Word-Internal Code-Switching Constraints in a Bilingual Child's Grammar

The correlation between a bilingual's usage of grammatical morphemes from one of his/her languages and his/her language dominance is examined. The subject is a three-year-old Danish/English bilingual who code-switches at the morpheme level even though she has never been exposed to a code-switch...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author Petersen, Jennifer
Format Report
LanguageEnglish
Published 13.09.1986
Subjects
Bilingualism
Child Language
Code Switching (Language)
Correlation
Danish
Discourse Analysis
English
Form Classes (Languages)
Grammar
Interference (Language)
Language Dominance
Language Usage
Morphemes
Uncommonly Taught Languages
Young Children
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Summary:The correlation between a bilingual's usage of grammatical morphemes from one of his/her languages and his/her language dominance is examined. The subject is a three-year-old Danish/English bilingual who code-switches at the morpheme level even though she has never been exposed to a code-switching bilingual community. Co-occurrence restrictions are found in her code-switching grammar as follows: English grammatical morphemes co-occur with either English or Danish lexical morphemes, but Danish grammatical morphemes co-occur only with Danish lexical morphemes. It appears that in utterances containing morpheme-level code-switching, the encoding of grammatical morphemes in one language is an indication of the dominance of that language. By that criterion, the code-switching of this subject is English-dominant. (Author/MSE)
Bibliography:Paper presented at the Minnesota Linguistics Conference (Minnesota, September 13, 1986).