LINGUIST List 11.2373

Wed Nov 1 2000

Qs: Grammatical Gender/Codeswitching, Reduplication

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Florencia Franceschina, Grammatical Gender in Code-Switching
2. Teal Nicole Bissell, Reduplication cases

Dear Linguist list members

I would like to know if anybody knows of any studies of how native speakers
of Spanish (or any other language which has grammatical gender) use
grammatical gender in the context of CS as opposed to non-native speakers of
the matrix language.

I have observed in my data (informal conversations between Spanish native
and non-native speakers) that the Spanish native speakers tend to produce CS
sentences like the following:

(1) Estos shoes est�n nuevitos.
 These(masc) shoes are new(masc).

(2) Tuvimos una worksheet de deberes.
 We had a(fem) worksheet for homework.

In examples like the ones above, determiners and adjectives take the gender
agreement that would be triggered by the Spanish counterpart of the English
noun used. By contrast, I have not found evidence of this sort of agreement
between determiners/adjectives and the CS noun in L1 English speakers of
Spanish.

I would be grateful if somebody could point me in the direction of any
research done in this area.

Thank you in advance.

Florencia Franceschina
ffrancessex.ac.uk

I am looking for languages in which reduplication is used to express a
certain morpheme when the root is of one shape, while a different process
is used to express the same morpheme when the root is of a different
shape. If anyone knows of such a language, I would appreciate your getting
in touch with me.

				Thanks,
				Teal Bissell
				MIT Dpmt. of Linguistics & Philosophy
				bissellmit.edu