Code-Switching and Syntax: A Large-Scale Experiment

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Sterner, Igor, Teufel, Simone
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Sterner, Igor
Teufel, Simone
author_facet Sterner, Igor
Teufel, Simone
contents The theoretical code-switching (CS) literature provides numerous pointwise investigations that aim to explain patterns in CS, i.e. why bilinguals switch language in certain positions in a sentence more often than in others. A resulting consensus is that CS can be explained by the syntax of the contributing languages. There is however no large-scale, multi-language, cross-phenomena experiment that tests this claim. When designing such an experiment, we need to make sure that the system that is predicting where bilinguals tend to switch has access only to syntactic information. We provide such an experiment here. Results show that syntax alone is sufficient for an automatic system to distinguish between sentences in minimal pairs of CS, to the same degree as bilingual humans. Furthermore, the learnt syntactic patterns generalise well to unseen language pairs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_01846
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Code-Switching and Syntax: A Large-Scale Experiment
Sterner, Igor
Teufel, Simone
Computation and Language
The theoretical code-switching (CS) literature provides numerous pointwise investigations that aim to explain patterns in CS, i.e. why bilinguals switch language in certain positions in a sentence more often than in others. A resulting consensus is that CS can be explained by the syntax of the contributing languages. There is however no large-scale, multi-language, cross-phenomena experiment that tests this claim. When designing such an experiment, we need to make sure that the system that is predicting where bilinguals tend to switch has access only to syntactic information. We provide such an experiment here. Results show that syntax alone is sufficient for an automatic system to distinguish between sentences in minimal pairs of CS, to the same degree as bilingual humans. Furthermore, the learnt syntactic patterns generalise well to unseen language pairs.
title Code-Switching and Syntax: A Large-Scale Experiment
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01846