grammatical constraints and motivations for - University of the ...

switched, rather than the preceding phrase. To use an Afrikaans example, it would
be impossible to say “John het by die huis gebly want his wife was at work.
Rather, the Afrikaans conjunction ‘want’ would have to be replaced by the
English conjunction ‘because’ to produce the sentence, “John het by die huis
gebly because his wife was at work. This may be due to the fact that if the
sentence were split into two phrases, the conjunction would ultimately belong
with the second phrase which is, in this case, the switched phrase.
Myers-Scotton (1993b, 2006a) discusses some constraints proposed by other
researchers as part of an introduction to the Matrix Language-Frame Model for
codeswitching. These are important constraints which I think are relevant to this
study.
Myers-Scotton (1993b) discusses word order equivalence as a possible constraint.
This constraint prevents the occurrence of codeswitching when the word order of
the matrix language (the majority language in the interaction) and the embedded
language do not correspond.
Poplack (1980) (cited in Myers-Scotton, 1993b: 27) illustrates the equivalence
constraint as follows:
Code-switches will tend to occur at points in discourse where juxtaposition of L1
and L2 elements does not violate a syntactic rule of either language, i.e., at points
around which the surface structure of the two languages map onto each other.
According to this simple constraint, a switch is inhibited from occurring within a
constituent generated by a rule from one language which is not shared by another.
This constraint is therefore only relevant to codeswitching between languages
sharing similar syntactic structures.
Poplack (1990: 58) also draws the following distinctions between constituent
insertion and word order equivalence:
48