Aspects of the Syntax, the Pragmatics, and the Production of Code-Switching: Cantonese and English (Berkeley Insights in Linguistics and Semiotics)

For decades, linguists have treated code-switching as a «special» language of its own, and devised many constraints accounting for code-switching patterns in various language pairs. This book argues that code-switching is governed by the same constraints as those governing native «pure» languages, and hence code-switching data provide a «window» to our language faculty. Although some other works have already suggested that code-switching and «pure» languages are governed by the same syntactic rules, this book goes a step further and explores the possibility that both are constrained by the same system in terms of syntax, production, and pragmatics.