TY - JOUR

T1 - The internal structure of Spanish–German verbalizations and the sophistication of bilinguals’ linguistic knowledge

AU - Fábregas, Antonio

AU - Rothman, Jason

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

PY - 2021/12/31

Y1 - 2021/12/31

N2 - The present article reassesses some available data regarding word-internal language mixing (Spanish–German) involving verbs and nouns. The empirical generalization is that Spanish roots can be combined with German verbalizers, but not vice versa. Data of this type highlight the sophisticated knowledge of the underlying representations that code-switching bilinguals must have of both contributing grammars and, in turn, how these contribute to the formation of the grammar that underlies their rule-governed systems for amalgamating them. Despite agreeing with the general conclusions of González-Vilbazo and López’s 2011 study regarding what the data tell us about code-switching more generally, we refine their analysis to better capture the patterns. Our proposal is that these mixtures are the only instances where the structural and lexical properties of verbal exponents used in both languages overlap, parting ways with previous analyses based on the possible zero nature of Spanish verbalizers or the absence of conjugation classes in German.

AB - The present article reassesses some available data regarding word-internal language mixing (Spanish–German) involving verbs and nouns. The empirical generalization is that Spanish roots can be combined with German verbalizers, but not vice versa. Data of this type highlight the sophisticated knowledge of the underlying representations that code-switching bilinguals must have of both contributing grammars and, in turn, how these contribute to the formation of the grammar that underlies their rule-governed systems for amalgamating them. Despite agreeing with the general conclusions of González-Vilbazo and López’s 2011 study regarding what the data tell us about code-switching more generally, we refine their analysis to better capture the patterns. Our proposal is that these mixtures are the only instances where the structural and lexical properties of verbal exponents used in both languages overlap, parting ways with previous analyses based on the possible zero nature of Spanish verbalizers or the absence of conjugation classes in German.

KW - Bilingualism

KW - Grammatical overlap

KW - Mixing

KW - Theme vowels

KW - Verbalizations

U2 - 10.3390/languages6040167

DO - 10.3390/languages6040167

M3 - Journal article

AN - SCOPUS:85118364683

VL - 6

JO - Languages

JF - Languages

SN - 2226-471X

IS - 4

M1 - 167

ER -