Shahrzad Mahootian

• BA Poli Sci, MA Linguistics, PhD Linguistics
• Professor at Northeastern Illinois University

NOTE: Please do not request the full text of this publication. As it is a book, the authors cannot make it available to download. "Code-switching," or the alternation of languages by bilinguals, has attracted an enormous amount of attention from researchers. However, most research has focused on spoken language, and the resultant theoretical frame...

Structural constraints on codeswitching have been the focus of much research and debate. While some researchers claim to have discovered universal constraints on codeswitching (Belazi et al., 1994; Di Sciullo el al., 1986; Joshi, 1985; Myers-Scotton, 1993; Sankoff and Poplack, 1981), others deny the possibility of constraints motivated solely by sy...

Code switching/code mixing is the systematic alternation of two or more languages during a conversation and is part of virtually every bilingual community. This article presents an overview of the terms and the structural and social facets of code-switching as well as its significance during bilingual language acquisition. Research into language co...

This article investigates the relationship between code choice, bilingual identity and language change. Code choice and codeswitches in a bilingual Spanish-English publication are examined with two questions in mind. The first asks the extent to which stylistic and social variables, including identity, govern code choice. The second looks at the re...

Studies investigating the role gesture plays in communication claim gesture has a minimal role, while others claim that gesture carries a large communicative load. In these studies, however, the role of gesture has been assessed in a context where speech is understood and could easily carry the entire communicative burden. We examine the role of ge...

Belazi, Rubin, and Toribio (1994) propose two universal syntactic constraints on intrasentential code switching: the Functional Head Constraint, which prohibits switches between functional heads and their complements, and the Word-Grammar Integrity Corollary, which requires all words of a language to obey that language's grammar in code-switching c...

In this paper we demonstrate that discourse-functional constraints on inversion in Farsi correspond to those on inversion in English despite differences in word order. Farsi canonically exhibits SXV word order, but permits a marked ordering of XSV. Although this word order is like that of English topicalization, it does not share the discourse func...

The recent syntactic literature contains three major proposals concerning the syntactic status of adnominal adjectives: 1.(1) that they are heads,2.(2) that they are phrasal adjuncts, and3.(3) that they do not form a uniform class. Given this lack of consensus, it is not surprising that the distribution of adnominal adjectives had remained an unsol...

In codeswitching contexts, the language of a syntactic head determines the distribution of its complements. Mahootian 1993 derives this generalization by representing heads as the anchors of elementary trees in a lexicalized TAG. However, not all codeswitching sequences are amenable to a head-complement analysis. For instance, adnominal adjectives...

In a recent study (Stone, Webb, & Mahootian, 1991), we failed to replicate the findings of Goldin-Meadow and colleagues (Church & Goldin-Meadow, 1986; Perry, Church, & Goldin-Meadow, 1988) regarding the value of gesture-speech mismatch as an index of transitional knowledge. In a response to our article, Perry, Church, and Goldin-Meadow (1992, this...

The purpose of the present study was to explore the proposed diagnostic role of gesture-speech mismatches as an index of transitional knowledge (Church & Golden-Meadow 1986; Perry, Church, & Goldin-Meadow 1988). A group of forty-three 15-year-olds was videotaped while working on a control-of-variables task. The prediction from the earlier work woul...