Syntactic differences of the probabilistic valency of nouns in Chinese–English Code-switching

Abstract

Based on a Chinese–English code-switching (CS) treebank, this study analyzes the probabilistic valency of nouns for the holistic examination of the syntactic features and functions of Chinese and English nouns in CS. It shows that: (1) Chinese or English nouns mainly head four types of monolingual or mixed syntactic relationsrespectively, among which attributives make up the biggest share. (2) Chinese or English nouns as dependents are mainly involved in six types of monolingual or mixed syntactic relationsrespectively. With Chinese noun dependents, objects and subjects are the top dependencies in monolingual and mixed dependencies, respectively. With English noun dependents, attributives and objects are the top dependencies in monolingual and mixed dependencies respectively. (3) Syntactic differences are found in dependency distance. Specifically, all mixed dependencies present longer mean dependence distances than the corresponding monolingual dependencies, except for dependencies headed by Chinese nouns. (4) The major causes for syntactic differences are syntactic transference, syntactic convergence, differences in placements of adverbials or attributives between Chinese and English, and switched chunks. These findings indicate that syntactic differences between Chinese and English nouns in CS are a consequence of language contact. However, their “specific” syntactic functions are still constrained by the grammar involved in CS.