Language switching constraints: more than syntax? Data from Media Lengua

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between intra-sentential codeswitching restrictions after subject pronouns, negative elements, and interrogatives and language-specific syntactic structures. Data are presented from two languages that have non-cognate lexicons but share identical phrase structure and syntactic mechanisms and exactly the same grammatical morphemes except for pronouns, negators, and interrogative words. The languages are the Quichua of Imbabura province, Ecuador and Ecuadorian Media Lengua (ML), consisting of Quichua morphosyntax with Spanish-derived lexical roots. Bilingual participants carried out un-timed acceptability judgment and language-identification tasks and concurrent memory-loaded repetition on utterances in Quichua, ML, and various mixtures of Quichua and ML. The acceptability and classification data show a main effect for category of single-word switches (significant differences for lexical vs. interrogative, negative, and for acceptability, pronoun) and repetition data show significant differences between lexical vs. interrogatives and negators. Third-person pronouns (which require an explicit antecedent) also differ significantly from lexical items. Logical-semantic factors may contribute to code-switching restrictions.

Pronouns, Interrogatives, and (Quichua-Media Lengua) Code-Switching: The Eyes Have It

“…In addition to the aforementioned transitional probabilities and closed-versus open-class distinction, some semantically motivated considerations are proposed in Lipski (2017aLipski ( , 2019a, namely the pronoun-antecedent relationship and the filler-gap dependency structure that characterizes interrogative elements. In the case of pronouns, because overt subject pronouns are not required in Quichua and Media Lengua, their presence highlights a specific language as well as the subject-verb agreement relationship, which although not thwarted by a language switch between subject and verb, is intimately linked to the language of the pronoun.…”

“…Delving into such subtleties in the Quichua-Media Lengua interface is beyond the scope of the present study. Previous psycholinguistic research conducted with Quichua-Media Lengua bilinguals has demonstrated that speakers are able to reliably distinguish the two languages as well as putative mixtures (Lipski 2017a(Lipski , 2017b; also Deibel 2020), and in a variety of language identification and elicited repetition tasks, both pronouns and interrogatives behaved differently from open-class lexical items (Lipski 2017a(Lipski , 2019a; in particular, these items triggered more "repairs" to deliberately mixed utterances. Because no grammatical constraints of either Quichua or Media Lengua are violated by switching languages at any particular point (e.g., after pronouns or interrogatives), the mixed utterances employed in the previous studies are clearly parsable, as evidenced, for example, by the ease with which they were translated (Lipski 2017b(Lipski , 2019b.…”

Field-Testing Code-Switching Constraints: A Report on a Strategic Languages Project

“…The data collected in three substantially different bilingual environments partially converge in the case of language transitions between subject pronouns and verbs, with an apparently inhibitory residue remaining even in those instances (e.g., Spanish-Portuguese and Quichua-Media Lengua) in which no collateral morphosyntactic differences might be invoked, and/or where there is substantial lexical and basic phrase-structure overlap (Palenquero-Spanish, Spanish-Portuguese). Given the motley collection of languages and experimental protocols, no firm conclusions as to a "special" status for PRONOUN + VERB language switches are being put forth here but some observations will be offered, expanding on the preliminary thoughts found in Lipski (2016a).…”

Adpositions in Media Lengua: Quichua or Spanish? – Evidence of a Lexical-Functional Split

“…Media Lengua, an L1-oriented,4 Lexicon-Grammar mixed language was first observed by Muysken in the late 1970s in the Ecuadorian Highlands (Muysken, journal of language contact 12 (2019) 404-439 1981Meakins and Stewart, forthcoming). While Muysken's first descriptions documented Salcedo Media Lengua, a variety of Media Lengua in the Cotopaxi region of Ecuador close to the town of San Miguel de Salcedo (see Shappeck, 2011), Media Lengua has also been encountered in other areas of Ecuador: The two less documented Loja and Cañar Media Lengua varieties (Muysken, 1997)5 and Imbabura Media Lengua, spoken in the Northern Ecuadorian province of Imbabura (Gómez Rendón, 2008;Stewart, 2011Stewart, , 2013Stewart, , 2015Lipski, 2016). Some researchers believe that Quichua-Spanish language contact has created a continuum of hispanized Quichua and quichuasized Spanish local varieties (Shappeck, 2011), whereas others have noted that "[a]ll Quechua dialects have borrowed heavily from Spanish, up to roughly 40%, but there are no dialects which borrowed more than 40%" (Bakker and Muysken, 1994:44;Lipski, 2017).…”

“…Along the same lines, if Spanish prepositions are regarded to be grammatical, they should not occur in Media Lengua. Thus, mixed languages such as Media Lengua, even though they remain to the present day largely understudied, may be particularly suitable to refine linguistic theories due to their extraordinary linguistic profile (see also Lipski, 2016). This paper reports recent field research data collected in two tasks: 72 trilingual speakers of Quichua, Media Lengua and Andean Spanish from three communities (Angla, Casco Valenzuela and Pijal, all located in Imbabura, Ecuador) participated in a video description task in Media Lengua and a translation task from only Quichua or Spanish into Media Lengua.…”