TY - JOUR
T1 - The good, the bad, and the gradient
T2 - The role of losers in code-switching
AU - Putnam, Michael T.
AU - Klosinski, Robert
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank audiences at the University of Georgia and the University of Tromsø for comments on a previous version of this paper. We owe a debt of gratitude to Matt Goldrick for his assistance with earlier versions of this paper, especially with his contributions to Section 3 and the Appendix. A special thanks is also in order for Matt Carlson, John Hale, Lara Schwarz, Katharina Schuhmann, and Ron Then for helpful critique and discussion. We would like to thank 3 anonymous reviewers and the guest editors for this special volume for detailed comments and criticisms, which undoubtedly strengthened the final version of this paper. All remaining errors are the responsibility of the authors.
Publisher Copyright:
© John Benjamins Publishing Company.
PY - 2020/3/2
Y1 - 2020/3/2
N2 - Although formal analyses of code-switching have enjoyed some success in determining which structures and interfaces are more fertile environments for switches than others, research exposing recalcitrant counter-examples to proposed constraints and axioms responsible for governing code-switching is abound. We advance the claim here that sub-optimal representations, i.e., losers, stand to reveal important information regarding the interaction of grammatical principles and processing strategies of bilingual speakers and that any comprehensive analysis of code-switching phenomena should include them. These losers are the result of gradient activation in both input and output forms. We demonstrate how the formalism Gradient Symbolic Computation (GSC; Smolensky et al., 2014) can account for both of these observed facets of bilingual grammars in a unified manner. Building upon the work of Goldrick et al. (2016a,b), we provide an analysis of mixed determiner phrases (DPs) as an example of the fundamental components of a GSC-analysis.
AB - Although formal analyses of code-switching have enjoyed some success in determining which structures and interfaces are more fertile environments for switches than others, research exposing recalcitrant counter-examples to proposed constraints and axioms responsible for governing code-switching is abound. We advance the claim here that sub-optimal representations, i.e., losers, stand to reveal important information regarding the interaction of grammatical principles and processing strategies of bilingual speakers and that any comprehensive analysis of code-switching phenomena should include them. These losers are the result of gradient activation in both input and output forms. We demonstrate how the formalism Gradient Symbolic Computation (GSC; Smolensky et al., 2014) can account for both of these observed facets of bilingual grammars in a unified manner. Building upon the work of Goldrick et al. (2016a,b), we provide an analysis of mixed determiner phrases (DPs) as an example of the fundamental components of a GSC-analysis.
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U2 - 10.1075/lab.16008.put
DO - 10.1075/lab.16008.put
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85081542148
SN - 1879-9264
VL - 10
SP - 5
EP - 34
JO - Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
JF - Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
IS - 1
ER -