Shared Lexical Items as Triggers of Code Switching
Shuly Wintner, Safaa Shehadi, Yuli Zeira, Doreen Osmelak, Yuval Nov
Abstract
Why do bilingual speakers code-switch (mix their two languages)? Among the several theories that attempt to explain this natural and ubiquitous phenomenon, the triggering hypothesis relates code-switching to the presence of lexical triggers, specifically cognates and proper names, adjacent to the switch point. We provide a fuller, more nuanced and refined exploration of the triggering hypothesis, based on five large datasets in three language pairs, reflecting both spoken and written bilingual interactions. Our results show that words that are assumed to reside in a mental lexicon shared by both languages indeed trigger code-switching, that the tendency to switch depends on the distance of the trigger from the switch point and on whether the trigger precedes or succeeds the switch, but not on the etymology of the trigger words. We thus provide strong, robust, evidence-based confirmation to several hypotheses on the relationships between lexical triggers and code-switching.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.tacl-1.83
- Volume:
- Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 11
- Month:
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Cambridge, MA
- Venue:
- TACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- MIT Press
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1471–1484
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.tacl-1.83
- DOI:
- 10.1162/tacl_a_00613
- Cite (ACL):
- Shuly Wintner, Safaa Shehadi, Yuli Zeira, Doreen Osmelak, and Yuval Nov. 2023. Shared Lexical Items as Triggers of Code Switching. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 11:1471–1484.
- Cite (Informal):
- Shared Lexical Items as Triggers of Code Switching (Wintner et al., TACL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/retraction/2023.tacl-1.83.pdf