‘I saw the madre’: evaluating predictions about codeswitched determiner-noun sequences using Spanish–English and Welsh–English data

Abstract

Previous work on intrasentential codeswitching has noted that switches between determiners and their noun complements are frequent in both Spanish–English and Welsh–English data. Two major recent theories of codeswitching, the Matrix Language Frame model and a Minimalist Program approach, make potentially competing predictions regarding the source language of the determiner in these mixed nominal constructions.

In this paper we evaluate the predictions of each theory with reference to comparable sets of Spanish–English and Welsh–English codeswitching data. Mixed nominal constructions are extracted to test the compatibility of these data with the predictions, taking into account coverage and accuracy.

We find that the data are broadly consistent with each set of predictions but do not find statistically significant differences between the accuracy of the predictions of the two theories. We examine in detail the counterexamples to the predictions of each theory to see what further factors may influence codeswitching patterns between determiners and their nouns, and also discuss the differences in observed patterns in the data from each language pair.

Keywords:

• codeswitching
• bilingual corpora
• evaluation of theories
• Matrix Language Frame theory
• Minimalist approaches to codeswitching

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Peredur Davies, Siân Lloyd-Williams and Myfyr Prys for their help with the analysis and presentation of the Welsh–English codeswitching data, to Kara McAlister for creating a subsample of the corpus, and to Diana Carter for invaluable editorial assistance and for running the statistical analyses. We would also like to thank the following for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper: Katja Cantone, Michael Clyne, Marcel Den Dikken, Virginia Gathercole, Jeff MacSwan, Kara McAlister, Gerald Stell, Enlli Thomas and two anonymous reviewers.

The support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales and the Welsh Assembly Government is gratefully acknowledged. The work presented in this paper was part of the programme of the ESRC Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Theory and Practice at Bangor University.

Notes

1. Key to glosses: PL, plural; S, singular; PRON, pronoun; POSS, possessive pronoun; DET, determiner; PRT, particle; NEG, negative/negative particle; NFIN, non-finite; PRES, present; IM, interactional marker; IMP, imperfect tense; CONDIT, conditional tense; FUT, future tense; PAST, past tense; NPAST, non-past tense; IMPER, imperative; 1S/1PL, first person singular/plural; 2S/PL, second person singular/plural; 3S/3PL, third person singular/plural.

2. All Welsh examples come from our own data. Labels give the name of the transcript file, and line number of the example.

3. The Welsh data were originally collected and transcribed by Marika Fusser, Elen Robert, Peredur Davies, Jonathan Stammers, Siân Lloyd-Williams and Margaret Deuchar as part of the project ‘Code-switching and Convergence in Welsh’, awarded by the AHRC to Margaret Deuchar. They are available via TalkBank (http://www.talkbank.org) in the BilingBank archive.

4. The appendix is available online as supplementary material.

5. We conducted similar analyses for coverage, even though an analysis of the coverage of the two models may seem superfluous, since the Minimalist approach has 100% coverage by definition, and the Matrix Frame model does not in practice. However, we argue that it may be seen as an additional way of quantifying the shortfall in coverage of the Matrix Language Frame. We found that χ² analyses confirmed significant differences in coverage for both the Spanish–English corpus (χ²(1, N=200), p<0.001) and the Welsh–English data (χ²(1, N=456), p<0.0001).