Borrowing or code-switching? Single-word English prepositions in Hong Kong Cantonese

Abstract With reference to a dataset of single-word English prepositions in Hong Kong Cantonese, this article re-examines the controversial distinction between single-word code-switches and lexical borrowing. These English prepositions may bring along syntactic structures of English into Cantonese, but they may also be morphosyntactically integrated into Cantonese and behave as verbs or coverbs. Accordingly, it is virtually impossible to pin down these prepositions as borrowing or code-switching based on morphosyntactic integration. Neither are they directly inserted into a sentence morphosyntactically framed in Cantonese, which has postpositions rather than prepositions. Considering that ‘languages’ are not discrete systems and words of different ‘languages’ are connected in a vast mental network, it is suggested that the boundary between lexical borrowing and single-word code-switching must be fuzzy. Freed from such distinction, it is plausible to see degrees of morphosyntactic integration and frequencies in single-word transfer or replication (i.e. borrowing/code-switching) due to word class or even specific properties of a word (e.g. for vis-à-vis other prepositions in Hong Kong Cantonese).