question about fillers and communicators in bilingual transcription

[Brian Macwhinney]

Some people consider forms like “okay" and “wow" to be Spanish words.  In orthography, I’ve seen forms like “okey” and “vau” or “guau”.  Languages certainly have their own unique fillers such as Spanish “pues” or Hungarian “izé”, but when there also seem to be a group of forms that have gone international.

I would argue that, to the degree that these forms typically lie outside of the syntactic structure of an utterance, they don’t engage the full code-switching system.  

— Brian MacWhinney
Teresa Heinz Professor of Cognitive Psychology, 
Language Technologies and Modern Languages, CMU



> On May 10, 2021, at 9:46 PM, Janet Bang <janet.bang at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello, 
> 
> We are transcribing play sessions in the lab between Spanish-speaking caregivers (primarily from Mexico, now living in the US) and their Spanish-English 6-year-old bilingual children. We are interested in assessing utterances that are English, Spanish or code-switched. We're currently debating how to treat English fillers and communicators (e.g., um, okay, wow), since these are used by both children and caregivers. 
> 
> For example, some utterances we see are:
> 	• *MOT: vamos a cocinar okay at s? 
> 	• *MOT: wow at s estás cocinando!
> 	• *CHI: no quieres um at s tengo esto.
> 	• *MOT: vamos a poner some at s salt at s. 
> 	• *CHI: estos son peas at s.
> 	• *MOT: okay at s?
> We have been debating some different approaches to decide on what our criteria for code-switching would be. We noticed in the literature and in some of the existing bilingual corpora on CHILDES that there were some different methods for this (including excluding some vs. others). 
> 
> If anyone has any thoughts on this or other references [in any language combinations], it would be much appreciated! Apologies if I've missed any conventions for this in the manuals. 
> 
> Thank you!
> Janet
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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