Modelling the Copying of Verb Argument Structure

In this chapter, the copying of verbs is discussed on a more abstract level. In addition to describing the types of code copying of verbs in Johanson’s approach (Language Encounters across Time and Space, Novus forlag, Oslo, 1999; Language Change, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, 2002; Language Contact and Contact Languages, Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2008; The Oxford Handbook of Case, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009) we aim at modelling these types in a framework that explicitly assumes the different linguistic levels in the process of copying argument structure. We will first discuss Eisenberg’s notion of integration and integration conflicts Neues Und Fremdes Im Deutschen Wortschatz. Aktueller Lexikalischer Wandel, de Gruyter, Berlin, 2001; Das Fremdwort im Deutschen, De Gruyter, Berlin, 2011) and Holler’s (Argumentstruktur Zwischen Valenz Und Konstruktion, Narr, Tübingen, 2015) study which has applied Eisenberg’s ideas to the copying of English verbs to German. Holler explains structural integration (conflicts) by showing that English verbs copied to German behave differently on the level of syntax and semantics using case and semantic role hierarchies. Yet even more interesting is the psycholinguistic approach by Myers-Scotton including the Abstract Level modelmodelAbstract Level model (ALM, Contact Linguistics: Bilingual Encounters and Grammatical Outcomes, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002) that seeks to account for bilingual production. This model specifically addresses the nature of lemmas on a more abstract level and serves well to analyse the different levels of argument structure that take part in the process of mixing entities of model and basic code. Crucially, it addresses the initiating process of copying an entity from the model code to the basic code. We will discuss Myers-Scotton’s framework (Myers-Scotton in Contact Linguistics: Bilingual Encounters and Grammatical Outcomes, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002; Myers-Scotton & Jake in Matching Lemmas in a Bilingual Language Competence and Production Model: Evidence from Intrasentential Code Switching, Linguistics 33(5), 981–1024, 1995) and specifically the ALM before we present our analyses of the phenomena discussed in Chapter 2 in this model.