Alternational code-switching in the story-telling narratives of English-Japanese bilingual children

概要

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This study addresses the grammatical constraints on English-Japanese code-switching (CS) produced by Japanese children living in the UK. A question of interest is where in a sentence the speaker switches from one language to the other? The source of the data used in this study is audio-taped story-telling elicited in one language at a time. The monolingual context was elicited by specifying the base language in which the child would tell the story. The present paper focuses on CS observed in the English base language. The data was analyzed in the framework of alternation and insertion (Muysken, 1997, 2000). The switches observed in the Japanese base language were all characterized as the insertional type (Takagi, 2006b). This paper shows that CS tends to be alternational when the base language is English and explores where, and in what syntax contexts, alternation occurs. It is shown that symmetrical sentences are constructed as a result of matrix language (ML) alternation and it is argued that this construction is attributable to the typological properties of English and Japanese. It is also shown that alternation tends to take place at sentence boundaries. The findings in this study support the theory of `blocking' argued by Sebba (1998). That is, where there is a high degree of incompatibility between the two languages, switching will be blocked at most points and may be limited to switching of lexical categories and inter-sentential switches