A corpus investigation of the typology of code-switching between closely related languages: Data from Mandarin

Abstract

Aims and objectives:

The study provides a documentation of the code-switching patterns in typologically similar languages and compares the code-switching patterns between typologically distant versus typologically similar languages.

Design:

The study examines the scale, type, matrix language, and syntactic categories of spontaneous Mandarin–Taiwanese code-switching as well as their interaction with the speakers’ language dominance and the main language of the conversation.

Data and analysis:

The study utilized data from a Mandarin–Taiwanese bilingual corpus of 16,186 utterances and conducted frequency analyses.

Findings:

Due to the large lexical gap in Taiwanese and the higher sociolinguistic status of Mandarin, code-switching between Mandarin and Taiwanese tends to be intra-sentential, classic—with a non-negligible proportion of composite code-switching, and in the direction of Taiwanese to Mandarin. When compared to the code-switching between typologically distant languages, Mandarin–Taiwanese code-switching tends to occur on a smaller scale as most of the translational equivalents in the two languages have a shared syntactic frame, which poses little constraint as to where code-switching can occur.

Originality:

This study presents a systematic corpus examination of the typological characteristics of code-switching between typologically similar languages.

Significance:

The results suggest differences in the code-switching patterns in typologically similar versus distant languages and invite future research to reconsider the applicability of the current models of code-switching when studying bilingual speech in typologically similar languages.

Keywords

Bilingualism code-switching Taiwanese Southern Min Taiwan Mandarin typology corpus

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A corpus investigation of the typology of code-switching between closely related languages: Data from Mandarin–Taiwanese code-switching

Abstract

Aims and objectives:

Design:

Data and analysis:

Findings:

Originality:

Significance:

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References