HighlightsData from typologically diverse languages shows common distributional patterns.Discontinuous repetitive patterns in the input provide cues for category assignment.Morphological frames accurately predict nouns and verbs in the input to children.

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Interlinear glossing is a type of annotation of morphosyntactic categories and crosslinguistic lexical correspondences that allows linguists to analyse sentences in languages that they do not necessarily speak. Automatising this annotation is necessary in order to provide glossed corpora big enough to be used for quantitative studies. In this paper, we present experiments on the automatic glossing of Chintang. We decompose the task of glossing into steps suitable for statistical processing. We first perform grammatical glossing as standard supervised part-of-speech tagging. We then add lexical glosses from a stand-off dictionary applying context disambiguation in a similar way to word lemmatisation. We obtain the highest accuracy score of 96% for grammatical and 94% for lexical glossing.

A quantitative analysis of a trans-generational, conversational corpus of Chintang (Tibeto-Burman) speakers with community-wide bilingualism in Nepali (Indo-European) reveals that children show more code-switching into Nepali than older speakers. This confirms earlier proposals in the literature that code-switching in bilingual children decreases when they gain proficiency in their dominant language, especially in vocabulary. Contradicting expectations from other studies, our corpus data also reveal that for adults, multi-word insertions of Nepali into Chintang are just as likely to undergo full syntactic integration as single-word insertions. Speakers of younger generations show less syntactic integration. We propose that this reflects a change between generations, from strongly asymmetrical, Chintang-dominated bilingualism in older generations to more balanced bilingualism where Chintang and Nepali operate as clearly separate systems in younger generations. This change is likely to have been triggered by the increase of Nepali presence over the past few decades.

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