Syntactic variations in Chinese–English code-switching

Based on a Chinese–English code-mixed treebank, this paper reports the probable syntactic consequences of code-switching. Compared with monolingual Chinese and English corpora, in the mixed corpus there are syntactic variations: variation in dependency distances and word-order variation in dependency direction. In the mixed corpus, there are two types of dependencies: monolingual and mixed dependencies. Mixed dependencies present longer dependency distances than monolingual ones. Major grammatical relations (subject, object, attribute and adverbial) and certain properties of code-switching (peripherality, flagging and dislocation) contribute to the variability of dependency distances. It is the distributions of major grammatical relations with different dependency directions in monolingual and mixed dependencies that cause the word-order variation.

► In the mixed code-switching corpus, there are syntactic variations.
► Mixed dependencies present longer dependency distances than monolingual ones.
► Major grammatical relations contribute to the variability of dependency distances.
► Different dependency directions cause the word-order variation.