A Study Of Grammatical Constraints On Mongolia-Chinese Intraclausal Code-Switching

Code switching is a phenomenon that a language switches to another, which is an integral part of sociolinguistics and is very common in the research of language of contact. Many scholars have done a great number of researches on code switching of multiple languages from different aspects, yet not complete. The present paper aims at researching the constraints of code switching from Mongolian language to Chinese in the case of Mongolian residents of He Jing County from three aspects:first is the constraints of Chinese compositions embedded in Mongolian language;second is the constraints of Mongolian language embedded in Chinese; third is the constraints of Mongolian language to the morphology of Chinese.Daily conversations from different ages, vocations, genders, educational backgrounds and degrees of education in five fields such as families, friends,vocations and education are recorded into 115 hours and transliterated into 1250 clauses and get 1482 times of code switching. The research analyzes three aspects combining the methods of qualitative and quantitative analysis and get those those results:Firstly, the embedded compositions of Chinese in Chinese-Mongolian code switching are single words, word groups and sentences. The switches of single words are the most common which is 1246 times; then word groups which is 225times; and then only 11 times of the switches of sentences. Among those embedded words, the switches of nouns are the most, then are successively verbs, adjectives,adverbs, numerals and measure words. Word groups those have code switched are noun phrases, verb phrases and adjective phrases, among which noun phrases are the most common in code switching and adjective are the least. All the code switched sentences are simple sentences among which subjective-predicate sentences are the most common.Secondly, on the syntactic level of Mongolian-Chinese code switching,because of the different word orders of Mongolian which belongs to agglutinative language and Chinese which belongs to isolating language, Mongolian restricts the embedded Chinese, thus the embedded Chinese must conform to Mongolian grammar order. In Mongolian language, code switching occurs on the positions of subject, object, predicate, attribute and adverbial.Thirdly, on the syntactic representation of Mongolian-Chinese code switching,the embedded Chinese all changed in form according to Mongolian syntactic rules.The embedded nouns and noun word groups are changed in case and subordinate.The embedded adjectives, adjective word groups, adverbs and numerals all have affixes which conform to Mongolian grammar. It is obvious that in the process of Mongolian-Chinese code switching, the embedded Chinese should conform to Mongolian morphology and syntax.According to the research above, in the process of Mongolian-Chinese code switching, the embedded Chinese is restricted by Mongolian grammar. As for compositions, single Chinese words are the most common; as for syntactic specifications, the embedded Chinese should conform to Mongolian word orders. All of the positions except for complement occur code switching; as for morphology restriction, the embedded Chinese compositions all restricted by Mongolian.