Why do speakers mix perspectives

Crucially, the English roots do not have any grammatical features. Rather, features are merged in the functional spine and morphophonological exponents come to realize them. An abstract structure for the American Norwegian noun phrase can be illustrated in 37 Riksem et al. In this structure, definiteness, number, and gender are all encoded on one functional projection. It could also be that gender is encoded on n Alexiadou, , a ; Kramer, , this particular choice does not matter for present purposes.

The features then combine with the root to yield the actual exponent, as shown in A similar logic underlies verbal mixing. In general, then, we see that English roots can combine with Norwegian functional material to yield instances of word-internal mixing.

Norwegians generally have a high proficiency in English, in particular the younger generations. In Norway, it is well-known that they often mix English words into their Norwegian. A recent study by Sunde investigates a gaming community, which is a community where English is especially important. Based on oral and spoken data, Sunde argues that Norwegian is clearly the matrix language in Myers-Scotton sense, as it is the language contributing the morphosyntactic frame.

That is, Norwegian determines the order of morphemes and functional morphology. One example of this is provided in 40 ; the translation into English is ours Sunde, , p. Sunde , p. Some of her examples are given in Carry er deg lett ut. Turning to word-internal mixing in the nominal domain, Sunde , p. Fant trad en. I come to to holde that scout. Inspect kniven i inventory en min. DEF in inventory. DEF my. Again, we see that the lexical items can come from English whereas the morphology comes from Norwegian.

The same analysis as Riksem et al. No further assumptions need to be made. The data are based on acceptability judgments. They observe an asymmetry similar to the one we have observed for other pairs discussed above when looking at a mixing variety of English-Telugu: Only Telugu roots can combine with English - ify.

It is not possible for an English root to combine with the Telugu - inc affix, as the contrast between 43 and 44 shows. NOM me. The authors attribute this to the fact that Telugu affix is an incorporator, while the English affix is not. They relate this to English systematically disallowing incorporation into verbal heads. For example, English does not allow 45 but instead makes use of John eats meat. John looked up the number. If incorporation were to take place in 44 , an ill-formed head at PF would be the result, assuming that mixing below the head-level is banned MacSwan, , , a claim Bandi-Rao and den Dikken endorse.

Thus, it is avoided. By contrast, the Telugu root and the English affix only come together as a unit at PF, i. For American Norwegian, the root can be either Norwegian or English, but we generally do not find a Norwegian root with English inflection Grimstad, ; Grimstad et al.

This is also the case in the nominal domain. Furthermore, Telugu displays an asymmetric pattern whereby Telugu roots can combine with English functional morphology but English roots cannot appear together with Telugu functional morphology. The following table offers an overview of the patterns seen in our survey. The variation displayed in Table 1 raises the question of what the source behind these various asymmetries are.

One potential answer to this question is to suggest that the asymmetries we observe are simply an effect of the main language. In other words, the morphosyntactic spine comes from the language whose affixes the speakers employ, i. However, it is important to clarify what we mean by main language.

For instance, Myers-Scotton , and Jake et al. A matrix language is the main language of the speaker and it has a grammatical correlate: It is responsible for word order and for providing functional morphemes. The embedded language can provide lexical items. Scholars have extensively discussed the predictions and factual accuracy of the matrix language model see MacSwan, , pp.

Evidence that this may be problematic as a general answer is provided by the Telugu cases since there, it is the secondary language that provides the functional morphology. Such data suggest that the relevant factor cannot be the division of labor between main language and secondary language.

Importantly, though, a caveat is in order. The crucial data from both Telugu and German-Spanish are based on acceptability judgments see Toribio, a , b on the latter in studying mixing. In other work on language mixing, it has been observed that judgments are not always reliable indicators of the underlying grammar.

Let us consider one such example. In mixing between English and Spanish, Moro reports that whereas speakers accept the pattern in 47 , they reject the pattern in This asymmetry would suggest that an English determiner cannot appear together with a Spanish noun. As Liceras et al. Examples like 48 are attested in spontaneous production see also Liceras et al. Liceras et al. Because they have gender, Spanish determiners contain more features than English determiners, and therefore Spanish determiners will be preferred.

As Grimstad et al. Now, scholars do not always have large corpora available to make the comparison that was just made. However, such findings as in the English-Spanish mixing case may caution us to draw too big conclusions based on acceptability data alone. Judgments involving mixing are often negative due to sociolinguistic reasons, suggesting that they often should be combined with corpus evidence when such evidence is available see e.

However, assuming that the data reported are adequate, a further option would be to appeal to morpho-phonology in accounting for why some data points do not fit the overall generalization. That is, in the spirit of MacSwan , , , , Bandi-Rao and den Dikken , and MacSwan and Colina and research cited there, those cases where a root and functional morphology are not able to combine must be ill-formed due to some PF-rule. This would be a language specific rule that would hopefully relate to other properties in the grammar, e.

Bandi-Rao and den Dikken, Approaching this problem from the perspective of Distributed Morphology Embick and Noyer, ; Embick, ; Alexiadou, a , b , we assume that nouns and verbs are syntactically derived. In particular, they emerge when a-categorial roots combine with categorizing heads v and n :. As already mentioned, we further assume that information about inflectional class, gender, and case is realized on n, for nouns e.

Once categorized, nP and vPs become part of extend projections, which we assume to be identical across languages. When it comes to bilingual speakers it is important to distinguish between utterances in monolingual mode and those in bilingual mode. Assuming that the abstract clausal structure is universal, these productions will differ in terms of realization and flavors of heads present in the structure see Grimstad, for extensive discussion of this point.

Speakers are able to shift from mode to mode, suggesting that in the monolingual mode alternative realizations are blocked. In the bilingual mode, matters are more complex. Let us illustrate this by discussing two of our patterns:. Both patterns involve cases where a root in combination with v or n create the vP and nP phase, respectively cf. Marantz, , and Arad, , In both cases, the complement of the phase head comes from one language, while the realization of n, v from the other language.

We have rejected above the GFSH, which appeals to visibility, though at first sight our data seem compatible with this, as in 50 and 51 , the realization of v an n seems to come from the language that makes more distinctions within a domain e. But note that it is not the case that all possible realizations of v and n are found in the data. This is particularly clear in the Greek case of mixing in the verbal domain, where the default verbalizer - ar - is used, although the language has a very rich system of verbalizers.

That is, the bilingual speaker in view of the fact that she has more VIs at her disposal will pick an overt realization, if a default such realization is available. The default realization is the one that is compatible with the largest number of roots, i. This competition is determined on the basis of the available VIs for the individual language pairs: e.

Let us illustrate this idea in some detail. By contrast, it is not clear what the default gender is in German, for reasons that have to do with gender shift in the history of the language neuter to masculine; Steinmetz, Thus, in the case of the Spanish-German pairs, the system treats masculine and neuter alike, while feminine nouns are always marked feminine.

In the Greek mixing pairs, the blocking of Germanic affixes on Greek roots is probably a PF effect, as we will show below for the verbal domain as well. For instance, a Greek root cannot appear ending in a consonant, thus bearing zero German or English morphology. As noun classes play a role similar to gender and are associated with n, this pair behaves similar to the other varieties we have been discussing here. Matters are different in the verbal domain. We hold that - ify - and its cognates across languages, i.

In languages where v is overtly realized by these forms, which are the default ones, roots combine with these to form the word-internal mixed cases, just as we have seen in the data reviewed in this paper. Spanish lacks verbalizers, although it has verbal conjugations. We assume that the features related to conjugation are attached post-syntactically Oltra-Massuet, Nevertheless, the features need to match the root in order for the appropriate conjugation to appear, ruling out Spanish inflection with German roots, again a PF effect.

These examples show that a Greek verbalizer cannot combine with a German root. She points out that word-internal and word-initial consonant clusters are dis-preferred in Greek. For that reason, Greek speakers instead make use of the light verb strategy, as seen in 5a , repeated here as Furthermore, it should be noted that the examples in 52 contain either an umlaut or a diphthong.

Neither of these exist in Greek phonology. Since Greek supplies the v, the output of word formation via incorporation needs to adhere to Greek phonotactics. Considering English-Norwegian, speakers combine English roots with Norwegian functional morphology, they generally do not combine Norwegian roots with English functional morphology.

However, as Grimstad shows, they do use English morphology in the verbal domain, though importantly, only in combination with English roots. In the nominal domain, there are cases of English functional morphology appearing with English roots see Haugen, and in particular Riksem, We do not find cases of Norwegian roots appearing with English functional morphology, which may be due to Norwegian being a heritage language and therefore, when English functional morphology is used, speakers will not insert a Norwegian root as we know that they have quite significant problems with lexical access, see again Grimstad, , and Riksem, Telugu is a bit more complex basically because inc is not exactly identical to ify , as it can be used to form non-lexical causatives as well.

This means that it might very well be that inc realizes something higher than our verbalizing v, i. This would explain why it would not be able to merge with an English root: Assuming that the combination between the verbalizer and the root is local, inc might simply be a realization of a v head in a higher phase, and thus it cannot combine with the English root.

Moreover, note that the ungrammatical examples cited in Bandi-Rao and den Dikken involve a stative verb combining with inc. That might very well be accidental. A more in-depth investigation of Telugu would be required in order to investigate this, which goes beyond the scope of the current paper.

The fact that speakers pick overt default realizations seems to suggest that all illicit combinations are filtered-out at PF. We mentioned earlier that several word-internal switches in Greek are filtered out because of phonotactics cf. MacSwan, , ; MacSwan and Colina, Put differently, the phonology within a phase head needs to be uniform. This is a far more refined role of phonology than an across-the-board ban on word-internal mixing.

There are, however, several issues and questions that we would like to raise. A first issue relates to the problem of root-equivalence, i. Does this suggest that the two forms have very different contexts of use or is it simply an issue of retrieval? Moreover, it is not the case that languages have the same inventory of roots Alexiadou and Lohndal, a , and the implications of this should be examined in the context of language mixing.

Moreover, the system predicts the possibility of double realization of a particular feature. Though such cases do exist, they are certainly limited. Finally, it is not entirely clear how the competition between different realizations of a particular feature is resolved. In other words, assuming the subset principle Halle, , how do we decide which form is more specific, the L1 or the L2 one? We have outlined above a system that favors overt realizations but picks default forms, thus blocking double realization.

In this paper, we have surveyed instances of word-internal language mixing across several different language pairs. In general, a root from one language can combine with functional morphology from another.

In cases where such a combination is not licit, we have argued that there may be two reasons why this is the case: Either because the language mode of the speaker suggests that the functional morphology should come from the language with overt default realization or because morpho-phonological reasons rule out the particular mixing in question.

We have also shown how a decompositional model like Distributed Morphology can be utilized to analyze the patterns. All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. We are grateful to reviewers for detailed feedback on this paper that hopefully has made it better and clearer. All remaining shortcomings are our own responsibility. Richard Page and M. Putnam Leiden: Brill , 12— Alexiadou, A. Gunkel, and G. Zifonun Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter , 21— Google Scholar. Building verbs in language mixing varieties.

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View 1 excerpt, cites background. View 10 excerpts, cites results, methods and background. Perspective switching in virtual environments. When exploring new environments, people regularly alternate among many sources of spatial information including direct visual input, navigation aids such as maps and mobile devices, and verbal route … Expand. View 5 excerpts, cites methods and background. Representational flexibility and specificity following spatial descriptions of real-world environments.

View 3 excerpts, cites background and results. Visuospatial working memory and the processing of spatial descriptions.

Moving through imagined space: Mentally simulating locomotion during spatial description reading. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp.

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Answers to Where-Questions, Discourse Processes 6: — Room Descriptions, Discourse Processes 7: — Sholl, M. Taylor, H. Descriptions and Depictions of Environments, Memory and Cognition — Tipper, S. Werner, S. Download references. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar.

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Search SpringerLink Search. Abstract Although considerations of discourse coherence and cognitive processing suggest that communicators should adopt consistent perspectives when describing spatial scenes, in many cases they switch perspectives.