Syntactic Analysis of Bangla-English Code-switching: A Study of Bengali Children

Abstract

The present research provides a syntactic overview of code-switching patterns available in the spoken discourse of Bengali bilingual children who speak Bangla as their L1 and English as L2. It looks into the lexical and functional categories and/or elements of their code-switched sentences and finds the ratio of this code-switching. In addition to that, the study also finds how significant these categories are against each element in the occurred code-switched sentences as well as how much these juxtapositions of L1 and L2 elements affect the well-formedness of sentences in Bangla language. Its parameters, hence, include the well-formedness judgments of sentences along with that of the sentential positions and code-switching arrangements to identify the main occurred lexical categories in bilingual children’s conversation with cross-linguistic data, word order, and code-switching processes in Bangla language. It also looks into the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic views to study the triggers, purposes, and attitudes of this phenomenon. In addition to these, the research also covers the concept of serial verbs, and its grammatical aspects in relation to this study. Its findings show that the children in this context tend to switch between codes in the classrooms and moreover, they switch mostly with the Nouns rather than Verbs which signifies that there might not be an influential change at the core in Bangla language. In most cases they switch between codes subconsciously and/or without much awareness of switching. In addition to that there is a difference with that of girls’ and boys’ code-switching ratio. Boys tend to be more frequent in adjunct and tag switching than girls. Another important factor for code-switching research is that the terms code-switching, code-mixing, and code-alternation are being used almost interchangeably in different researches. Thus, the term code-switching has been used here in the research from a general point of view. Since it is, indeed, one of the central issues of bilingual research, its findings contribute more information to the existing knowledge on code-switching as well as adding valuable information to second language acquisition, and bilingualism.