I will focus on the issue of how the grammars of the two (or more) participating language
in codeswitching (CS) data participate in the structuring of the bilingual clause. (The
bilingual clause is a clause containing surface level morphemes from two or more
languages.) I will deal largely with describing my own Matrix Language Frame (MLF)
model (cf. Myers-Scotton, 1997; 2002; 2005b) as a model for classic CS.
I will also discuss briefly other approaches to CS (e.g. Poplack 1980; MacSwan 2005).
(Classic CS is found in a bilingual clause in which the abstract grammatical structure of
mixed constituents comes from only one of the participating languages.) I will relate
classic CS to the Principle of Asymmetry that prevails in contact phenomena. However, I
also will discuss briefly composite CS, which is CS in which part of the abstract
grammatical structure comes from more than one of the participating languages.
In my discussion of the MLF model, I will show how the Uniform Structure
Principle, which preferences constituent structure from one of the participating languages
in bilingual data, and the Differential Access Hypothesis (DAH) offer explanations of the
structuring of CS clauses (Jake et al. 2002; 2005; Myers-Scotton & Jake 2008). The
DAH suggests that structurally-assigned morphemes are accessed at different abstract
levels than conceptually-activated morphemes in language production (Myers-Scotton
2005). As time permits, I will discuss other contact phenomena in terms of these models
as well as the Abstract Level model.
References
Jake Janice L., Carol Myers-Scotton, and Steven Gross.et al. (2002). Making a
minimalist approach to codeswitching work: Adding the Matrix Language.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 5, 1: 69-91.)
Jake et al. (2005). A response to MacSwan (2005): Keeping the Matrix Language.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 8, 3: 1-6.
MacSwan, Jeff (2005). Codeswitching and generative grammar: A critique of the MLF
model and some remarks on “modified minimalism”. Bilingualism: Language and
Cognition 8, 1: 1-22.
Myers-Scotton, Carol. (1997). Duelling languages, grammatical structure in
codeswitching. Second edition. Oxford: OUP.
Myers-Scotton, Carol. (2002). Contact linguistics, bilingual encounters and grammatical
outcomes. Oxford: OUP.
Myers-Scotton, Carol. (2005a) Supporting a Differential Access Hypothesis. In Kroll,
Judith and Annette de Groot (Eds). Handbook of bilingualism, psycholinguistic
approaches, 326-348. New York: OUP.
Myers-Scotton, Carol (2005b). Uniform structure: Looking beyond the surface in
explaining codeswitching. Rivista di Linguistica (Italian Journal of Linguistics)
17: 15-34.
Myers-Scotton, Carol and Janice L. Jake. (2008). Forthcoming. Universal structure in
code-switching and bilingual language processing and production. To appear in
Bullock, Barbara and A. Jacqueline Toribio (Eds) Handbook of Code-switching.
Cambridge: CUP.
Poplack, Shana. (1980). Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish Y TERMINO EN
ESPANOL: Toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics 18: 581-618.
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