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Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 5:1 (2015) ► pp.2–29

Bilingual compound verbs in children’s Panjabi-English codeswitched narratives

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Bilingual compound verbs (BCVs) are documented in various languages and are common in codeswitching between English and South Asian languages. It has been suggested that BCVs have no monolingual equivalent, and are generated by a ‘third system’ independent of the two languages. BCVs have also been cited as evidence of language convergence, and as a strategy employed by dominant bilinguals to circumvent lexical gaps in one language. BCVs were common in narratives from four to six-year-old Panjabi-English children in Huddersfield, UK. BCVs are argued to be based on analogy with Panjabi monolingual compound verbs, and to be unrelated to language convergence or language dominance. Instead, BCV use relates to two types of codeswitching in the data: one utilising the simplest structures from both languages, the other drawing more fully on the two languages’ grammatical resources. It is suggested that BCVs enable children with limited overall bilingual competence to ‘do codeswitching’.

Keywords: Panjabi English, compound words, codeswitching, narrative production
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Bilingual compound verbs (BCVs)
    • 1.2Codeswitching
    • 1.3Some grammatical features of Panjabi
  • 2.Research perspectives on Panjabi-English BCVs
    • 2.1BCVs as evidence of a ‘third system’
    • 2.2BCVs as evidence of language convergence
    • 2.3BCVs as a feature used by bilinguals who are dominant in one language
  • 3.Hypotheses
  • 4.Method
    • 4.1Study population
    • 4.2Task
    • 4.3Transcription
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1Division into utterances
    • 5.2Analysis of codeswitching
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1General results
    • 6.2Bilingual compound verbs
      • 6.2.1Use of Panjabi monolingual compound verbs
      • 6.2.2Matrix Language of utterances containing BCVs
      • 6.2.3Proportions of multimorphemic utterances produced by children in Panjabi and in English
      • 6.2.4Language dominance as determined by proportion of word types produced by children in English and in Panjabi
      • 6.2.5Language dominance as determined by ML of utterances
  • 7.Two types of codeswitching, and their relationship with the use of BCVs
    • 7.1Reanalysis of the dataset by type of switching used
    • 7.2Results
    • 7.3Discussion of quality of switching results
    • 7.4Relationship with BCV use
  • 8.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 May 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.5.1.01cru
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