The Dependency Distance Hypothesis for bilingual code-switching

This paper addresses the questions why and where, i.e. in which syntactic dependency relations, multilingual speakers are likely to code-switch. Code-switching (CS) is the linguistic behaviour of producing or comprehending language which is composed from lexical items and grammatical structures from two (or more) languages. This paper proposes that codeswitching is more likely in syntactic relations with long dependency distances (Distance hypothesis DH). Dependency distance is the number of words intervening between a head and a depended. The DH is tested on a 93,235 word corpus of German/English monolingual and codemixed discourse analyzed in Word Grammar (WG). This data set supports the DH in general and on specific syntactic functions. In ongoing work the DH is being tested on Welsh/English and Spanish/English corpora and with self-paced silent reading experiments using eye-