Syntactic and Pragmatic Functions of Chinese-English Bilingual Children’s Code-Switching

Based on the bilingual children’s and adults’ code-switching (CS) dependency treebanks, this paper investigates the syntactic features and pragmatic functions of the Chinese-English bilingual children’s CS and compares them with bilingual adults’. It is mainly found that (1) As to the bilingual children, the mixed sentences present the longest mean sentence length (MSL), followed by those of the dominant language and the weak language. Similarly, Chinese-English adults’ mixed sentences present longer MSL than monolingual Chinese and English; (2) Subjects, objects, adverbials, and attributives are four major syntactic functions. Regarding bilingual children’s CS, objects are the most frequently switched dependency relations and subjects are the least. Differently, as to bilingual adults, attributives are most frequently switched, and subjects are the least. (3) Nouns, pronouns, determiners, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions are the top word classes involved in four major syntactic relations; (4) The adverbial dependency relations present the longest mean dependency distance (MDD), and the attributives present the shortest for both bilingual children and adults; (5) The major causes that make different MDDs are the CS peripherality, the distributions of top word classes and adjacent dependency relations; (6) Six major pragmatic functions are performed by bilingual children and adults: filling lexical gaps, emphasis or expressing the intense feelings, explaining, giving “orders” or requirements, quotation, reiteration. The results syntactically and pragmatically suggest that there exist great similarities between bilingual children’s and adults’ code-switching.