Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- 1 Bilingualism across the lifespan: an introduction
- 2 Early differentiation of languages in bilingual children
- 3 Variation in children's ability to learn second languages
- 4 Idiomaticity as an indicator of second language proficiency
- 5 Prefabs, patterns and rules in interaction? Formulaic speech in adult learners' L2 Swedish
- 6 The imperfect conditional
- 7 Spanish, Japanese and Chinese speakers' acquisition of English relative clauses: new evidence for the headdirection parameter
- 8 Distinguishing language contact phenomena: evidence from Finnish–English bilingualism
- 9 The boustrophedal brain: laterality and dyslexia in bi-directional readers
- 10 Deterioration and creativity in childhood bilingualism
- 11 Crosslinguistic influence in language loss
- 12 Bilingualism in Alzheimer's dementia: two case studies
- 13 Language processing in the bilingual: evidence from language mixing
- Index
8 - Distinguishing language contact phenomena: evidence from Finnish–English bilingualism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- 1 Bilingualism across the lifespan: an introduction
- 2 Early differentiation of languages in bilingual children
- 3 Variation in children's ability to learn second languages
- 4 Idiomaticity as an indicator of second language proficiency
- 5 Prefabs, patterns and rules in interaction? Formulaic speech in adult learners' L2 Swedish
- 6 The imperfect conditional
- 7 Spanish, Japanese and Chinese speakers' acquisition of English relative clauses: new evidence for the headdirection parameter
- 8 Distinguishing language contact phenomena: evidence from Finnish–English bilingualism
- 9 The boustrophedal brain: laterality and dyslexia in bi-directional readers
- 10 Deterioration and creativity in childhood bilingualism
- 11 Crosslinguistic influence in language loss
- 12 Bilingualism in Alzheimer's dementia: two case studies
- 13 Language processing in the bilingual: evidence from language mixing
- Index
Summary
The bilingual behavior which has provoked the most controversy in linguistics is undoubtedly intrasentential code-switching (CS). When two languages are to be used in a single sentence, various problems of incompatibility may arise. The most obvious derives from word-order differences – if a switch occurs at a boundary between two constituents which are ordered differently in the two languages, the resulting configuration will be ungrammatical by the standards of at least one. Another type of difficulty involves morphological disparity, as when a noun in one language must be inflected for case, where the other uses alternative means of accomplishing the same function. And there are many other problems having to do with subcategorization patterns, semantic differences, idiomatic constructions, etc.
It has been observed in systematic studies of bilingual communities that speakers tend to avoid these difficulties by eschewing switches at sites which would result in monolingually ungrammatical fragments. How is this accomplished? In earlier studies of Spanish–English bilingualism among Puerto Ricans in New York (Poplack, 1980, 1981; Sankoff and Poplack, 1981) we postulated the equivalence constraint, whereby switching is free to occur between any two sentence elements if they are normally ordered in the same way by the grammars of both languages involved, while prohibited elsewhere, as illustrated in.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Bilingualism across the LifespanAspects of Acquisition, Maturity and Loss, pp. 132 - 154Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989
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