Structural Characteristics Of Code-Switches In Four-Year-Old Bilinguals

Abstract

The structure of code-switches at early periods of childhood bilingual development is underresearched. This article reports findings from mixed utterances of two four-year-old bilingual children who simultaneously acquire Russian and English within a Russian monoethnic family. The objective of the paper is to describe structural characteristics of code-switches observed in conversations of the siblings with their parents and grandparents. Structural analysis has been done within the framework of the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model elaborated by C. Myers-Scotton. The results of the study demonstrate that code-switches by both children frequently followed the main principles and rules of the MLF model, though their choice of Russian as the Matrix Language (ML) signaled its increasing dominance in the children's bilingual development at this period. Violations of the MLF model rules appeared only in those rare cases when English acted as the ML in the children's mixed utterances because their English Grammar acquisition lagged behind their Russian one. The structural types observed in four-year-old child bilingual speech are predominantly intrasentential, with English bare forms being the most frequent sub-types used within Russian morphosyntactic frame. The research is significant because the detailed analysis of code-switches can give insight not only into the child bilingual development but also into new ways of interrelation of two languages in close contact.