Speaker: Faruk Akkuş (UMass Amherst)
Title: “Locating code-switching in the grammar”
When: Friday, November 6th, 3:30-5pm
Where: 32-141
Abstract:
This talk investigates “word”-internal language mixing among Turkish, Anatolian Arabic, and Northern Kurdish across verbal and nominal domains. Drawing on rarely studied trilingual code-switching data, the study explores how language contact shapes templatic and affixal morphology. To account for these patterns, the study adopts the No-Reversal Constraint (NRC, Akkuş 2025), which dictates that language mixing cannot switch back to a language that contributed a morpheme earlier in the derivation. Demonstrating that the NRC fares better than alternative formal approaches, this talk broadens the empirical coverage of the constraint and addresses two issues not discussed in Akkuş 2025. First, the NRC is shown to apply to morphosyntactic words prior to linearization, exerting a structural, bottom-up restriction (prohibiting [[A B] A] structures) rather than a simple left-to-right linear prohibition (*A-B-A). Second, language mixing occurs even without phonological or morphological integration – or when phonological processes do not track each other – confirming that these patterns reflect genuine code-switching rather than borrowing, and that the NRC operates independently of integration levels.