Language Interaction in Emergent Grammars: Morphology and Word Order in Bilingual Children’s Code-Switching

Abstract

This paper examines the morphological integration of nouns in bilingual children’s code-switching to investigate whether children adhere to constraints posited for adult code-switching. The changing nature of grammars in development makes the Matrix Language Frame a moving target; permeability between languages in bilinguals undermines the concept of a monolingual grammatical frame. The data analysed consist of 630 diary entries with code-switching and structural transfer from two children (aged 2;10–7;2 and 6;6–11;0) bilingual in Estonian and English, languages which differ in morphological richness and the inflectional role of stem changes. The data reveal code-switching with late system morphemes, variability in stem selection and word order incongruence. Constituent order is analysed in utterances with and without code-switching, and the frame is shown to draw sometimes on both languages, raising questions about the MLF, which is meant to derive from the grammar of one language. If clauses without code-switched elements display non-standard morpheme order, then there is no reason to expect code-switching to follow a standard order, nor is it reasonable to assume a monolingual target grammar. Complex morphological integration of code-switches and interaction between the two languages are discussed.

Codeswitching within prepositional phrases: Effects of switch site and directionality

“…We would argue that since an account of structural and directionality aspects of CS should relate to typological differences (e.g. Poplack, 1980) and incompatible features between participating languages, overarching linguistic approaches to CS are unlikely to bear fruit, as others have noted (Green & Wei, 2014;López, 2018;Vihman, 2018). The present paper focused largely on structural aspects of CS, but we would recommend taking some of the open issues raised here in the direction of more socio-pragmatic and usage-based approaches (Green & Wei, 2014;Wasserscheidt, 2014).…”

A Crosslinguistic Study of Child Code-Switching within the Noun Phrase: A Usage-Based Perspective

“…Most bilingual children are dominant in one of their two languages (Gathercole 2016;Paradis and Nicoladis 2007) and dominance does tend to determine the division of labour in mixed utterances (see Cantone (2007) for German-Italian; Deuchar and Quay (2000) for English-Spanish; Lanza (1997) for English-Norwegian). However, dominance of one language over the other cannot account for observations such that even within an individual child mixed utterances sometimes conform to a set of constraints and sometimes flout them (see Vihman (2018) for the discussion of the system morpheme principle and the morpheme order principle). In addition, dominance is unable to explain why within the same language pair children sometimes combine functional elements from the weaker language with lexical items from the stronger one (e.g., Müller et al 2015).…”

Structural Characteristics Of Code-Switches In Four-Year-Old Bilinguals

“…One of the disputable problems in the study of child bilingual speech is in the assumption that the MLF model elaborated for the analysis of adult code-switches can hardly be used to research early child mixed utterances. Although for some combinations of languages this problem has been solved (Nicoladis, 2019;Vihman, 2016Vihman, , 2018, this is only beginning to be done for Russian-English early bilingual speech (Chirsheva & Korovushkin, 2017). Therefore, this paper can contribute to understanding important aspects of how early childhood bilingualism is developed and how two languages interact when they are acquired in very close contact.…”

“…While code-switches and code-mixing with various combinations of languages have been researched in the speech of young bilinguals (Nicoladis 2019;Vihman, 2016Vihman, , 2018Yow, Patrycia, & Flynn, 2016) Russian-English code-switches in early bilinguals' speech have been underresearched, with only several works dealing with them (Chirsheva & Korovushkin, 2017, 2019Chirsheva, Korovushkin, & Mushnikova, 2018).…”