Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T23:30:26.776Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Gender conflict resolution in Spanish–Basque mixed DPs*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2014

M. CARMEN PARAFITA COUTO ,
AMAIA MUNARRIZ ,
IRANTZU EPELDE ,
MARGARET DEUCHAR  and
BEÑAT OYHARÇABAL
M. CARMEN PARAFITA COUTO*
Affiliation:
Leiden University & Centre for Research on Bilingualism
AMAIA MUNARRIZ
Affiliation:
University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU
IRANTZU EPELDE
Affiliation:
CNRS, Centre de Recherche sur la langue basque – IKER (UMR 5478)
MARGARET DEUCHAR
Affiliation:
Bangor University & Centre for Research on Bilingualism
BEÑAT OYHARÇABAL
Affiliation:
CNRS, Centre de Recherche sur la langue basque – IKER (UMR 5478)
*
Address for correspondence: M. Carmen Parafita Couto, Leiden University Center for Linguistics (LUCL), Witte Singel-complex, van Wijkplaats 3, Room number 0.05b, Leiden University, 2311 BX Leiden, The Netherlands[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study analyzes gender assignment in Spanish–Basque mixed nominal constructions with nouns in Basque (a language that lacks gender) and determiners in Spanish (a language that marks gender) by using a multi-task approach: (i) naturalistic data, (ii) an elicitation task, and (iii) an auditory judgment task. Naturalistic data suggest cross-language effects under which a morphological marker of Basque (-a determiner) is interpreted as a morphophonological expression of gender marking in Spanish. A preference for feminine determiners was observed in the judgment task, which differs from the masculine default trend observed in Spanish–English bilinguals (Jake, Myers-Scotton & Gross, 2002). Our results point to feminine gender as default in Spanish–Basque mixed DPs, indicating that the resources that bilinguals use for gender assignment can be different from those of monolinguals. We argue that this is an outcome of interacting processes which take place at the interfaces (lexicon, phonology, morphosyntax) of both languages, resulting in cross-language effects.

Keywords

genderother-language insertionsBasqueSpanish
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 18 , Special Issue 2: L3 Acquisition: A Focus on Cognitive Approaches , April 2015 , pp. 304 - 323
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This work was funded in part by a British Academy Small Research Grant. The work presented in this paper was part of the programme of the ESRC Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Theory and Practice at Bangor University. This research was also partially supported by Basque Government (IT-676-13), University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU (UFI11/06), Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (BRAINGLOT CSD2007-00012), Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FFI2012-37884-C03-02) and Agence Nationale de la Recherche. Projet ACOBA. Programme Blanc. Édition 2010. We would also like to thank Yolanda Acedo, Ricardo Etxepare, Maria-José Ezeizabarrena, Marianne Gullberg, Iggy Roca, Jasone Salaberria, Mikel Santesteban, Hans Stadthagen-González, Jorge Valdés Kroff and Adam Zawiszewski, as well as three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and feedback. We are very grateful to the participants for generously helping us in this research.

References

Basque Government (2012). V. Inkesta Soziolingusitikoa. Euskal Autonomia Erkidegoa, Nafarroa eta Iparraldea [Fifth Sociolinguistic Survey of Basque Autonomous Community, Navarre and Iparralde]. Vitoria-Gasteiz: Eusko Jaurlaritza.Google Scholar
Corbett, G. G. (1991). Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Davis, C. J., & Perea, M. (2005). BuscaPalabras: A program for deriving orthographic and phonological neighborhood statistics and other psycholinguistic indices in Spanish. Behavior Research Methods, 37, 665–671.Google Scholar
Deuchar, M., Epelde, I., Oyharçabal, B., & Parafita Couto, M. C. (2010). Gender agreement in Spanish–Basque and Spanish–English nominal constructions. Presented at the XXXIX Simposio Internacional de la SEL, Santiago de Compostela, Spain.Google Scholar
Dussias, P. E., Valdés Kroff, J. R., Guzzardo Tamargo, R. E., & Gerfen, C. (2013). When gender and looking go hand in hand: Grammatical gender processing in L2 Spanish. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 35, 353–387.Google Scholar
Epelde, I., & Oyharçabal, B. (2010). Perpaus barneko hizkuntza lerratzeak ekialdeko euskal elebidunetan [Basque intrasentential code-switching among Basque bilinguals from the Northern Basque Country]. In Fernández, B., Albizu, P. & Etxepare, R. (eds.), Euskara eta euskarak: aldakortasun sintaktikoa aztergai [Syntactic variation: Evidence from Basque], pp. 55–65. Bilbao: University of the Basque Country.Google Scholar
Etxebarria, M. (2004). Español y euskera en contacto: Resultados lingüísticos. Revista Internacional de Linguística Iberoamericana, 4, 131–145.Google Scholar
Ezeizabarrena, M. J. (2009). Development in language mixing: Early Basque–Spanish bilingualism. In Grinstead, J. (ed.), Hispanic child languages: Typical and impaired development, pp. 57–89. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Ezeizabarrena, M. J., & Aéby, S. (2010). Les phénomènes de code-switching dans les conversations adulte–enfant(s) en basque–espagnol: une approche syntaxique. In Oliviéri, M. (ed.), La syntaxe de corpus, special issue of Corpus, 9, 53–80.Google Scholar
Ezeizabarrena, M. J., & Munarriz, A. (2012). Orden de palabras en los enunciados mixtos (euskera–castellano) de bilingües típicos y atípicos. In Cestero Mancera, A. M., Molina Martos, I. & Paredes García, F. (eds.), La lengua, lugar de encuentro, pp. 3893–3902. Alcalá de Henares: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alcalá. [http://alfal2011.mundoalfal.org/#/pdf/440alfal.pdf, retrieved February 10, 2013]Google Scholar
Gullberg, M., Indefrey, P., & Muysken, P. (2009). Research techniques for the study of code-switching. In Bullock, B. E. & Toribio, A. J. (eds.), The Cambridge handbook on linguistic code-switching, pp. 21–39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Harris, J. (1991). The exponence of gender in Spanish. Linguistic Inquiry, 22, 27–62.Google Scholar
Hock, H. H. (1986). Principles of historical linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hualde, J. I. (2003). Segmental phonology. In Hualde & Ortiz de Urbina (eds.), pp. 15–63.Google Scholar
Hualde, J. I., & Ortiz de Urbina, J. (eds.) (2003). A grammar of Basque. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Ibarra, O. (2011). Sobre estrategias discursivas de los jóvenes vascohablantes: causas que motivan el cambio de código. Oihenart, 26, 277–298.Google Scholar
Jake, J., Myers-Scotton, C., & Gross, S. (2002). Making a minimalist approach to codeswitching work: Adding the Matrix Language. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 5, 69–91.Google Scholar
Lantto, H. Code-switching, swearing and slang: The colloquial register of Basque in Greater Bilbao. International Journal of Bilingualism, doi:10.1177/1367006912457274. Published online by SAGE, August 31, 2012.Google Scholar
Larrañaga, P., & Guijarro-Fuentes, P. (2013). The linguistic competence of early Basque–Spanish bilingual children and a Spanish monolingual child. International Journal of Bilingualism, 17, 577–601.Google Scholar
Liceras, J. M., Fernández Fuentes, R., Perales, S., Pérez-Tattam, R., & Spradlin, K. T. (2008). Gender and number agreement in bilingual native and non-native grammars: A view from child and adult functional-lexical mixings. Lingua, 118, 761–852.Google Scholar
MacSwan, J. (2005a). Codeswitching and generative grammar: A critique of the MLF model and some remarks on “modified minimalism”. Bilingualism: Language and Congition, 8, 1–22.Google Scholar
MacSwan, J. (2005b). Comments on Jake, Myers-Scotton and Gross's response: There is no “matrix language”. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 8, 277–284.Google Scholar
Michelena, L. (1979). Miscelánea filológica vasca, I, 2. Fontes Linguae Vasconum, 11, 205–228.Google Scholar
Michelena, L., & Sarasola, I. (1987–2013). Orotariko Euskal Hiztegia – Diccionario General Vasco [General dictionary of Basque]. Bilbao: Euskaltzaindia.Google Scholar
Muysken, P. (2000). Bilingual speech: A typology of code-mixing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Myers-Scotton, C. (2002). Contact linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Perea, M., Urkia, M., Davis, C. J., Agirre, A., Laseka, E., & Carreiras, M. (2006). A word-frequency list and a program for deriving psycholinguistic statistics in an agglutinative language (Basque). Behavior Research Methods, 38, 610–615.Google Scholar
Poplack, S., & Dion, N. (2012). Myths and facts about loanword development. Language Variation and Change, 24, 279–315.Google Scholar
Poplack, S., & Meechan, M. (1998). Introduction: How languages fit together in codemixing. International Journal of Bilingualism, 2, 127–138.Google Scholar
Poplack, S., Puousada, A., & Sankoff, D. (1982). Competing influences on gender assignment: Variable process, stable outcome. Lingua, 57, 1–28.Google Scholar
Poplack, S., Sankoff, D., & Miller, C. (1988). The social correlates and linguistic processes of lexical borrowing and assimilation. Linguistics, 26, 47–104.Google Scholar
Roca, I. M. (1989). The organisation of grammatical gender. Transactions of the Philological Society, 87, 1–32.Google Scholar
Roca, I. M. (2005). La gramática y la biología en el género del español. Revista Española de Lingüística, 35, 17–44.Google Scholar
Sarasola, I., Salaburu, P., & Landa, J. (2013). Egungo Testuen Corpusa (ETC). [http://www.ehu.es/etc/, retrieved December 22, 2013]Google Scholar
Stammers, J., & Deuchar, M. (2012). Testing the nonce borrowing hypothesis: Counter-evidence from English-origin verbs in Welsh. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15, 630–643.Google Scholar
Teschner, R. V., & Russell, W. M. (1984). The gender patterns of Spanish nouns: An inverse dictionary-based analysis. Hispanic Linguistics, 1, 115–132.Google Scholar
Trask, R. L. (2003). The Noun Phrase: Nouns, determiners and modifiers; pronouns and names. In Hualde & Ortiz de Urbina (eds.), pp. 113–171.Google Scholar
Zubin, D., & Köpcke, K. (1984). Affect classification in the German Gender System. Lingua, 63, 41–96.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Parafita Couto Supplementary Material

Questionnaire

Download Parafita Couto Supplementary Material(File)
File 172.4 KB