“Ich spreche Englisch, ich spreche Deutsch, aber was ist das für eine Sprache?” Emigranto – a grammatical approach to code-switching

This paper presents the first grammar of Emigranto, the German/Englishmixed code spoken by Jewish refugees residing in London, UK. It goes backto Gardner-Chloros & Edwards’ (2004) paper by showing that the German/English bilinguals possess two identifiable linguistic systems or languages,each with its grammatical rules and lexicon, and that the mixedvariety results from the interaction between lexical elements and grammaticalrules from these languages. It supports Gardner-Chloros and Edwards’argument that grammar is distinct from the processes driving language production,but shows that knowledge about both can be derived from an analysisthat combines syntactic relations with processing features. The results ofthis analysis are captured in the Distance Hypothesis, which states thatgreater dependency distance increases the chances of code-mixing (DuranEppler 2010). The paper concludes that there is more variation in bilingualthan in monolingual data, but it argues that (a.) this does not preclude grammaticalapproaches to code-switching – they just have to be probabilistic –and (b.) variation has to be tackled if we want to identify grammatical regularitiesin natural speech