Intra-Sentential Code Switching in the Speech of Bilingual Children

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, Saarland University (Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Anglophone Kulturen), course: Hauptseminar First Language Acquisition, 5 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: In this paper, I analyse the patterns of intra-sentential code switching in the speech of bilingual children aged between of two and four years. The first section will deal with some of the theoretical approaches to code switching which try to establish certain grammatical rules for this linguistic phenomenon. Afterwards, I will analyse the code switches in the speech acts of different children in order to find out more about the nature of these switches. The aim is to find out whether code switches, within the sentence boundaries, always occur in the same position or if they can be found anywhere in the sentence. Furthermore, I will analyse what types of words are being switched and if the switches violate the word order of the sentences. All this will be looked at with regard to the principles mentioned in the first section and whether the code switches adhere to these principles or violate them. The findings and results presented here should be considered with reservation since the brevity of this paper does not allow the analysis of a representative amount of data. The data is taken from the CHILDES Corpus as well as from Gawlitzek-Maiwald and Tracy’s article Bilingual Bootstrapping and from Albrecht’s publication I can speak German- und Deutsch: The development and use of code-switching among simultaneous and successive English-German bilingual children.