Emotions and the Type of Code-switching in a Corpus of Dutch-English Online Hotel Reviews.

Abstract

Few studies on code-switching in written discourse have taken into account the role of emotionality on code-switching. Emotions were found to influence the use of code-switching. Therefore, this study investigated the effect of positive, negative, and neutral emotions on the type of code-switching used in online reviews and provides further observation on motivations for code-switching. A corpus analysis of 123 Dutch-English hotel reviews taken from the Tripadvisor.com website was performed. Findings showed that positive reviews included relatively more intra-sentential code-switching than neutral reviews, but not more than negative reviews. Intra-sentential code-switching was also the most frequently used code-switching and the main motivation for reviewers to code-switch was ‘Anglicism’. In addition, negative reviews tended to be longer than positive reviews. The findings demonstrated conclusions that were further discussed. Implications of these results and recommendations for future research are presented.