ROMANIAN-ENGLISH CODE-SWITCHING: A PRELIMINARY STUDY
Abstract
This paper takes a new look at syntactic constraints on code-switching by analyzing code-switches between Romanian (a Romance language never before included in a code-switching study) and English. Romanian-English code-switching provides evidence against the universality of Poplack’s (1980) syntactic constraints on code-switching. Moreover, it reveals that code-switches that would be impossible from a minimalist point of view (MacSwan, 1999) do not actually crash at LF. Thus, recent minimalist claims such as MacSwan’s (1999) should integrate Sridhar and Sridhar’s (1980) hypothesis that a guest language adjusts to syntactic and semantic prerogatives of the host language.
How to Cite
Ene, E., (2001) “ROMANIAN-ENGLISH CODE-SWITCHING: A PRELIMINARY STUDY”, The Journal of Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (JSLAT) 8, 45-55.
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