Syntactic differences of adverbials and attributives in Chinese-English code-switching

• Mixed dependencies generally have longer dependency distances than monolingual.
• Some mixed dependencies have shorter distances than monolingual ones.
• Word order differences are largely in adverbial and potentially in attributives.
• Code-switching is constrained by the grammars involved in it.
• The syntactic properties determine the word order of adverbials and attributives.

Based on a Chinese-English code-mixed treebank, this paper investigates the effect of code-switching on dependency distance and dependency direction of two major grammatical relations (adverbials and attributives). It was found that (1) mixed dependencies generally present longer dependency distances than monolingual ones, especially the adverbial dependencies with preposition or adverb dependents and attributive dependencies with pronoun dependents; (2) mixed adverbial dependencies with English verb heads and Chinese adverb and noun dependents and mixed attributive dependencies with Chinese noun heads and English noun dependents present shorter dependency distances than monolingual ones; (3) word order differences are largely found in adverbial dependencies with adverb, noun or preposition dependents and potentially in attributives with preposition dependents. These findings suggest that: (1) code-switching is constrained by the grammars involved in it; (2) the syntactic properties of dependents mainly determine the word order of adverbials and attributives.