This article investigates the diachronic development of language mixing within noun phrases in the heritage language American Norwegian. By comparing data collected in the 1930s and 1940s with recently collected data, I present and discuss patterns showing systematic changes, specifically concerning the categories number and definiteness. Moreover, I propose two potential analyses of these patterns based on an exoskeletal approach to grammar. This theoretical framework crucially separates the abstract syntactic structure from its phonological exponents, and the analyses that are discussed consider both the structure and the exponents as the origins of the change.

This article presents empirical evidence that disfavors using highly lexicalist minimalist models, such as the one presented in Chomsky (1995), when analyzing language mixing. The data analyzed consist of English – Spanish mixed noun phrases discussed in Moro (2014) as well as English – Norwegian mixed noun phrases and verbs taken from the Corpus of American Norwegian Speech. Whereas the lexicalist model in Chomsky (1995) only can explain a subset of the mixing patterns attested in both authentic English – Spanish mixed noun phrases and the American Norwegian corpus, we show that an alternative exoskeletal model can account for all of them. Such a model would entail that rather than assuming lexical items with inherent, functional features that determine the derivation, syntactic structures are generated independently from the lexical items that come to realize them.

This paper presents case-studies of language mixing within verbs and nouns in the heritage language American Norwegian, which refers to varieties spoken by Norwegian immigrants to the US and their descendants. The paper builds on data from the newly established Corpus of American Norwegian Speech and argues in favor of an exoskeletal approach to language mixing. This approach distinguishes between abstract syntactic feature bundles and the morphophonological realization of these bundles, much like in late insertion approaches to morphology. A main goal of the paper is to show how the word-internal mixing patterns observed in American Norwegian can be analyzed in a model of grammar employing an exoskeletal approach with a late-insertion approach to morphology.

This article investigates the morphosyntax of American Norwegian noun phrases that show mixing between Norwegian and English and proposes a formal analysis of these. The data show a distinct pattern characterized by English content items occurring together with Norwegian functional material such as determiners and suffixes. In the article, it will be argued that an exoskeletal approach to grammar is ideally suited to capture this empirical pattern. This framework crucially separates the realization of functional and non-functional terminals in an abstract, syntactic structure. Insertion of functional exponents is restricted by feature matching, whereas insertion into non-functional terminals is radically less restrictive. English exponents for noun stems are thus easily inserted into open positions in the structure, whereas functional exponents are typically drawn from Norwegian, as these are better matches to feature bundles comprising definiteness, number, and gender. In addition to the typical mixing pattern, the article addresses an unexpected empirical phenomenon, the occurrence of the English plural -s, and proposes a possible analysis for this using the exoskeletal framework. The formal analysis of American Norwegian noun phrases also exemplifies how an exoskeletal approach complies with the ideal of a Null theory of language mixing.

Taking as our point of departure an important distinction between gender as a semantic/conceptual property and gender as a formal morphological property, we argue, assuming a broadly Distributed Morphology/exoskeletal theoretical approach, that formal gender languages, for gender to be visible to the inflectional system, exploit a mechanism that translates semantic/conceptual gender into formal gender by valuing an unvalued formal gender feature. We propose that even though all formal gender features on the DP spine are initially unvalued, only the lowest locus of the unvalued gender feature is valued by the translation mechanism. Subsequent gender agreement is accomplished by probe – goal valuing. Next, we inquire about the exact locus of the lowest formal gender feature. We argue first that gender in the Norwegian DP is a formal feature on an already existing functional head. Then, based on Norwegian – English language mixing, we argue that the lowest locus of the formal gender feature may vary depending on the size of the non‐gender chunk mixed from English. In other words, there is no designated functional head where the lowest gender feature is always generated, and the formal unvalued gender feature at any functional head can in principle be the lowest formal gender feature.