ROMANIAN-ENGLISH CODE-SWITCHING: A PRELIMINARY STUDY

Abstract

This paper takes a new look at syntactic constraints on code-switching by analyzing code-switches between Romanian (a Romance language never before included in a code-switching study) and English.  Romanian-English code-switching provides evidence against the universality of Poplack’s (1980) syntactic constraints on code-switching.  Moreover, it reveals that code-switches that would be impossible from a minimalist point of view (MacSwan, 1999) do not actually crash at LF.  Thus, recent minimalist claims such as MacSwan’s (1999) should integrate Sridhar and Sridhar’s (1980) hypothesis that a guest language adjusts to syntactic and semantic prerogatives of the host language.