24th Annual Linguistics Spring Colloquium (Cancelled)

Every spring, the Linguistics Graduate Student Association (LGSA) at UNC-Chapel Hill and the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of Linguistics puts on its annual Spring Colloquium, a celebration of research in linguistics. This year’s event includes a poster session featuring
the work of our department’s graduate students, followed by a keynote talk titled “On the nature of word-internal language mixing” by Dr. Faruk Akkuş of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The Colloquium is free for all who present or attend; there is no
registration fee.

This talk deals with the language mixing patterns in the verbal and nominal domains of Turkish, Anatolian Arabic and Northern Kurdish, initially investigated in Akkuş 2025. In
that study, I proposed the No-Reversal Constraint (NRC), which prohibits switching back to a language that has been externalized earlier in the derivation. Focusing on rarely studied
trilingual settings, this talk broadens the empirical coverage of this constraint, and addresses two issues left unaddressed in Akkuş 2025. I demonstrate that word-internal language mixing takes place even in the absence of phonological and morphological
integration, and in some cases phonological processes do not track each other. As such, this phenomenon cannot simply be a case of borrowing, and the NRC applies regardless of the
level of integration. Moreover, I demonstrate that the NRC applies at the domain of morphosyntactic words, regulating the possible permutations of switches, and further show that the NRC is a structural, not linear-based constraint