1) Intrasentential and Intersentential Codeswitching
relevant to an analysis of song lyrics, some models may be useful for analysing the grammatical aspects of the song lyrics. In the following discussion, the work of Poplack and Myers-Scotton will be examined, and how their theories may be useful for this aspect of the thesis.
Poplack (1980, pp. 227-230)61 suggested two syntactic constraints for CS: the ‘free morpheme constraint,’ where ‘codes may be switched after any
constituent in discourse provided that constituent is not a bound morpheme’, ‘unless one of the morphemes has been integrated phonologically into the language of the other,’ and the ‘equivalence constraint’, which argues that CS is created by the overlapping of grammatically equivalent constituents of the different speech codes involved in sentences (p. 227).62 However, Pieter Muysken (1997, p. 362) believes that the view of Poplack and her associates is true for one aspect of codeswitching,63 ‘where the two languages share a grammatical structure which can be filled lexically with elements from either language,’ such as in the speech of Spanish-English bilinguals who Poplack studies whose CS blends together and it is difficult to tell what the main language is.
61 In Li (2000)
62This refers to linguistic items borrowed from another language and integrated into it. 63This is a situation which he calls ‘congruent lexicalisation.’
Poplack admits two kinds of codeswitching, intra-sentential switching and extra-sentential codeswitching,64 themselves useful categories for analysing CS in song lyrics. Most of her research however, focuses on multi-word switches, since her perspective and that of her co-researcher Meechan, do not permit single morpheme, or one word switching, regarding them as ‘nonce borrowing’. Poplack says she does not believe that CS in most circumstances is a result of the interplay between a dominant language which frames the discourse and other language material. However, the majority of other
researchers agree that in many situations there is, and Clyne (1987) shows that Poplack and her associates accept the existence of a base language implicitly in their own labelling system (Winford, 2003, p. 128).
2) Myers-Scotton and the Matrix Frame Model of Codeswitching
In Myers-Scotton’s standard Matrix Frame model of codeswitching there is one main or ‘matrix’ language and another language which is ‘embedded’ into it (Myers-Scotton, 1993, p. 3). Myers-Scotton, like Poplack and associates, distinguishes between intrasentential and intersentential CS. Myers-Scotton (1993) believes however, that when there is no congruence65 between the structures of the two languages, an ‘embedded language island’ (or EL island) is created, within which all the embedded structures can exist without
conflicting with the matrix structure (Myers-Scotton, 1993, p. 139). In this way, larger sections can be code switched, but still exist within the frame of the Matrix language.
While Poplack regards single morpheme switches within the morphosyntactic frame of the matrix language as borrowings, not codeswitched items, for Myers-Scotton what distinguishes borrowings and codeswitched phrases are frequency of use and the level of integration into the matrix language. Therefore apart from consistent and regular borrowings, single-morpheme borrowings are classed as intrasentential codeswitching.66 Regarding borrowed items and the relationship to the Matrix language, Myers-Scotton (1990, p.103) believes ‘borrowed items belong to a specifiable set from the embedded language which speakers know in some abstract sense as part of matrix
language competence.’ Therefore, in order to distinguish between borrowed items and codeswitched items it is necessary to have some understanding of the frequency of particular lexical items within the population concerned, perhaps from field work or through close acquaintance with a culture.
As Myers-Scotton’s (1993) view identifies borrowing as just a more lexically and grammatically integrated and consistent case of CS, information on the
66 Myers Scotton (1990) cites Gardner-Chloros (1984, p. 102) on this, who says that ‘a loan is a codeswitch
frequency of borrowing lexical items is important for this examination of the song lyrics.67 Poplack and Meechan’s (1998) research on this shows that most likely to be borrowed are ‘major-class content words’. Myers-Scotton’s own research (1993) complements this, showing that system morphemes such as quantifiers are the least likely to be inserted into the ML, or Matrix Language, frame. Therefore, it is likely that in the song corpus of this thesis, content words (which would include nouns, verbs and adjectives) will be more frequently codeswitched than system morphemes.
A strong point in favour of Myers-Scotton’s classic model of codeswitching, although primarily designed for the analysis of CS in conversation, is that it has also been applied successfully in international studies on CS in songs, and in the analysis of CE songs. Sarkar, Winer and Sarkar (2005, p. 2059) for example, state that they use Myers-Scotton’s Matrix Frame model precisely because the hip-hop song lyrics analysed in their study were embedded in a Quebec French ‘matrix language’. It has also been found appropriate for many Chinese studies, as will be shown in the following section.
67In 2003 Myers-Scotton updated her views on the MLF hypothesis. She presents the view that there may be
‘composite CS’ or codeswitching, where there is a ‘composite Matrix language’, (p. 190) which consists of material from more than one language. However, this ‘composite language frame’ only exists where ‘a single source frame no longer entirely controls the morphosyntactic frame’ (p. 200).Therefore, it appears more appropriate to use Myers-Scotton’s original or, as she put it, ‘classic’ MLF (Matrix Language Frame) hypothesis in this thesis, since in the CE codeswitching songs in this thesis, Chinese almost always is the Matrix Language.
3) Grammatical Aspects of Codeswitching in CE song lyrics
In their grammatical analysis of the characteristics of CS songs, Zhang Hua (2005) and Cai (2008) identify three categories of CS: intrasentential codeswitching (codeswitching within sentence boundaries), intersentential codeswitching (codeswitching at a sentence or discourse level), and tag- switching (which is switching between an utterance and a tag attached to it), the first two categories are identical to the categorization of CS by Poplack (1980). This is also the general classification of CS used by Schendl (1997) in his study of CS in medieval English poetry and songs, and therefore has some precedence in codeswitching research.
The findings of the majority of Chinese scholars who examine the relative frequency of intrasentential and intersentential codeswitching in CE pop song lyrics, namely Zhao (2007), Xu (2007), Qiao (2006), Feng and Wei (2007), and Cai (2008), are that there tends to be a predominance of intersentential over intrasentential codeswitching. However, Zhang Hua (2005) noted a predominance of intrasentential CS in her song corpus.68 This thesis will provide further insight into the frequency of these categories of CS.
68 Although Zhao 2007, Xu 2007, Qiao 2006 and Feng and Wei 2007, have not explicitly categorized the
grammatical categories of codeswitching into the three categories discussed above, and examine in terms of the categories of discourses, sentences, phrases and words, their results for phrases, words, and at the sentence and discourse level can be combined to indicate the relative frequency of either intrasentential or intersentential codeswitching.
Zhao (2007) and Cai (2008) provide particular grammatical findings on CS in song lyrics within Myers-Scotton’s (1993) MLF Model.69 Zhao’s (2007, p. 31) research supports Myers-Scotton’s theories by indicating that within the MLF, it is primarily content morphemes, such as nouns, verbs and adjectives that are switched (60.97% of his corpus), primarily nouns. Zhao (2007) and Cai (2008) have also indicated that while in intrasentential units English nearly always accords with Chinese grammar, Embedded Language (EL) islands in their data follow English grammatical rules, although sometimes the head words of nouns and verbs lose their inflections.
The grammatical studies of CS discussed above indicate that it would be appropriate for the purposes of examining the linguistic aspects of song lyrics in the present study to employ Myers-Scotton’s Classic Matrix Frame model with English as the embedded language. In addition, as in Zhang Hua (2005), Schendl (1997) and Cai (2008), the study of CS material will be separated into three categories: intersentential, intrasentential, and tag switching. By
employing the MLF and these categories, it is believed that the investigation of the songs in this thesis could also hope to find out whether this corpus supports the predominance of intersentential codeswitching seen in previous Chinese studies on the phenomenon, as well as which parts of speech are most
frequently switched, and whether there are any grammatical anomalies with regard to understood grammatical governance within the MLF, particularly inside embedded English verb or noun phrases (Embedded Language Islands) within the Chinese Matrix Language.
Another linguistic perspective for examining CS song lyrics is codeswitching functions. Many of the Chinese studies cited above that looked at the
grammatical aspects of the CS also looked at the discourse functions of
codeswitched sections within the song lyrics, which the present discussion will now turn to.