Each individual from the first group received a written invitation to participate in the study. The invitation contained general information about the project and instructions for audio-recording of conversations. It specifically asked the respondents to record themselves and their communication partners in spontaneous everyday interaction, so as to emphasise the importance of recording conversations that reflect natural language use. Moreover, the invitation asked the respondent to engage in conversation with their peers, i.e., friends and/or relatives of a similar age and with the same Russia German background. It also instructed the participant to inform beforehand the conversation partners about the audio-recording and to obtain their consent on it. Finally, it guaranteed all the persons involved that the audio-recordings would be used only for research purposes and in an anonymous format.

A first attempt to recruit Russia German young adults consisted in sending the invitation to the Youth and Student Association of Germans from Russia (*Jugendund Studentenring der Deutschen aus Russland e.V.*), which is the youth organisation of the Homeland Association of Germans from Russia (*Landsmannschaft von Deutschen aus Russland e.V.*), and the Youth Migration Service of the Caritas Association of Freiburg (*Jugendmigrationsdienst des Caritasverbandes Freiburg-Stadt e.V.*).7 Whilst my request addressed to the former organisation remained without response, the latter organisation kindly provided me with a list of persons willing to participate in the study. Two respondents, Svetlana and Elena (here and below I use fictitious names), could be recruited in this way. Another partici-

7The mentioned organisations are all incorporated associations (*eingetragene Vereine, e.V.*).

### 3.3 Research participants: Russia German youths and young adults

pant, Tatyana, was recruited from my personal Hanover network. Notwithstanding our previous acquaintance, she remained unaware of my specific interest in gathering speech samples with code-mixing until the end of the data collection.

My efforts to recruit young Russia Germans in Lahr, a city in Baden with a large proportion of Russia Germans (cf. Roll 2003), were futile, despite the mediation of the local group of the Homeland Association of Germans from Russia. The contacted persons either felt reluctant to participate in the research study or, being second generation immigrants, demonstrated only a limited command of Russian and thus did not meet the study's selection criteria. However, Lahr's local group played a major role in establishing contact with Marina, an respondent from Villingen-Schwenningen. Finally, I distributed posters publicising the project on the University of Freiburg campus. Two students with the Russia German background could be recruited thereby: Irina and Olga. They were both living in the aforementioned city of Lahr and were strongly rooted in the local Russia German networks. With their help, a total of six Russia German young adults volunteered for data collection. Irina and Olga were involved in at least one audio-recorded conversation, which they had held with members of their social networks. A speech sample of another Russia German, Julia, was taken from the Regensburg corpus of Slavic-German bilinguals (*Das Regensburger Korpus slavisch-deutscher Bilingualer*); in this corpus, collected by Grillborzer & Meyer (2008-2009), each speech sample is supplemented by relevant sociolinguistic information about the speaker.

As regards the other group, i.e., Russia German youths, they were all senior students of *Die Kaufmännischen Schulen*/*das Integrierte Berufliche Gymnasium Lahr* ('the commercial schools/vocational secondary school of Lahr'). At this level of education, completion of a second foreign-language programme is compulsory. In order to pass this course successfully or with little effort, some Russia German students, although they may have acquired Russian as an L1, chose Russian as their second foreign language subject. Yet, other Russia German students elected the Russian course for further reasons. Some sought, for example, to acquire literacy in Russian and to thus enhance their language proficiency. The identified motivations should however not be conceived of as mutually exclusive. Although many Russia German students had acquired Russian as an L1, their proficiencies in Russian differed. This variability is presumably determined by a shift, at least in some of the individuals, to German as a primary language.

The director of the school and the Russian teacher allowed me to establish contact with the students and engage them in an elicitation task. The task was to be carried out in freely formed discussion groups of three or four students. Free choice of partners allowed the students to consider the natural bonds and

### 3 Introducing the research participants and the corpus

affiliations existing between them while forming groups. This measure was intended to facilitate lively and natural group discussions. After the groups were formed, the students were confronted with the task, which consisted in comparing and contrasting aspects of Russian and German cultures. The group discussions, stimulated by a set of prepared questions, were recorded for subsequent analysis. The questions contained mixed utterances such as *Kak možno ocharakterisovat' Russlanddeutsche doma im Vergleich zu den einheimischen Deutschen?* 'How can Russia Germans be characterised at home when compared to indigenous Germans?' (the first three words of the question as well as the word *doma* 'at home' are Russian), or *Silvester i Weihnachten, was wisst Ihr von den Traditionen in Russland und Deutschland? Kak prasdnujut Russlanddeutsche simnie prasdniki?* 'New Year's Eve and Christmas, what do you know about the traditions in Russia and Germany? How do Russia Germans celebrate the winter holidays?' (the first sentence is in German except for the Russian coordinator *i* 'and', the second sentence is in Russian except for the autonymic ethnonym Russia Germans).

The analysis revealed that six of the thirteen students had high fluency in Russian and frequently switched the languages during the group discussions. All of them had learnt Russian in early childhood, although the extent of their literacy was often limited to the input received from the Russian class at school. With the teacher's permission, I made several visits to the school, during which I engaged with these selected students in group conversations by asking them questions but leaving room for extensive peer interaction. Crucially, my speech, like theirs, was distinguished by extensive code-switching and code-mixing. In the course of the conversations, the students frequently left the given subjects and started to talk about other things. Hence, these interactions are comparable with conversations recorded by young adults in their social networks.

Upon the recordings, respondents were asked to complete a paper self-report questionnaire, which was designed in order to gather basic sociolinguistic information. The requested information concerned the participants' migration and language acquisition histories, their language preference as well as language use in their social networks. Since the questionnaire data reported below are based on self-report, as any other self-report based data, they should be regarded with caution. Although self-report measures assume that people answer the questions honestly, respondents may sometimes be inclined to give incorrect responses, wanting to make a good impression (cf. Kassin et al. 2012: 208). For example, already in her (1980b) pioneering paper, Poplack showed that bilingual speakers occasionally over- and underrated their language proficiency, even though the great majority of the respondents provided self-report estimates which were compatible with the objectively observed proficiency rates. However, because

### 3.4 Research participants as a group

the focus of the present research is on explaining patterns of Russian-German code-mixing by relating them to facts of usage, cognitive processing and structural regularities, rather than social factors as such, the reported survey results are intended as a demonstration of the respondents' sociolinguistic backgrounds, which serves as a basis for comparing the investigated group with other bilingual communities, as to their preferences for specific patterns of bilingual speech, in general, and code-mixing, in particular.

The remainder of this chapter entails a presentation of the questionnaire results. It first characterises the study participants as a group and then introduces them as members of their social networks.

# **3.4 Research participants as a group**

This section presents and compares the respondents in terms of their age, migration history and linguistic memories about their language development. All the respondents' names are fictitious. It is furthermore necessary to note that all the respondents, with one exception, are female. This situation was not intended and owes to the strenuousness of the recruitment process.

# **3.4.1 Age and migration history**

As detailed in Table 3.3, the respondents were youths and young adults, with their age ranging between 18 and 35 years (mean 25 years). Their age at immigration varied from 4 to 21 years. Those individuals who were 7 to 18 years of age at the time of immigration qualify as immigrants of the intermediate generation. These respondents constitute the majority of the bilinguals sampled in the corpus. Among the few exceptions to this tendency are three first-generation and two second-generation immigrants. The former group comprises three participants who moved to Germany at the age of 19 to 21 years. The decision to include these speakers in the corpus rested on two considerations: First, the period of their residence in Germany had exceeded ten years by the time of recording. Second, all of them were fluent in German: while Valentina and Marina reported growing up bilingual, Inna developed her proficiency in German after the immigration, owing to which she could enrol at the University of Freiburg. The latter group includes two second-generation immigrants, Larisa and Alex. Larisa was born in Germany into a Russia German family, whereas Alex arrived in Germany being a four-year-old. Their speech samples were included in the corpus because, being rooted in the Russia German community of Lahr, they still maintained Russian as a community language and regularly used it in their networks. Regarding

### 3 Introducing the research participants and the corpus

residence duration, one respondent, Rita, did not satisfy the study's residence requirement, according to which each respondent was supposed to have stayed in Germany for approximately 10 years. The reasons for including her in the corpus are discussed in conjunction with her sociolinguistic profile in §3.5.

Table 3.3: Research participants by age at immigration

As to the geographical distribution of the bilinguals sampled in the corpus, it follows from the table that more than half of them were living in Lahr, a city with a high proportion of Russia German repatriates. The other speakers represented in the corpus were residents of other German cities.

# **3.4.2 Language acquisition history**

The study participants report learning Russian as their first language or one of their first languages. As to German, the situations and ages of its acquisition varied across the participants. These aspects of the acquisition of German are given in Table 3.4. The participants were asked whether they remembered speaking

German by the age of seven years. Of 19 participants, five individuals reported having an oral proficiency in German at that age, most probably in a Russia German dialect. They learnt German through the natural interaction with their parents (referred to in the table as "family") and can thus be considered early bilinguals. The others had no memories of speaking German at the age of seven years, although five respondents (marked by asterisks in the table) remembered hearing single German words, sayings or songs. One respondent reported learning German before immigration through interactions with her relatives and friends ("environment" in the table).

Table 3.4: Research participants' acquisition of German by situation types prior and upon immigration. (The typical situations in which the respondents learnt German include the family [in early childhood], the natural environment and classes of German as a foreign language (GFL) at school in their country of origin, or in a language school in Germany. The asterisk marks respondents with memories of fragmentary exposure to German in early childhood. The ReBiSlav corpus did not provide information on Julia's linguistic development.)

### 3 Introducing the research participants and the corpus

The respondents who were living in their home countries at the age of eleven or older were learning German as a foreign language in the classroom ("GFL" in the table). After migration to Germany, the participants either acquired German through natural interactions with speakers in their environment or through visiting specific language courses ("GFL" in the table). A comparison of Tables 3.3 and 3.4 makes two tendencies visible: First, individuals who moved to Germany either at a very early age or at least 16 years before the study took place, i.e., in the early 1990s, manifest the tendency to acquire German through natural interactions. Second, individuals who immigrated to Germany at the age of seven years or older and less than 16 years before the study took place, i.e., in the late 1990s, tend to have learnt German in classroom context.

In a nutshell, the participants of the study manifest the following acquisition patterns for German: five respondents learnt German in the family and named it one of their first languages, three respondents learned German in an informal context beyond the family, and ten respondents acquired German in a primarily formal context. However, as we can see in Table 3.4, the identified patterns of acquisition sometimes overlap and the exposure to German in the early childhood may also play a role in the later acquisition of the language. I therefore present detailed sociolinguistic backgrounds of the individual respondents below.

# **3.5 Participant subgroups**

This section draws a portrait of each of the 19 respondents by making use of the sociolinguistic information collected by the aforementioned questionnaire.

# **3.5.1 Irina and Olga**

Irina and Olga responded to the announcement poster distributed at the university campus Freiburg. The young women knew each other prior to the recordings. At the time of data gathering they were enrolled in the Slavic Department of the University of Freiburg. This fact may be interpreted as a sign of their affinity towards the Russian language and culture. Some of their audio-recordings contained conversations between each other, whereas the others included conversations with members of their individual social networks.

Both Irina and Olga were born into mixed families: their fathers are Russia Germans, their mothers are Russian. As would be expected in this case, their parents spoke Russian to them prior to emigration. Although Irina reported being exposed to fragmentary German input in form of chunks, i.e., individual lexical

items, phrases, and songs, she remembers speaking only Russian before the age of seven. Olga, in her turn, asserted that before the age of seven she spoke only Russian. Although Irina and Olga's early language biographies parallel each other to a large extent, their migration histories vary. Olga left Russia in 1995 at the age of seven years, whereas Irina moved to Germany in 2002 at the age of 17 years. Hence, upon arrival Olga learnt German from friends, relatives and at school, i.e., in her natural environment, whereas Irina had to take a German course before attending public school. Irina considered herself more proficient in Russian than German, whereas Olga's estimation was exactly the opposite. However, in dailylife situations it was easier for both of them to interact in German. Both Irina and Olga were living in Lahr. Being rooted in the large local Russian-speaking community, each of them audio-recorded several hours of conversation within their social networks.

Irina's Russian is close to standard, and her German is fluent. She has high language awareness and actually tries to avoid language mixing, obviously due to the need to speak standard Russian at the university. Although mixing and switching do occur in her speech, especially when her conversation partners mix languages, she sometimes pauses in the middle of a sentence and looks for a translation equivalent. Olga's language development differs from Irina's. Her German is native-like, but her Russian is also fluent. Her bilingual speech is characterised by frequent code-switching and code-mixing, even when she speaks to Irina.

The bulk of the recordings comprises one-on-one conversations between the two young women, in which they talk about their university and work life as well as mutual acquaintances and friends. Some of their conversations cover such topics as the Russian identity, the histories of Russia and Germany as well as current developments in the Russian politics. One of their interactions involves one of their fellow students. In this conversation, the primary topic is universityrelated matters and the speakers code-mix a lot. Apart from these conversations, Irina and Olga audio-recorded several interactions in their individual networks. Irina's recordings include a group conversation with Olesja and Valentina, both of whom were also Lahr residents.

# **3.5.2 Olesja and Valentina**

Olesja and Valentina arrived in Germany in 1999 and 2002 at the ages of 18 and 20 years respectively. Their parents are Russia Germans and they grew up in similar socio-cultural environments. Although Olesja's home town Omsk exceeded Valentina's home town Astana in population size at the time when the women were

living there, both cities had a fairly equal proportion of Russia Germans. Yet, despite this fact, Olesja's parents decided to speak only Russian to her, whereas Valentina received an equal amount of input in both German and Russian from her parents and reports growing up bilingual. However, Olesja remembered being exposed to German, even though this input was fragmentary. Upon her arrival in Germany, unlike Valentina, she had to attend a German course.

From the recorded conversation, it can be concluded that Russian is the dominant language for each of the interlocutors. Throughout the conversation Russian is more frequent than German, although both languages are widely used. Olesja's and Valentina's Russian may be described as colloquial with a few nonstandard sprinklings. As to German, Valentina appears to be more secure about it than Olesja. She also uses more German in the conversation than Olesja and Irina taken together. Nevertheless, Olesja's productive proficiency in German is adequate, which may be due to the fact that she had lived in Germany for twelve years before the recording took place and had been working as a sales person. The three conversation participants – Irina, Olesja and Valentina – regularly switch to German when attending to their children, who speak German most of the time.

# **3.5.3 Olga and Inna**

Olga recorded several conversations with her close friend Inna, who was also a Lahr resident. Like Olga, Inna was born into a mixed family: her mother is a Russia German, her father is Russian. Unlike Olga, who arrived in Germany in 1995 at the age of seven years (see above), Inna immigrated as a young adult of 19 years in 2002. Therefore, they demonstrate opposing trends in language proficiency: Olga regards German as her strongest language, whereas Inna considers Russian to be her better language. Nonetheless, before the age of seven Olga and Inna report Russian to be their primary language for speaking, despite they had received a minor portion of German input.

By the time of recording, Inna had lived in Germany for ten years and identified herself as a Russian. In her daily life, the use of each language is often compartmentalised: Russian is used in the affective domain, i.e., with the family members, relatives, partner and Russian-speaking fellow students, and German is used at the university, at work, but occasionally also with Russian-speaking friends.

In the recorded conversations they discuss their university life, plans for the future and exchange opinions about mutual acquaintances and friends. Hence, the conversations abound in topic-related code-switching as well as code-mixing.

### 3.5 Participant subgroups

# **3.5.4 Tanja and Alina**

I had known Tanja before conducting this study, and after I asked her to audiorecord some conversations with her sister Alina, she immediately agreed. Tanja and Alina were born in Uzbekistan to Russia German parents in 1980 and 1986, respectively. The family language was Russian, but the children also heard some German (presumably a German dialect), as used by their grandparents and other relatives. When the family left Uzbekistan in 1994, Tanja was 14 years of age and her sister was eight years old. The different ages at immigration influenced (and most likely still influence) the sisters' language use and ethnic identities. The elder sister identified herself as a Russia German, whereas the younger sister felt as a German. In her network, Tanja used both languages equally, unlike Alina, for whom the use of Russian was restricted to her parents and grandparents. With her sister, she reported speaking both languages, switching them back and forth. As for their proficiency assessment, Tanja considered herself to be equally fluent in both languages, whereas her sister rated her oral proficiency in German much higher than in Russian. However, the recorded conversations reveal extensive code-switching and code-mixing in each of the sisters' speech. They talk about household chores, flat renovation, their children and mutual acquaintances.

# **3.5.5 Marina**

Marina is the only respondent from Villingen-Schwenningen, a city at the historical border between the regions of Baden and Swabia. Marina recorded an interaction at the nursery school where she was working as a teacher and an informal conversation with her Russian-speaking friends. As both of her friends did not fulfil the study's requirement of residence duration, their contributions to the conversation were disregarded in the analysis. Prior to her emigration in 1999 at the age of 21 years, Marina lived in Kazakhstan, where she was born into a Russia German family. A Russia German dialect, standard German and Russian were spoken in her family. She thus grew up bilingual, acquiring Russian and standard German. At the time of the recording she considered herself a Russia German and evaluated her command of Russian as native-like and her proficiency in German as fluent. Based on the recorded conversations, her Russian may be described as a variety very close to the standard. She preferred speaking both languages without separating them as isolated codes, or, putting it in Grosjean's terms, using them in a bilingual mode (cf. Grosjean 1985). Interestingly, she used Russian with her Russian husband and spoke German with her children. In her social network, both languages were constantly in use. In the recorded conversation, she and her friends talk about their lives in Germany, their children and food.

# **3.5.6 Elena, Ira and Nataša**

Elena's contact details was provided by the Youth Migration Service of the Caritas Association of Freiburg. Elena recorded several casual interactions with her friends Ira and Nataša. Elena's and Nataša's linguistic memories are similar in several ways: First, they were born into mixed families, with one of the parents being a Russia German and the other parent being a Russian. Second, they remembered only speaking Russian before they started school (although Nataša's mother spoke German to her daughter). Third, they were almost of the same age when they moved to Germany: Nataša was ten years old (year of immigration: 1997) and Elena was eleven years old (year of immigration: 1996). However, at the time of recording, more than fifteen years after their immigration, they manifested diverging tendencies in language use and bilingual ability: Elena reported a regular use of the two languages in her network and equal fluency in both of them, while Nataša tended to speak German slightly more frequently than Elena and regarded her command of German higher than her proficiency in Russian. As to Ira, her parents, though being Russia Germans, used only Russian as a family language. The family arrived in Germany in 1995, when she was eleven years old. Upon her immigration, Ira learnt German predominantly in a language course. According to her report, the extent to which she used Russian in her daily-life interactions prevailed the extent of German used in the same contexts. Although Ira had lived in Germany for twenty years by the time of data collection, she still preferred Russian to German, but evaluated her proficiency levels in the two languages as equally high. In their conversation, Elena, Ira and Nataša talk about family matters and real estate prices in Freiburg. During their conversation, the friends have their children at the table receiving their meal and repeatedly attend to them.

# **3.5.7 Svetlana**

As in the above case, I received Svetlana's contact information from the Youth Migration Service of the Caritas Association of Freiburg. At the time of the recording she was a working single mother with a preschooler and was about to marry her fiance, also a Russia German. Being pressed for time, or for any other reasons, she refused to record a casual conversation for me, but allowed me to converse with her. During our interaction, Svetlana and I were switching languages back and forth; that was a natural and preferred way for her to speak Russian. Svetlana's family moved to Germany in 1994, when she was 10 years of age. During her childhood in Russia, her parents spoke to her Russian and German, and she

### 3.5 Participant subgroups

claimed speaking ability in these languages by the age of seven years. Svetlana may thus count as a Russian-dominant bilingual. It is yet unclear whether the variety of German that she remembers speaking was closer to standard German, or to one of the German dialects spoken in Altai Krai, Russia. At the time of the recording, Svetlana considered herself a German and evaluated her command of German as higher than her command of Russian. Although her Russian was strong, she had experienced several situations in her professional life in which she was unable to use it for professional purposes. This may have led her to think of her Russian competence as poor. In daily communication, Svetlana preferred speaking Russian and German in a bilingual mode. She reports using both languages for communication in most contexts.

As stated above, all younger participants of the study, except Julia, were senior students from Lahr. Julia's speech sample was taken from the ReBiSlav corpus (cf. Grillborzer & Meyer 2008-2009). Although the respondents from Lahr knew each other from the Russian class, each of them was linked with one of the two pre-existing groups of friends: Nadja, Rita, Vera and Vika, on the one hand, and Alex and Larisa, on the other hand. These bilingual speakers are described as members of the corresponding social network.

# **3.5.8 Nadja, Rita, Vera and Vika**

The girls caught my attention already during the elicitation task by being conspicuously loud among their classmates while discussing the task questions. They turned out to be a tightly-knit, enclosed group who stuck together in and after school. The girls regularly met each other individually, or gathered as a group. They celebrated holidays together, and during summer holidays, some of them travelled together. In their clique, they cultivated an atmosphere of trust and emotional immediacy. As to the clique's language of interaction, Russian was unequivocally the primary language, but code-mixing was the norm. The topics of the recorded conversations range from school matters to their childhood experiences in the countries of the former Soviet Union and Germany to the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Nadja, Vera and Vika were all born into mixed families, with one of the parents being a Russia German, and the other parent belonging to another ethnic group. In other words, they have the same ethnic background through one of their parents. By contrast, Rita's ties to Russia Germans are only through friends. Hence, she is the only respondent to contribute to the corpus who has no Russia German ethnic background. Although Nadja, Vera and Vika spent their childhood in various places, even different countries (Nadja and Vera were born in Kazakhstan,

and Vika in Russia), their language biographies and language learning memories are alike. All of them report learning Russian as their first language and not being exposed to German in their childhood. Yet, the three respondents also manifest differences. For example, their ages of arrival in Germany vary: Vera's and Vika's families moved to Germany in 2001 and 2000 respectively, when the girls were eight years old, and Nadja's family arrived in Germany in 2004, when she was eleven. This means that Nadja completed her primary education and the other two received some part of it in the countries of their origin in Russian. Upon immigration to Germany, they all attended German classes for repatriates. At the time of recording, the speakers rated their proficiencies in the two languages as follows: Nadja and Vika reported equally high proficiencies in both languages; Vera considered her German to be better than her Russian, which she rated as good. All of them stated that they preferred speaking the two languages in a bilingual mode, i.e., without separating them.

Rita was born into a Russian family, and arrived in Lahr following her mother. Rita moved to Germany in 2009 at the age of 15 years, but her first encounter with German took place some time earlier: she began learning it before leaving Russia. After English, German was the third language she learnt. By the time of recording, she had lived in Germany only for three years, but her German was more than adequate, particularly in casual interactions. Rita's extremely fast integration into the local community contributed substantially to her fluency in German. Being a very communicative person by nature, not only had she started attending school from her first days in Lahr, but she had also become a core member of the described bilingual clique as well as a member of a sports club, and had a German-speaking partner for some time. In her after-school job, she was involved in communication with German-speaking customers and colleagues. At the time of data collection, her German was slightly dialect-coloured, partly because she had received much input from her stepfather and colleagues, who spoke the local Alemannic dialect to her. Rita's leading position in the group and her exceptional language ability were the primary reasons for including the recordings of her speech in the corpus.

# **3.5.9 Alex and Larisa**

Alex and Larisa were classmates having a friendly relation without being close friends. They had similar language biographies but entirely different identities and attitudes towards Russian. Both of them were born into mixed families, Alex in Kazakhstan and Larisa in Germany. Both Russian and German were spoken in their families, so that the children grew up bilingual. Larisa is the only study

### 3.5 Participant subgroups

participant who was born in Germany. Alex's family moved to Germany in 1996, when he was four. Therefore, they both count as second-generation immigrants. His parents saw no value in Russian, and German became the primary language at home. At the time of recording, he considered himself as a German rather than a Russia German and his use of Russian was limited to the communication with his grandparents and a few friends. Unlike Alex, Larisa valued the Russian language and culture. She felt strongly attached to her Russia German friends and partner and considered herself a Russia German. Larisa reported receiving much of her Russian input from her bilingual clique. Nevertheless, Larisa's and Alex's language proficiencies paralleled each other at the time of recording: they were evidently German-dominant and ranked their German skills higher than their Russian skills.

# **3.5.10 Julia**

Julia is the only intermediate-generation immigrant from the ReBiSlav corpus (Grillborzer & Meyer 2008-2009). Of all the speakers sampled in the corpus, only her data could be used in this work. Julia's family moved to Germany in 1996, when she was twelve years of age. Russian was her first language, and she reports learning German in Germany. However, at the time of recording she was a German-dominant bilingual, with a limited Russian proficiency. Nevertheless, she reported regularly using Russian in several contexts.

# **3.5.11 Summary**

As can be seen from the linguistic portraits of the Russian-German bilinguals sampled in my corpus, their linguistic competences manifest similarities rather than differences, even though they represent immigrants of three generations: first-generation immigrants (two participants), 1.5-generation immigrants (14 participants) and second-generation immigrants (three participants). Crucially, all of the respondents demonstrated bilingual ability, being fluent in the hostcountry language and maintaining Russian in their day-to-day interactions. The intergenerational differences in my respondents' language competences and preferences appeared to be minor. This situation is attributed to two circumstances: the existence of tightly knit social networks and early bilingualism. Social networks and communal ties were particularly important for the two secondgeneration immigrants included in the corpus. Maintaining tight connections to Lahr's Russian-speaking community allowed them to be regularly exposed to Russian and to learn to use it in everyday situations. At the same time, two of

the sampled first-generation immigrants reported acquiring both languages at an early age prior to their immigration to Germany. Such a case is generally rare in the context of immigration, but not uncommon in the context of repatriation, provided that the minority language was maintained. That is, the "generational" approach alone cannot account for the patterns of bilingual language use in a situation of repatriation. Therefore, an adequate description of Russia Germans' languages should consider both the generation of immigration and the individual paths of language acquisition.

# **3.6 Data**

The data were collected in two types of setting. The lion's share of the gathered material included informal interactions audio-recorded by research participants in their social networks. These interactions occurred in the participants' everyday situations such as at home, in the street and in a restaurant as well as on train and car rides. Overall, the participants recorded 15.5 hours of naturally occurring speech. While most of the conversations of this type involve two participants, some of them are multi-party conversations; for example:

	- A: ty you slyšala heard čto that mara Mara ma- mara Mara, maša Maša s with danikom Danik *heiraten*? get\_marry
	- T: gde? where kogda? when
	- A: v in ijule July zags, registry\_office a and v in avguste August *hochzeit* wedding
	- T: tak so *kurzfristig*? short-term
	- A: ja I sama myself tol'ko just nedavno recently uslyšala. heard ona she mne me desjat' ten raz times rasskazyvala told što that oni they *heiraten* get\_married *dann* then *doch* actually *nicht* not *heiraten* get\_married
	- T: èto ptcl oni they rešili decided vot. ptcl mama, mother kak how tam there u at maši Maša s with danikom? Danik kakogo what čisla date u with nix them zags? registry\_office *standesamt*? registry\_office

M: čisla date pervogo first T: ((laughing)) *standesamt* registry\_office kogda when u with nix? them M: aah ponjatija idea ne not imeju.  T: 'Where? When?' A: 'In the registry office in July, and their wedding is in August.' T: 'At such a short notice.' A: 'I've heard it myself only recently. She told me ten times that they are getting married and that they aren't.' T: 'Well, they've decided now, you see. Mother, how is it with Maša and Danik? On what date do they have (the appointment in) the registry office?' M: 'Around the first.' T: 'The registry office, when do they have it?' M: 'Ah, I have no idea. It is one of you who told me.' T: 'No.'

This conversation begins as a two-party interaction and develops into a threeparty talk. At first, Alina announces her sister Tanya that a familiar couple is getting married, and then Tanya consults their mother about the date of the marriage registration. The language of the conversation, although being basically Russian, is permeated by German single words and multi-word sequences. The speech is thus described as language mixing. At the same time, the passage contains an instance of code-switching: After using the Russian term for the registry office, *zags*, Tanya provides its German equivalent, *Standesamt*, in order for her mother to better understand what she is speaking about. This kind of reiteration is a typical example of code-switching. Crucially, the base language of each turn is Russian, and no change in the conversation's base language takes place between the turns. Even Alina's multiword switch *heiraten, dann doch nicht heiraten* 'are getting married and then they are not' at the end of her turn does not incite a shift in the language of the conversation. I therefore conceive of the language practice in this passage, just as overall in the corpus, as code-mixing, rather than code-switching.

The other type of data includes recordings of interactions made by the writer. With two exceptions, the conversations in which I was one of the participants or an observer took place in the school setting. A total of ten hours of speech was recorded in this type of participant constellation. All but one interactions recorded by myself were multi-party conversations. The following snatch of informal talk, involving Rita (Ri), Vera (Ve), Vika (Vi) and the writer (Re), illustrates this type of data.

(2) (LS110316)

Ri: èto this ja I nazyvaetsja is\_called ja I xotela wanted na for ètju- èti this *ferien* holiday zarabotat' to\_earn i and vsë everything *spar*-ovat'. to\_save i and na for *führerschein* driving\_licence i and čë? what *führerschein*? driving\_licence na to jogu yoga ščas now pojdu will\_go [ha-ha *ha-und-em*] H&M *bestellen* order ha-ha-ha

Vi: [ha-ha *ha-und-em*] H&M

Ve: [ha-ha *ha-und-em*] H&M

Ri: [da] yes ne-ne no

Vi: *ich hab mir ein kleid für fünf euro bestellt*

I have me a dress for five euros ordered

Ri: he-he

Vi: *aber* but *nicht* not *so* so *einfach*; simple *ist* is *einfach* simply *mit* with *rüschchen* frills *so\_n* a *bisschen* bit

Ri: ne no esli if ja I sebe myself tam there čën'-t' something pokupaju buy to then vot ptcl ètot this vot ptcl top za for četyre four *euro* euros ((laughing))

At the beginning of this excerpt from a conversation recorded in a school setting, Rita describes her plans for the upcoming holidays and mentions her incapability to save money for the driving licence because she spends it on yoga classes and H&M articles. After I expressed my surprise at the fact that despite an earlier statement, the girls buy things at that store, each of the girls downplayed this fact by naming the few articles that they consider purchasable there. While I formulated my surprise in German, Rita and Vera responded to it in Russian, and

### 3 Introducing the research participants and the corpus

only Vika phrased her turn in German. In spite of that, Rita continues in Russian, thus sticking to the language of the conversation. Crucially, each of the turns framed in Russian contains German(-origin) words.8 In this regard, the language consultants' speech recorded by myself is similar to the samples recorded by the recruited community members in natural settings.

The recorded conversations in both types of setting contain purely monolingual intervals. Most of the time the base language of such monolingual passages is Russian, but in some situations it is German. For example, in situations involving a German monolingual or a German dominant speaker, the interlocutors switch to German as the base language of interaction. Being extremely rare, these situations barely influence the distribution of languages in the corpus.

Table 3.5 lists the situations in which the data were collected and details the constellations of the conversation participants. Additionally, it specifies the duration of each of the recordings. All the recordings marked with the asterisk correspond to the situations in which the writer was one of the participants. Altogether, these recordings include ten hours of recorded conversation. The duration of the samples recorded by the language consultants in their networks amounts to 15.5 hours. The bulk of these data (6.5 hours) include the interactions between Irina and Olga, university students of Russian. Crucially, including such a large portion of interactions between specific speakers to the corpus did not affect the distribution of the reported patterns of bilingual speech because the conversations between Irina and Olga contained a large number of long Russian monolingual intervals. As these passages were unsuitable for the investigation of language mixing, the scope of this book, the studies reported below draw on the data extracted only from bilingual turns.

The next step in the construction of the data sets for specific case studies involved the transcription of the recorded speech. As mentioned above, I disregarded the monolingual intervals in the conversations and transcribed only the bilingual passages. I finally extracted Russian sentences containing German lexical items and German sentences containing Russian lexical items. The great majority of the identified items included singly occurring nouns and verbs as well as adjective-modified noun phrases and prepositional phrases.

Table 3.5: Speech situations of the recordings

# **3.7 Conclusion**

In this chapter, I have described the research participants, who were German repatriates from the former Soviet Union and its successor states. They are traditionally referred to as Russia Germans and constitute Germany's largest group of Russian speakers. Although German, encompassing the standard language and various Russia German dialects, was the traditional community language of Russia's Germans, they have been undergoing language shift to Russian since the Second World War. Prior to the large-scale repatriation to Germany in the late 1980s and the 1990s, transmission of the minority language in the families had largely ceased. Therefore, the focus of the current research has been on the generations born between the late 1970s and the early 1990, which were labelled here as youths and young adults. These speakers demonstrate high-level proficiencies in both Russian and German, and their bilingual speech is likely to exhibit considerable variability in code-mixing.

Crucially, unlike the typical intermediate-generation immigrants, who learn the host language after moving to the host country, Russia Germans of the intermediate generation had often been exposed to German prior to their repatriation. A third of the research participants reported having grown bilingual, with German being one of their family, or community, languages prior to the repatriation. Other five respondents claimed that they had received some linguistic input in German in form of chunks, including sayings, songs, and the like. For this reason, the selection of the research participants was guided by their linguistic biographies, although it largely followed the traditional generational approach to immigrant languages, which relates the first, the second, and the intermediate generation to a specific pattern of bilingual language use and dominance. I have argued that careful treatment of the bilingual speaker's linguistic development in the community languages prior and upon their repatriation may ensure a high degree of homogeneity among the gathered speech samples in terms of the amount and quality of language mixing therein as well as more general patterns of bilingual language use.

Finally, I described the methods of data collection. While half of the material used for the corpus construction were informal peer interactions recorded by language consultants in natural speech situations, another part of the data included conversations recorded by the writer, in which he was one of the participants. Solely the bilingual turns of the recorded interactions were subject to transcription and further analysis. The inspection of the other-language elements in sentences framed by the base language of the interaction demonstrated that nouns and their combinations with adjectives and prepositions are among the most frequent items occurring in bilingual sentences, aside from verbs. Therefore, the remainder of this book focuses on the distributional patterns of the other-language nouns in the presented bilingual corpus.

# **4 Code-mixing in the adjective-modified noun phrase**

This chapter1 investigates insertional code-mixing in noun phrases with adjective modifiers. In this syntactic context, the speaker may insert an attributive adjective from one contact language into a noun phrase headed by a noun from the other contact language. Alternatively, she can insert a nominal constituent that comprises a noun and an attributive adjective into a sentence framed by the other language. Hence, two patterns of code-mixing in this context are distinguished: the switch may be placed within the modified noun phrase, or at the nominal constituent's boundary. Insertions of both nouns and nominal constituents, with and without modifiers, are well documented in the literature. For example, already Poplack (1980b: 604) offered empirical evidence suggesting that "nouns and noun phrases are frequently switched". Being ubiquitous in corpora of bilingual speech, nouns, nominal constituents and fully-fledged noun phrases have been the focus of extensive research along various lines (e.g., Sankoff et al. 1990, Poplack & Meechan 1995, Cantone & MacSwan 2009, Parafita Couto et al. 2015).

The aim of this chapter is threefold: First, the chapter sets out to investigate patterns of code-mixing in the modified noun phrase in Russian-German bilingual sentences. Second, it aims to construct and assess a statistical model which predicts, by using phrase frequency and noun frequency as predictive factors, the variation in the way Russian-German bilinguals code-switch in the examined syntactic context. Third, the chapter explores the potential of usage-based explanations for code-mixing patterns in the noun phrase domain and thus contributes to the ongoing discussion on the nature of adjective-noun insertions.

To set the stage for the analysis, I first review the existing research on code-mixed nouns and nominal constituents, including adjective-modified noun phrases, and examine the issue of their status and nature as addressed by the major approaches. In section §4.2, I outline the main features of adjective-noun combinations in German and Russian. Section §4.3 reports a distributional analysis of Russian-German code-mixing in the context of the adjective-modified

1Hakimov (2021) is an earlier and abridged version of this chapter.

### 4 Code-mixing in the adjective-modified noun phrase

noun phrase. Section §4.4 introduces the main hypotheses underlying this chapter and investigates the factors considered to regulate the variation in the scrutinised mixing patterns: switching within the adjective-modified nominal constituent and switching at its boundary. In the subsequent section, I present and assess the statistical model which predicts this variation. The final section entails a summary and a discussion of the main findings of the current study.

# **4.1 Insertion of nouns and nominal constituents in bilingual speech**

# **4.1.1 Noun insertion**

In language contact, nouns are involved in borrowing and in code-mixing more frequently than other word classes. Linguists who approach borrowing from a historical perspective (Whitney 1881, Moravcsik 1978, Thomason & Kaufman 1988, Matras 2009) place nouns at the top of borrowability hierarchies. Numerous studies of code-mixing show at the same time that noun insertion is the most frequent pattern of code-mixing. For instance, using multilingual data from the Gambia, Haust (1995: 112, 107) finds that in her Mandinka-Wolof-English corpus, nouns constitute 55.8 per cent of all lexical morphemes inserted and integrated into the matrix language (327 of 586 tokens) and 66.5 per cent of all bare insertions (141 of 212 tokens). Researchers who regard noun insertion as borrowing (Poplack et al. 1988, Sankoff et al. 1990, van Hout & Muysken 1994, Muysken 2000) 2 also report that bilingual speakers borrow nouns extremely often, even if, on certain occasions, noun insertions can count as switches (cf. Chapter 1.6). Treffers-Daller (1994: 99–100) demonstrates by using bilingual French-Dutch data that nouns constitute the greater part of single word switches (borrowings) in her Brussels corpus. She finds that French nouns encompass 58.4 per cent of overall French single word switches in Brussels Dutch, whereas Dutch nouns cover only 23.9 per cent of Dutch single word switches in French. (In fact, inserted Dutch nouns lie just behind inserted Dutch interjections with regard to both their token and type frequencies.) In total, noun switches still clearly dominate single word switches in the corpus. In conjunction with this, the question arises why nouns occupy such a prominent position in code-mixing and in the diachronic process of borrowing.

2 It should be noted that Muysken (2000: 75) acknowledges the equivocal status of single word insertion; he contends that "[l]exical borrowing has been associated with insertional codemixing, and not without reason. Nouns are the class of elements borrowed par excellence and also the prime example of insertion under categorical equivalence".

### 4.1 Insertion of nouns and nominal constituents in bilingual speech

One reason why nouns exhibit such a high degree of borrowability is their semantic nature. According to van Hout & Muysken (1994), nouns, as prototypical content words, are borrowed because, unlike function words, they "have a clear link to cultural content and the latter do not" (p. 42). Moreover, nouns are notably prone to being selected in code-mixing because their meanings are highly specific (Backus 1996, 2001, Field 2002). Backus (1996: 115–131) proposes a specificity continuum, with one pole formed by proper nouns and the other pole formed by schematic, or abstract, units. One of the intermediate categories includes words denoting very specific objects. Backus (1996: 116) defines these words as names for those concepts for which no other terms are available; these words are often referred to as cultural borrowings (cf. Myers-Scotton 1993: 165). If we consider the word classes to which most proper names and cultural borrowings belong, we will state that most of them are nouns.3 A structural property of nouns that makes them highly borrowable is their high syntagmatic freedom (Backus 2013), which means that nouns are less bound to other words in the sentence and can thus be inserted into any sentence configuration. In language contact, especially in situations of intensive contact, the semantic and structural factors apparently interplay (cf. van Hout & Muysken 1994).

Nouns can be inserted into virtually all possible configurations of the noun phrase. Louis Boumans (1998: 221) characterises noun insertion as an unconstrained process. In his 1998 monograph *The syntax of codeswitching: Analysing Moroccan Arabic/Dutch conversation*, he offers a detailed account of patterns in which Dutch nouns appear in the context of Moroccan Arabic. He describes various types of noun determination (ibid.: 181–191, 211–214) and modification (ibid.: 196–198, 200–205). In the latter case, he shows that inserted Dutch nouns can be modified by prepositional adjuncts and interrogative forms, but noun modification by Moroccan-Arabic adjectives is limited to few "atypical" instances (Boumans 1998: 200–201). Furthermore, as nouns can subcategorise for complements in both Moroccan Arabic and Dutch, inserted Dutch nouns sometimes take Moroccan-Arabic prepositional and clausal complements. Unfortunately, Boumans (1998) provides little or no information about the distribution of the various structures in the corpus. Alongside single nouns, insertion of nominal constituents from another language is also commonplace in bilingual speech involving various language pairs. To this, I turn in the following section.

3Backus (1996: 116) states that "[e]specially in early stages of contact many single EL content words are names of some sort, such as place names and personal names, but also less obvious cases".

### 4 Code-mixing in the adjective-modified noun phrase

# **4.1.2 Insertion of nominal constituents**

Noun phrase insertions are also commonplace in mixed clauses, although they are not as frequent as insertions of single nouns (cf. Poplack 1980b). For example, Treffers-Daller (1994: 205) observes that noun phrases make up 41.3 per cent of full-constituent switches in her French-Dutch data from Brussels. Haust (1995: 165) also reports that noun phrases comprise the most frequent type of constituent insertion in her Gambian corpus: 79 noun phrases make up 47.9 per cent of 165 constituent insertions observed. Although such general quantitative data are not rare in studies of code-mixing, researchers often provide little or no information on the distribution of noun phrases varying in their structure. However, it is interesting to know what types of noun phrase modifiers and complements are more or less common in code-mixing and why. The aforementioned monograph by Boumans (1998) represents an exception to this tendency insofar as it provides a comprehensive account of syntactic structures involved in Moroccan Arabic-Dutch code-mixing. Let us consider some of the findings regarding noun phrase insertion in greater detail.

Boumans (1998) shows that Dutch noun phrases inserted into Moroccan Arabic can be simple, such as *het vermogen* 'the capacity' in (1a), or expanded. The latter may contain a prepositional complement or an attributive adjective, as illustrated in (1b) and (1c).

	- a. ʕend-i at-1sg *het* def.n *vermogen* capacity baš comp n.. 1 eh ptcl ne-tbeʕ 1-follow *chimie* chemistry(Fr) 'I have the capacity to study chemistry.'
	- b. kayn-in exist-pl *daar-voor* there-for *verklaring-en* explanation-pl 'There are explanations for that.'
	- c.

Fully-fledged Dutch noun phrases inserted into Moroccan-Arabic clauses are considerably less frequent than inserted nouns (cf. Boumans 1998: 210). The insertion

### 4.1 Insertion of nouns and nominal constituents in bilingual speech

of expanded Dutch noun phrases is particularly low in number. For example, a noun phrase with a prepositional complement and a noun phrase modified by a relative clause appear only twice each in the Moroccan-Arabic discourse in Boumans's data. In contrast, inserted Dutch nouns, as mentioned in (§4.1.1), are freely modified "by means of [Moroccan-Arabic] possessive constructions, adjunct or complement PPs, and relative clauses" (Boumans 1998: 201). Expanded Dutch nominal constituents, just like Dutch single nouns, often follow Moroccan-Arabic determiners, as shown in (2a), where the inserted Dutch noun *nadeel* 'disadvantage' follows the Moroccan-Arabic indefinite determiner *ši* and is modified by the Dutch prepositional adjunct *voor de universiteit* 'for the university'.

	- a. u and hadak dem š-ši def-indef y-kun 3-be *nadeel* disadvantage *voor* for *de* the *universiteit*? university 'And this will be a disadvantage for the university?'
	- b. ʕla xaṭer because ʕend-ek at-2sg ši indef beʕḍ part l-h.. def-h.. *handeling-en* action-pl *die* that *je* you *doet* (..) do 'Because you have some .. some actions that you do.'

Example (2b) illustrates the use of the Moroccan-Arabic definite article *l-* with a Dutch nominal constituent, which consists here of the Dutch noun *handelingen* 'actions' and the modifying relative clause *die je doet* 'that you do'.4 Switching the language between determiner and noun has been frequently reported for other bilingual situations. According to Poplack (1980b: 604), this is a favourable locus for code-switching in her Spanish-English data. We can conclude from Boumans's analysis that insertion of fully-fledged Dutch noun phrases is less frequent than insertion of nominal constituents after Moroccan-Arabic determiners.

Noun-adjective combinations represent the most commonly inserted nominal constituents in Boumans's data (cf. Boumans 1998: 203–205). These insertions have an internal Dutch structure: first, the order of adjective and noun is A N, which is the opposite of the Moroccan-Arabic order, and secondly, the adjective exhibits the agreement marker *-e* – for all forms except for the indefinite singular neuter – as in (3) below:

4We can analyse the utterance in (2b) as an instance of revision: the speaker interrupts the utterance just before the switching site, i.e., at the beginning of the switched noun, so that the restart does not contain the Moroccan-Arabic determiner any more. It should be noted however that the same speaker produces smooth switches involving the Moroccan-Arabic prefix *l-* as well (cf. Boumans 1998: 185).

### 4 Code-mixing in the adjective-modified noun phrase

(3) Moroccan Arabic-Dutch (Boumans 1998: 204) walakin but daba now d-derri def-child ġadi fut ye-dxel 3m-enter *islamitisch-e* Islamic-agr *school*, school škun who ġadi fut ye-lqa 3m-meet 'But now the child will go to an Islamic school, whom will he meet?'

The adjective-noun combination *islamitische school* 'Islamic school' is inserted without a determiner, the omission of a determiner results from either the determinerless use of the noun *school* in Dutch, as in the collocations *naar school gaan* 'go to school' and *met school beginnen* 'start school', or the tendency in Moroccan Arabic to omit the definite article before foreign stems (cf. Boumans 1998: 187). The omission of a determiner with Dutch adjective-noun insertions in Moroccan Arabic discourse is as common as with Dutch single nouns. Hence, Boumans (1998: 205) states that inserted adjective-noun combinations behave just like inserted nouns. Another point that needs emphasising here is that, unlike Dutch attributive adjectives, Moroccan-Arabic adjectives are never used to modify single Dutch nouns in Moroccan-Arabic discourse (cf. §4.1.1 and Boumans 1998: 201). Furthermore, Boumans asserts that Dutch adjectives are generally infrequent in Moroccan-Arabic sentences, even in the predicative function. Possible explanations for this observation are a lack of congruence between Moroccan Arabic and Dutch in the category of adjective and a mismatch between the involved languages in the adjective-noun order. However, as I will show in the subsequent section, this is not always the case and inserted nouns may well be modified by attributive adjectives in the same language when the patterns of adjective modifications employed by the contact languages vary.

# **4.1.3 Inserted adjective-noun combinations**

Extensive insertion of adjective-noun combinations is characteristic not only of Moroccan-Arabic-Dutch code-mixing, but of code-mixing in general. Numerous studies of code-mixing have shown that adjective-noun combinations from one language appear in the discourse of the other language on a regular basis, regardless of the adjective-noun order that both languages use. As illustrated below, adjective-noun combinations are inserted into sentences in the other language when both languages share the adjective-noun order. For instance:

	- … cuma günü *vaste dag* yani
	- Friday day fixed day so
	- '…we always go on Friday, so'

4.1 Insertion of nouns and nominal constituents in bilingual speech

(5) Croatian-English (Hlavac 2003: 231)

… to that sam be.prs.1sg završi-o finish-ptcp.sg.m dva two tjedn-a, week-gen.sg *so* so … i and tako so sam be.prs.1sg dobi-o receive-ptcp.sg.m rezultat-e result-acc.pl *last week* i and … '…I finished that two weeks ago, so …and so I received the results last week and …'

(6) German (dialect)-Hungarian (Szabó 2010: 373) … ihr 2pl ha-t have-prs.2pl *szociális* social *villany* electricity[nom.sg] ghab have.ptcp '…you have had a social benefit rate for electricity'

The language constellations here – Turkish-Dutch in (4), Croatian-English in (5), and German-Hungarian in (6) – all use the A N order. The inserted nounadjective combinations *vaste dag* 'fixed day' (in 4), *last week* (in 5) and *szociális villany* 'social (benefit rate for) electricity' (in 6) all exhibit the internal structure of the corresponding language: Dutch, English and Hungarian, respectively. That is, the Dutch adjective *vast* takes the Dutch agreement marker *-e* (cf. example 3), and the English adjective *last* and the Hungarian adjective *szociális* remain uninflected, as required by English and Hungarian, but neither Croatian nor German.

In contact situations with languages differing in the adjective-noun order, combinations of nouns and adjectives have also been reported among frequent insertions. This applies, for instance, to Moroccan Arabic-Dutch code-mixing discussed above (§4.1.2). Another example is mixing between English and Welsh, since in Welsh, unlike in English, the head noun precedes the adjectival modifier (cf. Deuchar 2005: 260). In (7), the word combination *main news* occurs in a Welsh sentence, while the English adjective-noun order indicates that the internal structure of this nominal constituent is English.

(7) Welsh-English (Deuchar 2005: 261) ar on y det *main news*, ar on y det *news* oedd be.3sg.ipfv o 3sg.m 'On the main news, it was on the news'

An excellent source of further examples for this case is the (1991) study by Penelope Gardner-Chloros. The author reports numerous insertions of nominal constituents containing adjectives in her French-Alsatian data from Strasbourg. Again, the languages involved contrast in their adjective-noun order, though not

### 4 Code-mixing in the adjective-modified noun phrase

as categorically as English and Welsh. While attributive adjectives in Alsatian occupy the position preceding the head noun, the position of adjectives in French can vary: most attributive adjectives follow their head nouns, but a reasonably large group of adjectives occur pre-nominally. With regard to the adjective-noun order, both types of combinations are registered, even though combinations with the N A order seem to dominate all French noun-adjective insertions (cf. Gardner-Chloros 1991: 141).  Interestingly, the bilingual speaker can realise the adjective at one point in French, as in *toupie jaune* 'yellow spinning top', and later in the same conversation in Alsatian, as in *gäls toupie* 'yellow spinning top' (ibid.: 133). The latter example illustrates the possibility of single French nouns to be modified by Alsatian adjectives, as in *e kleini attention* 'a little treat' (ibid.: 120), *wunderbari charcuterie* 'wonderful charcuterie' (ibid.: 124) and *e klanni note* 'a little note' (ibid.: 140). It appears from this brief survey that despite the highly restricted congruence between Alsatian and French in the order of noun and its adjectival modifier, Alsatian-French bilingual speech exhibits considerable variability regarding code-mixing patterns in nominal constituents with attributive adjectives. These findings contrast strongly with those of Boumans (1998) on code-mixing between Moroccan Arabic and Dutch, which also use differing adjective-noun orders. As such, single Dutch nouns, unlike single French nouns in Alsatian discourse, are not modified by Moroccan-Arabic attributive adjectives (cf. §4.1.1). This comparison demonstrates that, although differing adjective-noun-order patterns may restrict adjectival modification of insertions by the other-language adjectives, as in the case of Moroccan-Arabic and Dutch code-mixing, they do not automatically rule out this possibility altogether. However, distributional properties of adjectival modification in bilingual sentences across various language pairs as well as different theoretical orientations have led some scholars to conclude that adjective-noun combinations in the context of the other language pertain to the domain of the lexicon, and others to suggest that insertion of nominal constituents operates in the domain of the grammar. The existing approaches to adjective-noun insertions are detailed in the following section. I first discuss their status as lexical or grammatical forms, and then turn to explanations of their occurrence in bilingual speech.

### 4.1 Insertion of nouns and nominal constituents in bilingual speech

### **<IP_ADDRESS> Status of inserted adjective-noun combinations**

The status of inserted adjective-noun combinations is the focus of much current controversy: while some scholars consider them pertinent to the lexicon, others regard them as inserted nominal constituents and thus a matter of grammar. In a detailed study on Tamil-English code-mixing, Sankoff et al. (1990) analyse English adjective-noun combinations in Tamil sentences, such as in (8), as lexical borrowings.

They assume noun-adjective combinations, such as *main purpose* and *supernatural being*, to have the status of compound borrowings – whether nonce, or established – because "the function words typical of English NPs *never* co-occur with them" (Sankoff et al. 1990: 80, emphasis in the original). Other compound nonceborrowings include *snide remarks*, *serious subjects*, *educational system*, *slacks and blouses*, *Government of India Scholarship*, *Hindi songs*, *Indian women*, *arranged marriage* (ibid.: 80, passim). This analysis is criticised by Muysken (2000: 78–81) for several reasons. His central argument against the nonce-borrowing analysis is that the borrowing process, for the most part, does not apply to multiword combinations at such a high rate as is the case with the material presented in Sankoff et al. (1990). Nevertheless, Muysken (2000: 79) agrees that "complex" nouns such as *supernatural being* in (8) are borrowable per se, because they might have been lexicalised already in English. His alternative analysis assumes that these constructions are inserted NPs and thus a matter of syntax, rather than the lexicon.

A further relevant study into the nature and status of inserted nominal constituents is Poplack & Meechan (1995). In this study of Wolof-French bilingual speech, the authors examine complex French nouns that occur in otherwise Wolof sentences. Among these nouns are instantiations of the French 'N *de* N' construction, such as*langue de cuisine* 'broken language' and *conditions de vie* 'living conditions' (Poplack & Meechan 1995: 215). In (9a), a French construction *tête de liste* 'head of the list' is followed by the post-nominal Wolof determiner *bi*.

### 4 Code-mixing in the adjective-modified noun phrase

(9) Wolof-French (Poplack & Meechan 1995: 215, 228)

Poplack & Meechan (1995: 215) report that 'N *de* N' constructions in Wolof sentences take the Wolof determiner *bi*, just like single French nouns in Wolof discourse (as example 9b with the noun *lettre* 'letter' demonstrates). Therefore, the authors regard the individual instances of the 'N *de* N' construction as loanwords. In doing so, they adopt the view outlined in Sankoff et al. (1990), but introduce another diagnostic feature of (nonce-)borrowing: the semantic nature of a word sequence. The authors assert that "the 'N *de* N' constructions virtually all consist of frozen or idiomatic expressions functioning as compounds" (Poplack & Meechan 1995: 215). Hence, the lexicalised nature of the examined sequences is a further argument in favour of their analysis as borrowings.

As regards Dutch adjective-noun combinations occurring in Moroccan-Arabic sentences (cf. §4.1.2) and French noun-adjective combinations in Alsatian discourse, these combinations are reminiscent of the French 'N *de* N' constructions in the Wolof discourse and, following Poplack and Meechan's structural and semantic criteria, count as borrowings. As mentioned above, in Muysken's (2000) view, these combinations of nouns and adjectives are inserted NPs. An intermediate position in this controversy is taken, for example, by Gardner-Chloros (1991: 141), who introduces the category of "lexical switches", encompassing the noun-adjective combinations under discussion.

Another possible analysis of adjective-noun combinations is to approach them from the Matrix Language Frame model proposed by Myers-Scotton (1993). According to this model and its extensions (see Chapter 1 for further details), nounadjective combinations in focus would be classified as "embedded-language islands" as they are "full constituents consisting only of Embedded Language morphemes occurring in a bilingual CP [Complementiser Phrase] that is otherwise framed by the Matrix Language" (Myers-Scotton 2002: 139). The internal structure of an embedded-language island corresponds to the norms of the language that provides the morphemes. For example, in (7), the adjective-noun combination *main news* follows English norms, whereas the rest of the sentence is in Welsh (cf. Deuchar 2005: 261). We can assert that the examples of

### 4.1 Insertion of nouns and nominal constituents in bilingual speech

adjective-modified nouns quoted above as well as the aforementioned instances of the French 'N *de* N' construction are well-formed embedded-language islands. Whether these combinations are borrowed, or inserted, the question still arises as to what factors determine the selection of the adjective modifying the inserted noun, or under what circumstances an attributive adjective comes from the same language as the inserted noun and when it comes from the other language.

### **<IP_ADDRESS> Explanations for inserting adjective-noun combinations**

One of the first explanations for the insertion of adjective-noun combinations is offered through the Matrix Language Framework model, which treats these combinations as embedded-language islands. As outlined in §1.4, Myers-Scotton & Jake (1995) assert that an embedded-language island may occur if two languages lack congruence in one of three aspects of "lemmas", i.e., abstract entries in the mental lexicon that underlie lexemes. These aspects include semantic/pragmatic features, predicate-argument structure and realisation patterns. However, this view neither details which of the three aspects motivates the emergence of an embedded-language island in a given context, nor is it susceptible to empirical verification. It is apparently this consideration that has led some scholars to restrict their analyses of embedded-language islands to a specific type of congruence. For example, Deuchar (2005: 258) assumes that "while the lack of semantic/pragmatic equivalence between lexemes in two languages may be an important cause of code-switching [which corresponds to code-mixing here] in the first place, it is considerations of grammatical rather than semantic congruence which determine whether or not a switch can take place".5 In case of nominal constituents containing an attributive adjective, congruence applies to word order within the constituent, or, in Myers-Scotton's terms, to morphological realisation patterns. As discussed above, word-order non-equivalence may account for the occurrence of embedded-language islands consisting of a noun and an attributive adjective in such language pairs as Moroccan Arabic-Dutch, Welsh-English, and possibly Alsatian-French. Nonetheless, this explanation would not hold for inserted adjective-noun combinations in language pairs with an identical nounadjective order, namely Turkish-Dutch, Croatian-English, German-Hungarian and Tamil-English.

5At the same time, Deuchar (2005) mentions one of Wei's (2001) findings that incongruence in semantic/pragmatic features or predicate-argument structure can motivate occurrences of English embedded-language islands in otherwise Chinese discourse (quoted in Deuchar 2005: 258).

### 4 Code-mixing in the adjective-modified noun phrase

Another explanation of nominal constituent insertions at non-equivalence sites is adumbrated by Poplack & Meechan (1995: 215). They assert that nominal constituents, such as the 'N *de* N' constructions, can be borrowed because they comprise "frozen or idiomatic expressions". This point recalls Backus (1996, 1999a, 2003), who elaborates the idea that idiomatic expressions are one type of multimorphemic lexical units which are inserted into a matrix language clausal frame. The "unit" hypothesis, laid out in §1.5, predicts that every embeddedlanguage island is a unit (cf. Backus 2003: 91). Backus defines as units such multimorphemic elements that exhibit irregular morphosyntax, non-compositional semantics or high frequency. A multimorphemic element distinguished by one of these characteristics is assumed to be stored in the mental lexicon as a whole. Its parts are welded together by the irregularity of its form or the frequency of co-occurrence. However, it is possible to hypothesise that bilingual corpora may contain embedded-language islands lacking these properties. When such sequences do not count as multimorphemic units, their occurrence in bilingual clauses would remain unexplained. An example of a multimorphemic sequence lacking the characteristics of a unit is the aforementioned French combination *toupie jaune* 'yellow spinning top', inserted into an Alsatian framing clause (remember that in further discourse the speaker realises the adjective in Alsatian, i.e., *gäls toupie*, Gardner-Chloros 1991: 133). The French string is neither frequent in French, nor is its meaning non-compositional. Furthermore, adjective-noun order differences between French and Alsatian cannot be a valid explanation for the insertion of *toupie jaune* either (in view of the French adjective-noun insertions in the Alsatian discourse). Hence, the obvious way to examine the "unit" hypothesis is to test it statistically.

A distinction between fixed expressions and ad hoc produced strings underlies the analysis of Russian nominal constituents in Kazakh discourse in Muhamedowa (2006: 77–88). Although the author claims to have adopted Backus's approach, only expressions that originate from Russian institutional language are considered fixed. Namely, multiword strings such as *metodičeskij otdel* 'curriculum and instruction department' (ibid.: 77) and *ministerstvo lëgkoj promyšlennosti* 'ministry of light industry' (ibid.: 79) are analysed as fixed, whereas the strings *staryj ploščad'* 'old square'6 in (10) and *vysotnye doma* 'high-rise houses' (ibid.: 81) are regarded as ad hoc creations.

6 It is worth noting that the adjective *staryj* 'old' lacks gender agreement with the feminine head noun *ploščad'* 'square' (Muhamedowa 2006: 82).

### 4.1 Insertion of nouns and nominal constituents in bilingual speech

(10) Kazakh-Russian (Muhamedowa 2006: 82) anau that *televizor*-dan TV.set-abl kör-gen see-perf šïğar-sïz-dar. perhaps-pol-2pl ne-ler-i-n thingummy-pl-pos3-akk *uže* already anau that *star-yj* old-nom.sg.m *ploščad'*-tï square[nom.sg.f]-acc ne-ler-di thingummy-pl-acc žönde-di, improve-3sg anau that universitet university ne thingummy qïl-dï. do-3 'Perhaps you have seen that on TV. They have renovated that Old Square and the thingummy already, and they did that thingummy at university.'

However, the adjective-noun combination *staryj ploščad'* 'old square' in (10) is obviously a place name and could thus be a fixed routine in the speaker's idiolect and a lexical unit in her mental lexicon. This may be the case because placenames are unlikely to be produced compositionally on-line. As for the string *vysotnye doma* 'high-rise houses', it is a fairly regularly occurring collocation in Russian: 17% of all occurrences of the adjective *vysotnyj* 'high-rise' in the Russian National Corpus comprise instances in which this adjective combines with the noun *dom* 'house'.7 Consequently, the string should be viewed as a collocation and thus a lexical unit. We can conclude that Muhamedowa utilises register as an indicator of a string's fixedness. But classifying embedded-language nounadjective combinations by virtue of register alone appears to be insufficient for determining the status of these combinations as lexical units. Furthermore, most of the examples in Muhamedowa (2006: 81–88) can well be subsumed under the category of lexical unit.

The final study to be discussed in this section is again the analysis of Dutch adjective-noun insertions in Moroccan Arabic by Boumans (1998). According to the author, in a situation in which embedded Dutch nouns are regularly modified by Dutch attributive adjectives but virtually never occur with Moroccan-Arabic adjectives, the selection of attributive adjectives, restricted by the noun being modified, results from "specific ties that bind nouns and attributive adjectives from the same language" (Boumans 1998: 220). By elaborating this point further, he provides support for Backus's (1996) conception: the ties between nouns and attributive adjectives are of a collocational nature and are obviously not limited to idiomatic expressions (cf. Boumans 1998: 386–387). This analysis may be extended to other multiword embedded-language islands. The existence of collocational ties can account not only for Dutch noun-adjective insertions in

7The adjective *vysotnyj* 'high-rise' co-occurs at a higher rate only with the noun *zdanie* 'building'.

### 4 Code-mixing in the adjective-modified noun phrase

Moroccan Arabic, but also for the insertion of fully-fledged phrases, such as *de volgende dag* 'the following day' in (1c). As the definite determiner *de* co-occurs with the string *volgende dag* much more often than the indefinite determiner *een*, we can assume that the string *de volgende dag* is a unit, which is stored and selected as a whole in online production. Boumans (1998: 386–387) concludes the section on collocational ties by suggesting that "[i]f the existence of collocational ties between lexical units in the mental lexicon accounts for the co-occurrence of EL [embedded-language] words, the total absence of such ties may perhaps explain the observed constraints on the co-occurrence of ML [matrix language] and EL [embedded-language] lexical items". This means that an approach elucidating the emergence of embedded-language islands in bilingual speech also has the potential to clarify the intricacies of mixed constituents. Moreover, this idea provides a starting point for the subsequent study: in order to prove the existence of collocational ties, we need to compare inserted adjective-noun combinations with noun insertions modified by attributive adjectives from the matrix language.

To recapitulate, scholars suggest both structural and semantic explanations underlying embedded adjective-noun combinations in code-mixing. A structural approach considers incongruence between the languages involved in the realisation patterns of adjective-modified nominal constituents as a crucial factor (Myers-Scotton & Jake 1995, Myers-Scotton 2002). In other words, non-equivalence in noun-adjective order can trigger the emergence of an embedded language island realised as an adjective-modified nominal constituent (Deuchar 2005). However, this explanation will fail for language constellations with an identical adjectivenoun order, like German and Russian. Some scholars (e.g., Poplack & Meechan 1995) state that at least some embedded nominal constituents are idiomatic expressions. Although plausible at first sight, this explanation will not account for embedded adjective-noun combinations lacking non-compositional meanings. Finally, Backus (1996) and Boumans (1998) consider noun-adjective combinations multiword lexical units, even when their semantics is compositional. Frequently used combinations, whose meaning may be compositional, also gain unit status in this approach. Boumans (1998) argues that it is collocational ties between a noun and an adjective that determine their insertion as a combination in codemixing. However, owing to a high variability observed in code-mixing, not every inserted adjective-noun combination would obviously qualify as a unit. Moreover, in order to obtain unequivocal evidence for the existence of collocational ties, it is insufficient to rely on code-mixing data alone; rather, examined collocations have to be investigated in both bilingual and monolingual speech. There-

### 4.2 Adjective-noun combinations in German and Russian

fore, following the report of the code-mixing patterns in the examined syntactic context as they occur in my corpus of Russian-German bilingual speech, I will analyse the adjectival modification of the obtained nouns in large monolingual corpora and will finally subject these results to statistical testing. However, before turning to these issues, I will briefly introduce the patterns of adjectival modification in German and in Russian.

# **4.2 Adjective-noun combinations in German and Russian**

In languages of the world, attributive adjectives may either precede or follow their head nouns. German and Russian employ both syntactic patterns for noun modification. However, the most common pattern is in both languages when attributive adjectives occur in the prenominal position and agree with their head nouns in gender, number and case (Švedova 2005 [1980](a): 1303; Eisenberg 1999: 232). For example:

(11) German (Zifonun et al. 1997: 1991) *ein* art[nom.sg.n] *klein-es* little-nom.sg.n *grün-es* green-nom.sg.n *Männ-chen* man-dim(n)[nom.sg] 'a little green man'

In (11), the adjectives *kleines* 'small' and *grünes* 'green' precede the noun *Männchen* 'little man'. Furthermore, congruence in number, gender and case is observed between the forms of the adjective, the noun and the indefinite article *ein*. This pattern of modification is also prototypical of Russian, for instance:

(12) Russian *malen'k-ij* little-nom.sg.m *zelën-yj* green-nom.sg.m *čeloveč-ek* man-dim[nom.sg.m] 'a little green man'

The attributive adjectives *malen'kij* 'small' and *zelënyj* 'green' in (12) precede the noun *čeloveček* 'little man' and agree with it in number, gender and case.

At the same time, Russian and German adjectives may also follow the noun. Particularly in German, this pattern is restricted to special contexts and individual lexical items. German adjectives occupy the postnominal position in the following four cases: (i) adjectives are postposed as a result of topicalisation (i.e., split topicalisation), as in (13a); (ii) adjectives occur in apposition to nouns in the

### 4 Code-mixing in the adjective-modified noun phrase

names of products and dishes8 , as in (13b); and (iii) specific lexemes, such as *bar* 'cash' and *pur* 'pure', tend to follow their head nouns, as in (13c) 9 .

	- b. (Dürscheid 2002: 64, 78) *Whisky* whisky(m)[sg] *pur*, straight, *Forelle* trout(f)[sg] *blau*, blue, *Schauma* shampoo.brand(n)[sg] *mild* mild 'Straight whisky, blue trout, mild Schauma'
	- c. (Fabricius-Hansen et al. 2009: 350; Dürscheid 2002: 67) *tausend* thousand *Euro* euro(m)[sg] *bar*, cash, *Natur* Natur(f)[sg] *pur* pur 'A thousand euros in cash, pure nature'

As is evident from the above examples, German postnominal adjectives inflect for gender, number and case when their head nouns are topicalised (cf. 13a), whereas the postnominal adjectives *bar* 'cash' and *pur* 'pure' as well as adjectives in product names remain bare.

With regard to Russian, Zemskaja (1979: 149) reports that in colloquial speech attributive adjectives occur in postnominal position more frequently than in the written language, for example:

(14) (Zemskaja 1979: 152)

*Prines-i* bring-imp *xleb-a* bread-gen.sg.m *svež-ego*; fresh-gen.sg.m *A* and *gde* where *jubk-a* skirt-nom.sg.f *sinj-aja*? blue-nom.sg.f 'Bring some fresh bread; And where is the blue skirt?'

8The case of appositive adjectives is not limited to these contexts; apposition is traditionally characteristic of literary, poetic and folk-song texts (cf. Zifonun et al. 1997: 1991) and has recently expanded to press texts (Dürscheid 2002). In the latter case, such adjectives as *brutal*, *light* 'easy', *total* 'sheer' often appear in postposition (e.g., *Fußball brutal* 'brutal football', Dürscheid 2002: 67). However, the use of adjectives in these contexts is immaterial in the further analysis.

9This outline does not include the case of adjectival increments, also analysed as loose appositions (Auer 2007b: 654). For example, the postnominal adjectives *bayrische* 'Bavarian' and *geschnitten* 'cut' in the following instances are distinguished by an appositive relation to their head nouns: *eine mode eine bayrische* 'a fashion, a Bavarian one' (Schröder 1997: 103, quoted in Schwitalla 2006: 142) and *[...] und möhrchen brauch ich klein geschnitten* 'and I need carrots, cut in small pieces' (Auer 2007b: 654).

### 4.2 Adjective-noun combinations in German and Russian

Zemskaja (1979) asserts that the postposed adjectives *svežego* 'fresh' and *sinjaja* 'blue' in (14) do not carry a special information load and are thus devoid of prosodic emphasis (cf. Lapteva 1976: 208–212). According to Zemskaja (1979), preposed adjectives tend to carry information load and prosodic emphasis, particularly when the noun phrase appears in clause-initial position, as in (15).

(15) (Zemskaja 1979: 153)

*Krasiv-ye* beautiful-acc.pl.m *cvet-y* flower-acc.pl.m *ja* nom.1sg *segodnja* today *kupi-l-a* buy-pst-sg.f 'What beautiful flowers have I bought today!'

However, Lapteva (1976: 208, 211, 221–222) considers both templates as functionally equivalent variants.

A further criterion for a syntactic description of Russian attributive adjectives is the distance between adjectives and their noun heads. Unlike in German, where attributive adjectives occupy only the positions immediately adjacent to their head nouns, adjectives in Russian may take positions distant from their noun heads. For instance:

(16) a. (Miller & Weinert 1998: 165) *interesn-uju* interesting-acc.sg.f *prines-i* bring-imp *mne* dat.1sg *knig-u* book-acc.sg.f 'Bring me an interesting book.'

b.

While the adjective of the "split" noun-phrase *interesnuju – knigu* 'interesting book' in (16a) appears in the prenominal position, the adjective *malen'kij* 'small' in (16b) occurs in the postnominal position. The distant prenominal position of the adjective *interesnuju* 'interesting' in (16a) is explained by a special information purpose, namely highlighting the adjective (Zemskaja 1979: 153). Miller & Weinert (1998) state that distant prenominal adjectives "are equal to or more important than the noun with respect to information load" (p. 167). As regards postnominal adjectives, as in (16b), Lapteva (1976: 213) and Zemskaja (1979: 153) describe one of their functions as elaboration. In this function, the adjectives are

### 4 Code-mixing in the adjective-modified noun phrase

weak semantically and prosodically. Although the question of how syntactic configurations of attributive adjectives combine with intonation patterns to express various discursive meanings is of theoretical and practical interest, it is beyond the scope of this work and will not be discussed further.

The subsequent analysis of Russian-German bilingual data requires us to distinguish between the aforementioned case of distant postnominal adjectives, as in (16b), and the case of adjectival increments, as in (17).

```
(17) (Zemskaja 1979: 155)
```
*Ona* nom.3.sg.f *zvoni-l-a* call-pst-sg.f *tët-e* aunt-dat.sg.f *Oksan-e* Oksana-dat.sg.f *čtoby* so.that *ona…* nom.3.sg.f *kupi-l-a* buy-pst-sg.f *tort* cake[acc.sg.m] *èt-ot* that-acc.sg.m *sam-yj*, very-acc.sg.m *s* with *proslojk-ami*, layer-instr.sg.f *vafel'n-yj* wafery-acc.sg.m 'She called aunt Oksana to ask her to buy that cake, with layers, a wafer one.'

The prepositional phrase *s proslojkami* 'with layers' and the adjective *vafel'nyj* 'wafery' are placed at the end of the utterance, after the word *samyj*, which is marked by a falling tone. According to Zemskaja (1979: 155–156), the function of these structures is elaboration. The author discusses them in conjunction with the principle of "associative adjoinment", which enables the speaker to add any additional detail to the end of the utterance. Nonetheless, she is silent about the difference between distant postnominal adjectives, as in (16b), and adjectival increments, such as *vafel'nyj* 'wafery' in (17). The morphological criterion, which is adopted to distinguish postnominal adjectives from adjectival increments in German (recall that German postnominal adjectives in the case of split topicalisation are inflected for gender, number and case, whereas adjectival increments, which are in apposition to their head nouns, are uninflected, see footnote 8), does not apply to Russian adjectives in the postnominal position: both types of adjectives inflect for gender, number and case. On formal grounds, I regard as increments only those postposed adjectives which are produced after words marked by the falling terminal tone. Being clause-peripheral elements, adjectival increments are irrelevant to insertional code-mixing, and will thus not be considered further below.

The last group of adjectives that need to be discussed in this outline are adjectives for which postposition is the only possible option. The use of such adjectives in Russian is restricted to two cases: (i) adjectives as part of classification terms

### 4.2 Adjective-noun combinations in German and Russian

and product names (Švedova 2005 [1980][b]: 203)10, as in (18a), and (ii) morphologically unintegrated borrowings (Švedova 2005 [1980][a]: 556), as in (18b).

(18) a. (Švedova 2005 [1980][b]: 203)

*šalfej* sage[nom.sg.m] *lekarstvenn-yj*, gardenly-nom.sg.m *šalfej* sage[nom.sg.m] *lugov-oj*; meadow-nom.sg.m *marmelad* gumdrop[nom.sg.m] *jabločn-yj*, apple-nom.sg.m *šokolad* chocolate[nom.sg.m] *soev-yj* soya-nom.sg.m 'garden sage (*salvia officinalis*), meadow sage (*salvia pratensis*); apple gumdrop, soya chocolate'

b. (Švedova 2005 [1980][a]: 540) *cvet* colour[nom.sg.m] *bordo*, claret *brjuk-i* trouser-nom.pl.m *klëš*, bell-bottom *jubk-a* skirt-nom.sg.f *plisse* plissé 'a claret colour, bell-bottom trousers, a plissé skirt'

Interestingly, the morphologically non-integrated loans in (18b) *bordo* 'claret', *klëš* 'bell-bottom' and *plisse* 'plissé' have well-integrated counterparts: *bordovyj*, *klešënyj*/*rasklešënnyj* and *plessirovannyj*. These morphologically integrated loans, which are common in the Russian colloquial speech, may appear in the pre- or postnominal position, as in *bordovyj cvet* 'the claret colour', *klešënye brjuki* 'bellbottom trousers' and *plessirovannaja jubka* 'a plissé skirt'.

As follows from the overview of the syntactic configurations involving attributive adjectives in German and Russian, Russian exhibits a greater number of patterns for noun modification by adjectives than German. Beyond the few lexical restrictions, pragmatics seems to be the only factor that constrains the position of attributive adjectives in Russian. In contrast, German has one canonical position for attributive adjectives, i.e., the prenominal position. The postnominal position, in which adjectives are morphologically bare, is restricted to specific lexical items and classifying modifiers in special contexts. One of these contexts, the use of adjectives in product names, is found in both languages. Although inflection for grammatical gender, number and case generally applies to adjectives in both German and Russian, it does not apply to German postnominal adjectives (with

10Rijkhoff (2009) uses the term "classifying modifier" to refer to this case.

### 4 Code-mixing in the adjective-modified noun phrase

the exception of adjectives in split noun phrases with topicalised nouns) and certain borrowed adjectives in Russian. Despite the morphological non-equivalence in the inflection of adjectives observed in these two cases, the syntactic patterns, i.e., the adjacent preposition and the adjacent postposition, are identical in both languages. What is different between German and Russian syntactic patterns of modification is the possibility of distant modification, which exists only in Russian. In other words, only in Russian inflected attributive adjectives may appear detached from the head noun.

On the whole, modification by attributive adjectives exhibits similarities and differences in German and Russian: adjectives appear in both the pre- and postnominal position to modify their head nouns, but in German semantic and pragmatic constraints restrict the use of adjectives in the postnominal position more rigorously than in Russian, in which the postnominal position is commonplace in the colloquial speech. Considering this outline, we can predict that in insertional code-mixing, with Russian being the matrix language, Russian adjectives may pre- or post-modify German noun insertions, whereas inserted German adjective-noun combinations would follow the German order, such that the attributive adjective precedes the noun. In order to see whether this prediction is correct, we have to investigate these two types of insertion in the bilingual corpus.

# **4.3 Adjective-noun combinations in the Russian-German bilingual corpus**

In my Russian-German bilingual corpus, the use of attributive adjectives in mixed sentences is limited to two cases: Firstly, combinations of German attributive adjectives and their German head nouns may be inserted into Russian sentences as embedded-language islands. Secondly, Russian adjectives may modify German nouns pre- and post-nominally. Instances of modification of Russian nouns by German adjectives are absent from the corpus, although German adjective insertions occur in the corpus as (subject) predicatives (see Deuchar 2005, for a similar case in Welsh-English code-mixing).

# **4.3.1 German adjective-noun combinations in Russian sentences**

German adjective-noun combinations appearing in Russian sentences can be analysed as instances of insertional code-mixing (see section 4.1.3). For example, the German noun phrase *gebratene Nudeln* 'fried noodles' in (19) is inserted into a Russian clause structure, namely, into a Russian prepositional phrase.

4.3 Adjective-noun combinations in the Russian-German bilingual corpus

(19) (LA-1205031A)

ja nom.1sg xoč-u want-1sg čë-nibud' what-any s with *gebraten-e* fried-nom.pl *nudel-n* noodle-pl 'I'd like something with fried noodles.'

The internal structure of the inserted constituent *gebratene Nudeln* is German: the adjective *gebraten* 'fried' agrees with its head noun in the number and takes the inflectional suffix *-e*, which marks the nominative or the accusative case. The morphologically marked case deviates from the case projected by the preceding Russian preposition *s* 'with', namely, the instrumental case. This mismatch may be due to the absence of the instrumental case from the German case system. However, since the prepositional phrase is a constituent of a higher level than the German noun phrase, the analysis of the German adjective-noun combination as an insertion holds despite the issue of the structural non-equivalence of the two systems.

Insertions of German nominal constituents containing attributive adjectives, which can be regarded as embedded-language islands from the viewpoint of the MLF model, are the most frequent case in the corpus: a total of 71 adjective-noun combinations were identified, which correspond to 65 lexical types. These extended noun phrases almost invariably lack German determiners. For example, the German inserted noun phrases *chillige Familie* 'chilly family' in (20) and *unbekanntes Gesicht* 'unfamiliar face' in (21) would require indefinite articles *eine* and *ein*, respectively, when used in German sentences because they refer to countable indeterminate objects.

(20) (LS-110125J)

nee no u with menja gen.1sg *chillig-e* chilly-nom.sg.f *familie* family(f)[sg] 'No, I have a chilly family.'

(21) (LA-12022404A)

a but mnje dat.1sg *oh* ptcl *nee* no *geh-t* go-3sg *nicht*; neg vidat' perhaps to čto because u with menja gen.1sg *unbekannt-es* unfamiliar-sg.n *gesicht=* face(n)[sg] da yes čto because *ich* nom.1sg *komm-e* come-1sg *selten* rarely *oder* or *so= ja*

so yes

'But (she says) to me, "Oh no, that's impossible"; perhaps because my face is unfamiliar (to her), yes, because I come rarely or so, yes.'

### 4 Code-mixing in the adjective-modified noun phrase

Even when the referents of the inserted noun phrases are definite objects, German articles are not used, for instance:

```
(22) (H-100712O)
```
ei ptcl smotr-i look-imp.2sg kak-ie what-nom.pl igrušk-i; toy-nom.pl smotr-i look-imp.2sg *na?* ptcl gde where *klein-er* small-sg.m *stern*? star(m)[sg] 'Ah, look, what (nice) toys! Hey, look, where is the small star?'

(23) (LV-12022404A)

potom then oni nom.3pl est' be[prs] v in *historisch-es* historical-sg.n *seminar* department(n)[sg] 'Then there are some in the department of history.'

(24) (LA-1205034V)

vo-pervyx firstly *baltisch-e* Baltic-pl *länd-er-n* pl\country-pl-pl/dat otnosi-l-i-s' be.part-pst-pl-refl ne neg k of rossi-i Russia-dat.sg.f pri under petr-e Peter-prep.sg.m perv-om first-prep.sg.m 'First of all, the Baltic countries were not part of Russia under Peter the First.'

The noun phrases *kleiner Stern* 'small star' in (22), *historisches Seminar* 'historical department' in (23) and *baltische Ländern*11 'Baltic countries' in (24) all lack definite articles, which would be mandatory in German clauses. Furthermore, the presence of the definite article before these noun phrases in German would require the use of inflectional suffixes of the "weak" declension, i.e., *der klein-e Stern*, *das historisch-e Seminar* and *die baltisch-en Länder*.

Unlike in standard German, the vast majority of attributive adjectives in the data, just as the adjectives in the examples given above, inflect according to the "strong" declension. Of 70 German adjectives, 60 take one of the three suffixes of this declension: *-e* for feminines and plurals, *-es* for neuters and *-er* for masculines; six masculine and neuter adjectives appear with the suffix *-e* of the "weak"

11The formative *-n* is added to the noun *Länder* apparently erroneously. We can interpret this form in at least two ways: the speaker either double marked the plural on the noun (cf. the standard singular *Land* vs. the standard plural *Länder*), or produced its dative plural form. However, the latter analysis seems rather implausible for two reasons: (i) the noun phrase, being the subject of the clause, should be assigned the nominative case, and (ii) the adjective is not inflected for the dative case (cf. *baltischen Ländern*).

### 4.3 Adjective-noun combinations in the Russian-German bilingual corpus

inflection, although the determiners requiring it are absent from the respective bilingual clauses; one feminine adjective adds the suffix *-en*, which can be attributed to either the "mixed" or "weak" inflection; and finally, three adjectives lack an agreement marker.12 The tendency to express gender agreement with the noun by means of suffixes of the "strong" inflection may result from the degree of syncretism of this inflectional class, which is the lowest among the three inflectional classes (Wurzel 1984). Apart from indicating gender, these German inflectional suffixes serve as markers of the nominative or accusative case. It is all the more striking that bilingual speakers select them even when the morphological case projected on the slot in which they are inserted together with their head nouns is neither nominative nor accusative. One instance of this tendency is the mixed prepositional phrase *s gebratene Nudeln* 'with fried noodles' in (19), which has been tackled above, another instance is the prepositional phrase *v historisches Seminar* 'in the historical department' in (23). In this latter example, the noun phrase preceded by the preposition would have to be marked for the dative case because the whole prepositional phrase has a spatial meaning (the equivalents of the phrase in the dative would be *historisch-em Seminar* if the adjective inflects according to the "strong" class, and *historisch-en Seminar* if it inflects according to the "weak" declension). As the dative case is not expressed morphologically, we could say that it is neutralised. At the same time, each of the inserted nominal constituents in the above examples has a coherent internal structure, which corresponds to that of the embedded language, i.e., German. This circumstance allows us to analyse such insertions as embedded-language islands. Furthermore, we can regard the pervasive use of the inflectional suffixes of the German "strong" declensional class with the adjectives in these insertions as a kind of compromise strategy. It allows the bilingual speakers to preserve the internal structure of the nominal constituents, while eschewing the use of articles, which are non-existent in Russian but indispensable to the German case marking system, and thus occasionally sacrificing case distinctions. In other words, structural similarity between the matrix language and the embedded language increases without the violation of the structural integrity of the inserted nominal constituents.

Beside plentiful insertions of adjective-noun combinations, the corpus contains one instance of alternation involving an adjective-modified noun phrase. In this case, see (25), the switched fragment is a fully-fledged noun phrase, consisting of an adjectival modifier and a determiner.

12One adjective (*Basler* in *Basler Zoo* 'Zoo Basel') was not included in this count because it does not take any agreement marker in German.

### 4 Code-mixing in the adjective-modified noun phrase

(25) (LA-1205031A)

on nom.3sg.m id-ët go-3sg kak as *der* det.nom.sg.m *alleinig-e* lone-nom.sg.m *stark-e* strong-nom.sg.m *kämpfer*; fighter(m)[nom.sg] *ich* nom.1sg *bin* be[prs.1sg] *auf* on *kein-en* no.one-acc.sg.m *angewiesen*. dependent 'He counts as a strong lone fighter: I am not dependent on anyone.'

As the well-formed noun phrase *der alleinige starke Kämpfer* 'the strong lone fighter' is part of a conjunction phrase, it could be analysed as an insertion, but it is better apprehended as an instance of alternation, because it occurs at a site of structural equivalence, namely, after the Russian conjunction *kak* 'as'. This conjunction, just like its German equivalent *als*, does not govern case; rather than, the dependent noun phrase receives the case from the relevant antecedent phrase, here the nominative case from the phrase *on* 'he'. Moreover, the fact that the noun phrase is embedded in discourse, i.e., followed by a clause in the same language as the noun phrase itself, is indicative of alternation (cf. Muysken 2000: 104).

A few German adjective-noun combinations in Russian discourse may be reminiscent of alternation, but are better conceived of as insertions. This is the case when a German adjective-modified noun phrase is adjacent to another German insertion. Two instances of this kind are found in the corpus, for example:

(26) (LA-1205034A)

net, no èto this eščë also i ptcl *frage* question *der* det.gen.sg.f *identität* identity(f)[sg] potomu because čto u with nas gen.1pl netu no *identität* identity i and oni nom.3pl probuj-ut try-3pl čerez through cerkov' church[acc.sg.f] *national-e* national-acc.sg.f *identität* identity(f)[sg] *aufbau-en*; build.up-inf vot ptcl èto this vot… ptcl 'No, this is also a question of identity because we don't have an identity, and they are trying to build up a national identity by using the church; that's what I mean…'

The above utterance contains four German insertions, these include three noun phrases and an infinitive. The noun phrase *nationale Identität* 'national identity' and the infinitive *aufbauen* 'build up', which is adjacent to it, constitute one switched fragment. Since the switched fragment comprises several words and exhibits a non-nested structure (cf. Muysken 2000: 97), it may be reminiscent of alternation. Yet, the analysis as insertion is preferred because the noun phrase

### 4.3 Adjective-noun combinations in the Russian-German bilingual corpus

is syntactically integrated into the Russian clausal matrix owing to a missing article, required in German, and because the infinitive *aufbauen* 'build up' is part of the verb phrase *probujut aufbauen* 'are trying to build up'. As a rule, however, the instances of German adjective-noun insertions in my corpus represent a straightforward case.

In a few occurrences, German nominal insertions, in which German adjectives generally precede their German head nouns, are further modified. Overall, seven tokens of modification by Russian adjectives and one token of modification by a German pronominal adjective were identified in the corpus. The latter instance is as follows:

(27) (LS-110517La)

u with menja gen.1sg *mein* my[nom.sg.m] *ganz-er* whole-nom.sg.m *pony* fringe(m)[nom.sg] sgore-l burn.away-pst.sg.m uže already 'My whole fringe had already burnt away.'

Here, the extended noun phrase *mein ganzer Pony* 'my whole fringe' is inserted into the slot requiring the nominative case and is preceded by the Russian possessive construction *u menja* 'with me'. Due to the presence of the possessive adjective *mein* 'my', the adjective *ganz* 'whole' receives the suffix *-er* of the "mixed" inflectional class, as is expected in German. The more common case, namely, the modification of German nominal insertions by Russian pronominal adjectives, is illustrated below:

(28) (LS-110125J)

u with menja gen.1sg tože also moj my[nom.sg.m] *erst-er* first-nom.sg.m *freund* boyfriend(m)[nom.sg] kogda when ja nom.1sg pereexa-l-a move-pst-sg.f nemec German[nom.sg.m] by-l be-pst.sg.m 'And me, too, my first boyfriend, when I moved [here], was a German.'

In (28), the German noun *Freund* 'boyfriend' is modified by the German adjective *erster* 'first' and the Russian possessive adjective *moj* 'my'. Although the extended noun phrase is mixed, the noun and its two adjective modifiers are congruent in number, gender and case: both modifiers carry nominative singular masculine suffixes. The suffix *-er* of the adjective is attributable to either the "mixed", or the "strong" inflectional class. In parallel with the German noun

### 4 Code-mixing in the adjective-modified noun phrase

phrase *mein ganzer Pony* 'my whole fringe' in (27), we can analyse the adjective *erster* as inflected according to the "mixed" type. Nevertheless, it seems more plausible to consider this adjective as "strongly" inflected because, as has been shown above, the inflectional suffixes of the "strong" class clearly preponderate over other agreement markers on German adjectives in the data.

Instances of German adjective-noun insertions preceded or followed by Russian modifiers are given in Table 4.1. While in the first five instances, modification is syntactically unconstrained, postposition is the only option for the last modifying structure, i.e., a relative clause. With the exception of the adjective *normal'naja* 'normal', the Russian modifiers in the table are all pronominal adjectives: *moja* 'my', *kakaja-n't'* 'some', *kakie-to* 'some', *ètot* 'this', *kotoryj* 'which'. We will return to the first example later in this chapter. Suffice it to say for now with regard to the noun phrases given in the table that the grammatical gender in their parts demonstrates a high degree of incompatibility, whereas the grammatical case is entirely congruent. This may be owing to the fact that the examined noun phrases are marked by the most frequent cases: the nominative, or the accusative case, the markers of which exhibit a high degree of syncretism in German and Russian.

In the analysed sentences Russian is the matrix language, it is therefore not surprising that Russian syntactic patterns such as post-nominal and distant modification apply to German attributive adjectives, albeit on very rare occurrences. For example, the data contain two instances of German nominal constituents in which the inflected adjectives immediately follow their head nouns, unlike in German. These instances are given below:

(29) (LA-1205034V)

ja nom.1sg xote-l-a want-pst-sg.f dela-t' do-inf *sozial-es* social-sg.n *jahr* year(n)[n] *freiwillig-es* voluntary-sg.n èt-ot this-acc.sg.m posle after universitet-a university-gen.sg.m nu ptcl posle after škol-y school-gen.sg.f 'I wanted to take that volunteer gap year after my studies, I mean after school.'

(30) (LS-110714-1)

A: *das* that *hab'* aux.prs.1sg *ich* nom.1sg *auch* also *überleg-t* think.about-ptcp *ob* whether *ich* nom.1sg *in* in *italien* Italy *was* something *mach-en* do-inf *was* something *mach-e* do-prs.1sg

### 4.3 Adjective-noun combinations in the Russian-German bilingual corpus

Table 4.1: Attributive modification of German adjective-noun insertions by Russian nominal modifiers. *Note:* Information on case marking on German adjectives is omitted in the glosses, for in each given instance the respective inflectional suffix expresses the nominative, or the accusative case.

The mixed noun phrase in (29) contains the German noun *Jahr* 'year', two German attributive adjectives *soziales* 'social' and *freiwilliges* 'voluntary' and the Russian demonstrative adjective *ètot* 'this'. The German adjectives occupy both

### 4 Code-mixing in the adjective-modified noun phrase

positions adjacent to the noun, whereas in German, these adjectives precede the noun, and the adjective *freiwilliges* is followed by the adjective *soziales*, i.e., *freiwilliges soziales Jahr* 'volunteer gap year (social)'. The relationship between the noun and the attributive adjective immediately adjacent to it, which Seiler (1976) describes as the most intimate one among the noun's semantic relationships to its attributive adjectives, obtains here as well. In other words, the noun *Jahr* 'year' is closely connected to the adjective *soziales* 'social' both syntactically and semantically. It is therefore not surprising that in the mixed phrase, this adjective occupies the same position as in the German phrase, while the adjective *freiwilliges* 'voluntary' moves to the post-nominal position. The syntactic pattern underlying this post-nominal modifier is distinct from both German post-nominal constructions: the construction used for names of dishes and products, in which the noun joins the adjective in an appositive relation with zero agreement marking (cf. *Jahr freiwillig*), as well as the increment construction, whose inflected adjective is usually preceded by the determiner (cf. *Jahr, ein freiwilliges*). The usage of the inflected adjective in (29) is akin to the respective Russian pattern. As regards the internal structure of the mixed noun phrase under scrutiny, the components thereof manifest agreement in gender, number and case.

By contrast, the noun phrases *Italien richtige* 'real Italy' and *normal'naja richtige Italien* 'normal, real Italy' in (30) seem to lack agreement in gender. At first glance, the gender feature value of the German noun *Italien* 'Italy', which is neuter, contrasts with the corresponding feature value of the adjective, which is interpreted as feminine. The analysis of the adjective suffix *-e* on the adjective *richtige* 'real, proper' as a feminine marker is based on the aforementioned observation that German attributive adjectives in inserted nominal constituents systematically inflect according to the "strong" declensional class. In this declensional class, the suffix *-e* marks either the plural or the feminine gender (cf. examples 29, 30 and Table 4.1). If we consider the neuter gender of the noun and the feminine gender of the attributive adjective, we will have to assert a lack of congruence between these parts of the noun phrase. Nevertheless, it may well be that the noun and the whole noun phrase are feminine forms. This analysis is supported by the fact that the Russian adjective *normalnaja* 'normal' of the mixed phrase in the following five is feminine. The speakers treat the modifiers and presumably the noun as feminine forms, possibly as a result of an interference with the Russian equivalent of the German noun *Italija*, a feminine noun. The use of the German feminine suffix *-e* with the adjective *richtig* may thus be explained by the transfer of the corresponding gender feature value from Russian. If the noun *Italien* counts as feminine, just as its adjective modifiers, we may well suppose that the heads of the noun phrases in (30) as well as their phrasal con-

### 4.3 Adjective-noun combinations in the Russian-German bilingual corpus

stituents all manifest agreement in gender and number case, just as the majority of inserted German nominal constituents.

The syntactic pattern of the combination *Italien richtige* is identical with the pattern of *Jahr freiwilliges* in (29): the inflected adjective immediately follows its head noun. As outlined above, this syntactic pattern deviates from both postnominal constructions available in German and is likely to be modelled on the Russian pattern of post-nominal modification. The second occurrence of the examined nominal constituent in the example is a repetition of the phrase in a rearranged order. That is, the German adjective *richtige* 'real' immediate precedes the noun *Italien* 'Italy' and combines with the Russian adjective *normal'naja*, resulting in a mixed constituent. The syntactic pattern here complies with the canonical syntactic arrangement of German extended noun phrases.

As to the distant placement of modifiers, another feature of Russian syntax, German adjectives, on rare occurrences, may be placed non-adjacently to their German head nouns. Distant placement applies to pre- and post-nominal adjectives. Below are the only occurrences of German pre-nominal adjectives placed distantly:

(31) (LA-1205034V)

do before nego gen.3sg.m on-i nom.3-pl otnosi-l-i-s' belong-pst-pl-refl *polen-litauisch* Poland-Lithuanian vot=vot ptcl *union* Commonwealth 'Before him they belonged [to] the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.'

(32) (LA-12050313A)

…a but čto that èto this *offen-e* open-sg.f by-l-a be-pst-sg.f *lesung*… reading[sg.f] '…but that it was an open lecture…'

While the adjective *polen-litauisch* 'Poland-Lithuanian' in (31) is separated from its head noun by the focus particle *vot-vot*, the adjective *offene* 'open' in (32) is detached from its head by the copula *byla* 'was'. Although the pre-nominal position is the default for attributive adjectives in German, just as is the case in (31) and (32), detaching pre-nominal adjectives from their head nouns is not possible. With regard to the internal structure of the constituents, the adjective *offene* in (32) exhibits the agreement suffix *-e*, whereas the adjective *polen-litauisch* 'Poland-Lithuanian' in (31) lacks it. Another bare constituent is the verbal complement. Since the verb *otnosilis'* 'belonged' requires, as a complement, a prepositional phrase headed by the preposition *k* 'to', the prepositionless verbal comple-

### 4 Code-mixing in the adjective-modified noun phrase

ment *polen-litauisch union* may be considered bare; cf. *(k) polen-litauisch(e) Union*. Another peculiarity of the examined nominal constituent pertains to the adjective *polen-litauisch* 'Poland-Lithuanian'. This nonce formation deviates from the usual German dvandva adjective *polnisch-litauisch* 'Polish-Lithuanian', which is a habitual collocate of the noun *Union* 'Commonwealth'. The production of the nonce formation may have been triggered by the interference with the synonymous noun *Polen-Litauen* 'Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth'. A concentration of unusual features in (31), such as bare and deviant forms, may signal processing difficulties and thus challenge the analysis of the split noun phrase *polen-litauisch Union* as an embedded-language island. With regard to the split noun phrase *offene Lesung* 'open reading', one conspicuous problem is its lexico-semantic nature. In their conversation, the speakers discuss their academic schedule and, in order to refer to a lecture open to students of various courses of study, they use the expression *offene Lesung* instead of *offene Vorlesung* 'lecture', a more appropriate phrase to use in this context.

The corpus contains three instances of German post-nominal adjectives that are detached from their noun heads. While two of them constitute separate turns and thus coincide with turn-taking points, one post-nominal adjective is placed distantly within a continuous utterance; this instance is given below:

(33) (LV-12022413)

A: ili or vsjak-ie all-nom.pl vot ptcl èt-i this-nom.pl vot ptcl zna-eš know-2sg gm hes *vorspeise-n* starter-pl.f m mne m dat.1sg nrav-jat-sja please-3pl-refl

V: a ptcl *vorspeise* starter ja nom.1sg ne neg e-l-a eat-pst-sg.f

A: *weinblätt-er* pl\vine.leaf-pl tam ptcl *gefüllt* stuffed ili or *florinis* florinis èto ptcl *gefüllt-e* stuffed-sg.f m *paprika* m sweet.pepper

A: 'I also like all sorts of well those well you know hem starters.'

The above fragment of conversation contains two German adjective-noun combinations inserted into a Russian syntactic structure (lines 4–5): the adjective *gefüllt* 'stuffed' follows the noun *Weinblätter* 'vine leaves', and the same adjective immediately precedes the noun *Paprika* 'sweet pepper'. The noun phrase

### 4.3 Adjective-noun combinations in the Russian-German bilingual corpus

*Weinblätter gefüllt* 'stuffed vine leaves' instantiates a German pattern used in recipes; in this pattern adjectives follow their noun heads in the relation of apposition (cf. section 1.2). Although in (33) the adjacency between the noun and the adjective seems to be disrupted by the particle *tam* 'well', which functions as a hesitation marker, I argue that adjacency is still maintained here, since hesitation markers may appear virtually at any point of the constituent structure. We may thus consider the noun-adjective combination *Weinblätter gefüllt* 'stuffed vine leaves' a well-formed embedded-language island. Interestingly, hesitation markers accompany one of the two distant post-nominal adjectives involved in turn-taking. This instance is reproduced as follows:

(34) (LS-110526)

A: nu well tam there taka-ja such-nom.sg.f mam-a mother-nom.sg.f tože also tam ptcl

B: *modern-e* modern-nom.sg.f

A: *modern-e* modern-nom.sg.f *mama* mother(f)[nom.sg]

A: 'Well, they have such a mother there.'

B: 'A modern one.'

C: 'A modern mother.'

In the conversation extract above, speaker B produces the German adjective *moderne* 'modern' in response to speaker A's utterance. Namely, speaker A signals her active word seeking by using the hesitation marker *tam* and speaker B aids her in completing her sentence. From the perspective of function, this phenomenon can be described as a self-initiated other-repair, whereas from the viewpoint of conversation organisation, it exemplifies a collaborative co-construction. Speaker B co-constructs the syntactic structure of the utterance initiated by speaker A. Coincidentally, the co-construction here involves not only a change of interlocutors but also a change of the code: speaker A's sentence is Russian, but the adjacent adjective, uttered by speaker B, is German. Speaker A accepts speaker B's repair proposal by repeating the German noun phrase with the default German word-order pattern, i.e., *moderne Mama* 'modern mother'. The bilingual homophone *mama* in the first line enables speaker B to complete the other speaker's utterance in German. In other words, it triggers the mixed coconstruction in line two. An orthodox analysis would regard the co-constructed part as an inserted adjective, which, in its turn, would count as the only German

### 4 Code-mixing in the adjective-modified noun phrase

adjective insertion in the corpus. Still, it is not impossible to view the German adjective as a modifier of a noun that exists in both languages. Then we would treat it as a part of a German noun phrase. This split noun phrase is similar to the noun phrase *Italien richtige* 'real Italy' in line three of (30) in that the syntactic patterns deviate from the German syntax in each case.

The other detached post-nominal adjective that constitutes a separate turn is reproduced in (35).

(35) (LA-12050313)

A: da

yes

In the above conversation fragment, speaker C is looking at products in an online shop, while her interlocutor, speaker D, is not immediately involved in the search. In line one, speaker C provides her conversation partner with details about a bookmark that she has found. In the next line, speaker D asks her for further information. Speaker C responds to the question by giving a confirming answer. In her question, containing merely the adjective *magnetische* 'magnetic', speaker D elaborates on the previous utterance, namely, the mixed extended noun phrase *odin Lesezeichen za dva evro* 'one bookmark for two euros.' The elaboration adds a further modifier to the noun phrase, the German adjective *magnetische* 'magnetic'. Although the adjective as well as its head noun *Lesezeichen* 'bookmark' come from German, the use of the adjective complies with neither German syntax, nor German morphology. The adjective is detached from its head by the adverbial attribute *za dva evro* 'for two euros', as is possible in Russian but not in German (cf. the analysis of the adjective insertion in 34). The adjective receives the German inflectional suffix *-e*, which can be analysed as a feminine or plural marker of the 'strong' inflection, the typical inflectional class for German adjectives inserted into Russian sentences with their German heads as shown above. The resulting form *magnetische* does not agree in gender with the other constituents of the noun phrase: the Russian numeral *odin* 'one' is masculine, and the German noun *Lesezeichen* is neuter. In other words, the gender of the head noun

### 4.3 Adjective-noun combinations in the Russian-German bilingual corpus

is neuter, whereas the inflected phrasal components are masculine and feminine. Interestingly, the gender value of the attributive adjective coincides with that of the Russian equivalent of the German noun *Lesezeichen* 'bookmark', i.e., *zakladka*. We can therefore assert that the gender value of the Russian noun is transferred to the adjective, just as is the case with the combination *Italien richtige* 'real Italy' in (30).13

As outlined above, a crucial step in an analysis of inserted nominal constituents in bilingual sentences is to determine their word order and internal structure. These characteristics allow us to define a combination of a German noun and a German adjective in an otherwise Russian sentence as an embedded-language island or two subsequent insertions. A classification of German adjective-noun combinations based on these criteria is given in Table 4.2. As can be seen from Table 4.2, inserted adjective-noun combinations that follow German word order patterns and exhibit German internal structure make up the largest group among the observed instances. This group includes such items as *kleiner Stern* 'small star', *unbekanntes Gesicht* 'unfamiliar face', *süße Grußkarte* 'sweet greeting card', *kriminelle Jugendliche* 'criminal youths' and many others (the adjectives in these items all take suffixes of the 'strong' inflectional class). These insertions can qualify as embedded-language islands because they are well-formed nominal constituents in German.

Table 4.2: Variation in German adjective-noun insertions in Russian sentences according to their word order and internal structure

The next largest group of the four possible variants includes five German adjective-noun combinations whose syntactic patterns comply with the syntactic patterns common in monolingual German but whose internal structure deviates from the German monolingual norm in terms of gender, or case agreement. Four adjectives of this group are inflected and one adjective is bare. Inflected adjectives occur in the combinations *zweite Auto* 'second car', *richtige Italien* 'real

13The incongruity in gender values between adjectives and nouns in inserted nominal constituents in bilingual sentences as well as adjectives and nouns in the same constituents in monolingual sentences is not uncommon in situations of language contact. For instance, Muhamedowa (2006) reports that in Kazakh-Russian code-mixing and in Kazakhstan Russian the gender feature is regularly neutralised in adjectives which are part of Russian nominal constituents.

### 4 Code-mixing in the adjective-modified noun phrase

Italy', *römische Reich* 'Roman empire' and *guten Wohngegend* 'good neighbourhood'. Notably, the gender values of the adjectives in these combinations parallel the gender values of the nouns' Russian equivalents: *mašina*(f) 'car', *Italija*(f) 'Italy', *imperija*(f), the exception being *guten Wohngegend* 'good neighbourhood'. The gender values thus seem to be transferred, just as in example (35). The only bare adjective observed is part of the insertion *typisch Zwilling* 'typical Gemini'. The analysis of this combination as a noun phrase is not trivial. The adjective *typisch* 'typical' is non-inflected in German when it is used predicatively, as in *Das ist typisch Zwillinge* 'This is typical of Gemini'. But an assumption that *typisch* in (36) functions as a predicate is hardly tenable in view of the fact that at the higher level of organisation, the whole noun phrase serves as the complement of the preposition *u* 'with'.