Bilingual Grammar

An extended argument that bilingual speakers have an integrated linguistic competence, rather than two separate grammatical systems.

Using empirical evidence from linguistic theory and psycholinguistics, López argues that bilingual linguistic competence should be regarded as an integrated system. This book is of interest to anyone working in the fields of linguistics and psycholinguistics, especially bilingualism, code-switching, and the lexicon.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.