Code Switching: Linguistic

Abstract

Though code-switching (CS) has been exceptionally well researched, controversy continues to reign over its identity, structure, and the rules governing its use. This article relates the state of the field to epistemological differences among researchers with respect to data, methods, the nature of evidence, and principles of scientific proof. Progress toward developing accountable theories of CS will be achieved once greater efforts are made to distinguish (1) apparently homologous but fundamentally distinct manifestations of language contact (currently subsumed under the label of CS) and (2) robust community-based usage patterns from isolated counterexamples.

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Code switching: Linguistic
Code-switching (CS) refers to the mixing, by bilinguals
(or multilinguals), of two or more languages in
discourse, often with no change of interlocutor or
topic. Such mixing may take place at any level of
linguistic structure, but its occurrence within the
confines of a single sentence, constituent, or even word,
has attracted most linguistic attention. This article
surveys the linguistic treatment of such intrasentential
switching.
In combining languages intrasententially, various
problems of incompatibility may arise. The most
obvious derive from word order differences: under
what conditions, if any, can the boundary between
constituents ordered differently in two languages host
a switch? Other potential combinatorial difficulties
involve mismatches in grammatical categories, sub-
categorization patterns, morphology, and idiomatic
expressions. Systematic examination of the sponta-
neous speech of bilinguals resident in a wide range of
communities suggests, however, that speakers gen-
erally manage to circumvent these difficulties. CS
tends not to produce utterances that contain mono-
lingually ungrammatical sentence fragments. Discov-
ery of the mechanisms enabling such ‘grammatical’ CS
is the major goal of current research. Central questions
include locating permissible switch sites and ascertain-
ing the nature (hierarchical or linear, variable or
categorical) of the constraints on switching.
1. Background
Though CS is apparently a hallmark of bilingual
communities world-wide, it has only begun to attract
serious scholarly attention in the last few decades.
Researchers first dismissed intrasentential code-
switching as random and deviant (e.g., Weinreich
1953!1968) but are now unanimous in the conviction
that it is grammatically constrained. The basis for this
conviction is the empirical observation that bilinguals
tend to switch intrasententially at certain (morpho)
syntactic boundaries and not at others. Early efforts to
explain these preferences proceeded by proscribing
certain switch sites, for example, between pronominal
subjects and verbs or between conjunctions and their
conjuncts. However, these particular sites were soon
reported to figure among the regular CS patterns of
some bilingual communities.
The first more general account of the distribution of
CS stemmed from the observation that CS is favored
at the kinds of syntactic boundaries which occur in
both languages. The equi!alence constraint (Poplack
1980) states that switched sentences are made up of
concatenated fragments of alternating languages, each
of which is grammatical in the language of its
provenance (see also Muysken 2000). The boundary
between adjacent fragments occurs between two con-
stituents that are ordered in the same way in both
languages, ensuring the linear coherence of sentence
structure without omitting or duplicating lexical con-
tent.
That general principles, rather than atomistic con-
straints, govern CS is now widely accepted, though
there is little consensus as to what they are or how they
should be represented. Much current research assumes
unquestioningly that the mechanisms for language
switching follow directly from general principles of
(monolingual) grammar. Theories based on this as-
sumption tend to appeal to such abstract grammatical
properties as inter-constituent relationships (e.g., gov-
ernment, case assignment) and!or language-specific
features of lexical categories (i.e., subcatgorization of
grammatical arguments, inherent morphological fea-
tures).
Since Klavans’s (1985) proposal that CS was con-
strained by structural relations, the formal linguistic
theories successively in vogue have each been extended
to encompass the data of CS. Di Sciullo et al. (1986),
for example, identified the relevant relations as C-
2062
Co-constructi!ism in Educational Theory and Practice
Poplack, Shana. 2001. Code-switching (Linguistic). In Smelser, Niel & Baltes, Paul (eds.),
International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier Science Ltd. 2062-2065.

command and government: CS cannot occur where a
government relation holds. Replacement of the func-
tion of government in standard theory by the notion of
feature agreement led to a parallel focus on feature
matching in CS studies. The Functional Head Con-
straint (Belazi et al. 1994) adds language choice to the
features instantiated in functional and lexical cate-
gories, prohibiting CS where a mismatch occurs. A
more recent Minimalist proposal (MacSwan 1999)
restricts CS at structural sites showing cross-language
differences in monolingual features.
This distinction between lexical and functional
categories is not new to CS research. It is a hallmark of
theories invoking the complement structure of in-
dividual lexical items to characterize permissible CS
sites (e.g., Joshi 1985) and its sequel, the Null Theory of
CS (Santorini and Mahootian 1995; see also Bentahila
and Davies’s Subcategorisation Constraint 1983). Per-
haps the most detailed model involving the contrast
between lexical properties and functional (or ‘system’)
morphemes is the Matrix Language Frame model
(Azuma 1993, Myers-Scotton 1993). Here, structural
constraints on CS result from a complex interaction
between a dominant matrix language and the pro-
hibition against embedding ‘system’ morphemes from
the ‘embedded’ language in matrix language structure.
The assumption that bilingual syntax can be ex-
plained by general principles inferred from the study
of monolingual grammar has not yet been substan-
tiated. While formal theories of grammar may account
well for monolingual language structure, including
that of the monolingual fragments in CS discourse,
there is no evidence to suggest that the juxtaposition of
two languages can be explained in the same way.
Bilingual communities exhibit widely different pat-
terns of adapting monolingual resources in their
code-mixing strategies, and these are not predictable
through purely linguistic considerations. The equi-
valence constraint, as formalized by Sankoff(1998), is
a production-based explanation of the facts of CS,
which incorporates the notions of structural hierarchy
and linear order, and accounts for a number of
empirical observations in addition to the equivalent
word order characterizing most actual switch sites.
These include the well-formedness of the monolingual
fragments, the conservation of constituent structure,
and the essential unpredictability of CS at any poten-
tial CS site. The mechanisms of monolingual and
bilingual grammars are not assumed a priori to be
identical.
2. E!aluating CS Theories
There has been remarkably little cross-fertilization
among CS theories; indeed, each has been greeted with
a host of counter-examples. Testing the fit of com-
peting models against the data of CS should be a
straightforward matter since they often make com-
peting predictions. But their disparate assumptions,
goals, and domains of application have hindered such
efforts. Assessment of the descriptive adequacy of a
theory of CS requires that at least two methodological
issues be resolved. One involves classification of other-
language phenomena, the other, confronting the pre-
dictions of the theory with the data of actual bilingual
behavior.
It is uncontroversial that CS differs from the other
major manifestation of language contact: lexical bor-
rowing. Despite etymological identity with the donor
language, established loanwords assume the morpho-
logical, syntactic, and often, phonological, identity of
the recipient language. They tend to be recurrent in the
speech of the individual and widespread across the
community. The stock of established loanwords is
available to monolingual speakers of the recipient
language, who access them normally along with the
remainder of the recipient-language lexicon. Loan-
words further differ from CS in that there is no
involvement of the morphology, syntax, or phonology
of the lexifier language.
Recent research has shown that borrowing is
actually much more productive than implied above
(see the papers in Poplack and Meechan 1998). In
particular, the social characteristics of recurrence and
diffusion are not always satisfied. This results in what
has been called, after Weinreich (1953!1968), nonce
borrowing (Sankoffet al. 1990). Like its established
counterpart, the nonce loan tends to involve lone
lexical items, generally major-class content words, and
to assume the morphological, syntactic, and often,
phonological identity of the recipient language. Like
CS, on the other hand, nonce borrowing is neither
recurrent nor widespread, and necessarily requires a
certain level of bilingual competence. Distinguishing
nonce borrowings from single-word CS is conceptually
easy but methodologically difficult, especially when
they surface bare, giving no apparent indication of
language membership.
The classification of lone items is at the heart of a
fundamental disagreement among CS researchers over
(a) whether the distinction between CS and borrowing
should be formally recognized in a theory of CS, (b)
whether these and other manifestations of language
contact can be unambiguously identified in bilingual
discourse, and (c) criteria for determining whether a
given item was switched or borrowed. Researchers
who consider lone other-language items to be CS tend
to posit an asymmetrical relationship, in which one
language dominates and other-language items are
inserted (e.g., Joshi 1985, Myers-Scotton 1993). Where
the class of CS is (in the first instance) limited to
unambiguous multiword fragments, both languages
are postulated to play a role (Belazi et al. 1994,
Sankoff1998, Woolford 1983). Muysken (2000) ad-
mits the possibility of both strategies.
The appropriateness of data is also relevant to
evaluating CS theories. The literature on CS largely is
2063
Code switching: Linguistic

characterized by the ‘rule-and-exception’ paradigm.
Despite the onslaught of counter-examples provoked
by successive CS theories, very few have in fact been
tested systematically against the data of spontaneous
bilingual usage. Instead, both the theories and tests of
their applicability tend to be based on isolated ex-
amples, drawn from judgments, informant elicitation,
and linguist introspection. The relation between such
data and actual usage is not known; nor do they
permit us to distinguish between the recurrent and
systematic patterns of everyday interaction and exam-
ples which may be judged ‘acceptable’ in some sense,
but which rarely or never occur.
The equivalence constraint has been verified as a
general tendency in Spanish-English (Poplack 1980);
Finnish-English (Poplack et al. 1987), Arabic-French
(Naı
!t M’Barek and Sankoff1988), Tamil-English
(Sankoffet al. 1990), Fongbe-French and Wolof-
French (Meechan and Poplack 1995), Igbo-English
(Eze 1998), French-English (Turpin 1998) and Ukrain-
ian-English (Budzhak-Jones 1998) bilingual commu-
nities. But most of the voluminous literature on CS,
especially of the ‘insertional’ type, is based on data
which represents, properly speaking, lexical borrow-
ing. As only the grammar and word order of the
recipient language are pertinent to borrowing, attempts
to understand the structure of CS based on a mixture
of borrowing and true CS (e.g., Myers-Scotton 1993
and many others) appear unwieldy or descriptively
inadequate.
3. Identifying the Results of Language Contact
Insofar as CS and borrowing are based on some
principled combination of elements of the monolingu-
al (i.e., unmixed) vernaculars of the bilingual com-
munity, it is important to have as explicit an idea as
possible of the nature of these vernaculars before
concluding that a code-mixed element is behaving like
one or the other. The analysis of code-mixing as a
discourse mode requires access to the grammars of the
contact languages as they are spoken, and spoken
language is characterized by structural variability. In
confronting, rather than evading this variability,
Sankoffet al. (1990) and Poplack and Meechan (1998)
developed a method to compare bilingual structures
with the unmixed source languages of the same
speakers. Making use of the framework of linguistic
variation theory (Labov 1969), the inherent variability
of such forms is used to determine their status. If the
rate and distribution of, for example, case-marking of
the contentious lone other-language items show quan-
titative parallels to those of their counterparts in the
(unmixed) recipient language, while at the same time
differing from relevant patterns in the donor language,
the lone other-language items are inferred to be
borrowed, since only the grammar of the recipient
language is operative. If they pattern with their
counterparts in the (unmixed) donor language, while
at the same time differing from the patterning in the
unmixed recipient language, the lone other-language
items must result from CS.
Quantitative analysis of language mixing phenom-
ena in typologically distinct language pairs shows that
lone other-language items, especially major-class con-
tent words, are by far the most important component
of mixed discourse. These lone items show the same
fine details of quantitative conditioning of phono-
logical, morphological, and syntactic variability as
dictionary-attested loanwords, both of which in turn
parallel their unmixed counterparts in the recipient
language (Poplack and Meechan 1998). This tendency
is apparent regardless of the linguistic properties of the
language pair. This is evidence that most lone items
are borrowed, even if only for the nonce, despite the
lack, in some cases, of dictionary attestation or
diffusion within the community.
4. Future Directions
Lack of consensus characterizing the discipline is
related to a number of methodological problems.
Foremost among them is failure to distinguish code-
switching from other types of language mixture,
which, despite similarities in surface manifestation,
are fundamentally different mechanisms for combin-
ing languages. The current state of knowledge suggests
that borrowing, nonce or established, is the major
manifestation of language contact in most bilingual
communities. Its linguistic structure is well accounted
for in the traditional language contact literature
(Weinreich 1953!1968). Intrasentential CS involving
multiword fragments of two or more languages is also
attested in some communities. Achievement of con-
sensus on an empirically verifiable characterization of
the rules for juxtaposing these fragments within the
sentence remains an important goal for CS research.
Fit between theories and data could be improved by a
broader empirical base. This would permit researchers
to situate bilingual behavior with respect to the
monolingual vernaculars implicated in language mix-
ing, account for the disparate CS strategies that have
evolved in different bilingual communities, and dis-
tinguish among incommensurable manifestations of
bilingual language contact.
See also: Bilingual Education: International Perspec-
tives; Bilingualism and Multilingualism; Bilingualism:
Cognitive Aspects; First Language Acquisition: Cross-
linguistic; Second Language Acquisition; Sociolin-
guistics
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Coeducation and Single-sex Schooling
Coeducation or single-sex schooling does not only
refer to an organizational form of separating or mixing
girls and boys, but also refers to such questions as:
should there be different goals, curricula, rights, and
outcomes for the two genders? Equality is not per-
ceived in all countries and not always an important
principle for men and women. For a long time,
education was oriented to prepare girls and boys for
their different spheres in adult life. Today, equality is
the goal, but it is not at all clear whether separation or
coeducation is the better way to reach this goal.
1. A Brief History of Coeducation
The history of educational systems shows, for most
countries, that especially for education beyond el-
ementary levels, single-sex schools have been the
preferred form, although coeducation was not un-
usual. Financial restrictions in mass education forced
coeducational schooling, but for ideological reasons,
separation was preferred by the authorities. While this
is mainly true for Europe, in the United States, soon
after establishing public schools, coeducation became
the norm. David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot describe
the beginning as ‘smuggling in the girls’ which led to
the adoption of coeducation by gradually moving
from ‘why to why not’ (Tyack and Hansot 1992, p. 47).
Even in secondary education, only 12 cities out of 628
reported that they had single-sex high schools at the
end of the nineteenth century. The European sec-
ondary education was for boys only—especially in
Germany; girls received secondary education only on
a private basis and were not allowed to attend higher
education at all. Prussian universities enrolled women,
but not before 1908.
Democratic movements in all countries valued
equality of education and therefore pledged for co-
education. The debates emphasized the question of
difference or similarity of women and men as human
beings. While the assumption of similarity historically
was associated with the preference for coeducation,
those who postulated differences were divided in
advocates and opponents to coeducation. The advo-
cates thought coeducation would ensure that girls and
boys themselves would make sure they behaved like
girls and boys. The opponents feared that girls and
boys together would encourage the loss of their
engendered behavior.
In most European countries, the years between 1960
and 1980 brought big educational reforms, and co-
education was one of those (Wilson 1991, p. 203)—
although it was more of a side-effect of the reforms,
and astonishingly, after the heated discussions in the
first half of the twentieth century, a change nearly
without debate. Efforts to establish ‘schools for all’
2065
Coeducation and Single-sex Schooling
Copyright !2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences ISBN: 0-08-043076-7