Introduction

It has been widely observed that when bilinguals converse with each other, they consciously or subconsciously engage in codeswitching, defined here broadly as an alternation of two languages within the same sentence/utterance or across sentences. It is a highly sophisticated process, capable of linguistic description, and also understandable in social and psychological terms.

For several decades, this phenomenon has been extensively studied from diverse linguistic perspectives. Micro-sociolinguistic studies have investigated the social function of switching by examining the whole conversation in one context (e.g. Scotton & Ury, 1977), and by viewing switches of all types that occur within a conversation as ways of realizing various conversational strategies (e.g. Gumperz, 1982a). Macro-level studies have analyzed switches as whole discourses in relation to societal motivations and demographic variables (e.g. Poplack, 1988), and dynamics of community intergroup relations (e.g. Wei, 1994). Morpho-syntactic studies (e.g. Mahootian & Santorini, 1996) have sought universal rules which govern switching within a single sentence.