Abstract
Although formal analyses of code-switching have enjoyed some success in determining which structures and interfaces are more fertile environments for switches than others, research exposing recalcitrant counter-examples to proposed constraints and axioms responsible for governing code-switching is abound. We advance the claim here that sub-optimal representations, i.e., losers, stand to reveal important information regarding the interaction of grammatical principles and processing strategies of bilingual speakers and that any comprehensive analysis of code-switching phenomena should include them. These losers are the result of gradient activation in both input and output forms. We demonstrate how the formalism Gradient Symbolic Computation (GSC; Smolensky et al., 2014) can account for both of these observed facets of bilingual grammars in a unified manner. Building upon the work of Goldrick et al. (2016a,b), we provide an analysis of mixed determiner phrases (DPs) as an example of the fundamental components of a GSC-analysis.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 5-34 |
Number of pages | 30 |
Journal | Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism |
Volume | 10 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Mar 2 2020 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Language and Linguistics
- Linguistics and Language