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

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