Evidence against a Third Grammar : Code-switching in Italian-German Bilingual Children

In this paper we will discuss the issue of code-switching by analyzing data from bilingual children. There has been a long debate in the linguistic research field about what is to define as code-switching and on which constraints this speech style involves. Sociolinguists and psycholinguists as well as generativists studied adult code-switching, assuming several underlying rules not only for the language context in which code-switching should be applied (cf. among others Gumperz 1976, Grosjean 2001), but also for the syntactical rules that it should require (cf. among others Poplack 1980, DiSciullo, Muysken & Singh 1986, Belazi, Rubin & Toribio 1994, Muysken 1995). Along this line of research, some switches are considered to be ungrammatical because they violate specific constraints which have been formulated in order to regulate code-switching. These restrictions, although they try to take into account universal constraints as government and dependancy relations, seem to represent a specific grammar of code-switching rather than to reflect the grammar of the two languages involved. In addition to this research agenda, several studies within the field of bilingual first language acquisition focussed on the mixing produced by young bilinguals, asking why the children mix their two languages and whether the mixed utterances differ quantitatively and qualitatively from adult‘s code-switching (cf. among others Meisel 1994, Köppe 1996). Our data will show that the children‘s mixing is absolutely comparable to instances of adult‘s codeswitching. From this we assume that even the earliest mixed utterances can be considered as cases of code-switching. We specifically will analyze intrasentential mixes in the bilingual children‘s data and, following MacSwan‘s minimalist approach (1997, 2000), we will claim that there is no third grammar which constrains code-switching, so that no grammatical constraints like the restrictions proposed in the literature are needed to control the mixing in an artificial way. We will argue that all mixes are to be considered as grammatical as long as they respect the constraints requested by the two languages involved. MacSwan‘s assumption that 'Nothing constrains code switching apart from the requirements of the mixed grammars’ (1997: 36) will be confirmed by the empirical data studied here. The paper is organized as follows: In section 1 we will discuss some terminology and present recent works on code-switching; in 1.1 we make some remarks on the definiton of code-switching that will be used in this study and determine what is the language context which underlies the data recording situation; in 1.2 we discuss studies on adult‘s codeswitching; in 1.3 we give an overview of studies on mixing in bilingual children; 1.4 we briefly discuss current hypotheses on interrelations between codeswitching and the representation of the bilingual mind. In section 2 we will present data from four bilingual Italian German bilingual children; 2.1 gives some methodological explanations on how the data were collected; in 2.2 we show the figures and tables of the mixes, presenting a quantitative discussion of the mixes in 2.2.1, and a qualitative one in 2.2.2, including several children‘s utterances as examples for code-switching; in 2.2. 3 we put forward the hypothesis that all the mixes discussed here can be considered as grammatical and as instances of code-switching. In section 3, we discuss preliminary results which can be drawn from our analysis of the mixed utterances, assuming a grammatical perspective. Furthermore, we will conclude by proposing how to interpret our findings with respect to a minimalist view of the bilingual language faculty.