Resumen de The distance hypothesis for bilingual code-switching tested on German/English and Chinese/English data
Eva Maria Duran Eppler, Lin Wang
That closely related words tend to be close together in the sentence is a well-established principle of monolingual language comprehension and production. This paper suggests that this is different in bilingual language use. It proposes that long dependency distances between syntactically related units facilitate bilingual code-switching (Distance Hypothesis DH). Code-switching (CS) is the linguistic behaviour of producing or comprehending language that is composed from lexical items and grammatical structures from two (or. more) languages. Dependency distance is the number of words between a head and a dependent. We test the DH on a 9,023 word German/English, and a 19,766 word Chinese/English corpus. In both corpora mixed dependencies present longer dependency distances than monolingual ones, which supports the DH. Selected major dependency types (subject, object, adjunct) also have longer dependency distances when the head word and its dependent are from different languages. We discuss how processing motivations behind the DH make it a potentially viable motivator for bilingual code-switching and - more generally -for contact-induced language change.
