Code-switching, constraints, and optimal grammars

ELSEVIER

Lingua 102 (1997) 223-25 1

Code-switching,

constraints,

and optimal grammars”;

Rakesh Mohan Bhatt Department of English, University of Tennessee. 301 McClun,q Tower, Knoxville, TN 37996-0430.

USA

Received 27 December 1996; revised version 3 February 1997

Abstract Although several constraints have been proposed in the past to record the grammatical properties of code-switching, the claimed status of their ‘universality’ has often been questioned. This paper provides a comparative-syntactic account of the properties of code-switching among languages such as Kashmiri-English, Hindi-English, Kashmiri-Hindi, and the much discussed Spanish-English (Poplack, 1980; among others) and Swahili-English (Myers-Scotton, 1993a). Based on this cross-linguistic data, we propose universal constraints on codeswitching which restrict the range of syntactic permutations of code-switches to all and only those that are grammatical. The proposal, couched in Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993), is premised on the assumption that the proposed universal constraints are prioritized: they are defeasible, but only in those contexts in which they conflict with another, presumably higher ranked, constraint. Under this proposal, the observed syntactic differences among languages involved in code-switching turn out to be a result of different (constraint-) ranking configurations opted by individual code-switching grammars.

1. Introduction Intrasentential code-switching (also known as code-mixing) is the alternate use of two linguistic systems within a clause. The linguistic interest in this verbal strategy, employed widely by multilingual speakers, is that mixers have clear, unambiguous intuitions about what is, and also what is not, a possible code-switched utterance (Singh, 1985)’ In other words, there is a grammar that presumably determines, and * This paper has benefitted from discussion with several scholars in the field of code-switching, too many to list them here; my thanks to all of them. Many thanks also to the audiences of SALA 94, ESCOL 94, LSA 95, AAAL 95, and the Penn Thursday Linguistics Lecture Series. ’ Bentahila and Davies (1995) make a strong argument for the influence of language contact configurations on switching patterns. In this paper I will not address this issue, instead I will restrict the discussion to how the switching patterns observed in different contact configurations in fact obtain. Further, in the absence of phonological and/or morphological evidence of borrowing, I have interpreted single word switches as instances of code-switching. Thus, for example, in a sentence like (3b) ‘Every d~&n~ar (storekeeper) was cleaning the front of his walkway’, the noun c_lukan&r is not a ‘borrowedl item in 037%2166/97/$17.00 0 1997 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved PII SOO24-3841(97)00007-7

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perhaps delimits the range of ‘grammatical’ code-switched utterances in a given bilingual context. In the last two decades, several syntactic constraints, both language-specific and universal, have been proposed in order to delineate the properties of such grammars (cf. Pfaff, 1976, 1979; Poplack, 1980; Sankoff and Poplack, 1981; Woolford, 1983, 1984; Bentahila and Davies, 1983; Joshi, 1985; Di Sciullo et al., 1986; Eid, 1992; Belazi et al., 1994). None of the proposed constraints, however, has been able to achieve the claimed status of ‘universality’ (cf. Clyne, 1987; Bokamba, 1989; Pandharipande, 1990; Mahootian, 1993; Myers-Scotton, 1993a; Bhatt, 1995).* Some, e.g., Bokamba (1989), have appropriately raised the following question: ‘Are there syntactic constraints on code-mixing?’ In this paper I argue that the question is not whether there are any structural constraints on code-switching, but, rather, what is the best way to characterize them (cf. Singh, 1986). This paper examines the properties of code-switching between Kashmiri-English, Hindi-English and Kashmiri-Hindi, in addition to the data that has been previously available, such as Spanish-English and Swahili-English, and develops an account of code-switching that is able to yield both the similarities and the differences among different code-switching languages. The specific proposal adopted in this paper to account for the generalizations of code-switching has evolved from one important cross-linguistic observation: that languages involved in code-switching have ‘preferences’ for what constitutes ‘wellformed’ (Gumperz and Hemandez-Chavez, 1975; Shaffer, 1977; Kachru, 1978; Gumperz, 1982; Poplack, 1981; Singh; 1985; inter alia). The constraints that have been previously offered to formalize this observation were, unfortunately, of categorical nature, such that a violation of a constraint was supposed to yield illicit structure. The problem with the proposed syntactic constraints was not that they were not universal, but rather that they were considered inviolable and counterevidence of their inviolability was often reported in subsequent studies. Instead of using categorical constraints to express the empirical generalizations, this paper uses ‘violable’ (soft) constraints, much in the spirit of Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993). The premise here is that a linguistic structure (e.g., code-switched constituent) that violates a particular constraint has its well-formedness ‘reduced’ by a certain amount. The framework developed along these lines integrates the empirical generalizations, noted in the previous studies, in terms of different constraints on well-formedness and allows them all to interact to account for a larger range of codeswitching data. The paper is organized in the following manner: in Section 2, I present a new set of code-switching data and discuss the linguistically significant generalizations that emerge from them. In Section 3, I discuss the theoretical framework used in this Indian English: there is no phonological (the use of Hindi dental for English alveolar or Indian English post-alveolar [retroflex] sound) evidence of it. For most of the single word occurrences of English in an otherwise Hindi or Kashmiri sentence, the World Englishes Corpus was consulted to make sure they were not listed as belonging to the lexicon of any variety of English, especially Indian English. * For a recent critique of Myers-Scotton’s (1993a) MLF model, see Bentahila (1995) and Bhatia and Ritchie (to appear). And for a critique of Belazi et al.‘s (1994) Functional Head Constraint, see Mahootian (I 993), Bhatt (1995),and Mahootian and Santorini (1996).

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paper, viz., Optimality Theory. In Section 4, I use the optimality framework to account for the cross-linguistic generalizations of code-switching. Finally, in Section 5, I summarize the main arguments of the paper.

2. Data and generalizations 2.1. Methods The Kashmiri-English, Hindi-English, and Kashmiri-Hindi data reported in this study were collected in New Delhi, India. Three kinds of data were collected: (i) recordings of spontaneous speech, (ii) printed resources, such as English newspapers and weekly magazines, and (iii) grammaticality judgments from survey questionnaires. It has been pointed out that the elicitation tasks are often unreliable because generally in multilingual societies code-mixed sentences are negatively valued, and as such speakers often reject sentences that they have in fact produced (cf. Pfaff, 1979; Bentahila and Davies, 1983; Mahootian, 1993; Mahootian and Santorini, 1996). In this study this risk was minimized by making comparisons, wherever necessary, with the spontaneous (code-mixed) data (cf. Wolfram, 1986: 17).3 I have collapsed the data into two categories: naturalistic (spontaneous speech and newsprint) and grammaticality judgments. 2.1.1. Naturalistic data Approximately, 10 hours of spontaneous speech was recorded. Seven of these hours are from a series of conversations among twelve adult speakers, roughly half men and half women. Only those topics (e.g., politics, Christmas, recent travels) that lend themselves to code-mixing were initiated to elicit casual conversations which vary in length between lo-35 minutes. Their permission to use the recorded material in an anonymous fashion was obtained. The other three hours of recordings are from various news items and socio-cultural programs from television and radio, programs which are known to use Hindi and English rather inextricably. The conversations which showed code-mixed utterances were selected and transcribed. 2. I .2. Grammaticality judgment data Since tape-recordings give us clues only to the range of possible grammatical code-mixing, grammaticality judgments were also elicited on a variety of HindiEnglish code-mixing data. The sentences were constructed specifically to check whether some grammatical constraints proposed earlier and/or the ones proposed in this study hold. This was done to estimate the range of what is not possible in, at least, Hindi-English code-mixing. It is importantto note that judgments were elicited to determine whether certain mixes reduce perceived acceptability more than certain other mixes. The purpose was to determine whether the distribution of elicited judgments was correlatable with grammatical violations.

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A small pilot of the questionnaire for grammaticality judgment was first run, and based on these results a larger questionnaire was then constructed for use in the present study. Altogether 74 questionnaires were administered in the main study. Nine of those were discarded either because Hindi was not reported as the first language of the subject or because the questionnaire was not completed. There were 40 items designed to cover most of the syntactic constraints proposed in the literature, such as, the Government constraint (Di Sciullo et al., 1986), the Functional Head constraint (Belazi et al., 1994), the Equivalence constraint (Poplack, 1980), and the System Morpheme and the Island constraints (Myers-Scotton, 1993a). The items were randomized and an additional 18 items were added to serve as distracters. Subjects were given three choices to express their responses (relative acceptability) for each item: [d] good, acceptable, [?] odd, but perhaps acceptable, and [*I bad, completely unacceptable. Since generally the societal attitude towards code-mixing is negative (Mahootian and Santorini, 1996), the subjects were given relatively more freedom in choosing the acceptability option [J or?] in order to give them a chance to include, even if marginally, socially unacceptable or marked - low frequency/low exposure - mixed structures. The calculations of grammaticality [d or?] or ungrammaticality [*] were based on the score of 80% agreement or more for an item. Items that scored less than 80%, one way or the other, were assumed to be data for which no clear, robust intuition exists, and were, therefore, discarded under the assumption that subjects’ knowledge of the syntactic generalization about those items is not secure. Seven out of the 40 items were so discarded. 2.2. Generalizations 2.2 .I. Naturalistic data

There are several linguistically significant generalizations that emerge from the naturalistic data. I will first discuss the generalizations that refer to the grammatical arguments of the verb (subject, objects and sentential complements), and then discuss adjunct phrases and clauses. It turns out that speakers tend not to switch subjects. Instances of the entire subject phrase being switched were very rare. There was only one instance in the entire code-mixing corpus where the whole subject of the subordinate clause is switched (1),4 and in this case a perceptible (audible) pause was observed between the switched subject and the rest of the predicate, giving an ‘as for’ topic reading.

4 The switched items are italicised: the language of the Infl (Tense/Agreement/Mood) determines the matrix/host language (see also footnote IO). Further, the data presented in this section involves, in addition to English, two other, not so well-known, Indic languages, Hindi and Kashmiri. For clarity in distinguishing the two languages in code-mixing with English or with each other, I have used subscripts small case letters ‘k’ and ‘h’ after the square brackets to indicate the language of the constituent. E.g., [k...] indicates a Kashmiri constituent. Further, the Kashmiri and Hindi data is transcribed using IPA symbols (cf. Language 66, 550-552). There are, however, minor deviations from the IPA system, noted below:

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(1) [Jsrael

kahta hai ki peace talks, isi: mahi:ne Juru ho ja:e taki start be go so that this month says is that octoher me . . . in ‘Israel says that, as for peace talks, they should start this (very) month so that in October ...’

Further, when the entire subject was switched without any pause after it, the morphological Case features of the Infl appeared at the end of the switched phrase, as shown by the ergative Case in (2a) and Dative Case in (2b) below. Finer (1990) and Halmari (1994) have made similar observations in their code-mixed data on KoreanEnglish and Finnish-English, respectively.

(24 [&al

supreme court ne . . . election commision

yesterday Erg kaha iha] told had ‘Yesterday the supreme court had ernment. ’ (2b) [,election commission ko . . . kaha Dat told ‘The election commission was told

aur sarkar and government

ko Dat

told the election commission and the govgaya] went ...’

The most frequent switches in subject NPs were those of the head nouns. The determiners and the quantifiers, as evidenced in (3ad), belonged to the host/matrix language. (3a) [,uska skin bahut dry hai] her/his very is ‘Her/his skin is very dry.’

[t] = voiceless retroflex plosive [d] = voiced retroflex plosive [r] = retroflex tap The data borrowed from other works is taken as is, and cited appropriately. Finally, the list of abbreviations is given below: Pres = present tense COP = copula = future tense Prog = progressive aspect Fut = ergative Case = question marker Q Erg aux = auxiliary verb Act = accusative Case hon = honorific Dat = dative Case = singular EMPH = emphasis marker = definite marker sl”L = plural def = object cosec = consecutive tense OBJ CL = clitic

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(3b) every b, ~@~~n&zr] was cleaning the front part of his walkway shopkeeper (3~) ],kafi: workers to kam par hi nahi: a:te] many &en work on EMPH not come ‘Many workers don’t even come to work.’ (3d) [k saxyi players gayi pa$ temis samjhavni] all went later him counsel ‘All the players went later to counsel him.’ Direct objects switched relatively more than subjects. However, as with subjects, the direct object switches were also restricted to either the noun or the adjective +noun combination, as shown in the data below. (4a) . . . and they also made [k gadi kyazyiki sanyi bil-as chi bad kho[ fish because our Bily-Dat is very happy karun] , does ‘And they also made fish because our Billo (son’s name) likes (it) a lot.’ (4b) . . . [,, ki Syria uske sath diplomatic relations kayam kare that it with establish do ‘... that Syria establishes diplomatic relations with it (Israel).’ (4~) [,, kal hi Israel government ne kaha ki Asaadi peace talks yesterday EMPH Erg said that ke prati serious nahti hai aur proi political games khel raha hai] toward not is and play Prog is ‘Only yesterday the Israel government said that Asaad is not serious about peace talks and that he is (instead) playing political games.’ There are, however, two instances in the data where there is an English possessive followed by a Hindi quantifier and a Hindi noun. (5a) . . . and he gave his h, sari: jaydad] to his youngest son, that created such a all forKe [,, jhamela] in the family problems (5b) first, you finish your [,, Sara kam], then . . . all work ‘First, you finish all your (home)work, then ...’ As noted earlier with subjects, switched direct objects too appear with the Case morphology of the governing head (=verb), as shown in (6a) below. However, the switched elements appear in bare form when the governing head is English (6b,c), or Hindi (6d,e) and assigns accusative which is morphologically null.

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dena cahiye] (6a) [,,pro is club ka management elected body ko sop Dat entrust give should this of ‘The managenment of this club should be entrusted to an elected body.’ (6b) Why do you need somebody to carry the [k nadir] lotus stalks (used as a vegetable) (6~) She got her [,tankha] today salary (6d) h, pro uski: wire badal dege] its change give-Fut ‘(We) will change its wire.’ pasand aye (6e) [,, hamare sabhi: sunna vale ko apke thoughts zaru:r certainly like came our all listeners Dat your hoge] be-Fut ‘All our listeners must have liked your thoughts.’ Indirect objects were the most unswitched arguments. There are only two instances of switches of the entire indirect object in the corpus, and these too were between Hindi-Kashmiri, languages which have post-positional phrases. There was no instance of switching of the entire indirect object in English-Hindi or EnglishKashmiri code-switching. (7a) [,,are nahi:], [k yus-a nan-an 0:s onmut] . . . [k pat dyu_tun suyi then gave that oh, no(t) which Nancy-Erg had brought pa_tlu:n h, bimla ke sabse chote bete ko]] [k pyoy-a yad] Bimla of from-all small son to fell-Q memory pant ‘Oh no, the one which Nancy had brought. (And) then gave those pants to Bimla’s youngest son. Do you recall (it now)?’ (7b) Rent.+, [,, proi [k mya:n khairi] gilas le gayi:] (question intonation) glass take went me for ‘Renu, (did you) take a glass for me.’ The head of the complement of the prepositional switch as the data in (8a,b) suggest: (8a) he stole from the [,, amizr] and gave the rich Robinhood tha, pakka was definitely (8b) [,, aur roz bina naga apni mother and daily without fail his ‘And everyday (he) used to bring prayer

(indirect object) phrase does

loot to the [,,garizb], Indian poor

ke liye pu:ja ke phu:l lata tha] for prayer of flower b&g was flowers for his mother.’

In addition to the NP arguments, we also find switches permitted between a complementizer and a sentence. This is shown in data (9a-e) below:

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me achyi sa:tyi ha:vni ki] I should not get involved he started me eyes wh:th show that ‘He started to indicate to me with his eyes that I should not get involved.’ [k pai vanakh tse-yi ki] I have not given you anything this year then say-Fut you that ‘Then you will say that I have not given you anything this year.’ dekha ki] some Indian boys were selling [h ve jab bahar gaye fo he when outside went then saw that stolen watches ‘When he went outside he saw that some Indian boys were selling stolen watches.’ sabhi: log6 ne yeh kaha ki] there is a continuity of past, ]h un those all people Erg this said that present and future ‘All those people said that there is a continuity of past, present and future.’ [h voh yeh bata raha tha ki] earlier it used to snow in Darjeeling he this say Prog was that but since 1990 ‘He was telling (us) that it used to snow in Darjeeling earlier but since 1990 ...’

(94 rksu log (9b)

(9~)

(9d)

(9e)

Although uncommon, switches are also permitted between a verb and the complementizer, as shown in (1Oa-d) below. (10a) I think if a hindustani guy was to walk up to a guy on Janpath and say Indian [h ki yar ap kya ho] that friend you what are ‘I think if an Indian guy was to walk up to a guy on Janpath and say that, friend, who are you ...’ kuch loan 16ge] (lob) We were hoping [h ki @j”-se take-Fut that you-from some ‘We were hoping that we will take some loan from you.’ voh kuch kahe to turn uska ada dam (10~) I think you told me [h ki half price that he some(thing) says then you its batana] tell ‘I think you told me that if he (seller) quotes you a price, you offer half of it.’ Rarely, switches are permitted between a verb and its sentential complement without an overt complementizer, as in (1 la,b). Since complementizers are optional in both monolingual Hindi and English, it is not possible to determine the language of the deleted complementizer. In (1 lc), we find an instance where it is the lone complementizer that switches.

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(1 la) I know h, jana bekar hi] to go useless is ‘I know (it) is useless to go.’ (11 b) [,,Jo maine dekha] it was only for two forty nine saw so I (1 lc) She probably thought [h ki] Kaka was not telling the truth that Like complement clauses, the entire adjunct clause, including the subordinating conjunction, can be switched, as shown in (12a,b) below. Some switches may exclude just the subordinator, as shown in (12~) below. ( 12a) [hacha, maine ek kap usse one cup him-from OK, I

aur liya tha] because they were really more taken had

tiny cups

‘OK, I had taken another cup from him because they were really tiny cups.’ (12b) and if you have good acting abilities, good for you [h kyaki isme because in kafi:

Ektig

karni: paz_ti: hai]

this much acting to do aux is ‘And if you have good acting abilities, good for youbecause lot of acting in this.’ magar] all it did was fries (12~) [k yi o:s-no mekdonalds it was-not a MacDonald’s but Switches of adverbial phrases and parentheticals examples are given in (13): ( 13a) [h furu-jiiru-me]

you have to do a

are not uncommon. Some of the

they started with a bang

beginning in (the) (13b) [,, subah] you get up at about 9; 9:30 . . . (In the) morning roz, on an average, sirif the ghante ke liye bijli: rahti: hai (13~) [haur har and every day only six hours for power stays is ‘And every day, on an average, the power is only on for six hours ’ Similarly, adjunct prepositional phrase switches are also common, as shown in the data below: ( 144 ik @pun ki ternis mi:j nokri (she) said that she got job (14b) [h papaji ne sab ke birthdates Papa-hon-Erg all of ‘Papaji wrote everybody’s birthday

in Bombay]

likhe] except his own birthday wrote except his own.’

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And finally, switching of topicalized constituents appears to be very common, such as shown in the data below: (15a) [,, yaha’ par] I cannot walk with so much pollution here on ‘I cannot walk with so much pollution here.’ (15b) h, durjeling se] you go to baldogra Darjeeling from Baldogra she started bleeding (1%) [k &han ahan manz-yi] days within-EMPH ten (15d) [,bathroom me] there is a small train hanging in 2.2.2 Grammaticality judgment data The results of the grammaticality judgments of Hindi-English code-switching are particularly revealing, in that these data help to delimit the range of possible mixes. These data help to capture several empirical generalizations that do not follow directly from the naturalistic data. There is, e.g., a robust generalization that follows from these data: (16) Specs of maximal projections (XPs) within the Case-domain of a head do not switch; i.e., the language of the Case-governor must match the language of the Spec of the XP it govems.“x6 Case domain of a functional category (e.g., Infl) is defined in terms of government under m-command, whereas the Case domain of lexical categories (e.g., verbs, prepositions) is defined as government under c-command. In the standard case, this

5

I am assuming

an X’-theory

where Specs are sisters of X’, as shown

spec

in Fig.

1:

A

Spec A X’ Complement Fig. 1. X’-theoretic projection Further, I assume that all determiners (articles, demonstratives, quantifiers, possessives) are generated under the Spec positions. 6 Mahootian’s (1993) as well as Santorini and Mahootian’s (1995) ‘null theory’ is unable to account for this very robust generalization, discussed often, in various guises, in the code-switching literature (Kachru, 1978, 1983; Singh, 1985, 1986; Backus, 1992; Myers-Scotton, 1993a). The contrasts found in Hindi-English data (17-22) are not predicted by the ‘null theory.’

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generalization refers to the fact that the Specifier position of subjects (within the Case-domain of the Infl) and direct objects (within the Case-domain of the verb) must belong to the language of the Case-assigning head. The following Hindi-English data support this robust observation: ( 17a) 4 apki: sister ajkal

kya pazhati: hai ( 100%) your these days what teaches is ‘What does your sister teach these days?’ (17b) *Your b&h&n ajkal kya pazhati: hai (98%) sister ‘What does your sister teach these days?’ ( 17~) *Y~~LIT sister ajkal kya parhat_i: hai (86%) ‘What does your sister teach these days?’ (17d) 4 maine uska critique patha (98%) I his read ‘I read his critique.’ (17e) *maine his critique parha (95%) ‘1 read his critique.’ In (17a) above, the Spec of the subject phrase belongs to the same language (Hindi) as the nominative Case-assigning (Infl) head. In both (17b) and (17~) however, the Specs and the Case-assigning heads are from different languages, hence their ungrammaticality. Similarly, in (17d) above, the Spec of the direct complement of the verb (the direct object) belongs to the same language (Hindi) as the accusative Case-assigning verb. In (17e), on the other hand, the Spec and the Case-assigning head are from different languages, and hence the ungrammaticality. With respect to subjects, however, as in (17~) above, ‘EL island’ - defined as the switching of the entire constituent (a la Myers-Scotton, 1993a) - is possible but only if there is a distinct pause after the subject phrase. This was observed earlier in the naturalistic data too, where a topic interpretation was suggested for these subject switches. Notice, in contrast to (17~) above, the switching of the entire subject constituent to English in Hindi-English code-switching, as shown in (18a) and (18b), is well-formed suggesting that EL islands are possible in an ungoverned topic position, and crucially not in a governed subject position (in the Case domain of Infl). (18a) 4 YOLII. sister [PAUSE] ajkal kya pazha$: these days what teaches ‘What does your sister teach these days?’ (18b) 4 Some diplomats [PAUSE] kal dili: ja tomorrow Delhi go ‘Some diplomats are going to Delhi tomorrow.’

hai (89%) is rahe ha1 (91%) Prog are

The fact that only those positions are forbidden from forming EL islands which are within the Case-domain of a head is also supported by the contrast shown in the data below. The data (19a-c) show that EL islands are banned from appearing in the

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direct argument position of the verb, whereas the data in (19d,e) confirms that arguments, like prepositional phrases above, which are not within the Case domain of the verb, can appear as EL islands. (19a) * mai his handwriting nahi: path sakta (97%) I not read can ‘I cannot read his handwriting.’ (19b) *I heard tumhari: khabar today (89%) your news (19c) * maine his critique parha (95%) I read ‘I read his critique.’ (19d) 4 Suresh bought flowers apni: behen ke fiye (80%) sister for his (19e) 4 I put (left) the book is tebal par (82%) this table on So, a corollary of the generalization below.

of (16) above can now be stated as in (20)

(20) A constituent outside the Case-domain of a governing head can switch and thus

appear as an EL Island.7 Again, the Hindi-English data like (21) below confirm the generalization (16) above: the direct complement of the preposition of the indirect object is forbidden from appearing as an island since the NP island is within the Case domain of the preposition.

’ It is not clear why such islands are not possible at all in cases where the matrix language is Hindi and the embedding (guest) language is English; the subjects responded very unfavorably to the following data: laya (97%) (i) *vah larka for his sister phu:l that boy flowers brought ‘That boy brought flowers for his sister.’ (ii) *kal Ramesh-ne to his teacher kit_ab di: (lOtI%) book gave yesterday Erg ‘Yesterday Ramesh gave a book to his teacher.’ One plausible explanation of the robust responses above can be offered by following Kayne’s (1993) proposal of Specifier-Head-Complement as universal order. Hindi allows left movement (scrambling) of its complements, but English does not allow such vacuous movements. Thus, whereas Hindi complements left-move [maine (I) khaanaa (food) khaayaa (ate)] or may not left-move [maine (I) khaayaa (ate) khaanaa (food)], English complements remain in-situ; they do not left-move. This non-movement property of English complements may be responsible for ungrammatical mixed structures, such as (i) and (ii) above where the English complement (indirect object) has been moved in each instance to the left of the head (verb). Hindi, a language with scrambling properties, can afford to have a complement well-formed as an island even to the right of the verb, which explains why Hindi indirect objects are possible (SO-82% acceptable) islands in an otherwise English matrix language.

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(21) *Suresh bought flowers for apni: behen (92%) sister his However, the above example can be salvaged if the Spec of the complement of the preposition is of the same language as the preposition. This is shown by (22a) below. Contrasting (22a) with the unacceptable cases like (22b), where the adposition and the Spec of the complement belong to different languages, further supports the claim that the Spec of XP and the head that assigns Case to XP must belong to the same language. (22a) 4 Suresh bought flowers for his behen (97%) sister (22b) *Suresh bought flowers his behen ke liye (92%) sister for To sum, several generalizations emerge from the data discussed above in Sections 2.2.1 and 2.2.2. Code-switching is relatively free in non-argument positions. The word order is generally dictated by the matrix language, which can be defined as the language of the Infl (Tns, Aspect, Agreement). Switched items, however, appear to obey the grammatical properties of the language they belong to. Subjects and objects are allowed to switch as long as their specifier positions are empty. Specifiers of maximal projections (Spec-XP) in complement positions are generally barred from switching. These general statements of distribution are encoded directly in OT as constraints to which I turn directly.

3. Theoretical framework

The framework adopted in this paper draws on the theory of Prince and Smolensky (1993), known as Optimality Theory. Languages involved in code-switching have been observed to have ‘preferences’ for what constitutes ‘well-formed’. This cross-linguistic observation allows us to make a plausible assumption that the syntax of code-switched constructions strives toward well-formedness, i.e., when the guest (embedded) constituents are mixed into the host (matrix) language, the syntax operates to optimize well-formedness. This is tantamount to saying that when the guest items are introduced to the host language, certain adjustments follow, naturally, since items (words, phrases) from one language with one set of well-fomredness conditions move to a language with another set of well-formedness conditions. The claim is that the optimal adjustment between items of the two languages is the grammatical (well-formed) option.8 A cross-linguistic observation about code-mixing is that a code-mixed utterance is well-formed if the structural conflict between the two participating languages is resolved in such a way that the output seems to the bilingual user as the best fit, as ‘optimal’. However, when the conflict is unredeemable, there are reportedly strong intuitions about the ill-formedness of the mixes.

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The constraints that were offered in the past to express distributional generalizations of code-switching were categorical; their violations lead to illicit structures. Instead of using categorical constraints to express empirical generalizations, the Optimality framework (a la Prince and Smolensky, 1993) uses ‘violable’ (soft) constraints. These soft constraints are defeasible in just those contexts in which they conflict with a higher ranked constraint. The claim, then, is that there are no rules of code-switching per se, rather the patterns of code-switching emerge from the interactions among these constraints. The theory works as follows: all possible output representations for a given input are examined by a set of (violable) ranked constraints which evaluate their well-formedness. The optimal, harmonic, output representation is the one that has the least serious constraint violations. The core ideas of Optimality, then, can be summed up in the following way: constraints can be violated; constraints are ranked; and the optimal form is grammatical. The optimization of well-formedness in code-switching follows from the interaction and satisfaction of the constraints I propose in (23), which have the potential to conflict with each other:9 (23a) LINEAR PRECEDENCE CONSTRAINT (LPC) Items of code-mixed clauses follow the word order of the language of the Infl (TNS). (23b) HEAD-SYNTAX (HS) Grammatical properties (e.g., Case, directionality of government, etc.) of the language of the head must be respected within its ‘minimal domain’ (a la Chomsky, 1993). (23~) EQUIVALENCE (EQUI) Switched items follow the grammatical properties of the language to which they belong. (23d) “SPEC Avoid switching Specifier of the maximal projection in a Case-position, i.e., the Spec of an XP must be of the same language as the head which assigns Case to that XP. (23e) COMPLAISANCE (COMP) A switched specifier of the maximal projection in a Case-position must accompany a switch of its head, i.e., if Spec-XP switches, then head X switches too. All of these constraints have appeared in the literature in different guises and under different names, either in the form of concrete proposals or in the form of background assumptions. In order to recruit them in an explanation for code-switching, a couple of theoretical assumptions need to be explicitly stated. First, the constraints listed in (23) are not necessarily ‘surface-true’; this is expected since the constraints which are always surface-true are going to be those which either do not conflict with any other constraint, or are always victorious in any conflict by virue The constraints listed in (23) are relevant a function that takes the input and generates

only when the input to ‘GEN’ is bilingual. all plausible X’-theoretic representations.

‘GEN’ in OT is

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of the fact that they are always ranked higher than those with which they conflict. Second, and importantly, the constraints listed above in (23) are universal; the grammar of every code-switching language has them, and all rankings of them are possible. This assumption follows a central meta-principle of OT, called UNIV, which says that constraints are universal. The cross-linguistic appeal of each of the constraints in (23) is discussed next. LPC ensures that the order of the major constituents (arguments of the verb) follows the requirements of the language of Infl (matrix language).]” Although this constraint is intended to capture the spirit of Myers-Scotton’s (1993a) Matrix Language Hypothesis, it differs from her account in assuming that the constraint is violable, under appropriate circumstances. This constraint guarantees the word order of the matrix language, as shown by the order of Adanme (SOV) in (24a) and Hindi (24b). The contrast between (24b) and (24~) shows the relevance of LPC in Hindi-English code-switching, (24a) Ada~me-English (Myers-Scotton, a mi help-e ‘Je 3PL COP me help-Pres Prog ‘They are helping me.’ (24b) Hindi-English uska skin bahui dry hai very his is ‘His skin is very dry.’ (24~) Hindi-English *uska skin hai bahu& dry his is very ‘His skin is very dry.’

1993a: 28)

The HS constraint mandates, among other things, that the grammatical properties of the language of the head are respected within its minimal domain. This is essentially the intuition carried partially in the work of Pandit (1990), Santorini and Mahootian (1995) and Sridhar and Sridhar (1980). Notice that in the Hindi-English passive (25a), the grammatical subject carries the morphological dative Case that the Hindi verb assigns to its complement. Similarly in (25b), notice that the subject carries the morphological ergative assigned by the Hindi Perfective aspect. (25a) Election Commision

ko . . . kaha gaya Dat told went ‘The election commission was told ...’ (2Sb) kal s~pre~le court ne . . . election commision aur sarkar ko . . . yesterday and government Dat Erg

I(’ Treffers-Daller (1994) uses the same idea to identify the matrix language.

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kaha tha told had ‘Yesterday the supreme court had told the election commission and the government ...’ Additionally, the contrast between (26a) and (26b) is predicted by this constraint; the complement order within the VP must conform to the subcat properties of the English verb, which is V-DO-IO. Further, the data such as (26a) where the EL island has its own phrase-internal structure points to an important empirical generalization - HEAD SYNTAX gets precedence over LINEAR PRECEDENCE CONSTRAINT. (26a) English-Hindi I left the book is tebal par this table on ‘I left the book on this table.’ (26b) English-Hindi *I left is tebal par the book this table on ‘I left the book on this table.’ The HS constraint also makes important cross-linguistic predictions. It predicts the well-formedness in Irish-English code-switching of the object NP in (27a) and object PP in (27b). In (27a) the object NP, an EL island, is English, whereas in (27b) the object PP is Irish. It also predicts the well-formedness of English-Spanish codeswitching in (27~) where the Spanish adjectival predicate appears to the right of the English NP; a position in English phrase-structure licensed for adjunct APs predicated of the object (cf. Rizzi, 1990: 49; passim). Further, this constraint also penalizes switching of the type (27d) where the English Infl is unable to license a (Spanish) pro in its Spec. (27a) Phos se Swedish girl married he ‘He married a Swedish girl.’ (Stenson, 1990: 171) (27b) posta le cailin Brazilian married with girl ‘married to a Brazilian girl.’ (Stenson, 1990: 171) (27~) My mother likes her rice amogollado (sticky). (Poplack, 198 1: 178) (27d) *prosP works,,g (Di Sciullo et al., 1986: 6) The EQUI constraint is a reformulation of Pfaff (1979), Poplack (1981), and Sridhar and Sridhar (1980); it refers to the observation that ‘harmony’ in code-switching is generally achieved when the well-formedness conditions of the switched items are met. This constraint thus correctly predicts the well-formedness of Kashmiri-English code-switching such as (28a,b). The switched English IP in both (28a,b) follows the X’-theoretic projection of English. EQUI also correctly predicts the ill-formedness of

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Spanish-English code-switching in (28~): the Spanish dative clitic appears in-situ, which is not where it is grammatically licensed. me achyi sa:t_hyi ha:vni ki I should not get involved (28a) su log show that he started me eyes with ‘He started to indicate to me with his eyes that I should not get involved.’ (28b) pat vanakh tse-yi ki I have not given you anything this year that then say-Fut you ‘Then you will say that I have not given you anything this year.’ (28~) *I saw lo him/it (Belazi et al., 1994: 224) *SPEC, the specifier constraint, switched structure be diminished if are switched. This observation has Kachru, 1983; Singh, 1985; Joshi, in (29a-m) motivate this constraint.

requires that the well-formedness of a codethe Specs of Case-governed maximal projections been uncontested in the literature (see inter alia 1985). The cross-linguistic data presented below

(29a) Kashmiri-English Why do you need somebody to carry the na$r lotus stalks (vegetable) (29b) English-Malay (Tay, 1989: 415; Appendix 1) No, we only had the Lembaga Peperiksaan Board of Examiners (29~) English-Korean (Park, 1990: 128) He became a kwahakca scientist (29d) Lingala-French (Kamwanmagalu, 1989: 122) na Moyen Orient Guerre oyo ezalaki this took place in (the) Middle East war (29e) Italian-French (Di Sciullo et al., 1986: 13) Ha portato un cadeau (He) brought a present. (29f) English-Polish (Ewing, 1984: 57) You are a krowa gruba cow fat (29h) Irish-English (Stenson, 1990: 182) Tharraing me na weeds amach ... me the pull-pst out ‘I have pulled the weeds out . ..’ (29i) Farsi-English (Mahootian, 1993: 120) un faers-e hala ye defect haem dar-e also have-3sg that carpet-def now a ‘Now that carpet also has a defect.’

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(29j) Spanish-Hebrew (Berk-Seligson, 1986: 324) Toma xdmer para la unive’rsita ‘She’s taking material for the university’ (29k) Spanish-English (Huerta-Macias, 198 1: 162) Bueno, i y un date para Pepe para el party Well, for the and a for ‘Well, and how about a date for Pepe for the party.’ (291) Spanish-English (McClure, 1981: 86) I put the tenedores on the table forks (29m) Spanish-English (Valdes-Fallis, 1978: 13) El old man esta enojada ‘The old man is mad.’ Notice also that this constraint predicts those instances of switching where a matrix language (English) possessive is followed by the embedded language (Hindi) quantifier and a noun, as shown below in (30a,b): (30a) . . . and he gave his sari: jaydad to his youngest son, . . . all fort&Ye (30b) first, you finish your sara kam . . . all work In both of the instances above, the highest Spec satisties the *SPEC constraint, the remainder of the EL island follows the constraint COMP. COMP is a fidelity constraint referring to the tendency of the switching of the head of a maximal projection just in case its Specifier switches too (cf. also Backus, 1992). This is clear from English-Hindi code-switching data (30a,b) discussed above. This constraint also allows for the English-Spanish code-switching in (31a,b) to be wellformed, where the direct object and the subject, respectively, are an EL-Island. (3 1a) I saw la casa the house (31 b) Pocos estudiantes finished the exam few students (Belazi et al., 1994: 229) In the next section, then, broader consequences of the analysis developed thus far are discussed by showing how the ranking of the constraints work out for different code-switching contexts.

4. Optimality and the typology of code-switching It is inevitable that maximally general constraints on code-switching will conflict; the options which different grammars choose to resolve the conflict gives rise to a

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typology of code-switching languages. The goal of this section is to explain why the code-switching languages have the typological distribution that they do. From the Optimality vantagepoint, the question is how the constraints in (23) are ranked in different code-switching languages; the theory must specify the constraints and their rankings. In OT, Universal Grammar is conceptualized as having a set of universal constraints, whereas particular grammars are instantiations of the way in which these constraints are ranked. Language variation arises when different ranking configurations yield different code-switching grammars. Thus, with the introduction of the idea that a grammar is a set of ranked constraints, it becomes possible, for the first time, to capture cross-linguistic generalizations of code-switching within one theoretical framework. Consider the first two constraints: LPC and HS. In Adanme-English (Myers-Scotton, 1993a: 28;5), there is robust evidence that LPC outranks (>>) HS, as the datum in (32) suggests: (32) a rJe mi help-e 3PL COP me help-Pres Prog ‘They are helping me.’ In (32), the word order of the language of the Infl (Adanme) is followed: the English transitive verb (=the head of VP) takes a complement to its left, not right. The constraint HS thus conflicts here with LPC, but is allowed to be violated; recall, the ranking of these constraints is significant, in that a banned option is available only to avoid violations of a higher-ranked constraint. Data like (32), then, suggest that in AdarJme-English LPC >> HS. There are several instances of Swahili-English code-switching (from Myers-Scotton, 1993a: 29) which support the same ranking LPC >> HS. in (33) for example, the head noun in the NP ‘taste lousy sana’ is English, but the order of words follow the syntax of Swahili. (33) nikapata chakula nyingine iko grey ni- ka-taste nikona ilsg consec OBJ CL9 i-na taste lousy sana it with very ‘And I got some other food (that) was grey and I tasted it and I thought it had (was with) a very lousy taste.’ In various other code-switching contexts, however, there is evidence that the opposite ranking holds. In Hindi-English, the ranking HS >> LPC is most robustly supported by data such as that shown in (30a,b), repeated below as (34a,b). In (34a,b), the language of the Infl is English and, therefore, LPC requires the word order to be English. However, the object complement NP of the verbs ‘give’ and ‘finish’ exhibit the Hindi word order, which is Possessive pronoun + Quantifier + Noun. The English order Quantifier + Possessive is not followed within the minimal domain of the Hindi head noun.

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(34a) . . . and he gave his sari: jay&d to his youngest son, . . . all for&& ... (34b) first, you finish your Sara km all work Several other instances of Hindi-English code-switching further support the ranking HS >> LPC. In (35a), the switched PP shows up as a head-final constituent with the grammatical requirements of the Hindi language, overriding the LPC requirements of English. The same is suggested by the head-fina character of the topicalized PP in (35b). (35a) I left the book is tebaf par this table on ‘I left the book on this table.’ (35b) darje~i~g se you go to baldogra Darjeeling from ‘You go to Baldogra from Darjeeling.’ Kashmiri-English code-switching patterns also reveal the ranking where HS dominates LPC. In (36) below, the switched Kashmiri topicalized PP appears as headfinal, consonant with the Kashmiri gramm~, defying English linear precedence requirements. 136) &&an @an manzyi she started bleeding days within ten ‘She started bleeding within ten days.’ In Spanish-English, too, there is evidence to support the claim that HS outranks LPC. In the Spanish-English example (37a) the English LPC is followed except within the switched subject NP, which appears with the Spanish Noun+Adj order. Similarly, in (37b), the NP complement of the verb ‘serve’ is switched to Spanish, and it appears with a postnomina1 modifier, again, as required by the Spanish grammar. (37a) The hombre viejo is mad old Therzman is mad.’ (Valdes-Fallis, 1978: (37b) They used to serve bebidas a~~oho~i~as en drinks alcoholic in ‘They used to serve alcoholic drinks in that 230)

13) ese

re~taurante

that restaurant restaurant.’ (Belazi et al., 1994:

In I~sh-English, as reported in Stenson (1990), HS outranks LPC as the data in (38a) and (38b) suggest. The word order in (38a) is Irish, but in (38b) the object NP follows the English order, as required by the HS.

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cailin Brazilian (38a) posta le married with girl ‘married to a Brazilian girl.’ (Stenson, 1990: 171) SCSwedish girl (38b) Phds married he ‘He married a Swedish girl.’ (Stenson, 1990: 171) Several other code-switching language pairs, such as French-Dutch (Treffers-Daller, 1994) and Polish-English (Ewing, 1984) among others, rank HS over LPC. All of these switching contexts (HS >> LPC) challenge the categorical morpheme-order principle of Myers-Scotton (1993a); having soft (defeasible) constraints allows us to capture greater generalizations. Turning now to the interaction of LPC and EQUI, we notice that in Adagme-English and Swahili-English code-switching contexts, LPC also outranks EQUI. First, notice that Adanme-English requires the matrix language order even in the switched elements, as (39) suggests.” he house red 6 (39) e the he/she past tone buy ‘He/She bought the red house.’ (Nartey, 1982: 187) This ranking also holds for Swahili-English, as the data (from Myers-Scotton, 1993a) in (40) and (41) suggest. We can now safely suggest that for Adanme-English and Swahili-English, LPC >> { HS, EQUI}. movements y-ake z-ote (40a) Unamuangalia her all You were watching ‘You were watching all her movements.’ (40b) Hao wanataka timing proper those they want ‘Those (people) want proper timing.’ (40~) Anaonekana kama ni mtu innocent COP person ‘He looks like (he) is an innocent person.’ (41a) *Anakula mbili plate ... two plates He eats ‘I There is also evidence in Adaname-English that shows that switched (English) adj+noun combination is allowed within the Adaname head-initial NP (cf. Nartey, 1982). In other words, the problem we face here is that of free variation of the switched English adj+noun order within the Adagame NP; both variants - adj+noun and noun+adj - are possible. In absence of any detailed data on Adaname-English code-switching, it is not possible to construct a grammar that predicts variation and/or variation preferences. Such variation can, in fact, be handled within OT by assuming that EQUI is not ranked with respect to LPC (cf. Prince and Smolensky, 1993: 5 I, for the idea of ‘crucial nonranking’). In other words, we can assume that the grammar of Adaname-English code-switching permits both rankings: LPC outranks EQUI and EQUI outranks LPC.

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(4 1b) Anakula plate mbili He eats plates two However, the grammaticality of Hindi-English (42a), Kashmiri-English code-switching (42b) and the ungrammaticality of Spanish-English code-switching (43) suggest that in these contexts EQUI outranks LPC. In both (42a,b) and (43) below, the grammaticality and the ungrammaticality, respectively, depends on whether or not the properties of the switched elements are respected. am ab bakay+ (42a) nahi:, promotion mil gaya tha use got went was to-him and now certainly no professor of linguistics hai is ‘No, he got the promotion, and now he is a professor of linguistics.’ (42b) me si:th shu akh professor from ibadan who was coming from Illinois me with is a ‘With me is a professor from Ibadan who was coming from Illinois.’ (43) *I saw lo it/him The differences Adqme-English in Table 1. Table 1 Constraint-rankings

established so far between the grammars of Swahili-English/ and Hindi-English/Kashmir&English/Spanish-English is illustrated

and code-switching HS>> LPC

Swahili-English (also Adaqme-English) Hindi-English Kashmiri-English Spanish-English

4

languages LPC>> HS

LPC>> EQUI

4

d

EQUI>> LPC

d

The other two constraints, *SPEC and COMP, also conflict, and again we notice different code-switching languages choose different rankings to resolve the conflict. Sawhili-English ranks COMP over *SPEC. The support for this ranking comes from the following data (taken from Myers-Scotton, 1993a: 44, 140-141): (44a) *Sikuona your barua ambayo uliipoteza ‘I didn’t see your letter which you lost.’ this evening at the usual place (44b) Wache mimi nielekeee tauni, tukutane let us meet ‘Let me go so that 1 may reach town, let’s meet this evening at the usual place.’

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ukiongea a lot of nonsense (44~) Ulikuwa You were talking ‘You were talking a lot of nonsense.’ In (44a), the ungrammaticality is due to the fact that the complement NP ‘your letter’ is not, as it should be, an EL island (Myers-Scotton, 1993a: 141). In other words, in (44a), the violation of *SPEC, can be salvaged iff the head also switched in that NP complement, pointing to the fact that COMP outranks *SPEC in SwahiliEnglish. This is further supported by the data in (44b) and (44~). In (44b) and (44~) the specifier (SPEC) of the complement NP has switched and so has, among other things, the head - their grammaticality can be accounted for straightforwardly by assuming the constraint ranking: COMP >> *SPEC. This ranking is also attested in Spanish-English code-switching. The interaction of these constraints, *SPEC and COMP, is evidenced by the contrast in the data like (45) noted by Belazi et al. (1994: 229; 18) and (46) noted by Myers-Scotton (1993a: 34): (45a) Pocos estudiantes finished the exam few students (45b) *Pocos students finished the exam (46a) The water esta boil-and0 is boiling (46b) La water esta boil-and0 boiling The is The grammaticality of (45a) suggests that COMP must outrank *SPEC, since the switched quantifier (Spec) is accompanied by the switched head. (45b) is penalized for violating both *SPEC and COMP. Similarly, (46a) suggests that COMP outranks *SPEC, and (46b) suggests that *SPEC is indeed respected if COMP is not involved. That COMP is ranked higher than *SPEC in Spanish-English is also shown by the data in (47, from Pfaff, 1979: 306) and (48, from Belazi et al., 1994: 230) where the entire object NPs, both Spec and head, are switched to English: (47) esto this (48) Los The

ano en P.E. year in policias police officers

ha ganado three ribbons ya I have won already han visto a thief have seen

Hindi-English and Kashmiri-English, on the other hand, rank *SPEC over COMP. The naturalistic data of Kashmiri-English has no instance of *SPEC violation. There are several instances of (49a) in my data, but not a single instance of (49b), suggesting a ranking of Kashmiri-English similar to Hindi-English, viz., *SPEC >> COMP. (49a) sa:ryi players gayi pa$ ternis samjhavni all went later him counsel ‘All the players went later to counsel him.’

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(49b) *all players gayi pa$ ternis samjhavni went later him counsel ‘All the players went later to counsel him.’ The Hindi-English code-switching data also support the ranking: *SPEC dominates COMP. This is demonstrated by the acceptability of (50a) and the unacceptability of (50b); (50a) is grammatical since *SPEC is respected, but (5Ob) is ungrammatical since *SPEC is violated, even though COMP is respected. (50a) maine uska critique parha his read x ‘I read his critique.’ (50b) *maine his critique parha ‘I read his critique.’ The lack of subject islands, as well as their unacceptability, fu~her supports the fact that *SPEC outranks COMP in Hindi-English. Consider the data below. (5la) every &kandar was cleaning the front part of his walkway shopkeeper nab?: aJe kam par hi (51 b) kafi: wrkers JO even work on EMPH not come many ‘Many workers don’t even come to work.’ kya parha&: hai (51~) apki: sister ajkal these days what teaches is your ‘What does your sister teach these days?’ (51d) *Your b&h&n ajkal kya parha&: hai sister ‘What does your sister teach these days?’ (5 le) *Your sister ajkal kya parha&: hai ‘What does your sister teach these days? ’ In (5la) and (51b) above, the Spec of the subject NP governed by the Infl agrees with the language of the Infl, which is what the *SPEC requires. The grammaticality contrast in (51c-e) also suggests that *SPEC is ranked higher than COMP. (51~) is grammatical since the Spec of the subject NP belongs to the same language as that of the Infl; (51d) is ungrammatical because the Spec of the subject NP has switched, violating *SPEC; and, (51e) obeys COMP but is still rendered ungrammatical because COMP is inferior to *SPEC in Hindi English. In other words, the data indicate that in Hindi-English COMP cannot salvage a *SPEC violation, as it does in Swahili-English and Spanish-English. The unswitchability of subjects, as in (51e) above, remain a problem for all other current theoretical frameworks, such as those of Di Sciullo et al. (1986: 19-20), Myers-Scotton (1993a,c), Belazi et al. (1994).‘* I2 What is surprising about Hindi-Engljsh code-switching, however, is that subject EL islands are sible if, and only if, there is a pause following the subject. This is shown in the data in (i).

pas-

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Finally, the ranking configuration established above for Hindi-English and Kashmiri-English, viz., *SPEC outranks COMP, provides a straightforward account of the rather recalcitrant Marathi-English data, given in (52) below, which is problematic for both Joshi (1985) as well as Belazi et al. (1994). (52) “some chail-s-war on (Joshi, 1985: 195; 8c) Joshi leaves (52) as a problematic case for his theory and offers no specific proposal (ibid.: 196). Belazi et al. give the following account of the ungrammaticality of (52): “An English NP looks to its left for Case, just as an English noun looks to its left for simple adjectival modification. The English NP is thus not satisfied, even though the Marathi Case assigner assigns Case to the left and is located to the right” (Belazi et al., 1994: 233). In other words, they claim that even though the correct configuration obtains for Case assignment, the NP must be ‘looking’ in order for satisfactory Case assignment. So, a notion of ‘Case satisfaction’ is stipulated based on some ‘looking mechanism’. Such notions will make incorrect predictions in those instances where directionality parameters of the code-mixing languages differ. In English-Hindi, all cases of switching between a verb and its complements will be incorrectly disallowed, since the verb may not be able to assign Case merely due to the fact that the complement is not located in a position from which it can ‘look’ to the Case assigner. We will need some ad hoc mechanism in their ‘looking’ theory to allow the English-Hindi code-mixing given in (53). In fact, in (53) the dative Case on the direct object confirms Halmari’s observation of Finnish-English data that the morphological Case must be of the language of the governor - in (53) that will be Hindi. (53) Election Commision

ko kaha gaya Dat told went ‘The election commision was told ...’

(ia)

Your sister [PAUSE]

ajkal kya parha&: hai these days what teaches is ‘What does your sister teach these days.’ (ib) Sonze diplomnts [PAUSE] kal @Ii: ja rahe hai tomorrow Delhi go Prog are ‘Some diplomats are going to Delhi tomorrow.’ Now, the ‘pause-strategy’ is illuminating. Cross-linguistic data have shown that subjects do not readily switch unless followed by a pause (e.g., French-Dutch (Treffers-Daller, 1994); Finnish-English (Halmari, 1994)). The interpretation of the sentences in (i) is different from the corresponding sentences in (5 le). The switched constituents in (i) gets a contrastive (‘As for’) topic reading. If so, I claim that the switched constituents are dislocated constituents, therefore ungoverned, and therefore switchable. I would also claim that the example of subject switch in (ii), shown in Pandit (1990: 44), is really an instance of dislocated subject. (ii) Some Englishmen tr-aditionul Indian Izwmen ko pasand karaten hain is -Act like do ‘Some Englishmen like traditional Indian women.’

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248

The ungrammaticality as (54a), with (54b). whereas in (54b) only constraint domination

IO2 (1997) 223-251

of (52) has its roots elsewhere. Contrast (52), repeated below The complement NP of Mararthi PP in (54a) is switched, the noun is switched, not the Spec. This is where the idea of developed in Prince and Smolensky (1993) becomes critical.

(54a) *some chairs-war on (Joshi, 1985: 195) (54b) kaahi chairs-war some on (Joshi, 1985: 195) Given the constraints *SPEC and COMP, the grammaticality contrast of the Marathi-English PPs in (54) is explained by the interaction of *SPEC and COMP. If an optimal form, selected from among the class of competitors, is the one which satisfies the highest ranking constraint on which the competitors conflict, then obviously (54b) is optimal, since *SPEC outranks COMP in Marathi-English codeswitching. To conclude this section, we noticed that with respect to the constraints LPC, HS and EQUI, Swahili-English and Adagme-English cluster together assuming the following ranking configuration : LPC >> { HS, EQUI }. Hindi-English, Kashmiri-English, and Spanish-English, on the other hand, cluster together assuming the ranking con~guration: (HS, EQUI} >> LPC. With respect to the constraints *SPEC and COMP, however, Swahili-English, AdarJme-English, and Spanish-English assume the ranking configuration: COMP >> “SPEC. Hindi-English and Kashmiri-English (and Marathi-English), on the other hand, assume the opposite ranking configuration: *SPEC >> COMP. Table 2 gives the summary of the constraint-rankings that individual grammars (examined in this study) have chosen. Table 2 Summary of the constraint-rankings HS>> LPC

/ English / KashmiriEnglish Spanishi English

of individual grammars.

LPC>> HS

EQUI>> LPC

LPC>> EQUI

*SPEC>> / COMP I

COMP>> *SPEC

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5. Conclusions This paper broadens the perspective of recent research on the interaction of the grammars involved in language contact. It offers data from previously unreported multilingual contexts, that of the typologically distinct languages: Kashmiri (SOV), with verb-second constraint, Hindi (SOV), and English (SVO). Thus, it joins the growing body of code-switching/mixing studies in non-Western societies in providing a comparison for, and correctives to, assumptions about code-switching/mixing which, until now, have been exclusively based on typologically close pairs of languages, especially from the Romance and Germanic branches of Indo-European. The account of code-switching proposed in this paper owes much to the insight developed in the theory of Prince and Smolensky (1993), known as Optimality Theory. In OT, there are universal constraints, which are prioritized (ranked) in a language-specific way. In the likely event of a conflict between two (or more) constraints, the one ranked higher always wins out. Using this optimality-theoretic insight, it became possible to formalize the intuition that in code-switching, too, constraints are prioritized; they are violable in any context in which they conflict with a higher ranked constraint. The grammatical differences between different code-switching grammars is reduced to the different constraint-ranking each grammar chooses. We noticed that the grammars of Swahili-English and Adaqme-English share the same constraint rankings: LPC >> { HS, EQUI} ; COMP >> *SPEC. The grammars of Hindi-English and Kashmiri-English, on the other hand, take the opposite option: (HS, EQUI} >> LPC; *SPEC >> COMP. The grammar of Spanish-English is somewhere intermediate; it shares its grammar with Hindi-English and Kashmiri-English in that it ranks HS and EQUI above LPC, but it also shares its grammar with Swahili-English and Adaqme-English in that it ranks COMP above *SPEC. So, for the five constraints listed in (23) above, and the list is by no means complete, we find three types of code-switching languages, as a result of constraint-interaction and satisfaction.

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