Abstract
The contentious question of bilingual processing cost may be recast as a fresh question of code-switching (CS) strategies—quantitative preferences and structural adjustments for switching at particular junctures of two languages. CS strategies are established by considering prosodic and syntactic variables, capitalizing here on bidirectional multi-word CS, spontaneously produced by members of a bilingual community in northern New Mexico who regularly use both languages (Torres Cacoullos and Travis, 2018). CS strategies become apparent by extending the equivalence constraint, which states that bilinguals avoid CS at points of word placement conflict (Poplack, 1980), to examine points of inconsistent equivalence between the languages, where syntactic difficulty could arise. Such sites of variable equivalence are junctures where the word strings of the two languages are equivalent only sometimes due to language-internal variable structures. A case in point for the English-Spanish language pair is the boundary between main and complement clauses, where a conjunction occurs always in Spanish but variably in English. The prosodic distancing strategy is to separate the juncture of the two languages. Here the complement clause appears in a different prosodic unit from the main clause—disproportionately as compared both with monolingual benchmarks and with bilinguals’ own unilingual English and Spanish. Prosodic distancing serves to mitigate variable equivalence. The syntactic selection strategy is to opt for the variant that is more quantitatively available and more discourse neutral. Here the preference is for the Spanish complementizer que—regardless of main or complement clause language. This is the more frequent option in bilinguals’ combined experience in both their languages, whereas the English complementizer that is subject to a number of conditioning factors. Syntactic selection serves to restore equivalence. Discovery of community CS strategies may spur reconsideration of processing cost as a matter of relative difficulty, which will depend on bilinguals’ prosodic and syntactic choices at particular CS sites.
Highlights
Code-switching (CS) may be defined as stringing together two languages in alternation
The prediction here is based on what we know about monolingual main and complement clauses, which cross-linguistically tend to occur in the same Intonation Unit (IU) (Croft, 1995: 861)
Following the prosodic distancing hypothesis, we may predict that when CS occurs at the boundary between main and complement clauses, they will be integrated in the same IU at a lower rate than their unilingual and monolingual counterparts
Summary
Code-switching (CS) may be defined as stringing together two languages in alternation. In (1), for example, the speaker begins the sentence in Spanish, continues in English, and ends in Spanish (In the examples, stretches of speech originally produced in English are italicized in the translation on the right.) CS is generally agreed to be orderly, though debate continues over the rules governing it (Poplack, 2015: 918). The notion that CS incurs blanket processing cost, is contentious (see Johns et al, 2019: 585–587 for a review). The question of cost is refashioned into an investigation of bilingual CS strategies. We establish prosodic distancing and syntactic selection strategies, capitalizing on CS data by members of a bilingual speech community who regularly use both languages. CS strategies are discoverable in speakers’ structural choices, as revealed by distribution patterns in the spontaneous production of CS
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