ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on language mixing in the heritage language American Norwegian. This is the variety of Norwegian spoken by native speakers of Norwegian who immigrated to the US after the critical period had passed, as well as their descendants. The chapter considers the formal grammar of cases where one language provides the inflectional morphemes and the word order, whereas the other language at most contributes some of the lexical content morphemes. These features generate a syntactic template or frame. For the realization of the feature matrices, the authors assume a set of vocabulary insertion rules. It examines an exoskeletal model, which is a version of Distributed Morphology. The chapter suggests that there will be a preference for functional exponents from the matrix language even when the exponent from the embedded language is equally well matched. Lexical content items are freely inserted into designated slots in the structure generated by the abstract feature matrices.
