Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

Section A: Language Contact 13
(8) Inork ez daki (Basque)
nobody.ERG NEG knows
‘Nobody knows it’
The analysis: This paper accounts for the syntactic distribution of N-words in preverbal and
postverbal positions in Basque Spanish. Furthermore, it discriminates between what is
transferred from Basque, if anything, and what is kept as part of the syntax of Romance
languages. These two goals are accomplished by: (i) determining the syntactic properties of
Basque Spanish N-words, (ii) comparing them with the syntactic properties of negative
elements in Basque and Standard Spanish. Thus, whereas Basque Spanish N-words abide by
the syntax of Standard Spanish (i.e. negative XPs are not NPIs), some similarities with
Basque, such as seemingly parallel word orders and absence of anti-agreement effects induced
speakers of this variety to interpret the doubling NEG head as an agreement marker and
develop a negative concord relation with the preverbal N-word.
The universal component of Gender Agreement in Code-
Switching
González-Vilbazo, Kay E. / Rothe, Astrid
University of Illinois at Chicago UIC / Universität zu Köln
kay.gonzalez@uni-koeln.de;astrid.rothe@uni-koeln.de
Our talk deals with gender agreement in DPs which contain a code-switch between the noun
and its determiner. In monolingual contexts, the gender of the noun and the determiner have
to agree, as in the Spanish examples in (1) and (2), i.e. they have to bear the same abstract
gender feature.
(1) el tenedor
the-MASC. fork-MASC.
(2) *la tenedor
the-FEM. fork-MASC.
In our data from code-switching pairs like Spanish/German or French/German (Gonzalez
1996, Gonzalez/Müller 2003 and Rothe 2004/2005), we found gender agreement patterns that
differ strikingly from known monolingual patterns. Example (3) shows a mixed DP in which
the noun and its determiner bear different genders and yet the example is grammatical. In (4),
we can observe that changing the gender renders the DP ungrammatical.
(3) el Brötchen
the-MASC. bun-NEUT.
(4) *la Brötchen
the-FEM. bun-NEUT.
Even more unexpected is the fact shown in (5), where a DP containing a noun and a
determiner with the same gender turns out to be ungrammatical.
(5) *der cuaderno
ART-MASC. notebook-MASC.
These agreement patterns can be explained without postulating a specific grammar for codeswitching.
All that is required are the monolingual grammars of the involved languages and a
general theory about agreement. This is captured in the agreement constraint (Gonzalez 2005)