Tonal aspects of code-switching: Three case studies of English-Cantonese/Mandarin/Vietnamese 

Abstract

This work investigates the possible phonological effects of lexical tone on code-switching between English and three tonal languages: Cantonese, Mandarin and Vietnamese. Previous studies have suggested that certain tones might facilitate code-switching, however, these studies were small in scale and did not consider other confounding factors such as tone frequencies and syntactic structures. In this paper, we re-examine this phenomenon using three recently developed corpora: HLVC (Cantonese), SEAME (Mandarin) and CanVEC (Vietnamese). We processed the data with semi-automatic natural-language-processing methods and conducted mixed effects logistic regressions controlling for grammatical categories, word frequencies and speakers’ background. We found no significant effect for Vietnamese-English, yet a significant effect of mid-level tone (T3) on Cantonese-English switches, and a less strong effect of falling tone (T4) on Mandarin-English switches. We provide an explanation through the similarities between these tones and English stress/intonation, and conclude that tonal effects in code-switching are language-dependent.