Quantity and quality: Using prosodic units to apply accountability to code-switching
While code-switching (CS) is highly studied, characterizing its frequency remains difficult. We utilize prosodic transcription in a bilingual corpus to detail CS types and frequency, putting forward replicable measures. A baseline is calculated through the proportions of Intonation Units (IUs) occurring at (22%) versus within (78%) the boundary of a prosodic sentence (Total N=45578 IUs). Inter- and intra-sentential CS are then compared to this baseline, revealing that CS is proportionally more likely at (38%) rather than within (62%) prosodic sentence boundaries (Total N=3650 CS). Even for intra-sentential switches, prosodic boundaries play a role, as speakers are more likely to switch languages between (63%) rather than within (37%) IUs (Total N=3569 CS). The rates of inter- and intra-sentential CS as operationalized here, together with the ratio of 2.8:1 IU-boundary to within-IU CS, allow us to estimate a replicable CS rate for the entire corpus (11%).
