Conflict sites in Spanish-English mixed nominal constructions Testing alternative predictions Belinda Korver [email protected] 1086537 2016 Master’s thesis Latin American Studies: Language Variation and Bilingualism Faculty of Humanities: Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL) Leiden University Under supervision of First reader: Dr. M. Carmen Parafita Couto | LUCL | Latin American Studies Second reader: Dr. D. Smakman | LUCL | English Language and Culture 2 Abstract This thesis investigates mixed nominal constructions, both complex (with an adjective) and simplex. Such constructions create potential conflict sites in Spanish-English code- switching. Spanish and English differ for (1) adjective-noun order: Spanish typically has post-nominal adjectives, whereas English has pre-nominal adjectives, and (2) grammatical gender: Spanish has a binary gender system, while English does not. A multi-task method was conducted in the Spanish-English bilingual community in Puerto Rico. The tasks comprised of an elicitation task (cf. director-matcher task, Gullberg, Indefrey, and Muysken 2008) and an auditory grammaticality judgment task. The predictions from the Matrix Language Framework (MLF, Myers-Scotton 2002) and a minimalist analysis from Cantone and MacSwan (2009) are tested against the collected data. The results from both tasks tend to indicate that the Matrix Language approach provides better predictions than the minimalist approach in every respect except for adjective-noun order constructions in the judgment task. This slight preference, however, is not significant. Toy task results for gender assignment in Spanish determiners indicate that there is a preference for the assignment of default gender, i.e. masculine in Spanish, rather than gender that is analogue to the translation equivalent of the noun. This preference is confirmed by judgment task results that include simple nominal constructions, but not by judgment task results for complex nominal constructions. I assume that adjectival presence in complex nominal constructions may have to do with this. Implications of my results for the theories and the methodologies are discussed. 3 4 5 6 Acknowledgments I am grateful to my supervisor, M. Carmen Parafita Couto, for supporting me throughout the writing process and months of fieldwork in Puerto Rico. Your precise way of revising turned this thesis into what it is today and I have learned a lot from that. Your network of professors and students at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguëz provided me with many enthusiastic people that helped me with my research. I am especially thankful for the involvement of professor Catherine M. Mazak with participant recruitment and for allowing me to use her office to prepare and conduct the research. My second reader, Dick Smakman, encouraged me from the beginning until the end. You have been very motivational and I am thankful that, while you are not a code- switching expert, you agreed to be my second reader. Great thanks for all the bilingual students and professors that participated in the study. They helped me not only by performing the tasks with much enthusiasm, but also by designing a Facebook group (‘Belinda’s research’) in which potential participants could form bilingual pairs and join the project. Lastly, I would like to thank my family: my mother Hanneke, who has been proud of me since day one and provided me with the motivation and inspiration to do so many other exciting things while working on this study; Valentijn, who made me conscious about the way I worked and gave me several reality checks; my boyfriend Jochem, who was always willing to help me and provide a listening ear whenever I got stuck, even if he had no idea what ‘DPs’ or ‘MLF predictions’ were; and my Leiden University friends, who were there when I needed diversion. Belinda Korver, 4 August 2016 7 8 Contents List of figures .......................................................................................................... 11 List of tables ............................................................................................................ 12 List of abbreviations and symbols .......................................................................... 13 1 Introduction ....................................................................................................... 15 1.1 Bilingual speech communities .................................................................................. 15 1.1.1 Bilingualism .............................................................................................................................. 15 1.1.2 Linguistic situation in Puerto Rico ....................................................................................... 16 1.2 Code-switching ......................................................................................................... 18 1.2.1 Code-switching, code-mixing, and language borrowing ................................................... 19 1.2.2 Conflict sites in Spanish-English code-switching .............................................................. 22 1.2.3 Theoretical approaches towards code-switching ............................................................... 24 1.3 The study .................................................................................................................. 28 1.3.1 Collecting code-switching data ............................................................................................. 29 1.3.2 Research questions .................................................................................................................. 30 1.4 Thesis overview ......................................................................................................... 30 2 Literature review ............................................................................................... 31 2.1 Adjective-noun order ................................................................................................. 31 2.1.1 MLF: Following the ML ........................................................................................................ 31 2.1.2 MP: Underlying word order structures ................................................................................ 32 2.2 Language of the determiner ..................................................................................... 34 2.2.1 MLF: Following the ML ........................................................................................................ 34 2.2.2 MP: Valuing phi-features ....................................................................................................... 35 2.3 Gender assignment ................................................................................................... 36 2.4 Coverage and accuracy ............................................................................................. 40 2.5 Summary of predictions ............................................................................................ 42 3 Methodology .................................................................................................... 44 3.1 Task descriptions ...................................................................................................... 44 3.1.1 Director-matcher task ............................................................................................................ 44 3.1.2 Judgment task .......................................................................................................................... 47 3.1.3 Background questionnaire ..................................................................................................... 52 3.2 Procedure .................................................................................................................. 52 3.2.1 Participant recruitment ........................................................................................................... 53 3.2.2 Tasks and briefing ................................................................................................................... 53 3.2.3 Methodological considerations ............................................................................................. 54 4 Results ............................................................................................................... 56 4.1 Participants ............................................................................................................... 56 4.2 Adjective-noun order ................................................................................................ 59 4.2.1 Toy task data ............................................................................................................................ 59 4.2.2 Judgment task data (type 1 stimuli) ...................................................................................... 62 4.3 Determiner-noun combinations: language of the determiner ................................. 66 4.3.1 Toy task data ............................................................................................................................ 66 4.3.2 Judgment task data (type 1 and 2 stimuli) ........................................................................... 67 4.4 Determiner-noun combinations: gender assignment in the determiner ................. 69 4.4.1 Toy task data ............................................................................................................................ 69 4.4.2 Judgment