Bilingual Early Functional-Lexical Mixing And The Activation Of Formal Features  

Oleh:

Liceras, Juana M. ; Spradlin, K. Todd ; Fuertes, Raquel Fernández

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: International Journal of Bilingualism (Full Text) vol. 9 no. 2 (Jun. 2005), page 227-252.
Topik: activation; bilingual; formal features
Fulltext: 227.pdf (394.4KB)

Isi artikel

We have argued that the grammatical features spell-out hypothesis (GFSH) (Liceras, Spradlin, Perales, Fernández, & Álvarez, 2003; Spradlin, Liceras & Fernández, 2003a) accounts for the functional-lexical mixing patterns that prevail in the case of Determiner Phrases produced by bilingual (English-Spanish) children. This hypothesis (Liceras, 2002; Spradlin, Liceras & Fernández, 2003b) states that in the process of activating the features of the two grammars, the child, who will rely on the two lexicons, will make codemixing choices which will favor the functional categories containing the largest array of uninterpretable features (Chomsky, 1998, 1999). This implies that in the case of English/ Spanish child acquisition data, mixed utterances such as el book (Spanish Determiner + English Noun) will prevail over mixed utterances such as the libro (English Determiner + Spanish Noun). Thus, in the process of acquisition, children pay special attention to the visible morpho-phonological triggers which lead to the activation of abstract formal features. In this paper, we will test this hypothesis by analyzing data containing English/Spanish functional-lexical mixings as well as data from other language pairs. We will argue that early functional-lexical mixings, including word-internal mixings, provide evidence for how children activate the abstract syntactic features of the individual target languages in an emergent grammar. Specifically, we will try to show that: (1) patterns of production are syntactically motivated in that morphemes which spell-out a greater array of abstract features are favored; thus in any given language pair, the “dominant” language—the one that will systematically contribute the functional free morpheme, the Determiner, to a Determiner + Noun pair—will be the language whose Determiner system displays the greater array of uninterpretable features to be checked

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