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The Study on Syntactic Variations in Chinese-English Code-switching and Its Cognitive Processing

Author: WangLin
Tutor: TangXiaoWei
School: Zhejiang University
Course: Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: code-switching syntactic variation dependency distance dependency direction cognitive processing
CLC: H146
Type: PhD thesis
Year: 2013
Downloads: 117
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Abstract

Code-switching is one of the important language-contact phenomena. In recent years, the study on code-switching has involved in not only the field of linguistics but also the interdisciplinary researches. The definitions, classifications, syntactic structures, social functions and even the cognitive processing mechanism have been widely focused and studied. From the syntactic and cognitive perspectives, building a dependency treebank of Chinese-English code-switching based on natural language data and applying self-paced reading and eye-movement reading experiments, the paper takes an quantitative and cognitive analysis on Chinese-English code-switching. The first part mainly discusses the syntactic variations of Chinese-English code-switching and the causes. The second part analyzes the presentation of the peripherality of code-switchingwhich which is one of the major causes of syntactic variations in Chinese-English code-switching in psychological experiments and verifies the conclusions drawn from the first part.The paper tentatively proposes a universal model to analyze syntactic variations of code-switching. According to Dependency Grammar, based on a dependency treebank of Chinese-English code-switching containing19766tokens, the paper takes an analysis on syntactic variations in Chinese-English code-switching with the criteria of the depenendcy distance and the dependency direction. Syntactically, we find that code-switching affects language syntactic structures in terms of the dependency distance and the dependency direction. In other words, compared with the monolingual Chinese and English corpora, there are variations in dependency distances and word-order variation in dependency direction in the code-switching treebank. Cognitively, by comparing the dependency distance, a measure of memory load in Word Grammar, it is mainly found that mixed dependencies present longer distances than corresponding monolingual ones, thus verifying the alleged processing cost of code-switching. Specifically speaking, major grammatical functions (subject, object, attribute and adverbial) play important roles in syntactic variations; MDDs of main grammatical relations in mixed dependencies are, on average, longer than those in monolingual ones. The data in the corpus further confirm that some properties of code-switching such as peripherality, dislocation and flagging contribute to the longer dependency distances of mixed dependencies. To test the word-order variation, we analyze statistically the distributions of head-initial and head-final dependencies in Chinese, English, and mixed corpora. Distributions of the dependency direction in mixed dependencies are different from those of monolingual ones, which usually cause the word-order variation of the mixed corpus. It is the different distributions of main grammatical functions in monolingual and mixed dependencies that make the dependency direction of the mixed dependencies different.For a more detailed and in-depth analysis on causes of syntactic variations in Chinese-English code-switching, this paper starts from the binding forces of the verb, accurately calculates and summarizes the Probabilistic Valency Pattern of verbs in Chinese-English code-switching, statistically compares the distributions of three main grammatical relations formed by verbs and their dependents of different part of speech in monolingual and mixed dependencies. Through the quantitative analysis, it can not only clearly display and compare the binding forces of Chinese and English verbs in Chinese-English code-switching treebank, namely forces of the verbs dominating or dominated by other parts of speech to form various syntactic relations, but also find the distributions of different parts of speech that result in syntactic variations in dependency distances. This paper tentatively expands the application of Probabilistic Valency Pattern theory and provides a theoretical basis for the comprehensive study of linguistics and cognitive experiments.In the first part, based on the quantitative analysis in Chinese-English code-switching treebank, it is found that one of major causes of syntactic variations in dependency distances and cognitive processing difficulties is the peripherality of code-switching, in order to verify the above conclusion through the psychological experiments, in the second part we adopt the natural language data in code-switching treebank and test the position effects of subjects in code-mixed sentences and Chinese sentences. It is verified that the peripherality of code-switching can result in the changes of cognitve processing difficulty.

The Study on Syntactic Variations in Chinese-English Code-switching and Its Cognitive Processing

Abstract

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