Project

Towards an integrative account of English-Tagalog intra-word code-switching

Code
1179825N
Duration
01 November 2024 → 31 October 2028
Funding
Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO)
Research disciplines
  • Humanities and the arts
    • Contact linguistics
    • Corpus linguistics
    • Morphology
    • Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics
    • Sociolinguistics
Keywords
Sociolinguistic predictors of code-switching Intra-word code-switching constructions Corpus-to-cognition approach
 
Project description

The switching of languages among bilinguals at the clause level is well-documented in code-switching (CS) research. On the other hand, intra-word code-switching (IWCS) has only been sparsely attested in a few language pairs, and its research remains limited. However, IWCS is a remarkably productive phenomenon in Taglish (i.e., English-Tagalog CS) which makes this understudied and typologically distant language pair highly relevant for studying switching at the morpheme level. Furthermore, the complex sociolinguistic landscape of the Philippines where CS is the norm rather than the exception allows for a more nuanced characterization of the sociolinguistic predictors of IWCS in spoken Taglish. This project seeks to identify the linguistic nature and the sociolinguistic predictors of IWCS across speech communities in the Philippines. In order to create an integrative account of IWCS, it also investigates the link between the sociolinguistic background of the speakers and the IWCS constructions in their speech. This study follows a corpus-to-cognition approach through the implementation of an experimental eye-tracking method based on corpus observations of naturalistic IWCS. Finally, the resulting IWCS corpus endeavors to provide an unprecedented open-source database that further research on this understudied CS type can base on.