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In:Dependency Linguistics: Recent advances in linguistic theory using dependency structures
Edited by Kim Gerdes, Eva Hajičová and Leo Wanner
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 215] 2014
► pp. 183–206

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The dependency distance hypothesis for bilingual code-switching

 | University of Roehampton, London
Published online: 1 October 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.215.09dur
This paper addresses the questions why and where, i.e. in which dependency relations, multilingual speakers are likely to code-switch. Code-switching (CS) is the linguistic behaviour of producing or comprehending language which is composed of lexical items and grammatical structures from two (or more) languages. This paper proposes that long dependency distances between syntactically related units facilitate code-switching (Distance Hypothesis DH). Dependency distance is defined as the number of words intervening between a head and a dependent. The DH is tested on two data sets from typologically different language pairs: a 93,235 word corpus of German/English monolingual and code-switched conversations analyzed in Word Grammar (WG), and a 19,766 word Treebank of Chinese/English mono- and bilingual speech. The data sets support the DH in general and on specific syntactic functions. In ongoing work the DH is being tested further on Welsh/English and Spanish/English corpora and experimentally.
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Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Gisborne, Nikolas, Eva Duran Eppler & And Rosta
2025. Introduction. In Word Grammar, Cognition and Dependency, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Gisborne, Nikolas & Stefan Müller
2025. Word Grammar in Its Intellectual Contexts. In Word Grammar, Cognition and Dependency, ► pp. 19 ff. DOI logo
Hao, Yuxin, Xuelin Wang, Shuai Bin & Haitao Liu
2023. A probability distribution of dependencies in interlanguage. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 59:1 ► pp. 65 ff. DOI logo

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