Distance and word order between lexical heads and noun dependents in Chinese–English code-switching

Publication date: Available online 8 March 2019Source: LinguaAuthor(s): Lin WangAbstractThis paper investigates the effects of code-switching on the dependency distance and the word order of the dependencies with lexical heads and noun dependents, using data from a Chinese–English code-mixed treebank. It is found that (1) except the object relation, mixed dependencies with English lexical heads and Chinese noun dependents present shorter dependency distances than monolingual ones; (2) mixed dependencies with Chinese lexical heads and English noun dependents present longer dependency distances than monolingual ones; (3) word order differences are mainly found in the adverbial dependencies with verb heads and noun dependents, or with English preposition heads and Chinese noun dependents. These findings suggest that: (1) the heads, either the first language or the second language, tend to have greater influence on the dependency distance of the mixed dependencies; (2) the word order of the mixed dependencies is greatly influenced by the first language and the dependents tend to play the greater role.

Source: Lingua - March 8, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research