Testing the Endoskeletal Hypothesis in English/German bilingual code-switching
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2022/13/0030/000572Keywords:
Syntax, Bilingualism, Code-switching, Endoskeletal HypothesisAbstract
In this paper, I report an experiment that provides preliminary evidence in favour of the Endoskeletal Hypothesis with respect to word-order constraints on subordinate clauses in English-German bilingual sentences. The debate between exoskeletal (structure-driven) and endoskeletal (lexically driven) models of syntax remains contentious in contemporary syntactic theory, yet there has been no theory-neutral attempt to distinguish between the predictions of these two models. In this study, I utilise the unique opportunity presented by bilingual code-switched sentences to test the predictions of these hypotheses against speaker judgements. The results of this experiment provide preliminary evidence in favour of the Endoskeletal Hypothesis (EnH).
References
Borer, H. 2003. Exo-skeletal vs. endo-skeletal explanations: Syntactic projections and the lexicon. In Moore, J. C., Polinsky, M. (eds.), The Nature of Explanation in Linguistic Theory, 31-67. Stanford: CSLI.
Schütze, C. T., Sprouse, J. 2013. Judgement data. In Podesva, R. J., Sharma, D. (eds.), Research Methods in Linguistics, 27-50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tukey, J. W. 1977. Exploratory Data Analysis. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley.
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Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
