Читать книгу A Companion to Chomsky - Группа авторов - Страница 36

Chomsky (1965) defined the focus of most formal linguistics when he argued the following:

Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker–listener, in a completely homogeneous speech‐community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance (Chomsky 1965, p. 3).

Put differently, the monolingual speaker has been given the primary role in formal (and many nonformal) investigations of language (cf. Benmamoun, Montrul, and Polinsky 2013). Concretely, when a native speaker Y of language X is asked to provide judgments on strings of words, the researcher has deliberately ignored the fact that Y may also know other languages to various degrees. It has been argued that this kind of simplification made it possible to create new theories of hitertho unattested complex empirical patterns (Lohndal 2013).

There are several reasons why formal grammar would want to extend its empirical and theoretical scope. Speakers who know multiple languages to different degrees provide another type of data which in turn present new theoretical opportunities. They come in different guises, ranging from balanced multilingual speakers to receptive heritage speakers who are able to understand their heritage language but not produce it.¹³ Given that a core objective in Chomskyan generative grammar is to model what a possible mental grammar is, data from multilingual speakers are extremely relevant (cf. Alexiadou and Lohndal 2016). These speakers also provide examples of what a possible grammar is, which is to say that the ecological validity of generative grammar is increased if it is able to account for what is after all the most common phenomenon today – namely that of being multilingual in one way or other (cf. Kupisch, Soares, Puig‐Mayenco, and Rothman, Chapter 15 of this volume).

With this as a backdrop, it should be added that Chomskyan generative grammar was extended fairly early on to situations and phenomena that do not fit the description in the quote above. Slabakova (Chapter 14 of this volume) shows this for second language learning, where substantial and crucial work especially started to emerge in the 1980s. However, multilingualism more generally has become much more prominent (cf. Kupisch, Soares, Puig‐Mayenco, and Rothman, Chapter 15 of this volume), in particular work on heritage languages (Polinsky 2018; Polinsky and Scontras 2020 make this vivid) and also work on code switching as an attempt to differentiate different formalisms. We will provide one example from the area of code switching and grammatical gender.

There has been a lot of discussion of how grammatical gender should be analyzed in the literature. Issues range from the nature of gender assignment to the syntactic location of gender features in the syntactic representation (see, among many others, Corbett 1991; Kramer 2016). The traditional assumption is that a gender feature is simply part of the lexical representation of a word. However, recent theoretical work has questioned this idea and also the idea that words are the grammatically relevant unit. Instead, words are epiphenomenal, a result of the syntactic derivation. In particular, Distributed Morphology has promoted the idea that the smallest units in a syntactic derivation are roots and functional elements that among others provide roots with a syntactic category (Marantz 1997; Alexiadou 2001; Arad 2003; Embick and Marantz 2008; Embick 2015). As an example, consider (29). In (29a), a root merges with a v to form a verb, and in (29b), the same root merges with an n to form a noun.

1 (29)[v v √ROOT ] b. [n n √ROOT ]

A root has to be merged in order to ensure that a category is assigned. Embick and Marantz (2008: 6) label this the categorization requirement. In her comprehensive approach to grammatical gender, Kramer (2015) argues that n is the locus of gender assignment. If true, that means that gender is syntactically assigned. This has important ramifications for understanding language mixing involving grammatical gender. For instance, in American Norwegian, a heritage language of Norwegian spoken in the United States (see Haugen 1953), speakers easily assign grammatical gender to nouns borrowed from English, i.e. masculine, feminine, or neuter gender; (30) provides some examples, where the English items are in boldface (Grimstad, Riksem, Lohndal, and Åfarli 2018, p. 198).

1 (30)a.en blanketa.M blanket‘a blanket’b.ei nursea.F nurse“a nurse”c.et crewa.N crew“a crew”

As Grimstad, Riksem, Lohndal, and Åfarli (2018, 198) point out, the genders on English items are not identicial to the translational equivalents in Norwegian. The question is what determines gender assignment for English words in American Norwegian. Arguing that speakers have one lexical representation with, say, blanket carrying a masculine gender feature, and one without such a feature, simply pushes the problem back: How come speakers have acquired two lexical representations where one has grammatical gender and the other does not? Instead, Grimstad, Riksem, Lohndal, and Åfarli (2018) make the case that gender is assigned syntactically. Following Kramer's (2015) specific implementation, gender features would be on n (cf. (29b)), meaning that if n has a gender feature and the root is an English root, then we get e.g. en blanket, as in (28a). The structures in (31) illustrate what this would look like for the three nouns in (30).

1 (31)[n n[MASCULINE] √BLANKET ][n n[FEMININE] √NURSE ][n n[NEUTER] √CREW ]

The major advantage of this analysis is that if gender were specified on the roots themselves, then multiple lexical entries for each root would be required. In contrast, the distributed approach in (31) allows the same root to be combined with any gender‐flavor of n, and the data from American Norwegian support this variability since several speakers assign a different gender to the very same root. There are certain patterns in how gender assignment works, e.g. phonological similarity with Norwegian words has been argued by Haugen (1953) to be a factor. Space does not allow us to expand on this analysis any further, but it demonstrates how data from multilingual speakers have become rather important in developing formal analyses of, say, grammatical gender and what the units of word formation actually are; see Alexiadou and Lohndal (2018) for further discussion.