Question on adult bilinguals and codeswitching

[Lorraine Rice]

Another thought which may support the idea that in
some languages the masculine (neuter?) gender is
unmarked: in French, borrowed nouns from other
languages automatically take the masculine gender
(e.g. le shopping, le parking, le karaoke...). This is
the standard in the language for borrowed lexicon, and
not particular to bilinguals. On a personal note, as a
French-English bilingual, I was fascinated to read
this message as I have often noticed myself doing the
same thing noted with your Spanish-English informants,
that is inserting an English word into a French
sentence and giving it the masculine gender by
default.

Lorraine Rice

--- Gary Morgan <g.morgan at city.ac.uk> wrote:
> Dear colleagues, the recent discussion on bilinguals
> has prompted me the
> send out this question.
>
> I have collected spontaneous language data from
> adult Spanish-English
> balanced bilinguals in London England. I have
> noticed that when they use
> Spanish as the matrix language and insert an English
> noun into the sentence
> they use the determiner / el / regardless of the
> gender of that noun in
> Spanish.
>
> el libro es abajo del / table /
> the book is under the table
>
> Table is / la mesa / in Spanish
>
> Also happens with demonstratives and adjectives.
>
> My question is does this happen in other
> Spanish-English bilinguals? I have
> noticed it doesn't when the speaker is clearly
> dominant in Spanish, then
> they use the Spanish gender agreement.
>
> I assumed that / el /  was simply being used as a
> default because there is
> no neuter in Spanish but an informal enquiry of
> people working on
> bilingualism has yielded the following:
> Italian-English and German-English
> bilinguals don't act like Spanish but Czech -
> English bilinguals do. There
> might be an explanation in phonology.
>
> Any comments?
> Gary
> -------------------------
> G. Morgan, PhD
> Dept. of Language & Communication Science
> City University, Northampton Square
> London, EC1V 0HB
> Tel: 0207 040 8291
> Fax: 0207 040 8577,lab: 0207 040 8979
> g.morgan at city.ac.uk,
> http://www.staff.city.ac.uk/g.morgan/index.htm
> --------------------------
>
>


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