Proceedings

Stress Patterns in Intra-word Code-switching

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Abstract

Code-switching has primarily been studied at the sentence level. More recent work, however, shows that intra-word code-switching is cross-linguistically robust and widespread, yet its phonological properties remain underexplored. As a result, a central open question is whether intra-word code-switching maintains a single phonological system or allows phonological processes from both languages to surface within a single word. To address this gap, we investigate intra-word code-switching between Kazakh and Russian, a societally-widespread but understudied language pair, focusing on stress patterns. Using experimentally-derived acoustic data, we examine whether Russian stress patterns are preserved when Russian stems are inflected with Kazakh suffixes within a Kazakh morphosyntactic frame. Our results show that Russian stress persists in inflected forms, most robustly through duration, while also exhibiting Kazakh-style final lengthening. Vowel quality analyses further reveal a Russian-style effect of stress on vowel reduction also in code-switched tokens. Overall, these findings point to hybrid stress patterns in intra-word code-switching, reflecting interaction rather than categorical dominance of a single phonological system. We analyze these patterns within a Stratal Optimality Theory framework.

Keywords: intra-word code-switching, bilingual phonology, Kazakh-Russian, stress

How to Cite:

Baidildinova, M., Mayer, C. & Scontras, G., (2026) “Stress Patterns in Intra-word Code-switching”, Proceedings of the Annual Meetings on Phonology 2(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/amphonology.3703