Structural characteristics of proper nouns in Korean-Swedish discourse

Abstract

This article examines the structural characteristics of proper nouns from other languages, which have been considered to be the most typical borrowings to such an extent that most codeswitching researchers have not made it a subject of discussion at all. The data consist of spontaneous adult, child and family conversations among Koreans residing in Sweden. Linguistic analysis shows that a number of proper nouns attested in the Korean-Swedish data do not behave as borrowings but as codeswitches. They do not show complete morphosyntactic integration into the language of the sentence, yet even so they sometimes include function morphemes such as definite articles. Occasionally the word order of the proper noun (or noun phrase) corresponds to the original language. Taking all of this into account, we can reasonably conclude that even proper nouns, which are generally assumed to be the most typical borrowings by many codeswitching researchers, undergo the same (or at least related) morphosyntactic processes and that they are not different from codeswitching.