Structural Analysis of Persian-English Reverse Code-Switching and Code-Mixing

Abstract

Code-switching and code-mixing are considered dynamic conversational phenomena in interpersonal interactions, that is an alteration between two or more languages, dialectal variants, language registers, and it is an effective communicative strategy which Persian-English bilinguals consider a genuine thing in their ordinary speech practice. The focus of the present study is on the structural analysis of reverse code-switching between Persian and English that are known to be referred to two typologically different languages. Participants of the present research, all late bilinguals, reported on frequent use of code-switching (CS) and code-mixing (CM) in everyday language practice. CS/CM is quite normal and frequent among Iranian bilinguals, especially in informal settings where bilingual speakers can freely switch between their languages. Furthermore, the results revealed that Iranian bilinguals switch from English to Persian and in verso mostly at the lexical and the phrasal levels (intrasentential switching mode), but less frequently at the clausal or the sentence level (intersentential switching mode). The research states that there are some restrictions on inserting English verbs into the Persian syntactic frame: the Persian language is thought to be the matrix language and the preverbal part comes from English as the embedded language, such incongruity between the morphosyntactic structure and the verbal system of the Persian and English languages impose some constraints on the occurrence of switching codes between the pair of the languages under study.

Attitude-Behavior Relation and Language Use: Chinese-English Code-Switching and Code-Mixing Among Chinese Undergraduate Students

“…Elite students are considered to be the most proficient non-English major students in the college. Bilingual speakers proficient in both their languages use fewer cognitive resources to talk in both their languages as “the mental effort is lower and relatively switching between languages is easier and more expected” (Moradi & Chen, 2019, p. 124). Speakers who are highly proficient in one language but have relatively low proficiency in the other need to use more mental effort when switching between languages, especially when switching to their L2/FL.…”

“…Gumperz (1982) defined CS as "the juxtaposition within the same speech exchange of passages of speech belonging to two different grammatical systems or subsystems" (p. 59), and Cook (2008) considered it the process of "going from one language to the other in mid-speech when both speakers know the same languages" (p. 174). Moradi and Chen (2019) explain that CS and CM are considered "dynamic conversational phenomena in interpersonal interaction, that is an alternation between two or more languages, dialectal variants, language registers" (p. 122). Laoire (2016), focused on Irish-English CS and asserted that CS is "the most visible and marked of language contact features and it forms part of the active linguistic repertoire of most speakers of Irish" (p. 81).…”