| Summary: | This thesis focuses on Chinese–Swedish code-switching of bilingual children in Sweden. The purpose is to, through a case study, study what Chinese–Swedish code-switching looks like in daily conversations between bilingual children and their parents. Three main questions are formulated from the purpose of the thesis, foucusing on the types and frequencies of code-switching, the grammar of code-switching, and the motivation of code-switching. The linguistic material comes from voice recordings of naturally occurring conversations between three children and their parents, which are transcribed afterwards. In order to answer the questions, two different kinds of analyses are carried out: a quantitative analysis, to study the types and frequencies of code-switching, and a qualitative analysis, to study the grammar and motivation of code-switching. The qualitative analysis includes a grammatical analysis and a conversation analysis. The results of the analyses show that the types and frequencies of code-switching vary between different children, due to the interplay of three factors, namely the children’s language competence, the parents’ language patterns and the status of Swedish as the primary language in the society. In intra-sentential code-switching, when both languages have the same word order, constituents in different languages follow the corresponding grammar; and when code-switching occurs at places where there are different word orders in the two languages, the speaker has to choose and follow one of the grammars. The conversation analysis shows that code-switching is used as an extra and exclusive resource for bilingual speakers at turn distribution, marking preference and initiating repair.
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