Syntactic variations in Chinese–English code-switching

Based on a Chinese–English code-mixed treebank, this paper reports the probable syntactic consequences of code-switching. Compared with monolingual Chinese and English corpora, in the mixed corpus there are syntactic variations: variation in dependency distances and word-order variation in dependency direction. In the mixed corpus, there are two types of dependencies: monolingual and mixed dependencies. Mixed dependencies present longer dependency distances than monolingual ones. Major grammatical relations (subject, object, attribute and adverbial) and certain properties of code-switching (peripherality, flagging and dislocation) contribute to the variability of dependency distances. It is the distributions of major grammatical relations with different dependency directions in monolingual and mixed dependencies that cause the word-order variation.

[1]  Y. Miyashita,et al.  Image, language, brain , 2000 .

[2]  Edward Gibson,et al.  Processing relative clauses in Chinese , 2003, Cognition.

[3]  Janice L. Jake,et al.  Matching lemmas in a bilingual language competence and production model: evidence from intrasentential code switching , 1995 .

[4]  Brian Hok-Shing Chan.  The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-switching: Code-switching between typologically distinct languages , 2009 .

[5]  Shana Poplack,et al.  Variation theory and language contact , 1993 .

[6]  E. Gibson.  The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity. , 2000 .

[7]  Richard Hudson,et al.  English word grammar , 1995 .

[8]  Paul Salmon,et al.  The Nordic Languages and Modern Linguistics , 1973 .

[9]  So Hiranuma,et al.  Measuring the processing load of Japanese words , 1998 .

[10]  Haitao Liu,et al.  Using a Chinese treebank to measure dependency distance , 2009 .

[11]  Haitao Liu,et al.  Dependency direction as a means of word-order typology: A method based on dependency treebanks , 2010 .

[12]  David Sankoff,et al.  A formal grammar for code‐switching 1 , 1981 .

[13]  Shana Poplack,et al.  Distinguishing language contact phenomena: evidence from Finnish-English bilingualism , 1989 .

[14]  M. Halle,et al.  Preliminaries to Speech Analysis: The Distinctive Features and Their Correlates , 1961 .

[15]  Eva Duran Eppler,et al.  The dependency distance hypothesis for bilingual code-switching , 2014 .

[16]  Daniel Gildea,et al.  Do Grammars Minimize Dependency Length? , 2010, Cogn. Sci..

[17]  Pieter Muysken,et al.  Bilingual Speech: A Typology of Code-Mixing , 2000 .

[18]  M. Kutas,et al.  The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-switching: Code-switching and the brain , 2009 .

[19]  J. Hawkins.  Efficiency and complexity in grammars , 2004 .

[20]  Hubert Cuyckens,et al.  The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics , 2010 .

[21]  Carol Myers-Scotton,et al.  Contact Linguistics: Bilingual encounters and grammatical outcomes , 2013 .

[22]  Klaus Schubert.  Metataxis: Contrastive Dependency Syntax for Machine Translation , 1987 .

[23]  Richard Hudson,et al.  Language Networks: The New Word Grammar , 2007 .

[24]  William Labov,et al.  On the uses of variable rules , 1979, Language in Society.

[25]  H. Giles,et al.  Contexts of Accommodation: Developments in Applied Sociolinguistics , 2010 .

[26]  Shana Poplack,et al.  Code Switching: Linguistic , 2001 .

[27]  C. Myers-Scotton.  Multiple Voices: An Introduction to Bilingualism , 2005 .

[28]  Wenwen Li,et al.  Chinese Syntactic and Typological Properties Based on Dependency Syntactic Treebanks , 2009 .

[29]  Carol Myers-Scotton,et al.  Four types of morpheme : evidence from aphasia, code switching, and second-language acquisition , 2000 .

[30]  Eva Maria Eppler,et al.  The syntax of German-English code-switching , 2005 .

[31]  Haitao Liu,et al.  Dependency Distance as a Metric of Language Comprehension Difficulty , 2008 .

[32]  Shana Poplack,et al.  Contrasting patterns of code-switching in two communities , 1985 .

[33]  Carol Myers Scotton,et al.  The negotiation of identities in conversation: a theory of markedness and code choice , 1983 .

[34]  Jeanine Treffers-Daller,et al.  Mixing two languages : French-Dutch contact in a comparative perspective , 1994 .

[35]  E. Gibson.  Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies , 1998, Cognition.

[36]  David Temperley,et al.  Minimization of dependency length in written English , 2007, Cognition.

[37]  Longxing Wei.  The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-switching: Code-switching and the bilingual mental lexicon , 2009 .

[38]  Richard Hudson,et al.  An Introduction to Word Grammar , 2010 .

[39]  Anat Ninio,et al.  Language and the Learning Curve: A New Theory of Syntactic Development , 2006 .

[40]  Almeida Jacqueline Toribio,et al.  Code switching and X-bar theory: the fuctional head constraint , 1994 .

[41]  Tony McEnery,et al.  Corpus-Based Contrastive Studies of English and Chinese , 2010 .