Enhancing Code-Switching Research Through Comparable Corpora: Introducing the El Paso Bilingual Corpus

Languages, vol. 10, pp. 174

Abstract

Research on language contact outcomes, such as code-switching, continues to face theoretical and methodological challenges, particularly due to the difficulty of comparing findings across studies that use divergent data collection methods. Accordingly, scholars have emphasized the need for publicly available and comparable bilingual corpora. This paper introduces the El Paso Bilingual Corpus, a new Spanish–English bilingual corpus recorded in El Paso (TX) in 2022, designed to be methodologically comparable to the Bangor Miami Corpus. The paper is structured in three main sections. First, we review the existing Spanish–English corpora and examine the theoretical challenges posed by studies using non-comparable methodologies, thereby underscoring the gap addressed by the El Paso Bilingual Corpus. Second, we outline the corpus creation process, discussing participant recruitment, data collection, and transcription, and provide an overview of these data, including participants’ sociolinguistic profiles. Third, to demonstrate the practical value of methodologically aligned corpora, we report a comparative case study on diminutive expressions in the El Paso and Bangor Miami corpora, illustrating how shared collection protocols can elucidate the role of community-specific social factors on bilinguals’ morphosyntactic choices.

Authors 4

1. Margot Vanhaverbeke

   Ghent University

   Affiliation as printed

   Spanish Linguistics Department, Ghent University, 9000 Ghent, Belgium

2. Renata Enghels corresponding

   Ghent University

   Affiliation as printed

   Spanish Linguistics Department, Ghent University, 9000 Ghent, Belgium

3. M. Carmen Parafita Couto Aachen Centre for Linguistics, Leiden University

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Centre for Linguistics, Leiden University, 2311 EZ Leiden, The Netherlands

4. Iva Ivanova

   The University of Texas at El Paso

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Psychology, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX 79968, USA