Intrasentential Codeswitching as Conceptual Projection of Lemmas in the Bilingual Mental Lexicon

Abstract

This paper explores the bilingual speech containing intrasentential codeswitching (ICS) in relation to the nature and activity of the bilingual mental lexicon. ICS is defined as the use of two or more linguistic varieties within the sentence boundaries in the same discourse. It explains the phenomenon of ICS in terms of the abstract notions of 'lemmas' and 'lemma activation.' Lemmas are abstract entries in the mental lexicon which contain semantic, pragmatic, syntactic, morphological, and phonological information about actual lexemes.