Interesting data

[Jeff MacSwan]

At 01:30 PM 11/21/99 -0700, Frances Karttunen wrote:
>I was sent the following Nahuatl data from a very recent publication.  It
>seems that for the provider of these data, the fact that Nahuatl does not
>distinguish masculine and feminine third person singular subjects is a
>problem that has been solved by resort to Spanish el/ella.
>
>The reference is
>MacSwan, Jeff.  A minimalist approach to intrasentential code switchine.
>1999.  NY:  Garland.  (this is a revision of his 1998 UCLA dissertation)

Fran,

Actually, my analysis is concerned with grammaticality in codeswitching.  I
wouldn't say that the use of the third person Spanish pronoun compensates
for a Nahuatl pronoun which is unspecified for gender, especially since
these examples were presented to bilingual consultants who gave
grammaticality judgments on them.  But it does turn out that bilinguals can
mix languages at this boundary for third person but not first or second.

In my analysis of the examples you quote below, I relate the grammaticality
of the third person cases to the absence of overt third-person agreement
morphology on the Nahuatl verb, and argue, in line with a proposal Pollock
made for English, that verbs don't have to check agreement when they lack
relevant morphology.

For anyone interested in reading more about these and other Spanish-Nahuatl
examples, my 1999 Garland book is the best source (ask your library to
order it if you don't find it!).  But the Garland book is a revision of my
dissertation, and that's free on the web, at

http://www.public.asu.edu/~macswan/diss.html

I also wrote up a shorter paper which might be of interest (the data quoted
below is treated on pages 32ff).  You can download the paper version at

http://www.public.asu.edu/~macswan/newcastle.pdf

Thanks for your interest!

Jeff

>Some acceptable examples with el and ella are:
>
>El kikoas tlakemetl
>'He will buy clothes'
>
>Ella kikoas tlakemetl
>'She will buy clothes'
>
>The comparable ungrammatical ones are:
>
>*Yo nikoas tlakemetl
>'I will buy clothes'
>
>*Tu tikoas tlakemetl
>'You will buy clothes'
>
>These are all on page 192 of his book.
>