Abstract

On the communicative utility of code-switching

Authors
  • Yanting Li
  • Gregory Scontras
  • Richard Futrell

Abstract

In the multilingual world we live in, code-switching (CS) is becoming more natural and more common. Why do bilingual language users CS from one language (the source language) to another (the target language) during communication, and how do they decide the CS point? In this corpus study, we investigate the hypothesis that it is harder to accurately express the meaning represented by the CS words in the source language. We analyzed sentences containing CS from Chinese--English bilingual corpora and found evidence for our hypothesis: compared to non-CS words, the English CS words are farther away from their closest Chinese word neighbors in a bilingual meaning space. This result supports the idea that bilinguals are using CS as a communication strategy to express their intended meanings accurately and efficiently.

Keywords: code-switch, language production, bilingualism, corpus study, word vector, communicative utility

How to Cite:

Li, Y., Scontras, G. & Futrell, R., (2024) “On the communicative utility of code-switching”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 7(1), 343–349. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/scil.2225

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Published on
24 Jun 2024
Peer Reviewed