A Minimalist Approach to Intrasentential Code Switching:
Spanish-Nahuatl Bilingualism in Central MexicoJeff MacSwan
Arizona State University
A revised 1999 version of my dissertation work is available at Amazon.com or by contacting Garland Press. The book appears as part of Garland's series Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics.From the New Preface:
Although this book is part of a series of published dissertations, a number of important changes have been made here. Based on comments from friends and colleagues, I have made a number of corrections throughout, and I have updated, revised and expanded the literature cited. Perhaps most importantly, I have significantly expanded the conclusions section of chapter 5 (section 5.1), providing a much richer summary of the results of the analyses pursued in this volume.
I concluded the original preface to my dissertation by saying that I still viewed the work very much as a draft. While I am much more satisfied with the current version, and hope that it, rather than MacSwan (1997), will be taken as the best articulation of my current views, the project of understanding bilingualism and bilingual speech remains very much in its infancy. I hope that further study, both my own and that of others interested in these topics, will lead to refinements, new insights, and expanded inquiry.
However, the dissertation may still be downloaded, and is also available through University Microfilm International and at the UCLA University Research Library.
My dissertation explores some consequences of minimalist grammars for the data of code switching (or language mixture) using an original corpus of Spanish-Nahuatl data I collected in Mexico. In the model I develop, items may be drawn from the lexicon of either language to introduce features into the numeration which must be checked for convergence in just the same way as monolingual features must be checked (or must not "mismatch"); no special mechanisms are permitted (§5.1).I also conclude that code switching is impossible in the computation N ->PF (my PF Disjunction Theorem), since the rule ordering associated with the phonological component is not preserved under union (code switching); this conclusion is sustained empirically (§5.2.2.3-5.2.2.6, 5.3.1.7).
Chapters 1 and 6 discuss applied issues in bilingualism, touching on assessment, tracking of minority-language students, and notions of 'bilingual competence.' Chapter 2 is the literature review which spans numerous topics, including some critical discussion of other approaches to code switching. Chapter 3 details the research design, and chapter 4 is an annotated (descriptive) catalogue of my findings. Chapter 5 is the core chapter where the approach is outlined and the data is analyzed; here I present my framework, give counter-examples from my data to other approaches to code switching, and analyze my data and data from other code-switching corpora in terms of the framework developed. Pollock's (1994) idea that uninflected verbs do not undergo LF checking is extended to the Spanish-Nahuatl data, showing some interesting implications for the theory of movement.
Happy reading! Comments, of course, are welcome (at macswan@asu.edu).
TABLE OF CONTENTS FRONT MATTER AND PREFACE (xxiv+4 pgs): 110k .pdf or 88k zipped
1. RATIONALE (32 pgs): 127k .pdf or 103k zipped
2. LITERATURE REVIEW (83 pgs): 221k .pdf or 183k zipped
3. RESEARCH DESIGN (13 pgs): 34k .pdf or 27k zipped
4. BASIC FINDINGS (37 pgs): 95k .pdf or 77k zipped
5. A MINIMALIST APPROACH TO CODE SWITCHING (114 pgs): 294k .pdf or 243k zipped
6. SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR EDUCATION (31 pgs): 73k .pdf or 60k zipped
REFERENCES (28 pgs): 80k .pdf or 69k zipped
Or, for the whole document, click here for the .pdf version (932k) or here for the zipped .pdf version (772k).
Notes on Portable Document Format (.pdf) files and WinZipped files Files on this page are of two types: .pdf files and zipped .pdf files. The zipped files are compressed and will download a bit faster; to decompress them you'll need WinZip, a shareware program available at http://www.winzip.com/zdnet/download.cgi. If you're not using a PC, download the .pdf versions of the files, not the zipped versions.
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