L2 Acquisition as a Process of Creolization: Insights from Child and Adult Code-Mixing

Abstract

Language contact which manifests itself as “code-mixing” constitutes a natural ground for investigating possible commonalities and differences between the L2 acquisition and pidginization/creolization processes. In this paper, we analyze spontaneous and experimental functional-lexical DP mixings in order to address the differences and similarities between the mental representation of language in the bilingual child, the bilingual adult and adult non-native language. Drawing a parallel with Pesetsky and Torrego’s (2001) proposal concerning the relationship between nominative case (nominative case is a T feature on D) and agreement (phi) (agreement is a D feature on T), we assume that Gender is an N feature on D and Gender Agreement is a D feature on N. This dichotomy allows us to make a number of predictions as to how the native and non-native mental representation of these features determines the directionality of code-switching (which language contributes the functional or the lexical category). We will argue that the comparative priorities for the specification of uninterpretable features in a given pair of languages that are already present in the emergent bilingual grammar are transferred to the adult bilingual grammar but do not show up in the case of the non-native grammar. We attribute this to the fact that adult native speakers do not process and internalize formal abstract features from input in the same way as children do (Liceras 2003). Thus, in the spirit of Bickerton (1984, 1996, 1999), we will argue that adults do not “create” language and, in this respect, adult non-native systems and pidgins may share a number of properties, as initially proposed by Schumann (1978) or Andersen (1983) and recently discussed by DeGraff (1999) and Winford (2003), among others. However, in the case of the pidgin/creole continuum, the non-native system will eventually become a native-like system as it develops into a creole, although due to the special language contact situation, some formal features may only make it into the creole system in cases where contact between the creole and the lexifier persists through several generations.