Caveat: Doubly Possessed

My student Sophia is probably the only student I have who actually thinks in English at least some of the time. And maybe it is only in the context of being able to effortlessly switch what language one is thinking in does it really become common to see dynamic lexeme-level code switching, in the linguistic sense.

I was handing her a vocabulary quiz booklet, and she handed it back to me, saying, offhandedly,

that's 동현의 것's
(i.e. that's Dong-hyeon-ui geot's)

"Dong-hyeon" is her classmate's name. Really it's not exactly code-switching, since it's a kind of "doubled-up possessive" – a Korean possessive (-의 것 [-ui-geot]) embedded in an English possessive – so more like "code layering." She was just covering her bases.

I just found it fascinating from a language-acquisition standpoint.

[daily log: walking, 6.5km]

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