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#linguistweets #lt2015 My presen-tweet-ion today is about the double plurals in English-Tagalog code-switching as you see in the image. I will avoid the use of jargons but feel free to ask questions!
Pl=Plural
S=Singular
NP=Noun Phrase
Pl=Plural
S=Singular
NP=Noun Phrase
After mining thousands of tweets from 
, I arrive at 1400 unique tokens that use Tagalog “mga” followed by an English NP. According to math, the classification of the NP, character limits, and origin of the tweet do not influence the double pluralization. #linguistweet
, I arrive at 1400 unique tokens that use Tagalog “mga” followed by an English NP. According to math, the classification of the NP, character limits, and origin of the tweet do not influence the double pluralization. #linguistweet
Existing literature suggests that our brains store PL and S forms separately so when code-switching, the PL mental image prompts "mga" to introduce a PL NP and remains activated as the English NP is inserted. #linguistweets
So I checked @BYU's Corpus (COCA) to get some representation of how often the S and PL versions of the English NP tokens I gathered are used. Results confirm that if S is more used than P, we get "mga" +S and if P is more used than S, we get "mga" + P
#tagalog #english #taglish
#tagalog #english #taglish
Because Twitter data is not the same 24/7, I went back and mined tweets with “mga +keyword” to see if the double pluralization remains consistent. All but 2 tokens did. I then use the Complex Adaptive System Principles (CASP) Model for Bilingualism to explain all this.
The CASP model suggests that double PL a. minimizes processing effort, b. maximizes expressive power of the phrase, c. maximizes efficiency because of reduced cognitive effort, and d. maximizes common ground as grammatical systems from both languages are used. TY #linguistweets
