Resumen

SILVIA, KIM. Spanish in Contact with Korean: New Insights into Language Switching. Cuad. linguist. hisp. [online]. 2020, n.36, pp.155-180.  Epub 01-Nov-2020. ISSN 0121-053X.  https://doi.org/10.19053/0121053x.n36.2020.11301.

'Code-switching' (CS) refers to language-mixing where individuals who speak two or more languages switch from one to another, often mid-sentence. Several morpho-syntactic constraints governing when switches happen have been proposed in prior work, mostly on Spanish-English CS (e.g. Timm, 1975; Pfaff, 1979; Poplack, 1980). However, what happens when the languages are typologically different? This is the case with Spanish-Korean CS, which has not been systematically investigated. Korean and Spanish differ in many respects, including clause structure/word order, absence/presence of articles, and morphology (Korean: agglutinative, Spanish: fusional) (Kwon, 2012; Bosque, Demonte, Lázaro, Pavón & Española, 1999). For the present study, balanced Spanish-Korean bilinguals were interviewed to obtain a naturalistic corpus of CS. Strikingly, we find that many constraints proposed for Spanish-English CS do not hold for Spanish-Korean. Specifically, there are three main ways that Spanish-Korean CS violates the constraints proposed for Spanish-English: (i) in contexts involving word order/clause structure, (ii) on the level of nouns and (iii) on the level of morphemes. Crucially, the violations are not random: We suggest that they stem from the typological differences between Korean and Spanish. This work highlights the empirical and theoretical benefits of including typologically diverse language pairs when investigating CS.

Palabras clave : Spanish-Korean; code-switching; bilingualism; typology; Free Morpheme Constraint; Functional Head Constraint.

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