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Bare forms and lexical insertions in code-switching: A processing-based account

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2005

JONATHAN OWENS
JONATHAN OWENS
Affiliation:
Bayreuth University
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Abstract

Bare forms (or Ø forms), uninflected lexical L2 insertions in contexts where the matrix language expects morphological marking, have been recognized as an anomaly in different approaches to code-switching. Myers-Scotton (1997, 2002) has explained their existence in terms of structural incongruity between the matrix and embedded languages, while Poplack (Budzhak-Jones and Poplack, 1997) looks to distributional symmetries or asymmetries with other anomalous phenomena such as non-standard case marking. In corpus-based studies, bare forms often emerge as clinal in nature, with full matrix language marking appearing alongside bare forms. This suggests that discrete structural constraints are not the only factors, nor necessarily always the dominant ones in play. In this paper it is proposed that on-line processing constraints governed in particular by lexical frequency effects and inherent latencies associated with inflectional attachment may lead to bare forms. The argument is based on a multilingual corpus of native Arabic speakers from the city of Maiduguri in northeastern Nigeria.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , April 2005 , pp. 23 - 38
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2005

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Footnotes

The author would like to acknowledge the support of the German Research Council (DFG) via the special research project 560 centered at Bayreuth University, as well as the unstinting support of Klaus Wolf in the Computer Center. For the interpretation of the Ø forms, Mr. Jidda Hassan of the Department of Languages and Linguistics, Maiduguri University, a native speaker of Nigerian Arabic, was indispensable. Aspects of this paper were presented at the 32nd NWAVE conference. Three readers provided valuable suggestions for improvement.