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Title:
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A Government Approach to Finnish-English Intrasentential Code-switching
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Author:
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Helena Halmari
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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University of Southern California
, Department of Linguistics
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Degree Date:
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1994
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Sociolinguistics
Syntax
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Subject Language(s):
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English
Finnish
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Director(s):
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William Rutherford
Alicja Gorecka
Edward Finegan
Bernard Comrie
Roger Woodard
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Abstract:
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Naturally occurring Finnish-English bilingual conversations are examined in order to discover the syntactic principle constraining the distribution of intrasentential code-switching. Morphological assimilation of English lexical items to Finnish morpho-syntactic rules is the prevailing tendency, and a structural explanation to this observation is offered in the general syntactic principle of government.
The purpose of the study is to provide a structurally based explanation for a phenomenon which has earlier received its explanation as 'nonce borrowing' (Poplack, Wheeler, and Westwood 1989), and in terms of lexically based constraints (Myers-Scotton 1992b, 1993a). Looking at the phenomenon of intrasentential switching from a hierarchical, structural point of view, and aiming at explanation rather than description, the study complements the earlier proposals.
The proposal here is based on Di Sciullo, Muysken, and Singh's (1986) Government Constraint on code-switching, according to which code-switching within a governed element is possible if and only if the governed element includes a 'language-carrier' whose language index is identical with the language index of the governor. It is argued that in governed positions the rich Finnish inflectional morphology functions as language-carrier, carrying the language index of the Finnish governing element to the governed phrase. Since government relations are crucial in the processes of case-assignment and agreement, it is for this reason that Finnish inflectional and agreement morphology prevails in code-switched sentences. Evidence for the Government Constraint is provided not only by the data that conform to the constraint, but also by those data which are near-violations of this constraint and consistently accompanied by severe repair phenomena (pausing, hesitation, false starts, and backtracking). It is claimed that these repair phenomena 'break' the government relation when it is about to be violated. In a few instances an explanation for code-switching needs to be looked for in sociolinguistic factors, such as interspeaker variation.
The study aims at a comprehensive explanation of Finnish-English intrasentential code-switching, an explanation where not only syntactic but also discourse and pragmatic factors enter the picture.
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