The bilingual lexicon under Distributed Morphology: An investigation of gender agreement in code-switching
Keywords: Grammatical gender, Code-switching, Agreement, Distributed Morphology, Lexicon
TL;DR: Patterns of grammatical gender agreement in code-switching are unpredicted by the lexicalist model of grammar, and motivate abstract lexical entries under DM.
Abstract: An adequate model of the Language Faculty must account for bilingualism, specifically, how two sets of lexical representations and grammatical rules may be represented simultaneously. In this study, we explore the resolution of grammatical gender agreement in intra-sentential code-switching, when the agreement controller and target are in different languages and specify different features. In three experiments on early Hebrew-English bilinguals, we find evidence for analogical agreement: bilinguals prefer for a Hebrew form in an agreement relation with an English nominal to match the gender of the nominal’s Hebrew equivalent. This tendency is modulated by the type of agreement dependency: we observe less analogical agreement in adjective concord compared to coreferential pronoun form selection. Our results support an integrated lexicon in bilingual grammar, wherein language specific information is represented on shared lexical entries rather than separated between two autonomous systems. We argue that a Distributed Morphology architecture (Halle & Marantz 1993, Harley 2014), unlike the traditional lexicalist model of grammar (Chomsky 1965, 1981), is better equipped to accommodate an integrated bilingual lexicon, as language specific phonological exponence is only inserted post-syntactically.
Submission Number: 67
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