Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

This study investigates the linguistic nature of code-switching (CS), the concurrent use of more than one language in conversation, which is commonly observed in bilingual speech. Earlier research shows that the patterns of CS are not random but systematic, thus, suggests the possibility that CS is constrained by grammatical principles that underlie human language. Under the assumption that monolingual and bilingual grammars are subject to the same principles, the present study aims to provide a principled account of word order variation in CS, with particular emphasis on the relative placement of the object (O) and the verb (V). Cross-linguistic CS data show that not only can a switch occur between languages with different canonical word orders, such as an OV language (e.g., Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Turkish) and a VO language (e.g., English, French), but the internal order of a code-switched constituent may also vary, exhibiting either order of the two languages involved in CS. One immediate question that arises is how these different word orders are distributed and derived.

The results from a pilot study of Japanese-English and Korean-English CS (Shim 2011) show that light verbs play an important role in deriving different word orders in CS. However, it also reveals that syntax alone cannot account for the various word order patterns in CS, and suggests that both syntax (particularly, the syntax of light verbs, which differs from language to language) and meaning (the semantic compositionality of a phrase) contribute to OV-VO variation in CS. The present study modifies and extends this view, and employs three experimental different tasks, which have been tested against Japanese-English and Korean-English bilingual speakers’ introspective judgments of CS patterns presented.