Bilingual Grammar Toward an Integrated Model

Does a bilingual person have two separate lexicons and two separate grammatical systems? Or should the bilingual linguistic competence be regarded as an integrated system? This book explores this issue, which is central to current debate in the study of bilingualism, and argues for an integrated hypothesis: the linguistic competence of an individual is a single cognitive faculty, and the bilingual mind should not be regarded as fundamentally different from the monolingual one. This conclusion is backed up with a variety of empirical data, in particular code-switching, drawn from a variety of bilingual pairs. The book introduces key notions in minimalism and distributed morphology, making them accessible to readers with different scholarly foci. This book is of interest to those working in linguistics and psycholinguistics, especially bilingualism, code-switching, and the lexicon.

1. Introduction. Motivating a unified linguistic system; 2. Remarks on separationist architectures; 3. Phases, distributed morphology and some contributions from code-switching; 4. 1Lex in MDM; 5. Building the case for 1Lex: Gender; 6. 1PF in MDM; 7. Lexical questions: what do you know when you know a word?; 8. Psycho-syntactic questions: acquisition, priming and co-activation, and a note on the processing cost; 9. Convergent and divergent paths; 10. General conclusions; 11. Appendix. Restrictions on code-switching; 12. Appendix. The Creole continuum; List of figures; Acknowledgements; References; Endnotes.

Luis López is Professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Fulbright Commission. He is the author of three books in theoretical linguistics and many articles.