restrictive: o the free morpheme constraint does not account for why switching is impossible between certain free morphemes: (11) not possible in Spanish-English code-switching, yet the free-morpheme constraint would seem to posit that it can (see Belazi, Rubin & Toribio 1994) (11) * The students had visto la película italiana. the students had seen the movie Italian ‘the students had seen the Italian movie.’ o Conversely: equivalence constraint rulse out common switches

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- Adaŋme (language spoken in Ghana, SOV, NAdjD) postnominal determiners used with English NPs (English = SVO, DAdjN)despite the requirements of the equivalence constraint: (12) E hé house red ò. he/she PAST buy house red the ‘He/she bought the house.’ 4.2. The Matrix Language Frame Model (Myers-Scotton 1993, 1997, 2002) • Poplack’s model: CS as balanced alternation between languages versus • ‘Matrix Language Frame model’: illustration of “insertional” CS (Muysken 2000) • Myers-Scotton: CS involves a base or Matrix Language that has pockets/islands of Embedded Language • Matrix Language supplies the ‘system’ morphemes: not assigning/receiving theta-roles, e.g. affixes, determiners, clitics, i.e. functional elements • Embedded Language supplies a proportion of the ‘content’ morphemes: assigning/receiving theta- roles • Two principles: A. Morpheme Order Principle The surface morpheme order will be that of the Matrix Language, even if the sentence contains a number of Embedded Language lexemes B. System Morpheme Principle All functional elements (~ “system morphemes”) that have grammatical relations with an external head constituent will come from the Matrix Language (e.g., 3sg -s [T+v]) § Turkish (ML) - Dutch (EL) CS sentence (Backus 1992)

Turkish verb-final - in (13) inflected main verb yap “do” occurs after its predicate (Dutch infinitive), not before it, as it would in Dutch

(13) O diyor ben uitmak-en yap-tı-m diyordu kız-ınam he say.PROG.3SG 1SG finish-INF do-PRET-1SG say.IMP.3SG girl-with ‘ He is saying “I broke up with a girl” ’ • Matrix Language Frame model is not flawless: - how to identify the Matrix Language, particularly when a speaker's bilingualism is quite balanced? - does not account for all instances of code-switching in all language pairs, fitting only with “cases of very asymmetric bilingualism”.

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4.3 A Constraint-free Model (MacSwan 1999, 2004) § CS: described in terms of grammatical principles relevant to monolingual grammars, without

postulating additional devices or constraints that are specific to bilingual grammars § “Nothing constrains Code-Switching apart from the requirements of the mixed grammars.” § For Gx, a grammar of Lx, and Gy, a grammar of Ly, CS falls out of the union of the two grammars

({Gx ∪ Gy}) and nothing more. (14) *He doesn’t quiere ir he doesn’t want-3SG go-INF ‘He doesn’t want to go.’ v Structural violation in (14): T-features doubling. T is already represented in doesn’t, the Spanish

verb cannot discharge its T feature. • Cantone & MacSwan (2009) - word order in CS modified DPs (German-Italian) § Position:

- In German, adjectives appear pre-nominally (das alte Haus ‘the old house’, das grüne Haus ‘the green house’) - In Italian they can appear pre- (la vecchia casa ‘the old house’) or post-nominally (la casa verde ‘the green house’) § Agreement:

- Both in Italian and German the D and (attributive) Adj phi-agree with the noun they modify v Experiment 1

- Subjects - 10 adult Italian-German simultaneous and balanced bilinguals - Procedure - Written survey - Subjects had to indicate if the sentences were well-formed or not - See sentences in Table 1 below. - Results - 4 items were judged as well-formed by all consultants - Two of them, ‘un bel Garten’ (‘a nice garden’) (Table 1, 17) and ‘eine alte zia’ (‘an old aunt’) (18), both have the word order D(eterminer) A(djective) N(oun). - On the other hand, items (19) of Table 1, ‘una Gegend fredda’ (‘a region cold’), and (20), ‘un Bett nuovo’ (‘a bed new’), were judged to be well-formed by 80% of the participants, and in both cases, an Italian D is followed by a

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German N, which is followed by an Italian Adj. - Thus, both D-Adj-N and D-N-Adj are acceptable a priori, and the language of the noun does not determine word order Table 1. Results

- the language of the adjective determines the acceptable word order - In row 7. ‘Laura hat i verdi Augen’ obtained 0%, the adjective is Italian and appears pre-nominally - In row 9. ‘Laura ha die capelli schwarze’ obtained 20%, the adjective is German and appears post- nominally. v Experiment 2 - Subjects

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- 5 Italian-German simultaneous and balanced bilingual children aged 2;6-4;10 - Procedure - Spontaneous speech - Results - There were 23 instances of adjective/noun CS - In 8 cases there was an Italian adjective. In 5/8 word order requirements were the same in both languages, as in ‘un grosso nest’ (‘a big nest,’ Jan, 4;4,27), as Italian adjectives of size precede nouns. The remaining 3/8 cases showed the Italian order D-N-Adj - In 13/15 cases of German adjectives, the adjective is pre-nominal, D-Adj-N, regardless of the language of the D or N - Only in 2 cases did the German adjective appear after the Italian D-N (14) a. [DP D [NP Adj* N ] ] ] b. [DP D [NP Adj* N Adj* N ] ] ] (Italian) c. [DP D [NP N Adj* N ] ] ] (Italian) d. [DP D [NP Adj* N ] ] ] (German) o These results have been partially replicated in later studies (Parafita Couto & Gullberg 2017).

§ Can you think of or predict other (un)grammatical switches?

- Romance object clitics [no theta role] vs. English object pronouns [theta role] - French negation with Vfin+pas vs. English not+Vfin - Possessives in English vs. Romance: *El John’s coche, ?The car de Juan). 5. The triggers of Code-Switching A. Dominance • Retrieval difficulties in unbalanced bilinguals: speakers try to find the word they need but temporarily fail to remember it, so they switch to their dominant language o Often there is a little pause as the speaker tries to find the word (Cantonese-English example): (15) Ngoh jok-yat maai-joh yat-goh… hard drive… and today I'll have to install it. ‘Yesterday I bought… a hard drive… and today I'll have to install it.’ o Unbalanced bilinguals feel more comfortable discussing certain more formal topics in one of their languages

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B. Lack of translation equivalent • an expression or idiom exists in one language, but not the other (at least not with the same exact connotations). E.g.: o He’s a very well-known linguist but hasn’t published much lately, I guess cría buena fama y ponte a dormir. Lit. ‘Breed good fame and go to sleep’ used to indicate that someone can build a good reputation for themselves, and people will still think positively of that person even if they stop working hard. § Can you think of a word or expression with no translation in English or an English word/expression

with no translation in your native language? C. Emphasis/Clarification Such switching often involves repetition/iteration - a speaker says something in one language and then repeats in the second language (16) Vieni qui. Vieni qui! Come here, you! ‘Come here. Come here! Come here, you!’ D. Topic marking - Mark the distinction between the topic and comment - e.g. the Japanese topic-marker -wa is attached to the topic Yano-san ‘Mr. Yano’ and Tami (17) a. Yano-san-wa, he was speaking in English! ‘Regarding/Speaking of Mr. Yano, he was speaking in English!’ b. Tami-wa, it took her a month to get there, yo! ‘Regarding/Speaking of Tami, it took her a month to get there, you know!’ E. Social identity • CS: stable bilingual communities, rather than in transitional bilingual ones o In Poplack’s study use of CS was 4 times as frequent within members of the “ingroup” interlocutor than with a non-member of the group o CS narrows social distance OR o CS increases social distance, to encode anger or to emphasize a difference in status and power between two speakers • analogous to monolingual speakers using different levels of speech (i.e. from colloquial/vernacular to formal) F. Change of point of view in a discourse For example, in presenting reported speech (i.e. the speech of another individual): (18) a. Et puis le gars est entré et il dit que John wasn’t there. ‘And then the guy came in and says that John wasn’t there.’

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b. Él me dijo “Call the police.” ‘He told me “Call the police”’ o reported speech not in the language used by the actual speaker o Monolinguals do the same thing: past event in present tense (as if hearers were present) marking a subtle switch in perspective and point of view: (19) I was just about ready to go out and then the doorbell rang [PST]. I open [PRS] the door and suddenly there is [PRS] this old woman standing there with a little girl and she asks [PRS] me if she can use the phone. Assigned (**) and suggested (*) readings ** Cacoullos, R. T. and C. E. Travis, 2019. Code-switching and bilinguals’ grammars. In E. Adamou & Y. Matras (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Language Contact. London/New York: Routledge. https://sites.psu.edu/rct11/files/2019/06/15_TorresC_Travis_revised_2019.05.31_DV.pdf * Poplack, S. 1980. Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish and termino en Español: toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics 18, 581-618. * Revision of previously assigned Chapters from textbook