Explaining the diversity in Malay-English code-switching patterns: the contribution of typological similarity and bilingual optimization strategies

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Treffers-Daller, J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6575-6736, Majid, S., Yap, N. T. and Flynn, N. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3710-9910 (2022) Explaining the diversity in Malay-English code-switching patterns: the contribution of typological similarity and bilingual optimization strategies. Languages, 7 (4). 299. ISSN 2226-471X doi: 10.3390/languages7040299

Abstract/Summary

Bilingual speakers often engage in code-switching, that is the use of lexical items and grammatical features from two languages in one sentence. Malaysia is a particularly interesting context for the study of code-switching because Malay-English code-switching is widely practiced across formal and informal situations, and the available literature reveals that there is a great diversity in switch patterns in this language pair. One of the most remarkable characteristics of Malay-English code-switching is the high frequency of switches of function words (pronouns, modal verbs, demonstratives, etc.), which is very unusual in most code-switching corpora. Here, we analyse the structural properties of Malay-English code-switching, which have received less attention than functional analyses in the academic literature on code-switching in this language pair. We first summarize the literature on the different types of code-switching that are found in a range of sources, and then analyze the code-switching patterns in the speech of two teachers of English in Malaysia. We conclude with a discussion of the variables that can explain the diversity found, in particular structural factors (similarity between the word orders of both languages, and the limited number of inflections), and bilingual optimization strategies, as well as strategies of neutrality and efficiency.

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Additional Information	I believe my co-author Naomi Flynn has already created a record for this, but I would prefer this document to appear in the repository under my name please, as I am the first author of the piece.
Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/109680
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism (CeLM) Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > English Language and Applied Linguistics Arts, Humanities and Social Science > Institute of Education
Uncontrolled Keywords	code-switching; codemixing; English; Malay; bilingual; congruent lexicalization; function words
Additional Information	I believe my co-author Naomi Flynn has already created a record for this, but I would prefer this document to appear in the repository under my name please, as I am the first author of the piece.
Publisher	MDPI
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Date Deposited:	06 Jan 2023 10:39	Date item deposited into CentAUR
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