No-Reversal Constraint and beyond

Abstract

This study investigates various un(der)studied word-internal language mixing patterns among Turkish, Anatolian Arabic and Northern Kurdish, in the context of both verbal and nominal domains. The examination of these patterns reveals various theoretical implications. First, head-directionality may change as a result of language contact. Second, in some instances, certain functional categories are borrowed as semantically vacuous heads, and are identical to their bare counterparts (cf. Marantz 2013; Anagnostopoulou and Samioti 2014). Therefore, such semantically empty heads are ignored for meaning. Moreover, informed by the rarely-discussed trilingual language-mixing contexts, the study demonstrates that various formal approaches to code-switching which rely on either a distinction between functional vs lexical categories or phasehood as the defining constraint on code-switching are not tenable (e.g., Poplack 1981; Belazi et al. 1994; López et al. 2017). This study demonstrates language mixing is more permissive for the languages in question than would be predicted by these approaches, and proposes the No-Reversal Constraint, whose governing restriction is that code-switching does not allow a switch back to a language that has already been externalized earlier in the derivation.