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Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 2:4 (2012) ► pp.337–378

Code-switching between an OV and a VO language

Evidence from German-Italian, German-French and German-Spanish children

| Bergische Universität Wuppertal
| Bergische Universität Wuppertal
| Bergische Universität Wuppertal

The present article investigates intra-sentential code-switching in French/Italian/ Spanish-German bilingual children. The main question is what determines the syntax of code-switching in OV/VO structures and subordinate clauses. While in the domain of OV/VO, neither the language of the lexical verb nor that of the modal/auxiliary verb determines the structure of code-switched utterances, the complementizer seems to be decisive for the syntax of code-switching in subordinate clauses. The present approach focuses on the relevance of the functional head C in code-switching, claiming that the syntax of code-switched OV/VO structures is influenced by the language of a (covert) C-head, while it does not depend on the language of T or V. Our approach can explain the variability of OV/VO in code-switching data and supports the observations by Belazi, Rubin, and Toribio (1994), Cantone (2007), Chan (2003; 2007), and Gonzalez-Vilbazo and Lopez (2012) that functional categories play an important role for the syntax of code-switching.

Keywords: code-switching, bilingualism, language acquisition, functional categories, word order, language balance
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
  • 3.Current state of research
    • 3.1Approaches towards code-switching
    • 3.2Code-switching and language dominance
    • 3.3The acquisition of OV/VO and subordinate clauses
  • 4.The crucial role of functional C for the syntax of code-switching
  • 5.Data analysis
    • 5.1 Word order in code-switching involving OV/VO structures
    • 5.2Word order in code-switching between C and the sentence
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 November 2012
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.2.4.01jan
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