Cover not available

In:Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 12: Selected papers from the 45th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Campinas, Brazil
Edited by Ruth E.V. Lopes, Juanito Ornelas de Avelar and Sonia M. L. Cyrino
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 12] 2017
► pp. 213–234

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
authorization required

Chapter 14
Structural approaches to code-switching

Research then and now

 | The University of Texas
Published online: 19 October 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.12.14tor
Abstract
The present contribution reflects on the competing disciplinary, ideological, and methodological tensions in the study of bilingual code-switching and advocates for a data-driven structural approach to the patterns of language mixing attested across language pairings and Speech communities. More specifically, the chapter argues for the benefits of corpus and computational techniques in yielding reliable and replicable findings with which to confront long-standing questions and established theoretical constructs and in advancing our understanding of this bilingual phenomenon.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A recent history of structural approaches to code-switching
  • 3.A first step towards a data-driven research program
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (81)
References
Abney, S. P. 1987. The English noun phrase in its sentential aspect. Doctoral dissertation: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Balam, O. 2015. Code-switcing and linguistic evolution: The case of ‘hacer+V’ in Orange Walk, Northern Belize. Lengua y migración 7: 83–109.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Balam, O., de Prada Pérez, A. & Mayans, D. 2014. A congruence approach to the study of bilingual compound verbs in Northern Belize contact Spanish. Spanish in Context, 11:2. 243–265.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Backus, A. 2001. The role of semantic specificity in insertional codeswitching: Evidence from Dutch-Turkish. In Codeswitching Worldwide II, R. Jacobson (ed.), 125–154. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ball, K., Bullock, B., Guzmán, G., Neupane, R., Novak, K. & Serigos, J. L. 2015. Bon cop, bad copy: A tale of two cities. Paper presented at Transcultural urban spaces: where geography meets language. University of Berne, Switzerland.
Belazi, H., Rubin, E. & Toribio, A. J. 1994. Code-switching and X-bar Theory: The Functional Head Constraint. Linguistic Inquiry 25: 221–237.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Berk-Seligson, S. 1986. Linguistic constraints on intra-sentential code-switching: A study of Spanish-Hebrew bilingualism. Language in Society 15: 313–348. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bullock, B. E., Serigos, J. L. & Toribio, A. J. 2016. The stratification of English-language lone-word and multi-word material in Puerto Rican Spanish-language press outlets: A computational approach. In Code-switching in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and its diaspora, C. Mazak, M. Parafita Cuoto & R. Guzzardo (eds.), 171–189. New York: John Benjamins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bullock, B. E., Serigos, J. L., Toribio, A. J. & Wendorf, A. Forthcoming. The challenges and benefits of annotating oral bilingual corpora: The Spanish in Texas Corpus Project. In Romance Parsed Corpora and Linguistic Theory, C. Tortora, B. Santorini & F. Blanchette (eds.), special issue, Linguistic Variation.
Bullock, B. E. & Toribio, A. J. 2009. Themes in the study of code-switching. In The Handbook of Linguistic Code-switching, B. Bullock & A. J. Toribio (eds.), 1–17. Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2012. The Spanish in Texas Corpus Project. Center for Open Education Resources and Language Learning (COERLL), the University of Texas at Austin. [URL].
Bullock, B.E., Toribio, A. J. & Greaser, C. 2012. The bilingual compound verb [hacer+VE] in Texas Spanish. Paper presented at the Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, University of Florida.
Cantone, K. F., & Müller, N. 2008. Un Nase or una Nase? What gender marking within switched DPs reveals about the architecture of the bilingual language faculty. Lingua 118: 810–826. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Carter, D., Deuchar, M., Davies, P. & Parafita Couto, M. C. 2011. A systematic comparison of factors affecting the choice of Matrix Language in three bilingual communities. Journal of Language Contact 4: 153–183. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Çetinoğlu, O., Schulz, S. & Vu, N. T. 2016. Challenges of computational processing of code-switching. Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code Switching. Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2016, Association for Computational Linguistics. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chan, B. 2009. Code-switching between typologically distinct languages. In, The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-switching, B. Bullock & A. J. Toribio (eds.), 182–198. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1986. Barriers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1993. A Minimalist Program for linguistic theory. In The View from Building 20, K. Hale & S. J. Keyser (eds.), 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Di Sciullo, A. M., Muysken, P. & Singh, R. 1986. Government and code-mixing. Journal of Linguistics 22: 1–24. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Diab, M., & Kamboj, A. 2011. Feasibility of Leveraging Crowd Sourcing for the Creation of a Large Scale Annotated Resource for Hindi English Code Switched Data: A Pilot Annotation. Colombia University New York Center for Computational Learning Systems.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Donnelly, K. & Deuchar, M. 2011. Using constraint grammar in the Bangor Autoglosser to disambiguate multilingual spoken text. Constraint Grammar Applications: Proceedings of the NODALIDA 2011 Workshop, Rigva, Latvia 2011: 17–25.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dubois, S. & Noetzel, S. 2005. Intergenerational pattern of interference and internally-motivated changes in Cajun French. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 8: 131–143. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ebert, S. 2014. The morphosyntax of Wh-questions: Evidence from Spanish-English code-switching. Doctoral Dissertation, The University of Illinois at Chicago.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fuller Medina, N. 2005. Spanish-English contact in Belize: the case of Hacer + V. In Proceedings of the 2005 Canadian Linguistics Association Annual Conference, C. Gurski (ed.) 1–9.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gardner-Chloros, P. 2009. Sociolinguistic factors in code-switching. In The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-switching, B. Bullock & A. J. Toribio, 97–113. Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gardner-Chlros, P. & Edwards, M. 2004. Assumptions behind grammatical approaches to code-switching: when the blueprint is a red herring. Transactions of the Philological Society 103: 103–129. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gardner-Chloros, P., Moyer, M. & Sebba, S. 2007. Coding and analysing multilingual data: the LIDES project. Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2007. 91–120. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
González-Vilbazo, K. & López, L. 2011. Some properties of light verbs in code-switching. Lingua 121: 832–850. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gullberg, M., Indefrey, P., & Muysken, P. 2009. Research techniques for the study of code-switching. In The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-Switching, B. Bullock & A. J. Toribio (eds.), 21–39. Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Guzmán, G., Serigos, J. R., Bullock, B. E. & Toribio, A. J. 2016. Simple tools for exploring variation in code-switching for linguists. Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code Switching. Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2016, Association for Computational Linguistics. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Guzmán, G., Joseph, R., Serigos, J., Bullock, B. & Toribio, A. J. 2017. Moving code-switching research toward more empirically grounded methods. CDH 2017 Corpora in the Digital Humanities, 1–9, CEUR Workshop Proceedings.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Herring, J. R., Deuchar, M., Parafita Couto, M. C. & Moro Quintanilla, M. 2010. ‘I saw the madre’: evaluating predictions about codeswitched determiner-noun sequences using Spanish-English and Welsh-English data. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 13: 553–573. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jake, J. L., C. Myers-Scotton, and S. Gross. 2002. Making a Minimalist approach to codeswitching work: Adding the Matrix Language. Bilingualism, Language & Cognition 5: 69–91.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Liceras, J. M., Fernández Fuertes, R., Perales, S., Pérez-Tattam R. & Spradlin, K. 2008. Gender and gender agreement in bilingual native and non-native grammars: A view from child and adult functional-lexical mixings. Lingua 118: 827–851.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
MacSwan, J. 1997. A minimalist approach to intrasentential code switching: Spanish-Nahuatl bilingualism in central Mexico. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2000. The architecture of the bilingual language faculty: Evidence from codeswitching. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 3: 37–54.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
MacSwan, J. & McAlister, K. 2010. Naturalistic and elicited data in grammatical studies of codeswitching. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 3: 521–532. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mahootian, S. 1993. A null theory of codeswitching. Doctoral dissertation, Northwestern University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. 1995. The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk (2nd ed.). Hillside, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Montes-Alcalá, C. 2005. Mándame un e-mail: cambio de códigos español-inglés online. In Contacto y contextos lingüísticos: El español en los Estados Unidos y en contacto con otras lenguas, L. Ortiz & M. Lacorte (eds.), 173–185. Iberoamericana/Vervuert.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2007. Blogging in two languages: Code-switching in bilingual blogs. In Selected Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics, J. Holmquist, A. Lorenzino & L. Sayahi (eds.), 162–170, Somerville, MA. Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Montrul, S. 2008. Incomplete acquisition in bilingualism. Re-examining the age factor. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2013. Bilingualism and the heritage speaker. In The handbook of bilingualism and multilingualism, T. Bhatia & W. Ritchie (eds.), 168–189.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Muysken, P. 2000. Bilingual speech: A Typology of Code-Switching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2013. Language contact outcomes as the result of optimization strategies. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 16, 1–22.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Myers-Scotton, C. 1993. Duelling languages: Grammatical structure in codeswitching. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2002. Contact Linguistics: Bilingual Encounters and Grammatical Outcomes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2006. Natural codeswitching knocks on the laboratory door. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 9: 203–212.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Otheguy, R., & Stern, N. 2011. On so-called Spanglish. International Journal of Bilingualism, 15: 85–100. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Otheguy, R. & A. C. Zentella. 2012. Spanish in New York: Language contact, dialectal leveling, and structural continuity. Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pap, L. 1949. Portuguese American speech: an outline of speech conditions among Portuguese immigrants in New England and elsewhere in the United States. New York: Colombia University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pavalanthan, U. & Eisenstein, J. 2015. Audience-modulated variation in online social media. American Speech 90: 187–213. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Peng N., Wang Y., Dredze M., 2014. Learning Polylingual Topic Models from Code-Switched Social Media Documents. In Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 674–679.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Poplack, S. 1980. Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español: Toward a typology of code-switching. In Spanish in the United States: Sociolinguistic Aspects, J. Amastae & L. Elías-Olivares (eds.), 230–263. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rubin, E. & Toribio, A. J. 1995. Feature checking and the syntax of language contact. In Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 123: Contemporary Research in Romance Linguistics, J. Amastae, G. Goodall, M. Montalbetti & M. Phinney (eds.), 177–185. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Poplack, S. 1980. Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in English y termino en español: Toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics, 18: 581–618. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Post, R. 2010. Code-switching in the Determiner Phrase: A comparison of Tunisian Arabic-French and Moroccan Arabic-French switching. The University of Texas at Austin.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sayahi, L. 2002. Social identity and code-switching in bilingual contexts: a comparative approach. In Language and Identity: Selected Papers of the International Conference, L. Ashley & W. Finke (eds.), 373–381. East Rockaway, NY: Cummings & Hathaway Publishers.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sebba, M. 1998. A congruence approach to the syntax of codeswitching. International Journal of Bilingualism 2: 1–19. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2009. On the notions of congruence and convergence in code-switching. In The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingual Code-switching, B. Bullock & A. J. Toribio (eds.) 40–57. Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Serigos, J., 2016. Using distributional semantics in loanword research: A concept-based approach to quantifying semantic specificity of Anglicisms in Spanish. International Journal of Bilingualism, 1–20.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Silva-Corvalán, C. 1994/2000. Language Contact and Change: Spanish in Los Angeles. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Solorio, T. & Y. Liu. 2008a. Learning to predict code-switching points. The Conference Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing, EMNLP-2008, 973–981. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2008b. Part-of-speech tagging for English-Spanish code-switched text. The Conference Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing, EMNLP-2008, 1051–1060. Honolulu, HI: Association for Computational Linguistics. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Toribio, A. J. 2002. Spanish-English code-switching among US Latinos. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 158: 89–119.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2001a. Accessing bilingual code-switching competence. International Journal of Bilingualism 5: 403–436. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2001b. On the emergence of bilingual code-switching competence. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 4: 203–231. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Toribio, A. J. & Bullock, B. 2016. A new look at heritage Spanish and its speakers. In Advances in Spanish as a Heritage Language, D. Pascual y Cabo (ed.), 27–50. New York: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Toribio, A. J. & González-Vilbazo, K. 2014. Operator movement in English-Spanish and German-Spanish codeswitching. In Grammatical theory and bilingual codeswitching, J. MacSwan (ed.), 87–119. MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Toribio, A. J., Bullock, B., Serigos, J. L., Neupane, R. & Ball, K.. 2015. Towards developing a bilingual metric for US Spanish. Spanish Contact, Expansion, and Transformation: 25th Conference on Spanish in the United States and 10th Conference on Spanish in Contact with Other Languages. City College of New York.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Valdés, G. 2001. Heritage language students: profiles and possibilities. In Heritage Languages in America: Preserving a National Resource, J. Peyton, D. Ranard, & S. McGinnis (eds.), 1–42. McHenry, IL: Center for Applied Linguistics and Delta Systems.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Valdés, G., & Geoffrion-Vinci, M. 1998. Chicano Spanish: The problem of the “under- developed” code in bilingual repertoires. The Modern Language Journal 82: 473–501.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
VanCoetsem, F. 1990. Review of Thomason and Kaufman (1988), Lehiste (1988), and Wardhaugh (1987). Language in Society 19: 260–268.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
van Gelderen, E. & MacSwan, J. 2008. Interface conditions and code-switching: Pronouns, lexical DPs, and checking theory. Lingua 118: 765–776. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vergara Wilson, D. & Dumont, J. 2015. The emergent grammar of bilinguals: The Spanish verb hacer ‘do’ with a bare English infinitive. International Journal of Bilingualism 19: 444–458. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vergara Wilson, D. 2013. One construction, two source languages: Hacer with an English infinitive in bilingual discourse. In Selected Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics, A. M. Carvalho & S. Beaudrie (eds.), 123–134. Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wei, L. & Moyer, M. 2008. The Blackwell guide to research on multilingualism. Blackwell Publishing. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Woolford, E. 1983. Bilingual code-switching and syntactic theory. Linguistic Inquiry 14:520–536.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1984. On the application of wh-movement and inversion in code-switching sentences. Revue Québécoise de Linguistique 14: 77–86. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (8)

Cited by eight other publications

Olson, Daniel J.
2025. Bilingual language experience and code-switching acceptability judgments: A constructive replication of the work by Stadthagen-González et al. (2019), Balam et al. (2020), and Stadthagen-González et al. (2018). International Journal of Bilingualism 29:6 ► pp. 1724 ff. DOI logo
Vanhaverbeke, Margot, Renata Enghels, María del Carmen Parafita Couto & Iva Ivanova
2025. Enhancing Code-Switching Research Through Comparable Corpora: Introducing the El Paso Bilingual Corpus. Languages 10:7 ► pp. 174 ff. DOI logo
Aboh, Enoch O. & M. Carmen Parafita Couto
2024. Modelling multilingual ecologies beyond the L1-L2 Binary. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 14:1 ► pp. 37 ff. DOI logo
Parafita Couto, M. Carmen, Charlotte Pouw, Rodi Laanen & Luis López
2024. The role of INFL in code-switching: a study of a Papiamento heritage community in the Netherlands. Frontiers in Language Sciences 2 DOI logo
Balam, Osmer, Hans Stadthagen-González, Eva Rodríguez-González & María del Carmen Parafita Couto
2023. On the grammaticality of passivization in bilingual compound verbs. International Journal of Bilingualism 27:4 ► pp. 415 ff. DOI logo
Bellamy, Kate & M. Carmen Parafita Couto
2022. Gender assignment in mixed noun phrases. In The Acquisition of Gender [Studies in Bilingualism, 63], ► pp. 13 ff. DOI logo
Suurmeijer, Luuk, M. Carmen Parafita Couto & Marianne Gullberg
2020. Structural and Extralinguistic Aspects of Code-Switching: Evidence From Papiamentu-Dutch Auditory Sentence Matching. Frontiers in Psychology 11 DOI logo
Toribio, Almeida Jacqueline
2018. The future of code-switching research. In Code-switching – Experimental Answers to Theoretical Questions [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 19], ► pp. 257 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 30 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue