Congruence and Welsh–English code-switching

This paper aims to contribute to elucidating the notion of congruence in code-switching with particular reference to Welsh–English data. It has been suggested that a sufficient degree of congruence or equivalence between the constituents of one language and another is necessary in order for code-switching to take place. We shall distinguish between paradigmatic and syntagmatic congruence in relation to the grammatical categories of the two languages, focusing on the insertion of English nouns and noun phrases, adjectives, verbs and participles in otherwise Welsh utterances. We shall demonstrate how differing degrees of congruence between grammatical categories in the two languages are reflected in different code-switching outcomes.

[1]  W. Bruce Croft.  Radical Construction Grammar , 2001 .

[2]  Albert Valdman,et al.  Pidginization and Creolization of Languages , 1973 .

[3]  A. Radford.  Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English: Head movement , 1997 .

[4]  J. Zwart.  The Minimalist Program , 1998, Journal of Linguistics.

[5]  Nancy Stenson,et al.  Phrase Structure Congruence, Government, and Irish-English Code-Switching , 1990 .

[6]  Susan Berk-Seligson,et al.  Linguistic constraints on intrasentential code-switching: A study of Spanish/Hebrew bilingualism , 1986, Language in Society.

[7]  Shana Poplack,et al.  How Languages Fit Together in Codemixing. , 1998 .

[8]  S. Sridhar,et al.  The Syntax and Psycholinguistics of Bilingual Code Mixing. , 1980 .

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

[10]  M. Clyne,et al.  Dynamics of Language Contact , 2003 .

[11]  Mark Sebba.  A Congruence Approach to the Syntax of Codeswitching , 1998 .

[12]  Margaret Deuchar,et al.  Welsh-English code-switching and the Matrix Language Frame model , 2006 .

[13]  Uriel Weinreich,et al.  Languages in Contact: French, German and Romansh in twentieth-century Switzerland , 2011 .

[14]  Ian Roberts,et al.  Principles and Parameters in a VSO Language: A Case Study in Welsh , 2005 .

[15]  James R. Hurford,et al.  Linguistic Controversies: Essays in Linguistic Theory and Practice in Honour of F. R. Palmer , 1984 .

[16]  Agnes Bolonyai.  English Verbs in Hungarian / English Codeswitching , 2004 .

[17]  Robert D. Borsley,et al.  The Syntax of Welsh , 2007 .

[18]  Ad Backus,et al.  Units in codeswitching : evidence for multimorphemic elements in the lexicon , 2003 .

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

[20]  James Mccloskey.  The syntax of the Celtic languages: Subjects and subject positions in Irish , 1996 .

[21]  David Thorne,et al.  A Comprehensive Welsh Grammar , 1993 .

[22]  J. Macswan,et al.  The architecture of the bilingual language faculty: evidence from intrasentential code switching , 2000, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.

[23]  Longxing Wei,et al.  Lemma congruence checking between languages as an organizing principle in intrasentential codeswitching , 2001 .

[24]  Eirlys E. Davies,et al.  The syntax of Arabic-French code-switching , 1983 .

[25]  A. Backus.  Two in one. Bilingual speech of Turkisch immigrants in the Netherlands , 1996 .

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

[27]  J. Davies.  The Welsh language , 1993 .

[28]  Carol Myers-Scotton,et al.  Making a minimalist approach to codeswitching work: Adding the Matrix Language , 2002, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.