Codeswitching provides important information on the linguistic and psycholinguistic status of grammatical features such as gender in the mind of native and non-native speakers (Burkholder 2018; Liceras et al. 2008, 2016; Fairchild & Van Hell 2017; Parafita Couto & Gullberg 2019; among others). The analysis of gender agreement in the Determiner Phrase (DP) and in the adjectival predication (AdjPred) involving codeswitching-examples (1) and (2), respectively-is a challenge for researchers in that, even when the dominant language of the bilingual and the type of structure seem to allow us to account for the bilingual's behavior, data obtained via different methodologies (production versus interpretation) in relation to a specific structure are not convergent. That is, there is no guarantee that the bilingual will always prefer or produce switches like those in (1a) and (2a), where the so-called "analogical criterion" (Otegui & Lapidus 2005) holds (i.e., the English noun bears the gender of the Spanish translation equivalent noun as it agrees with the Spanish determiner or the Spanish adjective).
(1) a. La(fem. 'the') house(SP fem. 'casa') / El(masc. 'the') book(SP masc. 'libro')
(1) b. El(masc. 'the') house(SP fem. 'casa') / La(fem. 'the') book(SP masc. 'libro')
(2) a. The house(SP fem. 'casa') es bonita(fem. 'beautiful') / The book(SP masc. 'book') es bonito(masc. 'beautiful')
(2) b. The house(SP fem. 'casa') es bonito(masc. 'beautiful') / The book(SP masc. 'book') es bonita(fem. 'beautiful')
In order to account for the bilinguals' behaviour, different explanations have been put forward within the framework of the Minimalist Program (Liceras et al. 2008; Moro 2011, 2014), Distributed Morphology (Burkholder 2018; Peters 2017) or acquisition theory (Liceras et al. 2005; 2008). However, those explanations do not account for the divergence that is observed in the bilingual's behavior. Using data from English dominant English–Spanish bilinguals from Trinidad and Tobago and Spain, in this study we focus on the divergence that the bilingual data show with respect to the analogical criterion depending on: (i) whether codeswitching happens within the DP or the AdjPred (Liceras, Fernandez Fuertes & Klassen 2016), a divergence that is accounted for by the directionality of feature checking (from the left to the right in AdjPred or in both directions, from the right to the left and from the left to the right, in the DP); and (ii) whether the data are obtained using production or interpretation tasks where the complexity of the structures intertwine with lexical access (accessing the noun in the case of the DP versus the noun and the adjective in the case of the AdjPred).
We argue that, in order to provide an explanation for the divergence in the representation of grammatical gender related to the type of structure and to the data elicitation technique, syntax (the mechanisms of feature checking) and lexical access impose processing restrictions rooted in the mental lexicon and in formal linguistics.
Selected bibliography
• Burkholder, M. (2018). Language mixing in the nominal phrase: Implications of a Distributed Morphology perspective. Languages, 3(2), 10. • Fairchild, S. & Van Hell, J. (2017) Determiner-noun code-switching in Spanish heritage speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20(1), 150-161. • Liceras, J.M., Fernández Fuertes, R., Perales, S., Pérez-Tattam R. & Spradlin, K.T. (2008). Gender and gender agreement in bilingual native and non-native grammars: a view from children and adult functional-lexical mixings. Lingua, 118(6), 827-851. • Liceras, J.M., Fernández Fuertes, R. & Klassen, R. (2016). Language dominance and language nativeness: the view from English–Spanish code-switching. In R. E. Guzzardo Tamargo, C.M. Mazak & M. C. Parafita Couto (Eds.) Spanish- English codeswitching in the Caribbean and the U.S. (pp. 107-138). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. • Liceras, J.M., Fernández Fuertes, R., Perales, S., Pérez-Tattam R. & Spradlin, K.T. (2008). Gender and gender agreement in bilingual native and non-native grammars: a view from children and adult functional-lexical mixings. Lingua, 118(6), 827-851. • Otheguy, R. & Lapidus, N. (2005). Matización de la teoría de la simplificación en las lenguas en contacto: El concepto de la adaptación en el español de Nueva York. En L. Ortiz López & M. Lacorte (Eds.), Contactos y contextos lingüísticos. El español en los Estados Unidos y en contacto con otras lenguas (pp. 143-160). Madrid / Frankfurt: Iberoamericana / Vervuert. • Parafita Couto, M. C. & Gullberg, M. (2019). Code-switching within the noun phrase: Evidence from three corpora. International Journal of Bilingualism, 23(2), 695-714.
