This article presents empirical evidence that disfavors using highly lexicalist minimalist models, such as the one presented in Chomsky (1995), when analyzing language mixing. The data analyzed consist of English – Spanish mixed noun phrases discussed in Moro (2014) as well as English – Norwegian mixed noun phrases and verbs taken from the Corpus of American Norwegian Speech. Whereas the lexicalist ...

The growing interdisciplinary research feld of psycholinguistics is in constant need of new and up-to-date tools which will allow researchers to answer complex questions, but also expand on languages other than English, which dominates the feld. One type of such tools are picture datasets which provide naming norms for everyday objects. However, existing databases tend to be small in terms of ...

In order to understand the human ability for language, we cannot simply focus on the idealized monolingual speaker or signer (Chomsky, 1965). Rather, as much work in second language acquisition has recognized, it is also necessary to study instances where a person masters two or more languages at different levels of proficiency. Today’s globalized world with increased migration will further ...

The notion of complexity is evasive and often left to intuition, yet it is often invoked when studying heritage language grammars. In this article, we propose a first pass at decomposing the notion of complexity into smaller components in a formal grammatical model. In particular, we argue that a distributed model of the lexicon (i.e., one that assumes that principles that generate both words and ...

Language mixing is a ubiquitous phenomenon characterizing bilingual speakers. A frequent context where two languages are mixed is the word-internal level, demonstrating how tightly integrated the two grammars are in the mind of a speaker and how they adapt to each other. This raises the question of what the minimal unit of language mixing is, and whether or not this unit differs depending on what ...

This paper investigates spontaneous production from 50 speakers of Norwegian heritage language in the Corpus of American Nordic Speech and studies the interplay between four linguistic properties: possessives and double definiteness, verb second word order, grammatical gender, and the amount of language mixing. It is shown that speakers cluster in the sense that some speakers produce more Norwegian-like ...

This chapter provides an overview of the micro-variation in Norwegian when it comes to Verb Second (V2) word order, both in the various dialects and in the two written standards. The variation is dependent on a number of factors, including clause type, type of initial element, and information structure. This overview demonstrates a rich inventory of micro-systems, raising the question of how children ...

Reverend Thomas Bridges’ Yagan-English dictionary (1879) has hitherto been little explored outside of linguistics but is highly valuable as a complementary source to archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic records in Tierra del Fuego (Argentina and Chile). The dictionary contains 22,800 entries and yields rich information concerning the marine lifeways of the Yagan and their and ...