The topic‐comment construction in Japanese‐English code‐switching

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In many bilingual communities, two languages are often used back and forth in a single situation, even with a single sentence. In the last several years, there has been a considerable interest in syntactic aspects of intrasentential code‐switching. Attempts have been made within various linguistic frameworks to characterize the rules that govern switches. A study of Japanese–English code‐switching is promising in this regard in that Japanese and English are typoligically different languages. One of the differences between the two is that Japanese is a topic‐prominent language while English is a subject‐prominent language. This paper deals with an interaction between these two language types. More specifically, it will analyze a set of sentences which consist of a Japanese topic and an English sentence uttered by Japanese–English bilingual speakers in North America. First, it is discussed how these sentences should be treated in the formal account of intrasentential code‐switching, considering what topic is in relation to the sentence. Then, forms and functions of the topic of these sentences are analyzed in light of what is said about Japanese topics in general in both syntactic and semantic terms in order to understand why these bilingual speakers use Japanese topics as they do in the code‐switching mode. Finally, our case will be compared with the early English interlanguage of a speaker of Hmong, another topic‐prominent language. We will see whether these two different cases (code‐switching vs interlanguage) share a common process with respect to the way in which these two language types interact with each other.

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