Essays sakshi LISSIM 6

How did LISSIM 5 help in improved understanding of your research topic? (for applicants who participated in LISSIM 5)

The everyday and extremely common pattern of bilingual language use, and the system or ‘grammar’ underlying this isthe focus of my research. My aim is to analyze intrasentential code switching (henceforth CS) in light of Hindi-English alternation data to understand the nature of the bilingual[1] language faculty.

The current work within the generative paradigm on this topic presents a model which argues that ‘items may be drawn from the lexicon of either language to introduce features into the numeration, which must then be checked for convergence in just the same way as monolingual features must be’ (MacSwan 2000: 45).The assumption is that the Lexicons and Phonological systems of the languages are separate. Thus, the PF disjunction theorem is proposed which argues that CS within a PF component is not possible.What becomes central then is the principle of Full Interpretation and the parametric differences associated with lexical items in the numeration coming from different languages would leadone would expect a significant number of derivations to not converge at the interfaces on account of feature mismatches.

Let us look at the following examples to illustrate two equivalent monolingual utterances and range of logical possibilities of CS within the DPwhich we will evaluate in terms of feature matching:

(2)      [Bacc-e] aa rah-e           haiN
          Kid-3p come stay.prog-p be.pres.p
          The kids are coming.

-s                 plural marker (English)
bacc-aa                 kid-3s
null/eN -      plural marker (for consonant ending words in Hindi)]

Comparing the well-formed and ill-formed sentences we find that it is difficult to make sense of the data simply in terms of feature mismatches. That English has the requirement of overt determiners obviously has a role to play with (a) being judged to be better than (c), but apart from that it is not clear what other featural differences there are between ‘baccaa-s’and‘bacce’ in (a), (b), (c) and (d) with both having the categorial feature N,which should satisfy the [uN] feature of the D, in addition to the same phi-features, and ucase feature. Furthermore, given that CS below X⁰should not be permitted in line with the PF disjunction theorem how does one explain the form ‘baccaa-s’ in (a)? Previous accounts have attempted to put this under ‘borrowing’ relying on phonological cues to strengthen this argument. As an example look at (3) and(4) below where the borrowed root ‘pakaa’ can take an English tense affix only if it is phonologically integrated into English:

(3)      *She is        pakaa-ing me too much.
                             cook
          She is irritating me too much.

(4)      She is   pakaa-o-ing me too much.
                     Cook-phonological integration marker
          She is irritating me too much.

However, this begs the question regarding the difference between ‘insertion’ and ‘borrowing’, and the further distinction between established and nonce borrowing (Muysken 2000). There is no clarity that such accounts of borrowing offer. Instead, they highlight the crucial role played by our understanding of the lexical and phonological systems at work and the formalism employed for the same.

It is in this context that LISSIM 5 helped in an improved understanding of my research topic by exposing me to theories which serve as a point of departure regarding our understanding of the nature of the lexicon. In the rest of this essay I focus on the insights provided by Michal Starke’s lectures on Nanosyntax which brought into sharp focus the idea that ‘the lexicon comes strictly after syntax’ (Starke 2011: 4). The syntax operates on features, each of which forms a terminal node, and different extents of the resultant tree are spelt out by the lexemes. Given, the understanding that the lexical choices (conveyed to the syntax through a feedback loop) affect further computation, it is predicted that spelling out a syntactic structure with a particular lexical item from one language will lead to different consequences than spelling out a syntactic structure with another item from another language. What needs to be evaluated in detail then is the ‘match’ between syntactic structure and lexicalization, in the context of CS behaviour. It needs to be seen whether the syntax has equal access to lexical items from ‘separate’ languages, in that lexemes from either of the languages available to the speaker are able to spell out syntactic structure and whether the consequences of this post-syntactic lexical choice can explain CS behaviour better than notions of ‘constraints’ or ‘language frames’.

Let us take a look again at (a), (b), (c) and (d) above and at (e), (f), (g) and (h) below:

The two sets of comparisons which follow highlight the contrastive behaviour within the DPs. Comparing (a),(c),(e) and (f) first: while [D_EN_H-plural marking_E][2] is well-formed [(D_E) N_E-plural marking_H] is ill formed. As we can see when ‘kid’ is followed by the Hindi plural marker, the presence or absence of the determiner does not improve the construction. When the languages of the IPs and DPs vary as in the comparison of (d), (g) and (h) [N_H-plural marking_H] in an IP_Eis ungrammatical while [N_E-plural marking_E]in an IP_His grammatical. The question, here, is if this contrast can be seen asthe consequence of previous lexical choice in the building of the structure bottom-up. Apart from this, examples (a) through (h) encourage us to look at the structure of the DPs in greater detail by (i) focusing on the cross-linguistic equivalence in syntactic structure which allows for the attested alternations in the DPs and (ii) correlating the forms ruled out as ungrammatical forms with the structure. Of course, given that the expanded structure of DPs/NPs is still a work in progress this is an uphill task at this point. I ought to add here that Boskovic’sclassesat LISSIM 5 on the structure of DPs and NPs may also provide insights into the CS pattern presented in this essaywhich is something I hope to take up further.

MacSwan, J. (2000). The architecture of the bilingual language faculty: Evidence from codeswitching. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 3(1), 37–54.

Muysken, P. (2000). Bilingual Speech: A Typology of Code-mixing. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Myers-Scotton, C. (2006). Multiple Voices: An introduction to bilingualism. MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Starke, Michal. (2011).Towards elegant parameters: Language variation reduces to the size of lexically stored trees. http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/001183

Starke, Michal. (2009). Nanosyntax: A Short Primer to a New Approach to Language. In Peter Svenonius, Gillian Ramchand, Michal Starke, and Knut TaraldTaraldsen(Eds.) Nordlyd36.1, Special issue on Nanosyntax, 1-6.. CASTL, Tromsø. http://www.ub.uit.no/baser/nordlyd

[1] Bilingualism is used as the cover term for both bilingualism and multilingualism

[2] E: English; H: Hindi

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