S. Wintner, Safaa Shehadi, Yuli Zeira, Doreen Osmelak, Yuval Nov
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract Why do bilingual speakers code-switch (mix their two languages)? Among the several theories that attempt to explain this natural and ubiquitous phenomenon, the triggering hypothesis relates code-switching to the presence of lexical triggers, specifically cognates and proper names, adjacent to the switch point. We provide a fuller, more nuanced and refined exploration of the triggering hypothesis, based on five large datasets in three language pairs, reflecting both spoken and written bilingual interactions. Our results show that words that are assumed to reside in a mental lexicon shared by both languages indeed trigger code-switching, that the tendency to switch depends on the distance of the trigger from the switch point and on whether the trigger precedes or succeeds the switch, but not on the etymology of the trigger words. We thus provide strong, robust, evidence-based confirmation to several hypotheses on the relationships between lexical triggers and code-switching.
期刊介绍:
The highly regarded quarterly journal Computational Linguistics has a companion journal called Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. This open access journal publishes articles in all areas of natural language processing and is an important resource for academic and industry computational linguists, natural language processing experts, artificial intelligence and machine learning investigators, cognitive scientists, speech specialists, as well as linguists and philosophers. The journal disseminates work of vital relevance to these professionals on an annual basis.