The structure of the Taiwanese DP in Taiwanese–Spanish bilinguals: evidence from code-switching

摘要

This paper proposes an analysis of the Taiwanese DP justified by Taiwanese–Spanish code-switching data from highly competent bilingual speakers from a Taiwanese–Spanish community in Buenos Aires. In line with other research, we claim that Taiwanese has a NumP and an independent DP which cannot be filled by null elements. Further, we propose a new analysis for pre-classifier (Cl) adjectives (the tua ‘big’ and se ‘small’ type), which we show to be functional elements of what we call the Size Phrase. We also claim that Taiwanese has two classifier positions, the upper of which optionally appears for our speakers in constructions involving a Size element. In addition to our claims on the Taiwanese DP, our analysis provides evidence against claims that phrase structure is universal (Cinque, Adverbs and functional heads: a cross-linguistics perspective, 1999).