Syntactic Configuration of Code-Switching between Indonesian and English: Another Perspective on Code-Switching Phenomena

Code-switching, an alternation or mixing one language with another, has been an unmarked phenomenon for a multilingual society. In Indonesia, this phenomenon nowadays lives and thrives among the people. This study discusses the syntactic configuration of code-switching between Indonesian and English in terms of switched segments, points, and changing types. The study is descriptive qualitative in nature. The data comprise 25 recording hours of natural speech produced by 119 Indonesians in 4 types of interaction: seminars, meetings, TV dialogues, and chitchats conducted in six metropolitan cities—Jakarta, Bandung, Semarang, Yogyakarta, Surabaya, and Makassar. The sample drawn purposively comprises 550 switching discourses consisting of 666 switching corpora. It is found that nouns serving as subjects, predicators, objects of verbs, and prepositions to be the most dominant switched segments. A switch between Indonesian noun phrases and English noun phrases, Indonesian verbs or prepositions, and English objective noun phrases, Indonesian conjunctions, and English conjoined noun phrases or clauses is the most popular switched points, and intercausal switching including intraporal and interlexical switching is the most frequent switching type of code-switching between Indonesian and English. ANOVA Friedman’s test confirms that these patterns are the same among the four types of discourses, implying that such a syntactic configuration of Indonesia-English code-switching is universally applicable to any situation and type of interaction. In conclusion, the domination of nouns indicates that the syntactic configuration of Indonesian-English code-switching mainly occurs at minor constituents such as within a clause, phrase, and word boundaries. This demonstrates that code-switching between Indonesian and English is more likely to occur intrasentential rather than intersentential, which is the most popular anywhere in literature.

‘“Gott Strafe England”: Ivor Gurney’s Strafes and Ways’

This essay describes Ivor Gurney’s use of the word ‘strafe’ in his poems of the First World War. At the outbreak of the War, the word was a new arrival in the English national consciousness. It had come to prominence in the German Army’s slogan, ‘Gott strafe England’ (‘God punish England’). Allied counterpropagandists soon redeployed this slogan as evidence that the German people were hateful and frenzied, and it gained currency as an informal English noun for a German artillery bombardment. In poems dating from during and after the War, Gurney draws on ‘strafe’s’ interlinguistic existence to express his contempt for the two powers’ propaganda. In treating the word as fluctuating between two languages, Gurney stages his separation from both English and German narratives of nationhood. Tracking his use of the word ‘strafe’ shows how he described the importance of individual experiences for understanding the War, portrayed a sense of ‘Wonder’ that he suggested could define soldier poets, and expressed his post-war belief that England had betrayed him. By outlining how Gurney attached these possibilities to ‘strafe’, this essay contributes to the wider critical understanding of how and why he wrote about his War experiences.

ИНОВАЦИОННИ ПРОЦЕСИ В СЪВРЕМЕННАТА ГРАМАТИКА НА АНГЛИЙСКИЯ ЕЗИК (С ОГЛЕД НА ТЕХНИТЕ ВЪЗМОЖНИ ПАРАЛЕЛИ В БЪЛГАРСКИЯ ЕЗИК) / PROCESSES OF INNOVATION IN PRESENT-DAY ENGLISH GRAMMAR (IN VIEW OF THEIR POSSIBLE PARALLELS IN BULGARIAN)

The paper explores some processes of innovation in present-day English grammar in view of the typological features, the historical development and the present status of English as the language of global communication. Some innovations can be observed within the noun phrase and the verb phrase that have to do mostly with changes in the properties of nouns and verbs in relation to particular grammatical categories. The ana-lysis also focuses on a particular structural pattern of the English noun phrase consisting of a sequence of nouns joined without the use of prepositions. Within a longer time span, a number of innovations can be noticed that are related to the process of grammaticalization. Special emphasis is placed on the tendency towards implicitness and compression of the linguistic expression, which is typical of present-day English. The study also discusses innovations associated with the current status of English as a global language that have to do mostly with the expanded application of grammatical rules and the minimization of exceptions. The most general conclusion of the study highlights the continuous tendency towards the simplification of English grammar in the context of the historical development of the language as well as its present state. Keywords: language typology, innovations in language, present-day English gram-mar, noun phrase, verb phrase, grammaticalization, Global English, English-Bulgarian parallels

A syntactic approach to gender assignment in Spanish–English bilingual speech

This paper examines gender assignment in Spanish–English bilingual speech and develops a theoretical account of gender features in the bilingual grammar on the basis of the linguistic properties that correlate with gender assignment. An analysis of 76 sociolinguistic interviews from an autonomous bilingual community in Southern Arizona, U.S. (Carvalho 2012) reveals three key findings in terms of gender assignment in Spanish Det–English Noun switched DPs (i.e., el industry ‘the.M.SG’): (i) biological sex categorically determines gender assignment with human-denoting nouns; (ii) frequent inanimate nouns that have Spanish feminine counterparts are feminine in bilingual speech; (iii) masculine is a prevailing default gender. Following Kramer’s (2015) proposal of gender features, it is argued that an interpretable [+/-FEM] feature encodes biological sex in the grammar whereby a category-neutral √ combines with a n hosting an interpretable [+/-FEM] feature and triggers feminine (i.e., la coach ‘the.F.SG’) or masculine (i.e., el stepson ‘the.M.SG’) agreement. Inanimate feminine nouns are associated with an uninterpretable [+FEM] feature as the result of bilingualism (i.e., la school ‘the.F.SG’), and masculine default gender is viewed as an effect of Preminger’ (2009) failed Agree. On the basis of these findings, this paper rejects the distinct-lexicons view of the bilingual language faculty (MacSwan 2000 et seq.) and attempts to substantiate a single-lexicon approach compatible with a realizational (Late Insertion) view of the morphosyntactic model (Halle and Marantz 1993).

Intensificatory Tautology in the History of English: A Corpus-based Study

This paper explores the development and establishment of intensificatory tautology (specifically, size-adjective clusters, e.g., “ great big plans,” “ little tiny room”) in the history of English. The analysis suggests that size-adjective clusters appear in the Late Middle English period as a result of the functional-structural reorganization of the English noun phrase. It is only towards the end of the Early Modern English period that they start to become (relatively) productive in the language, and in Present-Day English that they acquire a wide(r) intensifying functional range (i.e., adjective modifier, emphasizer, degree intensifier) and become associated with informal, spoken-based registers. More broadly, the paper suggests that more research is needed as regards the role of collocation in processes of intensifier creation in the noun phrase and, more generally, as regards how collocation interacts with word-formation processes in this context.

Modification versus Complementation in the Structure of English Noun Phrases

"Modification versus Complementation in the Structure of English Noun Phrases. Apart from its head, the core element around which all the other phrasal constituents cluster, the noun phrase may contain dependent elements effecting determination (which poses few taxonomical issues), modification or complementation (two functions notoriously difficult to demarcate). This article outlines the inconsistent ways in which reference grammars make the distinction between modification and complementation in the structure of English noun phrases, and offers a more unified approach aimed to solve the terminological quandary. Keywords: complementation, modification, premodifier, postmodifier, complement, the noun phrase "