Adjective Placement in English/Spanish Mixed Determiner Phrases: Insights from Acceptability Judgments

Abstract

The present study examines the relative order of noun-adjective sequences within code-switched Determiner Phrases. Several hypotheses have been considered: (i) Order is a property defined by the noun; (ii) it is a property defined by the adjective; (iii) it is a property governed by the carrier phrase. The studies that have investigated the issue all assume that the class of adjectives is homogeneous, but in fact, there exist several sub-classes of adjectives which in many languages, including Spanish, exhibit distinct ordering properties. We propose to add the variable ‘adjective type’ to our study and use code-switching of English/Spanish, two languages that differ in the position of adjectives, as our database. A total of thirty English/Spanish heritage speakers took part in an experiment. Our results show that both the language of the adjective and the carrier phrase are significant factors of word order in the noun phrase; on the other hand, the noun itself does not seem to play a role.

The role of grammatical gender in Spanish-English switched DPs and copula constructions..

“…In the case of the Adj switches, as in ( 38), the second structure under consideration in this dissertation, the switch occurs between the DP subject and a lexical category such as the Adj. Many studies on codeswitching have focused on the gender and the placement of the Adj within switched DPs (e.g., Arnaus Gil et al, 2012;Balam & Parafita Couto, 2019;Cantone & MacSwan, 2009;de Nicolás, 2020;Moro Quintanilla, 2016;Pablos et al, 2019;Parafita Couto & Gullberg, 2019;Stadthagen-González et al, 2019;Vaughan-Evans et al, 2020), but only a few have examined switched sequences in which the Adj is outside the DP Liceras et al, 2017;Liceras & García-Alcaraz, 2019;Valenzuela et al, 2012). In the case of the latter, they have mostly considered switches where Spanish provides the Adj, as in (38.b), as their focus has been on the double feature valuation mechanism and how it accounts for the gender agreement strategies (see section 2.3.2. for more details on the strategies).…”

“…Thus, it seems that the modality of the task (i.e., judgment vs. guided production) may play a role in the HL speakers' gender agreement preferences. (adapted from Liceras et al, 2017) On the other hand, in the case of codeswitching involving other language pairs, gender agreement mechanisms have only been explored when the Spanish Adj is within the DP and in these cases the focus has mostly been place on word order between the Adj and the N (e.g., Boers et al, 2020;de Nicolás, 2020;Vanden Wyngaerd, 2017).…”