Code-Switching and Syntax: A Large-Scale Experiment

The theoretical code-switching (CS) literature provides numerous pointwise investigations that aim to explain patterns in CS, i.e. why bilinguals switch language in certain positions in a sentence more often than in others. A resulting consensus is that CS can be explained by the syntax of the contributing languages. There is however no large-scale, multi-language, cross-phenomena experiment that tests this claim. When designing such an experiment, we need to make sure that the system that is predicting where bilinguals tend to switch has access only to syntactic information. We provide such an experiment here. Results show that syntax alone is sufficient for an automatic system to distinguish between sentences in minimal pairs of CS, to the same degree as bilingual humans. Furthermore, the learnt syntactic patterns generalise well to unseen language pairs.