Against Word-internal Codeswitching: Evidence from Ukrainian-English Bilingualism

• Autores: Svitlana Budzhak-Jones
• Localización: International Journal of Bilingualism: interdisciplinary studies of multilingual behaviour, ISSN 1367-0069, Vol. 2, Nº. 2, 1998, págs. 161-182
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In this paper I develop diagnostics for distinguishing word-internal codeswitching from borrowing, based on Ukrainian-English bilingual discourse; a typologically different language pair. Assuming that a codeswitched noun will retain its original characteristics, and a borrowed noun will acquire language-specific properties of the recipient language, I focus on conflict sites in the morphosyntactic structure of Ukrainian (a fusional language) and English (an analytical one). Using quantitative variationist methodologies, I show that English-origin nouns with overt Ukrainian morphology occurring in otherwise Ukrainian discourse do not behave as if they were English. Instead, they replicate the patterns of behavior of monolingual Ukrainian nouns with respect to gender assignment, modifier-noun agreement, inflectional variability and flagging. I found no evidence for lone item codeswitching within a word boundary, and conclude that all English-origin utterances occurring with overt morphology of the recipient language are borrowed.