The syntax of Arabic-French code-switching

Lingua 59 (1983) 301-330 North-Holland Publishing Company

301

THE SYNTAX OF ARABIC-FRENCH Abdelali BENTAHILA

CODE-SWITCHING*

and Eirlys E. DAVIES

Uttiversity Mohamed Ben Abdellah, Fez, Morocco

Received July 1982 This paper examines the syntax of the intra-sentential code-switching between Arabic and French which is a common feature of the speech of Moroccan bilinguals. Previous work on code-switching has suggested a variety of constraints prohibiting switching in specific structural and language environments. However, the present study concludes that Arabic-French code-switching is possible at all syntactic boundaries above the word level, though it is not generally permitted between word-internal morpheme boundaries, Moreover, contrary to claims made by others about other types of codeswitching, there is for Arabic-French code-switching no constraint that the structure exhibiting a switch must conform to the surface structure patterns of both languages. Instead, it is shown that the possibilities are limited by the requirement that, in structures exhibiting switching as elsewhere, all items must be used in accordance with their own language-particular subcategorisation restrictions. Finally, it is noted that certain types of switch, though not prohibited by any syntactic constraint, occur much more rarely than certain others; this is seen to reflect contrasts between the roles the two languages typically assume in structures involving switching.

1.

The phenomenon of code-switching

In the literature on the speech patterns of bilinguals, the term codeswitching, along with similar terms such as code-mixing, code-shifting and code-changing, has been used in more than one sense. It has sometimes been used to refer to the bilingual’s ability to choose one or the other of his two languages in a particular speech situation, the choice of code being influenced by such factors as the nature of interlocutor, topic or setting, the speaker’s mood, purpose and so on (e.g. by Kachru 1977). However, * This paper has benefited from suggestions by Andrew Radford, to whom we are very grateful for his comments on an earlier version. Any errors are of course our own.

0024-3841/83/000~0000/$03.00

0

1983 North-Holland

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A. Benrahila, E. E. Davies / The symr

qf’ code-switching

this act of choosing one code rather than another must be distinguished from the act of mixing the two codes together to produce something which might itself be called a third code. It is this second phenomenon which we are here concerned with, and we shall henceforth use the term codeswitching to refer to the use of two languages within a single conversation, exchange or utterance. The result is an utterance or interaction of which some parts are clearly in one of the bilingual’s languages and other parts in the other language. The other important distinction to be drawn is that between code-switching as we have defined it and borrowing. The latter refers to the use in one language of items which originate in another language, but which are currently felt to form an integrated part of the borrowing language. Haugen (1956: 40) indeed uses the term integration instead of borrowing, describing it as “the regular use of material from one language in another so that there is no longer either switching or overlapping except in a historical sense”, in contrast to switching which occurs “when a bilingual introduces a completely unassimilated word from another language into his speech”. An obvious difference between the two is that, while code-switching is a feature of the speech of bilinguals, borrowings may of course be used by monolinguals as well. Thus French words which are regularly used by Arabic monolinguals must be recognised as borrowings which have become part of the competence of the Arabic speaker. It is usually easy to see the motivation for such borrowings, for a word from one language is usually introduced into another to till a lexical gap in the second; which may possess no simple term for the concept represented by the borrowed word. Code-switching, on the other hand, need not be motivated by the need to fill such a gap; on the contrary, a bilingual may switch from one language to another even though he is perfectly able to convey the whole of his message in the first language, and may in fact sometimes demonstrate this by making a switch and then returning to his original language and providing a translation of the switched material. As Gumperz (1976: 7) points out, “only in relatively few passages is code alternation motivated by a speaker’s inability to find words to express what he/she wants to say in one or the other code. In the great majority of cases, the code-switched information could be equally well-expressed in either language”. One feature which may sometimes serve to distinguish borrowed items from instances of code-switching is the phonological adaptation to the system of the host language which borrowed words typically undergo. For instance, the French word 6picerie /episari/ has been borrowed into Moroccan

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Arabic and adapted to the phonological system of Arabic to become /bisri/; it will therefore be clear from a bilingual’s pronunciation whether he is using the borrowed word or switching to use the French one. A word from one language may also undergo morphological adaptation to the rules of another, but we would agree with Pfaff (1979) that this should not be considered a criterion for distinguishing between borrowing and switching. Pfaff suggests that a hesitation before the item may indicate that the speaker regards it as foreign rather than as a borrowing. Another distinction between the two is drawn by Shaffer (1975: 489), who notes that while borrowings may occur in writing or formal speech, “switching is confined almost exclusively to informal speech”. He suggests that this is because, in writing or speaking formally, a bilingual will take more time to monitor his output and seek out the most appropriate words and phrases, thus avoiding switching. Finally, the contrast between code-switching and borrowing has sometimes been identified with that between single lexical items and longer stretches of language. For instance, Gingras (1974) feels that where the change of language extends over only a single element, this element must be identified as a borrowing, whereas if it extends over more than one element it is an instance of code-switching. However, this view does not seem accurate. It is after all possible for whole phrases to be borrowed and integrated into another language (consider examples in English like t.Gte-ci-tcte,faux pas, savoir faire); and there seems no reason to exclude the possibility of a switch involving a single item, many examples of which will in fact be seen in the data discussed below. The particular variety of code-switching examined here is that used by Moroccans who are bilingual in Moroccan Arabic and French.’ A survey of language choice among such bilinguals (Bentahila, forthcoming) reveals that while there are some domains where the tendency is to use exclusively Arabic (e.g. the home), and others where the use of French predominates (e.g. science education), in very many situations they tend to use a mixture of Arabic and French. The use of this mixture, involving very frequent code-switching, could in fact be considered a separate language variety, which Moroccan bilinguals use most typically in casual conversations where all the participants are similar bilinguals. To put the following discussion of isolated extracts from such conversations into some sort of context, then,

1

All references

Moroccan

Arabic.

to Arabic

in what follows

should

be understood

to be references

to colloquial

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304

we include below transcriptions of two longer extracts which illustrate the effect of this repeated code-switching in connected speech.

(1) Fla:s

les moustiques daba

lilana

Trfti fajn huma

mxbFi:n

pouvoir @Ire stir qu’il nj, a pas de mousriques wtanqbD

ana

mousrique hnaja ‘Why?

because

tanxari

hadsi

kullu

et tandir

mxbaF elle cherehe Ibmbre, mosquitoes, now you know

taht

ie Ii; et Ii, done pour2

cYrair la poubelle xSSha Ima alors automatiquement

vide si

elle ./out Ie camp f la ,jour&e where

they are hiding,

Ihere, so to be ahle IO be sure ihar there are no mosquiroes must be kept empty. I took everything

tkun la kajn

and I put it outside

so automatically if there is a mosquito here hiding

fhe bed and

under

Ir bras rhe bin, it

and I poured

water

over it,

it looks ,fbr rhr shade, ir goes ahsay

in the da)Jrime’

(2) lorsqu’elle

est zaTma au stade adulte elle mepique waxa

min fuq Ie drap w elle r’envoie wahed sang comme elle voudra wahed jtkwagulas ‘&en II

w tajbqa

it is supposedly

biles you through

like that,

IO

dima

Approaches

la subsrance yui hadak

de succr ton

hadak

inhibe un peu le sang baS ma

liquide

in the adult srage it hires you even if you put rhe sheet over you. tire slteei

and

ir sends out into you a liquid 4lich

suck your blood as if wishes, a subslance ,vhich, for example,

blood a little so that it won’t

2.

tlbes le drap Falik elle te pique

Ie liquide qui lui permet

clot and will always

allows if, inhibits the

stay liquid

to the syntax of code-switching

We are concerned here only with the possibilities for switching within syntactic units, the largest such unit, in accordance with tradition, being regarded as the sentence. The patterning of code-switching within larger discourse units, though extremely interesting from a sociolinguistic viewpoint (see Bentahila 1981) is not considered here since we are interested in determining the structural possibilities for code-switching. The syntax of code-switching has already attracted considerable attention, although the only previous work on Arabic-French code-switching we have come across is that by Abbassi (1977); it is Spanish-English code-switching which seems to have been most frequently used as the basis for such studies. Among those who have examined code-switching from the syntactic point of view, Lance (1975 : 143) seems to be alone in concluding from his examination of Spanish-English code-switching that “there are perhaps no syntactic restrictions on where the switching can occur”. Others have tended z In transcribing the examples, we represent French words in their normal form, while a phonemic representation is used for Arabic. Where necessary nature

of a switch,

a word-for-word

translation

is provided

orthographic to clarify the

as well as the gloss.

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to disagree with this claim, arguing instead that it is necessary to recognise a variety of syntactic constraints which restrict the environments where switching is possible. Some are content to state rules which they find to be valid for a particular type of code-switching (see for instance Abbassi 1977 on Arabic-French switching; Kachru 1977 on Hindi-English switching; and Lipski 1977, Pfaff 1976, 1979, Poplack 1980, and Timm 1975 on Spanish-English switching), but there have been some attempts to compare different cases; Timm (1977) compares the Russian-French switching in Tolstoy’s War and peace with Spanish-English switching, and Gumperz (1976) proposes a number of constraints he considers to be valid for the three types of switching he looks at, namely Spanish-English, Hindi-English and Slovenian-German. Indeed he claims that code-switching is governed by “perhaps universal underlying constraints” (Gumperz 1976 : 35). The types of constraint which have been proposed are varied. Some assert that switching is impossible between items of two particular syntactic categories, such as between a verb and its infinitive complement (Timm 1975), a conjunction and the second of a pair of conjoined sentences (Gumperz 1976), or an interrogative word and a verb phrase (Abbassi 1977). Other restrictions have been stated in terms of the particular language environment in which a switch occurs; for instance, Pfaff (1979) claims that it is impossible for a preposition to be in a different language from the items both preceding and following it, and Kachru (1977) claims that two sentences from one language cannot be linked by a conjunction from the other. Others again prohibit a switch in one direction but not in the other; for instance, Abbassi (1977) claims that a switch from Arabic for a preposition to French for the noun phrase it governs is acceptable, but not the opposite, where the preposition is in French and the noun phrase in Arabic. Some of those who have examined the syntax of code-switching have been content to list a number of such highly specific and seemingly unrelated constraints. However, such constraints appear to be extremely ad hoc and seem strangely arbitrary. Others have attempted to establish some more general principles which account for the possibilities in a rather less ad hoc manner. For instance, there have been several suggestions that the possibilities for switching may be determined by the relationships between the surface structures of the two languages involved, some kind of equivalence between these being required before a switch is possible (Lipski 1977; Pfaff 1979; Poplack 1980). There have also been attempts to generalise about the types of structure which cannot be dissected by a switch (Lipski 1977; Poplack 1980). These proposals will be considered in more detail in relation to the discussion of our own data which follows.

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A. Bentahila, E. E. Davies / The syntax of code-switching

The present study examines the syntax of code-switching by ArabicFrench bilinguals from two points of view, considering two factors which might be expected to constrain the possibilities for switching. The first question examined is that of the types of syntactic boundary at which a switch may occur. In section 4, we consider whether, as some have suggested is the case with other kinds of code-switching, certain constituents or constituent members are bound together in such a way that switching is impossible within or between them. The second possible source of constraints, examined in section 5, involves the relations between the two languages’ surface structures. Here we shall consider whether there are restrictions on the kinds of interaction between the structures of the two languages which a switch can produce, such as the kind of equivalence requirement mentioned above. In addition, we shall in section 6 consider some other possible types of constraint: the possibility that there are restrictions on the number of switches that can occur within a particular constituent, and the possibility that the acceptability of a switch is dependent not only on its structural environment but also on the direction of the switch, the different roles of the two languages in the resulting structure.

3.

Collecting the data

In investigating syntactic constraints on code-switching, some studies, such as those carried out by Gumperz (1976) and Kachru (1977) have relied on elicitation experiments in which specific examples of structures involving a switch are submitted to bilinguals who are requested to judge their acceptability. One difficulty here, however, is that when such hypothetical examples are rejected by respondents, one cannot always be sure that this is for syntactic reasons. An examination of the patterning of bilingual discourse (Bentahila 1981) reveals that switching is not merely random, but may be motivated by any of a variety of factors, including availability of vocabulary, the connotations of particular items, and special stylistic effects. Thus, while a certain category of switch may be theoretically possible, as evidenced by examples found in actual speech, it is certainly not likely that all invented examples illustrating such a switch will be judged equally acceptable; whether or not the respondents find them natural will also be influenced by whether they can see any motivation for the switch. The kind of substitution used by Gumperz (1977), for instance, where one example is modified by substituting other strings for one constituent or another,

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or by making the switch at one point rather than another, the resulting structures then being submitted for acceptability judgements, may often lead to the creation of examples which are odd for purely pragmatic reasons rather than syntactic ones. It is possible that some of those using elicitation have been rather too quick to assume that since one or two specific examples are rejected by judges, the structural configuration they illustrate is excluded by some syntactic constraint. We feel therefore that one should be cautious in using information obtained in this way to draw conclusions about syntactic constraints on code-switching. While respondents’ judgements that an utterance involving a switch sounds perfectly natural may be considered to suggest that there are no syntactic constraints against such switches, we should not be so quick to assume that their rejection of other utterances as odd is evidence for the existence of some syntactic constraint. Where elicitation was found necessary in the present study, then, efforts were made to reduce the risk of misleading results by using not one but numerous examples of each pattern, and by attempting to construct examples in which the switch could be seen to be motivated in some fairly obvious way. However, the study was mainly based, not on elicited judgements, but on a corpus of naturally-occurring speech. This was composed of seven and a half hours of conversations, in all of which the participants were unaware that they were being recorded, since it was felt that only in these circumstances could the recorded samples be considered to illustrate spontaneous, unselfconscious speech. The method adopted differed in this respect from that used by some others, such as Fallis (1976), Gumperz and HernandezChavez (1975) and Redlinger (1976), in collecting samples of SpanishEnglish code-switching. In their investigations, the speakers involved were aware that they were being recorded, and had even been told that the investigator was interested in hearing some examples of code-switching. We feel that this approach is undesirable because it may encourage artificiality; through self-consciousness or a desire to please, the speakers may adopt special styles of speech in which the amount, distribution and nature of their code-switches is not representative of that which occurs in their natural everyday speech. The conversations recorded for the present study took place in the casual setting of a home, and each involved between two and four participants, who were friends or casual acquaintances, and all of whom were bilingual in Arabic and French. This method of collecting data also has its limitations, which must be recognized. The actual utterances exhibiting code-switching which one finds

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in such a corpus are subject to a variety of influences, and cannot simply be regarded as a set of sentences exhibiting the syntactic constraints governing code-switching. Firstly, besides syntactic constraints there may be functional constraints of the kind mentioned earlier; the lack of occurrence of a certain type of switch in the corpus may be due, not to its syntactic deviance, but to the fact that such a switch is very rarely motivated. This is one reason why it has sometimes been necessary to supplement information from the corpus with that obtained by eliciting judgements. Secondly, there is the fact that a corpus consists of actual performance data, whereas in searching for syntactic constraints on code-switching we are attempting to establish facts about the code-switcher’s abstract competence. Just as we recognise that the speech of a monolingual does not perfectly reflect his linguistic competence, but contains hesitations, slips of the tongue, changes of structure in mid-utterance, and so on, so we must expect to find the same performance phenomena in the code-switching utterances of bilinguals, and be aware of these when attempting to deduce from these actual utterances the theoretical possibilities for code-switching. The structural disjointedness of some utterances involving switching, for instance, could be attributed to the changes of structure which characterise spontaneous speech rather than taken to imply that the syntactic rules for code-switching allow such fusions of structure. Fortunately, other features of the utterance, such as intonation and hesitations, usually help to identify such performance features. These will, for instance, lead us to ignore examples like the following (taken from the corpus) when examining the syntax of code-switching. lorsque je rentrais de la TchPcoslovaquie to me in . n4len I H’as returning ,fbom Czechoslovakia’

(3)

wqaFtli f ‘it happened

(4)

/es gens sont . . . zaTma matajlr buS had5 ‘people are . . supposedly, they don’t play

with

things

like that’

It seems necessary to acknowledge that any corpus will exhibit accidents of performance as well as a reflection of underlying competence. This seems another reason why, in a study like this, once the possibilities have been suggested by the corpus, elicitation may be necessary to verify and expand the investigation.

4.

Switching

at category

boundaries

In looking at the possibilities for switching at various syntactic boundaries, it seems appropriate to begin with the maximal syntactic category and to

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work down through major to minor categories, at each point considering whether a switch can occur at the relevant boundary. In accordance with current syntactic analysis, we shall take as the maximal syntactic category s, the clause. The data yield numerous examples of switches at various types of clause boundary. Firstly, there are switches between a main clause and a subordinate clause. There are examples involving embedded declaratives (5) and interrogatives (6) : (5)

il va comprendre bilana

tandfaT bzzaf

‘he> going to understand that we spend a lot’

(6) matajqrfsaj

qu’esr-ce qu’il est en train de ,/bire

‘he doesn’t know what he is doing’

(7)-(9) show switching for an adverbial clause of reason or purpose: (7) je vais plonger dans Ikau baS Auf I magana ‘I’m going IO dive into the water in order to see the watch’ (8) tanyajnu wahed xiji pour qubn lui tSphone ‘we are waiting for somebody in order that we can phone him’ (9) ana FTeitulu parce que j’ai trouve un type ‘I’ve given it to him because I’ve ,fbund a man’

There are also many examples of switching between the two clauses of a conditional construction, as in (10) and (1 l), and of switching for a relative clause as in (12) and (13). (10) si j’avais (11)

la maison, mafamri

na : kul temma

‘ff’I had the house, I would never eat there’ ila ia rasi :d on ,/&a un peril mkhoui

‘if Rachid comes ~~‘71have a little barbecue’ voiki /a premiere chose hi drti ‘here is the,/irsr thing that you did’ (13) tajbyiw jsufu Sihata qui esr dtf/Zrenfe ‘they enjoy looking at something which is d!Jtirent

(12)

Switching is also possible between than one pattern is possible. Firstly, first clause, so that the coordinating as the second clause, as in (14) and (14)

(15)

j’avais,/bim

two co-ordinated clauses. Here more a switch may occur at the end of the conjunction is in the same language (15).

w xft na:kul ‘I WIISltungry and I was afraid to eat’ Fandna bzzaf ddrija et ,je ne m’enfends pas avec ma m&e ‘we have a lot of children and I don ‘I ger on well wirh my morher’

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In other examples, like (16), the switch is at the second 5 boundary. (16)

YTeitulu w il I’a analysk ‘I gave it to him and /Ie analysesedii’

The existence of examples like this one conflicts with the claim by Gumperz (1976: 34) that when a switch occurs between two conjoined sentences, the conjunction must always be in the same language as the second sentence. Finally; there are many examples where both these types of switch are made, so that the conjunction is in a different language from both clauses: (17)

ana

tanxari

had% kulu ef tan dir 1 ma

‘I take everything (18)

,ic~me

out and pour

water

over’

rase wIa jc, ne me raw pas

‘I shave or I don’t shave’

Kachru (1977) claims that in Hindi-English code-switching it is impossible for a conjunction to be in a different language from both the clauses it conjoins; but examples like the above show that this is certainly not true of Arabic-French code-switching. We can also mention here a type of switch which is very frequent in our data, where the speaker changes languages to insert a parenthetical clause, after which he returns to his original language. (19)

elle a man’irf

di_y ans

‘she is, I don’t (20)

ctst

know,

ten years old

un aspect jFni de ce qui e.yiste ici

‘ir’s one aspect, I mean, (2 1) w xla:h

e/’ w/lat exists here’

IU vois w bqa tajSuf

‘and he left him, you see, and

kept looking

round’

The next category boundary within 3 is that between COMP and S - the boundary between a complementiser and the clause it introduces. A variety of examples illustrate that switching is possible here. (22) and (23) show switching after the French complementiser que ‘that’ and the Arabic equivalent /bi?ana/; these too provide evidence that the claim by Gumperz mentioned above is not valid for Arabic-French switching. (22)

lorsque jhi vu gue mabqaS ‘when I saw rhar there was nothing

(23) i/ croyait

bi?ana ‘he rhought that

left’

je ,/hisais Fa exprks I was doing rhar on purpose’

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In many cases, like (23) above and (24) below, there is a switch at S as well as at S, so that the complementiser alone is in a different language from the rest. This too shows the invalidity of Kachru’s constraint for ArabicFrench switching. (24)

zjada parce que kulSi qal zjada

matkunS

‘there would

be no increase

because everybody

said (there

There are also examples of a switch after a conditional after a relative pronoun (26). (25)

et si wahed ran infkeur jii jhDar mYak ‘and (f one your in/krior (one of your inferiors)

(26)

bzzaf djal ‘many

comes

would

be) an increase’

conjunction

you’ll

speak

(25) and

to him’

I hmi:r daba Hi ignorenr I mya:rba

of the fools now who do not know Moroccans’

The existence of examples like (26) casts doubt upon a constraint proposed by Abbassi (1977) who claims that a relative pronoun must be in the same language as the rest of its clause. Hypothetical examples were judged perfectly natural by respondents when the switch was from Arabic to French, but odd when it was the converse, so that examples like (27) and (28) contrasted in acceptability : (27)

kajn bzzaf djal nna:s Hi ne ,jbnt rim ‘there are many people who do nothing’

(28) ?il y

a des gens qui tajhDru bzzaf ‘there are people who talk a lot’

At any rate, Abbassi’s absolute constraint does not seem to hold. We might also ask whether switching is possible after the wh- complementiser in an interrogative. Abbassi (1977) claims that this kind of switch is excluded, but the data provide just one example to contradict this: (29)

Shal min wahed braient ‘how many were . ..?’

Respondents judged all cases where an Arabic w&word was followed by a switch to French, as in (30) and (31), to be perfectly acceptable, but when the &-word was in French they were not so sure, finding examples like (32) and (33) to be odd. (30)

Skun a dir ca

‘who said rho!?‘

312

A. Bentahila,

E. E. Davies

(31) waS tu ie connais (32) ?qui qal had ii

‘who

(33)

‘what

?qu’est-ce

que

/ The syntax

‘whether you know said that?’

kliti

is it that you

him

?f code-switching

(do you know him?)’

ate?’

Thus, while there are some differences between the roles of French and Arabic here, switching clearly is possible at this boundary. As for the possibilities for switching within S, in the first place there are many examples of switches at the major constituent boundary between NP and VP - subject and predicate. (34) les gens mabqaw jxalSu: ‘the people stopped paying’ (35) bqat lhppartement ‘remained the aparrmenf (the apartment remained)’

While all the examples in the data involved an NP in French and a VP in Arabic, invented examples of the opposite, like (36), were also judged acceptable. (36) had 1 marSa

sent digueulasse

‘this port smells

revolting’

When the subject NP is a pronoun, however, the situation is rather different. In French, a pronoun subject is obligatory in sentences containing no other overt subject constituent (with the exception of imperatives). The subject pronouns cliticise to the verb and can never be used apart from it. In Arabic, on the other hand, the verb does not require an overt subject; both /ana nkteb/ and simply /nkteb/ express ‘I ate’, the former with an overt pronoun subject, the latter without it. The pronoun subject is usually included only where some special emphasis is required; so the Arabic pronouns are structurally and functionally parallel to the French disjunctive pronouns (moi, toi, etc.) rather than to the clitics (ie, tu, etc.). The corpus contained no example of a switch between French clitic pronoun and Arabic verb, or between an Arabic pronoun and a French verb, and invented examples like (37) and (38) were judged quite unacceptable by respondents.

‘,:i’, *jP yadi *ana

vais

‘I

go’

*I go’

It would seem that the boundary between clitic pronoun and verb is such as to discourage switching; the impossibility of such switches in the speech

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of other types of bilingual has been noted by Timm (1975) and Gumperz (1976). On the other hand, there are frequent instances of switching between an Arabic pronoun and the French verb accompanied by its clitic, as in (39) and (40); no examples of the reverse pattern were found, but ones like (41) were found acceptable. (39) (41)

‘you, you are going 10 work’

nta lu vas fravailier

(40) huwa

‘him he doesn’r care’

il s’en ,fout

moi dxlt

‘me, I went in’

While it might be possible to regard the pronoun here as a subject NP, a more plausible view is to consi$r it as a Topic phrase, outside the S altogether (in a larger constituent S), in which case these examples illustrate switching at an S boundary. Within S, switching is also possible at the boundary of an ADVP. The adverbial phrase may occupy various positions within S, as the following examples illustrate. (42)

ce n’est plus de service gaT

(43)

‘it is no longer in use at all’ IU es temmak isolP ‘you are there

isolaled

(44)

nta mataiiS

(45)

‘you don’t come qfien here’ ici makajnS nza: ha

souvent

lhna

‘/zere there is no fun’

Finally, we can look at the possibilities for switching within the major phrasal categories. Within VP, there are many examples of switching between the verb and an object NP. (46)

fateik

(47)

‘I gave you an envelope’ il ne ,fbur pas changer ttwSe:I

une enveloppe

‘you must not change the receipt’

On the other hand, there are no instances of a switch between verb and object pronoun. Since in both Arabic and French such pronouns cliticise to the verb tie les vois /ana nsufhum/ ‘I see them’), the fact that such switches are impossible (confirmed by respondents’ judgements of examples like (48) and (49)) can be attributed to the same constraint which excludes (37) and (38).

314

A. Benrahila,

(48)

(49)

*(ana) /es nSuf ‘je vois hum

E. E. Davies 1 The synmr

01 code-stvitching

‘(I) them see’ ‘I see them’

Timm (1975) similarly notes that switching between subject or object pronoun and finite verb is impossible in Spanish-English code-switching, and Lipski (1977 : 264) refers to this restriction as “a cardinal rule governing code-switching”. Pfaff (1979 : 303) formulates a constraint as follows : “Clitic pronoun objects are realized in the same language as the verb to which they are cliticized, and in the position required by the syntactic rules of that language”. This needs modifying to cover subject as well as object pronouns. Alternatively, since phonetically the sequence of clitic and verb constitutes a single word, the impossibility of switching between them might be accounted for in terms of some more general constraint prohibiting switching within word boundaries. Within the VP, a switch can also be made at the boundary of a prepositional phrase : (50)

kuna

yadji:n

en ville

‘we were going

info town’

(51) IUpeu.r

le regarder tht I ma ‘you can look ar it under water’

Pfaff (1979) finds this kind of switch to be rare in her Spanish-English data, but there are many examples in our corpus. Another boundary to be considered is that between auxiliary and main verb, or between a tensed main verb and its verbal complement, the choice of terminology here depending on the kind of syntactic analysis preferred. It has often been claimed that this boundary does not permit switching; for instance, Timm (1975) finds that switches between finite verb and infinitive complement or between auxiliary and main verb are impossible in Spanish-English code-switching, and considers this to hold also for the Russian-French data in Timm (1977), although she finds two exceptions to the rule here. Lipski (1977) approves Timm’s claim, but Pfaff (1979) finds instances of switching for an infinitive complement. As for ArabicFrench switching, Abbassi (1977) claims such switches to be impossible. However, our corpus yields a number of examples where a main verb in Arabic introduces a French complement verb, or, to use Harrell’s (1962) terminology, an Arabic auxiliary is followed by a French main verb. The following examples are representative.

A. Bentahila,

(52) tajbqa

jcor@onler

E. E. Davies

/ The synrax

o/’ code-switching

315

ces idies

‘he keeps imperfect-oppose these ideas (he keeps opposing these ideas)’ (53) tatbqa tatgrarrer ‘you keep durative - scratch (you keep scratching)’ (54) mbqaS j,/bncfionner ‘it stopped imperfect-work (it stopped working)’ (55) Tad xSSu jredouhler ‘again he needs imperfect-repeat (again he needs to repeat)’ It is interesting, too, that in each case the French infinitive is accompanied by an Arabic inflection; this shows that switching is sometimes possible even across word-internal morpheme boundaries - a point we return to later. We can conclude that switching can take place at a variety of boundaries within the VP constituent. Switching is also possible within a PP; there are numerous examples in the corpus where a preposition in one language governs an NP in the other.

(56) f /e dPbut (57) bla aurorisarion (58) de I marSa (59) avec iifa:fa

‘in I/W beginning’ ‘without aurhorisation’ Ifrom the port’ ‘with the floorcloth’

Abbassi (1977) claims that it is impossible for a preposition in French to govern a noun phrase in Arabic, but the existence of examples like (58) and (59) proves him to be wrong. Pfaff (1979) maintains that in SpanishEnglish code-switching it is not permitted for a preposition to be in a different language from both the preceding and following items. However, given that switching is allowed across a PP boundary, as in (50), and across a PP-internal NP boundary, as in (56), we would expect such a pattern to result where both of these types of switch are made in the same sentence; and indeed the data include examples like (60) and (61), showing that there is no such arbitrary restriction on Arabic-French code-switching. (60) il devient bhal un perroquet ‘lie becomes like

a parrot’

(61) e//e re pique min fuq le ‘it biles you

drap

through rile s/leer’

Finally, we may look at the possibilities for switching within noun phrases. In French, an NP contains only a single determiner, whether this is the definite article (le, la, /es) the indefinite article (un, une, des) or a demonstrative (ce, cette, ces). In Arabic, the definite article and the indefinite

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/Si/ ‘some’ behave like the French ones, and can immediately precede the noun, but the indefinite /waRed/ and the demonstratives /had/, jdak/ must instead be followed by a definite article, so that NPs containing these have a sequence of two determiners, as in /waRed 1 hint/, literally ‘one the girl’ and /had 1 ma/, literally ‘this the water’. The structure of such NPs could be represented as in (62) and (63).

i-3

(62)

DETa

DETb

ADJ Y bint (girl)

waked (one)

I yzaila (pretty)

'a pretty girl'

(63)

Li

bint

syira

'some little girl'

une

fille

laide

'an ugly girl'

The data include examples of switches at each of the types of boundary shown here. Firstly, there are switches at the R boundary, between determiner and noun: (64) ii semaine (65) dak ddisodoranr (66) des mraja: t (67) un 'iaskri

'someweek' 'that thedeodorant’ ‘some mirrors' ‘a soldier'

The existence of examples like (66) and (67) falsifies a claim made by Abbassi (1977), who maintains that while it is possible for an Arabic determiner to accompany a French noun, the opposite does not occur. Secondly, there are numerous instances of a switch at the R boundary, between two determiners.

A. Bentahila, E. E. Davies / The synrax qf code-switching ‘these the people’

(68) (69)

dak la chemise

i;yi

wa:i

le liquide

‘one [he liquid

wa e

une cousine

‘one a cousiu’

haduk

317

Ies gens

‘that

tile shirt’

Moreover, within N switching is possible between the noun and a qualifying adjective; the corpus offers examples like the following: ‘dress qf/icial’

(72)

hwajei

(73)

Si wahda

(74)

WI panralotl mqawd

‘some trousers awful’

(75)

deux cents wagons zdad

‘tnlo hundred carriages new’

qniciels enceinte

‘somebody

pregnanr’

This survey of the possibilities for switching at various types of boundary is of course not exhaustive - space does not permit us to examine every boundary. However, we have found switching to be possible across S, S, at major constituent boundaries within S, such as NP, VP, PP and ADVP, and at various boundaries within such constituents as NP, VP and PP. The only boundaries which seem to block switching are those morpheme boundaries internal to words. The data yielded no examples of switches within compounds or derivations, for instance, and any invented examples we could devise were felt to be most bizarre by the respondents, provoking amusement or incomprehension : (76)

*yza:lment

‘pretty-/y

[;i{

‘yirprarique

‘non-practical (impractical)’ Wpe-windscreen (windscreen-wiper)’

‘essuiezaza

(prettily)’

There is also the impossibility of switching between verb and clitic, noted earlier. Nor does it seem generally possible for an inflectional morpheme from one language to accompany a root morpheme from the other. To account for these restrictions, then, we need simply to postulate a constraint which states that code-switching is not possible across word-internal morpheme boundaries, similar to Poplack’s (1980) Free Morpheme Constraint. Nevertheless, it seems necessary to recognise that this restriction is not absolute, for there are instances of switching between a root morpheme and an inflection, such as examples (52~(55). Further investigation is needed to see if there are other exceptions to the rule, and if these can be stated in any systematic way. Apart from this one constraint blocking switching within words, then, Arabic-French code-switching would appear to be permissible across syntactic

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q/ code-switching

boundaries at all levels from S to the minimal categories like N and V. Our findings are thus rather different from the views of those who consider certain boundaries to be impervious to switching. For instance, they do not lend support to Lipski’s (1977: 265) idea that there are certain ‘atomic’ phrasal elements, such as verb + auxiliary and preposition + noun, which cannot be broken by a switch; nor do they accord with Timm’s (1975 : 481) observation that, for Spanish-English code-switching, “the verb system remains inviolable”. On the contrary, they suggest that, for Arabic-French code-switching at any rate, there is no need to postulate the variety of ad hoc constraints prohibiting switching in certain syntactic environments which have previously been suggested.

5.

Cases of structural non-equivalence

Having surveyed the possibilities for switching at a wide range of syntactic boundaries, from the maximal to the minimal syntactic categories, we can now look more closely at some particularly interesting environments for switching. These are cases where the two languages differ in their surface structure organisation. As was mentioned in section 2, it has sometimes been suggested that switching is possible only within structures which have the same surface form in both languages. For instance, Pfaff (1979 : 309) concludes from her examination of Spanish-English code-switching that “morphologically unadapted mixing is constrained to form surface structures shared by both languages”. Poplack (1980) formulates a constraint to the same effect, which she calls the Equivalence Constraint, and according to which a switch is possible only if it involves no violation of the surface syntactic rules of either language. Lipski (1977: 271) postulates a similar hypothesis, which states that the two languages’ superficial structures must be identical in that portion of a structure involving code-switching which falls after the switch. However, the possibilities for ArabiciFrench code-switching revealed by our data can be shown to cast doubt on the validity of such constraints for code-switching of this type. They include a number of cases where there quite clearly is not such surface structure equivalence between the two languages, yet where a switch can be made. To take one example, we can look again at the case of switching between subject and main verb. In French declarative main clauses, the subject must precede the verb, the required order of elements being SVO; but in

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319

Arabic the ordering VSO is also possible. The corpus includes instances of switching where this VSO order is observed, such as (35) and the following : (79)

ia le conrr6le

(80)

na:Du

/es prives

‘came

tile checking-time’

‘arose

the private practitioners’

These exhibit an Arabic surface structure which is not equivalent to that required in French, yet the switch is perfectly acceptable. Another example involves the position of adjectives relative to the nouns they modify. The kind of equivalence constraint that has been postulated would predict that the order of adjective and noun would have to satisfy the rules of both languages for a switch between them to be possible. Indeed, Pfaff states a specific constraint to this effect, claiming that where a noun and its modifying adjective are in different languages, the order of the two “must match the surface word order of both the language of the adjective and the language of the head noun” (1979: 306). Now, in Arabic, adjectives are required to follow the noun, but while this is also true of most French adjectives, there are some others which must precede the noun. According to Pfaff’s constraint, we would expect a switch between adjective and noun to be possible only where the adjective followed the noun, since this is the only position which is allowed in both languages. However, examples like the following, involving French adjectives which, to receive a particular interpretation, must precede the noun, are judged to be perfectly acceptable. (81)

j’ai vu WI ancien tilmid ‘I saw an old student

(82)

kajn un aurre muSki

(83)

c’est we pauvre bint

(84)

c’est le seul ustad

djali of mine’

‘there is another problem’ ‘sloe is a poor girl’ ‘it is [he only teacher’

Again, the requirement of equivalence of surface structure between the two languages does not seem to hold. Also in connection with adjectives, we could note another difference between French and Arabic surface structures; in Arabic, but not in French, an adjective within a definite NP must, like the noun it modifies, itself be accompanied by a detinite article, so that we have /l kelb 1 kbir/ ‘the

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320

dog the big (the big dog)’ as opposed to the indefinite /waRed 1 kelb kbir/ ‘one the dog big (a big dog)‘. Here too there is a lack of equivalence between the two languages, since French postnominal adjectives will not be accompanied by an article.3 Yet we find switches within definite NPs in both directions here: (85) (86)

dak

1 warqa

bleue

les immeubles

1 xri:n

‘that

the paper

blue’

‘rhe aparrment-blocks

the other’

In each case, within the NP the smaller constituent ADJP conforms to the rules of the language in which it appears; (85) satisfies the rule of French, (86) that of Arabic. Neither conforms to the requirements of both languages; yet these examples seem just as acceptable as others, such as (74), which do. Another example of non-equivalence is provided by the determiner systems described in section 4. Arabic NPs may contain a sequence of two determiners, whereas only one is permitted in French; yet switching is perfectly acceptable in examples like (68~(71), which conform to the surface structure rules of Arabic but not those of French. As a final illustration, we could cite the possibility of switches like those in (87) and (88) : (87)

il y a des quarfiers bna :whum

idad

‘fhere are some disrricrs they have built new (which

(88)

they have newly

built)’

c’est un type xSSek tSufu ‘he’s a chap you must see’

In the relative clause here, the relative pronoun has been omitted, as is permissible in Arabic, despite the fact that the equivalent structure is not possible in French, where the relative pronoun is obligatory. It would seem then that the kind of equivalence constraint postulated by Pfaff, Poplack and Lipski is not motivated for Arabic-French code-switching. On the contrary, switching may occur within constituents exhibiting the surface structure of one language but not that of the other; within a constituent exhibiting switching a smaller constituent not involving switching will conform to the rules of the language in which it appears. This is not to say, however, that there are no constraints at all on the possibilities for switching, provided that the resulting structure satisfies the rules of one language or the other. There are certain conditions which 3

Except

in the special

case of superlative

adjectives

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321

must be satisfied for a switch to be acceptable. To return to the possibilities with NPs once again, it is interesting that while examples like (68)-(71) are frequent, we do not find ones like (89) and (go), which would nevertheless seem to conform to the surface structure requirements of Arabic.

(8% *certe

I xubza

(90) *WI1 fqi

‘this the loaf

‘OAFthe teacher’

And while (91) and (92) are judged to be perfectly normal, (93) and (94) are rejected, although all four exhibit French surface structure. (91) un fqi

‘a teacher’

(92) cette xubza (93) *wahed prqfkweur (94) *had pain

‘fhis loaf ‘a teacher’

‘this loqf

Clearly it is not possible simply to construct an NP conforming to the rules of one language or the other regardless of which elements are in which language. The impossibility of examples like (89)-(90) and (93)-(94) can in fact be explained in terms of the two languages’ subcategorisation rules. The Arabic ieterminers /had/, /dak/ and /wahed/ are subcategorised as requiring an N complement (see (62)), and it seems that this subcategorisation rule must be satisfied whether the fi concerned is in Arabic or in French; (93) and (94) are impossible because here they are given R complements. The French determiners, on the other hand, are subcategorised *for an fi complement, this rule being satisfied in (91) and (92) but not in (89) and (90). The restricted possibilities here suggest that switching is constrained by the requirement that there be no violation of the subcategorisation rules of either language. The possibilities for switches between adjective and noun also reveal the influence of subcategorisation rules. In French some adjectives are subcategorised as postnominal, others as prenominal; when they occur in NPs involving a switch, these subcategorisation rules must be satisfied, as they are in (72)-(73) and in (81~(84). In Arabic, on the other hand, all adjectives are subcategorised as postnominal, and this explains why switches like that in (95) are possible, but not ones like that in (96); the latter is excluded because it violates the subcategorisation rule. (95)

(96)

WI prqfksseur FaDim *UN FaDim prqfesseur

‘a reacher excellent’ ‘ail excellent reacher’

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A. Benrahila, E. E. Davies J The synrax qf’ code-su~itching

The need to observe subcategorisation rules can be shown to be responsible for certain other restrictions on switching which might otherwise appear quite arbitrary. The possibilities for switching between main verb and verbal complement provide one illustration. We have already seen, in examples (52)-(55), cases where such a switch occurs. It is striking that in these and all the other instances of such switches in the corpus the French infinitive in the complement is accompanied by an Arabic inflection for tense and person. In fact, parallel examples in which no such inflection was present, such as (97) and (98), were judged to be impossible. (97)

(98)

*tajbqa confionter ces idies ‘he keeps opposing these ideas’ *Fad xSSu redoubler ‘again he needs to repeat’

Moreover, invented examples of the reverse pattern, with the main verb in French and the complement in Arabic, were also rejected. (99)

(100)

*je dois nSeLi

‘I must I pray (I must pray)’ *cl/e d&ire tzwe? had I Tam ‘she wants she gets married this year (she wants to get married this year)’

It is perhaps the unacceptability of examples like (97~(100) which leads Abbassi (1977) to claim that switching between verb and verbal complement is not permitted. However, again the restrictions can be attributed to subcategorisation rules. Arabic verbs such as /bqa/ ‘to remain’ and jxeSS/ ‘to have to’ are subcategorised for a finite verb complement, marked for tense, person and number, whereas French verbs such as devoir ‘must’ and dksirer ‘want’ require an infinitival complement. (97) and (98) are excluded because here the Arabic verb is given a non-finite complement; but in the actually occurring examples like (52)-(55), the subcategorisation rule is satisfied, since the French infinitive has been transformed into a finite form by the addition of the Arabic inflection. Similarly, (99) and (100) are impossible because here French verbs subcategorised for an infinitival complement are given instead a tiniterone. Since there is no form of the Arabic verb corresponding to the French infinitive (the only non-finite forms being the two participles), there seems to be no way in which a switch at this point can be compatible with subcategorisation restrictions. Similar restrictions account for the possibilities for switching between a subordinate clause and its complementiser. Examples like (22)-(24) showed

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323

that there is nothing to prevent a switch from occurring across the S boundary. However, Abbassi (1977) claims that there is a specific constraint which requires that the Arabic complementiser introducing purpose clauses, /has/, and the corresponding French pour, must always be in the same language as the rest of the clause they introduce. An example like (101) from our data shows the first of these claims at least to be wrong. (101) ie peu.r la dire had 1~ true hada baS jr

commence ci appretldre

‘I can say ir this thing here in order that I start to learn’

However, it is significant that in this case /baS/introduces a finite clause in French. The hypothetical example which Abbassi (1977: 158) uses to illustrate the validity of his constraint, on the other hand, is (102), where /baS/ is made to introduce a French infinitival clause.

(102)*on

est alIP au CC# baS boire un pot ‘n’e Irent to the C&J in order to have a dritlk’

Our respondents too found this impossible, and also rejected similar examples such as (103). (103)

*nqra Swija baS r&ssir d I’examen ‘we work a bit in order 10 succeed in the examination’

Interestingly, some respondents suggested that (103) should be corrected to (104), which they did find acceptable: (104) nqra Swija baS

nr&ssir d I’examen

‘we work a bit in order that imperfect-succeed

in the exambtation (in order that

we may succeed in the examination)’

The contrast between the acceptable (101) and (104) and the excluded (102) and (103) is again attributable to the necessity for subcategorisation rules to be observed. The subcategorisation rule that requires /baS/ to introduce a finite clause is violated by the form of the French infinitival clauses in (102) and (103), whereas it is satisfied in (101) and even in (104), where again the French infinitive has been made finite by the addition of an Arabic inflection. Similarly, the impossibility of examples like (105) and (106), with a switch after pour, is due to the fact that pour is subcategorised as introducing an infinitival clause, whereas here it is given a finite one; since there is no available infinitive in Arabic to satisfy the rule, switching is indeed impossible at this point.

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324

(105) *mGna 1 DDa:r pour nrtahu Swija ‘we went home in order IO we have some rest’ courir pour ndfa:f Swija ‘I am going to run in order to I lose sotne weight’

(106) *je vais

Pour can in fact be contrasted

with pour que, which does introduce finite clauses, and which therefore can be followed by a switch to Arabic, as in (107) and (108) which are perfectly acceptable. (107) je (108)

vais me coucher Gr pour que nxdem mzja :n yda ‘I am going 10 bed early in order that I (may) work well tomorrow’ elie va rester ici pour que Teijbna si tafi:n ‘she is going 10 stay here in order rhat she (may) cook us a stew’

Similar contrasts can be found with other pairs of subordinating conjunctions; thus a switch is possible after sans que, which introduces a finite clause, but not after sans, which introduces a non-finite clause. The oddity of Abbassi’s examples, then, is not due to some peculiar restrictions on specific complementisers such as /baS/ and pour, but rather to a much more general constraint, which accounts not only for these but also for many other impossible switches. This is the requirement that, even in structures involving code-switching, all items must be used in such a way as to satisfy the subcategorisation restrictions imposed on them.

6.

Other possible restrictions

on code-switching

Another possibility which is worth a brief consideration is that there may be some quantitative restrictions on code-switching. Gumperz (1976: 35) claims that switching is constrained so that “the total number of switches within any message subunit cannot be more than one”. Unfortunately, it is not very clear what he means by “message subunit”; the example he gives to illustrate it is (log), where, he claims, a switch may occur after the first or the second clause, but not after both. (109)

I think that he believes that my father is the oldest.

Timm (1977) seems to interpret his claim as meaning that there cannot be more than one switch within a constituent such as an NP, claiming that the code-switching in War andpeace supports this hypothesis. However, our corpus includes instances of various types of constituent which do

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325

contain more than one switch; there are NPs like (110) and (ill), simple sentences like (112) and (113), and complex sentences like (114) and (115). (110) hadak I pince djalu ‘those the pliers of him (those pliers of his)’ inviti djal la ,/tibmiile ‘some guesl of the ,fhmily’ sur place Tahu nna :s f le pikge ‘at once the people fell into the trap’ tajFml rrapporr ntaTu ‘he makes the reporr of him (he makes his report)’ txuri et elle me pique f la jigure ‘it comes out and it bites me on the ,Jtice’ elle te pique waxa tlbs le drap Fli: k ‘it bites you even if you put tile sheet over you’

(111) ii (112) (113) (114) (115)

We have already seen examples like (23) and (24), where switching takes place at both S and S boundaries, violating Kachru’s constraint, and ones like (60) and (61), where it occurs at both PP and NP boundaries, violating Pfaff’s constraint. It seems unlikely, then, that there are any specific restrictions preventing there being more than one switch within any constituent type. No doubt the actual frequency of switching is influenced by pragmatic factors; a constituent containing more than a certain number of switches might be difficult to produce or interpret, or it might be that so many switches would simply never be motivated. However, there seems no reason to suppose that there are any absolute constraints on the number of switches which may occur within any syntactic unit. A rather more interesting question is that of whether the two languages have different roles in those structures which exhibit switching. We have already noted a number of cases where Abbassi (1977) claims that a switch is possible in one direction but not in the other; for instance, he claims that it is possible for an Arabic determiner to be used with a French noun, for an Arabic adjective to modify a French noun, and for an Arabic preposition to govern a French noun phrase, but not for a French determiner or adjective to accompany an Arabic noun, or a French preposition to govern an Arabic NP. He also claims that a French clause may be introduced by the Arabic complementiser /belli/ ‘that’, but that an Arabic clause cannot be introduced by the French equivalent que. Abbassi assumes these contrasts to require the postulation of extremely ad hoc constraints on switching, involving specification not merely of a particular structural configuration but also of the roles of the two languages within this structure.

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Our data have in fact shown all these claims to be false, yielding examples of each of the patterns Abbassi claims is impossible. However, while such absolute generalisations are clearly invalid, the data do suggest that in certain environments switches in one direction are far more common than switches in the other. Thus we find in our corpus many more examples where an Arabic determiner accompanies a French noun than we do of the contrary; prepositional phrases composed of an Arabic preposition and a French NP are much more common than ones where the preposition is in French and the NP in Arabic; and there are far more examples where an Arabic conjunction serves to link two French clauses than there are cases of a French conjunction linking two Arabic ones. In other cases, switches are common in one direction while there are no recorded examples at all of the same type of switch in the opposite direction. For instance, there are examples of Arabic demonstratives and possessives co-occurring with French nouns, of clauses in which the verb is in Arabic and the subject in French, and of the very common pattern where an Arabic disjunctive pronoun occurs in what is an otherwise entirely French sentence; but there are no instances of any of the reverse patterns. Again, however, there seem to be no constraints excluding the non-occurring patterns, for invented examples of each type were judged to be perfectly acceptable. In the case of switches after a &-word in an interrogative, or after a relative pronoun, however, there does seem to be a difference of acceptability; cases where an Arabic &-word introduces a French clause are always found acceptable, whereas switches after certain French w/z-words are judged to be odd. Finally, we might also mention that the use of a parenthetical clause in Arabic within a French structure is much more common than the use of a French one in an Arabic environment; and the data offer examples of tag questions in Arabic accompanying main clauses in French, but not of the converse (though again, invented examples were judged possible). What all these contrasts suggest is that, while there are perhaps no absolute constraints preventing a switch from Arabic to French or vice versa in certain environments, there are certainly some fairly clear tendencies for the two languages to fultil rather different functions within structures exhibiting switching. Within the speech variety which is characterised by much switching between Arabic and French, then, the typical roles of the two languages can be contrasted. There is a tendency for speakers to resort more to Arabic than to French for grammatical items or function words, such as determiners, pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions. Even when

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327

they are speaking mainly in French, they often use Arabic for such items, and also for the kinds of parenthetical clause used as fillers or discourse markers. On the other hand, when speaking mainly Arabic, they seem to resort to French for lexical items, particularly for nouns, far more frequently than they have to resort to Arabic lexical items when speaking mainly French. These comments are of course impressionistic, but it is hoped that they will later-be confirmed by a statistical analysis. These patterns of usage may perhaps be related to the fact that for all these bilinguals, Arabic is the first language, acquired in the earliest years, in the home, whereas French is learned at a later date, in school. One could hypothesise that somehow the gramma.tical formators of the tirstlearned language remain more basic even after the assimilation of the second language is also complete, and so tend to surface frequently even in L2 environments when the speaker is using this code-switching variety which pools the resources of both languages. Some other evidence which might be considered to support this hypothesis is provided by cases of morphological agreement across switches which were found in the corpus. We have already seen some examples of how agreement rules are observed across switches; thus, in (34), the Arabic verb is inflected to accord with the plural French subject NP, and in (75) the Arabic adjective is plural to agree with the French plural noun. However, there are some interesting examples where the agreement made is not that which would be expected. For example, in (116) an adjective marked as singular is used with a plural noun, while in (117) and (118) the adjectives are feminine but the nouns they modify are masculine. (116) /es moustaches I xaburi (117) dak Ie rrajet kulha (118) UII,/bancais mqawda

‘tile moustache the yellow’ ‘that the journey whole (that whole journey)’ ‘a French awful (awful French)’

Such lack of agreement is not due to ignorance, for the correct use of the French determiners in each case shows that the speakers are aware of the gender of the French nouns. It is perhaps not merely accidental that in each case the Arabic adjective has the inflection which would be required to agree with the equivalent Arabic noun, the word for moustache in Arabic being singular and those for journey and French (language) being feminine. A similar lack of agreement is sometimes seen in the choice of pronominal forms coreferential to preceding NPs.

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328 (119)

(120)

(121)

A : avant, oui, jhimais

le soleil, mais daba B: hija c’est bien il jbit gue+ir ‘A: bqfbre, yes, I liked the sun, but now . . . B: it, it? good, it cures’ des anchois, sardines, hta huwa ‘anchovies, sardines, even it (even these)’ des urgences dajrin fi:h . . . ‘emergencies, they have put in it (in them)

In (119) the masculine French noun soled is referred back to by the second speaker using the feminine Arabic pronoun /hija/. In (120), the plural noun is referred back to by the singular pronoun /huwa/, while in (121) the French noun is feminine plural, yet the clitic pronoun /h/ referring to it is masculine singular. Again the inconsistencies can be traced back to Arabic, where the word for sun is feminine and those for sardines and emergencies are both singular masculine nouns. In these and all the other examples of nonequivalence in the data, it is always an Arabic adjective or pronoun which is made to agree, not with its French antecedent, but with the Arabic equivalent. This tendency to use forms which accord with the grammar of Arabic rather than that of French could perhaps also be thought to suggest that the Arabic rules are somehow more dominant. It would be interesting to know whether there are similar differences between the roles of the first and second languages in the code-switching varieties of other types of bilingual. A similar tendency may exist in the speech of Mexican bilinguals, whose first language is Spanish and second language English, for Pfaff (1979 : 313-314) refers to “the tendency . . . for function words, sentence adverbials, tags, and loosely-bound interjections to be realized in Spanish even in predominantly English sentences”. A further examination ofcode-switching from this angle might consider the psychological implications of these apparent differences in the roles of the two languages.

7.

Conclusion

From our data, it appears that Arabic-French code-switching is not subject to numerous highly specific and ad hoc constraints of the type which have previously been claimed to hold for this and other types of code-switching. Nor does it seem to be governed by the more general constraint requiring there to be some kind of equivalence of surface structure between the two languages for a switch to be permissible.

A. Bentahila,

E. E. Davies

/ The syntax

qf’ code-switching

329

With regard to the syntactic boundaries where switching can occur, the only restriction which emerges clearly from our study is that which prohibits switching within words, although even this appears to allow some exceptions. We can therefore postulate a constraint like (122). (122)

Code-switching

is not possible across word-internal

morpheme boundaries

Apart from this, the possibilities and impossibilities for switching in all the environments we have examined seem to be naturally accounted for if we assume a further constraint, as follows: (123) All items must be used in such a way as to satisfy the (language-particular) subcategorisation

restrictions imposed on them.

We can conclude, then, that switching is freely permitted at all boundaries above that of the word, subject only to the condition that it entails no violation of the subcategorisation restrictions on particular lexical items of either language. However, it must also be noted that the actual distribution of switches is influenced by other factors besides these constraints, so that some types of switch, although theoretically possible and judged to be perfectly acceptable by respondents, are likely to occur much more rarely than others. In fact, the patterning of actual switches reflects a certain difference between the roles typically assumed by the two languages within the structure of utterances involving code-switching.

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