John Benjamins Publishing Company
The painted word
Abstract
This paper examines code-switching between English and Chinese by speakers of Chinese as a heritage language. It focuses on spontaneous, dynamic, natural and high-density code-switching within the smallest building block of a speaking turn – the turn constructional unit. Drawing upon naturally occurring, carefully transcribed data, it shows that speakers migrate between and mingle the two language systems at multiple and nested levels of phonemes, morphemes, syllable structures, tones, noun/verb phrases as well as sentence structures. It suggests that each instance of the said type of code-switching is a discursive interactional process that is accomplished through all the verbal resources from both languages that are simultaneously accessible to the speaker.
Abstract
This paper examines code-switching between English and Chinese by speakers of Chinese as a heritage language. It focuses on spontaneous, dynamic, natural and high-density code-switching within the smallest building block of a speaking turn – the turn constructional unit. Drawing upon naturally occurring, carefully transcribed data, it shows that speakers migrate between and mingle the two language systems at multiple and nested levels of phonemes, morphemes, syllable structures, tones, noun/verb phrases as well as sentence structures. It suggests that each instance of the said type of code-switching is a discursive interactional process that is accomplished through all the verbal resources from both languages that are simultaneously accessible to the speaker.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Contributors vii
- Acknowledgements ix
- Introduction 1
- Subjecthood in Chinese 23
- Characteristic syntactic patterns of Mandarin Chinese 49
- The origins of Sinitic 73
- Classifier choices in discourse across the seven main Chinese dialects 101
- The painted word 127
- Tone realization in younger versus older speakers of Nanjing dialect 147
- Evaluating the emergence of [ʋ] in modern spoken Mandarin 171
- The semantic constraints on the verb + zhe nouns in Mandarin Chinese 189
- The semantic type system of event nouns 205
- Semantic reanalysis in grammaticalization in Chinese 223
- How linear distance and structural distance affect the processing of gap-filler dependencies in head-final relative clauses 247
- Variation in Mandarin Tone 3 Sandhi 271
- The role of instruction in developing pragmatic competence in L2 Chinese 293
- Author index 309
- Subject index 311
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Contributors vii
- Acknowledgements ix
- Introduction 1
- Subjecthood in Chinese 23
- Characteristic syntactic patterns of Mandarin Chinese 49
- The origins of Sinitic 73
- Classifier choices in discourse across the seven main Chinese dialects 101
- The painted word 127
- Tone realization in younger versus older speakers of Nanjing dialect 147
- Evaluating the emergence of [ʋ] in modern spoken Mandarin 171
- The semantic constraints on the verb + zhe nouns in Mandarin Chinese 189
- The semantic type system of event nouns 205
- Semantic reanalysis in grammaticalization in Chinese 223
- How linear distance and structural distance affect the processing of gap-filler dependencies in head-final relative clauses 247
- Variation in Mandarin Tone 3 Sandhi 271
- The role of instruction in developing pragmatic competence in L2 Chinese 293
- Author index 309
- Subject index 311
